South Africa’s walking trails began on this ground: by 1958 half of iMfolozi had been proclaimed a wilderness area, among the first in Africa, enterable only on foot, on horseback or by canoe, and guides have been taking people into it on foot ever since.
Guiding people on foot through wild country, to watch animals rather than shoot them, has one of its first grounds in South Africa. By 1958 half of South Africa’s iMfolozi Game Reserve was proclaimed a wilderness area, among the first official wilderness areas in Africa. In 1959 Ian Player and the game tracker Magqubu Ntombela led the first official Natal Parks Board trail into it, and the trails they began are still walked today. Today the craft is most alive in South Africa, where the Field Guides Association of Southern Africa, founded in 1990 and based in Hoedspruit, sets the standards guides train and are assessed against. In 2024 it helped found a sister association for East Africa, built on those same standards.
Learn to guide on foot in the wilderness where South Africa’s walking trails began, and qualify on the same ground.
One school has its base camp here, and FGASA's own list of delivery partners is where we found it rather than its own site. What is older than the school is the trail: the Wilderness Leadership School has been walking people into this wilderness since the late 1950s, and the two men who started it are named below. Nobody teaching here today is named on any page we can find, which is the gap to ask about before you book.
BirthplaceVerified schoolsHeritageA FGASA-endorsed training provider in northern KwaZulu-Natal, started in 2009, whose base camp sits on Kuleni Game Park at Hluhluwe. Its one-year Professional Nature Guide programme bundles the FGASA NQF2 Field Guide qualification with the Apprentice Trails Guide course, taught across several wilderness camps. Checked on bhejanenaturetraining.com and FGASA's own partner list, 17 September 2026.
Facts read on the school's own pages, 17 Sep 2026.
FGASA Professional Field Guide (NQF2) + Apprentice Trails Guide · Certifying body: FGASA (Field Guides Association of Southern Africa) / CATHSSETA; KPSGA in East Africa
There is a real difference between a school that teaches you and a good-looking website, and too much of the internet is the second kind. Four instruments do the work, and every one of them is visible on the page you are already on.
If a place dodges these, that's your answer. It costs you nothing to ask, and it tells you everything.
This is the short version. The full method is here — the six questions, in order, for any craft anywhere.