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‘About iSimangaliso’ Topics relevant to Sodwana Bay and Ozabeni November 2009 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................1 Plant and animal names in “About iSimangaliso” .........................................................................3 Section 1: Introduction to the iSimangaliso Wetland Park ...........................................................5 ‘Poverty amidst Plenty’: Socio-Economic Profile of the Umkhanyakude District Municipality .5 The first World Heritage Site in South Africa ..................................................................................9 iSimangaliso’s "sense of place" ....................................................................................................13 A new model for Protected Area development: Benefits beyond Boundaries ..........................16 Malaria ..............................................................................................................................................23 Section 2: Topics .............................................................................................................................28 Bats of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park .........................................................................................28 The climate of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park .............................................................................32 The coast and shoreline of iSimangaliso ......................................................................................35 iSimangaliso’s coastal plain: rivers and lakes ..............................................................................40 Coelacanths ......................................................................................................................................43 iSimangaliso’s coral reefs ...............................................................................................................47 Crocodiles of iSimangaliso ............................................................................................................51 Deep-sea fishing in iSimangaliso’s waters ...................................................................................57 Terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park ....................................60 The Pelagic Marine Ecosystem ......................................................................................................66 Frogs of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park .......................................................................................69 The formation of iSimangaliso’s grasslands ................................................................................73 The dynamics of the coastal grasslands .......................................................................................78 The hippos of iSimangaliso ............................................................................................................83 iSimangaliso’s people: the precolonial period .............................................................................87 iSimangaliso’s people: the Zulu Kingdom ....................................................................................89 iSimangaliso’s people in the 19th century ....................................................................................93 The creation of poverty in the iSimangaliso area ........................................................................97 White settlers enter Natal .............................................................................................................100 The impact of HIV and AIDS on the iSimangaliso area ..............................................................103 Lake St Lucia .................................................................................................................................105 The Lala Palm ................................................................................................................................108 The shaping of the land claims on iSimangaliso: the national framework ..............................114 The shaping of the land claims on iSimangaliso: Events in KwaZulu Natal ...........................119 The land restitution process .........................................................................................................123 Land claims in the iSimangaliso area: memory, community and kinship ...............................128 Experiences of loss: the Mngomezulu family in Mbila ..............................................................132 Experiences of loss: Mr Zikhali of the Mbila Land Claims Committee .....................................135 Marine Protected Areas .................................................................................................................137 The Ndlozi Peninsula: conservation and the military. ...............................................................142 Turtles of iSimangaliso .................................................................................................................146 Wilderness in history ....................................................................................................................151 Managing wilderness in iSimangaliso .........................................................................................155 Introduction About iSimangaliso is designed to provide support for tour guides working in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park. It is also intended as a resource for the new training programmes offered by iSimangaliso to local people who will take up employment as tour guides in the Park and the surrounding areas. It offers content material and topic worksheets about the people, animals and plants of the Park, and about the way in which the iSimangaliso is fulfilling its management mandate. It also offers a brief history of the area, which will help tour guides and their clients to place what they are experiencing in context, and perhaps to look at the Park with new eyes. iSimangaliso is committed to the development and transformation of the tourism industry in and around the Park, as central to its conservation of this extraordinary World Heritage Site. These materials set a standard for the level of information that will be required from tour guides and others who offer tourism services in order to be certified to operate within the Park. This material may be studied through one of the training courses offered by iSimangaliso, or used as a study guide by an individual candidate for iSimangaliso Authority assessment. iSimangaliso has designed a workshop to introduce the methodology of training tour guides in the content required for certification using these study guides. Conventionally, tour guides are more familiar with what we refer to as Green facts and ideas. These include the biophysical descriptions of plants and animals, and facts about their habitats and their life cycles. Red materials describe the lives and actions of the people who have made the history of the Park - hunters and gatherers, farmers, soldiers and traders, missionaries, hunters and conservationists, government officials, chiefs, and ordinary men and women. Brown - the mixture of red and green - represents the different management regimes that have created the Park over the last century, in conflict and co-operation with local people, governments and agricultural interests. These materials are strongly represented in About iSimangaliso. Tour guides in the iSimangaliso Park are required to integrate the red, green and brown materials in the presentation of the Park to visitors and tourists. Outside of the descriptions of science, a good fact is hard to find. There is no one body of unified knowledge about the Park and its surrounds that can be made into one coherent story. These materials draw on voices from different knowledge traditions: conservation management, biophysical descriptions, historical fragments, oral histories collected from local people - land 1 claimants, healers, farmers, conservationists - as well as autobiography and local history - which record stories of the area. At the heart of the materials is a gap: there is no record of the voices of the original owners of the land. About iSimangaliso will remain a partial and incomplete collection of materials about the iSimangaliso Wetland Park and its surrounding areas that will need constant change and update. Names and naming The iSimangaliso area borders Mozambique and Swaziland, and in the nineteenth century was the northern border of the Zulu Kingdom. The various names of the area and people reflect the creation of a cultural landscape. A recent interview with a land claimant gives very local names such as kwaGwalabanda and kwaMashude. The colonials and the subsequent white settler government referred to the area as Northern Zululand, and later, as the Homeland of KwaZulu. Since 1994 it has become Northern KwaZulu Natal; its new municipal name is uMkhanyakhude (a tree that shines in the dark: the Fever Tree). The area is also known as Maputaland in some contexts, after the broad coastal plain which stretches across southern Mozambique and north-eastern KwaZulu Natal, or Tongaland/Thongaland, after the local language, spoken by those who may now prefer to identify as "Zulu". Some alternative names for local people are Tembe-Tonga, Tsonga, Ronga, and Gonda. The area is sometimes referred to, generically, as St Lucia. Some small
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