Zimbabwe's elephant capital — 45,000 elephants in one national park, artificial waterholes that concentrate wildlife to a density impossible in the wild, and painted dogs that hunt in packs across the teak woodland
Hwange National Park (14,651 sq km, in the northwest of Zimbabwe at the Botswana border, accessible from Victoria Falls by road, 1.5 hours, or from Bulawayo, 3 hours) contains the largest elephant population of any national park in the world: approximately 45,000-50,000 elephants (Loxodonta africana), a concentration that has grown since the end of major ivory poaching in Zimbabwe and now significantly exceeds the park's estimated carrying capacity of 15,000-20,000 elephants. The ecological consequence of this overabundance (the destruction of the mature teak woodland — the Baikiaea plurijuga…
Hwange's pre-colonial history is the history of the San (Bushmen) hunter-gatherers who inhabited the Kalahari sand forest of the Zimbabwe plateau for thousands of years before Bantu-speaking peoples arrived in the first millennium CE. The colliery town of Hwange (formerly Wankie) gave the park its post-independence name: the Wankie Colliery (established 1903, the largest underground coal mine in central Africa, producing the coal that powered Southern Rhodesia's railways and is still operating under Zimbabwe National Parks management) was the reason for the colonial administration's interest…