# Bush tracking and warfare in late twentieth-century east and southern Africa

> In Africa’s wars of the 1950s to 1980s, finding the enemy often came down to reading footprints. Historian Tim Stapleton traces how game wardens, tracker teams, helicopters and mine-protected vehicles turned tracking into a weapon in Kenya, Rhodesia and Namibia, and how guerrillas fought back with stilts, swapped boot soles and watered-down tracks.

Summary by Kersey Lawrence, Original Wisdom. Updated 9 November 2026. Page: https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/2014-stapleton-bush-tracking-warfare-late/

## Citation and access

- **Authors:** Tim Stapleton
- **Year published:** 2014
- **Journal or source:** Historia
- **Full citation:** Stapleton, T. 2014. Bush tracking and warfare in late twentieth-century east and southern Africa. Historia 59(2): 229–251.
- **Access status:** Open access (CC BY 4.0)
- **PDF:** https://www.originalwisdom.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/2014_Stapleton_bush-tracking-and-warfare-in-late-twentieth-century.pdf

## Tags

- **Species:** Humans
- **Region:** Africa > Angola; Africa > Botswana; Africa > Kenya; Africa > Mozambique; Africa > Namibia; Africa > South Africa; Africa > Zambia; Africa > Zimbabwe
- **Tracking:** Spoor age estimation; Tracking; Tracks; Tracks and signs identification; Trailing
- **Methods and technology:** Interviews
- **Data type:** Existing data
- **Observer qualification:** Reported but not validated
- **Discipline:** Human tracking; Social science
- **Year published:** 2014

## Detailed keywords

- **Species:** Studied: humans (security force trackers, insurgents and anti-tracking). Animals in the paper: scent tracker dogs and patrol dogs, tracker and mine detector dogs, horses (mounted infantry), cattle (stolen cattle tracked by Kenya Police tracker teams; cattle driven over or ahead of tracks to hide them), elephant and rhino (insurgents in Kenya wore elephant or rhino feet to disguise their tracks; some Rhodesian Training Troop staff were accused of poaching ivory and rhino horn), lions (mentioned in passing). Trackers recruited from Waata elephant hunters in Kenya.
- **Location and habitat:** Kenya (Aberdares and Mount Kenya high-altitude and bamboo forest, Tsavo, Nanyuki, Fort Hall, northern Kenya); Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe (Zambezi Valley and Lake Kariba, the populated northeast and east and the Tribal Trust Lands, Honde Valley, Umtali, arid southwest, Lomagundi district, Mozambique border cordon sanitaire); Mozambique (Tete and Gaza provinces); Angola; Zambia; Botswana; South West Africa, now Namibia (Caprivi Strip, Ovamboland, Kavango, Kaokoland, Otavi, the “Yati” border strip and the sandy “cutlines”); South Africa (police tracking courses near Potgietersrus, now Mokopane, and in Kruger National Park; Equestrian Centre in Potchefstroom). Terrain ranges from high forest and bamboo to dry thin woodland, hilly populated farmland, hard ground, and flat sandy bush.
- **Topics:** military history; counter-insurgency; decolonisation wars (Mau Mau, the Rhodesian bush war, the Namibian war of independence); combat and tactical tracking; anti-tracking and counter-tracking; tracking deception; Tracker Combat Teams; tracking schools and courses; game wardens and game scouts as military trackers; stereotypes of “martial” peoples and of Bushmen, Shangaan and Ovambo as trackers; recruitment of indigenous trackers; scent tracker dogs; helicopters leapfrogging trackers; aerial tracking; mine-protected vehicles with tracker teams; horse and motorcycle mounted units; swept roads and border strips for detecting footprints; spoor age; insurgents’ own use of tracking for intelligence; pseudo-operations.
- **Statistics or models:** None
- **Data type:** Existing data: British National Archives files, unit histories, memoirs, training pamphlets, newspapers and secondary literature, plus the author’s own interviews and correspondence with veterans (2012 to 2014). Covers the 1950s to 1989. Small inconsistencies in the paper’s references: the historian Wood appears as J.R.D. Wood in the text and J.R.T. Wood in the footnotes, and an interviewee appears as Callie Calitz (note 61) and Callie Kalitz (note 76).

## Synopsis

### 1. What they did

Tracking, following people or animals by the signs they leave behind, became an important skill for both sides in Africa’s late twentieth-century wars of decolonisation. Military history has paid it little attention. Tim Stapleton, a historian, traced how security forces and insurgents used tracking and anti-tracking in three counter-insurgency wars:

- Kenya, 1952 to 1956: British forces against the Mau Mau rebellion.

- Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), late 1960s and 1970s: the white minority government against the Zimbabwe liberation movement.

- South West Africa (now Namibia), late 1960s to 1989: South African forces against the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN).

He drew on British archive files, unit histories, memoirs and his own interviews with veterans from both sides.

### 2. What they found

Kenya

- Game wardens and their African game scouts tracked insurgents from the start of the emergency. They recruited many African trackers, often from hunting communities such as the Ndorobo and Waata, or from groups seen as “martial” peoples. Some trackers were captured and turned insurgents.

- In November 1953 a Tracking School opened at Nanyuki, staffed by game wardens. It tested prospective African trackers and taught British junior leaders enough tracking to work with them. By 1954 each British battalion was meant to have 30, later 36, local African trackers.

- Tracker Combat Teams were formed: three African trackers under a European leader, a support group to do the fighting, and a patrol dog and a scent tracker dog. Grouped under one commander, they were far more effective; in one operation a small group accounted for almost ten percent of insurgent deaths.

- Mau Mau fighters practised anti-tracking: walking backwards, taking long high steps, brushing out tracks, walking on stilts, vaulting over open ground, stepping on blankets, wearing elephant or rhino feet, and laying false trails to set ambushes. Their bush smell also helped them, while soldiers often smelled of soap or tobacco. They left signs for each other, such as bent twigs and marks on bark.

Rhodesia

- Game ranger Allan Savory led the first military tracking units. The Tracker Combat Unit used four-man teams of white hunters and game rangers and left out dogs, because dogs were noisy, destroyed spoor, lost scent in hot weather and needed food and water.

- In the remote, lightly populated Zambezi Valley, where “fresh human tracks command instant attention”, insurgents in the late 1960s moved in large groups, all wearing the same boots with a distinctive “figure 8” print, and knew little about anti-tracking. Security forces tracked and engaged every group that crossed.

- Helicopters were used to leapfrog trackers forward along a trail, and the army opened a Tracking Wing at Kariba in 1970. National Parks game scouts did much of the actual tracking for the police.

- In the 1970s the war moved into the populated, hilly east. Insurgents “bombshelled” (scattered in many directions to meet later), walked in streams or on busy footpaths, changed footwear or went barefoot, and had supporters brush out tracks or drive livestock over them. Tracking operations more often lost insurgents than found them. Insurgent trainees also learned to read footprints and judge how long ago they were made.

- The switch to pseudo-operations (soldiers posing as insurgents) and air-mobile Fire Forces drained tracking skill from the army.

South West Africa

- Police first used Bushman and National Parks trackers and tracker dogs. Later the army recruited Bushman trackers into 31 Battalion, often coercively. Roads called “cutlines” were swept by vehicles dragging trees and checked for footprints.

- The police unit Koevoet (“crowbar”) had trackers on foot followed by others in mine-protected vehicles, which leapfrogged up to ten kilometres ahead to pick up the same line of spoor. Teams circled villages at more than a kilometre to avoid the mass of civilian footprints. Helicopter gunships flew set orbits over a tracking team, and tree shadows were used as a shared “12 o’clock” for directions.

- Koevoet came to rely on Ovambo trackers, who knew the area and its people; Bushmen were stereotyped there as inferior trackers. Tracking dogs proved useless in the heat and noise.

- PLAN trained hard in anti-tracking: removable boot soles, plastic bags over feet, shuffling along fences, stepping in each other’s prints, lifting bent grass, sprinkling water to make tracks look older, starting bush fires, walking in circles, and moving into the sun to blind trackers before an ambush. The most skilled Koevoet trackers specialised in solving these deceptions.

- Security forces also used anti-tracking themselves, and back-tracked insurgents to their bases. A man’s and a dog’s tracks together crossing the border suggested a scout checking a route.

### 3. What they concluded

- In Kenya, tracking relied on African trackers supervised by Europeans and followed the old method of persistence hunting, searching for tracks and catching up on foot. The main innovation was grouping specially trained tracker teams under one commander.

- In Rhodesia, tracking worked well in the late 1960s, when insurgents lacked anti-tracking skills and terrain was remote and open. It became much less useful once the war moved to populated areas and insurgents practised anti-tracking. Recruiting trackers mostly from minorities (whites, Bushmen and Shangaan) meant there were never enough.

- In South West Africa, flat open terrain, vehicles and helicopters made tracking very effective. Recruiting trackers from the Ovambo majority, “just as skilled”, gave far more manpower. With both sides highly skilled, it became “a trackers’ war”.

- Game wardens were central to military tracking in Kenya and Rhodesia. Dogs were only really useful in Kenya’s high forests, and horse-mounted trackers were vulnerable to ambush.

- How tracking was used depended mostly on local geography, technology and colonial culture.

### 4. How tracking was or was not used

The paper is about tracking itself: how armies and police recruited, trained and organised trackers, how they followed footprints and other signs on the ground (and sometimes from the air), and how insurgents tried to hide or fake their tracks. The author did no tracking himself.

### 5. Tracker or observer certification

Reported but not validated. Trackers are described as skilled or expert, and the paper describes tracking schools and courses that tested and trained trackers (Nanyuki 1953, Kariba 1970, police courses in South Africa), but no certification or test results are reported.

### 6. Other technologies, skills or innovations

- Helicopters leapfrogging tracker teams ahead along a trail, and dropping ambush teams ahead of fleeing insurgents.

- Mine-protected vehicles carrying fresh trackers, water and ammunition behind trackers on foot.

- Set helicopter gunship orbits over tracking teams, and a “clock code” using tree shadows to give directions between air and ground.

- Aerial tracking by police reserve and air force pilots.

- Swept roads and cleared border strips to show fresh footprints.

- Scent tracker dogs, a radio harness for directing a dog from a helicopter (it failed), and horse and motorcycle mounted units.

### 8. Implications for tracking (Original Wisdom's observations)

_These are Original Wisdom's observations, not the authors'._

- The long list of anti-tracking tricks in this paper (false trails, stepping in each other’s prints, altered footwear, water to age tracks) shows how much a tracker must read deliberate deception as well as natural signs.

- The paper shows how ideas about which people “are” trackers shaped who was recruited, and that these ideas did not always hold: Ovambo trackers proved just as skilled as Bushmen, and stereotypes left some forces short of trackers.

## Cite this summary

Lawrence, K. 2026. Summary of: Bush tracking and warfare in late twentieth-century east and southern Africa (Stapleton, 2014). Original Wisdom, Tracking Literature. https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/2014-stapleton-bush-tracking-warfare-late/