A safari is a word from the East African language called Swaheli. It means an overland journey. It was first introduced to the English language by the famous nineteenth century explorer Sir Richard Burton.
In the past it meant to make a journey to hunt and kill animals. Most, but not all, have since learnt better. Nowadays people usually mean a tourist visit to the plains of East Africa to see and photograph wildlife.
What most people now understand is that the plains of East Africa, just like everywhere else on Earth, are the home of other living things that need respect, too.
The problem is that there is always a struggle between farmers and wildlife. In the past there were few people; now there are many more, and they all have herds of cattle and goats. The most efficient way of farming is to cultivate the land, but then you must cut down the native trees, dig up the savanna grass and replace them with crops.
Most crops need good supplies of water, so growing crops in the savanna is a very risky business because the rainy season is very variable, and in many years hardly any rain falls (it’s a time when the rains are said to ‘fail’). Then harvests will be low and many people will not have enough to eat. In these times, herds will also overgraze land and many animals will die.
The savanna is being destroyed by people because they need to find some way of living. But they cannot continue to eat up the land because more and more farming is doomed to failure due to lack of rain. So what alternatives are there? One answer would be to find other work for people, so they do not depend on the land. It is a hard task for the poor countries who have the savanna lands in their care.
But tourists from other parts of the world will pay large amounts of money to see the wild savanna animals, and on balance, this kind of tourism brings a country far more money than the small farmers can make. It saves the savanna and its animals. But the money made has to reach down to the poor so they can stop farming. It is a difficult challenge.
