About the park

The history of Gonarezhou

Name: Gonarezhou National Park
Address: Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe's wildest park did not get that way by being left alone. It was Shangaan homeland, a poacher's hunting ground, a tsetse war zone and the edge of two wars before it was ever a safari destination. Here is the documented story, with the uncomfortable parts left in.

If you only want the answer

Gonarezhou was Shangaan land, then the hunting ground of the ivory poacher Bvekenya, then a game reserve its own people were removed from between 1957 and 1968. War closed it for most of two decades after it became a national park in 1975, and since 2017 a ZimParks and Frankfurt Zoological Society trust has been rebuilding it. The emptiness visitors love was made, not found.

Shangaan country first

Long before it was a park, the dry country between the Save, Runde and Mwenezi rivers was Shangaan land. The people, also recorded as Tsonga or Hlengwe, settled here in numbers in the nineteenth century and built a lowveld economy of river-margin farming, fishing, livestock and hunting. The name the land now carries is usually translated from Shona as the place of elephants, and our about page unpacks the folklore behind it. This page is about how the place of elephants became a park, because very little of that story is gentle.

When the colonial government first declared a game reserve here in the mid-1930s, roughly 7,000 Shangaan were living inside the new boundary. They stayed, for a while. What happened next took thirty years, and it is documented.

Bvekenya, the one who swaggers

The park's most storied character never held a hunting licence in his life. Stephanus Cecil Rutgert Barnard was born on a farm outside Knysna in 1886 and arrived in the Limpopo valley in 1910. The Shangaan named him Bvekenya, the one who swaggers, after his rolling walk. For nearly two decades he shot elephant for ivory across what is now Gonarezhou, Mozambique and the northern Kruger, unlicensed and usually one step ahead of the police of three territories.

His base made that possible. Crooks' Corner is the spot where the Luvuvhu River meets the Limpopo and the borders of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique touch. A wanted man standing there could step into another jurisdiction in minutes, and the place drew enough smugglers, deserters and fugitives to earn its name honestly. Barnard hid on an island in the Limpopo itself when rangers came looking. He also worked as a blackbirder, recruiting mine labour illegally, a part of the record the romantic versions tend to skip.

The legend says Barnard spent years pursuing Dhulamithi, taller than the trees, the greatest tusker of the lowveld, finally had him in his sights in 1929, and lowered the rifle. He left for a farm in the western Transvaal that November and never hunted again. That version comes from The Ivory Trail, the 1954 bestseller T.V. Bulpin wrote from Barnard's own telling, and not everyone buys it. The hunter and warden Ron Thomson argued that a poacher that hardened would never have walked away from those tusks. Barnard died in 1962, and the story, true or polished, is still the one the whole region tells.

Rifles against the fly, trucks against the people

The reserve declared in the 1930s protected very little at first, because the administration's real campaign in this corner of the country was against the tsetse fly. The control methods were blunt: game shot in the thousands as hosts of the fly, riverine forest ring-barked and bulldozed, pans filled in and, later, DDT sprayed across the region. Zimbabwe-wide, animals killed in the name of tsetse control ran into the tens of thousands. The reserve was, for a stretch, a hunting ground with a government letterhead.

Then the people were removed. From 1957 to 1968 the Shangaan communities inside the reserve were evicted, and the historian Baxter Tavuyanago has reconstructed how it went. The Chisa people were given 15 days' notice in 1957 and their huts were burned behind them; their chief was demoted to headman for objecting. The Ngwenyeni community argued its case for five years with a plain sentence, our fathers and grandfathers were born here, and was trucked out anyway in August 1968, the last of the mass removals. The destinations were crowded reserves like Matibi No. 2 and Sengwe, on land poorer than the riverbanks they left.

The uncomfortable twist is that the man across the table at some of those negotiations, District Commissioner Allan Wright, was also the park's most effective champion. The reserve was re-proclaimed in the late 1960s largely through his efforts, and in 1975 Gonarezhou became a national park. The emptiness visitors now fly in for was made, not found.

Two wars, a cull and a drought

The timing could hardly have been worse. The Rhodesian Bush War closed the new park almost immediately, and Mozambique's civil war, which burned along the park's eastern border from 1977 to 1992, kept the region dangerous long after Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. Armed men treated the park as a larder, and snares made from the park's own fence wire did quiet damage for years. One hollow baobab near the Runde is still called Shadreck's Office, after the Mozambican poacher who used it to cache ivory from 1968 until his arrest in 1983.

The elephants took blows from every side. Concerned about what a growing herd was doing to the vegetation, the authorities culled more than 4,000 elephants in 1983, 1986 and 1987. Then the 1992 drought, the region's worst in living memory, killed hundreds more, and in 1993 around 670 elephants, entire female herds, were captured and translocated out of the park. When Gonarezhou finally reopened to tourism in 1994, it was a wounded place with almost no witnesses.

The turn: Mahenye, the treaty and the Trust

The recovery arguably started earlier, in 1982, across the Save River at Mahenye. The Shangaan community there had lost its ancestral hunting grounds to the park, and poaching had become both livelihood and defiance. A local rancher named Clive Stockil sat down with about 70 Shangaan elders and helped broker an idea that was radical at the time: if the community benefited from wildlife, the community would protect it. Mahenye went on to become a pioneer of Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE programme, and tourism income has since built the village a school, a clinic and a mill.

The institutions caught up slowly. In 2002 Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa formalised the international treaty behind the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, joining Gonarezhou to Kruger and Mozambique's Limpopo National Park, first on paper and increasingly on the ground. And in 2017, after nine years of Frankfurt Zoological Society support, ZimParks and FZS formed the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, the 20-year co-management partnership that runs the park today. How that arrangement works is on our about page.

The elephants answered. After the 1992 drought the population grew at around six per cent a year, and the park now holds more than 11,000 elephants, one of the highest densities in Africa. Fifty years after the culls began, the place of elephants has earned its name back.

What you can see of this history today

Start at the Chilojo Cliffs, the red sandstone wall above the Runde. Nothing about the view has changed since Bvekenya's day, which is roughly the point of the whole story: this is what the lowveld looked like before fences, and what it cost to keep it that way.

For the human history, stay a night on the eastern boundary. Chilo Gorge Safari Lodge sits above the Save River next to Mahenye village, and the community that was once at war with the park now shares in its tourism. Visiting is the closest you will get to the other half of this page.

Crooks' Corner itself is not in Gonarezhou. It sits across the border in Kruger's Pafuri sector, marked by a plaque that tells Bvekenya's story, and reaching it means entering South Africa. If your trip links Kruger and Gonarezhou through the transfrontier region, you are travelling the poacher's old geography with better paperwork.

One last thing you will notice: Gonarezhou's elephants have a reputation for being warier and quicker to bluster than Kruger's or Hwange's. Guides often attribute that to the culls and the war years. Whatever the mechanism, give the herds room. They have their reasons.