Fiona Macleod
Oupa “Birdman” Mkhabela usually takes a month to finish one of his giant, surrealistic bird carvings.
First he hacks huge pieces of wood from the marula trees around the Hazyview railway station, near the Kruger National Park.
The tortured limbs of the once stately trees bear testimony to his craft – some of the trees manage to survive, but many do not.
He takes about three weeks to carve each bird, using such basic implements as an axe, hammer and chisel. Then comes the hard part: arranging transport to Johannesburg, where he sells the carvings for about R1 600 apiece.
When a truck arrived at his carving site and dropped off 10 huge marula logs this week, it was like manna from heaven.
“This is a good present. It will save me time, and make my life easier,” he smiled.
The logs – 26 tons of wood – were trucked about 450km from the Limpopo River area in the far north.
The consignment took eight months to arrive at Mkhabela’s carving lot, but the process of getting them there saw various NGOs, government officials and the private sector working together on an ambitious pilot project to improve the lives of ordinary people in the country’s poorest province.
When De Beers sited a new diamond mine at The Oaks near Swartwater in the Northern Province last year, it had to clear 16ha of vegetation for the mine’s waste dumps.
“There were about 30 beautiful old marula trees,” says Mark Berry, De Beers’s group ecologist. “We called in local labour with hand saws, and they spent three months cutting the trees into huge logs.”
Berry says De Beers tries to put the cleared vegetation on its mining sites to good use, usually giving it to communities for firewood. A few trees cleared from its Venetia mine five years ago were given to woodcarvers in Venda.
“We decided it would be a good idea to give the marula logs cleared from The Oaks to the woodcarvers near the Kruger Park. But we had not undertaken a project like this on such a mammoth scale before.”
So the networking began. Berry contacted Laura Yeatman, who deals with woodcarvers in the Kruger area as part of a community forestry project run by Danced, a Danish aid and development agency, in co-operation with the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.
The two roped in private forestry company Mondi, which transported the logs from The Oaks to Hazyview railway station, and the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s Working for Water programme, which distributed the logs from the station to the carvers at various carving lots inside and outside the Kruger Park.
Yeatman says although the carvers are not the greatest threat to indigenous trees in the Kruger area, they consume the equivalent of 22 households worth of wood each year. They are not allowed to harvest wood in the park, but outside it they are leaving a trail of destruction.
Marula is a popular wood among the carvers because it’s pliable, has a pleasant pink colour and is fairly common. But it’s also prized for its medicinal uses treating malaria, fevers and stomach ailments and the fruit, when fermented, makes a popular, potent brew. The kernels of the fruit are ground up and used as condiments.
“For these reasons it’s usually the last tree to be cut. The carver who kills a marula can become a very unpopular person in a community,” says Yeatman.
For her the project is not just about helping people like Mkhabela, but about changing attitudes to natural resources and their management.
“Danced aims to promote the planting and propagation of trees, but trees take years to establish themselves while people’s needs are immediate.
“Wood from development sites helps meet the demand for wood while the newly planted trees are growing.”
The carvers involved in the project are encouraged to envisage their future without trees, and to take preventative steps. Already one group of carvers, called the Skukuza Alliance, has set aside a plot of land where they plan to plant their own indigenous grove.
Berry says if the project helps to relieve pressures on indigenous woodlands, it will have achieved its main purpose and will set a precedent for future co-operation on similar projects.
Mkhabela, meanwhile, is getting to grips with his next giant sculpture: part of the deal is that each group of carvers who received logs from The Oaks’s marulas will produce two special carvings. These will be exhibited and sold at an exhibition in a few months’ time.