African Hunter Published Books Guide to Nyati | Hunting the African Buffalo | Page 17

Introduction

Along the road of publishing this book, I have been fascinated by the
aura which surrounds the mighty African buffalo. Seemingly such
a pillar of African hunting, I am concerned by its tenuous future.
How the buffalo has survived in Southern Africa so far is a mystery,
and that today it should be the source of such great wealth to man
- both financially and aesthetically - is almost criminal. One can
only assume that God bestowed the great tank-like beast with such
fortitude knowing it would both be persecuted and then embraced
and exploited in order that it may ultimately survive. In the mighty
buffalo, we have much to be thankful for.
A casual glance through photographic records of any of the
pioneers of ranching in the region will quickly reveal the thoughtless
nature in which buffalo were exploited. Ample record exists of the
buffalo’s once vast distribution across southern Africa (records
show buffalo were hunted by Kolbe in 1705 around Cape Town) and
where it was not pushed out by settler encroachment (usually white
pioneers), domestic animals and hunting acted with the Rinderpest
outbreak of the 1890s to almost totally remove them from much of
the continent.
In one patch of Zimbabwe’s south eastern Lowveld, the story
plays out like some macabre pantomime portraying the events which
swept the buffalo along with it. Through the early 1900s, they only
survived in relatively small pockets, modern progress slowly pushing
them to the very brink of local extinction. Heavily persecuted by
settler farmers in the 1950s, buffalo were shot almost on sight (as
were many other game species) as they were considered competition
for grazing and other resources. They did have some value as ration
meet, feeding the staff of farmers and ranchers as and when needed,
though this “value” also acted against their long term survival. As
the sugar cane farming industry opened up through the 1960s, still
more land was taken, and more buffalo shot. Though there was no
official policy on exterminating buffalo, they were systematically
eliminated, until when the misguided tsetse fly eradication policies
decreed “game free zones”, a more concerted effort was made to
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