Robbie Robinson: Led way in nature conservation from Kruger to the coast
1939 - 2017
ROBBIE Robinson, who has died in Knysna at the age of 77, was a worldrenowned, trailblazing conservationist.
He became the CEO of South African National Parks in 1990 and immediately upset the apartheid establishment by kicking the South African army out of the Kruger National Park, which it had come to regard as its private playground.
When he took over at SANParks, the Kruger Park was in effect controlled by the National Party government, which saw it as a fifth province.
The administrators of the country’s four provinces, all of them Nat politicians, sat on the board.
The army had been allowed to build, with taxpayers’ money, a camp in the park near Skukuza for the exclusive use of army top brass and their guests.
Robinson thought this was outrageous and wasted no time informing the generals that they could no longer use the Kruger as their playground.
He threw them out of “their” camp, which he turned into a rest camp like the others. If they wanted to use it they would have to book like everyone else, he said.
When he was appointed CEO of SANParks he began making the first senior black appointments. This went down smoothly enough in the other parks, but was strongly opposed by the old guard at the Kruger National Park.
There were efforts to remove him, which eventually took their toll when he resigned with a heavy heart in 1996.
Under his leadership SANParks became a world leader in conservation. He established and expanded many of South Africa’s most important national parks, and changed the thinking behind them from insular to holistic.
He created biodiversity linkages between protected areas, so-called conservation corridors that allowed animals and hikers to move freely from one park to another.
He was the first local conservationist to understand and incorporate into the guiding philosophy of our national parks the interdependence of parks and adjacent communities.
Historically, communities had always been evicted to make way for the establishment of national parks, and then largely excluded from any of the benefits associated with the park.
Robinson established the first community-owned national park in the country, the Richtersveld park in the Northern Cape. AN INTEREST IN ANCHOVIES: Robbie Robinson
It was the first time a national park had been established without chasing away the local communities.
The opposition he faced was daunting and it took him 18 years of fraught negotiations with feuding local communities, politicians and stakeholders, not least diamond miners, before the northern part of the Richtersveld was proclaimed a national park in 1991.
In 1995, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) recognised his achievement by awarding him and the Richtersveld community what is considered to be the Oscar of conservation, the Conservation Medal of the Duke of Edinburgh.
Robinson was born in Cape Town on June 12 1939. He matriculated at Paul Roos Gymnasium and went to Stellenbosch University where he obtained a BSc in botany and zoology, an honours and a master’s (cum laude).
He had worked briefly for the Department of Fisheries, where he developed an interest in anchovies, which became the subject of his thesis.
He also completed a PhD at the University of Washington in Seattle.
He joined what was then the South African National Parks Board in 1966 as a marine biologist and became the first CEO of the newly proclaimed Tsitsikamma National Park.
He built the Storms River rest camp. In 1967-68 he and a couple of helpers built a 70m suspension bridge for hikers and the local community across the Storms River mouth. Hanging 7m above the water, it lasted 40 years before being rebuilt.
At about the same time he also built the now world-famous Otter Trail, which he designed himself. He walked ahead of his small construction team, marking out the coastal trail with scraps of cloth.
As the head of the southern parks he expanded, developed and managed the Tsitsikamma, Knysna, Wilderness and Bontebok national parks, and initiated and established the West Coast National Park with the help of Rembrandt founder and philanthropist Anton Rupert and the WWF.
He started the groundwork for fish population studies in the Tsitsikamma National Park and elsewhere. It was a huge programme involving a number of universities.
He was the first local conservationist to understand the interdependence of parks and adjacent communities
It was the first study of its kind in South Africa and established the need for a marine protected area, which he then established in Tsitsikamma. It was the country’s first marine protected area, and the second in Africa.
After his retirement, the World Bank asked him to restore the national parks in Uganda to their former glory. They had been in terminal decline since the days of Idi Amin. Tourists had been killed, staff hadn’t been paid and poaching was rife.
He spent three years there as head of the Uganda Wildlife Service, got projects going and brought in investment, which revived the parks and brought back tourism.
After the tsunami of 2004 he went to Bangkok for six months and visited all the islands that had been badly battered to advise on environmental measures they should take to limit the damage in the event of another tsunami.
Robinson, who died after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and having major heart and back surgery, is survived by his wife of 53 years, Joh, and two sons. — Chris Barron