The white man's toys

Nicholas Luard

Natal For the two hours between 10 a.m. and midday the traffic of game to and from the main waterhole in the Umfolozi reserve is unbroken. Herds of zebra file through the trees, drink and trot away. Bands of slender impala dispute shore space with families of warthog. Nervous kudu bulls and elegant young nyala ram's spread their legs wide as they lower their heads to the surface. A white rhino strides forward, scattering the antelope before it, gulps noisily and vanishes. In the distance a lion, disturbed at rest, growls irritably. From the river beyond a fish eagle calls. On every side the immensity of the bush is grey-green and hazed with dust in the winter sun. This is primaeval Africa, the elemental landscape of Hemingway and Ruark, a million-years- old wilderness untouched by man. Here in the absence of human interference is the world as it was at the beginning, function- ing unchanged according to the rhythms and patterns of natural law.

Well, not quite. Before dusk the rhino, birth-dated and coded by a filigree of ear- clips, will have been darted by helicopter with a cocktail of morphine-based stupe- fiants, crate-loaded with an invoice in duplicate, and despatched by truck for `translocation' to another reserve hundreds of miles to the north. The irritable lion, a sub-adult male, is on computer tape. The computer, programmed to determine op-

timum predator-prey balances, has declared it a 'surplus feline unit'. Within the week the entry will have been erased from the tape and the lion from the bush. Six of the kudu, ten nyala and two dozen impala, cull- ed at night by spotlamp, will have suffered the same fate. Their skinned and quartered carcasses will be hanging in a refrigerated store-room awaiting collection by a local meat wholesaler. Meanwhile carefully- plotted transects of the bush itself will have been subjected to rotational firing to clear dead vegetation matter and allow the plant Equal Opportunities A-c4.111%," LJ 'Don't knock the Commission — I wouldn't have a job without them.' communities to regenerate. Once the Pro- cess would have been carried out by lightn- ing bolts from celestial storms. Now the task is entrusted to Swan Vestas. Like nostalgia the African wilderness isn't what it used to be. Although the visitor Is unaware of it, reserve management has become an increasingly sophisticated, highly contentious and yet essential weapon in the battle to save the pitiful remnants of the continent's wildlife. Nowhere Is management firepower laid down with greater accuracy, economy and effect than in the province of Natal.

On Christmas Day 1479 the Portugese ex- plorer, Vasco da Gama, sighted land. The coastal sands were white and shining. Behind them rich green vegetation lined the shore. The sun was warm, the air was sweet, all the omens were favourable. In honour of his Saviour's birthday da Gama named the land Natal. More than 500 years later Natal is still a benign, seductive place. The smallest of white South Africa's four pro- vinces, sloping down from the mountain fastnesses of the Drakensberg to the clam- my heat of the Indian Ocean's shoreline, it is a land of moor and trout stream, sugar cane and farm, deep-cut valley and gentle coastal plain. Its northern ranges encom- pass what zoological jargon terms an 'inter- face', in Natal's case the fusion line bet' ween the tropics and the sub-tropics. As 3 result the province provides a natural home for an extraordinary diverse array of birds and animals. To safeguard this wilderness resource and administer the various sanctuaries that had been set up on an ad hoc basis over the past half-century, in 1947 the provincial council created a semi-autonomous statutory bodY, the Natal Parks, Game and Fish Preserva- tion Board. Today, under its energetic and highly experienced director, John Geddes- Paul, the NPB controls 53 separate reserves occupying in total well over 500,000 acres or some 3.1 per cent of the province's sur- face area. Like many South African institu' tions the board's style and structure are military. Strategy is decided by the govern' ing body, the joint chiefs of staff, 11 citizens appointed by the council and drawn from all areas of Natal's life. Beneath them and under Geddes-Paul's direct command is an armed and uniformed force of 44, white officers and 2,650 blacks, a handfin of whom hold commissions too. To run this private army and the wildlife garrisons it defends Geddes-Paul has an annual budget of £10 million. Apart from the admin costs of HQ company the money is divided among the three battalions which make uP, his brigade: conservation, recreation and interpretation. Almost half of all NPB's funds are allocated to the first. The wardens, ranges and scouts of conservation are Geddes" Paul's elite combat troops, the 2 Para af, the bush. They come — and they are proud to come — crisp from the pages of BoY s Own Paper. They are lean, muscular men with bone-crushing handshakes, flint-grey eyes that can stare down a charging

elephant, and the skills to repair a broken axle with spittle and string or drop a wounded leopard at a hundred paces with a casual shot from the hip. As such they con- form to a tradition stretching back more than a hundred years to the heroic figures of Africa's hunting past, men like William Cotton Oswell, Matabele Wilson and F. C. Selous.

In Natal, as virtually everywhere in Africa, the designated wilderness areas have until recently suffered the impact and abuse of European man as trekker, settler and farmer. Before the gutted landscape can be conserved it has to be restored. Out of necessity the NPB has become the Colefax & Fowler of the wild.

In place of Wren's designs or llawksmoor's working drawings, the board consults Bushman rock art, Zulu oral tradi- tion and the leather-bound reminiscences of early hunters. At Umfolozi, for instance, the showpiece of the province's conserva- tion programme, giraffe may not have been recorded within living memory. Yet a hunter-gatherer's cave painting may show the animal in faded ochre silhouette near the junction of the reserve's two rivers. An ancient Zulu nduna, a tribal headman, may remember his grandfather saying that 'he who looks over trees' came down to the banks to drink. Perhaps the melancholy Tom Baines, Livingstone's unjustly accused companion, will have noted the giraffe's presence in the area in his Shifts and Expe- dients of Camp Life. The evidence will be gathered, sifted and examined. If the board decides the balance of proof comes down in the giraffe's favour, the species will be re- introduced. Like a section of Tudor panelling wantonly removed by some vulgar Vic- torian refurbisher, the giraffe will be returned to Umfolozi's library.

Reintroduction is only one aspect of the Wilderness restorer's work. More important is the stripping of the paint so the building's woodwork can live and breathe. When the first settlers reached the Cape they found one of the planet's six floral kingdoms, a vegetation of such richness and diversity it has the same botanical status as the great boreal kingdom that covers North America and most of Europe and Asia. Table Moun- tain alone supports over 14,000 different flowering plants and ferns. Unimpressed, the settlers immediately set about 'improv- ing' the landscape by importing plants from their native countries. The first successfully established exotics, or 'aliens' in the now Preferred term, are recorded as early as 1680. By the mid-19th century plant in- troduction had become an obsession. One of its most passionate enthusiasts was the German colonist, Baron Karl von Ludwig. Writing to Kew requesting seeds von Lud- wig declared to the curator: 'My chief ob- ject in life is to introduce into this colony exotics from all quarters as well ornamental as useful.' He alone is credited with establishing 1,600 foreign species: gum trees from Australia for timber, American cactus and bramble for hedging, oleander, bougainvillaea and water hyacinth, even

cannabis. The plants came from all over the world. Their catalogue is almost endless.

Gardening is traditionally among the most peaceful and harmless of all man's pursuits. In South Africa its effects have been catastrophic. Vigorous, hardy, resis- tant to the diseases which regulate the in- digenous species, the invading aliens have erupted from farms and gardens across the landscape. Habitats have been changed, often irreversibly. Rivers have been choked and their courses redirected. Pasture has been degraded and then made sterile, the palatable native grasses finding themselves unable to compete with the foreigners.

Many of the newcomers contain toxins lethal both to domestic stock and the wilderness herbivores. Even where the local vegetation has managed to accommodate them, the death toll in mammalian life has been horrifying. South Africa now has to feed a human population of 25 million. The aliens have come to rank equally with drought and erosion as the three principal threats to achieving this.

I n the reserves the hazard of the

`beautiful but dangerous' (the slogan under which the government tries to educate the public about the alien menace) is tackled by a variety of techniques ranging from selective spraying to machete clearance. All are labour-intensive, all are costly. Within their resources — handsome by most standards, meagre in relation to the problems they face — the best Geddes- Paul's garrisons can do is conduct a limited holding operation. 'We can also pray,' a burly ranger, not at first sight one of nature's instinctive Godfearers, remarks to me as we walk together through the early-morning bush, 'pray that one day our two rivers don't burst their banks, deposit 10 million floating syringa seeds in the plains on either side, and then retreat. If that happens we'll wake up a few years later to find we're living in a lilac plantation. It'll

'We're getting more flak than the PLO.' be very pretty, very dark and very lonely. The birds and animals will have gone. There'll be nothing left but us human chickens.' He grins. Then he spots something in the undergrowth, frowns and kneels down. A 'moment afterwards the blade of his hunting knife is gouging out the earth between the roots of an acacia bush. The Gardens of Eden not only need restocking. Today they have to be weeded.

Contemporary management practices population culling, translocation, transect burning, alien control — may seem to the outsider the most innocuous and uncon- troversial of activities. Far from it. A strong and vocal lobby not merely condemns but actively campaigns against them. 'Tamper- ing' with the wilderness is an affront to God, motherhood, the Dutch Reformed Church, the value of the rand on the world's money markets, and a whole host of other human or divine concerns.

Not all the criticism is quite as fundamen- talist in nature. Within the board itself a few voices, accepting unhesitatingly the broad principles of conservation, are starting to question the intensity of their ap- plication. So successful have modern techniques become in curing the wild's ills that they are in danger of creating a penicillin effect. Increased usage means in- creased tolerance. Increased tolerance re- quires larger and larger dosages. Finally im- munity is reached and a new antibiotic is needed. In the wilderness as in medicine the cycle demands ever more sophisticated con- trol systems, ever greater investments in manpower and technology. Somehow the reserves must find their own equilibria. For the future the guiding philosophy must be: less not more.

One of the most sensitive and fiercely debated issues facing any reserve manager is the question of visitors. The wildlife parks of Natal belong to its citizens. Like any common resource they are surely entitled to use and enjoy them at their will. How does one reconcile that right with the diametrically opposed requirement of a wilderness — that by definition there should be no human presence? In Natal the problem has been solved, and solved brilliantly, by a combination of zoning and Geddes-Paul's 'theatre policy'. Zoning has designated a number of reserves as recrea- tion areas. In these, under the administra- tion of the board's second battalion, wildlife takes second place to camping, riding, fishing, surfing and the various other outdoor pursuits of the voortrekkers' heirs. With 10,000 camp sites and 1,500 beds in roofed lodges (a year-round oc- cupancy rate of over 75 per cent testifies to their enormous popularity), these 'wench and booze stockades', as the recreation wardens refer to them, absorb the human pressure that would otherwise bear down on the province's key sanctuaries. There Geddes-Paul can operate his theatre policy, the box-office option. Each wilderness auditorium is allocated a fixed number of stall, dress circle and gallery 'seats' — in tehzed camps, at viewing hides or on

escorted day tours. When the seats are filled the box-office is closed. The scheme in- evitably involves arbitrary and subjective decisions, but it has won widespread public acceptance. Bookings are often made, and have to be made, many months in advance. It is the price one has to pay for attending the longest-running show on earth.

Quite how long those performances will continue in Natal has suddenly become a matter of doubt. The South African government's 'constellation of interdepen- dent sovereign states' policy requires shuffl- ing and redealing its lands like a pack of cards. Natal has the unenviable distinction of having been declared trumps. Interpreta- tion, third of Geddes-Paul's battalions, was raised originally to explain conservation to the board's visitors — white visitors. Now it has a more urgent and demanding combat objective: to win the hearts and minds of the blacks who encircle the reserves, have long regarded them as the white man's toys, and can at last see the day when their pro- tein larders will fall under black control. In its efforts to safeguard the wilderness's future, time is not on interpretation's side. My last night in the province was spent at Ndumu, a bird and game paradise on Natal's border with Mozambique. I went to bed in South Africa. Next morning I woke in another country. During the hours of darkness Ndumu had been transferred lock, stock and lilac-breasted roller to Swaziland. A plot in Eden's garden had ac- quired a new sovereign steward.