Serengeti Unnatural Histories


Serengeti

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The last remaining wild places on Earth -

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primordial,

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timeless, untouched by humans.

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But are they as pristine as we think?

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Ancient cities in the heart of the Amazon.

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The most iconic wild places shaped by man.

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Is wilderness just a figment of our imagination?

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How natural is the natural world?

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Nowhere speaks of wild nature more powerfully

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than the savannas of East Africa.

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And here one place has become iconic -

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Serengeti.

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For many, Serengeti is the embodiment of wild Africa.

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The Serengeti is that which is infinite,

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that which is tremendous,

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that which is beyond control.

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But is this place what it seems?

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A national park is typically an artificial set-up. It's just a zoo magnified.

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Is this primordial wilderness as timeless and unchanging as we imagined?

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There's an assumption that if you put a line around a park, it's going to stay like that.

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Nothing stays the same.

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Is Serengeti as natural as we think?

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Humans did have a very big influence in shaping the savanna fauna and almost certainly the plants as well.

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Behind the popular image of a pristine wilderness

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hides a far less natural history.

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A story that charts the fortunes of hunters and hunter-gatherers.

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Of devastating disease,

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war and battles for political dominance...

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..taking us right back to the origin of our species and the very nature of existence,

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the story of how a particular view of the wild came to shape Africa.

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In 1957, a small zebra-striped aeroplane left Frankfurt in Germany

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on a 6,000-mile journey to East Africa.

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Inside was Bernhard Grzimek, the curator of Frankfurt Zoo, and his son Michael,

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their mission - to save the Serengeti.

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'The Serengeti in Tanganyika is a wilderness of about 8,000 square miles.

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'That is practically the size of Northern Ireland

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'and yet the Serengeti is one of the Seven Wonders of this Earth.

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'To the east lies the plateau of the giant crater.

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'The Ngorongoro Crater is the most magnificent natural zoo on Earth.

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'God created it for himself and fenced it in with mountain walls 1,800 feet high

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'to protect its inhabitants.'

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SQUAWKING

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The Serengeti at that time was headline news.

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It had recently been made a national park to protect its natural wonders.

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But the British colonial government had just announced plans to make the park smaller

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to allow more room for a rapidly expanding human population.

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When the Grzimeks went to the Serengeti in 1957,

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there was a controversy brewing over the borders of the national park.

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The British colonial government decided to create a conservation area

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that would include Maasai herders

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and separate that off from another part of the park that would be devoted solely to the animals.

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Though animals would still get some protection,

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leading conservationists the world over were up in arms.

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They opposed any reduction in size of what they saw as Africa's last great wilderness

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and in particular,

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the removal from the national park of the spectacular Ngorongoro Crater.

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Bernhard Grzimek was determined to prove the case for a bigger national park.

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He believed the key lay in the world-famous wildebeest migration.

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Serengeti's annual migration is a true wonder of the natural world -

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two million wildebeest, along with 500,000 zebra,

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following the rains across two countries.

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You encounter an immensity that you almost imagine cannot be real.

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So many wildebeest.

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And everything moving towards a certain direction.

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And you're also overwhelmed by the sense of mystery,

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the vastness, the awesomeness.

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The wildebeest migrations happen

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in a pattern that's linked to the patterns of rain and desiccation on the Serengeti.

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Their young, as well as those of zebra and gazelle, are prey for a number of the iconic predators -

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lions, hyena...

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So in a sense, they're an indicator for the broader health of that entire ecosystem.

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The migration is so famous today,

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it's difficult for us to imagine that as recently as the late 1950s,

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almost nothing was known about it.

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Bernhard Grzimek believed that the colonial government's new plans to cut Serengeti in half

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would leave the wildebeest completely unprotected for a large part of the year.

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He was deeply concerned that this would spell the end for Serengeti's wildlife.

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With the plane, Grzimek would be the first to follow the migrating herds

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and to prove that Africa's wild animals needed more space to survive.

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The plane was also the key to bringing a completely new and dramatic perspective on Serengeti.

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The film Serengeti Shall Not Die would show the splendour of this wilderness as never before

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and bring the plight of the Serengeti to the world.

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And so he became, if you like, the voice of Serengeti,

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the one that went out there to the western world and North America

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through his films to say, "Serengeti is in trouble.

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"This is the greatest place on Earth and what we don't know is about to be lost very quickly."

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Grzimek would show the world what he perceived to be the real threat to Serengeti's survival - humans.

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It was this last great Eden, so to speak, which he championed,

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but it was also this dark, stalking menace in the background which is about to overwhelm it.

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So he put those things together very effectively to create a crisis of the Serengeti.

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The bigger argument was

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these natural wonders have to be kept

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against these hordes of human predators, if you will.

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And therefore, human beings were seen as a problem, as a threat.

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They were not part of the argument, they were not part of the picture.

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The broader picture was nature has to be kept pristine.

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Over the next few years, it was this idea

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of a pristine nature, timeless, unchanging and, most of all, untouched by humans

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that came to determine not only the future of Serengeti,

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but of wild Africa as a whole.

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"A national park must remain a piece of primordial wilderness

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"to be effective.

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"No man, not even native ones, should live inside their borders."

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The only problem is, the more we look,

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the more we find this view to be at odds with the bigger picture.

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Beneath the hooves of the wildebeest, there is a much older story,

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the story of human beings.

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Actually, the story of life itself.

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The complete account of the shaping of Africa's landscape

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that has been hidden from us by the dominance of just one way of looking at the world.

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Almost 50 years earlier,

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an entomologist called Kattwinkel was chasing butterflies through the wilds of Serengeti

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when events took a remarkable twist near the edge of a rocky gorge.

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He had spotted a butterfly that he particularly wanted and Kattwinkel followed it down into the bushes.

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Presumably, he found a number of butterflies,

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but he also found fossilised remains

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of extinct mammals.

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Kattwinkel had stumbled upon Oldupai Gorge,

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one of the most famous sites of early human history known today.

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The real significance of Oldupai wasn't immediately clear, not until after the Second World War

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when a controversial paleoanthropologist and his wife focused their attention

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on Kattwinkel's scrubby, remote gorge.

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It wasn't long before Louis and Mary Leakey revealed a sensational new find.

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Zinjanthropus boisei, as they called it,

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was estimated to be nearly two million years old,

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at the time, the oldest human-like creature ever found.

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And that got the world very excited about the great antiquity of humanity

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and the presence of humanity in one form or the other in Africa

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and, presumably, in some way relating to the spread from Africa to other parts of the world.

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And just 30 miles south of Oldupai is Laetoli.

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Here, Mary later found footprints -

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three apes walking upright across the savanna

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three and a half million years ago.

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Clearly, bipedal apes, creatures that walked habitually on two legs,

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from which we are descended in one way or the other,

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were in Africa at least four million years ago

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and it's the oldest record of bipedalism that's been found anywhere in the world

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and clearly the African apes, of which we are one, were derived from that ancient fauna.

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The very latest evidence suggests that the presence in Serengeti of humans

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and the ancestors of humans from so far back in time is no coincidence.

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Because of a quirk of nature,

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grasses and trees have a different way of turning sunlight into food.

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When they die, they leave slightly different forms of carbon in the earth.

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Analysis of these signature traces has led to startling conclusions

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about the true nature of the African savanna.

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Over time, the amount of tree cover has fluctuated drastically between two extremes -

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on one hand, a forest, on the other, a grassland.

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And the main force behind these cycles is the climate.

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CRACK OF THUNDER

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What we've seen, major changes in rainfall conditions,

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so that we have had droughts, some of them have lasted

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for 30,000 years, where clearly this whole system would have been completely different.

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And the other thing that we've known from all of this is that they changed incredibly fast.

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It could take only 20 years for it to flip from one to another.

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CRACK OF THUNDER

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What it means in terms of what we see today and the future is that nothing stays the same.

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And it is this changing nature of the savanna

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that in turn influences everything.

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It is the dynamic of habitat change that drives evolution.

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If everything had remained pristine whenever that moment was,

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then we certainly wouldn't be here anyway

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because there would have been no pressure for an ape to stand up in the first place.

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The more we find out, the more a picture of humans

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as an integral part of the savanna ecosystem from the earliest times begins to emerge.

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And soon, early humans started to exert their influence on the landscape.

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With fire, they could start to tip the natural balance of the savanna to their advantage,

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pushing back woodland to open up grassland.

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I think it's been shaped and reshaped time and time again for the last...

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at least a million years, and certainly since fire became a factor

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because even the early hunter-gatherers would have used fire to get rid

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of some of the coarser grazing to create these patches of greenness that then attracted in wildlife.

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So I have no doubt whatsoever

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that the hunter-gatherer going back half a million years plus was a major agent of using fire in the Serengeti.

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As geological time gave way to historical time,

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the human influence over the environment moved into a new phase.

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When cattle came down into that area some four, four and a half thousand years ago,

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they would have had a huge impact from opening up the countryside

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and I think herders would have frequently set fire to bush to clear areas for grass.

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What the pastoralist is trying to do is get rid of the tree cover and create more grassland,

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so fire for them becomes a very important tool

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in making the savannas more savanna-like, and this is the irony to me.

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If you take away fire and you take away the pastoralist,

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you end up with lots of thickets and bush over much of Africa.

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And by changing the nature of the savanna, you also change the nature of the savanna's wildlife.

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And it's going to increase the ratio of the grazing animals like the zebra and the wildebeest,

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compared with the browsing animals like impala and giraffe.

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Though ultimately it's the climate that drives places like Serengeti,

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over time, humans became a key part in fine-tuning its characteristic nature.

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By the time the earliest maps started emerging from Victorian explorers of the late 1800s,

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we can see the extent to which people had begun to dominate the landscape around Serengeti.

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In the eastern side of our system, we have pastoralists.

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You can't conduct agriculture on the plains. They cannot support that sort of thing.

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They're not the right soils and it's far too dry, so it's really only for pastoralism.

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In contrast to that, we have agriculturalists in the west

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and these people are largely from what's called the Bantu group

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and they came from the Congo. They arrived in the 1500s.

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And in between, the Wandorobo with a specialism for elephant hunting.

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The most recent people to arrive in the area have in many ways become the most iconic - the Maasai,

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arriving from the north of Kenya and Sudan as recently as the 1800s.

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They later won the respect of the colonials, largely as a result of their fierce warrior reputation.

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But their success was much more to do with the way they saw their cows

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and the wild animals of the savanna as part of the same fabric of survival

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and for wildlife and Maasai alike,

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the key to survival here is movement.

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The Maasai have really perfected the art of making sure that they use their ecosystem

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in a way that they do not necessarily deplete it, but they move about.

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For instance, they've got a dry season area where they graze their animals during the drought period.

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They've got an area where they move to when it is rainy.

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They use the hooves of the cow to cultivate their ecosystem. Without that, very quickly it can change

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to not necessarily a grassy area, but to more of a thicket and bushy

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that will not have a lot of value for your livestock.

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You try to move about, so you can continue balancing the shrubs, trees and grasses around your ecosystem.

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Until this point in the history of the Serengeti,

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the story was of humans coming to exert more and more control over the landscape and the moving herds,

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quite the opposite of the modern picture of a pristine wild Africa.

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What happened next would change all that.

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In 1891, an Austrian explorer, Oscar Baumann,

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was one of the very first Europeans to travel through the Serengeti.

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His account records first-hand evidence

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of what turns out to be nothing short of the worst human catastrophe ever

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to befall the African continent.

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"There were skeleton-like women with the madness of starvation in their sunken eyes,

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"warriors who could hardly crawl on all fours.

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"There were refugees from the Serengeti

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"where the famine had depopulated entire districts."

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What he was describing were the effects of a colonial invasion,

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not of an army, but of something ultimately much more destructive -

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a virus called rinderpest.

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Rinderpest arrived in Africa,

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as far as we know, for the first time, in 1890,

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brought in with cattle from Egypt

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when the Italians invaded what was called Abyssinia - Ethiopia now.

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It took six years to spread from Ethiopia to the Cape of Good Hope and to West Africa

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and killed off 95% of the cattle.

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With this cattle virus, the whole socioeconomic fabric of pre-colonial Africa collapsed.

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Without meat, without milk, without even the means to pull a plough,

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mass starvation quickly followed on a scale matched in global terms only by the Black Death.

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"Parents offered us their babies in exchange for meat.

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"Swarms of vultures followed them from high, awaiting their certain victims.

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"Such affliction was from now on daily before our eyes."

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I think the reason why rinderpest was a signature impact

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is that it swept through Africa so fast.

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In the best part of a decade, it had moved from Cape to Cairo

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and it devastated livestock populations and, therefore, it devastated pastoral people.

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It was much more than a virus.

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I think it was the loss of a way of life.

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I think there was a loss of a certain meaning.

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If everything you ever imagined life to be was suddenly swept away and swept away so drastically,

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what else is there to hold on to?

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And I think it was such a struggle to reconstruct life again.

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Over the next 20 years, a transformation took hold.

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Across East Africa, human mediated grasslands were now swallowed up

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by the wild African bush.

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Most critically, just at the time that the colonial scramble for Africa was reaching out

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into the remotest parts of the dark continent.

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The impact of rinderpest was to create the impression

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among the incoming explorers and the administrators that the savannas had very few people.

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And I think the unfortunate thing is that that was true for that time,

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but looked at in the bigger historical picture, going back maybe 200 years,

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these would have been prime areas and they would be prime areas again

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once the populations of people and livestock built up again.

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So we're looking at a very low ebb ecologically for the relationship between people and wildlife

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and it had a huge bearing on the way in which conservation went

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and the perception or, let's say, the misperception

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that the colonial governments and even independent governments had on the role of people in the savannas.

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With the shutting out of the local people from the landscape,

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the way was now open for a completely new vision of the African savanna -

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wild, savage and pristine.

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"It is the strong attraction of the silent places,

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"of the large tropic moons and the splendour of the new stars

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"where the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset

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"in the wide waste spaces of the Earth, unworn of Man,

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"and changed only by the slow change of the ages through time everlasting."

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In April 1909, ex-US President Theodore Roosevelt arrived on the shores of East Africa

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for his now famous safari.

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Theodore Roosevelt was probably America's greatest conservation President.

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During his administration,

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the largest amount of public lands was set in forest reserves

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and national parks than probably any other President since.

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Roosevelt was very much of this generation

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that saw nature as an antidote to civilisation.

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And in coming to East Africa, I think that it was part

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of his effort to recapture that long-gone pioneer spirit.

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Here was this great open landscape, very few people,

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and he had a whale of a time over that period of a year.

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Immediately, the great American conservationists set out doing

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what conservationists in those days did - hunt.

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Roosevelt just lined up with specimens and this is the ultimate He-Man, sort of big hunter image.

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But as his lust for the primitive urges of the hunt propelled him on,

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Africa started to stir deep emotions for an age lost to the modern world.

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When I went to the Serengeti for the first time

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and saw those wildebeest, the first thought that came into my head

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was this is what the American West must have looked like before we destroyed all the bison,

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so when someone like Roosevelt saw

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all this game running around,

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he was like, "It hasn't all been squandered. It's still here."

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Here was a last primordial wilderness

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that urgently needed preservation,

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atonement for the losses of the civilised world.

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"All civilised governments are now realising that it is their duty here and there

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"to preserve unharmed tracts of wild nature

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"with thereon the wild things,

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"the destruction of which means the destruction of half the charm of wild nature."

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That's certainly a big part of how conservation in East Africa is talked about.

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It's like something to be protected for all of humanity because it's unique and special now.

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This is a place where it hasn't been destroyed that we should be especially concerned about.

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On his return, however, Roosevelt's adoring public were captivated,

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not by fledgling thoughts of global conservation,

0:27:230:27:27

but by the heroic exploits of the great white hunter.

0:27:270:27:31

Roosevelt's 1911 safari really created a cascade of hunters coming out.

0:27:370:27:43

In East Africa, the British colonial government's initial reaction to controlling this slaughter

0:27:460:27:53

was to create hunting licences,

0:27:530:27:56

but in a place as big as this with just a handful of administrators,

0:27:560:28:01

their power to actually control anything was severely limited.

0:28:010:28:06

Licences were much more effective against the local people.

0:28:060:28:10

With one fell swoop, native hunting became illegal

0:28:110:28:16

because not many natives could go to the towns, the colonial towns,

0:28:160:28:22

the colonial bomas where the colonial administrators were

0:28:220:28:26

to obtain hunting licences.

0:28:260:28:28

So the only form of hunting that then became legal

0:28:280:28:33

was European hunting.

0:28:330:28:35

So there was this complete divide between the trophy hunting colonials

0:28:350:28:40

and the subsistence hunters trying to get at those same animals for meat.

0:28:400:28:45

And the local populations felt very alienated

0:28:450:28:49

that wildlife had become not their customary right,

0:28:490:28:52

but it had become something of a sport, something of a pleasure for the colonial government,

0:28:520:28:58

so again that became a deep antagonism.

0:28:580:29:01

As traditional hunters were branded "poachers",

0:29:010:29:05

hunting and the safari now became the noble pursuit of foreign dignitaries and kings,

0:29:050:29:11

like the future George VI.

0:29:110:29:13

But very soon wild Africa would be available to all with the invention of the portable movie camera.

0:29:150:29:22

Martin and Osa Johnson were among the first to lay down their guns and pick up a camera.

0:29:260:29:32

For some of the time, at least.

0:29:320:29:35

On the trail, Osa's eye catches a slinking figure ahead.

0:29:390:29:42

A lion has caught the scent of his favourite delicacy - zebra.

0:29:420:29:47

While he stalks his prey, guns are dropped, cameras take their place and Martin photographs the action.

0:29:470:29:53

They spent a couple of years in Africa filming wild animals.

0:29:530:29:58

And part of it very much conformed to a vision of Africa

0:29:580:30:04

of ecological paradise.

0:30:040:30:07

The talk about this place that they discovered, Lake Paradise.

0:30:070:30:11

They hadn't discovered it. It had been known by the African people in that area for a long time.

0:30:110:30:18

They very much portrayed it as this Garden of Eden.

0:30:180:30:23

Through the camera lens, the animals of Africa took on new meaning,

0:30:230:30:27

transformed by technology from savage beasts to things of extraordinary beauty.

0:30:280:30:34

And the Johnsons were the first to film from the air.

0:30:400:30:44

Aerial scenes become very important because

0:30:450:30:49

it's a kind of God's eye view of the world and portrays the immensity of the landscape.

0:30:490:30:57

Wildebeest, hundreds upon hundreds of wildebeest, led on by overpowering thirst,

0:30:570:31:02

driven on by the lions that follow.

0:31:020:31:05

If you're filming wildebeest migration, you begin to capture the awe of the sheer scale

0:31:050:31:12

and size of these wildlife populations.

0:31:120:31:16

Though still in black and white, these extraordinary scenes from the early 1930s

0:31:170:31:23

show a surprisingly familiar image of Africa emerging,

0:31:230:31:27

one that we can recognise in wildlife films today.

0:31:270:31:31

Roosevelt's savage, primordial wilderness was evolving into a land of awe-inspiring, majestic beauty,

0:31:310:31:39

even if, ultimately, the audience's need for thrills and spills

0:31:410:31:48

required every scene to climax with a large dose of false jeopardy

0:31:480:31:52

and end up with Osa shooting the main subject.

0:31:520:31:56

Osa lets go another bullet. And Osa Johnson has scored the first lion kill of her life.

0:31:580:32:04

But attitudes were beginning to change

0:32:050:32:08

and soon a few more enlightened hunters began to see the impending end of what had once seemed endless,

0:32:080:32:15

even in the vast expanses of Serengeti.

0:32:150:32:18

There was almost no control of this hunting. It was a free for all.

0:32:200:32:25

And there was, on some occasions, as many as 100 lions shot in one trip.

0:32:250:32:31

This enraged some of the more conscientious professional hunters,

0:32:320:32:38

one of which, Finch Hatton, who features in Out of Africa,

0:32:380:32:43

he wrote a letter to The Times complaining and saying there has to be regulation.

0:32:430:32:49

"And what should one say of the two gentlemen who went to the Serengeti by motor car

0:32:490:32:54

"and killed, between them, 80 lions?

0:32:540:32:57

"Can we think of anything more nauseating? And this is considered sport."

0:32:570:33:03

The last of the great hunters ended up in southern Tanzania,

0:33:030:33:07

people like Rushby and many others.

0:33:070:33:10

They had been the great elephant hunters of the 1920s.

0:33:100:33:14

That whole era came to an end in the 1930s.

0:33:140:33:18

And, ironically, they became the first game wardens.

0:33:180:33:23

They switched from seeing wildlife as endless to realising, in fact,

0:33:230:33:27

this was not an endless resource. It was coming to an end and very quickly.

0:33:270:33:33

Over the following decades,

0:33:350:33:38

it became clear to these early hunter-turned-conservationists

0:33:380:33:43

that to control hunting in Serengeti would be futile without the creation of a protected area.

0:33:430:33:49

So in 1951, after the distraction of the Second World War,

0:33:540:33:59

Serengeti National Park was created, just in time for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

0:34:000:34:06

And that park stretched from Lake Victoria in the west

0:34:060:34:11

and then eastwards to include Ngorongoro Crater and across the plains.

0:34:110:34:16

So it was largely an east-west oriented park.

0:34:160:34:20

But this new national park included people.

0:34:240:34:28

There were still human settlements.

0:34:280:34:31

The Sukuma were still present, the Ngoreme, Kuria and the Maasai,

0:34:310:34:36

but their activities were seriously curtailed.

0:34:360:34:39

In the eyes of the local people, this new protection was incomprehensible.

0:34:390:34:45

What once belonged to everyone now became shambala bibi - the Queen's field.

0:34:450:34:51

Not to say the Queen wouldn't allow them into her field, at first anyway.

0:35:130:35:19

The concept of the national park was alien to the British government.

0:35:190:35:25

The interesting this is that they had it in mind that local people could and had lived with wildlife

0:35:250:35:31

so all you had to do was set these areas aside so they would not be invaded by settlers

0:35:310:35:36

or be hunting areas and it would be fine. It simply didn't work.

0:35:360:35:41

What had been low-level subsistence hunting now became more commercial hunting.

0:35:440:35:50

The towns were growing, there was an urban population with a demand for meat and so the call went out -

0:35:500:35:57

we need meat.

0:35:570:35:59

And where was the largest source of free meat? The Queen's field.

0:35:590:36:05

It was just a question of taking traditional methods and scaling them up.

0:36:050:36:10

What was far more effective was the line trap,

0:36:100:36:14

the miles and miles of traps that people laid, the pit traps and many other traditional means,

0:36:140:36:20

which were now multiplied by a factor of 10 or 20. This became extremely effective.

0:36:200:36:26

At the same time, modernisation was also challenging the colonials' harmonious view

0:36:290:36:35

of the pastoral population.

0:36:350:36:38

The government's own vaccination programmes had all but eradicated rinderpest

0:36:400:36:46

and as the Maasai, in particular, began to move back into lands they had traditionally used,

0:36:460:36:52

they too were beginning to exert a new level of pressure on the wild.

0:36:520:36:57

The role of local people as a dominant force in the environment could no longer be brushed aside.

0:36:570:37:03

The scene was now set for the prevailing image of the African landscape to evolve once more.

0:37:030:37:10

It's in the films of another couple, Armand and Michaela Denis, that this next reinvention of wild Africa

0:37:140:37:20

first appears.

0:37:200:37:22

In Below The Sahara, the modern picture of a fragile paradise threatened by evil man

0:37:230:37:30

first came into popular culture.

0:37:300:37:32

Below The Sahara represents this transformational shift

0:37:350:37:40

in the representation of Africa to one of ecological splendour.

0:37:400:37:45

And really to see man as a threat.

0:37:450:37:48

Flying over game country is the best way to realise the wealth of wildlife which still survives

0:37:480:37:54

in immense Africa. You feel as if the pages of time had been turned back to a more primitive age

0:37:540:38:00

when animals roamed the tropical earth in their countless thousands before man, the enemy,

0:38:000:38:07

man the ravager and destroyer had been born.

0:38:070:38:11

This scene really represents a pristine wilderness,

0:38:110:38:15

nature in its purity

0:38:150:38:18

before man the destroyer had entered the scene.

0:38:180:38:23

And that really sets up this dichotomy, if you will,

0:38:230:38:27

between humans versus nature, that humans can't exist alongside nature

0:38:270:38:33

and humans are always a threat. And that nature needs to be protected from them.

0:38:330:38:40

The Denises were, by now, part of a growing international movement

0:38:410:38:45

that saw the future for African wildlife only in the separation

0:38:450:38:50

of pristine Africa from the dark forces of humanity.

0:38:500:38:54

The political champions of this emerging view were London-based hunter-turned-conservationists.

0:38:590:39:06

The Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire.

0:39:060:39:11

Some people called it the Penitent Butchers Club because it was made up of a lot of hunters.

0:39:130:39:19

The Serengeti was to be the first

0:39:190:39:23

and the crown jewel of Britain's national parks within the Empire.

0:39:230:39:29

A lot of people felt very passionately about its preservation.

0:39:290:39:33

The SPFE now looked for a way to enforce their growing conviction

0:39:330:39:38

that the Serengeti should be free from the threat of humanity in future.

0:39:380:39:43

Their attention was drawn to another national park for inspiration.

0:39:450:39:49

Not an African park, but an American one.

0:39:500:39:53

Yellowstone, the world's first national park,

0:40:050:40:09

had itself been through a difficult history of uncontrolled poaching

0:40:090:40:14

and conflict over indigenous rights, and had long before established the precedent

0:40:140:40:20

that human rights and conservation don't mix.

0:40:200:40:24

Largely as a result of its high profile relaunch, by none other than Theodore Roosevelt,

0:40:280:40:33

it had long ago become the shining example of world conservation.

0:40:330:40:38

Yellowstone National Park in the United States provided

0:40:400:40:44

a model that was then applied all across the colonial world.

0:40:440:40:49

So Serengeti is the best example of the Yellowstone idea.

0:40:500:40:56

An area of fantastic ecological wonder

0:40:560:40:59

being emptied of the social presence that had been part and parcel of that ecology.

0:40:590:41:05

For the new hard-line conservationists, Yellowstone was the perfect template for Serengeti.

0:41:060:41:12

A park without people.

0:41:140:41:16

But back in East Africa, the local colonial administration wasn't convinced

0:41:160:41:23

that moving people out of Serengeti was a good idea.

0:41:230:41:28

The debate came to focus on the fate of the most numerous people in the park -

0:41:280:41:33

the iconic Maasai.

0:41:330:41:35

There was quite a bit of tension between local colonial administrators

0:41:350:41:40

who understood these people's relationships to place

0:41:400:41:44

and what their livelihoods were about. They said, "You can't just throw these people out of this park.

0:41:440:41:51

"It's going to be catastrophic. Plus, they'll hate it. So if you want that, go ahead and throw them out."

0:41:510:41:58

As the rift grew between the powerful conservationists in London

0:41:590:42:04

and the local colonial government, the future of two completely different visions of wild Africa -

0:42:040:42:10

one with people, one without - was held in the balance.

0:42:100:42:16

In 1956, the British Government tasked a special committee to come up with a solution.

0:42:170:42:23

That recommendation said the Maasai are living in the eastern side

0:42:240:42:29

and therefore what we should do is draw a line down the middle of the plains

0:42:290:42:35

and have the Maasai where they currently are

0:42:350:42:38

and the wildlife on the western side.

0:42:380:42:41

The proposal was a clever compromise.

0:42:410:42:44

To create a Serengeti without people, they would shift the park boundary to the west

0:42:440:42:51

and so avoid having to evict the 6,000 Maasai who lived in the east.

0:42:510:42:56

Because this made the original park much smaller, they would add an extra extension to the north,

0:42:590:43:05

up towards the Kenya border.

0:43:050:43:08

The habit of the human being to try to, em...

0:43:080:43:13

create boundaries around that which is infinite,

0:43:130:43:18

around which he or she cannot really understand, the assumption of control of nature,

0:43:180:43:25

was one of those exercises in futility and nonsense.

0:43:250:43:29

By early 1959, Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael had been studying the wildebeest herds

0:43:330:43:40

for over a year to try to stop the plans for the proposed new boundaries.

0:43:400:43:45

During the dry season, the majority of the animals are to be found near lake Victoria,

0:43:450:43:51

but as soon as the rain falls and the wide areas of plain turn green,

0:43:510:43:55

the herds begin to move over them.

0:43:550:43:58

And they always come back to the same place as soon as the prolific grass starts to grow again.

0:43:580:44:04

They wander far across the new frontiers of the National Park and remain outside them for months.

0:44:040:44:11

It looked like his findings supported his worst fears.

0:44:120:44:17

The wildebeest would be exposed to the threat of people outside the new park boundaries

0:44:170:44:22

for over half the year.

0:44:220:44:25

His only hope was to now push his vision for a larger, people-free park in his new film.

0:44:270:44:34

The areas around the Serengeti are sparsely inhabited,

0:44:350:44:39

but Africa's coloured population is now increasing as rapidly as the rest of humanity.

0:44:390:44:45

Once the wilderness surrounding the present borders of the park fills up with people, it will be too late.

0:44:450:44:52

But just as he was completing the final scenes of Serengeti Shall Not Die,

0:44:520:44:58

filming was cut short by tragedy.

0:44:580:45:00

Michael, his son and director of the film, was killed.

0:45:000:45:05

A Griffon vulture had collided with the wing of the zebra-striped aeroplane.

0:45:050:45:11

Michael's death had a profound impact on Bernhard Grzimek.

0:45:130:45:17

Michael's body was actually buried on the side of the Ngorongoro Crater.

0:45:170:45:22

And so Bernhard's feeling was that completing the film, throwing himself into its completion,

0:45:220:45:28

was the best way to honour his son's memory.

0:45:280:45:32

In the film, Grzimek took the best of filmmakers before him -

0:45:320:45:37

the visual innovation of the Johnsons and the Denises' passion -

0:45:370:45:43

to create a visual masterpiece, an appeal from the heart for pristine Africa.

0:45:430:45:49

It was an instant box-office hit, winning the 1959 Oscar for Best Documentary,

0:45:570:46:03

and it brought the plight of the Serengeti to the world at large.

0:46:030:46:07

Before it is too late, cannot we at least preserve the Serengeti,

0:46:070:46:12

this last refuge of the giant herds of the African plains, as God created it,

0:46:120:46:18

for the animals and for the people who come after us?

0:46:180:46:22

But by now the British colonial authorities had moved on.

0:46:290:46:34

Just three hours drive to the north of Serengeti,

0:46:370:46:40

the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya was at crisis point,

0:46:400:46:44

giving a terrifying glimpse of just how fragile the colonial hold on Africa could be.

0:46:440:46:50

Tanzania was not a colony. It was a mandate handed over by the League of Nations after WWI

0:46:500:46:56

to lead towards independence.

0:46:560:46:59

The overriding concern for the colonial government right now was not conservation.

0:47:000:47:07

It was to avoid conflict on the road to independence.

0:47:070:47:12

Moving 6,000 Maasai from their homeland to create Grzimek's ultimate pristine park

0:47:140:47:20

was not something they could seriously consider.

0:47:200:47:24

So despite Grzimek's pleas for the wildebeest,

0:47:250:47:29

in 1959, on the dawn of independence, the new boundaries of the National Park were imposed.

0:47:290:47:35

Grzimek thought that the decision

0:47:370:47:40

was a catastrophe.

0:47:400:47:42

And he remained angry about it pretty much throughout his career.

0:47:420:47:46

All was not lost for the wildebeest, however.

0:47:480:47:52

Though they do spend a large part of the year on the eastern plains outside the new park,

0:47:520:47:58

we now know that, completely by chance,

0:47:580:48:01

the new northern extension has become the most important factor for their survival.

0:48:010:48:07

And that was entirely fortuitous. That's actually where the wildebeest go

0:48:090:48:14

at the worst time of year. It is their refuge. Nobody knew that at the time.

0:48:140:48:20

Even Professor Grzimek did not pick up on that, so by an incredible amount of luck,

0:48:200:48:26

we had the very bit of the park which is essential for this migration

0:48:260:48:31

because without that they would all have died.

0:48:310:48:35

And in many ways the most significant point slipped through almost unnoticed.

0:48:390:48:45

Although it was smaller,

0:48:450:48:47

Grzimek and the conservationists had got their park without people.

0:48:470:48:52

And that, ultimately, would be the defining factor in shaping Serengeti's future.

0:48:530:48:59

The Maasai had avoided the worst-case scenario,

0:49:000:49:04

the majority now able to stay put outside the park.

0:49:040:49:08

But to finalise the new people of Serengeti,

0:49:090:49:12

1,000 Maasai, along with their 50,000 cattle, were now moved out.

0:49:120:49:18

For them, this marked the end of a life

0:49:200:49:23

based on the freedom to move across the savanna.

0:49:230:49:27

"We understand we shall not be entitled henceforth

0:49:300:49:34

"to cross the boundary of the new Serengeti National Park,

0:49:340:49:38

"which we have habitually used in the past.

0:49:380:49:41

"We agree to move ourselves, our possessions, our cattle,

0:49:410:49:46

"and all our other animals out of this land by the advent of the next rains."

0:49:460:49:53

Less is known about the effects on the other people who traditionally used the Serengeti.

0:49:540:50:00

The Sukuma, peasant farmers, were pushed westwards.

0:50:000:50:05

The Ngoreme and the Kuria were also pushed further north.

0:50:050:50:10

So the process of creating Serengeti National Park

0:50:100:50:14

was not... was not a peaceful affair.

0:50:140:50:19

There was resistance, but the colonial armed force, the armed might of the colonial state did the job.

0:50:190:50:26

The people moved out.

0:50:260:50:29

By drawing another line on a map,

0:50:290:50:32

this compromise had effectively drawn a line between people and animals in the Serengeti.

0:50:320:50:38

Pristine Africa to the left, people to the right.

0:50:380:50:42

Those rural populations now saw wildlife

0:50:500:50:54

as government animals and so, coming up to independence, it was said by most people I knew

0:50:540:51:01

that as soon as independence comes through, we will take our own wildlife back.

0:51:010:51:08

So there was this incredible threat

0:51:080:51:10

that independence would be a release of the rights to go back and kill wildlife.

0:51:100:51:17

'No nation has the right to make decisions for another nation,

0:51:220:51:27

'no people for another people.'

0:51:270:51:29

In the same year Serengeti's new boundaries were fixed,

0:51:320:51:36

a young history teacher, Julius Nyerere, was preparing to lead his country to independence.

0:51:360:51:42

Tanzania didn't start up under President Nyerere as a socialist state,

0:51:460:51:51

but he very quickly moved into the notion that there was something called African socialism to adopt

0:51:510:51:57

in the development of the state. He was very concerned about the inequity under colonial governments.

0:51:570:52:04

He was very firmly committed to levelling the playing field for all his people in Tanzania

0:52:040:52:10

and I think that's what he did. He saw the vehicle of doing that as African socialism

0:52:100:52:16

because it would create equality.

0:52:160:52:19

It was clear from the start that Nyerere's priorities lay with his people,

0:52:190:52:25

but what would he make of the new National Park

0:52:250:52:29

and a vision of Africa that excluded them?

0:52:290:52:33

In September, 1961, as independence loomed,

0:52:330:52:37

the conservation world held its breath and focused its attention on the Tanzanian town of Arusha.

0:52:370:52:43

Here, a conference of 21 African countries and five international organisations

0:52:430:52:50

had gathered to debate the future of conservation in Africa.

0:52:500:52:55

Julius Nyerere delivered his address to the assembled dignitaries.

0:52:560:53:00

The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa.

0:53:020:53:08

We solemnly declare that we will do everything in our power

0:53:080:53:13

to make sure that our children's grandchildren will be able to enjoy

0:53:130:53:18

this rich and precious inheritance.

0:53:180:53:21

These wild creatures and the wild places they inhabit

0:53:230:53:27

are not only important as a resource of wonder and inspiration,

0:53:270:53:31

but are an integral part of our natural resources and our future livelihood and wellbeing.

0:53:310:53:39

Not only had he apparently adopted this foreign idea of pristine nature,

0:53:390:53:45

but there was a commitment to make an absolute priority to look after it for the future.

0:53:450:53:51

In the years following independence, there was an explosion of park building,

0:53:510:53:56

resulting in almost a third of Tanzania's land set aside for wildlife,

0:53:570:54:02

more than any other country today.

0:54:020:54:05

Even in the new socialist Tanzania, the value of tourism would come before human rights.

0:54:090:54:16

The creation of national parks was a grand success.

0:54:170:54:21

It was a great benefit to the nations of Tanzania and Kenya in creating this fabric of parks and reserves,

0:54:210:54:28

which then became the basis of a tourist industry, which rose to number one in the export economy.

0:54:280:54:34

So those have really been the fuel for a lot of our economic growth and are recognised as such.

0:54:340:54:40

Today, Serengeti National Park sees half a million visitors a year

0:54:440:54:49

who generate 10 million for the state.

0:54:490:54:52

It supports conservation of animals within the park

0:54:520:54:56

and helps finance some of the other less profitable parks.

0:54:560:55:01

But as the parks have become more and more successful,

0:55:010:55:05

the expectations of tourists have come to reinforce the pristine vision of Africa.

0:55:050:55:12

# In the jungle, the mighty jungle

0:55:120:55:15

# The lion sleeps tonight... #

0:55:150:55:19

Let's start with the morning. It is a most splendid orange sunrise.

0:55:190:55:26

You raise your eyes and right across the plains, dotted with acacia trees,

0:55:260:55:33

giraffes kind of lollop over.

0:55:340:55:38

To your left, elephants browse. To your right, the distant roar of lions.

0:55:380:55:44

And...

0:55:450:55:46

no people. No human beings to disturb the space,

0:55:460:55:50

save the observer of that particular landscape.

0:55:500:55:54

# The lion sleeps tonight... #

0:55:540:55:57

Serengeti is the essence of wild Africa. This is the real wild Africa, this is timeless.

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This is something that is absolutely outside of any human influence

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and it's one of the few places left in the world like that.

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Our obsession to preserve wild Africa has created a pristine fantasy world,

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a place without people, preserved behind invisible walls.

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It may well work for tourism, and it has played an important role in the preservation of animals.

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The problem is that it's a vision that doesn't take into account the bigger picture.

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Serengeti is not a theme park. It is a real place.

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-CRASH OF THUNDER

-A place whose true nature is one of constant change.

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Nothing is more iconic of Serengeti than the wildebeest migration,

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for many the symbol of primordial permanence.

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But the latest evidence suggests that not so long ago the climate was very different

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and the migration went in a completely different direction to today.

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The bigger ecological picture says that the climate will drive change again.

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If we get serious changes

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in the climatic regime,

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which is highly likely as a result of global warming,

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then there may be required a change in direction of the migration.

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And if that's the case, then we need to make provision for that.

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In the future, if the place where the animals of Serengeti need to be

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falls outside the boundaries of parks, their chances of survival would seem slim

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without a vision for wild Africa that transcends the unnatural divide between people and wilderness.

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In the next programme, we discover how a European idea

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led to the creation of the original pristine wilderness

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in the unnatural history of Yellowstone.

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Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd - 2011

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Email [email protected]

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