One of South Africa’s most scenic and sensitive natural areas in the Eastern Cape is dotted with illegal homesteads
Fiona Macleod
The government is planning a new national park on the Wild Coast of Pondoland, in the Eastern Cape, which is expected to end the illegal development of holiday homes by rich whites along the prized coastline.
If a proposal for a new Wild Coast National Park gets the go-ahead, it will succeed where the Heath special investigating unit failed in preventing hundreds of developers from bulldozing sand dunes, cutting down mangroves and other protected plants, and dumping sewage and waste into rivers and the sea.
Though the holiday homes are illegal, attempts to evict the owners – most of whom bought access to the pristine area from tribal authorities for a song – have so far proved fruitless.
But the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, which favours plans for a new national park put forward by the Wildlife and Environment Society of South Africa (Wessa), says if it has to resort to bulldozing the illegal homesteads, it will do so.
Minister Mohammed Valli Moosa’s special adviser, Didi Moyle, says the uncontrolled development of illegal structures is not only destroying the coastline, but is scaring away potential investors.
“If we don’t stop this, it’s going to happen all along the coast. Bulldozing the homesteads may end up being an option,” she says. The area earmarked for the park is one of the country’s most scenic and sensitive natural areas.
Unscrupulous developers have been taking advantage of the Heath unit’s failure in 1998 to evict almost 140 owners. Some estimates now put the number of illegal homesteads – a mixture of fishing shacks and sprawling mansions – as high as 800.
When the Heath unit threatened to evict the owners in 1998, 40 of them challenged its authority in court. The Umtata High Court ruled that the unit did not have the jurisdiction to evict them and that the regulations the unit used were vague.
Heath investigators say although the regulations have since been changed and the case passed on to the state attorney in Bisho, no action has been taken against the illegal owners since 1998 – and they are being joined by hundreds of others in what amounts to an illegal land-grab.
Most of the deals that have been concluded between local chiefs and the illegal homestead owners amount to little more than R20 rent a year, and hold no benefits for the communities living in the area.
Wessa proposes the homesteads, most of which have been built on river banks and within a 1km no-go zone on the beach, be redeveloped for tourists.
Wessa’s envisaged national park would cover about 30E000ha in Pondoland, stretching along the coastline from the border of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu- Natal down to Port St Johns in the south.
It would include core protected areas, surrounded by buffer zones where agriculture and forestry would be encouraged. Because Pondoland is scarcely populated, no people would be moved; the aim is to embrace and improve the rural livelihood of the Mpondo communities.
The Pondoland coastline is one of South Africa’s four biodiversity “hot-spots”, with the highest concentration of endemic trees in the country, a variety of rare species and some of the most scenically dramatic landscapes along the Wild Coast.
The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism says though the park could become a lead project in developing one of the country’s poorest provinces, it is concentrating at the moment on a smaller area than that envisaged by Wessa. The department is investigating turning Mkambati, a 7E720ha provincial reserve in the middle of Wessa’s proposed park, into a national reserve and extending it.
Keith Cooper, Wessa’s director of conservation who has been working in Pondoland for more than 20 years, says he is encouraged by the recent enthusiasm for his proposals, not least from the tribal authorities.
“I was summoned to the tribal court recently, where I made it clear I did not support the illegal homesteads,” he says. “The King of Pondoland, King m’Pondombini Sigcau, has since indicated that he too would rather have a national park.”