Kruger National Park History

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 1^st 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 1^st 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.