Safari Holidays: A History part one

“Safari Holiday”. It’s a phrase that encapsulates romance, adventure, excitement and spectacle. A Safari isn’t just a journey.   It’s a trek of the imagination, exposing you to sights, sounds and smells that leave indelible and incredible memories…

Safari comes from Arabic via Swahili and means “to make a journey”.  Originally, the concept of a Safari Holiday would have been ridiculous.  Safaris were nothing more than trade missions. The trophies sought by these 18th century explorers were ivory, rhino horn, and slaves.  With the coming of European colonisation the Safari gradually began to be associated with exploration and the discovery of natural resources, animal and mineral.

European exploratory safaris were military scale operations that involved a huge contingent of staff and crew along with supplies and weapons.  They paved the way for scientific exploration by the likes of Stanley and Livingstone or Burton and Speke.  Many explorers never returned alive. Disease, starvation or attacks by wild animals or hostile tribes were part and parcel of the African Safari experience:  magnificent, but potentially deadly.

African Safaris were also part of the public consciousness early on.  The novels of Rider Haggard, especially his blockbuster, King Solomon’s Mines,  introduced Allan Quatermain and the thrill of the African Safari  to an entirely new Victorian audience.  Inevitably, along with great naturalists and men of science came the hunters.  The colonial ethic was to rule and dominate the people, the mineral resources and the wildlife.
The Safari became synonymous with the “Hunt”.  Conquering the wild beast  and returning with trophies ranging from hides, skins and heads, to an entire animal became the Safari’s  entire raison d’être.

This was when Great White Hunters like Cornwallis Harris and Frederick Courtenay Selous prospered and by 1850 they were killing 30,000 elephant a year in East Africa. Gradually, this attitude too changed with the increasing realisation by those same hunters that the wildlife they were slaughtering was a finite resource.   The first seeds of a conservation ethic grew.

In our next post we’ll look at how the Safari changed from a killing spree to what we know today……

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