National parks belong to everyone

As SA National Parks Week kicks off – and people can get free access to them for seven days from today – it is appropriate to consider the role of our national parks and what the future might hold for them.

Places like nature and game reserves can be in the firing line in a country like South Africa, where the land question and the heritage of colonialism are issues which have to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.

It is easy for uninformed critics to point at such places and claim the land they occupy should be handed “back to the people” or that the wildlife and nature experiences which they offer are aimed at society’s elite and are inaccessible to ordinary, or poor, people.

While it is true that national parks throughout Africa began, in many cases, as entertainment and relaxation zones for the then ruling classes (read: mainly white) and that indigenous people felt excluded, the story is not that simple.

In some cases, communal or traditional land was expropriated for incorporation in reserves like the Kruger National Park. Some of that dispossession has already been partially rectified by allowing affected communities to earn royalties from tourist operations and to have title over the land which was once theirs.

That has not always gone well, with dissension, corruption and looting sometimes turning promising community projects into failures and leading to an overall loss of job opportunities in poor areas which desperately need them.

In other cases, land occupied by national parks is also marginal when it comes to traditional farming activities…so the most effective use of it is through wildlife tourism.

It is important, too, that SANParks reaches out to the whole population to show them that our parks are a national asset which belong to everyone and not the elite.