How the Serengeti Was Made
Kenya and Tanzania were my home for just under twenty years. I made my living there as a development anthropologist, doing research to support rural development projects which then led to more complex work in “institutional development,” and policy initiatives. My work took me to all parts of Kenya for extended periods of time, especially to remote areas. I spent much time in and around the Great Rift Valley of Africa.
There I witnessed and tried to understand the transition from tribe to nation state that is the social essence of these two sub–Saharan African societies as well as the other states of Sub-Saharan Africa, some of which I worked in on short term projects.
Each year I return to East Africa to show friends the spectacular game parks and wildlife of the Mara and the Serengeti and to try and make continuing sense of this rapidly changing part of the world. When I do, it is understood that we will visit the game parks in the Northern Serengeti which the Kenyans call the Mara.
These are the true, hard to believe but persuasive historical origins of the Masai Mara Game Reserve.
I am there now and write this piece from the safety of my safari tent while the sounds of wild hyenas and tree hyraxes can be heard outside. It will soon be dawn and as I write I am listening to the birds’ “dawn chorus” which breaks out in all its cacophony, just before sunrise.
One of my friends asked me a simple question that is rarely addressed in any of the tourist brochures or the more serious “wildlife conservation literature” and that is, how did the Serengeti (Tanzanian part) and the Mara (Kenyan part) emerge? What is the origin of this game park? The answer is not simple.
First, what do these two game parks comprise? They are part of the Great African Rift Valley system that was formed millions of years ago and for thousands of years has been the home of an abundance of African wildlife topped by charismatic species such as the lion, the elephant, the giraffe, buffalo, and zebra.
Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Our ancestors evolved among these animals and landscapes and tellingly did not hunt them into extinction, unlike the Paleo Indians of the New World, who after having crossed the Bering Straight killed off the megafauna over a brief period, finishing the job by 12,000 BC.
In the Serengeti, the two major groups responsible for this “non extinction” are the original groups of African hunter gatherers, called the first people by the Masai, and the prehistoric agro pastoralists who lived here for millennia, until the coming of the conquering British and the Germans in the late 19th century.
The indigenous hunter gatherers here hunted big game but never in enough numbers to drive them towards extinction. And then, the incoming pastoral Masai who took over this part of the rift valley some five hundred or more years ago, filled it with their cattle that did not displace the wild animals.
On top all this and for reasons anthropologists find hard to really explain, the Masai have a taboo against killing most wild animals, thus allowing the annual migrations and reproductive complexity of this area to maintain its ancient biological complexity, one that modern scientists spend millions of dollars trying to unravel in the name of natural history and evolution.
Such was the situation for about the last 2,000 years. But in the early 19th century all of this changed. Western Europeans became obsessed with ivory and there was big money to be had from European “white hunters” who came in from the Indian Ocean coast and killed animals, mostly elephant for their ivory tusks. It is thought that most of the billiard balls of 19th century Europe emerged from this trade.
Then there is what historians call the “Scramble for Africa.” This describes the European rage during the 19th century to occupy and settle most of the African continent under the authority of European governments. Until that time the interior of Kenya and Tanzania were that area outside of the authority but not the reach of the Islamic Sultans who lived in coastal enclaves, such as the island of Zanzibar. They ran a lucrative slave trade in non-Muslim Africans for Middle Eastern clients, from the coast to the Congo and back.
This gradual but in the end near total occupation of Africa by Europeans was facilitated by the discovery that daily doses of quinine could keep the endemic malaria at bay until the time that colonial scientists realized that malaria had nothing to do with bad air, but was caused by mosquitos that carried it and injected into the blood of their victims. During my 17 years in Africa, I had malaria twice and survived. It can be a terrifying experience.
The only partial exception to this almost complete takeover of Africa by Europeans was the Kingdom or Empire of Ethiopia, Abyssinia as it was called in those days. Ethiopia sits in the highlands of the Horn of Africa. Its people are Cushitic and Semitic language speakers and the core Ethiopians (the Tigreans and Amharans) have been Christian since at least the fourth century AD.
They have their own form of Orthodox Christianity and were able to defeat an invading Italian army at the battle of Adowa in 1896, gaining the grudging respect of the Imperial powers of the day. After WWI Ethiopia was recognized as an independent state and joined the League of Nations under their emperor Hailie Selassie.
During the 19th century, Ethiopia’s Emperors managed to reconstitute an enlarged Ethiopian state wresting back territory in the south that had been taken by invading Muslim southern Ethiopians called in their time the Galla. And so, the Ethiopian kings and emperors began to realize that to maintain their independence they would have to, for starters, imitate and adopt the military technology and organization of Europe.
This began slowly but came to a rare impasse when reigning Emperor Theodore wrote a letter to Queen Victoria asking for recognition as a ruler of equal standing and requesting technical and military “assistance.” The letter was never delivered.
And so, Emperor Theodore, “the King of Kings” seized a number of European and English missionary types, including the British Consul, Charles Cameron. He imprisoned them in his mountain fortress of Magdala. It created a scandal and national outcry in Britain, whose government sent out a negotiator who failed to obtain the release of these innocent men and women.
Soon after, the British government decided that British prestige was at stake and so they voted money for an expeditionary force from British India to cross the ocean and move inland from the Red Sea coast to free these prisoners and teach the emperor a lesson. Thus, was mounted one of the 19th century’s largest, concerted military actions in the Horn of Africa.
In 1886, under the authority of Lieutenant General Sir Robert Napier the British launched a punitive expedition to teach the emperor a lesson and to free the hostages. The operation cost 8.6 million British sterling.
The expedition was led and driven by the Royal Engineers with a force of 13,000 soldiersm and 26,000 camp followers, all who traveled 400 miles from the Red Sea coast up to the mountain of Magdala in the Ethiopian highlands.
To ensure success Napier brough 44 elephants from India to transport heavy artillery. At the invasion site at Zula on the coast, he built 20 miles of railway, lighthouses, and even a desalinization plant to provide his soldiers and their assistants with potable water. In addition, they used the latest in tube well technology to satisfy all water needs.
The outcome of the battle for Magdala in April of 1868 was a sure thing, but the surrounded Ethiopians fought hard and bravely. In the end they could do little against the Snider Enfield fast loading rifles of the British who were supported by rocket fire against Ethiopian warriors who mostly fought back with spears.
The British killed 700 Ethiopians and wounded 1,200, while the British lost two soldiers who died of their wounds. King Theodore committed suicide when he saw that all was lost, ironically with a handgun that had been a gift from Queen Victoria herself and was misinterpreted by the King as a sign of future military assistance.
The hostages were freed, some of them wrote about their harrowing experience in chains and at the time they were considered heroes of the British Empire. This would have gone into the annals of 19th century British imperial realpolitik but was marred by a custom which although was dying out, had not done so by this time. That was the looting of the treasures of the enemy, and it was a precedent set by the early British conqueror traders of Bengal known as the Nabobs.
Napier and his men then stole the emperor’s gold crown, 500 ancient manuscripts, and numerous gold and silver religious artifacts that together needed 200 mules to carry back to the Red Sea coast.
Much of this material is now held in various British institutes of higher learning and public education and which caused British antiquaries of the 19th century to better study the history and languages of Ethiopia
.One such scholar was Wallis Budge, who translated the Ethiopian national saga, the Kebre Nagast into English. This epic describes how a son of Solomon and Sheba brought the ark of the covenant from Jerusalem to Aksum. One hundred million Ethiopians believe it is kept and cared for by a single Ethiopian priest in a small church called Saint Mary of Aksum.
I have met the priest and visited the church. I did not request to see the ark. Oddly, Napier then kidnapped the emperor’s son, took him back to England where he was raised as an upper-class member of high society and was a favorite of Queen Victoria until his death at an early age.
As a reward for his successful operation Napier was named Baron Napier of Magdala by Queen Victoria herself. You can read all about it in the marvelous recent book called, The Prince and the Plunder: How Britain Took One Small Boy and Hundreds of Treasures from Ethiopia by Andrew Heavens, published in 2025.
During the late 19th century, the newly established and reunited state of Italy under a new king from Piedmont looked at the British in Ethiopia and later in Kenya with envy and they then wanted an Empire too.
So, they chose Ethiopia and by the early 20th century they were established on the Red Sea coast in what is now called Eritrea. There they planted a colony of Italians in the hope that they would one day rule Ethiopia. They did it just before WWII and established a fascist regime in Ethiopia, until the British from East Africa defeated them with large levies of native troops.
As the Italians, in imitation of the British, were establishing their mini empire in what is now called Eritrea, it is most likely that all this activity triggered a major epidemic of a viral disease that was brought from India or Arabia by the British and/or Italians. Scientists called this rinderpest or cattle plague.
It spread across East Africa like wildfire causing massive devastation to both livestock and humans. It reached the horn in the late 1880s. Killing off most of the cattle in Ethiopia, it triggered death and destruction.
Historians and biologists estimate that one-third of the people of Ethiopia died as a result as well as two-thirds of the Masai in the rift valley. The Masai remember this as the Mutai and travellers among them describe the kind of famine and destitution that we know from descriptions of travellers in Ireland after the potato famine.
As the British pushed up the coast into what is now Kenya and the Germans occupied much of what is now Tanzania, the Masai had no choice but to recognize their authority over them. In Kenya this allowed the British to clear the plains of Laikipia. It also allowed their upper classes to turn what is now the Mara into a controlled hunting zone as the Masai do not in the main hunt wild animals.
As the Masai found themselves under British authority they soon regained their demographic strength, and they herded their cattle amongst the herds of wildlife that were partially protected by their hunting taboos.
For those familiar with the writings of Karen Blixen or Ernest Hemingway, this was the time of the great white hunters so well described in their books. At that time, ecological science was in its infancy and so these largely wealthy men and some women from Europe were not aware that if a charismatic species like the lion or the elephant were hunted out the entire ecosystem can be negatively affected. The rinderpest also killed off much of the bovid wildlife that is part the Serengeti ecostyem.
Masai Mara, Kenya (Nina R from Africa, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
One of the things that the British brought to East Africa was a keen interest in natural history and then biological science. In 1948 the British gazetted the Mara as a wildlife sanctuary.
By the 1960s Western scientists had internalized what we now call an ecological approach to conservation, understanding that it was not just charismatic species that need protection, but their entire environment.
And so, the Masai Mara National Reserve was created in 1961 by the colonial authority to protect the area. They restricted hunting and the so-called poaching.
With the coming of independence, a core area was called the park and Masai were banned from bringing their cattle into it. Over the decades various Masai groups have been given tenure over their increased land holdings in what is now called the Masai Mara Triangle, and they are allowed to subcontract to tourist companies that bring tourists to see the wildlife. Business is booming.
For a parallel account of how the Serengeti was managed — first in Tanganyika under German rule and later under the British after World War II — see the well-known book The Serengeti Shall Not Die by Bernhard and Michael Grzimek.
Today the Mara and Serengeti host hordes of BBC and National Geographic type film makers who fill our screens with the wonders of the annual migration of the animals. Scientists from all over the world cooperate with their Kenyan and Tanzanian counterparts to better understand the ecology, and to plan for the sustainable conservation of this living wonder of nature.
So in truth, one can point to many true origins of the Mara and the Serengeti game parks. I like to think it all started when a disgruntled Ethiopian emperor contemplated a pistol that was a gift from Queen Victoria and triggered an unpredictable series of events. These are the true, hard to believe but persuasive historical origins of the Masai Mara Game Reserve.
READ MORE from Geoffrey Clarfield:
The Two Faces of the Wren Library at Cambridge University
‘Everything is Personal’ — Remembering Jane Goodall
Trump Should Shutter USAID — Development Economics Is a Hotbed for Corruption
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