Pretoria - In December, an illustrious career spanning 40 years formally comes to an end for Albert Machaba, the first black person to hold the post of regional ranger in the Kruger National Park (KNP).
Machaba turns 65 at the end of this year and will have to retire in line with the country’s labour regulations.
Machaba joined the Department of Environmental Affairs (DEA) in 1975 as a junior conservator, after graduating from Mangosuthu Technical College in KZN, with a diploma in nature conservation.
During his time as a conservator with DEA, he worked mostly in communities, and his duties included arresting villagers who indulged in subsistence poaching.
In 1996 he applied for the advertised position of regional ranger in KNP. He got the job, and in 1997 started working at Punda Maria in northern KNP as regional ranger, becoming the first black person to hold such a senior position in the world-renowned park.
In 1998, he was transferred to Satara in the central part of the park, where he worked until 2005. He then asked to be transferred to the north so that he could be nearer home since he comes from Thohoyandou.
Recalling his early days working in the park, Machaba said at the time senior positions were held almost exclusively by whites, and that being the first black person to hold the position of regional ranger in the KNP came with a lot of challenges. He said there was a lot of resistance to his authority by white rangers, most of whom openly undermined him.
“Some of the white rangers just felt they could not report to a black man, so instead of reporting to me, they would report to white regional rangers who headed other sections which they were not even working under,” Machaba said.
He said he was fortunate in that the first black director of KNP, David Mabunda, understood his situation, and gave him much-needed support. In spite of this, some junior rangers continued to resist Machaba’s authority.
He said the errant rangers were also very unhappy when he occupied a big house formerly occupied by the former regional ranger who was white.
Machaba said when he took over the reins as regional ranger for the northern part of KNP, he realised that there were a lot of injustices against black people, and he was determined to correct things regardless of the resistance by most of the white rangers.
“For example, white rangers could drive out of the park at any time to go for sporting activities, and come back at night, yet blacks were denied this privilege well after the advent of the democratic dispensation,” he said.
He said he also realised that black cleaners employed by the park were being asked to go and clean white rangers’ houses during their lunch time, for no extra payment. He stopped the practice immediately on discovering it, and this made him even more unpopular.
He also established soccer and netball teams so that black workers could have some form of recreation. “Lack of recreational activities had led to sexual immorality among black employees,” he said.
Machaba said resistance to change was so widespread across the KNP that a political solution became necessary as the majority of the rangers were white and most of them so young that they would remain under the park’s employ for decades. As a result, it was decided that all positions be made redundant, and everyone had to apply for the newly advertised posts under Operation Prevail.
“This was the only way blacks could also get into rangers’ positions, because prior to the democratic dispensation, the only positions that blacks occupied were those of cleaners and labourers,” he said.
So those who could not get jobs under the new dispensation were given packages and had to leave.
Machaba said once he had settled into his position, he began to push for the advancement of women, who at the time could not advance past the position of field ranger. He said he approached the director with the idea, but twice it was turned down.
Eventually, after doing some research on the subject and giving examples of what was happening in other countries such as the US, his idea finally triumphed. He then became the first regional ranger to appoint women as section rangers.
“I realised there were some female field rangers who were even more capable than their male counterparts, but they were being overlooked for promotion simply because they were women,” he said.
“I therefore appointed Tinyiko Golele to head Punda Maria section, and Sandra Visagie to head Pafuri section, and I must say I have never regretted (it),” he said.
He said the two were doing a very good job in their sections and he was extremely proud of them.
Some colleagues actually refer to them as iron ladies as they have brought many poachers to book.
Visagie was thrown at the deep end, and heads a section which shares borders with Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Many poachers have been arrested under her watch.
“We work very closely with the police, and together we have been able to arrest poachers trying to smuggle elephant tusks through the Pafuri border post,” she said.
She said poachers from the two neighbouring countries were a menace, especially this time of the year when the Limpopo river was almost dry and poachers crossed into the nature reserve easily without having to fear crocodiles or hippos.
Visagie said at the end of May, they arrested two Zimbabwean poachers who had snared a lion.
Golele, the first black woman to become section ranger in KNP, said when she was appointed to this position to head Punda Maria section, she heard that poachers in communities neighbouring the park celebrated, because they believed life was going to be easy for them.
She said on assuming her new duties, she immediately introduced new measures, including the unpopular random stop-and-search operations. She said although genuine tourists were inconvenienced in the process, they understood the necessity of such a measure in the interest of combating poaching. She said she also got support for the operation from her boss, Machaba.
“Within my first two months on the job, my team had accounted for two Mozambicans with two elephant tusks, and three months later we arrested members of a rhino poaching gang and seized three firearms in the process.”
She said the tusks had been brought from outside the park, and were being smuggled into Mozambique via Punda Maria and through Pafuri border post.
Machaba said while significant strides had been made in terms of employing black rangers and promoting them into senior positions, much still needed to be done to attract more black visitors to the park.
He said currently, blacks constituted only 29 percent of visitors to KNP, and the majority of them were day visitors, with very few staying overnight.
He said this was a hangover from the apartheid era when blacks were not allowed to visit the park.
Most black people were interested in visiting coastal areas, especially Durban, he said.
Although Machaba’s career has been full of challenges, he says he will leave SanParks with a high sense of achievement, having trained scores of rangers, helped account for a significant number of poachers, and having initiated the employment of women as field rangers and ultimately their promotion to section rangers.
Pretoria News