Kruger National Park: the “tenth province” of South Africa

An index to this series can be found at the first post.

December 14th-22nd, 2019

Kruger National Park is routinely named as one of the greatest national parks in all of Africa. Nearly two million visitors a year enter its gates. Many opt to stay overnight in the park; it currently offers 4179 beds in twelve main rest camps in addition to a large number of campsites. Nearly 900 kilometers of tarred roads and nearly twice as many kilometers of gravel roads enable visitors to drive to areas teeming with wildlife. Our week in “Kruger” was a first for both Natasha and me.

Our course passed through all the southern areas of Kruger National Park.

In this and the posts to follow, I will talk about our experiences starting with our entry to the park at Phalaborwa, three nights at the Mopani Rest Camp, two nights at the Satara Rest Camp, and three nights at Skukuza Rest Camp, followed by an exit via the Malelane Gate. For some visitors, Kruger can feel like a bingo card; did you see all of the “Big 5?” The equivalent among bird watchers is sometimes derisively called a “twitcher.” For other visitors, coming to Kruger is a quasi-spiritual experience, imagining that the park is what all of Africa would be like if humans had not built cities.

On December 20th, Natasha and I discovered that our rondavel at Skukuza was barely a rock throw away from the Stevenson-Hamilton Knowledge Resource Centre. We had wanted to see the museum that describes the genesis of the Kruger National Park, and here it was on our doorstep! I am adding information from Jane Carruthers‘ The Kruger National Park: a Social and Political History. If you cannot find it at a local library, much of the information is available in her 1988 Ph.D. thesis from UCT.

The Stevenson-Hamilton Library and Museum is centrally located at the Skukuza Rest Camp.

The Library and Museum has a nice display on the archaeology sites within the park. People have been living in Africa for millennia, of course. Given that Mapungubwe is so close by, it seems inevitable that the rich lands of Kruger Park would have attracted people to live here, as well. Thulamela is revered as a “place of birth” for the Venda people. This royal city in stone dates from 1240 AD to 1700 AD (essentially in the period immediately following the decline of Mapungubwe), and it was located in the northernmost “Pafuri” section of Kruger Park. Several artifacts from this kingdom were on display, reaffirming that their ceramic and metal-forging technologies were quite advanced. Their trade links are illustrated by the presence of Chinese porcelain fragments and glass beads.

Why was Kruger National Park named after Paul Kruger?

Photograph by Lynn Meskell

The Sabi Game Reserve (proclaimed 1898) and Singwitsi Game Reserve (proclaimed 1903) were originally created by the South African Republic (a republic created by the Boers who crossed north of the Vaal river– later called the “Transvaal”). Paul Kruger was president of the South African Republic from 1883 to 1900. Sabi and Singwitsi were merged into a national park in 1926, after the Union of South Africa joined together the Cape Colony, Natal Colony, South African Republic, and Orange Free State. Jane Carruthers and Hennie Grobler had a lively public debate about Paul Kruger’s leadership in creating the Sabi Game Reserve. Carruthers argued in a 1994 paper that Paul Kruger’s name was attached to the park largely to gain support from the Afrikaner community, creating a myth of Paul Kruger’s foresighted wildlife conservation. She noted that the first game reserve created by Paul Kruger was actually Pongola Game Reserve (1894); Kruger prioritized asserting the Republic’s eastward expansion above protecting its wildlife. Grobler shot back in 1996, describing Carruthers’ methods as “blunt instruments,” portraying Paul Kruger as a stalwart supporter of South Africa’s wildlife heritage during the “crucial 1890s.” Carruthers was given right of reply in the same journal issue, engaging each of Grobler’s points in succession. Sometimes academics are portrayed as boring, but I note that researchers occasionally require sharp elbows!

In the years since 1994’s first democratic election in South Africa, the Kruger Park brand has proven too valuable to dislodge through a renaming. Paul Kruger’s head was sculpted by Coert Steynberg in the 1970s from a granite boulder quarried in Paarl, a town associated with the growth of the Afrikaans language. A flood in 2000 submerged the base of the statue, but it was in no danger of being swept away!

How did Stevenson-Hamilton gain so much control over this area?

Apparently this rail bridge at Skukuza will become home to a river hotel!

The headquarters for the game warden of Sabi Game Reserve was established at the bridge across the Sabi River before 1907. This bridge, serving the Selati Rail Line, is still in place, though trains stopped rumbling across it in 1973. When Kruger National Park gained that status in 1926, the Report of the Game Reserves Commission (1918) specified a five-fold purpose (paraphrased here):

1. Visitors could see what nature would have looked like before civilization developed.
2. Students in the sciences of botany, zoology, and others would gain a valuable training ground.
3. Animals that were becoming extinct throughout the rest of the country would be visible in something other than a zoo.
4. Animals would be able to behave naturally rather than living in terror of huntsmen.
5. Winter months would enable visits without fear of fever.

Harry Wolhuter’s 1904 battle with a lion is memorialized by a small statue, the lion pelt, and the knife that saved his life.

In 1936, the Sabi Bridge station was renamed “Skukuza,” a nickname for game ranger James Stevenson-Hamilton, a former British officer who set his stamp on Kruger Park by serving as its warden from 1902 to 1946 (contrary to a lot of the information one finds online, I note that he was actually its third warden; his two predecessors were short-lived). In the first years of the Sabi reserve, Stevenson-Hamilton gained an incredible amount of authority over it:

Anyone wishing to enter the reserve had first to obtain a permit from him and he was therefore aware at all times of who was within the reserve boundaries. Stevenson-Hamilton was appointed Resident Justice of the Peace as well as a Native Commissioner and, at the beginning of 1903, he arranged that the regular police vacate the reserve and hand over their powers to the Warden and his rangers.

J. Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History, page 40

The warden was also able to forestall the movement of livestock into the reserve and prevent miners from prospecting within its bounds. In many respects, the reserves that would later become Kruger Park were separately administered from the Transvaal Province of the Union of South Africa in which they were located. It is worth noting that Kruger Park is much older than the Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa; these boundaries date only from 1994. This is why I call Kruger the “tenth province” above.

What did we lose by creating this park?

The nickname Skukuza, though, is not a pleasant one. Stevenson-Hamilton gained this name because when he first arrived at Sabi Game Reserve, the warden apparently accepted the popular contemporary prejudice that the black population of the area were the chief killers of wildlife, though the Voortrekkers and English sportsmen, armed with rifles, were largely responsible for the tremendous losses of wildlife in the nineteenth century. The quagga and the blue antelope both became extinct during this era.

“Skukuza” means “to sweep away like a flowing river.” Even if no white cities were established in the area of Kruger Park, people of color had been living in this area for some time. Stevenson-Hamilton gained the nickname Skukuza because he insisted that the Sabi Game Reserve could only thrive if all humans were moved out of the area. As he developed the administrative and legal power to do so, he evicted families who had lived within the Reserve’s boundaries for generations. By the time Singwitsi Game Reserve was also placed under his control, Stevenson-Hamilton had changed his mind, perceiving the people who lived in that vast area as being helpful in catch poachers. The damage had already been done to the families removed from Sabi, though. Some communities continue to use “Skukuza” as a nickname for the entire Kruger National Park to this day.

Even if families were allowed to continue living in the Singwitsi Reserve, Stevenson-Hamilton transformed their lives in many ways, some very negative. Those who continued to live in the reserve were forbidden from eating wildlife, and substantial penalties applied to those who broke that law. The inhabitants of the reserve were held to owe rent from continued occupancy, and compelled labor was expected as “payment.” Many whites claimed that forcing blacks into the wage laborer role was part of a “civilizing” mission.

Of course, people of color were not allowed to enjoy the National Park on the same basis as whites, either. Black visitors were not offered equal accommodations at the park, and they weren’t allowed the same recreations within the park. Stevenson-Hamilton recorded in his diary that he was concerned that a visiting Japanese chargé d’affaires would be segregated as an “Asiatic” by the “fatheads” (J. Carruthers, page 99). These discriminatory policies have echoes today, as domestic park visitors still skew strongly to the white citizens of South Africa.

Bringing people to nature: park infrastructure and future

Today’s rondavels offer fully-featured open-air kitchens and, critically, air-conditioned bedrooms!

Today, Kruger National Park offers a wide range of accommodation for guests and a great road network to enable tourists to go almost anywhere in the park, often touching artificial watering holes charged by windmills. In several respects, Stevenson-Hamilton acted as a brake on building out this infrastructure in the game reserves and later in the national park, favoring genuine wilderness. In fact, the park opted in 1931 to allow visitors only in winter to forestall problems with malaria and thunderstorms. In the early days of the National Park, the Board formed an agreement with South African Railways to manage most aspects of the tourism operation. A system of concessions evolved in the 1930s, though, and general stores began opening at the rest camps springing up across the park. In 1932, a road connecting Letaba (a rest camp near the Phalaborwa Gate) and Punda Maria (a camp at the extreme north of the park) was completed, opening the north to visitors and making way for the Shingwedzi rest camp.

Kruger National Park occupies a substantial part of South Africa’s northeast, running from its border with Zimbabwe down the majority of its border with Mozambique. Because Mozambique has named its side of that border the Limpopo National Park, it’s possible to think of this entire region as one conjoined park. The governments of South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe have formed agreements to unify the entire area as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Two big problems have stood in the way of this unification so far. One is that a fair number of rhinoceros poachers have entered Kruger Park across this border; the two governments have actively collaborated to arrest or otherwise stop the poachers. The second problem is that economic conditions in Zimbabwe mean that people are attempting to move back into Gonarezhou National Park, designated for wildlife in the 1940s. Zimbabwe’s ability to merge Gonarezhou with the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park has been on-again, off-again as it navigates its current economic crisis.

The anti-poacher squad is ready for action!

I would like to dedicate this post to Paul van Helden and Eileen Hoal, researchers whose love for the great outdoors is apparent to all!