Gerald L’Ange
Never mind Nkandla – there’s a far bigger scandal developing on Jacob Zuma’s turf and that is the iniquitous plan to develop an open-cast coal mine on the very border of the iMfolozi game Reserve. Not just on its boundary, but on the verge of its even more precious wilderness area.
If this shameful scheme goes ahead it will be fatal to the wilderness area and hugely damaging to the larger reserves.
The very proposal is a travesty of the fundamental principle of nature reserves and, in particular, the wilderness concept. It is an affront not only to the people of KwaZulu-Natal but to the whole nation. If it goes ahead it will be nothing less than a crime, a felony that can never be excused or reversed or requited.
Compared to the iMfolozi scheme the Nkandla affair is small potatoes. Sure, it has been shown to be at least an unconscionable use of public funds for personal gain at the highest level.
But, for all the ballyhoo that Nkandla has aroused it is essentially a passing thing that will leave a dent in Jacob Zuma’s image and perhaps also in that of the ANC.
Its effects will be relatively minor and even, if recompensed, will be quite soon forgotten.
But the destruction of the iMfolozi wilderness would be an irrecoverable loss to South Africa, for wilderness is vital in human life more than is generally realised.
And you can’t just make another wilderness; only nature can create wilderness and it takes aeons. There’s no such thing as a new wilderness.
The identification and preservation of the iMfolozi wilderness was due mainly to that remarkable man Ian Player. He did more than anyone else I know of to develop the concept of wilderness areas not only in South Africa but elsewhere.
He recognised wilderness as a precious but endangered heritage, an invaluable repository of natural life and habitat from which humankind could draw knowledge, understanding and healing, and find salvation from the madness and self-destruction that technology and “development” are exponentially inflicting upon our Earth.
I got to know Player quite well while I was working as a journalist in Durban and later in New York during his visits there.
From him I learnt the truth that the real world is not the one that is being concreted over, industrialised, mined, poisoned, plasticised, digitally accelerated and blindly sped towards an uninhabitable condition.
The real world is the wilderness. It is in and from the wilderness that we can learn the truth about our planet, about what it is, how it functions. Humans will always need wilderness areas to remind them of their vulnerability on Earth and how life should be lived on it.
iMfolozi was the inspiration of Player’s wilderness concept, the seed from which it grew and spread across the world. It is in a sense a living monument to South Africa’s greatest conservationist, one of our greatest social visionaries.
Now some nameless – and evidently shameless – “developers” want to proceed with a scheme that would ruin this treasure.
Why? Well, obviously for some petty profit for themselves.
But why exploit this particular coal deposit? There are others elsewhere. True, any open-cast coal mine inevitably ruins its neighbourhood.
But no other coal deposit is alongside anything as singular and precious and irreplaceable as the iMfolozi wilderness.
If this shameful plan goes ahead it will be an act of monstrous criminality for which succeeding generations will suffer beyond what can now be measured.
It should not, must not, be allowed to happen.
l L’Ange is a former journalist. He is also the author of The White Africans: from Colonisation to Liberation