About the park

The history of Hwange

Name: Hwange National Park
Address: Zimbabwe

Hwange was a royal hunting ground before it was a park, and a waterless one before a 22-year-old warden started drilling. This is the documented story of how Zimbabwe's largest park was built, why it still runs on pumps, and what the death of one lion in 2015 did and did not change.

If you only want the answer

Hwange was San country, then Nambya land under a chief named Hwange, then the hunting territory of the Ndebele king Mzilikazi. In 1928 it became the Wankie Game Reserve under Ted Davison, a warden appointed at 22 who spent 33 years building it, and whose boreholes turned land with almost no surface water into elephant country. Renamed Hwange in 1982, the park came through war years and poaching, and in July 2015 the killing of Cecil the lion just outside its boundary made it briefly the most discussed park on earth. The pumps still run, and the park still depends on them.

Before the park: hunters, farmers and kings

The oldest human story here belongs to the San, who hunted across this corner of the Kalahari sandveld long before anyone kept written records of it. They were followed by the Nambya, also recorded in colonial documents as the Nhanzwa, farming people whose chieftaincy gave the area its name: a chief called Hwange held this country in the nineteenth century, and both the park and the coal town on its northern edge are named after his title.

Then the kings arrived. Mzilikazi, who led his people north out of Zululand and founded the Ndebele state in the 1830s, reserved this game-rich, thinly settled country as his royal hunting territory, and the arrangement is generally said to have continued under his son Lobengula until the Ndebele kingdom fell to the British South Africa Company in 1893. Royal reservation was, in its way, the area's first game law: hunting here was the king's privilege, not open to everyone. When people today call Hwange a wilderness untouched until 1928, they are skipping several centuries of owners.

1928: a reserve on land nobody else wanted

The land became a game reserve partly because it was considered useless for anything else. Deep Kalahari sand, no perennial rivers, seasonal pans that failed by late winter and tsetse fly across much of it: the assessors of the 1920s saw no farming future here. Decades of uncontrolled hunting since the fall of the Ndebele state had also stripped the game. When the Wankie Game Reserve was proclaimed in 1928, it protected an area that held remarkably few animals.

The man sent to change that was Ted Davison, who took up the post of first warden in September 1928 at the age of 22. His preparation was a year as an apprentice taxidermist, two years as a farm assistant and a stint on government tsetse control. He arrived to a reserve with no roads, no maps, no staff to speak of and no permanent water, and started with a pole-and-dagga hut on the site that became Main Camp. He stayed 33 years, and his own account of them, Wankie: The Story of a Great Game Reserve, published in 1967, is still the foundation of everything written about the park since.

The water problem, and Davison's answer

Davison's central problem was hydrological. With no permanent surface water, the game drifted out of the reserve every dry season toward the rivers beyond its boundaries, where the guns were waiting. A game reserve the animals left for half the year protected very little.

His answer, begun in the early 1930s, was to drill. Boreholes were sunk into the Kalahari sand, windmills went up over them, and diesel pumps took over in the driest months. The mineral-rich groundwater proved doubly attractive to game, and animals that had always migrated began to stay. Populations recovered and then grew, and the reserve slowly filled with the elephants it is now famous for. It is hard to overstate what this decision did: the Hwange a visitor sees today, the herds stacked around Nyamandhlovu in October, is not a natural system that was fenced and saved. It is an artificial water table with a park built on top of it.

That is also the bill that never stops arriving. About 60 waterholes are pumped across the park today, and if the pumping stopped, the dry-season Hwange of the brochures would empty out within weeks. In the severe drought of 2019, when pans failed faster than they could be supplied, elephants died at the mud in numbers that made international news. Ecologists have long debated whether so much artificial water has pushed elephant numbers beyond what the woodland can carry, and that debate is not settled. What is settled is the dependency itself: Davison solved the water problem in the 1930s by making it permanent.

Wankie, the colliery and the name

For most of the twentieth century the park shared its name, in its colonial spelling, with the coal town up the road. The Wankie Colliery, worked since the early 1900s, fuelled Rhodesia's railways and power stations, and in June 1972 it was the scene of the country's worst industrial catastrophe, an underground explosion that killed 427 men. Park and pithead were neighbours with the same name and utterly different lives.

The reserve itself moved up the ladder of legal protection in stages after the Second World War. The National Parks Act was passed in 1949, the former ranch of H.G. Robins in the north-west was added to the protected area, and full national park status followed, though published sources date the final designation anywhere between 1949 and 1961. In 1982, two years after Zimbabwean independence, the colonial spelling was corrected: town, colliery and park all became Hwange, restoring the name of the Nambya chief it had come from in the first place.

War years and poaching

The park's middle age was harder than its youth. The Rhodesian Bush War of the 1970s emptied it of tourists and stretched its staff, and the early 1980s brought no real recovery, because Matabeleland was then living through its own violent and tense aftermath. Through those years the pumps mostly kept running, which in Hwange counts as heroism of a quiet sort, but budgets, roads and morale all decayed.

Poaching pressure never went away, and its worst documented episode came much later. In 2013 poachers poisoned waterholes and salt licks in and around the park with cyanide. Official follow-up surveys logged more than a hundred elephant carcasses, other estimates ran considerably higher, and it was described at the time as the largest illegal killing of animals in Southern Africa in 25 years. Several poachers were caught and sentenced. The method shocked even people hardened to the trade, because poisoning a waterhole in a park that runs on waterholes kills everything that drinks.

Cecil, July 2015

On the night of 1 July 2015, a 13-year-old male lion known as Cecil was lured out of the park with bait and shot with a bow by Walter Palmer, an American trophy hunter who had paid for the hunt. The first arrow wounded him; he was tracked and killed some ten hours later. Cecil wore a GPS collar and had been a study animal of WildCRU, Oxford University's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, which has run one of Africa's longest lion research projects in Hwange. It was the collar data, and the researchers reading it, that turned a routine boundary hunt into a global story.

The reaction was unlike anything wildlife conservation had seen. WildCRU's director called it arguably the biggest global response to a wildlife story ever, and donations to the research unit surged within days. Some of the change stuck: the United States listed lions under its Endangered Species Act in December 2015, tightening trophy imports, and dozens of airlines banned the carriage of hunting trophies. Some of it did not: Palmer held permits and was never charged, the case against his professional guide was dismissed, Zimbabwe's brief suspension of hunting around Hwange was lifted, and legal trophy hunting continues on the park's boundaries today. In 2017 Cecil's son Xanda was legally shot in the same border country. The honest local summary is that Cecil's death funded a great deal of lion research and changed the paperwork in other countries, while the ground rules at the park edge stayed largely as they were.

What you can see of the history today

Start at Main Camp, which grew outward from Davison's original hut and the small cottage he moved into in the 1930s. It is still the park's administrative heart, and its older buildings, water tower and shady camp square have the unhurried, slightly worn feel of a place that has been doing the same job since before your grandparents were born. Davison's Camp, a safari camp in the south-east, carries the first warden's name.

Then drive the few kilometres to Nyamandhlovu Pan and climb the raised viewing platform. Everything this page describes is in front of you at once: a pumped pan on land with no natural permanent water, the borehole machinery that feeds it, and the elephants that exist here in these numbers because a young man decided in the 1930s that if the water would not stay, he would make it stay.

The pumps themselves are the real monument. Every pan you park beside in September is a running cost met by park fees, trusts such as Friends of Hwange, and the camps you stay in. Hwange's history is not behind glass in a museum. It is the sound of a borehole engine at midday, still doing what it was built to do.