Africa is referred to as the 'Fire Continent' (Komarek 1971) as a result of the widespread occurrence of biomass burning, particularly in the savanna biome. This description is equally applicable to southern Africa, where savanna is a major plant community, and the early Portuguese explorers who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in the fifteenth century recorded in their ships' logs that the interior of South Africa was 'Terra dos fumos'-the land of smoke and fire (Scott 1970). This capacity of Africa to support fire stems from the fact that climatic factors are the driving force of fire ecology, and the main requirement for fire to occur anywhere on earth is to have lightning as the primary ignition source and climatic conditions that will permit the burning of vegetation and the spread of fires caused by lightning strikes. Africa is one of the continents that is highly prone to lightning storms and has a fire climate comprising dry and wet periods during which fires can burn the plant fuels during the dry period that have been produced and accumulated during the wet rainy period (Komarek 1971).