About the park

The history of Serengeti National Park

Name: Serengeti National Park
Address: Tanzania

The Serengeti looks timeless, but its boundaries, its herds and even its trees are the product of the last hundred years: a cattle plague and its cure, a boundary deal in 1959 that split the park from Ngorongoro, a father and son counting animals from a striped plane, and a court case that stopped a highway.

If you only want the answer

The Serengeti was protected as a game reserve from 1929, became Tanganyika's first national park in 1951 and took its present boundaries in 1959, when the Ngorongoro highlands were split off as a separate multiple-use area under the National Parks Ordinance (Cap 412). The wildebeest herds grew from about 250,000 in the 1950s to well over a million once cattle were vaccinated against rinderpest. UNESCO inscribed the park as a World Heritage Site in 1981, and in 2014 the East African Court of Justice barred Tanzania from building a tarmac road across it.

Before the park

Long before any boundary was drawn, the western Serengeti was home to farming and hunting communities and the eastern plains were Maasai grazing land. The standard scholarly account is Imagining Serengeti (Ohio University Press, 2007), a history of landscape memory in the region from the earliest times to the present.

The name is usually said to come from a Maasai word for endless plains. Even that is less settled than it sounds: the term does not appear in standard Maasai dictionaries, so treat the translation as tradition rather than etymology.

Rinderpest, and why the herds exploded

The migration as visitors know it is younger than the park. Rinderpest, a cattle disease that also kills wildebeest, held the herds down while it circulated in livestock: in the 1950s, before cattle were vaccinated, there were about 250,000 wildebeest. Once the disease was controlled, the population rose from 1963 to 1977, stabilised from 1977 to 1993 and fell during the drought of 1993 and 1994, according to a 40-year record published in 1999.

The growth changed the landscape too. A 2009 study in PLoS Biology showed that the wildebeest eruption reduced fire across the ecosystem and allowed tree cover to recover. The herds you see today are, in a real sense, a twentieth-century creation.

1929, 1951 or 1959: when was the Serengeti founded?

Sources disagree because the park was built in stages. The Tanganyika government created the Serengeti Game Reserve on 19 November 1929. The reserve was made a closed preserve in 1950 according to one history, and Wikipedia gives 1940 for an earlier protected-area stage. In 1951 the Serengeti was chartered as the first national park under the National Park Board of Tanganyika, and that first park included the Ngorongoro highlands.

The present park dates from 1959. Under the National Parks Ordinance, Cap 412 of 1959, the eastern areas including the Ngorongoro Crater were removed and became the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, a multiple-use area where Maasai pastoralism continues, while the park was extended north to the Kenyan border. The decision was taken while Sir Richard Turnbull was governor. TANAPA's own corporate history says its story begins in 1959, when Serengeti became the first national park under that Ordinance.

Date	Step	Source
19 November 1929	Serengeti Game Reserve created	EBSCO Research Starters, 2021
1940 or 1950	Closed reserve or protected-area status (sources disagree)	Wikipedia; EBSCO
1951	First national park in Tanganyika, including the Ngorongoro highlands	EBSCO; Wikipedia
1959	National Parks Ordinance Cap 412; Ngorongoro split off, park extended north	TANAPA Quick Reference, 2024; UNESCO
1981	UNESCO World Heritage inscription	UNESCO

The Grzimeks and Serengeti Shall Not Die

At the end of 1957, Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael flew a zebra-striped light aircraft, registration D-ENTE, from Germany to Tanganyika to count the migration from the air. They flew pre-defined transects, a new method at the time, to show that the planned boundary change would be fatal for the herds. In January 1959 Michael died when the plane crashed over the Serengeti; the Frankfurt Zoological Society says it collided with a vulture.

The book and the Oscar-winning film Serengeti Shall Not Die followed in 1959, and the park's slogan, Serengeti Shall Never Die, still echoes them. The boundary change went ahead as planned in 1959, and the Frankfurt Zoological Society now notes that the new boundary, ironically, suited the migration. Father and son are buried on the rim of the Ngorongoro Crater. The society has worked in Tanzania for more than six decades, and its de-snaring teams have removed more than 100,000 snares in the Serengeti.

Half a century of research

Research has been part of the park for most of its life. The Serengeti Research Institute was set up by the national park trustees in 1966, the year the Serengeti Lion Project began. In 1980 an Act of Parliament created the Serengeti Wildlife Research Institute, renamed the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI) in 1999, and its Serengeti Wildlife Research Centre is still in the park. Wildebeest monitoring runs back to 1958, and the cheetah study on the plains to 1974.

The research has recorded the park's crises as well as its successes. A canine distemper epidemic hit the lions in 1994. The resident wild dogs disappeared in 1991, and the long-debated idea that research handling was to blame was rejected by a 2019 study. In 2022/23 the lion project still monitored 205 lions in 21 prides in the central study area.

World Heritage, and the size of the park

UNESCO inscribed the Serengeti as a World Heritage Site in 1981, under criteria (vii) and (x), with an area of 1,476,300 hectares, or 14,763 km². It is also part of the Serengeti-Ngorongoro Biosphere Reserve. Rounder figures of 15,000 km² circulate, including on TANAPA's own pages, and 30,000 km² is the wider ecosystem, not the park.

The ecosystem stretches across the boundary. UNESCO lists the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, the Maswa Game Reserve in the south, the Grumeti and Ikorongo Game Reserves, the Loliondo Game Controlled Area and the Masai Mara in Kenya. Its text puts Grumeti and Ikorongo in the east and Loliondo in the west; on the map it is the other way round, with Grumeti and Ikorongo on the north-western side and Loliondo to the east.

The highway that was never built

In 2010 the Tanzanian government proposed upgrading about 179 km of road from Natta through Mugumu to Loliondo to bitumen standard, a route it said would serve more than two million citizens. The stretch inside the park, 53 km from Tabora B to Klein's Gate, was then mostly a four-wheel-drive track used for tourism and administration. In 2011 UNESCO's World Heritage Committee commended Tanzania for its stated intention to keep that stretch as gravel.

The Kenyan-registered African Network for Animal Welfare took the case to the East African Court of Justice. On 20 June 2014 the court declared the proposal to build a bitumen road across the park unlawful and issued a permanent injunction restraining Tanzania from building or maintaining one, while leaving it free to pursue projects without negative environmental effects. Tanzania appealed, and in September 2015 The Citizen reported that the Appellate Division had faulted the lower court for ruling on a mere proposal. No paved road crosses the park today, and UNESCO still lists a road through the Serengeti as a potential threat that would cut the ecosystem in two.

The border, the river and the money: the recent picture

Some of the park's shape is political. The Bologonja border post between the northern Serengeti and the Masai Mara closed after the first East African Community collapsed on 5 February 1977, and it has stayed closed to tourist traffic since. The Mara River, the only perennial river through the park, is under pressure from dams and deforestation upstream in Kenya; TANAPA's 2024 crossing guideline warns that if it dried up, about 500,000 wildebeest would likely die in the first year.

TANAPA, which runs the park, adopted a paramilitary model in 2018 and manages 21 national parks covering about 97,078 km², according to its October 2024 quick reference. In March 2025 the government froze park fee increases for 12 months, and from 2025/26 TANAPA retains and reinvests the fees it collects. These governance facts are stated as they stood in October 2026 and may have moved since.