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 Periodical article |
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| Title: | National Parks for Natal? Zululand's Game Reserves and the Shaping of Conservation Management Policy in Natal 1920s to 1940s |
| Author: | Brooks, Shirley |
| Year: | 2004 |
| Periodical: | Journal of Natal and Zulu History |
| Volume: | 22 |
| Pages: | 73-107 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | South Africa Natal |
| Subjects: | national parks and reserves nature conservation 1920-1929 1930-1939 Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment History and Exploration colonialism Development and Technology |
| Abstract: | Unlike other national parks, those in Natal were not brought under the National Parks Act of 1926, and conservation remained a provincial business. This article traces the history of conservation management policy in Natal in the interwar years, in an attempt to explain why control of Natal's parks and game reserves took the form it did after 1947. The author analyses the reasons for the failure to establish national parks, which were so successful in other parts of South Africa, instead of the embattled game reserves which existed in Natal, in Zululand in particular. One reason was the increasing marginalization of overwhelmingly English-speaking Natal in the Union of South Africa. Another was the presence of 'nagana', a form of trypanosomiasis which affects animals but not people, in Zululand. Under such circumstances, the establishment of a national park would have been seen to be working against the interests of white settlement in the countryside. In 1947 the Natal Parks Board was founded, taking conservation management away from the direction of national parks. Two important figures in this history were Dr Ernest Warren, zoologist and Natal Museum director in the 1920s and 1930s, and Colonel Jack Vincent, first director of the Parks Board. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |