Kruger National Park

Kruger National Park, located in northeastern South Africa, spans 19,623 square kilometers across Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces. Stretching 360 kilometers from north to south and 65 kilometers from east to west, its administrative center is in Skukuza. The park operates within the South Africa Standard Time Zone (GMT+2). Initial protections for the area were enacted by the South African Republic government in 1898, and it became the country’s first national park in 1926. It forms part of the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere, a designated biosphere reserve. President Paul Kruger is recognized as the park’s founder. A major tourist destination, it attracted nearly 2 million visitors in 2024.

Conservation efforts in the region began before the establishment of a formal game reserve. In 1891, a Game Commission was formed, leading to the game law of that year. As early as 1867, individual farmers in the South African Republic published notices in the *Staatscourant* banning hunting on their private land to preserve wildlife. Between 1867 and 1881, around 200 landowners protected game across some 300 farms. One such farmer, Alexander Marsh Robertson, owned two adjacent farms—Rolfontein and Elandsberg—covering over 7,600 morgen (about 6,511 hectares) in the Wakkerstroom district. Robertson was the first in the eastern Transvaal to fence part of his property, creating a game camp of roughly 500 morgen (about 428 hectares) using leadwood and barbed wire. The fence was originally built to contain his horses but inadvertently protected ground game, whose numbers increased significantly as a result.

President Paul Kruger, while touring rural areas, learned of Robertson’s successful game camp. He wrote to Albertus Stoop, a conservationist and neighbor of Robertson, to arrange a visit to Rolfontein. Impressed by the experiment, Kruger visited again in 1892. During a braai held in his honor, he publicly outlined for the first time his plan to establish Africa’s first game reserve along the Sabi River, aimed at protecting large game requiring a bigger habitat.

The Sabi Game Reserve was created in 1898 to control hunting and safeguard dwindling animal populations, covering the southern third of today’s park. James Stevenson-Hamilton became its first warden in 1902. The Singwitsi Reserve, named after the Shingwedzi River and located in what is now northern Kruger, was proclaimed in 1903. Over subsequent decades, all native tribes were removed from the reserve, with the last—the Makuleke in the Pafuri triangle—relocated in the 1960s. In 1918, a commission reviewed the Sabi Reserve and, counterintuitively, recommended reducing its size to allow more commercial land use. In 1923, Minister for Lands Deneys Reitz led a survey expedition and devised a plan for the government to exchange state land outside the reserve with private landowners to create a true national park. That same year, large tourist groups began visiting the Sabi Game Reserve via the South African Railways’ “Round in Nine” tours, traveling the Selati railway line between Komatipoort and Tzaneen.

After a government change in 1924, new Lands Minister Piet Grobler implemented Reitz’s scheme. In May 1926, Grobler introduced a National Parks Bill to parliament, which passed on June 11, 1926, officially establishing Kruger National Park. The name “Kruger” was proposed by Judge J.A.J. de Villiers at a meeting of the National Monuments Commission and appealed to Grobler, who was a great-grandnephew of Paul Kruger. English-speaking naturalists had championed the name to gain Afrikaner support for the park.

Under the National Parks Act of 1926, the Sabi Game Reserve, the adjacent Shingwedzi Game Reserve, and various farms were combined to form Kruger National Park. Private landowners exchanged a total of 76,000 square kilometers of land inside the reserve for 550 square kilometers of government land outside, plus financial compensation totaling £40,000. James Stevenson-Hamilton, former warden of the Sabi Reserve, became warden of the new park. A Board of Trustees was appointed, chaired by Senator W.J.C. Brebner, and included Deneys Reitz, Oswald Pirow, H.B. Papenfus, R.A. Hockly, Sir Abe Bailey, W.A. Campbell, Alwin Karl Haagner, Gustav Preller, and secretary A.E. Charter. In 1928, Sir Pierre van Ryneveld, head of the South African Air Force, led an airborne expedition with three board members to study the effect of low-flying aircraft on game.