The Kruger National Park is an absolute gem of a place. Home to
incredible vegetation and game, it is the sort of place that makes
you want to visit over and over again. What is its history though?
What were the events that shaped this most unique of national parks?
Let’s take a journey down the history lane of the Kruger National
Park:
When did it start?
The 1st area of what was to later become Kruger National
Park was protected officially by President Kruger in 1898, when he
established Sabie River Game Reserve. This consisted of what is today
Kruger’s southern sector; that area between the Sabi and the
Crocodile rivers. The San and the Baphaloborwa tribes were the
early inhabitants, who had minimal impact on the wildlife of the
region but who did a lot to leave their mark throughout the area, in
the form of cave paintings. It became South Africa’s first national
park in 1926.
Why Was The Game Reserve Established?
The purpose for its establishment was to protect wildlife from the
credible threat that “biltong hunters” posed. These hunters had
made a habit of visiting the Lowveld during the dry season, and their
numbers were getting larger in a worrying fashion as the years
passed. These hunters had already killed and slaughtered great-sized
herds all over South Africa, and the establishment of the Kruger Park was an early attempt to preserve the wilderness in the
purest state possible. A single police sergeant, at Komatipoort, was
given the daunting job of protecting the whole area from these
hunters.
In 1903, the British re-proclaimed it, expanding the park size by
adding the Shingwedzi Game Reserve; that particular area between the
Luvuvhu and Letaba rivers and the 5,000 square kilometers of raw
ranchland between the Letaba and Sabi rivers. This new protection
area covered roughly the same area as Kruger Park does today.
Things haven’t been smooth since its creation though; the park has
faced threats some of which we will discuss next.
Turmoil
Numerous factions threatened the park’s survival. For instance, the
hunters wanted access to the park; soldiers who were coming back from
the 1st world war expected land for their sheep farming
activities; prospectors who were looking for coal, copper and gold
were keen on getting mining rights and South African vets were
engaged in a campaign to slaughter wildlife in large numbers so as to
slow down the spread of tsetse fly. These were real threats that the
park has had to deal with over the years.
However, it emerged victorious after all these threats and now sits
on 200,000 hectares or roughly 5 million acres covering 19,485 square
kilometers. So what made the park to survive the threats?
Kruger Park’s Unlikely Savior
The seeds of developing a self-financing park open to visitors were
sown, unwittingly, by South African Railways, when they decided to
open a new tour that ran from Pretoria to Lorenco Marques (known
today as Maputo). It stopped right in the reserve, for game rangers
to take the visitors into the bush. The first batch of tourists
arrived in 1923, and the visits quickly developed into such a popular
feature that the railways started using park visits as publicity
vehicles.
The After-Years
By 1946, there were around 38,000 tourists a year. In 1947, Princess
Elizabeth & Princess Margaret visited the Kruger National Park
on their South African royal tour. The publicity that the visit
generated propelled Kruger Park to the next level, ensuring that
since then, a visit to the park became a fixture on every tourist’s
South African trip. By 1955, over 100,000 tourists visited the park
every year and today, the park attracts over 1.3 million visitors a
year.
