В юбилейный год национального парка Крюгера подписано соглашение о компенсации земель, изъятых у местных сообществ

Percy Fitzpatrick’s tale Jock of the Bushveld harks back to a time of being one with nature, in tune to its fine nuances, such as a dung beetle, a rustle in the tall grass or the sudden silence of the bush at the start of the long-awaited rain. “It was past noon that day when everything grew still; the birds and insects hushed their sound; the dry leaves did not give a whisper. There was the warning in the air that one knows but cannot explain.” Is the bush deeply embedded within our DNA, the need to leave behind the hassle and hustle of city life to find ourselves, like Fitzpatrick and his dog, Jock? While many, including Paul Kruger, saw wildlife as biltong or a rack of ribs on the braai and thus wanted the Kruger National Park to remain available to them, the conservationists won over the Volksraad in the 1890s. Local communities were mercilessly dispossessed of their land in this battle and relocated to inferior grazing land, even into the 1960s. In this centenary year of the park, the beneficiation scheme framework agreement, a document 10 years in the making, aims to redress this dispossession. It is a huge task as about 2-million hectares of land claims in the park have been registered. The redress involves several benefits: a SANParks-Sanlam SMME fund, providing non-interest-bearing loans of up to R1m to small businesses that would not otherwise have access to such loans; training and skills transfer; bursary funding; and marketing access. This means SANParks acts as guarantor of businesses, the purchase order acting as security. And buying products from local entrepreneurs for use in national parks’ restaurants and shops. At the signing ceremony with local community leaders in Skukuza at the end of May, the SABC interviewed several beneficiaries. One entrepreneur, Ratang, said she has a tea manufacturing business in nearby Sekhukhuneland. She launched her teas at the ceremony. “We have a range of teas that represent our heritage and our culture,” she said, adding that it “signifies the inclusion of small businesses and assists us to create jobs and build the rural economy”. Another entrepreneur, Reuben, who has a game and beef biltong business, said, “We source game meat from land that has been claimed by black communities, so when communities claim land, we go, we offer them off-take agreements, we buy the game and cull them, and then we process the game meat into a finished product. We try and bring value to communities who have claimed land for restitution.” Most believe it was Kruger who pushed for the park but it was in fact Volksraad member Richard Loveday who finally got permission to establish two game reserves — the Sabie in 1898 and Shingwedzi in 1903 — after persistent cajoling over several years, according to Jane Carruthers in The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History. Kruger’s name was officially given to the park in 1926, in a surge of Afrikaner nationalist and Voortrekker fervour, with some saying it was “Paul Kruger’s dream … it was a national duty to preserve the landscape of the park ‘just as the Voortrekkers saw it’”, writes Carruthers. In 1902 James Stevenson-Hamilton, a Scottish soldier and explorer, was appointed as the first warden, assisted by several black and white rangers. He brought energy and vision to the park, and by 1926 it was transformed into a national park. He was to shape the park until his retirement in 1946. When he took control, wildlife had largely been hunted out, with malaria and tsetse fly causing major problems for cattle farmers. Carruthers writes that “by the mid-1890s wildlife diminution was so apparent that the possibility of the extinction of all game in the Transvaal became of real concern”. The first visitors entered the park in 1927 (only three vehicles that year, apparently). Early photos reveal them parking in the bush and pulling out their picnic blankets and baskets. Without roads and rules, visitors camped where they wished. I recently spent four days in Kruger Park to celebrate a friend’s 70th birthday. Our party of 30 people had about 19,500km² to explore, with 3-million to 5-million animals, according to SANParks CEO Hapiloe Sello. In just a small area I saw plenty of elephants, two unhappy-looking lions, blue wildebeest, giraffes, warthogs, kudus, zebras and impalas and had a rare sighting of a genet. Others in our group saw a hyena with cubs, a lion with cubs, a buffalo herd and a cheetah devouring an impala. Plenty of hunting and gathering. Lekker. We stayed at Pretoriuskop camp, and it delivered the goods. Our rondavel was rudimentary but adequate, with a young baobab growing in the grounds and a maroela tree keeping it company. Two bat houses on tall poles completed the picture. Pretoriuskop has a great pool, with natural rock cascading down into the water, just across the grass from our half-moon row of rondavels. Among the usual offerings, it has a beautifully restored transport wagon, in a nod to times past. Tales around the braai-side included the one back in the army in the early 1980s, when troopies slept on the floor in their browns, as they had ironed their bedclothes so they were spotless for inspection the next day, while their overalls were sprayed and hung up, a trick to make them look ironed the next day. As the embers dimmed, we took an ultraviolet light to a large, fallen trunk and shone it in the cracks. Scorpions, the Transvaal thick-tailed scorpion, I later learnt, glowed brilliantly in the light. Magic. On the road, we were stopped dead by a matriarch about half a kilometre ahead. She was clearly agitated, throwing up her trunk and widening her ears. It was soon apparent why: she was shepherding her large herd of all sizes across the road. This took about an hour, with her dashing towards the row of cars occasionally, forcing us to reverse several times. Drama. Further along we had more evidence of the caring character of elephants. Under a large tree the adults were standing patiently, with several calves lying resting in the grass. On the last morning, we woke to cold, grey skies. Rain was in the air. We packed the vehicles, satisfied that we had got in touch with our ancient DNA. Fitzpatrick’s rain was mighty after a prolonged drought: “The first puffs of dust, where drops struck like bullets; the cloud that rose to meet them; the drops themselves that streaked slanting down like a flight of steel ramrods; the dust dissolved in a dado of splash. I had seen the yellow-brown ground change colour; in a few seconds it was damp, then mud, then all asheen.” Business Day