South Africa's Kruger National Park used to be surrounded by land that shared its world-famous biodiversity, but decades of overgrazing have reduced much of the neighbouring land to dust. Paddy Woodworthreports on a movement to restore the vegetation and wildlife - and raise living standards for locals, too
Travor Xivuri is an inveterate optimist. 'When you come back here you will not recognise this place; you will get lost in a forest," he promises, grinning broadly. He knows there will never - should never - be a forest in this environment. But there should be plenty of trees and a lot of other tall vegetation to get lost in.
Where we are standing there is often not even any grass. We have been driving along slow dirt roads in the heart of the remote Mopani district of Limpopo province for hours, and we have not seen a single wild animal. Yet Kruger National Park, with herds of antelope, buffalo and zebra roaming its rich grassland among plentiful stands of acacia - the classic low savannah veldt of southern Africa - is only two kilometres away.
The high fence that separates the Kruger from the villages around the small town of Giyani doesn't just keep the lions and elephants inside the park. It also keeps cattle and goats out, and it is their presence, in large numbers, that makes this side of the fence so different.
Decades of overgrazing have brought most of the fertile land in the Letaba river catchment around Giyani close to collapse, stripping first the vegetation and then the soil. Eroded dongas - dry and sterile depressions where the topsoil has blown off - stretch ever longer and broader fingers among the spring growth. Desertification is still a long way off. It is not hard to imagine, however, as the midday heat bounces off the bare and impoverished bones of the earth.
But that is beginning to change, thanks to the innovative program that Xivuri manages. There is not one cow, not a single goat, in the 57-hectare enclosure near Khakhala village that one of Xivuri's teams has fenced off. The grass is growing tall again - its heads heavy, bending with seed - and the dongas are receding before its advance.
Xivuri points out the "ablution place" - a small corrugated-iron hut sheltering a long-drop toilet - for the workers. He wants people to have at least minimal working conditions. "I was thinking of a tent where we could eat in the shade," he muses, as if he were talking about a luxury canteen.
"I was afraid the grass might not grow back," says James Blignaut, an economic consultant on the project. "But the seed bank was so good here it has come back of its own accord." That won't be the case everywhere, of course. In many areas eroded soil will need to be replenished, and impoverished soil will need to be enriched with compost. And for many of the less prolific but ecologically important plants that have been lost from the seed bank there will be no automatic grow back at all.
And so, at the next village, Gawula, there is a large nursery. It is marked out with tall poles that carry protective netting, although there are, as yet, no plants to be protected. This is where native trees and shrubs will be cultivated before being planted out in the enclosed areas. Conny Xivuri - she is Travor's sister - writes out, in a tiny, meticulous hand, both the English and the scientific names of the plants she hopes to see there.
She has studied to become a "community conservator" - "community" is a euphemism for poor and black in the new South Africa - and she cannot wait for the first plants to arrive. "The seedlings are still in Pretoria," she says, a little doubtfully. "We are going to workshop the people in caring for nature," she continues quickly. "The older people know the names of the indigenous trees, but we will have to teach the children, because many of those trees had disappeared before they were born."
The nursery will include a herb and vegetable garden. The vegetables should improve the local diet. The herbs will be of use to sangomas - traditional healers - as well as for cooking.
The scheme that she and her brother are working on is one of three pilot projects in Working for Woodlands, based on South Africa's well-known Working for Water scheme. It follows the same model of combining a social goal (poverty alleviation) and an environmental one (ecological restoration).
The rural-rehabilitation initiative, Africa's Rural Initiatives for Sustainable Environments (Arise), has been researched by GreenGrowth Strategies, and the Arise project in Giyani is being implemented by Environmental Offset Investments. These two related companies are at the cutting of edge of South Africa's rapidly expanding eco-sector. Funding comes from the poverty-alleviation fund of South Africa's department of environmental affairs and tourism.
This kind of public-private partnership is much favoured by the ANC government, because it attracts investment while offering employment opportunities for the poorest of the electorate.
The first phase of the project at Giyani is simply to fence off plots to introduce a rotational system of land use. Grass may be harvested from them to provide feed for the cattle in times of shortage - which are now all too frequent, as the local climate appears to be warming up and drying out.
There does not seem to be a strong historical tradition of allowing grazing land to lie fallow among the local Tsonga people. In any case, the area has suffered great administrative changes, as parts of it were incorporated into the supposedly self-governing Bantustan of Lebowa during the apartheid period. It may be that, before the white colonists began to squeeze them into ever more restricted and less fertile areas, the land was simply so vast that rotation was unnecessary.
The benefits of the new scheme are obvious enough. But anyone familiar with attitudes to common land in the Irish countryside will not be surprised to learn that negotiating where the fenced areas should be, with people who have grazed them for decades, has been a delicate task.
At a third village, Mahlathi, the people have insisted that the fenced area be split in two, allowing their cattle a corridor right down the middle of the restoration zone, for easy access to a dipping tank. "Heavy erosion of this corridor, that is my concern," says Travor Xivuri, thoughtfully rubbing the exposed soil with his foot. Dust rises and blows away at once. But he knows he can proceed only by consensus. "It would be very difficult if we had to fight with the community," he says.
His goal is local support to the point that anyone who damages a fence will be forced by peer pressure to repair it, without need to resort to security measures. "The community is its own security," he says. Then he mentions wryly that all but one of some solar panels that were installed in local schools recently have "disappeared". The tension between the common good and the chance for an individual to make some desperately needed money is evident.
Tribal structures here are strong, however, and the local chiefs - each village has one - are very influential. This influence extends to a major say in who is employed on the scheme.
A member of the steering committee, Dr Eric Ngobeni, meets us in Gawula to explain how it works. "When Nicholas Funda [ of Environmental Offset Investments] came here he spoke to me. Poverty is our great enemy here, and I saw this project could be one of best soldiers in this war, a David to conquer this Goliath. I went to the chiefs, and they welcomed the project because they know me - I am from the royal family and also a pastor."
I tried to take this information in my stride, suppressing the feeling that I was speaking to the local Charles Windsor. Was there not, I asked, a danger of favouritism if the chiefs selected the people who get the badly needed jobs?
For a moment it seems as though he has not heard me, but then he responds: "I will answer your question. We are very networked here, not like in the cities. We speak to Sanco [ the South African National Civic Organisation, a community-based NGO network], elected local councillors and the chiefs. Then we bring the whole community together under a tree for a meeting.
"We tell everyone that our criterion is to select the poorest of the poor, those who need the work most. We explain that there should be a 60-40 gender balance in favour of women, that youth and the disabled should be strongly represented."
As his early reference to the royal family indicates, Ngobeni is the son of a former chief and the brother of a current chief, so he cannot be seen as entirely disinterested in maintaining the influence of the tribal system.
In the very different surroundings of Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital, where meetings are held in air-conditioned offices rather than under trees, Nosipho Jezile offers an interesting take on this system. She is the department of environmental affairs and tourism's chief operating officer, and one of a new breed of dynamic young administrators who has risen fast in the young democracy.
"I trust the old traditional systems, though of course there is good and bad in them. They are not completely free from corruption, but the European analysis which says they are totally corrupt is wrong. The African extended-family tradition means that everyone should give everyone else a hand."
Ngobeni accepts that problems can arise but insists that "as long as you have good intentions the system works". He gives an example of a pragmatic solution to a problem that arose in trying to meet a quota of drawing 2 per cent of the work force from people with disabilities.
"We took on one mentally disabled young man, but he was causing problems; he was not able to work with others. So we decided to employ his mother instead. He still benefited from the extra income to the family, and we were able to ensure that the necessary work got done."
Looking at the tribal system - or what remains of it - as analogous to feudal oppression is certainly not helpful. The system provides a valuable social cement in remote communities fracturing under pressure from unplanned urbanisation and Aids.
These two factors are linked, because there is a long tradition of men going to work in distant mines and factories, so that up to 90 per cent of households are headed by women. Inevitably, many lonely men in big cities contract sexually transmitted diseases. Aids is often the unwanted gift brought home on their brief holidays.
The take-up on the Arise programme has been remarkable. The original target was to employ 208 people, but it has been well exceeded, with 323 currently at work on the project. The area fenced now amounts to 172 hectares.
The establishment of a rotational system, however, is only the very beginning of an ambitious project. First, the restored lands could provide benefits additional to fodder. They could yield sustainable harvests of mopane worms (an edible caterpillar), the vitamin-rich marula fruit and date-palm beer, for example.
Beyond that stage there are plans to restore big game species that have disappeared from the Giyani area in living memory. Dr Ngobeni, who is in his 50s, remembers playing among zebras and antelope as a little boy on grassland where the dongas are today. His uncle gained fame for killing six lions, on one memorable occasion hurling his assegai, or spear, with such force at a beast raiding the family's cattle that it was impaled and pinned to the ground. That, at any rate, is how the pastor remembers it. "The same man," he recalls, "would run in terror from his wife, when he tried to beat her, if she could produce a frog to scare him with." Nobody is planning to bring back lions to the banks of the Letaba, but the restoration of antelope offers the prospects of sustainable hunting and of attracting tourists who want to experience the environment of the Kruger without the restrictions imposed by the presence of dangerous animals.
"People would love to come to a place like this just to hike, and the birding is fantastic," says James Blignaut, the economic consultant. Two species of bee eater, gloriously plumaged, hawk insects from a nearby wire to bear out his point. In the Kruger you could not get out of your car to look at them.
If the villagers can learn to cater for such tourists, the prospect of incomes comparable to those that drain young people towards the shanty towns around cities comes into view.
So, I ask Connie Xivuri, do you think you might one day be running a vegetable garden for a small tourist lodge? "Why not?" she says, and then adds shyly but with visible excitement: "Why a small one? Maybe a big one."