The history of Nairobi National Park

Nairobi National Park exists because a handful of people in the 1940s refused to accept that the plains game around a growing colonial town was expendable. Mervyn Cowie, who grew up watching wildlife on the Athi plains, campaigned for years for formal protection. In 1946 the park was gazetted: 117 square kilometres of grassland, acacia and riverine forest, seven kilometres from the city centre.

Why the southern boundary was left open

The Mbagathi River marks the park's southern edge, and it was never fenced. That decision is the single most important thing to understand about how this park works. Zebra and wildebeest still move out onto the Kitengela plains in the wet season and drift back into the park as the surrounding grass dries out. From Ololo, on the southern boundary, our guides watch that movement every year — the plains in front of the lodge fill and empty with the rains.

The 1989 ivory burn

On 18 July 1989, twelve tonnes of confiscated elephant tusks were set alight inside the park. The image travelled the world and helped push through the international ivory ban that year. The Ivory Burning Site Monument is a shortdetour from the Main Gate and is worth ten minutes of any game drive — most visitors drive straight past it without knowing what it is.

A rhino stronghold

From the 1980s onwards the park became a core black rhino sanctuary. Its small size, fenced perimeter and permanent ranger presence made it defensible during the worst poaching years, and rhino born here have since been translocated to restock other Kenyan parks. It is still the reason a two-hour drive here can produce a sighting that takes days elsewhere.

The park today

The pressures are now urban rather than colonial: a standard-gauge railway line crosses the park on raised pylons, Nairobi's southern suburbs press against the fence, and land in Kitengela is steadily being subdivided. Conservation work here is largely about keeping that southern corridor viable — which is why lodges, conservancies and landowners on the southern boundary matter so much to the park's future.