Mkomazi National Park

Mkomazi National Park, TZ

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Mkomazi National Park is located in northeastern Tanzania on the Kenyan border, in Kilimanjaro Region and Tanga Region. It was established as a game reserve in 1951 and upgraded to a national park in 2006.The park covers over 3,234 square kilometres (323,400 ha), and is dominated by Acacia-Commiphora vegetation; it is contiguous with Kenya's Tsavo West National Park. The area commonly called 'Mkomazi' is actually the union of two previous game reserves, the Umba Game Reserve in the east (in Lushoto District, Tanga Region) and the Mkomazi Game Reserve in the west (in Same District, Kilimanjaro Region); in government documents they are sometimes called the Mkomazi-Umba Game Reserves. Of the two, Mkomazi is larger, and has more diversity of relief and habitat, and a longer shared border with Tsavo West National Park. In the rest of this entry, 'Mkomazi' will refer to both the Mkomazi and Umba reserves together. == History of contest == Like many national parks and game reserves, Mkomazi's history is one of contest, with the main contenders being government conservation planners and local rural resources users. It differs from many other cases in East Africa because limited resource use within the reserve was initially permitted. When Mkomazi was first established a number of pastoral families from the Parakuyo ethnic group were allowed to continue to live there with a few thousand of their cattle, goats and sheep. The (colonial) government of the time permitted them to reside there because they had been in the area for many years and were thought not to threaten the ecological integrity of the reserve. The pastoralists were only allowed in the eastern half of the reserve. SOURCESWikipedia