"People think we all live in the bush with the wild animals. But no. This is how we live."

When we arrived at Kruger National Park, the game rangers were on strike. They were camped in tents by the main entrance calling for an increase in wages. They had been camped there for over 2 months. In that time, at least 100 rhinos were lost to poaching in the park. Most of the poachers sneak across from Mozambique and bring back horns to be shipped to China.

There was a particular line in the Park’s explanatory booklet that caught our attention. It said that while “some people were moved out of the area [in the creation of the park], the park is working hard to provide opportunities to local people and to contribute to local economies.” A young man who had been working in the park for several years told us that, while he has seen many wonderful animals there, he does not earn enough to sustain his family. 

 

When we were in India, we spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of parks. What does it mean to draw a boundary line to declare some land ‘protected’ from the people who might otherwise be living there? Partly we were thinking of this because it came up in the environment and development class Kacy was teaching, and because the struggle over land and resources has been a central aspect of her Geography studies. Also, we were thinking of this because of where we both come from. The uneasy relationship between the ranchers and the park service and the environmentalists in Point Reyes has been a part of both of our lives. 

In the US we often imagine wilderness to be utterly pristine. Emmerson, Muir, Thoreau, Leopold and Abbey have built for us a cathedral of the wild- a holy place to worship and preserve, but not to live in.  Except of course that the Yosemite Muir saw was not an untouched wilderness, it was the well-tended garden of the Miwok. They had been harvesting, pruning, and burning that land for centuries (see Tending the Wild by Kat Anderson).

 

 

While we were in India, our friend Nitin came to give a talk to the students about his research at a tiger preserve in southern India. He had found that the plants and animals in the preserve were actually better off when the indigenous tribal people were able to live within the park and manage the land- including practicing agriculture and controlled burns. He also recommended this wonderful article by Amitav Ghosh.

When we were hiking in the Pyrenees on our honeymoon, we were amazed to be standing on the highest, most remote peaks and suddenly hear the unmistakable tinkle of cowbells as a herd of cows and sheep came munching around the corner. And yet why not? Why shouldn’t people use that land? There must be a way to maintain the balance of a natural ecosystem and human occupation at the same time.

(The incredibly beautiful lilac-breasted roller flying away from a pile of elephant dung)

There is an article in the Brazilian Constitution that reads that all land should be used for its ‘social purpose’ – no unused (a sticky term to be sure) land should be off limits to people that could otherwise be used to make a livelihood. Of course, this does not apply to national parks, conservation areas and giant foreign-owned tracts of land throughout the country. One has only to mention the words mining and logging to understand that this article does little to resolve the struggles over land access and use (particularly as they relate to marginalized communities).

As we drove through Kruger National Park, we thought of all these things. We wondered about the history of land use and land rights in this country. Who had been living on or making use of this land before it was made into a park? Where are they now? Who is deriving economic and material benefit from the park as it exists today? 

The Kruger experience was in these ways fraught for us: both a first hand look at the problematic nature of reserves, conservations areas and parks (giving us time to reflect on conflicts over land rights, resources and ideas of conservation), and at the same time a beautiful and rare experience of incredible animals very different from a zoo or a nature program.

 

The animals. Driving down the road in this gigantic park we first came across giraffes poking their very strange heads out from behind the bushes. Around the next bend, there was a herd of white rhinos. Down the road a bit we saw wild dogs lazing about on the side of the road. In the next few days we saw both a lone male lion and a pride of at least 10 female lions tearing into a recent kill.  As we drove down the winding roads of the park in our little car, we had to stop for zebras, impala, elephants, wildebeest, and hyenas in the middle of the road.  On our last morning we watched as a giant bull elephant nearly trampled the tiny white car in front of us.  He was noshing on a tree by the side of the road and they tried to get around. He came running to the car with his tusks down. Needless to say, we stayed put and waited for him to move on.

From Kruger we drove back through the dry landscape of the northern part of the country to Johannesburg and flew down to Cape Town. We stayed for two nights in the township of Khyleshita with Vicky, her husband, and their six wonderful kids at their home and B&B.  Khyleshita is the newest and one of the largest townships that spread out from the edges of Cape Town. There are miles upon miles of tiny shacks made of corrugated metal clustered together in the sandy soil of the cape flats. There are also some small, well built houses in the townships, with indoor toilets and water supply. Everyone else uses communal outhouses and water taps. Vicky’s place is the only two storey shack in Khyleshita- it’s a hodge podge of used materials and uneven floors and a surprisingly comfortable space to live in. In our three days in the township, we were fed incredibly tasty meals, beaten roundly in card games with the kids, given lessons in the Xhosa language (the x is a click-so cool!), and generally welcomed into the family. We did not see another white face the entire time.

Our first morning in Khyleshita involved a visit to one of the many churches in the area (this one Catholic). We understood nothing of the sermon, which was in Xhosa, but the singing was unbelievable. I get shivers up my spine just thinking of it now. Everyone in the church joined along with the large choir. They even had special beanbag pillows to pound out a beat.

The woman who brought us to church asked us to come to the front after the sermon to introduce ourselves to everyone. There must have been 200 smiling black faces in front of us and, when we said that we came from the USA, everyone cheered wildly-it was amazing. We felt proud. Proud to have a black president. Proud not to have to feel so ashamed the history of where we are from. They love Barack Obama here. They also love Beyoncé, and Whitney Houston, and Rhianna. The kids at Vicky’s were excited to listen to our ipods, but were disappointed to discover that we didn’t have any ‘lil Wayne on them.  Apparently we are not as up to date on our African American pop stars as the children in the township are.

 

Everywhere we went in Khyleshita, people asked us if we were scared to be walking in the streets of South Africa. They worried that we had heard only about the violence and HIV. One out of every four people in South Africa is infected with HIV. The numbers are even higher in the townships. One of Vicky’s teenage daughters told us she hoped to grow up and become a doctor because she wanted to discover a cure for AIDS.  We told her that HIV is also a problem in the US. She was surprised. She had thought the disease was only a problem for Africans. We loved these kids; they were so lively and welcoming and provided a window into the everyday lives of young people in the densely populated townships on the outskirts of Cape Town.

We love South Africa. We are fascinated and confused by South Africa. We try to compare and contrast what we understand about race and the history of inequality around race and class in the US. We try to think about colonialism and indigenous peoples and revolutionary struggle and all that we have learned from our travels and from our home. In many ways this country feels the most familiar of anywhere we have been so far. The landscape, the language, the culture, even the problems here seem so familiar. And yet so very different too.