Hatching Conflicts: Trout Reproduction, Properties of Water, and Property Ownership in South Africa

ABSTRACT

Trout were introduced to South Africa in the late nineteenth century with colonial fanfare, but since the 1990s, post-apartheid legislation has declared trout alien and sought to reduce their numbers. Both the initial introduction of trout and contemporary debates are entangled with ‘properties’, in the dual sense of land claims and biophysical traits of fish and waters. Trout introductions were part of colonial enclosures; now, attempts to control them are seen by many white owners as a state attempt to undermine private property. Trout become a site for conflict because they struggle to spawn in South African waters and are largely dependent on hatchery reproduction, which makes them available for legislative acts that can eliminate owners’ ability to maintain private stocks. Attention to links between these dual meanings of property illustrates how contestations over land-waters in contemporary South Africa are shaped by the ongoing effects of more-than-human colonial projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Property
• water
• trout
• South Africa
• dispossessions

Acknowledgement

Fieldwork for this article was carried out by the first author between 2018 and 2022 and consisted of several shorter visits to a hatchery in KZN, shorter visits to other hatcheries, archival research and attending meetings with trout producers, five months in total. In addition, provincial officials, NGOs and trout producers have been interviewed. The second author has carried out complementary fieldwork in the Western and Eastern Cape region. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Fellow’s seminar at the Stellenbosch Centre for Advanced Studies (STIAS) while the first author was a fellow there during the first half of 2022. He wishes to acknowledge the helpful suggestions from the interdisciplinary cohort of colleagues there. He would also like to thank the trout producers, environmentalists and members of the fishing clubs who shared their knowledge about trout in South Africa, especially Ilan Lax and Ian Cox who introduced him to contemporary debates. We are grateful for discussions with project members Juana Aigo, Cato Berg, Javier E. Ciancio, Peter Christiansen and Rune Flikke. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their inputs and suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a detailed account of this process, see Jeff Guy (1982).

2 This is a term coined by the third author. We use it here to gesture to the inseparability of fly-fishing and British masculinity. In this way, anglification also intends to point to the racialisation of South African waterscapes. This is evident in the quote from Nuttall above, where the characterisation of indigenous fish as childish compared to the power and subtlety of trout is part of colonial efforts to mark the white male as ‘adult’ and justify intertwined acts of landscape transformation and racial subjugation. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for encouraging us to clarify this point.

3 https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/why-trout. Accessed 8 February 2022.

Additional information

Funding

All authors are part of the Research Council of Norway funded project Global Trout: investigating environmental change through more-than-human world systems [grant number 287438].