About the park

The history of Nyerere National Park

Name: Nyerere National Park
Address: Tanzania

The park carries the name of Tanzania's first president, but the land carries much older stories. A reserve was declared here in 1896, a rebellion and a famine emptied the surrounding country a decade later, a famous hunter lies buried where he fell in 1917, and for a century the map grew every time people were moved off it. Here is the documented story, with the uncomfortable parts left in.

If you only want the answer

Nyerere National Park is the northern, photographic part of the old Selous Game Reserve, split off and renamed in 2019. The German administration first protected land here in 1896, among the oldest reserves in Africa. The Maji Maji rebellion of 1905 to 1907 and the famine that followed it depopulated the region, and the reserve took the name of Frederick Courteney Selous, killed in action at Beho Beho in 1917, when the British amalgamated it in 1922. Sleeping-sickness clearances in the 1940s grew it into Africa's largest game reserve, ivory poaching cut its elephants from about 109,000 in 1976 to about 13,000 by 2013, and since 2019 the Julius Nyerere hydropower dam has stood at Stiegler's Gorge inside the World Heritage site. The park is what the northern half became.

Rufiji country and the road to Kilwa

Long before any boundary existed, the floodplain of the Rufiji and the miombo woodland behind it were settled country. The Ngindo lived in scattered homesteads across what is now the heart of the protected area, the Matumbi held the hills to the northeast, and the people of the river farmed its flood margins, planting as the water fell and fishing the channels and lakes. Settlement was never dense, tsetse fly and flooding saw to that, but it was home, with fields, shrines and trade.

The trade ran east. From the medieval centuries onward, Kilwa on the coast grew rich on goods carried out of exactly this interior, and by the nineteenth century caravan paths crossed the Rufiji country carrying ivory to the Indian Ocean ports. The elephants that later made the Selous famous were its export commodity a century before the reserve existed, and the caravan traffic, with the slaving that travelled alongside it, had already taught the region what outsiders wanted from it.

1896: a reserve before almost any other

Formal protection here is older than nearly anywhere on the continent. In 1896 Hermann von Wissmann, governor of German East Africa, declared protected land along the Rufiji, and in 1905 the area became a designated hunting reserve. Only a handful of African protected areas can claim an earlier founding date. The motive was not preservation as we would now mean it: the German decrees were about controlling who could shoot game, and the reserve was run for the hunt from its first day, a character the Selous would keep for the next century.

Maji Maji: the water that failed

In 1902 governor Gustav Adolf von Goetzen ordered villages across the south of the colony to grow cotton for export. The scheme paid almost nothing and took the labour that fed families, and it landed on top of head taxes, forced work and drought. At Ngarambe on the Rufiji, close to the reserve's modern eastern boundary, a spirit medium named Kinjikitile Ngwale began dispensing maji, sacred water mixed with castor oil and millet seed, which was to turn German bullets to water. In July 1905 the Matumbi hills rose first, uprooting the cotton, and the war spread across the whole southern half of the colony.

The water did not stop bullets. German forces with machine guns broke the massed attacks, hanged Kinjikitile for treason in August 1905, and answered the guerrilla war that followed by burning fields and granaries so that the country itself would surrender. It did. Between 75,000 and 300,000 people died, the great majority of famine, in a campaign several historians now describe as genocidal, and the south did not recover for generations.

The relevance to a wildlife page is direct. The depopulated country went to bush, the bush went to tsetse, and the emptiness the war made is a large part of why the reserve could expand so easily in the decades that followed. Some of the wildest land a visitor drives through today was farmland within living memory of the rebellion.

Selous, the man under the tamarind

Frederick Courteney Selous was born in London in 1851 and spent his life demonstrating what the nineteenth century imagined a heroic life to be. He hunted professionally across southern Africa from the age of twenty, shot animals in the thousands, sent more than 5,000 specimens to the British Museum, wrote bestselling books about all of it, served as a partial model for Allan Quatermain, and became a friend and correspondent of Theodore Roosevelt. Late in life he argued for game reserves and hunting regulation, having watched the elephants he lived off become, in his own words from 1881, scarcer and wilder every year until a hunter could no longer make a living. His conservation was a hunter's conservation, protecting game so there would be game to shoot, and it is worth being clear about that.

The First World War brought him here. Rejected at first as too old, he talked his way into the 25th Royal Fusiliers, a battalion of over-age frontiersmen, fought through the East African campaign against Lettow-Vorbeck's elusive force, and won the DSO in 1916. On 4 January 1917, in fighting near the Rufiji at Beho Beho, a German sniper shot him dead, four days past his sixty-fifth birthday. His men buried him under a tamarind tree where he fell. When the British administration amalgamated and extended the old German reserves in 1922, they put his name on the result, and his grave has been inside the Selous ever since.

Growing by eviction

The Selous became enormous the way most empty places in colonial Africa became empty. Through the 1930s and 1940s the British administration fought sleeping sickness by concentration: scattered homesteads were ordered into consolidated settlements where the tsetse fly could be held back, and the vacated land was added to the reserve. Whole districts went. The Liwale country south of the Rufiji, Ngindo heartland, was cleared in the 1940s, and the standard history of the reserve, edited by its long-time German adviser Rolf Baldus, puts the number of people moved at around 40,000. We have not been able to check that figure against primary records and flag it as unverified, but the outline is not in dispute: the reserve doubled and redoubled, and by the 1970s it covered roughly 50,000 square kilometres, larger than Switzerland, with nobody living inside it.

In 1982 UNESCO inscribed the Selous Game Reserve as a World Heritage Site, citing an undisturbed wilderness on a scale nothing else could match and wildlife populations to go with it, including the largest elephant population in Africa. The undisturbed part was true by then. This page is about what it cost to make it true.

The ivory catastrophe

In 1976 an aerial census counted about 109,000 elephants in the Selous ecosystem, the largest population on the continent and very likely in the world. Within a decade the ivory trade had found it. Through the 1980s poaching gangs worked the reserve while its income was siphoned off to the national treasury and its ranger force fell apart, a few dozen men with broken vehicles responsible for country the size of a small European state. By the late 1980s the elephant population had roughly halved.

Recovery came, and then a second wave, worse than the first. A German-funded conservation programme begun in the late 1980s let the reserve retain part of its own revenue, rebuilt ranger posts and patrols, and by the early 2000s the ecosystem held on the order of 70,000 to 80,000 elephants again. Then industrial-scale poaching returned. Between 2006 and 2013 the Selous suffered one of the fastest elephant declines ever recorded, down to about 13,000 animals by 2013, including a 66 per cent drop in the final four years alone. The rangers were again too few for the country, and this time the trade ran like logistics, with middlemen, lorries and export containers rather than lone hunters. In 2014 UNESCO placed the property on the List of World Heritage in Danger, citing the poaching directly.

The 2022 census counted 20,006 elephants across the ecosystem, stable since 2018, with 8,303 inside the national park. That is a population in slow recovery, not one that was never touched, and our wildlife page explains what the history does to behaviour: the elephants you meet here are warier than in parks that were never hit this hard, and they have earned it.

2019: the dam, the split and the new name

Engineers had eyed Stiegler's Gorge, where the Rufiji narrows between cliffs, since the 1970s, and feasibility studies came and went for decades because no international funder would build a dam in the middle of a World Heritage site. In 2018 the government of John Magufuli went ahead regardless, and from 2019 the Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project rose inside the reserve: a 134 metre wall, a reservoir of about 34 billion cubic metres, nine turbines and 2,115 megawatts, roughly doubling the country's generating capacity.

The same year, the northern third of the Selous, the photographic sector where tourism had always operated, was regazetted as Nyerere National Park, 30,893 square kilometres named for the country's first president, whose 1961 Arusha Manifesto remains the founding text of Tanzanian conservation. His name now stands on both the park and the dam, which captures the argument neatly. In 2021 UNESCO and IUCN concluded that the project had already caused irreversible damage to the values the site was listed for and recommended deleting the Selous from the World Heritage List altogether. The World Heritage Committee declined, and the property stays on the danger list instead, where it has been since 2014. IUCN's 2025 conservation outlook, finalised in October 2025, rates the site critical, its lowest category.

The dam itself is finished. All nine turbines were operating by April 2025, and the project was formally inaugurated on 22 August 2026. What the altered flow of the Rufiji will do, over decades, to the lakes and sandbanks downstream, which is where every boat safari in the park happens, is the open question a future edition of this page will have to answer.

What you can see of this history today

Selous's grave is still at Beho Beho, a plain slab with a bronze plaque below the hills where he was killed, and camps in the sector will walk you to it. It is one of very few parks in Africa where the name on the gate has a grave you can stand beside.

The Rufiji is the constant. The caravans crossed it, Kinjikitile's shrine stood beside it, the 1917 campaign was fought along it, and it still does all the work, feeding the lakes, Manze, Nzerakera and Tagalala, that carry the park's boat safaris. Drives between the sectors still use the cable ferry across the river near Stiegler's Gorge, a crossing that has been part of the Selous experience for decades and now runs within sight of the dam's transmission lines.

The gorge itself is named, the story goes, for a hunter called Stiegler who was killed there by an elephant around 1907. No primary record confirms it, and we flag the story as unverified. It is a fitting name all the same, for a park where the elephants have outlasted nearly everyone who came for them.