PARKS: THEIR ORIGINS AND INFLUENCES
4.3. THE COLONIAL CONCEPTUALISATION OF THE PEOPLE AND PARK RELATIONSHIP RELATIONSHIP
4.3.2. The national park model
Smith, 1988; Powell, 1998). Indigenous hard wood timber from the Afromontane forests of the southern Cape was favoured by the settlers for building carts and wagons. Wood was also used for gun carriages, shafts of assegais and spears, the handles of axes, the stocks of muskets and rifles, and for knobkerries. The value of wood for military purposes was so great that the British Royal Navy established a naval forest reserve in the Knysna region in 1807 (Brown, 1887, in McCracken, 2004).
Protective legislation introduced throughout the 1800’s up until the 1920’s was based on the need to ensure that the railway, mining and shipbuilding industries, which were critical for colonial advancement, would have sufficient timber in the future (van der Merwe, 2002;
McCracken, 2004). However accounts by van der Merwe (2002), McCracken (2004) and Seydack and Vermeulen (2004), reflect the difficulty in applying protective legislation. The exploitation of forest resources during the Millwood gold rush is an example of the demand placed on timber resources for development. McCracken (2004) writes that it was only in the early 1920’s that the idea of setting indigenous forests aside as forest reserves to preserve them as a national heritage emerged. The shift away from indigenous wood as an economic timber crop in favour of exotic plantation timber and imported timber, due to the stripping of indigenous forests and also the decline in wagon building, assisted in the shift towards a conservation-orientated paradigm (after Neumann, 1995b).
The preservation of nature through the establishment of a national park is a model that is based on “the notion that ‘nature’ can be ‘preserved’ from the effects of human agency by legislatively creating a bounded space for nature controlled by a centralised bureaucratic authority” (Neumann, 1998:9). The aim of such a park, as Ghimire (1994:198) notes, is to
“preserve scenic beauty and natural wonders, and to meet the educational and recreational needs of the population”. National parks therefore were preserved in the interests of the nation.
The establishment of England’s extensive private parks was not the only model available to the colonial authorities for selection for application to African parks (Neumann, 1996). South Africa was engaged in significant discussions with American national parks and wildlife preservation groups in the 1930’s (MacKenzie, 1988) and as such national park model in the United States which played a significant role in shaping the establishment of national parks in southern Africa. As MacKenzie (1988:263) writes:
“Just as southern Africa was used as a model, not always an appropriate one, for the rest of Africa in prognostications about game decline and the need for legislation and reserve provision, so was North America used as a model for the development of national parks. To a large extent, the very different conditions of Africa…were all overridden in favour of a concept which seemed to represent a North American success story, an example of what conscience could do to redress the destructiveness of America’s nineteenth-century frontier and make her flora and fauna available to a population”.
Ghimire (1994) and Neumann (1998) both locate the origin of the national park concept in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century, and most notably with the establishment of the Yellowstone National Park in 1872. The Yellowstone National Park was the first model of how nature-society relations, as imagined by British imperialists, could be formalised. The term ‘national park’, which was coined by the American George Catlin (Nash, 1982 in Neumann, 1998; Neumann, 1998; Ramutsindela, 2004), has become commonplace and refers to the management of natural resources within a bounded space in by a centralised authority owing to its national significance (after Ghimire, 1994 and Neumann, 1998). It is therefore instructive to consider the origins of the term before considering the early conservation paradigms in colonial Africa.
Powell (1998) with reference to the IUCN (1992) refers to the national park concept as a
‘protected areas approach’ and states that a key feature of this concept or model is that exclusive, ecologically defined nature zones are designated. However, this model emphasised
the consumptive focus of national parks. Ghimire writes (1994:198) that the United States national park model became the “initial impetus for the establishment of national parks in developing countries”. With respect to many African and Asian countries, “parks were originally established to protect larger animals…which were valued by Europeans and North Americans for safari viewing and hunting” (Ghimire, 1994:198). Therefore with these aims in mind, when it became time to propose an approach for the preservation of game in the colonies, the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) in Britain suggested the national park model as the most appropriate model (Neumann, 1996).
In South Africa, although game reserves and other natural areas had been set aside before this (MacKenzie, 1988; Ramutsindela, 2004), the first national park was established in 1926 with the passing of the National Parks Act (Act 46 of 1926) by the Nationalist government (Bulpin, 1983; Pinnock, 2005). In 1927 the reserve was opened to the public for tourism. However this was not the initial vision of the reserve. The first warden appointed to manage the Sabie Reserve9 in 1902, Colonel James Stevenson-Hamilton, was given a brief by the Volksraad10 to manage the reserve with a view to “build[ing] up a future hunting reserve” (Pinnock, 2005:121). To this end, Pinnock (2005:119) writes that it was under Stevenson-Hamilton’s
“steady hand that the future relationship between humans and the wilderness in southern Africa was to be hammered out”. The nature-society dualism prevailed in the management of the Reserve, because the warden worked to curb the activities of hunters and also the “removal of all human inhabitants from the new reserve” (Pinnock, 2005:119). Bulpin (1983:691) similarly encapsulates this dualism when he writes that the “park was to be a sanctuary for all living things except man, who would alone be controlled”. Stevenson-Hamilton’s change in attitude towards wildlife made the notion of a national park a plausible option. Rather than seeing the preservation of fauna in a reserve for the express purpose of hunting, Stevenson-Hamilton wanted to establish a reserve where wildlife could be preserved for all to enjoy. The ideal of a national park, which was to be held in trust in perpetuity, provided the model for him to realise his goals (Pinnock, 2005). Since its establishment in 1926, nineteen other national parks have been established in South Africa (Ramutsindela, 2004).
9 The Sabie Game Reserve was established in 1895 and was later amalgamated with surrounding veld to create the larger Kruger National Park in 1926 (Wolhuter, 1965; Bulpin, 1983; Pinnock, 2005).
10 Dutch and Afrikaans term for the legislative assemblies of the Transvaal and Orange Free State republics.
In the context of the case study area of the southern Cape forests, the application of the preservationist ideology to the management of Crown forest in order to protect them resulted in the fencing off of forests, and the regulation of access to and use of land and natural resources through a system of permits and licenses. In her novel The Mulberry Forest Dalene Matthee writes about extreme regulation of Crown land (1990:4):
“Crown land. Crown forest. Crown everything. Every blessed forest warder’s first and last defence. Everything belonged to the Crown: blue buck, bush-buck, bush-pigs, elephants, footpaths, sled-paths, the wagon-road at Deep Walls [Diepwalle]. Every tree in the forest was the Crown’s tree and before you could fell it, the Crown’s licence had to be in your pocket. Before you could lift your gun to shoot a bigfoot, an elephant, Crown’s permission had to be in your pocket as well, for if they caught you without it, it was off to the village with you to pay up or to be thrown in the Crown’s jail”.
Under the first Forest Act in the Cape colony in 1888, the Crown forests were demarcated and became inalienable. Prior to this act being passed, however, Crown forests were already regarded as the property of the Cape Government. In 1886 government officials tried to order prospectors at Millwood to leave, as they were deemed to be trespassers (van der Merwe, 2002). Hunting laws were also introduced with a view to preserving game for white hunters.
Certain animals were classified as royal game, which meant that “they could be shot under a special license, and the horns, hides, and skins…were subjected to a 20 per cent export duty”
(MacKenzie, 1988:204). For example in 1908, the government at the Cape proclaimed the elephants in Knysna as royal game (van der Merwe, 2002). The preservation of wilderness through such measures ensured the imperial inheritance of wildlife, just as regulations concerning timber harvesting in the southern Cape forests were initially designed with the intention of preserving timber to ensure the sustainability of future supplies.