Zen and the art of garden province maintenance: the soft intimacy of hard men in the wilderness of KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa, 1952–1997

Abstract

Within the short space of a few decades, the South African white male's role as a game ranger and conservationist rose to glory and fell from grace. The disgrace roughly coincided with the demise of apartheid as the ideological basis of racial hierarchies became more widely recognised. The illegitimacy of the white conservationist's colonial role as the gamekeeper and custodian who forcibly withheld natural resources from African people became apparent. This knocked the calling and mission of the game ranger off the moral high ground, and forced it down to the grassroots to consider more egalitarian participatory approaches. While the racial and class connotations of colonial conservation have been well recognised, such analyses have rested on the presentation of the game ranger as an insensitive khaki‐clad macho man on a militarised mission, possibly driven by romantic ideals. In such depictions, the losers of this war over resources are rural African people — especially women who are generally seen as closer to the earth in the struggle for livelihood. This essay does not seek to challenge such a reading of history, but maintains that the story is not that simple. White men did not make this history themselves. Both the racial and gendered aspects of nature conservation need to be seen in a multi‐dimensional frame that accommodates the insouciant agency of people, as well as nature. This it does by focusing on South African wilderness politics in the province of KwaZulu‐Natal. It also shows the links with the global situation and situates such an analysis in terms of the debates about changing masculinities where the frontier experience has been fundamental. In another settler society (Australia) the environmental movement which identifies with wilderness in particular, has been shown to be an important home for men seeking to shrug off their hegemonic power and attempting to move against the ingrained habits of their race and class identities. In the maverick lives of Ian Player and Nick Steele, the two white men principally examined here, identification with wild nature and indigenous Africans did involve some quite radical reorientation away from the milieu of the white ruling class. They anticipated and influenced trends that came to the global environmental movement relatively recently. Player and Steele were, however, caught up in circumstances that made for some curious local twists in their adventures on a frontier’ where the laws of nature became confused with social ideals.