From Wildlife to Natural Resources, and Back Again? Translating Natures in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park

ABSTRACT

The article explores the contested natures of the Dukuduku forest bordering the iSimangalison Wetland Park in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, through the analytics of translation. The first half of the article explores environments as objects of translation, by drawing on debates between social scientists and conservationists over whether nature should be seen as constructed or as inherently real. These debates, which took place in the 1980s, help clarify contemporary debates about representationalism and multiplicity. The second half of the article explores environments as translating subjects by showing how different constellations of human and non-human networks have shaped and framed contemporary struggles over the future of the area. It is precisely these processes, it is argued, that make attempts at restoring wilderness to a landscape so challenging.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservation
• translation
• environments
• natural resources

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the editors of Ethnos and the anonymous reviewers, as well as the editors of this special issue, for invaluable comments and suggestions for how to improve my argument.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Knut G. Nustad http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0386-8134

Notes

1 The three vignettes are adapted from Creating Africas: Struggles over nature conservation and land (Nustad 2015). In the monograph, I used them as a way to show multiplicity. Here they have been modified to serve as a basis for a discussion of translations.

2 Fieldwork was carried out in shorter visits of about a month, three times a year, between 2007 and 2011. As I describe in my monograph Creating Africas (Nustad 2015), a group from AFRA and I worked closely with a land claims committee in the forest. However, a self-appointed chief who represented people who had moved into the forest later mobilised against the committee and we had to abandon direct work in the forest for safety reasons. The land claims committee denied his claim to authority and urged us to continue working with them and, from 2009, we did so through meeting groups and individuals in a community centre outside the forest. Frode Sundnes joined the project as a PhD student in 2007 and carried out his main research in 2008. He also had to abandon fieldwork in the forest but he conducted invaluable archival work on the scarce sources that exist on Dukuduku (Nustad and Sundnes 2013; Sundnes 2013a, 2013b).

3 A longer version of this argument can be found in chapter 2 of Creating Africas.

4 Nagana had existed in Zululand for a long time and, together with the presence of malaria, was part of the reason why many areas were sparsely populated (McCracken 2008: 154). In these areas game thrived.

5 http://www.africaholidaysandsafaris.com/articles/616. Accessed 3 March 2017. Frode Sundnes first came across a similar statement on the iSimangaliso Wetland Park’s homepage in connection with the description of a rhino project, but this document is no longer available. In the original, the CEO was quoted as saying: ‘The bold vision for iSimangaliso […] continues to evolve. With 16 separate parcels of land united as one great Park, the ultimate plan is to see the restoration of game populations as it would have been in pre-colonial times’ (iSimangalisòs Ozabeni rhino introduction, http://www.isimangaliso.com, Accessed: 18.10.2012). See Sundnes (2013b).