Honouring the Guardians: A Short History of Africa's Wildlife Rangers

Communication
Jul 30
3 min read

Every July 31, the conservation world pauses to recognise a profession most people never see up close: the rangers who walk Africa's parks on foot, day and night, so that elephants, gorillas, zebras, and countless other species still have somewhere to call home. At Upemba National Park, this day belongs to our own rangers; and to a much longer story of guardianship that stretches back across the continent.

A profession born of necessity

The role we now call "ranger" took shape in the early twentieth century, as colonial administrations across Africa established some of the continent's first game reserves in response to the near-collapse of wildlife populations from unchecked hunting. South Africa's Kruger National Park, established in 1926 under its first warden, James Stevenson-Hamilton, is one of the best-known examples of this era. It was the beginning of a formal profession dedicated to protecting Africa's wild places; one that would, over the following century, spread across the continent and grow into something far more than the colonial administrations that first created it.

Long before that, of course, African communities were already the original custodians of these landscapes; through traditional hunting restrictions, sacred groves, and generations of ecological knowledge. The modern ranger corps did not invent conservation in Africa; it formalised a duty of care that Africans had already been carrying for centuries..

A profession that came of age

It took until 1992 for rangers to gain a truly international voice, when ranger associations in the UK and United States founded the International Ranger Federation. Fifteen years later, in 2007, the Federation and the Thin Green Line Foundation created World Ranger Day; a date chosen specifically to honour rangers who have died in the line of duty, and to bring global attention to a profession that, even today, remains dangerous, underpaid, and underappreciated. Today, an estimated 286,000 rangers protect the world's parks, against an estimated need of one and a half million by 2030; a gap that speaks to how much this work still needs support.

Upemba's own story

Upemba National Park carries this history in a very direct way. Established by royal decree in 1939, Upemba is one of Africa's oldest national parks; and its rangers have, for decades, protected some of the DRC's last remaining savanna elephants, wild zebras, Katanga buffalo, and many other wild species through periods of extraordinary hardship.

That guardianship has come at real cost. In December 2012, Upemba's chief warden, Atamato Madrandele, was killed in an ambush; a loss that, for years afterward, left the park without the resources to properly protect itself. It was in the aftermath of that period that the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) and the Forgotten Parks Foundation began rebuilding Upemba's ranger corps under their 2017 co-management partnership, retraining and re-equipping the men and women charged with its protection.

The results of that rebuilding are visible today: Upemba's zebra population has grown from just 35 individuals in 2022 to more than 170, and its elephant population now exceeds 200 — recoveries made possible almost entirely by rangers walking the park's trails, tracking its wildlife, and holding the line against poaching, year after year.

What this day is for

World Ranger Day is not an abstraction for parks like ours — it is a day to say thank you to people we know by name: the rangers currently on patrol, the ones training the next generation, and those we have lost. It is also a reminder that ranger work, in Upemba and across Africa, has become something far bigger than a job. It is a form of stewardship — rooted, in the deepest sense, in a much older African tradition of caring for the land.

To every ranger who has ever put on the uniform, at Upemba and beyond: thank you for standing where few others will.