Hans Otto Hoheisen

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Hans Otto Hoheisen (1 March 1905 – 8 July 2003) was a South African conservationist and philanthropist. He spent much of his childhood on a farm near Hectorspruit close to the Kruger National Park. His German-born father, Alfred Hoheisen, made a fortune as a building contractor in the Reef mining industry after the Anglo-Boer War and invested heavily in Lowveld property, owning five farms west of the Kruger Park. Alfred also bought the fruit farm Drie Sprong in Stellenbosch in 1938, which Hans turned into a wine estate in the late 1940s. The farm later became Delheim, a leading South African wine estate. When Alfred died in 1965, Hans inherited the farms and became a devoted conservationist, developing the properties into wildlife refuges. In 1990, he donated 15,000 hectares to the World Wildlife Fund of Southern Africa, the first land increase for the Kruger area since 1926. In the same region near Hoedspruit, he encouraged the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation via the German Development Bank to fund the construction of the Southern African Wildlife College, a nonprofit that offers conservation education. In 1980 he donated 37 hectares of his Kempiana farm for the Hans Hoheisen Wildlife Research Centre near the Kruger Park’s Orpen Gate; the centre opened on 15 July 1983.