THE ZIMBABWEAN DEPARTMENT OF
NATIONAL PARKS AND WILD LIFE MANAGEMENT:
GROWTH BEFORE 1990.
By
Graham Child
Director of National Parks and Wild Life Management, 1971-1986.   

Introduction
This is a brief history of the Department of National Parks and Wild Life Management. It came into being through amalgamation, on November 1st 1963, of two Departments in Southern Rhodesia, in anticipation of the breakup of the Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland on December 31st, that year (Gibson, 1963).  These were the Department of National Parks which had been created in terms of the National Parks Act, 1949, and during the Federal area, had been a Federal agency, but with jurisdiction only in Southern Rhodesia, and the Southern Rhodesian Game Department, created in 1952 (Gibson 1962).
Before the creation of these two departments there had been no specialized agency charged with wildlife matters.  They had been dealt with by the general administration since the Game Law amendment Act, a modification of Cape legislation, came into force in Rhodesia in 1891, within a year of white settlement in what is now Zimbabwe. The Rhodes Inyanga and Rhodes Matopos National Parks were created in 1902, early in the country’s history at the behest of Mr. Cecil John Rhodes.

The Department of National Parks
Edward (Ted) Davison took up the post as warden of the newly created Wankie Game Reserve in September 1928 and managed and developed the Reserve for 34 years. This is covered in his charming book, entitled “Wankie: the story of a great game reserve”, published in 1967  By the outbreak of World War II Ted had a European assistant and a small support staff of Africans, many of Bushman extract.  Ted’s first assistant, a Mr. ******** was killed in action with the British Fleet Airarm during the war.  We next hear of John Tebbit, an ex-member of the BSAP, as Ted’s assistant, before John became the first Warden of the Victoria Falls National Park, all under a Col Vorley (?) in Salisbury.  These and perhaps other pioneers in national parks were the first members in a Department of National Parks formed soon after the promulgation of the 1949 Parks Act.
It is difficult to trace the early history of National Parks as, unlike its sister organization in the Territorial Government it apparently only ever published one annual report, in about 1959.  By the time the present author became acquainted with its staff as a student assisting Thane Riney, an American Fulbright Scholar working in Wankie, in late 1958, there were five Wardens and Rangers at Main Camp and another at Robins Camp in the north west of the Park.  Les Stewart M.B.E., a career civil servant, had been appointed Director in 1953 and had staff stationed at Inyanga, Matopos (which came under his jurisdiction in terms of Proclamation No. 48 of 1953) the Victoria Falls, Lake Mac Illwaine, Ewanrigg, Vumba and perhaps Ngezi, Sebakwe, Mushandike, and Chinhoyi Caves.  At that time these areas and the unstaffed Chimanimani and Mutarazi National Parks were termed National Parks.       

The Game Department/ Department of Wild Life Conservation
The Game Department was created in 1952, but its first unpublished report covered the year ending December 31st, 1953.  Archie Fraser, also a career civil servant, reputed to have had long experience in Treasury, became the first Game Officer and published his fourth annual report for the year 1956, which was tabled in parliament.  By the time of this report he had a clerk and four Rangers with their African support staff working to him.  The first rangers were Ian Nyschens, who left the service in 1957, Rupert Fothergill, awarded the MBE in 1959 for his outstanding contribution while leading the game rescue team to save animals trapped by the rising waters of Lake Kariba, Barrie Ball, who many years later became the combined department’s distinguished and greatly respected Chief Game Warden, and Tommy Orford. 
Initially Archie and the Rangers were engaged chiefly in controlling animals in conflict with agriculture, mainly elephant dispersing onto private farms and ranches or into Communal Areas. It was also policy to use elephant meat to help feed the large gangs of labourers assembled at Kariba to build the dam.  Rupert Fothergill and Ian Nyschens spelled each other on this rather unpleasant task for over a year in 1958 and 1959.  

The Department first came to prominence as a force in wildlife conservation in September 1950 when the press reported “thousands” of game animals dying from thirst along a recently completed tsetse game control fence that was denying them access to drinking water in the south-eastern low-veldt.  Many animals died on the fence or had to be destroyed after injuring themselves trying to break through, but many more were saved by the actions of the Department, but not before a large number of pregnant eland and zebra had aborted their foetuses.  In other cases young calves were apparently abandoned by their mothers and both poachers and predators, especially lion, took the easy opportunity to over kill prey.  Only Rupert Fothergill, who remained an anonymous Game Ranger, emerged with credit for his hard untiring efforts to provide water and chase animals to it and for ignoring bureaucratic orders and cutting the fence.            

This incident illustrates how tsetse control in Zimbabwe has often been in direct conflict with wildlife conservation and sound land and resource use. Not only did it involve the killing of thousands of head of game animals, but resulted in the widespread destruction of habitats from riparian systems, through savanna woodland, and thickets to pans essential to game and incidentally many not targeted species for water. It is ironical that in 1959 the Game Department went to considerable trouble and expense to save 1,686 animals from drowning during the formation of Lake Kariba while 18,583 were shot on tsetse control, mostly not too far away from Kariba.  During the first 39 years of the tsetse control programme a total of 659 334 head of game were destroyed for no real purpose (Child and Riney, 1987; Child 1995 and 2008). The whole programme was based on the fallacious assumption that the contraction of the tsetse distribution in southern Africa during the early 20th century was in response to the death of most of its food animals during the rindepest pandemic of 1896, which killed vast amounts of game and livestock.  In fact historical evidence, first presented by Rodger Summers (1971), shows that the recession in the tsetse range commenced a decade before the rindepest, implying that tsetse distribution was unrelated to the abundance of its food animals.
Early growth of the Game Department was slow considering what had come to be expected from it.  However, from 1958 when there was a total staff of 27, including 16 Scouts, it grew rapidly to 40 in 1959 and 75, of whom 50 were Scouts, in 1960, before leveling off at 86 in 1961 and 91 in 1962 shortly before amalgamation. The first staff biologists, Frank Junior as a Fisheries Officer, the present author, as a Wild Life Ecologist and Allan Savory as a Quelea Control Officer were appointed to the Department in late 1959/early 1960.  Both the present author and Allan Savory left the Department within a couple of years and their posts were amalgamated to create a senior research post at Assistant Director grade.  Dr Roth, a German wildlife veterinarian had this job with Frank Junor under him on the fisheries side.  Roth was soon supported by three young wildlife biologist recruits. Dave Cumming, based at Sengwa Gorge to study wildlife/tsetse relationships, Jeremy Anderson, to encourage game ranching and Michael Kerr, to work on the general biology of selected game animals with the author at the National Museum in Bulawayo.

In 1956 the agency was still a Section of the Department of Mines, Lands and Surveys, but it became a fully fledged Department of Game under the Division of Mines, Lands and Surveys in 1957, and later in the Division of Irrigation and Lands.  In 1960 the Department’s name was changed, in terms of the Wild Life Conservation Act, to the Department of Wild Life Conservation and men who had been Game Rangers acquired the long winded title of Wild Life Conservation Officers.  Archie Fraser, the ester while Game Officer, who drafted this seminal, but short lived act, remained on as Director of the newly named department, but after a year and a bit he was promoted to Under Secretary in the Ministry.

Archie was replaced as Director by J. N. (Needham) Gibson, another career civil servant, who came under increasing political pressure for his lack of professional wildlife expertise.  The Department was rapidly becoming more scientifically orientated and attracted increasing criticism in parliament and from the general public over management of the country’s wildlife. Needham did, however, remain at the helm during the difficult transition period while the two departments were amalgamated and for a couple of years afterwards, before he was replaced by John Robinson in 1966.  John had been a Provincial Veterinary Officer, but he too was deemed unsuited for the post and was retired in 1970, followed the report of the Parliamentary Wild Life Commission, 
The Commission was composed of  Prof. George Petrides from Michigan State University in the US and Dr. U. deV. (Tol) Pienaar, Chief Biologist and CEO of the Kruger National Park.  Its terms of reference were broad: to investigate, evaluate and advise on the wildlife sector in Rhodesia.  Among other things, it recommended a more scientific approach to wildlife management and scientific leadership of the Department. Assistant Director, Phil Evans, yet another career civil servant, who had handled the practicalities of the amalgamation of the two departments with extreme skill and understanding, held the fort for about 18 months until the present author was appointed to the postion 1971.  I held the position for over 15 years, until 1986, when I handed the baton on to Dr Willie Nduku, my competent deputy, as it was obvious that a white Director was a politically intolerable anachronism for the new independent Mugabe government. Unfortunately, Willie also did not last long before he too was forced out, this time by another black whose credentials were loyalty to Mugabe and not ability to manage the Department of wildlife

Amalgamation
Responsibility for the National Parks in Southern Rhodesia reverted to the Southern Rhodesian Government on November 1st, 1963, shortly before the breakup of the Federation at the end that year. Amalgamation of the two departments to form the Department of National Parks and Wild Life Management formally took place on the same day. The Federal National Parks (Designated Areas) Act, 1955, remained in force in Southern Rhodesia, in terms of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Order in Council, 1963.   
Combining the two departments with their proud records of achievement, often against apparently insoluble odds, which had often been in competition with each other in the field, was a major achievement.  It meant integrating two bodies of essentially self reliant individuals into a single cohesive unit of some 253 people within a hastily developed institutional structure to administer about 8 million acres of land with minimal resources. National Parks staff tended to be more possessive and parochial in their attitudes towards the resources in the parks under their care, whereas Wild Life Conservation staff tended to view the resources for which they were responsible much more broadly and these two approaches, to what were now common objectives, had to be reconciled and consolidated into the corporate culture of a single agency. Phil Evans must take the lion’s share of the credit for accomplishing this delicate exercise so well, with minimal individual personal anguish to the many prima donnas in the two organizations and for mixing and matching their skills to face the new tasks they had to accomplish together. 

The departmental structure that emerged consisted of Needham Gibson as Director, Phil. Evans, Harald Roth and Ted Davison, as Assistant Directors of administration, research and the field branch respectively.  Under them they had 22 clerical staff, two research officers, 4 Regional Wardens, 12 Wardens, 39 Rangers and Assistant Rangers, 157 Scouts, 12 part time seasonal assistants, a Building Supervisor and a variable number of casual labourers.  Apart from additions to all grades this structure was strengthened in 1971 with my appointment to include Phil Evans, as an in-line Deputy Director and four heads of Branches responsible for field operations (John Tebbit), terrestrial research (Roelf Attwell), aquatic research (Ian Vander Lingen) and administration (Dave Lee), in place of the three Assistant Directors. By the time I retired in 1986 the Department had a permanent establishment of over  2000 people, of whom over 30 were scientists, many with doctorates or masters degrees, about 40 were  Provincial Wardens and Wardens, over 100 were Rangers and Senior Rangers, and about 1500 were Scouts and graded tourist Rest Camp Attendants. The remainder ranged from administrative staff, tourist personnel, interpretative and training officers, and technicians, through various individual specialists, to messengers, cleaners and the like.  A feature of the deployment of this staff was that only about 53, or  2.5% of the entire  establishment was based in Head Office and even a few of these were specialists that it was simply most convenient to locate in head quarters, where there was the infrastructure to support them.               
The Game Department was originally housed in three minute inter-leading offices looking onto a garden between Chaplin Buildings and the building that had housed an early Government Mining Assayer, on the corner of Third Street and Jameson Avenue, now Samora Machell Avenue.  It soon expanded to take over a temporary office building, built during World War II for the RAF, before extending into a rabbit warren of neighbouring buildings. This remained the headquarters of the combined departments after amalgamation, but by the time I became director we also occupied the whole of the first floor of Chaplin Buildings and considerably more adjacent real estate.  Our ivory store and other storerooms were variously located in Cranborne or the light industrial site, in abandoned temporary buildings. It was not unusual in later years for the ivory store, alone, to house several millions of US dollars worth of bullion like ivory, and we were fortunate to have experienced only one break in from which we lost a single tusk.  

A shock came shortly after independence when the attractive accommodation in Chapman Buildings, diagonally across the intersection of Third Street and Samora Machell Avenue from the Prime Minister’s office, was required for more prestigious purposes than a Parks and Wild Life headquarters.  The high handed ex-Britisher, from Ministry who enjoyed evicting us, was incredulous when I refused to move to the shambles of ex-World War II corrugated iron relict prefabs in North Avenue which he offered as an alternative as we simply could not have fitted into the space, even had we been happy to move.  A compromise was reached in which we agreed to take over the North Avenue ruin after it had been modified and refurbished to our satisfaction in exchange for the first floor of Chapman buildings and one small nearby building with the other buildings in Third Street complex remaining ours. One of my last contributions to the department before retiring in 1986 was to secure a site in the Botanic Gardens and the funds to build a custom designed headquarters. This included storage facilities and a secure ivory store so that for the first time since its early inception the department has not had to occupy make shift ruins of temporary World War II buildings in several localities around town.  In part, head office was to blame as it always gave priority to field needs when allocating the department’s meager annual grant from Treasury.

Legislation
There was nothing remarkable about Southern Rhodesia’s legislation covering the protection and management of biological reserves, and wildlife outside, until the Wild Life Conservation Act 1960, promulgatedon January 1st 1961.  Previous laws had mimicked legislation in surrounding countries and beyond, but the 1960 Act initiated a break from the traditional provisions in nature conservation legislation. Archie Fraser drafted and implemented the 1960 Act, introducing and testing cautious innovation in applying an early local example of adaptive management.  He tested new approaches to many issues, to determine their effectiveness, before using the experience to consolidate or replace a method with a better one. Two events in Rhodesia and a third that affected most of southern Africa, a few years later, apparently influenced him greatly during this period and helped develop his thinking as it matured into what became the Parks and Wild Life Act, 1975. 
The first was the visit to the country to study its wildlife of three eminent Fulbright Scholars from California which catalysed many new ideas for nature conservation in Rhodesia. The second was Operation Noah or Animal Dunkirk to save animals marooned as Lake Kariba filled, which came directly under Archie’s jurisdiction.  It became a huge uncontrollable public relations and political event that gathered its own momentum and may sometimes have frightened Archie, but gave him the confidence and the political clout to change the course of local nature conserved. The third event was the reorganization of SARCCUS in September 1968.  Because of their combined momentous influence on nature conservation in Rhodesia and beyond, these somewhat disparate events are described together in a little more detail in the next sub-section.      

    
The Wild Life Conservation Act was the first legislation to show a measure of trust in landholders to managing the wildlife on their land.  Before that Southern Rhodesia, like most other colonies and ex-colonies of European nations, in Africa and elsewhere, especially those of France and Great Britain, had had legislation for managing wildlife that was top-down, centralized, undervalued the resource financially, and relied on the State to protect it. Evidence emerging since the 1960s, at least, indicates that this legislation probably did more than anything else to cause the observed decline in game numbers in Africa.  Loss of habitats to agriculture may, on the face of it, have caused even greater losses, but was strongly aided and abetted by the game laws. The new 1960 legislation in Rhodesia reversed many of the defects of the previous legislation through the trust it placed in landholders and by permitting them to use and profit from wildlife on their land under permits issued by the State.

After about a decade expectations in the wildlife industry that emerged under the Wildlife Conservation Act exceeded the provisions in the act, which was also limited in scope to terrestrial wildlife outside parks and reserves. It was deemed necessary to bring the fisheries legislation into line with that for land animals and to revise the old Federal National Parks (Designated Areas) Act 1955, and toupdate the law dealing with the control of quelea, small highly gregarious finches.  New bills were require to curb snaring of wild and domestic animals as game attracted snaring and the snares often killed or maimed cattle, bringing wildlife into disrepute with landholders, and to regulate the lucrative bee-keeping industry. Archie Fraser was tasked with drafting this raft of legislation and, as I was to administer it as Director of Parks and Wild Life, it was sensible for me to assist him after I became Director.  At the time I was very busy familarising myself with my new responsibilities, so I cannot claim to have played as big a part in deciding the contents of the Trapping of Animals (Control) Act, 1973, the Quelea Control Act, 1973, or the Bees Act, 1974, as I should. I did, however,have considerable inputs, as a “junior author” to Archie, into the five or six bills that he prepared and which were eventually consolidated into the Parks and Wild Life Act.1975.  Archie had originally wanted separate acts to cover wildlife and fish, and the various classes of parks and reserves into which we had decided to divide the Parks and Wild Life Estate.  He argued for this division, largely to emphasise the ridiculous situation that had arisen from the recent promulgation of the Land Tenure Act which divided the country into European, African Areas and State Land.  Most categories of the Parks and Wild Life Estate fell into all three Land Tenure categories, which necessitated three sets of legal provisions for each category of the Estate. 

Two events saved us from this cumbersome legislative arrangement.  Minister Mark Partridge, ever one to consolidate, replaced Minister Phil van Heerden, who had supported Archie’s arguments, and Archie retired at the end of his government service.  Ronny Jack took his place in the Ministry and with a little help from me consolidated the conceptual provisions that Archie and I had set out in the five of six bills, into a single bill which he and I had little difficulty steering through the preliminary stages required before a bill goes before the House.  This was thanks largely to Archie’s thorough preparation over several years that included numerous public hearings and discussions with members of parliament to secure support for controversial aspects of the bill.  

The Parks and Wild Life Act, 1975, was supported by subsidiary legislation, most notably, the Parks and Wild Life General Regulations which gave rise to the Parksand Wild Life Estate as a composite legal entity. These regulations also laid out how visitors to the Estate should conduct themselves to protect the resource base, maximize their wilderness experience and minimise their impact n each other.

The Parks and Wild Life Board
The Act created the Parks and Wild Life Board to replace the National Parks Advisory Board.  The old Board was chaired by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry and included mainly civil servants, where as the new Board consisted almost entirely of non civil servants with an established track record in nature conservation outside government.  Dr Colin Saunders, the Medical Director of a large rural hospital in the south-eastern low veldt, was Chairman from 1975 to about 1987, when he was replaced by Vivian Wilson.  Viv. established and ran a wildlife orphanage outside Bulawayo and was an ardent wildlife researcher, specializing in duiker a group of small African antelope.  He handed the chairmanship on to Prof. Marshall Murphree, an eminent wildlife sociologist from the University of Zimbabwe.  Reay Smithers, the father of vertebrate zoology in Rhodesia, if not the whole of southern Africa, was the first Vice Chairman and was followed by Peter Mahlangu a prominent Ndebele intellectual and educator and later Chairman of the National Tourist Board.                      
The Board consisted of 12 members and had three core responsibilities and a number of more general crosscutting functions. The first responsibility was to act as knowledgeable technical auditors of our programme to implement our mandate, and to advise on the suitability and effectiveness of our actions. The second was to review policy drafted by the Director and, if appropriate, to recommend it to the Minister as official Government policy guiding the Department and the wildlife sector. Thirdly, the board was supposed to assist the Department to raise funds for special projects, but was never called upon to do this during the period under review while we were a grant dependent agency funded by an annual vote from Treasury.  Besides these formal responsibilities, the Board provided valuable ongoing informal liaison between us and politicians and acted as a trusted public watchdog to ensure our conduct was ethical and there was no conflict of interests between our role as a major wildlife producer and the regulatory authority for the wildlife sector.             

The board was a great help to the Department. Its firm but gentle oversight gave us confidence that we were fulfilling our mandate and this encouraged us to upgrading and liberalise our contribution to the private sector and encourage rapid growth in the wildlife industry, which grew from small beginnings into a major pillar in the national economy in a dozen short years. The Department was able to trade ineffective power and authority over wildlife for influence and credibility, which was beneficial to both the Department and the resources for which it was responsible.

Royal Game   
The next portion of the Act was devoted to the protection of Royal Game, now Specially Protected Animals.  Even in the Rhodesian era the country was a de facto republic and strictly speaking the term “Royal Game” was a misnomer, although readily understood by the public.  With independence the new Zimbabwean Government objected to it, so we changed it to “Specially Protected Animals”. These animals were given very full protection in that they could be destroyed without a permit only in defense of life and not of property, as a recent high court ruling had pronounce natural vegetation on owned land to be property.

The schedule of animals was kept short as it was appreciated that each additional species detracted from the protection enjoyed by those already listed.  It was also realized that giving a species a high level of legal protection was in effect an admission of the failure of more conventional forms for conserving it, or the species appeared rare because of a naturally sparse distribution or secretive habits. The hammerkop was, however, listed because of its role in traditional Ndebele cultural and we include a number of birds, cheetah and python in deference to international conservation opinion, although there was no evidence that they were being hunted in Rhodesia.  In fact we were about to remove python from the provisional list, but did not do so because of the restraint of farmer who brought one in that had just killed and eaten his dog.  He told us he had not killed the snake only because he knew it was about to become royal game! 

As we had anticipated when we first listed them, Cheetah, being predators in which individuals occasionally taking to killing stock, became more contentious.  We had predicted that we would be able to handle the problem by issuing the odd permit to eliminate a troublesome individual, not appreciating the magnitude to which cheetah predation might escalate under certain conditions.  Predation of calves by wild animals reached devastating levels in the first year after a drought when farmers were looking for some respite from the effects of the weather. This predation was mainly by hyaena, leopard and cheetah, of which only cheetah was royal game and could not be shot legally without a permit.  Hundreds were killed by any means possible, by normally law abiding farmers, in a bid to rid themselves of the scourge from “government owned” cheetah. We never received a single complain against leopards which farmers could hunt and sell, which apparently provided adequate compensation for their rpredation on domestic animals.

A number of plant species were given specially protected status which had to take account of the rights of landholders to till their land or otherwise modify habitats.  In addition the act introduced protected animals and plants which received protection, in their areas of responsibility, at the request of the local Intensive Conservation Area (ICA) committees. Other wild animals and plants were classified as wildlife and landholders with it on their land were encouraged to use it sustainably and maximize their profits from doing so.  Most landholders responded positively to the incentive of being able to manage, use and profit from the game on their land, which was apparently adequate compensation for bearing the opportunity costs of husbanding it.  The rapid decline of wildlife evident in so much of Africa was rapidly halted and reversed in Rhodesia. Other countries in southern Africa and beyond have emulated the process pioneered in Namibia and Rhodesia, but using different legal paradigms to give wildlife a value to the people with it on their land who ultimately determine its fate.                  

Wildlife remained res nullius and ownership did not pass to land holders who were simply given the authority to use it while it remained on their land provided they did not abuse it.  Traditional nature conservation provisions such as government permits or licenses to hunt and countrywide hunting seasons were abolished and it was left to landholder to decide if and when hunting or fishing could take place on their land and the fees they would charge for it and associated service.  
Game remained a fugitive wild resource with the state responsible to the people of the country for ensuring its continued well being. This removed the legal need try and identify individuals in a population, or to restrict its movements with fences and the like.  Keeping wildlife wild, obviated people with free ranging wildlife from liability in the event of an animal inflicting damage on a third party, as might have been the case had the animals been domestic species or owned (Child and Chitsika, 2000).  Likewise the restricted authority allowing people to mange and use wildlife on their property did not confer the right to sell an animal or its derivatives until the animal was either killed or restrained, although it maintained the right of landholders charge for the opportunity to game view or hunt on their land. Having wildlife on a property also greatly enhanced its market value, presumably because of its enhanced aesthetic appeal and the broader spectrum of renewable resources that could be harnessed to generate income.  Within about a decade of the act coming into effect, land supporting wildlife enterprises was generating up to four or five times the income from livestock and wildlife use was more environmentally friendly (Child, B., 1988) and more economically beneficial to the national economy.  Land with wildlife was also about four times as valuable as similar land without.

Government in the form of the department did not abrogate its responsibility for the well being of wildlife when it devolved the authority to manage and use it to the private sector on private and communal land. It looked to ICA committees of the Natural Resources Board (NRB) (Child and Child, 2008) to be the first line of regulation to ensure its community members did not abuse their privileges to use wildlife. Compliance was enforced mainly through local social sanction, but if that failed an ICA could ban hunting on a property for 14 days while the matter was referred to the NRB which could extend the ban for another 14 days while the director of national parks and wildlife management considered appropriate action. In fact few cases went beyond the local ICA and the department had to deal with only one referral during the first 16 years after the act came into force.  Likewise ICAs promoted and synchronized wildlife management in their area of responsibility and, where necessary, allocated hunting quotas among their members sharing populations of mobile species like sable and eland that spent different length periods of the year on several members land.                 

Events with a Strong Influence on Attitudes during the Department’s Maturation

Visit by American Fulbright Scholars
A visit to the National Museum in Bulawayo by Prof. Emmlin, a Fulbright Scholar from the University of Wisconsin to study small whydah birds, apparently alerted Dr Reay Smithers, the Director of Museums in Southern Rhodesia, to the possibility of attracting Fulbright scholars from the US to initiate the study of the country’s large game animals. Similar studies had recently commenced in East Africa and a Frenchman, J.  Bigourdan, had done a comprehensive study on wart hog in West Africa, but by and large knowledge of African game animals was limited to their taxonomy and biogeography, and hunter’s anecdotes of their ecology and behavior. Reay lost no time in engineering and hosting a visit to Rhodesia by three eminent Fulbrights for the purpose.
On advice from Harold Coolidge an American professor with long and strong IUCN affiliations, Thane Riney, who had spent 8 years exploiting the research opportunities created by the upsurge of introduced large mammals to New Zealand, was recruited to lead the team, from October 1958.  The other two members were Ray Dasmann and Archie Mossman, two wildlife professors from their native California.  All three had studied at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California and were strong proponents of the philosophies advocated by Aldo Leopold, the father of wildlife management in the States.  Besides doing excellent research on wildlife and its habitats these three outstanding Scholars, working with young Rhodesian professionals in the department, introducing much new thinking to nature conservation during the two or three years they remained in the country. Thane, in particular, was an architect of many of the ideas that have led to the growth of concepts that relate appropriate socio-economic institutions to the sustainability of nature conservation, or other uses of the land.         

             
Partly in response to the popular appeal of game rescue operations at Kariba, described in the next sub-section, coupled with a growing public awareness and appreciation of nature conservation, there had been a rapid proliferation of young biologists recruited into nature conservation agencies in southern Africa.  It was arguably the ideas planted by the Fulbrights and developed and spread through the sub-region by Rhodesians that provided the intellectual catalyst for these young biologists to pop the bubble of conservatism that was plaguing contemporary conservation thinking. In any event there was an avalanche of new thought, often incorporating the Rhodesian ideas, emanating from southern Africa that has and continues to change global nature conservation.  This author is satisfied that the modification of SARCCUS in September 1968, described in the third sub-section of this section, provided the mechanism to accelerate the effective implementation of this process.

Game Rescue
No one was sure what would become of the plentiful game in the Central Zambezi Valley when the dam wall at Kariba was closed and the vast impoundment commenced filling.  Many hunters and other “experts” of the time believed the animals would simply retreat before the rising water, but Archie Fraser was more cautious and stationed a small group of men, under Rupert Fothergill, with a borrowed boat to see what would actually happen. It soon became obvious that many animals would become marooned on temporary islands or in semi-inundated trees and would perish if not rescued. Thus commenced the game rescue operations during which 4957 animals, excluding birds and reptiles were caught and mostly released on the mainland between December 2nd, 1958 and June 30th 1963 (Gibson, 1963). 

Rupert led the team throughout this period and was accompanied by scouts Teguru and Lankton for much of the period.  Other permanent staff that assisted for more than one season included the author, who used the data he collected on the exercise to write a Ph. D. (Child, 1967), Tinkey Haslam and Boyd Reese who served on the Lake for considerable periods as temporary rangers, before obtaining permanent posts in the department and Frank Junor who became the first fisheries biologist.  Other temporary rangers that did a fair period at Kariba were Mike van Royan, Stewart Klassens and Peter More.  The last remained on to supply stations along the Lake shore and to check fishing permits after game rescue ended.  Rupert is remembered by Fothergill Island off the shores of the Matuzadonna national park and Peter gave his name to the peninsular in Kariba where our camp was situated and which is now the department’s permanent base in Kariba.    
The glamour associated with a few fit young, but ill equipped “game rangers” and their 50 African casual labourer assistants risking life and limb to save innocent wild animals, including venomous snakes, from modern development had a strong public appeal. It attracted a great deal of positive publicity for the department and the country.  This was reinforced by our appeal for used lady’s stockings to be platted, 9 at a time, into strong soft elastic “ropes” which involved many people personally in the rescue efforts.  About 10 of these “ropes” were used to bind the legs of smaller animal on their journey from the islands from which they had been saved to the main land where they were released to safety by cutting their bindings free.  In all we used something like 100 000 to 150 000 stockings kindly contributed by ladies in Britain, South Africa and Rhodesia.
After a couple of years of game rescue, Archie Fraser calculated that it had attracted some 8 million pounds sterling in free print publicity for Rhodesia and wildlife conservation throughout southern Africa.  A number of our colleagues in sister nature conservation agencies in South Africa were full of praise for our efforts and the beneficial public relations impacts they were feeling at home.  Game rescue had apparently come at just the right time when the social climate in southern Africa was ripe to encourage people to take public issue with the local disappearance of Africa’s attractive big game animals in the face of the rapid modern development following World War II.       
At the time, we on the rescue unit knew little of the regional, almost global implications of our work, as we soldiered on with inadequate equipment, but gradually things improved as the Southern Rhodesian government was more or less shamed into improving our resources.  A major breakthrough came in 1960 with the development of immobilizing drugs by Hal Beuchner, Toney Lock and Toney Harthoorn, in East Africa.   Toney Harthoorn came to Rhodesia, en route to Natal to dart white rhino, and darted the first black rhino to be caught with drugs, using gallomine triethiodide.  A month later Toney Lock came and helped us catch three more, but after that we were on our own as we caught another 50 animals by June 1963, losing 10 in the process to starvation, intra-specific fighting and the effects of capture.  As a footnote it is worth recalling that one rhino remained on an island throughout the Zimbabwean civil war and was caught and taken to safety soon after independence in 1980.  Previous animals had been transported on a slay pulled by men and then on a launch drawn pontoon to the mainland, where the process was reversed before the animal was either released or prepared for the long journey to Hwange to restock the park where black rhino had been extinct for 50 or more years.  The swan song of game rescue was transported to the mainland by air, in a net slung under a helicopter, by courtesy of the Air Force, in a manifestation of the rapidly changing tools now available to wildlife managers!       

Revision of SARCUS
SARCCUS began as the Southern African Regional Commission for the Conservation and Utilization of the Soil, but later came to apply to the wise use of all renewable resources. SARCCUS was the southern African equivalent of EARCCUS in East Africa and a similar body for West Africa set up by the Technical Cooperation Commission for Africa south of the Sahara (CCTA) after World War II, to combat soil erosion and desertification which was seen as the primary constraint to development in Africa (Lord Hailey, 1938). In southern Africa, it began as an inter-governmental network of senior Government agriculturalists concerned with soil conservation, but soon expanded to cover all renewable resources which necessitated its reorganisation at a seminal meeting in Pretoria in September 1968, at which the author represented Botswana.

The meeting decided to retain SARCCUS as an over arching organization, with a small secretariat comprising one senior South African agriculturalist to report to the governments of southern Africa, but to delegate the day to day work of the organization to 11 permanent standing committees. One of these was to be responsible for the conservation, management and use of wildlife and nature conservation areas, known as MUNC.   Roelf Attwell, the chief ecologist from the department was on the Rhodesian delegation and he and the author from Botswana were largely responsible for persuading governments of the need for such a body and for outlining its terms of reference.  Attwell and Child became the first chairman and vice-chairman of MUNC which met annually for a week for the next 12 years, at least.

MUNC comprised the heads of the nature conservation agencies in southern Africa and their most senior advisors, with the exception of Zambia which was not a member of SARCCUS.  From the outset, it provided a formal and informal gathering for senior policy makers and administrators to share ideas among peers.  From the outset, there was lively discussion and a sharing of ideas on a broad range of practical applications of the concepts underlying nature conservation (Child, 2004), among people who could make things happen at home, recalling that nature conservation outside the national parks is a provincial responsibility in South Africa.   Arguably, this did more than anything else to spread and entrench a more flexible and innovative approach and prompt new more effective paradigms for nature conservation on the sub-continent, especially outside parks and reserves, (Child, B. 2004 and 2008).           

Wildlife based Tourism
The Zimbabwean tourist industry was based very largely on outdoor recreation and the wilderness experience, with the Parks and Wild Life Estate providing the most popular destinations. Many parks and reserves were justified to a Rhodesian electorate on the grounds of their use for tourism and outdoor recreation.  Ted Davison built the first tourist accommodation in Hwange soon after World War II. It consisted of thatched “squaredarvels”, which were squared off rondarvels for sleeping quarters with common ablution blocks and outdoor cooking facilities.  By 1952 the 10 squaredarvels in Number one camp had been augmented by another 10 such units of cement block under corrugated asbestos in adjacent number two camp and work had commenced on a similar complex at Robins camp.  These very basic accommodation units were augmented by camping and caravanning grounds. 

Such austere accommodation was unsuited to the cold rainy weather at Inyanga where Doug Newmarsh took advantage of the abundant local timber to build the first cottages consisting of one or two bedrooms, a living room and its own ablution facilities. When Lake Mcilwaine recreational park was opened in the mid 1950s, Doug built similar units to those he had built at Inyanga, but of brick under thatch. John Hatton built Malaeme camp at Matopos, John Tebbit Victoria Falls main camp at about the same time while  other accommodation units sprang up in what were then national parks.

In the early 1960s government decreed that the department should no longer build its own tourist accommodation but that this should be done on its behalf by the Department of Public Works.  Zambezi camp in the Zambezi national park and Sinamatella camp in Hwange were the result. Both consist of 20 well built comfortable brick urban cottages under tiles that lack the character needed in national park accommodation. Thereafter we resumed building our own tourist accommodation as wardens vied with each other to see who could build the most attractive units that caused the minimal visual environmental impact with the limited funds available. Within little more than a decade this competition had resulted in attractive rest camps in Kyle, Hwang main camp (to replace the Davison squaredarvels), Simawene in the Gonarezhou national park, Rhodes and Udu camp at Inyanga as well as smaller numbers of units in Matopos and Mana.  This building virtually ceased in the mid 1970s since which time there has been little further building of tourist accommodation in the estate.             

Ted Davison (1967) describes how the earliest tourists to parks like Hwange were often little more than the personal visitors of the warden in charge, who provided them with basic guiding services in the form of a game scout. Many of tho se to Inyanga were trout fishermen who stayed at the Rhodes Inyanga hotel which for many years was run as a private sector venture by Mrs. Stokes.  With the post world War II surge in tourism, the numbr of visitors to Hwange grew from 2771 in 1949 to 25 351 in 1965 (Davison, 1967). Unfortunately the number of tourists visiting unit of the estate is not well documented and figures that were recorded represent a mixture of counts and estimates, but Child et al (1989) put together the best data available which was for 1969 to 1988. Numbers of arrivals rose rapidly from around 200 thousand in 1969 to about 430 00 in 1974 before declining to 110 000 in 1979, at the height of the pre-independence civil war. Following r independence numbers were quickly restored and were over 400 000 by 1988, in spite of the continued civil unrest in the west of the country, in particular.

The nature of park visitors changed somewhat after independence as more expatriates travelled by air and stayed at hotels and lodges outside the parks. While they continued to visit the parks they did so as day visitors and fewer people stayed in the parks.  Overnight visitor peaked at 160 000 in 1972 of which about 85 000 used parks accommodation and the rest were campers and caravaners.  After independence those using parks accommodation peaked at about 60 000 with campers and caravaners dropping to around 27 000.  This was only partially due to the Department having disposed of the Victoria Falls main camp to the local town council, as by then it had become divorced from any of our areas as their boundaries were revised to cope with the growth of the town of Victoria Falls.

At the peak of the department’s contribution to the national tourist industry it was the third major “hotel chain” in the country, but after independence with the rapid growth of the private sector it declined into being a modest player in the industry.  By then it had fulfilled its role of being a major catalyst in the rapid growth of national tourism during the 15 years of comprehensive UN sanctions against Rhodesia, in 1965 through 1979 (Child, 2004). A more modest involvement, commensurate with the income generating needs of the estate, is more in keeping with the functions of a nature conservation agency whose core business is conserving nature not building tourist accommodation and pandering to visitor needs, if it can avoid doing so.    

       
The Growth of the Parks and Wild Life Estate.

The Parks and Wild Life Estate came into existence by stages and through a mixture of legal provisions from 1902. This and the fact that the growing number of conservation areas was administered by two separate specialist departments meant that there was little logic in the nomenclature applied to the various areas and little standardization in how they were managed before the Parks and Wild Life Act, 1975.  The Act classified parks and reserves into the six categories of national parks, botanical reserves, botanical gardens, sanctuaries, safari areas and recreational parks, anddescribed how each class would be managed. The aim was to offer a spectrum of outdoor activities culminating in a high wilderness experience in a range of nature conservation areas with increasing conservation values.
In addition, the policy document and outline management and development plan for each area divided it into a number of zones of permissible use.  There were usually up to four zones, with some absent from smaller areas and occasionally a fifth, in which the levels of development and visitor use were prescribed.  Special conservation zones were either sensitive biological sites or areas for research from which the public and most staff were permanently or seasonally excluded. Wilderness zones were large areas with minimal development for visitors, often with only primitive access, where a prescribed number of visitors were permitted maximum freedom of action within the limits determined by the act and the preservation of the area’s wilderness qualities. Wild zones were also large areas, but were developed to permit maximum visitation under more restrictive rules of conduct than in a wilderness area.  The aim was to preserve their wild qualities and prevent visitors from impacting too severely on each other’s park experience. Development zones were prescribed areas for the provision of staff and management facilities and visitor amenities where visitors had freedom of action within the decorum expected of park visitors (Child, 1977).    

Rhodes Matopos and Rhodes Inyanga National Parks
These two parks were set up to include land that Cecil John Rhodes purchases and left in trust to the nation for outdoor recreation and agricultural purposes in terms of his will in 1902. They are among the oldest parks in Africa and were originally managed by the Rhodes Trustees with an endowment left for the purpose by Mr. Rhodes, until 1918 when, by order of the Legislative Council, the responsibility passed to the national administration which exercised day to day supervision of the areas through two management committees (Child, 2008).  As we have noted, it was not until 1953 that management of these two areas was placed with the Department of National Parks and they became part of the growing system of national nature conservation areas.

Nyanga
Donald  Purdon was the first manager of the Rhodes estate at Inyanga, now Nyanga. He managed the park for the ministry of agriculture from 1928 to 1947 and was replaced by a Mr. Goringe and then Mr. Turnbull-Kemp. From an early date there was a hotel in the park and visitor accommodation adjacent to it in Inyanga village and later at Troutpeck on the Inyanga downs.  Doug Newmarsh, the first national parks department warden in charge of the park added the Mari dam chalet camp for park visitors to the house, office built by Purdon and the district recreation hall already there. The hotel was refurbished in 1970/1 and the Rhodes tourist camp and dam were built in the early 1970s with grants provided by the Southern Rhodesian treasury. On the other hand, Udu camp was paid for with half the proceeds from the sale of Rhodesia by The Sea, a hotel built by the state lotteries trustees in Simonstown on the Cape peninsular, to offer Rhodesians an affordable coastal holiday. When constructed soon after World War II, many Rhodesians were still travelling by train to the Cape for their long holidays and Rhodesia by the Sea  was popular, but by the mid 1950s cars and roads were improving and fashions were changing, with more and more Rhodesians taking their leave on the  Natal coast until eventually the venture became nonviable. The department called in Willam Van Reit, a South African landscape architect, about whom we hear more in connection with the reclamation of the Victoria Falls and its environs, to design Udu camp.          
With its mild mountain climate Nyanga provided trout fishing, hiking and bilhartzia free river bathing for visitors and was a popular domestic holiday destination for Zimbabweans. Trout are not indigenous to the country and initially the fingerlings for stocking and restocking the mountain streams and three dams provided for angers were imported from the Cape, but by Turnbull-Kemps time, at least, they were being bred in the park.  A modern hatchery was built in 1970 and under Sandy Mac Gowan it and a commercial mimic produced enough fingerlings to satisfy the growing trout angling and commercial production that grew up in the Inyanga Mountains, particularly under the comprehensive UN sanctions leveled against Rhodesia for declaring unilateral independence from Britain in 1965. We even produced an import substitute for pink salmon for our hotel industry by feeding trout an innocuous red dye that turned their flesh pink.              
Before 1975 the Mtarazi section of the park was a separate national park although it had been managed from Inyanga.  We made it part of Inyanga, later Nyanga, in terms of the new Parks and Wild Life Act.  In accordance with Mr. Rhodes’ wishes many species of exotic trees were planted in the park and there was a horticultural research station within its limits.  

Matopos
The Matopo national park was originally much larger than it is to-day.  Land purchased by Mr. Rhodes and bequeathed to the nation stretched from the outer limits of the city of Bulawayo to Worlds View, but only two farms in the Matopo kopjes, Hazelside and Worlds View, were included in the park to which the government added a large area of agriculturally poor broken kopje country in the south.  The rest of Mr Rhodes’ land was given over to agriculture. Seven  farms closest to Bulawayo were leased to private individuals until 1972 or 1973 when the leases were terminated and, on the advice of a parliamentary committee, most of the land was added to an agricultural research station under the Ministry of agriculture.  Two small areas were added to the Parks and Wild Life Estate, the Tshabalala sanctuary along the outer limit of Bulawayo, and Rhodes Matopos recreational park bordering the north of the park to include the Matopo dam and a Boy Scouts and a Girl Guides camp on the land where Baden Powell thought up the world wide scouting movement.  Originally there had also been an agricultural college, called for by Rhodes, but it proved nonviable and was converted into a primary boarding school for boys.  
People were allowed to live in the park, but it became a dormitory for the city of Bulawayo and by the early 1940s there was severe overpopulation with gross resource degradation and soil erosion.  Some of the erosion gullies were deep enough to “hide a bus” and the state of the environment was a disgrace, especially in a national park.  The first people were moved from the vicinity of the Boy Scout camp on Hazelside and by the mid-1949 people from as far south as White Waters in what now remains of the original national park were resettled on better agricultural land further south in the Matobo administrative district.
Slum clearance, whether rural or urban, is seldom popular with those affected and the removal of people from the Matopo national park was no exception, even though the land was 95% granite kopjes and outcrops and virtually useless for agriculture. Against this it was a critical catchment for many of the rivers feeding arid southern Matabeleland and was highly suited to intensive outdoor recreation.  Government eventually reached a weak compromise with the unhappy settlers whereby it was agreed that there would be no settlement in the northern third of the area, which would remain park, and settlement would continue in the southern two thirds, which was marginally better for agriculture, would be de-proclaimed and formed into two communal areas. Expensive habitat reclamation, including major soil conservation measures, were implemented to good effect although some of the scars on the land from 3 to 4 decades of peasant settlement remain clearly visible 5 to 7 decades later.  A game park was stocked in the 1960s before the animals were gradually spread to much of the park   
Mr. Rhodes had a hotel built overlooking the Matopo dam and another at the railway terminus, where the branch line from the Bulawayo/Cape Town main line that he had called for, reached the edge of the Matopos hills.  This was so that the people of Bulawayo “could enjoy the glory of the Matopos from Saturday to Monday” (Tredgold, 1956).  Mr. Rhodes wanted a zoo in the Matopo Park and, as at Inyanga, for the area to be planted to all types of trees, meaning mostly exotic species. None of these developments stood the test of time for the purpose for which they were originally provided.  The zoo washed away in a flood releasing a number of sable to became the founder stock for the present population in the park.   Progeny from the arboretum spread into the park and gave rise to the on-going programme to rid it of unwanted exotics.  The branch line became nonviable for passenger trains early I the 20th century and was lifted in late 1940s by which time it was used by one short freight train a week, while the hotel at the terminus became government offices in the Matobo administrative enclave about the time passengers ceased using the rail service. The dam hotel staggered on into the early 1970s, before it was used briefly by the department as a training establishment shortly after independence.     
The first park headquarters were located at Hazelside where a Mr. Groblar and a Mr. Marshall were successive wardens managing the park during the 1940s.  Mr. Grobler’s nephew, Hans was later the biologist in the park where he did his Ph. D. on the sable herd before moving to senior positions in South African nature conservation agencies.  Mr. Marshall’s son Brian also became a biologist and obtained his Ph.D. in the department, on the fisheries side, where he gained international eminence before leaving the department to become a professor at the University of Zimbabwe.
John Hatton was the first warden from the national parks department in charge of the park and he had a young recruit, Ron Thompson, as his assistant. John established a new headquarters for the park at Maleme, where he built a most attractive rest camp nestling among the kopjes overlooking the dam and opened the park to visitors south and west of the old circular drive around Rhodes’ grave. 
The park is extremely rich in terrestrial biological diversity, and Zimbabwean history and prehistory.  It is said to have the greatest number of resident raptors, other than vultures of any park in Africa, and perhaps beyond, and more rock art sites than the whole of Europe.  When dassie (hyrax) numbers erupted in the 1960s, apparently in response to the removal of the people, black eagles were especially numerous but they like their prey have since declined somewhat numerically. The mammal fauna like the avifauna lacks scavengers like hyaena and jackal, but there is a particularly dense leopard population and most of the introduced game species have done well.  There is also a highly diverse flora for a savanna region in southern Africa.
In addition to the rich rock art, the Matopo hills are well off for pre-historical stone-age and iron-age sites and relicts of the early Kalanga (Shona) and Ndebele cultures, for both of whom it had deep religious connotations and provided refuge in times of conflict.  Cecil John Rhodes and his small group of truce makers met with the Ndebele and established trust between them and the white settlers in Rhodesia at two meetings in the Matopos that ended the Matabele rebellion, and Rhodes elected to be buried there.  Few parks in Africa south of the Sahara have a richer natural and cultural heritage than Matopos and it is indeed surprising that it took Unesco and IUCN so long to recognize it as a world heritage site.               

Other National Parks
Hwange (formerly Wankie)
Lobbying, by people like Major W. J.  Boggie, among his colleagues in the House of Assembly, persuaded parliament to set aside Whange as a game reserve in terms of a Governor’s proclamation in 1928.  As we have seen, Ted Davison was the first warden and managed the reserve for many years before and after it became a national park.  It was largely a sandy waste that was waterless and unoccupied, except for occasional bands of wandering Bushmen from Botswana and the national assembly agreed to it being proclaimed only after an assurance that the land was “useless” for any form of agriculture.
Since its proclamation, land has been added progressively to Whange.  This commenced with some of the railway farms which had been surveyed on alterative sides of the railway line up the eastern border of the reserve, apparently in an effort to attract settlement along the line of rail.  A number of commercial farms in the north of the park were added in due course of which perhaps the best known was Mr. G. H. Robins’ farm along the country’s north western international frontier. Robins was a bit of an eccentric who had persuaded government to build him a house with a three storied tower where he could mount his telescope to watch the stars in exchange for leaving his farm to the state when he died. Other property was added with the government acquisition of the Matetsi farms in 1973 and the rationalization of the park boundary in terms of the Parks and Wild Life act, 1975.     
From the outset, Davison began testing methods to improve the year round availability of drinking water for game in the reserve.  Early efforts to deepen the numerous widely scattered seasonal pans on the Kalahari sand veldt failed and eventually the meager natural perennial sources of water were supplemented with about 80 artificial water holes, mostly bore holes, but with a few dams in those parts of the park with harder shallow soils.  The boreholes were first pumped by windmills, but as game built up and the demand for water increased these proved inadequate and were replaced by diesel engines which required pump attendants to be based in remote parts of the park during the dry season.
Ted Davison often took his cue from Col. James Stevenson-Hamilton, the first warden of the Sabi game reserve, later the Kruger National Park, which he managed for 44 years from 1902 to 1946.  Like his mentor, Ted set out to eliminate poachers and predators in the interest of increasing other game and he burnt the veldt early every dry season to give the game a green bite and to protect the trees from the later hot fires that were supposed to kill them.  This management achieved the aim of building up game populations to justify the continued existence of the park, but with the exception of the anti-poaching measures which have had to be intensified over the years early management has left a legacy of biological problems.               
Apart from relatively minor extensions, the game viewing roads in the park follow those pioneered by Davison and, as we have seen, he built the first tourist rest camps at Main Camp and Robins. In spite of public reservations against the perceived inroads on the wilderness qualities of having a tarred road in a game reserve the road from Main Camp to Shumba was tarred with immediately beneficial results in 1963 and the access road to Main Camp was rerouted and tarred in 1970. The Robins camp persists with few changes to this day, but the Main Camp facilities were rebuilt and modernized in 1970/1 while Bruce Austin was the Provincial Warden in charge of the Park.  Sinamatella camp was built in 1964/5 and a new access road from Hwange town was constructed in that and the next year.  Helped by the introduction of commercial flights to “Wankie Main” which led to the building of the Whange Main airport outside the park in the early 1970s, the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s were bumper years for tourism to the park.    

Victoria Falls and Zambezi National Parks
Victoria Falls national park which we divided in 1979 into a small park with the same name around the falls and the Zambezi national park upriver of the growing town of Victoria Falls came into being in 1931.  It appears to have remained unmanned until John Tebitt became the first warden of the park during the early 1940s.  John came to us from the BSAP and later became the department’s first regional warden (in ca 1963) before he became its first chief warden (in ca 1971) and throughout his 30 odd years in the department he maintained a strong military orientation.
The national park had incorporated a previously declared national monument around the precincts of the cataract and attendant rainforest.  It also boasted a statue of David Livingstone the missionary-explorer reputed to have been the first European to have seen and named the Falls after Queen Victoria.  Even before the advent of formal white settlement in Rhodesia there was a steady trickle of visitors from far and wide to gaze on the spectacle of what has became recognized as one of the seven natural wonders of the world.  There is thus little wonder that it has become a major tourist attraction that is which unfortunately over cramped because of Cecil John Rhodes’ demand that the railway bridge across the gorges should be within the spray of the cataract to enable railway passengers to view the falls from their carriage windows. Coupled with a zealous parks authority that swept the paths daily to keep the place tidy, and a health authority that tried to drain the rain forest to stop mosquitoes breeding, the thousands of visitors’ feet soon led to serious erosion.  By the late 1960s this had become a serious threat to the ecological integrity of southern Africa’s prime tourist site and the department called in William van Reit for advice. He produced a masterly plan to control visitors and rehabilitating the natural features of the falls and their immediate environs, which Jon Hatton, as warden, put into effect with great ingenuity, skill and feeling for the area and the importance of restoring it.    
Our saving of the site around the falls did not stop.  At least two brash developers garnered considerable political support, including ministerial backing, for projects to develop hotels.  These were to generate personal profit but were indecently close  to the falls where they would have destroyed the essential natural ambience of the place.  They would also have precluded the general public from enjoying the natural splendor of the site. I also had to contend with a director of tourism who wished to install a synthetic lunar rainbow, to augment the real thing, in the gorge below the falls; a well known golf course builder who wanted to encroach into and disrupt the naturalness of the thin riparian strip along the river bank above the falls; and the army which wanted to build a major highway along the river bank from Victoria Falls to Kazungula. Preventing all these nonconforming developments took a lot of time and distracted from my key functions.  My selection for the post of director, following the wildlife commission’s recommendation, was based on my technical expertise; to succeed in it I had to depend more on my political and administrative acumen!

Lesser Areas Administered by the old Department of National Parks
A number of smaller areas were first recognized as national parks under the department of national parks.  These included Chimanimani set aside in 1953 and a number of areas around large impoundment which were set aside on the completion of the impoundment to provide venues for outdoor recreation in close proximity to major urban areas. They included Mushandike, Robert Mcilwaine, Sebakwe, and Ngezi.  In addition national parks administered two areas that became botanical gardens, Vumba and Ewangigge and the Chinhoyi dolomite caves. Three of the dam areas and Chinhoyi were recognized as recreational parks and Mushandike as a sanctuary by Parks and Wild Life Act, 1975.  

Areas Administered by the Department of Wild Life conservation.
Many of the remaining national parks and a number of the safari areas came into being as non-hunting reserves in the early 1960s on the in initiative of Archie Fraser, then director of the department of wildlife conservation.  At the time they were mostly unoccupied state land considered useless for any form of agriculture which Archie persuaded government to set aside for wildlife. Chizarira, Matusadonna, Mana and Gonarezhou became national parks while Chete, Rifa, Urungwe, Sapi, Chiwore, Deka and the Tuli Circle became safari areas in terms of the Parks and Wild life Act 1965. The Kyle dam game reserve became a recreational park around the dam and a scatter of small botanical reserves were created throughout the country to conserve special plant communities. 
Later additions to the estate included the Matetsi area at the instigation of Prime Minister Ian smith.  It consisted of failed European farms and the Prime Minister believed it would serve the country better under wildlife and tourism, and would link Hwange, Zambezi and Victoria Falls national parks into one massive wildlife complex.  The intention had been that the whole area should become national park, but I persuaded government to reconstitute the defunct Kazuma Pan national park and use the rest of the area as a safari area offering 7 hunting concessions to reputable safari operators. There was not the money to develop the area for national park purposes and by retaining it as a safari area we had more options for using it profitably without in any way detracting fromits natural qualities.  In the event, Matetsi became one of the prime hunting destinations for hunters visiting Africa and as such earned the country over a million US dollars a year. 
Three private game reserves in the African area were also added to the estate.  They were Malaparti an annex to the Gonarezou national park, Dande a safari area which became an important hunting area earning valuable revenue for the local communities and Carisa safari area.  Chirisa was divided between the Sengwa wildlife research area with the Sengwa wildlife research institute that had grown out of David Cumming’s research into tsetse game relationships and the rest of the safari area which, like Dande, earned valuable revenue for the local communities.  Other safari areas added to the estate included Charara on the eastern shore of Lake Kariba, which offered quality hunting and Hartley A, Umfurudzi and Chipinge A which offered limited hunting and were leased to the Zimbabwe hunters’ association which managed them and had the exclusive hunting rights in them.
Lake Kariba
Lake Kariba became a recreational park in 1979 to rationalise a long standing arrangement by which the department managed the lake.  We had managed the fisheries and had been the de facto authority on the lake ever since game rescue and the lake came into existence, even though the water body and its islands had no formal status in terms of the Parks and Wild Life Act, 1975. Much of this management was done by the Lake Kariba fisheries research institute which came into existence under Ian vander Lingen when the Zambian government and FAO abrogated their three way agreement with the Rhodesian government after Rhodesia’s UDI.  The three parties had    been in a joint FAO special fund agreement to research and develop the emerging fishery on the lake.  When Zambia and FAO pulled out the Rhodesian government decided to carry on alone as though the agreement still existed and formed a small quasi parastatal organization for the purpose. The department recruited additional staff and effectively seconded them to the new institute which had its own board, comprising Archie Fraser and another member from the ministry, myself and the department’s chief fisheries ecologist, and continued the programme started by the FAO special fund project. It even kept two sets of books, one to record the fate of the assets left behind by FAO and the other to keep track of its annual grant from the Rhodesian treasury.
Housed in a temporary staff mess built by the Italian company that constructed the Kariba dam, the institute had many success to its credit. Frank Junor soon took over from  Ian vander Lingen who became our Chief Ecologist (Fisheries) in 1971 and most of the young biologists recruited to replace the departing FAO and Zambian experts quickly gained their masters and/or Ph.D. degrees and did excellent work on a whole range of topics with a strong management bias.
The lake fishery was divided into an inshore, mainly artisanal peasant fishery, with The fishermen living in a number of villages around the lake shore and Irwin and Johnson buying their fish and supplying them ice to keep their catches fresh. We were careful not to allow I and J a monopoly but they inevitably emerged as the most competitive buyers in the free market that ensued and yielded between one and two thousand tones of fish per year.  Catches were made up of indigenous riverine fish that had occurred in the Zambezi river and were now limited mainly to the lake shoreline. A second offshore fishery emerged after the introduction of kapenta or white bate from Lake Tanganyika by Graham Bell-Cross of the Zambian fisheries department in December 1966. These delicate pelagic fish soon spread throughout the lake by 1968, attracting the predatory tiger-fish into open water.   
The history of kapenta has been written up elsewhere by Brian Marshall (1981) and the present author (Child, 1995). Suffice it here to note that as the result of excellent research work by staff at the institute and the perseverance of Frank Junor, Zimbabwe but not Zambia, had a thriving commercial kapenta fishing industry from 1973.  By 1990 we had grown the catches to some 23 000 tonnes per year supporting an annual industry worth around US$36 million. In the process Bob Cameron of the institute staff had designed its own research vessel, reputed to be the most seaworthy and efficient boat on the lake.  By 1986 when I retired the institute staff had described the limnology of the lake in some detail, had provided the technical background for the kapenta industry and  a fresh water mussel and shrimp industry, had investigate the biology of many of the indigenous fish and kapenta, and were monitoring both the inshore and offshore fisheries in  detail.

Conclusion
Having made landholders (including commercial and peasant farmers, and ourselves, within the parks and wild life estate) the effective proprietors of wildlife on their land, we maximized the value of wildlife to them, encouraged free market mechanisms and its sustainable use to generate profits. This pragmatic approach provided the incentive for farmers to husband their wildlife to the extent that the downward trend in country wide animal numbers evident from the 1950s was halted and substantially reversed by the late 1980s.  Coupled with the declining world terms of trade for red meat from domestic stock, from the 1970s, this encouraged wildlife ventures by giving them an economic advantage over domestic animal production. The amount of land devoted to wildlife in the private sector soon equaled or exceeded that in the parks and wild life estate. In effect a  commodity driven agricultural economy with a largely inflexible environmentally determined ceiling was being replaced by a service based wildlife and tourism driven economy with a highly flexible ceiling determined by the level human initiative and effort. 
The outcome was a considerable release of pressure on the environment by increasing the financial return per unit area of land by up to four or five fold (Child, B. 1988).  Not was this beneficial to wildlife and the environment, but it enhance the viability of farming, enabling many marginal farming ventures to meet the twin objectives of being both profitable and sustainable.  From small beginnings in the early 1970s, this enabled wildlife and tourism, including hunting, to grow into a significant component of the national economy.
Our pragmatic approach in allowing wildlife to realize its economic potential and encouraging landholders to exploit this potential sustainably enhanced our public credibility greatly.  Instead of having to try to rely on failed law enforcement to implement our policies, we were able to depend on gentle persuasion to do so and our role changed from being largely a law enforcement agency to being an extension service promoting country wide nature conservation.  This in turn enhanced our political credibility which helped us expand the estate.     
By the late 1980s the department had been highly effective in developing and implementing its mandate, especially outside the parks and wild life estate, to the extent that Kenton Miller while secretary general of IUCN twice described us in public as the “most appropriate organization of its kind” of which he was aware globally. Likewise John and Kathy MacKinnon, in their 1986 Review of the Protected Area Systems in the Afrotropical Realm for IUCN and UNEP, described Zimbabwe’s parks and reserves “as some of the best managed in the world with a highly trained and efficient National Parks and Wildlife Department”. This success can be attributed to the caliber of our staff, their training, and the fact that we had a well defined corporate culture aimed at achieving clearly enunciated management goals through devolutionary mechanisms that encouraged in house initiative and cooperation with the public in general and landholders in particular.