Safari Holidays: A Brief History Part One
“Safari Holidays”. Adventure, excitement, spectacle or romance? Here at Africa Sky we’ll tailor make a Safari experience that will include all those elements if you wish. To us, a Safari Holiday is a journey of the mind and body. It’s a kaleidoscope of sights, sounds and emotions that should leave indelible memories. But how did it all start?
Safari has it roots in Arabic via Swahili and means “to make a journey”. Originally, Safaris were essentially trade missions seeking ivory, rhino horn, and slaves. With the coming of Europeans, the Safari began to be associated with exploration and the discovery. And those early European Safaris were huge operations that involved armies of staff and crew along with supplies and weapons. They blazed a trail for scientific safaris by Stanley and Livingstone or Burton and Speke. Many explorers never returned alive. Disease, starvation or death was part of the early African Safari experience.
African Safaris were trendy too. The novels of Rider Haggard, such as King Solomon’s Mines, introduced Allan Quatermain and the African Safari to an entirely new Victorian audience. Inevitably, along with great naturalists and men of science came the hunters. The European 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 became the Safari’s entire purpose. 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 changed. Those same hunters realised that the wildlife they were slaughtering was a finite resource. The first seeds of a conservation ethic were planted.
In our next posting we’ll look at how the Safari Changed to become closer the the experience we know today..
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 6:41 pm and is filed under General, Namibia Safari, South Africa Safari. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
