EMSIE FERREIRA, Cape Town | Sunday
IF you walk far enough up Table Mountain these days you will hear the noise of chainsaws and falling trees and see sweaty yellow-shirted armies toppling the old pines and bluegums that well-meaning settlers planted for shade and wood.
Time has shown the trees to be a menace – they drink rivers dry and drive out the plants that belong here – and President Thabo Mbeki himself has declared that they must go.
His government’s war on 198 invading species from the Americas, Europe and Australia is most intense in Cape Town because here the tindery trees feed the fires that blaze around the city every summer.
In January last year the worst wildfires in memory burned through more than 8_000 hectares of mountainside and veld in six days, destroying mansions and poor men’s shacks alike.
In the aftermath a campaign called Ukuvuku – the Xhosa word for wake-up – was born with a grant of R70m ($8.9m) from public and private sources and the mandate to bring the Cape’s alien problem under control by 2004.
A workforce of hackers was not hard to find in a country with an unemployment rate exceeding 30%.
On a sweltering weekday on a slope running to the sea below Chapman’s Peak, 15 formerly jobless men and women from the fishing village across the bay are at work with cutters and bottles of blue poison.
It is near impossible to pull even a tiny bluegum out of the soil, so they snip the saplings down and daub what is left with poison.
Ricky Bowman demonstrates, bent double in the sun. He is on parole from prison and says this is the best job he has ever had.
I like this work. At least you have a life, something to do and its nice working out on the mountain. I was naughty, it wasn’t rape or murder or anything that serious, but I’ve learnt my lesson,” he says with a gap-toothed grin.
Then he points to a patch of alien trees behind the last row of houses in the village and frowns.
“It is all rooikrans (acacia cyclops) and it should all go. Look, how black the land is. When the fires came last year they burned right down to the houses. The whole village could have gone.”
He wants a contract from Ukuvuku to hire his own workers from the village and do the job.
“I don’t know if I’m going to get it, but the people from over there, a lot of them have nothing to do and we still have so much work here.”
This particular slope proves his point because the bluegum trees make seedbeds that see saplings spring up again for years after the land has been cleared. – AFP
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Govt sets mutants on alien invaders September 21, 2000