There were two experimental projects to erect electric fences around both the Arusha National Park, and Lake Manyara National Park, a new report reveals.
While the electric fence at Arusha National Park did not materialize, the one erected in Lake Manyara to protect the park from Mto-wa-Mbu humans, did function for a while before being disbanded.
This is according to an old Ian Douglas Hamilton’s 1975 publications ‘Ian and Oria among the Elephants,’ whose excerpts were recently sent to the ‘The Tanzania Times‘ from Nairobi.
Electric fencing at Arusha National Park was a project hatched by Leslie Desmond Edward Foster-Vesey-Fitzgerald, an Irish entomologist, ornithologist, conservationist, and plant collector.
Vesey who in 1964 became an ecologist and conservationist at the Ngurdoto Game Reserve which eventually became Arusha National Park, wanted the entire conservancy fenced off electrically and launched an ambitious project to that effect.
Local people in Arusha used to call Vesey ‘Bwana Mungozi,’ (Lord of leathers), which referred to the high boots which he always put on.
Vesey had for some years experimented with an electric fence along the boundaries of the small Ngurdoto National Park having foreseen future invasion of human activities in the reserve but with disregard to wildlife migratory corridors.
Two other writers, Samler Brown and Gordon Brown, in ‘The South and East African Yearbook and Guide for 1927,’ claim that the area was known as Mount Meru Game reserve and contained big and small game of similar character to that found on Mount Kilimanjaro.
They added that the area which is now Arusha National Park (ANAPA) was packed with hundreds of Lions.
Today there are no lions at the park which strides the foot of Mount Meru. Rhinos have also disappeared from there.
This is possibly why Edward Foster, known to all his colleagues as Vesey, wanted to seal off the park with an electric fence, a project which was later dropped.
Two years later in 1966 Jonathan Muhanga the Warden in-charge at Lake Manyara, tried a similar electric fence project along the boundary of the National Park with Mto-wa-Mbu.
However it was his successor, David Stevens Babu who eventually managed to get the fence working.
The Mto-wa-Mbu hamlet, according to Douglas Hamilton, was founded in 1920 when immigrants moved into the area.
By 1967 the population at Mto-wa-Mbu comprised over 3,500 residents and counting.
David Babu succeeded Jonathan Muhanga as Manyara Park Warden.
Babu was an efficient young graduate from Mweka College of Wildlife Management. He later became Chief Park Warden in the Serengeti from 1981 to 1989 before becoming the acting director of Tanzania National Parks.
Italian farmer shoots and kills 400 elephants in Manyara
There was also an Italian farmer, Signor Fiorotto who arrived in the country in 1958 and cleared several thousand acres of bush in the southern parts of Manyara and planted maize.
The Fiorotto maize farm was later to result into the first major Human-Wildlife conflict in the precinct.
Story goes that, one fateful night, herds of elephants and rhino stormed into Signor Fiorotto farm which by then stood in the way of their migratory path and destroyed the maize plantation.
In retaliation, Fiorotto and his workers hunted down, shot and killed more than 400 elephants in Manyara.
It was a shocking incident which raised uproar in the region.
Professor Bernhard Grzimek of Serengeti, who was visiting Iain Douglas-Hamilton at Manyara, during the time of the incident, offered to raise funds and buy the farm from Fiorotto, on behalf of the Frankfurt Zoological Society, so as to extend the Manyara Park boundaries.