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There are facts that will astound you about the Selous Game Reserve ...
At over 50,000 square kilometers, it is the largest game reserve in Africa, representing over 5% of Tanzania's total land area. There are over 50,000 elephant, 110,000 buffalo .... all that kind of thing ...
But we think the Selous is another park which is desperately mis-sold with all this hyperbole.
When we go there, we don't get an appreciation of these 50,000 square kilometres. This is not because only a small fraction of this is allocated to photographic safari (the remainder being hunting blocks), but it is because like everyone else, we fly into the Selous and stay at a single camp. So the size, as impressive as it is ... is of no consequence to us
Nor are the numbers of game. On our last visit we saw a grand total of three elephant ... who knows where the other 49,997 were hiding at the time. We saw none of those buffalo either. But we did get a good look at a few lion and most importantly, some wild dog. And we had a great time.
None of this is meant as criticism of the park ... just of how it is sold. We absolutely love the Selous. For us it is one of those places that calls you back ... one of Africa's great parks for sure. But bombarding people with hyperbolic statistics is not the right way to introduce what we think is one of the most subtle and gentle of parks.
The Selous does not welcome guests with great vistas of volcanoes and forested mountain slopes. Its landscape is flat, with a few distant hills on the horizons. But what a flatness. Its rivers do not cascade through ravines, but glide and wind their way like septagenarians through a maze of oxbows lakes and mbuga swamps. Even at Steigler's Gorge, where the Great Rufiji is confined within a narrow granite channel, it is not exactly the Boiling Pot at the base of Victoria Falls, more like a prolonged version of the weir on the river Avon at Pultney Bridge.
The Selous is a gentle place, whose pace is slowed by the languid heat and humidity of the coastal region. Safari here is a slow-paced, relaxed affair, of short morning walks, long lunches and late afternoons spent birdwatching from the boat. It is the kind of place where people enjoy dosing off to the sound of a fish eagle as much as they do chasing around the bush in search of big game.
This is what makes the Selous a special place, especially when you compare it with the typical race around the Northern Parks of Tanzania. But don't go comparing the two safaris like for like ... the north is far more adventurous and has much more visible game, whilst the south is far more intimate, relaxed, decrete and genteel. Both fantastic, but very different types of experience
History
Selous Game Reserve was first set aside as a wildlife reserve as early as 1905.
The park takes its name from renowned hunter and soldier Frederick Courtney Selous, one of a small band of men who became legends in their own lifetimes back in Victorian times, when tales of their adventurous exploits in "darkest Africa" exemplified the spirit of the time.
Selous is famous for telling the headmaster of Rugby School in England that he would become a great explorer and hunter in Africa ... and this at the age of eight, when he was first interviewed for a place there. If ever there was a life which fulfilled a childhood ambition then it was his.
For nearly thirty years Selous was a self-employed professional hunter across the great uncharted regions of Southern Africa. But he was also a naturalist and at the same time as killing a prodigious tally of game, he was also studying it and considering the future of its survival ... at a time when this kind of forward thinking had not really come into being.
As one of very few white men in the interior of Africa at the time, Selous was also instrumental in opening up south central Africa for Cecil Rhodes and the British empirialists, nogotiating with the great cheiftains like Lobegula at his royal boma in Bulawayo.
By the time the First World War started in 1914, Selous was already in his sixties, but he begged the war office for a commission and headed out to East Africa. Here the regiment under his commmand helped to defend the Uganda railway from the Germans, who at the time were in control of Tanzania (German East Africa) and who had ambitions across the border in British Kenya. He also took part in the successful invasion of northern Tanzania and in driving the German army south, eventually expelling it out into the bush.
But the German army was far from finished and under General Lettow, they holed up in the area of what is now the game reserve. Selous and his men pursued the Germans into the bush and found them camped on the ridge of the Beho Beho hills. Whilst attempting an encircling manoevre, they came under machine gun fire and Selous was killed.
He was buried near to the spot where he fell, which is marked by a gravestone to this day. He was one of the great white men of colonial Africa, famed for his honesty, integrity and zeal. The reserve was named in his honour, when the area was enlarged and established into its present form in 1922.
In 1982 the Selous Game Reserve was designated a World Heritage Site |
