In 1969, the South African government forcibly removed the Makuleke people from their ancestral land in the Pafuri region to make way for the expansion of the Kruger National Park.
The Makuleke had lived for more than a century in a well-watered country near the Limpopo river. Their staple food was mabele and millet, which unlike maize, one could get at least a bag or so even in a bad harvest year. They had plenty of water, wild fruit, guinea-fowl, buck and river fish.
This was until they were uprooted to an arid, reclaimed game reserve, where only mopane worms flourish, where they learned to eat the worms.
They were not politely asked to move either. Government demolisher vehicles came while the men were away working in the cities and the women struggled to build houses during the harsh winter months with no poles or grass to even build makeshift shelters.
The winter months passed into spring and into rainy summer. They ploughed their gardens but the harvest from the arid soil was nil. In the second year, rain drowned the young crops and the third year heat scorched the crops so badly they could be set on fire.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, “For four successive years there was nothing to reap. Death ravaged the settlement. In the fifth year there was some promise of a good year. But wild beasts, especially buffaloes, baboons, monkeys and buck, as well as hares, caused complete destruction. Those who set traps to catch them were jailed for five years and more. They were told they should have reported and asked the white Bantu commissioners to go and shoot these beasts. The beasts ravage at night and the white commissioners are hundreds of kilometres away!”
At nearby Sibasa, people had been resettled in the “wrong” place and within a year they had to be removed again. Upon removal, grass for thatch was hard to get and reclaiming the old thatch broke the grass and meant a leaky roof. When journalists came, the women sat in front of their half-thatched huts with no fire, no shelter for their pit latrines and no privacy whatsoever.
Women and children had to walk as far as six kilometres for water, balancing 20 to 25 litres on their heads and carrying in their hands litres to drink along the way. Irrigation dams were restricted for watering government cash crops.
One community demonstrator organised women and old men to dig out the dry bed of a stream to reserve water when the rain came. After two rainy months the water was full in the dam. Then came the dry season, women were allowed to climb up the dam wall and then down to the water, but the dam was black with tadpoles. They had no choice but to carry the tadpoles along and strain the water before drinking.
All of this hardship was unleashed upon natives under the guise of “nature conservation”. People who had lived sustainably with their environment for generations, who knew how to weather bad harvests and draw abundance from their rivers, were seen as obstacles to “preserving” nature and uprooted to a landscape that offered nothing but worms and poverty.
Today, that same land is celebrated as the Makuleke Contractual Park, a “biodiversity hotspot” with walking safaris. The tourists are never told that the ecological richness that they fly across the world to admire was paid for with the humiliation of the people who once called it home.