Serengeti Shall Not Die

The documentary tells the founding years of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. At the end of the fifties the park administration was considering fencing in the protected area around the Ngorongoro crater. Two researchers were invited in 1957 for that purpose; their task was to measure how the animal migrations actually ran and to give the administration figures to work from. Using a new counting method carried out with two aircraft, they found that the routes of the herds were other than had been assumed. The film also carries the conservation thinking of that period and the way European researchers looked at the region, and it is worth watching with that in mind. Bernhard Grzimek’s eighty five minute German documentary was completed in 1959.