In South Africa, precisely the same conditions have prevailed until recent times.  The early colonists were kept so busy shooting lions and making farms that not one game preserve was made.  If any men can be excused from the work and worry of preserving game, and making preserves, it is those who spend their lives pioneering and state-building in countries like Africa.  Men who continually have to contend with disease, bad food, rains, insect pests, dangerous wild beasts and native cussedness may well claim that they have troubles enough, without going far into campaigns to preserve wild animals in countries where animals are plentiful and cheap.  It is for this reason that the people of Alaska can not be relied upon to preserve the Alaskan game.  They are busy with other things that are of more importance to them.

In May, 1900, representatives of the great powers owning territory in Africa held a conference in the interests of the wild-animal life of that continent.  As a result a Convention was signed by which those powers bound themselves “to make provision for the prevention of further undue destruction of wild game.”  The principles laid down for universal observance were as follows: 

1.  Sparing of females and immature animals. 2.  The establishment of close seasons and game sanctuaries. 3.  Absolute protection of rare species. 4.  Restrictions on export for trading purposes of skins, horns, tusks, etc. 5.  Prohibition of the use of pits, snares and game traps.

The brave and hardy men who are making for the British people a grand empire in Africa probably are greater men than far-distant people realize.  To them, the white man’s burden of game preservation is accepted as all in the day’s work.  A mere handful of British civil officers, strongly aided by the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the British Empire, have carved out and set aside a great chain of game preserves reaching all the way from Swaziland and the Transvaal to Khartoum.  Taken either collectively or separately, it represents grand work, characteristic of the greatest colonizers on earth.  Those preserves are worthy stones in the foundation of what one day will be a great British empire in Africa.  The names of the men who proposed them and wrought them out should, in some way, be imperishably connected with them as their founders, as the least reward that Posterity can bestow.

In Major J. Stevenson-Hamilton’s fine work, “Animal Life in Africa,"[O] the author has been at much pains to publish an excellent series of maps showing the locations of the various British game preserves in Africa, and the map published herewith has been based chiefly on that work.  It is indeed fortunate for the wild life of Africa that it has today so powerful a champion and exponent as this author, the warden of the Transvaal Game Preserves.

[Footnote O:  Published by Heinemann, London, 1912.]

Events move so rapidly that up to this date no one, so far as I am aware, has paused long enough to make and publish an annotated list of the African game preserves.  Herein I have attempted to begin that task myself, and I regret that at this distance it is impossible for me to set down under the several titles the names of the men who made these preserves possible, and actually founded them.