Rising barely 160m above the arid Namaqualand coastline, the Boegoeberge hardly deserve to be called mountains. Yet their size belies both their ecological importance and the controversy that is swirling around them.
Once islands off the coast of a prehistoric Africa, today they are lapped by another sea. This time it is a sea of sand, generated by the operations of state-owned diamond-mining company Alexkor.
Environmentalists say the sand, which has drifted virtually unchecked for more than a decade, has done possibly irreparable damage to the Boegoeberge.
And the Richtersveld community, which is now at least the theoretical owner of the area after a successful land-restitution claim, is concerned at the degradation of what it has earmarked as an ecotourism drawcard.
The Boegoeberge are inselbergs, outcroppings of erosion-resistant rock that were laid down more than 600-million years ago.
The larger Boegoeberg South, almost circular in shape, and the lower, ridge-like Boegoeberg North lie a short walk inland from a spectacular stretch of Atlantic coast.
Microclimate
According to Bryony Walmsley, a Cape Town-based expert in environmental management, the hills catch an extra share of the fog generated by the cold Benguela current because they rear up above the plain. This provides an important source of moisture for life forms there.
”You’ve got a complete, unique microclimate on these two hills,” said Walmsley, who has been advising the Richtersvelders in their land claim. ”As a result, you’ve got a highly adapted flora, completely different to anything surrounding it.
”Many of the plants that are growing there are highly endemic, and some of them are thought to be threatened or endangered species. But because researchers have not had ready access to the diamond area, little is known about the flora on the Boegoeberge, which is even more reason to protect it.”
She said the Boegoeberge fall squarely into the succulent Karoo biome, identified by the United Nations as a global biodiversity hot spot.
The area boasts not only plant but also mineral treasures, and for about 80 years Alexkor has been ripping the landscape apart in search of diamonds. It has done so with little consideration for the environment: viewed from the air, the top-security diamond area looks in places as though a gigantic cat had clawed at the face of the Earth. These claw-marks are mega-trenches dug by the company to identify likely deposits and never filled in again.
The trenches are not the only scars on the landscape. Where the company did find diamonds, it set up processing plants, accompanied by tailings dumps and slimes dams to hold the fine sand left after the last diamonds had been washed out.
Dust plumes
Slimes dams are not necessarily a problem when they are kept wet. But when they dry out, the strong southerly winds that sweep the unprotected coast lift the dust and spread it in long tongues or plumes that blanket the land for kilometres.
The plumes acquire a life of their own: as the vegetation in their path dies, it loses the capacity to hold the soil, and new sand is released.
This is what has happened in the Boegoeberg area, which has the misfortune to lie downwind from Alexkor’s Rietfontein slimes dams.
According to Walmsley, the Rietfontein plume, stretching for 3km to 4km, has marched across the east flank of Boegoeberg South, smothering vegetation there under several metres of sand. Boegoeberg North has also been affected.
In 1994, an environmental management plan commissioned by Alexkor said the inselbergs were one of the most sensitive landscapes in the mining area, requiring ”complete protection”.
The consultants who did the study even urged that the Boegoeberge be considered for classification as a statutory natural heritage area. They noted the hills were already under threat from mining, and marked them as a ”priority area for rehabilitation”.
Alexkor reportedly did nothing until last year, when it put up two lengths of shade-cloth netting, neither more than 100m long, across the plume, which at its widest is several hundred metres across.
Action
In September, the community’s lawyers wrote to the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, demanding that it act. Departmental officials last month eventually conducted an inspection — and found that Alexkor had suddenly sprung into action. Three new short stretches of netting had been put up, and the company was busy ”armouring” the Rietfontein Inland slimes dam by covering it with a layer of coarse tailings and pebbles.
Walmsley and other members of the Richtersvelders’ environmental advisory team went along on the inspection. She said afterwards that the armouring had had some effect on the plume, particularly on the cloak of sand on Boegoeberg South.
”There appears to be less sand on the mountain; something positive is happening. But we feel the netting exercise could have been done a lot more effectively. At the moment, the nets are randomly placed and quickly get smothered with sand, which Alexkor then has to dig out at great expense. They need a more systematic and properly designed system of stabilisation.
”And they need to have a vegetative solution as well. Without trying to stabilise that sand with vegetation, they’re going to be fighting an uphill battle forever.
”So, we’re happy that they have taken some action. But the mountain itself still has a problem, and will have for a long time, because the plants that have been smothered are dead. Even if the sand movement in the plume was to stop today, the mountain won’t recover for a long, long time.”
The South African Press Association asked Alexkor for comment, and was told the matter would have to be referred to the Department of Public Enterprises, the parastatal’s shareholder. Departmental spokesperson Vimla Maistry said the issue was an operational one and should be dealt with by Alexkor. — Sapa