History of Serengeti National Park
Serengeti National Park is located in the north of Tanzania. The park has been listed by UNESCO as one of the World Heritage Sites, and it is regarded as the best wildlife reserve in Africa.
According to the History of Serengeti National Park, long before the first foreigners set foot on African soil, the Masai people grazed their cattle freely in the open plains of the eastern Mara region, which they named “endless plains.”
In 1951, the Serengeti National Park was gazetted, covering an area of 5700 square kilometers (14,736sq km) of some of the best grassland range in Africa, as well as acacia woodland savannah. The Serengeti name is derived from “siringet,” which in the Masaith language means a great open space where the land goes on and on.
The Serengeti gained more fame after the first work of Bernhard Grzmek and his son Michael in the 1950s. The duo produced a book and a movie, ‘Serengeti shall not die,’ which got worldwide recognition as one of the most important early pieces of nature conservation documentary in the History of Serengeti National Park.
In early 1892, German explorer Bauman, who probably was the first explorer to see the Serengeti, burst out of the Oldeani Highland Forest to find themselves on the rim of that great extinct crater Ngorongoro, 12 miles in diameter, 2000′ deep, and filled with a great array of wildlife.
Baumann explored the crater and then made his way north and west to the Serengeti plains themselves. At this time, the combined ravages of rinderpest, which had wiped out their cattle, smallpox, and locusts had depopulated large areas of this region, and the Masai were starving and in a desperate condition.
Later in the early 1900’s, collectors and hunters, like James Clarke of the American Museum of Natural History and Stewart Edward White, explored the area. At the time, they recorded very few buffalo and no elephant in the areas, and ironically, these species are now in abundance here.
The lions, however, were the main reason for their visit and exploration. These large cats that are now crying out to be saved were then classed as vermin and could be shot at will. This attracted numerous hunters, and by the 1920’s it was common for one safari to kill up to 50 lions.
Around the same time, the British colonial administrators realized that hunting the lions was making them scarce, and they came up with legislation to protect the area. First, they made a partial game reserve of about 3.2 km². This was to be the base for the current Serengeti National Park, which was gazetted in 1951.
Masai residents were evicted and resettled in the Ngorongoro conservation area, a move that is still questioned to this day as having been a compulsion and deception by the British administrators. Today, the Serengeti National Park is Tanzania’s largest national park, protecting a vast wealth of terrestrial wildlife, and is very popular for one of the largest and greatest migrations in the History of Serengeti National Park that has not been altered.
