Saving the Magaliesberg
James Clarke has fought for the conservation of this area since he first fell in love with the mountain after seeing it from his flat in Hillbrow, writes Leon Marshall
THE STAR’S renowned Stoep Talk columnist, James Clarke, could have afforded himself a satisfied smile when the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) recently declared the Magaliesberg a world biosphere reserve.
The mountain range got its international recognition nearly half a century after he first drew attention to its natural worth and beauty and the need to protect it. He did so by way of a series of articles that The Star ran under the banner “Save the Magaliesberg”.
His campaign ran in the early Seventies when environmentalism was hardly the household word it is today. Other issues were more pressing.
The South African mind was occupied with the gathering storm of local and international opposition to apartheid, the state’s resort to ever-harsher suppressive measures, and the anti-colonial and civil wars raging around the sub-continent. Internationally the fearsome spectre of the Cold War and its nuclear-arms build-up loomed ominously.
But it was at that time too that the first step towards universal care of nature got taken in the shape of the UN Conference on the Human Environment that was held in Stockholm in 1972. Seen as the birth of the global environmental movement, it declared that “a point has been reached in history when we must shape our actions throughout the world with a more prudent care for their environmental consequences. Through ignorance or indifference we can do massive and irreversible harm to the earthly environment on which our life and well-being depend”.
Back in South Africa, environmental awareness was such that the cabinet portfolio under which it resorted was still lumped together with other lesser ministerial responsibilities, like statistics and planning. It was such an afterthought that the minister in charge had to be primed by James about what to tell the Stockholm conference.
It was a mark of how James’s reputation as The Star’s environmental writer had grown. He was making politicians, business people and the newspaper’s readers realise that environmental activism was no longer the preclude of the era’s hippies and flower children. The government, business and the populace all had to start showing nature greater respect.
As a mountain range, the Magaliesberg was nothing as eye-catching as the Drakensberg or Table Mountain. So it might have been a fresh eye that made James notice its particular beauty. He had come to Joburg from England in 1955 after being recruited by the Argus company, which had The Star as its flagship paper.
In the humorous Stoep Talk column for which he has become best known to the newspaper’s readers over the past 30 years, he has on occasion alluded to how he fell in love with the mountain after he first spotted it in the distance from the flat he rented in Hillbrow.
Care of nature was already in his blood by the time he set foot in South Africa. Even as a child he loved going for walks in the woods around the pretty village of Streetly in Worcestershire where he grew up. As a young journalist in England, his concern for nature started extending to the general human environment. He ruffled political feathers when he reported on the atrocious conditions in which people lived in the backstreets of the historic city of Wolverhampton.
It was not long after arriving in South Africa that he also started to get under the skin of the government and business. He so fell in love with the country’s natural beauty that he cut short a new job he got in New Zealand to get back here. He got into the thick of things when he slammed a glass company for smashing into the side of the Magaliesberg after silicon.
At a meeting called to discuss the mining operation, the company confronted James with slides showing what an environmentally neat job they were doing.
James retorted that they must have worked incredibly fast for when he visited the site two hours earlier it had looked nothing like the photographs they were showing. It turned out to be a telling first step towards the protection of the mountain when the quarry was closed.
When James first arrived in South Africa, he had no more than a pound in his pocket. Money remained tight on a reporter’s salary, which had him use his growing understanding of nature by writing a book titled Man is the Prey.
It was about animals that were a danger to people and it became a best-seller that earned him enough money to buy a car and a nice house in Bryanston.
It was the first of several books he has since written on nature. It was also what persuaded The Star’s then-editor, John Jordi, to appoint him as the paper’s science writer, a beat which James used to pursue his environmental interest. He says he is grateful to this day for having had an editor who cared so much about such issues.
The paper launched a campaign under a front-page column named “Care”. It covered the full spectrum of environmental issues, from nature to urban living.
It was from this that the “Save the Magaliesberg” initiative sprouted.
A photograph of beautiful waterfalls at a place in the mountain called Retiefskloof was used on a poster that only said Magaliesberg. This was aimed at warding off plans by the then-Transvaal provincial administration to build a resort at the spot.
The bureaucrats argued that people did not make use of the land.
James retorted that this was exactly the point – the land should indeed be saved from damaging human intrusion.
The initiative evolved into something far bigger. A campaign flagged “Trail Blaze” was launched by the paper with the aim of bringing home to the entire country the magnificence of its natural beauty and diversity and the need to look after it.
The idea was to blaze a nature trail running the length of the country, not unlike America’s Appalachian Trail that stretches for 3 476km from the southern state of Georgia to Maine in the far north.
It involved having two hikers at a time covering a series of legs in relays, starting at Mapungubwe in the north and ending at Cape Point. The trail blazers in places walked along roads, but the idea was to mainly follow the mountain ranges. The Magaliesberg’s 120km shallow S-curve from west of Rustenburg to where it levels out east of Pretoria was one of the legs.
The Star ran regular reports on the hikers’ progress and experiences. It was as much fun as it was serious, recalls James. The paper’s staff were keen to do the honours themselves. On one of the stretches, the police caught one of them sleeping in a pumpkin field. It was later revealed that another two enjoyed a wonderful time at a coastal resort and hitched a lift instead of walking their allotted distance.
At Cape Point the hikers who covered the final leg were met by the then-minister of water affairs and forestry, Fanie Botha, who went on to open a series of nature trails. It was said at the time that he too had dreams of a footpath running all the way from the far north to Cape Point. “That was our dream at The Star as well,” says James. “And I think it is still possible.”
During his time as environmental writer, James fought and helped win major battles against destructive mining in wrong places.
By having The Star gather voluminous public petitions against coal mining in Kruger National Park, of all places, and by having it throw its weight behind a similarly successfully campaign against titanium mining in KwaZulu-Natal’s St Lucia that would have wrecked the park’s precious coastal dunes, he has written his name in South Africa’s conservation annals.
In the case of the Magaliesberg, a group of leading conservationists joined in taking the campaign for its protection forward. They included Paul Fatti, then professor of statistics and actuarial science at Wits University, Kevin Gill, a lawyer who recently published a book co-authored by Andry Engelbrecht on the flowers of the Magaliesberg, and Vincent Carruthers, author of a definitive work titled The Magaliesberg that tells the amazing story of the mountain from its origins more than 2 billion years ago, its archaeological and botanical treasures and its close connection with society’s development from the earliest times.
Through a remarkable initiative involving stakeholders, most notably land owners along the mountain range, the group succeeded in the late Seventies in getting it declared a Natural Area, later to be renamed the Magaliesberg Protected Environment. Its listing as a world biosphere reserve is reward for many years’ toil, often against debilitating odds. The purpose of a biosphere is to fashion a mutually beneficial relationship between nature and people under guidance from a management board made up of interested parties.
The Magaliesberg biosphere includes the Cradle of Humankind which, situated across a valley from the mountain range, is once again the focus of international attention following probably its most remarkable hominid fossil find.
The biosphere has a 58 000-hectare core protection area, the Magaliesberg part of which spans the length of its crest, taking in its high southern cliffs where Cape vultures breed and its extensive northern slopes that are interspersed with deep ravines in which leopards prowl.
It has a buffer zone made up largely of farms, private reserves and a wealth of retreats and lodges ranging from rustic to luxurious that mostly provide access to the mountain. Beyond the buffer zone is a vast transition area in which development is expected to be sensitive to the environmental objectives of the biosphere.