A full-day visit in South Africa's premier national park offers close encounters with many animals, but it leaves the writer wondering why there are hardly any black tourists enjoying this heritage.

If, like me, you grew up in South Africa in the turbulent 1980s, your distrust and suspicion of white people tends to kick in especially in spaces where, for many years, darkies were excluded on the basis of their race.

I'm talking about a place like the Kruger National Park where, until the end of legislated apartheid in 1994, black people were only allowed as labourers who tended to the needs of whites, who were indifferent to their exclusion.

When I started visiting the Kruger in the late 1990s, mostly as a solo traveller in search of the unknown, I often felt that I was like one of the attractions in the park, given the stares I received from white folks.

At public facilities like restaurants and toilets some white folks would nervously grab their bags and cameras at the sight of this lone black traveller.

Even some of the people in my circle, young black men and women, just couldn't understand why a young man from ekasi would be so fascinated by wildlife.

"So you spend money to travel so far to see a lion?" some would ask. It became somewhat of an irritating joke. But even the black...