/ 12 October 2004

Phumla Mzazi-Geja

Park Manager: Mountain Zebra National Park, SANParks

The Cape mountain zebra nearly became extinct, but at Mountain Zebra National Park near Cradock, they are making a comeback. Now their population numbers 300. Their custodian is a small Xhosa woman, with a big laugh and a big heart.

The sole female among SANParks’s 20 national park managers and the second black woman to achieve a conservation diploma in the late 1980s, Phumla’s work has won her the respect of her community and peers. ‘My park is the best for game viewing,” she smiles proudly. ‘Here you will always see game.”

Her main focus is nurturing the relationship between the park and her community, to ensure that SANParks’s philosophy of ‘parks and people” succeeds by involving those who were excluded in the past.

Phumla leads by example: ‘You must always be ahead of everyone to avoid surprises. I had a tough education, working under two men in my first years. But it taught me that nothing mattered except production. What you put in you will get out.”

Phumla’s other passion is her family. Her husband is a clergyman. She has a daughter and is still nursing her laatlammetjie, and she has no qualms about taking him to work.