Trying to sell nature-based tourism in game reserves to people who would rather go to the beach on holiday, if they go at all, sounds like a case of real hard sell.
Research by South African Tourism and the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism shows that 51% of black South Africans prefer to go to the beach for their festive and other holidays. Blacks make up less than 12% of the local visitors who go to national parks.
Isidore Bandile Mkhize, newly appointed director of the flagship Kruger National Park, wrote a doctoral thesis on the reasons behind this and is determined to turn the situation around.
Mkhize (42) grew up on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast. He completed a BA (Hons) in geography at the University of Zululand and a masters degree in the geography of recreation and tourism at the University of South Carolina in the United States.
‘For me geography is the study of the distribution of phenomena on the surface of the Earth,” he says. ‘That is why geography fits in well with tourism. In tourism you look at the migratory patterns, like why do people move from place A to place B, what fascinates them about place B, why don’t they go to place C, and so on.”
When he returned to South Africa in the early 1990s, he did a PhD on ‘The meaning and expression of tourism among urban blacks” through the then University of Durban-Westville. He also lectured at the University of Zululand.
His professional career saw him appointed as Mpumalanga’s director of tourism in the mid-1990s and then as chief director of economic affairs, gaming and tourism. In 2001 he went back to his home province to set up Trade and Investment KwaZulu-Natal, a non-profit organisation that assisted the provincial government with investment and export.
Mkhize says his appointment as director of the Kruger earlier this year gives him the opportunity to embrace his ‘first love” – tourism. He talked to Earthyear about his seduction plans.
What did you learn from your research on black tourists?
I targeted urban blacks because there is this general perception that people from the urban areas are wealthier than those from rural areas. I wanted to see where they go on vacation and what do they do during their holidays. My study was based in urban centres like Johannesburg, Durban Cape Town and Port Elizabeth.
I discovered that most urban people prefer to go to urban areas for their holidays. The reason is that most of them have family and friends in the urban areas. Their thinking is governed by the availability of friends and family, not on the availability of accommodation and facilities. They think, do I know someone in that place?
This is my own experience in relation to my friends visiting Kruger because I have moved here. It’s a trend. A lot of my friends and the people I know say, we can now go to the Kruger because you are there, otherwise it would never have occurred to us to visit the park.
This is the mindset I confirmed through my research. I discovered that black people are not really adventurous in terms of tourism. They don’t say, I’ll go there, I don’t care who I meet there, I’ll go because all that I am after is the experience and I want to see how those people think.
In most instances, this counts more than the monetary aspect and the perceived cost. Though some people said hotels and lodges were expensive, when I asked them how much do they cost, they didn’t really know. For most black people, to sleep in a hotel is a luxury and they believe there are a lot of other things they can do rather than go and sit in a hotel.
Another thing I discovered in my research is that black people don’t see why they should go to nature reserves. Very few of them had ever been to a reserve, to them the thought of seeing lions and leopards in the wild was not fascinating.
That is what I see as a challenge that I am faced with now. I have got to make sure that everybody is aware of what is happening in these nature reserves. Why we have national parks, why they are a heritage.
Black people have not really been into this heritage stuff and appreciating the heritage that we have. In the past black people weren’t allowed to go into places like the Kruger park unless they were going to work there.
We’ve got to change that mindset now, 10 years of democracy must have taught us that these places are for everybody. As we say in our vision for the Kruger park, everybody should be able to enjoy it. We need to get the word out there to say the parks are accessible to everybody and they are not really expensive.
In some of our chalets, you can stay for a night for R120 per person sharing. You can get a chalet with three or four beds for R400. That’s not too expensive, but there is a perception it is. What we want to get across to the general public out there is that a holiday in the Kruger park is affordable.
How do you plan to draw black tourists to the Kruger park?
It’s important for places like the Kruger to draw a wider spectrum of tourists. For that to happen there has to be an understanding, especially among those who haven’t been privileged enough to go to the park before, of what the park is all about and what it has to offer. So we are going to embark on an awareness campaign, not only in the immediate communities but also in the broader black communities.
What I have noticed is that even those people who might want to go on a holiday in the Kruger are not well-versed in what happens there.
A personal story indicates this point: a friend of mine who is a prominent person in Johannesburg came to visit me recently and he didn’t know the Kruger offered accommodation. He was surprised when I said to him, come and visit me and you can stay in the Kruger. He thought you had to stay outside the park and then make trips into the park to visit.
We need to increase awareness and we plan to use the media to communicate this message. We have already had some journalists at the park, many of whom were visiting it for the first time, and we were encouraging them to communicate their experiences with the public at large. They were really surprised at what the park has to offer.
What does it have to offer?
A different tourism experience, based on biodiversity – what is popularly known as ecotourism. We don’t just conserve nature for the sake of conserving it, we conserve it so that people can come and see how nature conservation is done. We do this on behalf of the people of South Africa, so we want South Africans to come and see what we are doing.
What is the experience you are trying to sell?
Tourism is about experience. What you take away with you is the experience that is different from what you have been exposed to before. Like the fauna and flora that we have in the park. Not a lot of people are privileged to see a lion or a leopard in its natural setting.
The beauty of it is that, unlike what you see in a zoo, in the Kruger park you see these animals in their natural setting. When we explain to you how the ecosystem works, it’s a fascinating experience. This is what we want tourists to take with them.
How does this compare to relaxing on the beach?
That’s another kind of experience. The emphasis in the park is on the fauna and the flora, so we talk about wildlife and indigenous plant species. It gives you an idea of how people can co-exist with nature.
People tend to believe that the animals are wild and they have no respect for people, but when you go to the park you find a different story. It takes you back to the days when animals used to roam freely among people. That’s exactly how we live in the park and it’s a wonderful experience to watch how the animals live with each other and the way in which they interact with each other and with nature itself in their natural setting.
As a human being, this experience allows you to respect the nature that is around you because nature has its own way of doing things and that is what is demonstrated in the park.
What about the expense? Even relatively well-off white people are complaining these days that it is too expensive to visit the park.
I don’t think it is expensive. We live in changing times and things are becoming more expensive. We have to maintain the infrastructure that we have. In spite of the fact that we talk about visitors having a wilderness experience, we’ve got to make it possible for people to enjoy the park. We also want to improve our quality of service.
We have to get money to be able to do these things. Although we belong to the South African National Parks family, we don’t really get money out of SANParks, so we have to generate our own money.
We need it to build infrastructure such as the new day visitors’ centre at Skukuza. People come there for picnics in the bush. This is meant to create access to the park for local people.
Our infrastructure has to be up to standard. We cater a lot for overseas tourists with certain expectations. Even though we are providing them with a bush experience, it has to be of a particular standard. That is why we need money to keep our infrastructure up to scratch.
I once went to Israel to do a course on tourism development and management. One thing I learnt there that I want to practise at the park is that you must keep your customers. Those people who have been to the park must be keen to go back.
This will happen if we improve the service that we give. It is very difficult to attract new customers, so it is important to keep the ones that we have so that they can assist us to attract those that we don’t have yet.
The moment you start losing your customers you know there is something wrong with your business. I have had an interaction with a tourist from overseas who has been coming to the park for about a month every year for the past 20 years. That guy knows the park better than anybody else. He is the kind of client we want to recognise and perhaps reward.
Are there different pricing structures for locals and overseas visitors?
Yes, there are different structures, although this has created problems sometimes when overseas tourists come to the park as guests of local visitors. We are still trying to refine that.
We also have the new Wild Card system. It is a good system [of providing visitor incentives], but it has also created some confusion because some people think that once you have a Wild Card you can go anywhere in the park. Whereas in fact it only provides you with access to the park and you still have to pay for the other facilities.
Seeing as tourism was your first love, how do you marry the conservation side of your new appointment with that?
It’s very easy because there is a lot of emphasis on ecotourism. The park is an example of how ecotourism must be put in practice. There is a balance between tourism and conservation. Sometimes this is called nature-based tourism.
All you have to do is to ensure that what the people come to see, they find. When the people go to the park, it is unlike any mass-based tourism experience, they want to see nature. So everything that is there must be nature-based.
That is why we don’t have very high bridges in the park, why we don’t kill animals and birds. The tourists go there to see these creatures in the park. The opportunity to see them in their natural setting is what distinguishes us from other destinations.
The emphasis is that our tourism is an adjunct of our nature conservation. We don’t conserve it just for its own sake, but so that generations to come can also appreciate it.
So I find it very easy to balance the two.
Who advises you on conservation?
We have a lot of people, some are overseas experts, we get input from independent researchers and we have our own scientific services. Some of the research done by scientific services in the park has not been done anywhere else in the world and we are very proud of that.
We talk to groups of experts all the time, for example, on the issue of culling elephants. There is a moratorium on culling. We believe that something has to be done about the elephants, but culling is not the only solution. We will have a big conference later this year with all the stakeholders so that we can reach consensus about what to do.
What are your plans for the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP)?
We are definitely going ahead with the transfrontier park and are holding strategic planning sessions with our partners in Zimbabwe and Mozambique to see how to take the process forward. We have a joint management board to take it forward.
Doesn’t the GLTP provide you with a solution for the growing number of elephants in the Kruger?
It does, but guess what, when we took the elephants to Mozambique, most of them came back to South Africa.
I have been told that a way to get them to stay there is to pen in the matriarch of a herd for a while. Are you trying such things?
All the elephants that were sent over there were tagged, so it was easy for us to see which ones came back. Apparently all the males came back, they are more territorial than the breeding herds, which stayed that side.
But that doesn’t solve our problem, we still need to look into these things. It’s a very sensitive issue, which is why we want all the stakeholders to sit around a table and tell us what to do. We want to say to them, this is a problem, advise us how we can cope.
Did you grow up in nature?
When I was doing my geography studies, I developed this love for nature. I grew up on the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal, between Umzinto and Ixopo, and went to school in Marianhill. This was a nice setting, and so was the University of Zululand. We used to go to St Lucia for our field trips.
Any other stakeholders you want to mention?
Another thing we are looking at is trying to get local communities involved in some of the programmes we run in the park. For example, recently we donated some indigenous trees from our nursery to a hospital in Mtimkulu. We included a bit of education about how indigenous trees are not as harmful to the environment as alien trees.
We will be continuing with those kinds of projects, through our People and Conservation programme, headed by Helen Mmethi. This is a new section, it became fully fledged in November last year. It used to be part of the social ecology unit.
Your predecessor, David Mabunda, undertook a wide-ranging transformation programme among staff at the park. Is that finished now, or is more transformation necessary?
I think we are more or less at the point we want to be at now. At the senior level we are there, but at some of the lower levels there is still room for improvement. For instance, in terms of scientific services and specialists in nature conservation, we need to do something.
We have a training programme for junior scientists that is sponsored by a trust in the US, and we are interacting with all the tertiary institutions that offer courses pertaining to environmental management and conservation. We are urging them to recommend to us people that are our future scientists. Fortunately, I am well versed in the developments around tertiary education because I am the chairperson of the council of the University of Zululand.