Go Back

By Colin Saunders

Established in 1975, Zimbabwe’s second largest national park, the Gonarezhou National Park, is both blessed and cursed by its off-the-beaten-track location in the extreme south-east corner of the lowveld country, where it borders Mozambique and South Africa. As the last sanctuary in eastern Zimbabwe for elephants, from the Shona dialect word meaning stronghold or refuge, the area is appropriately named.

For hunters, names like the Save and Bubi rivers, Chirezdi and Chipinda Pools come to mind, along with tales of great elephants roaming these thousands of square miles of dry mopane forest, unsuitable for farming or livestock. (Zimbabwe game ranger, PH and author Richard Harland, who shot hundreds of elephants during tsetse fly control in the late 60s, discusses the region in depth in his excellent books, African Epic - The Story of Paul ‘Kambada’ Grobler and in his autobiography, The Hunting Imperative - Biography of a Boy in Africa and Ndlovu – The Art of Elephant Hunting, all reviewed in ASG.)

Until now, the park has suffered from a combination of ‘benign neglect’ with fewer than 5,000 visitors each year and abusive exploitation of its natural resources. Inevitably, Gonarezhou has played second fiddle to the more familiar and accessible Hwange National Park, even to Zimbabwe nationals. Today, the park’s greatest hope is profiting from eco-tourism, as it joins hands along with South Africa’s Kruger Park and Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park in forming the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area, which offers real hope to conserve the region’s wildlife while creating local employment.

The timing could not be better for a qualified writer like Zimbabwean Dr. Colin Saunders to recount the Gonarezhou’s natural and human history, lifting the curtain on its geology, diverse habitats, bugs, fish, birds and mammals. Unfortunately, the park lost its black and white rhino to poachers in the early 1990s; its eland were hammered by soldiers from across the border during the war in Mozambique; and Lichtenstein’s hartebeest are now locally extinct, probably due to drought. The south-east lowveld is also the sad story of the extermination of wildlife in the name of tsetse fly control, and of massive elephant culling operations during the brain-numbing heat of October.

Saunders takes us through the area’s “hints of ancient cultures,” of a diminutive people called the Waremba who hunted elephants with arrows tips dipped in poison, through to when it was settled by Shangaan subsistence farmers who can pick out the breathing holes of lungfish in dry riverbeds, and use marula and wild figs and the sap of the mlala palm to brew wine. And it is the story of trading ivory for firearms.

Whites have played their role, too, in the lowveld for the last 80 years – in Rhodesian tobacco and sugar farming, during the guerilla war of independence, and through the park’s battle with drought, pollution and poaching. Saunders describes the creation of Buffalo Bend Game Reserve, and how in the early ‘50s Nuanetsi Ranch was broken up into ‘shooting boxes’ exploited by wealthy South Africans hunting for biltong. He recounts how the park’s wildlife endured the minefields set by Mugabe’s ZANLA (Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army) in the mid-70s that killed and wounded dozens of elephants and countless buffalos – animals that wardens, rangers and scouts had to mercy-kill in the end.

This is not a hunting book. Rather it is “the story of one of the last great unspoilt wildernesses in southern Africa,” writes Saunders, who spent 33 years as a country doctor in the hardscrabble lowveld Triangle. Declaring himself “bewitched” with the park, he weaves his own many experiences with the untold stories of several dozen unforgettable and dedicated individuals who worked over the years to promote and protect the park’s “bruised but intact” resources from greed in all its incarnations in Africa.

Saunders tells their campfire tales for them. Zimbabweans will recognize many names - from game rangers like John Osborne, Ron Thomson, Richard Peek, Tim Braybrooke, Tommy Orford, Mike Bromwich, Rob Murray and Gordon Putterill; DC Allan Wright; Archie Fraser who became Deputy Secretary for Lands and is credited with drafting visionary legislation on conservation and management; and Graham Child, Director of National Parks and Wild Life Management during the war. He also celebrates the dedicated grassroots Game Scouts – “the eyes and ears of the National Parks system” - despite evidence in the ‘80s of poaching by staff when 860 ivory-less elephant carcasses were found.

As an example of all those who lead rough bush lives to work with wildlife, Osborne and his wife, Jill, first arrived at Chipinda to find a ruined home, an office with no furniture or battery for the radio, a neglected infrastructure, and a surprisingly aggressive population of elephants. With an annual budget for the entire northern field station of 500 pounds, Osborne still managed to train and pay his white, Shangaan and Shona staff, and develop an anti-poaching programme, at one point turning over some 60,000 lbs of illegal ivory!

Shadrek, “the Prince of Poachers” was Gonarezhou’s most notorious poacher. He alone probably killed more big tuskers than the white ivory hunter ‘Bvekenya’ Bernard who, according to T.V. Bulpin’s The Ivory Trail, killed some 300 pachyderms in this region. Saunders recounts how Shadrek used a homemade muzzleloader that he crafted from an old bolt-action rifle, and manufactured his own ‘Portuguese lead’ ammunition out of old nuts, bolts and slugs. (Also see Ron Thomson’s The Adventures of Shadrek: Southern Africa’s Most Infamous Elephant Poacher.)

But the story of Gonarezhou is really of its elephants whose “giant footprints like territorial markers” and “fibrous piles of dung scattered like visiting cards on road and track and riverbank, remind us that it is their kingdom.” Like the ones Osborne saw sliding on their backsides down the park’s iconic terracotta sandstone Chilojo Cliffs to water. And of the huge, old bull thought to be Dhlulamithi – the largest tusker ever to come out of Southern Africa – with tusks weighing 132 lbs for 8 feet 6 inches, and 107 lbs for 7 feet 2 inches, controversially shot in 1967 by South African State Buyer for the South African State Tender Board, Victor Verster, with his 500/465 Holland & Holland, with game rangers Harland and Braybrooke.

Saunders discusses the long, complicated history of culling the park’s elephant that are both its primary attraction for tourists and most tough customer in terms of the environment. In the 30-year period from 1960 to 1991, 10,567 elephants were removed. More were culled after the devastating 1992 drought. At one point, half the area’s elephants were culled – and even that was not enough to reduce the population to a semblance of carrying capacity. Otherwise, the park’s baobabs, its dark-leafed ebony and broad canopies of wild mango, its dense thickets of ironwood - hard enough to deflect a bullet – will disappear with the usual consequences of loss of habitat, soil erosion, silting up of rivers, etc.

Rangers used FN-7.62s or AK-47s to cull, and learned to make the best of an ugly task by recovering skins, tusks and meat with remarkable efficiency. Crop-raiders, too, were “handled with the usual administrative restraint to avoid using this as a pretext for free meat.” Incredibly, there were hardly any mishaps, except the time when the brass-jackets of their ammunition covered up the loads of soft nosed slugs, rather than the hard nosed .425s bullets they expected.

Although one senses that Saunders, who founded the Lowveld Natural History

Society and has chaired the National Parks, Wild Life Board and Malilangwe Trust, is not much of a hunter, he is definitely not a fan of Western NGOs coming in to dictate wildlife policy in the African bush. “I am a determined advocate of the role of ethical hunting in conserving the wild open spaces and wild things of Africa,” he writes.

As demonstrated by illegal netting of massive numbers of fish, using army mosquito nets and shade cloth stolen from horticulturalists, Saunders writes that, “Many of us are holding our breath,” as Gonarezhou limps towards its role in one of Africa’s last great efforts to conserve habitat and wildlife. In the meantime, he has written an enduring historical document that pays tribute to the role individuals can play in preserving and managing vast tracts of remaining wilderness.

At 380 pages of text, with maps, photos and drawings,Gonarezhou – A Place forElephants can profoundly influence and deepen one’s experience, wherever you are on safari in Zimbabwe. It is available from Zimbi books in South Africa.