Draper 2003 - Going Native - Trout and Settling Identity in a Rainbow Nation

Going native? Trout and settling identity in a rainbow nation

MALCOLM DRAPER

I will explain to him [my young son] as an acceptable

realpolitik: if the trout are lost, smash the state. More

than any other fish, trout are dependent upon the

ambience in which they are caught. Whether it is the trout

or the angler who is more sensitized to the degeneration

of habitat would be hard to say, but probably it is the trout.

Thomas McGuane1

The Last Day of Salmon

When James Henderson left Scotland to seek his fortune in South Africa

during the 1890s, after much searching around Natal, he finally bought,

settled on, and began to farm a piece of land he named Balbrogie in 1897.

There in the Waschbank area between Ladysmith and Newcastle, he made

good and his dynasty lives on a century later. The home he built was

decorated in an understandably nostalgic fashion, but little could have been as

deeply melancholic as the turn-of-the-century monochrome print of a

Malcolm Draper researches and teaches around the interplay of sociology, history, the environment and identity in the School of Human and Social Studies, University of Natal,

Pietermaritzburg. He would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who commented

on earlier drafts of this essay presented in Bulawayo, Durban and Johannesburg in

particular Gerhard Mar and Liz Gunner whose detailed reviews either saved Historias

editors much effort, or him the sting of rejection. Jeff Guy is responsible for the paper

having some archival references. When Draper failed to be persuaded by Guy that

searching archives can be as exciting as fishing, he made a cast prospecting for trout,

found some likely lies and passed on the rod which was not used until Ben Carton

eventually dragged the reluctant convert into the Pietermaritzburg depot.

1. T. MCGUANE, The Longest Silence: a Life in Fishing, (London, Random House, 1999), p.

110.

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

waterscape and fishing scene titled The Last Day of Salmon.2 According to

his late son Charles, the view of the Biggarsberg reminded him of the

landscape of his home district, Perthshire.3 That the Scots settler could

identify with the distinctly African bushveld, perhaps shows he harboured no

hope of reproducing his life at home. Still, he stocked the land with European

cattle and sheep and planted imported trees around the homestead that were to

overshadow the flat-topped acacias. While The Last Day of Salmon refers to

the close of the Scottish season, for Henderson it symbolised a resignation to

permanent exile from fly-fishing for his national fish. Attempts at

acclimatisation of the king of fish in South Africa never succeeded. This was

not true, however, of the lesser salmonidae, trout.

The Last Day of Salmon Source: M. Draper

When setting out to uncover little known aspects of settler and post-colonial

South African identity, trout are a great guide. As Adrian Franklin has shown,

2. The last day of salmon. 1902, Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd. London, Paris and New York.

Publishers by appointment to their Majesties the King and Queen Alexandra, printed in

Vienna. Painted by Alfred Parsons. Thanks to Callie Henderson for allowing me to

photograph her heirloom.

3. Pers comm late Charles Henderson, 4 June 2000.

56

animals are good to think with.4 With a similar historical frame as Franklin,

but a different geographical focus, I want to show that the acclimatisation of

trout is a powerful metaphor for appreciating, at the level of the elite at least,

a search for identity in a settler society. What piscatorial naturalists wanted to

see was not so much an empty landscape, but a vacant ecological niche into

which their favourite fish not only harmlessly slotted but, in so doing,

enriched life in the southern hemisphere. By contemplating water and the life

therein, anglers not only saw a reflection of the sustainability of their own

communities in question although usually unconsciously but were forced

to confront the socio-economic processes causing environmental

deterioration. Through tracing a few significant biographies in the Cape and

Natal provinces, the role of trout in conservation leadership is made apparent.

The close connection with museums and debates over heritage management is

drawn in the still unfolding, but very telling, history of state conservation

bureaucracies turning their backs on such exotic fish. State withdrawal leaves

the fate of trout in non-government and private hands. In Franklins book

angling and fly-fishing have a complex historical relation to capitalist

industrialism and can be both a cultural product of as well as resistance to

such values.5 Without rehearsing his deliberations on this theme or that of

masculinity in blood sports, I show that fly fishing provides a metaphor for

the form of non-violent, inter-racial male bonding that played a crucial role in

the elite pact which ushered South Africa away from apartheid. The same

holds true in contemporary labour relations at a national level. To provide an

analysis beyond the level of the elite, the role of ordinary African people in

the trout story is touched upon, along with that of the changing importance of

fish in a rural African community and attempts by organised fly fishers to

share the gilt-edged benefits thereof.

Issues of identity and environment have to be seen in the context of

globalisation. Trout originate in the northern hemisphere, but are not entirely

exotic to Africa. The brown trout (Salmo trutta) are natural inhabitants of the

Atlas Mountains, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco eastwards to the

Mediterranean. It was not from there that they came south, but from Britain

where they are also a native species, as they are elsewhere in Europe.

Rainbow trout (Salmo gairdneri later renamed Oncorhynchus mykiss) came

from North America. These two species were successfully and widely

established wherever rivers sufficiently cool and clear occurred. The lengths

that settlers went to in importing and naturalising these fish were extreme but

fitting considering that salmon are considered the king of fish, and trout the

4. A. FRANKLIN, Animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in

modernity, (Sage, London, 1999), pp. 2, 7.

5. Ibid., pp. 117, 121.


57

prince. In more recent times in South Africa, trout are close to following the

Scottish thistle onto the list of invasive alien species to be eradicated from the

local ecology. Such a line of reasoning should lead one to Alfred Crosbys

ecological imperialism thesis of biological succession being a more important

engine of world history than deliberate forceful conquest. Yet trout slip out of

and highlight big holes in Crosbys sweeping historical net. Most obviously,

by Crosbys own definition, Southern Africa is not among the Lands of

Demographic Takeover where

European pioneers were accompanied and often preceded by

their domesticated animals, walking, sources of food,

leather, fibre, power and wealth, and these animals often

adapted more rapidly to their new surroundings than their

masters. To a certain extent, the success of Europeans as

colonists was automatic as soon as they put their tough, fast,

fertile and intelligent animals ashore.6

Also, rainbow trout are a species that went the other way: from western North

America to Europe where they have successfully colonised considerable

bodies of water, at the expense of indigenous species in some cases.

Nevertheless, as is seen when wading into the biological debates below, trout

can be located within what John Mackenzie has called the apocalyptic view

of the environmental history of empire.7 Richard Groves alternative narrative

of green imperialism is also apposite for many reasons deeper than the

strong Scottish connection. As he has revealed, men whose intellectual, and

aesthetic sensibilities had been shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment, which

emerged in nationalist tension to English imperialism, put down settler

environmentalist roots in the nineteenth century Cape. By the mid nineteenth

century, romantic landscape tastes and a school of landscape painting

paralleled the contemporary intellectual dominance of the Scots in all fields.

Thomas Pringle, whose writings stimulated many a settler imagination during

this time, made much of the comparability between Scottish and African

landscapes.8 This tradition might well explain James Hendersons willingness

to identify with the African savannah in the foothills of the Biggarsberg. As

we shall see, the redemptive environmentalist mission of acclimatisers and

6. A. CROSBY Ecological Imperialism: the overseas migration of Western Europeans as a

biological phenomenon in D. WORSTER (ed.) The Ends of the earth: perspectives on

modern environmental history, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988) p. 109.

7. J. MACKENZIE, Empire and the ecological apocalypse: the historiography of the imperial

environment, in T. GRIFFITHS, and L. ROBIN (eds, Ecology and empire: environmental

history of settler societies, (University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1997), pp. 215-

228.

8. R. GROVE, Scotland in South Africa: John Croumbie Brown and the roots of settler

environmentalism, in T. GRIFFITHS, and L. ROBIN (eds), Ecology and Empire, pp. 139,

142.

58

trout men in the Cape has continuity with Groves naturalist clergymen. But

this internationalist trajectory what Nigel Clark calls environmental

cosmopolitanism has been intercepted and unsettled by more recent

nationalist concern about invasive alien organisms.9 The Commaroffs have

highlighted the xenophobic social parallels of such apocalyptic moral panic

with a focus on the contemporary Cape on a largely postcolonial canvas.10 By

going back some decades and revealing trout being dubbed an eco-terrorist,

a label which found more disfavour with Afrikaner conservationists than

former terrorists or African nationalist freedom fighters, it is hoped that

some complicating texture is added to the picture. In contemporary times, the

pursuit of this fish has become an ironic hallmark of class and character

amongst significant members of the African nationalist elite and therefore

reveals an antinomy of the African Renaissance.

Pisciculture, the domestic cultivation and breeding of fish, dates back to the

early Egyptian dynasties, but received a European impulse in Germany during

the mid 18th

century. It was inaugurated in Britain in 1837 with effort initially

concentrated on salmon.11 In the 1860s trout and salmon ova were transported

to Australia in the refrigeration chambers of ships. The success of those

efforts stimulated local interest. Act No. 10 of 1867 was passed by the Cape

Government for the purpose of encouraging the introduction into the waters

of this Colony of fishes not native to such waters. In The Guide to South and

East Africa for the Use of Tourists, Sportsmen, Invalids and Settlers, the

Union-Castle Company claimed that their man, Lachlan Maclean,

who, after personally importing a consignment of ova in

1884, induced the Government to take the matter up in 1892,

the year, by the way, in which work first commenced on this

guide book.12

The editors of the guide also pointed out that the

first successful attempts to introduce trout was due to

Macleans representations to the government, his own

9. N. CLARK, The Demon Seed: Bioinvasion as the Unsettling of Environmental

Cosmopolitanism in Theory Culture and Society, 19(1-2), 2002, pp. 101-125.

10. J. COMAROFF and J. COMAROFF Naturing the nation: aliens, apocalypse and the

postcolonial state in Journal of Southern African Studies, 27(3), 2002, pp. 627-651.

11. F. SHAW, The complete science of fly fishing and spinning, (Fred Shaw, London ,1920), p.

97. Domestic cultivation has proved to be the salvation of the wild salmon in Scotland, but

has not been without negative environmental impact.

12. A. SAMLER BROWN and G. GORDON BROWN (eds), The guide to South and East Africa for

the use of tourists, sportsmen, invalids and Settlers, (For the Union-Castle Company, 23rd

edition, Sampson Low, Marston & Juta, London & Cape Town, 1917), p. 765.


59

efforts, like those efforts in Natal beginning in 1875 without

state support, must have resulted in failure.13

Popular histories in the Cape and Natal compete over which won the race to

successfully import trout. Natal appears to be the victor by an insignificant

margin. Private individuals formed a committee in Natal and, with financial

assistance from the Natal Colonial Government, managed to hatch and release

brown trout fry in the Umgeni and Bushmans Rivers in May 1890 which

survived and self-propagated. These were imported from Scotland where fish

farming techniques provided a model for the world to follow.14

In 1926 a

monument at Trout Bungalow in the Nottingham Road area was erected to a

man reputed to have released the first brown trout into the Mooi River. In

1990 a delegation of pilgrims made a pilgrimage to the shrine in a celebration

of a century of trout in South Africa. According to the Natal Parks Boards

fresh water scientist, Jake Alletson who organised the event, many of the

visitors from were from overseas and included amongst their numbers were

members of royalty and aristocracy.15 The sundial monument is inscribed

with the following tribute:

ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF

JOHN CLARKE PARKER

By Lovers of the Gentle Art of

TROUT FISHING

By His Untiring Efforts

TROUT

Were First Introduced Into

NATAL

CIRCA A.D. 1884

Thereby Giving Much Pleasure

To

Many Persons

1926

13. Ibid., p. 765.

14. R.S. CRASS, Freshwater fishes of Natal, (Shuter & Shooter, Pietermaritzburg, 1964), p. 30;

Trout Fishing in Natal, (Daily News, Durban, 1971), p. 6; Trout in South Africa,

(Johannesburg, Macmillan, 1986); T. LIVERSAGE, The history of the introduction of exotic

trout into the waters of KwaZulu-Natal, (Unpublished Honours Dissertation, University of

Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1996), pp. 3-22.

15. J. ALLETSON, Celebration of the Centenary of Trout in South Africa, in Flyfishing

(Official Journal of the Federation of Southern African Flyfishers) 3 (12), 1990, p. 12.

60

In spite of such success, the Natal enthusiasts had to learn the hard way about

their fishs intolerance of warm water. Organised fisherman began to press

for a closed season for six months of the year, only applicable to protecting

trout. The Western Districts Game Protection Association was formed in

1890, to which Trout was added in 1902, and assumed responsibility for the

introduction of the fish to the Western Cape. Growing out of this body, the

Cape Piscatorial Society was formed in 1931 and today still proudly upholds

the credo of Extending and encouraging the culture and protection of Trout

and other desirable freshwater fish in the Cape.16

Much of the details of these histories are of little consequence here. It is

sufficient to note that the importation and acclimatisation of brown trout was

successful before the close of the nineteenth century, and rainbow trout

followed soon thereafter. This required considerably more resources than

private individuals could muster and succeeded as a result of co-operation

between non-government and government institutions dedicated to the cause,

as well as the movement of ova between the provinces. By 1911 a South

Africa railways guide to Natal advertising trout fishing as an attraction,

demonstrates that there is no reason for settler melancholy on this score. One

of the saddest moments when packing up to move to this land, writes an

Army Officer, in the South African Field,

was when I came to my fishing rods, and surmised that they

would probably for years, hang idly on their nails; but reality

has proved far different, and I can now say without

exaggeration that the man without well preserved water on

his own land has out here a better chance of sport than in

Great Britain.17

Grove has shown the relationship between Scottish nationalism, a fervently

puritanical Calvinism and nascent environmentalism in the mid-nineteenth

century Cape. Such values provide an impulse to this tale but, as is seen

below, soon thereafter become a tributary indistinguishable from the

quickening flow of South African nationalism and nativist ecological thought.

The most accessible way to relate fly fishing and trout to Groves themes is

through Norman Macleans writing set in early twentieth century Montana,

USA. A river runs through it, which, with the help of Robert Redford, Brad

Pitt and Columbia pictures, romanticised the pursuit in the public imagination

in an unprecedented fashion. Macleans autobiographically inspired writing,

as he put it turned out to be Western stories as one publisher said in

16. E. HERBST, The Cape Piscatorial Society: Sixty-eight years of service to angling and

conservation, (1999) at http://www.smallstreams.com/cps.html,. accessed 8 May, 2000.

17. A.H. TATLOW (ed.), Natal Province: descriptive guide and official handbook, (South

African Railways Printing Works, Durban, 1911), Chapter 16, Trout Fishing in Natal, p.

360.


61

returning them, These stories have trees in them. While fictionally

embroidered, his principle debt is to his father, a minister who restored his

soul walking the hills between sermons and fishing. The story opens as

follows:

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and

fly fishing ... As a Scot and a Presbyterian my father

believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from

the original state of grace. . . he certainly believed God could

count and that only by picking up Gods rhythms were we

able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians,

he often used the word beautiful. . . To him, all good things

trout as well as eternal salvation come by grace and

grace comes by art and art does not come easy. So my

brother and I learned to cast Presbyterian-style, on a

metronome.

Maclean believes that his stories are historically instructive. What might the

lesson be for us? His brother Pauls fly fishing reached a state of grace much

higher than his fathers and when he was casting the canyon was glorified by

rhythms and colors.18

Theologians refer to the above passage to point out

refuges of sanity, truth and grace in a world gone mad and make parallels

with ethical farming.19 Yet from his early aversion to his fathers oatmeal

porridge in the morning, hard work and asceticism held no attraction to Paul

Maclean. Like many famed fly fisherman, he was a gifted writer and

journalist, but this work was produced under the influence of a copious intake

of alcohol and his brother affectionately narrates his moral life falling in

smaller and smaller circles of decay. Perhaps another lesson is that pursuits

with religious roots can quickly become institutionalised in secular society

without any loss of vigour. Max Webers classic of historical sociology, The

Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, explores religious values of

salvation underlying hard work and capital accumulation which had

unintended consequences that may have changed the world.20

Fly fishing is not above commodification and as will be further explored

shown, manifests itself in contradictory ways. Reverend John Croumbie

Browns (1808-1894) words, according to Grove had thundered from a Cape

18. N. MACLEAN, A river runs through it and other stories, (University of Chicago Press,

Chicago, 1976). pp. ix-5. I subsequently discovered that this passage has twice been used

in theological scholarship. See below.

19. W. FRIESEN, What are we fighting for? in Direction, 21(2), 1992, pp. 47-53; D. TOOLE,

Farming, Fly Fishing and Grace: How to inhabit a postnatural world without going mad

in Soundings, 76(1), 1993, pp 85-104. Many thanks to Steve De Gruchy for finding these

references after seeing an earlier draft.

20. M. WEBER, The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, (Scribners, New York, 1958

[1904-1905]).

62

Town pulpit with all the energy of Scottish ecological redemption.21

Although the details and pulpits were to change, nationalism, moral

righteousness and unintended consequences are themes that lived on through

the close relationship between conservation and trout in South Africa.

A worldly work advocated by Brown was afforestation the planting of

trees of righteousness in the moral wilderness. Grove does not tell us

which species, but in all likelihood, such trees would have been Scottish trees

such as the pine which today, among other exotics, are the subject of much

controversy for contributing to, rather than alleviating, what Brown called

dessication by consuming so much water, and blotting out indigenous

biodiversity. Work is underway to eradicate them from Table Mountain. As

we shall see, trout have been accused of having run afoul of endemic

biodiversity, a moral concept which, today, is the zeitgeist of conservation

science and management. Trout are not without their own flock of

worshippers whose politics centre on the need for clean water. This is an

understandably unexplored dimension in Donald Moores study of

environmental conflicts and cultural contestations in Zimbabwes Eastern

Highlands, which insightfully views the landscape as the historical

sedimentation of symbolic and material processes.22

He opens with a quotation from Norman Maclean:

A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to

know what it says to each of us.23

To appreciate what some rivers have to say to us, we have to listen closely to

their inhabitants, trout. As bearers of the spirit of capitalism, they carry

contradictions that have both divided and united South Africa. If one was to

follow the western fashion of environmental history and attribute agency to

nature, one could say that this is a story with not only trees in it, but also

toads, swans, damselflies, minnows and a princely fish-imperial which is

central to the forging of settler identification with the landscape, South

African conservation institutions, and a peaceful negotiated settlement. The

trout is contested heritage. It not only says things about how settlers wish to

21. R. GROVE, Scotland in South Africa: John Croumbie Brown and the roots of settler

environmentalism, in T. GRIFFITHS, and L. ROBIN (eds), Ecology and Empire, p.151.

22. D. MOORE, Clear waters and muddied histories: Environmental history and the politics of

community in Zimbabwes Eastern highlands, in Journal of Southern African Studies,

24(2), 1998, pp. 377-404.

23. N. MACLEAN, A river runs through it and other stories, p. 102. Trout and fishing politics

do feature in the Zimbabwean case, and are extensions of empire which came via the same

route as the oaks, squirrels and starlings brought personally by Cecil John Rhodes and left

as an ambiguous living heritage for Cape Town. As conservationists today seek to

establish ecological corridors for the migration of wildlife from reserve to reserve, so

Rhodes dreamt of a British corridor and train line pushing all the way through to Cairo.


63

become naturalised, but also how natives can become restless settlers. We

now turn to the biographies which best illustrate the former.

Sons of Trout: the rapture of South African landscape24

Adolph Hey began his adulthood by being drafted into the Prussian army in

1870 from the small town of Schleusigen in Germany, which is situated on

the edge of the edge of the Thringen forest and on the junction of the river

Schleus. The river takes its name from the old weirs and sluices flowing into

the fishponds of the abbey of Vessra. His grandson, who is central to the

linking of trout and conservation, writes of this in the Cape one and a quarter

centuries later to indicate how far back water and fisheries go in his life. After

three years of service, Adolph Hey moved to Liege in Belgium to train as a

horticulturalist. In 1875 he set off to Scotland to further his education in

forestry. There he met Janet Drummond whom he married in Edinburgh in

1876. Lean times in Scotland made him look for opportunities abroad. He

successfully applied for the post of horticulturalist in the Cape Town Botanic

Gardens, but delays in their passage meant that when they arrived in Cape

Town in 1877, the post had been filled. He found work first as a gardener and

later as a policeman and retired as a Chief Constable in the Eastern Cape in

1908. Adolph and Janet Heys most remarkable achievement was parenting

eleven children, the fourth being S.A. Hey.

S.A. Hey married Sybil Dreyer, a sportswomen and teacher who shared his

love of walking in the outdoors. A disagreement with the brides Anglican

parson over the wedding details meant that they did not observe the Sabbath

in Keiskammahoek where S.A. Hey was appointed postmaster just after their

marriage and before the birth of their son, Douglas, in 1914. When censured

by the village elders for walking instead of worshipping on Sundays, S.A.

replied that he believed that he was closer to his Creator in the outdoors than

in a church. Given S.A. Heys mixed nationality and that his career spanned

the two world wars, his book, The rapture of the river: an autobiography of a

South African fisherman, makes a claim to identity but avoids politics and

personal detail, including his first name, and focuses instead on his self-

initiated passion: fish and angling, trout and fly fishing in particular.25

His son

Douglas, whose conservation career will be followed shortly, is more open on

24. Sons of Trout is the name of a South African pop band in a category dubbed by music

journalists as white-boy rock. I wrote to them asking about the origin and significance of

the name, but their cryptic and vacuous reply indicated nothing. This paper shows that

there is something in a name.

25. S.A. HEY, The rapture of the river: an autobiography of a South African fisherman, (A.A.

Balkema, Cape Town, 1957) p. 26. My emphasis. The authors first name is Sydney but I

prefer to refer to him by his initials, as he does.

64

matters personal and remembers his grandfather as a stern old gentleman of

martial bearing who listened to military marches on the gramophone I

have kinder memories of my grandmother, a frail careworn lady who

spoke with a soft Scottish accent she would croon her wee laddie to

sleep with Scottish lullabies.

S.A. Hey not only fished but, beginning with the Keiskama and Gxulu rivers,

stocked a great deal of water of the Eastern Cape with trout. The stock was

acquired from the Pirie trout hatchery located some 25 km from King

Williams Town. It was established in 1901 as a private undertaking by the

Frontier Acclimatisation Society of King Williamstown with the aim of

stocking what they termed the barren waters of the Province.26

S.A. Heys

telling of his close involvement with this society is the nearest sense he gives

of a political home. The river was probably a good place to escape human

conflict and a clashing identity. The Heys moved north to Maclear in 1927

which is surrounded by excellent trout water stocked in the early 1900s by the

Society, but far from its headquarters in King Williams Town. So the Heys

lived and fished remote from and with little influence on institutions of

significance until 1937 when Douglas Hey took a job as a biologist for the

Cape Provincial Administration at the Jonkershoek Hatchery on the Eerste

River near the town of Stellenbosch.

Douglas Hey matriculated in 1931 and went on to study at Natal University

College and Rhodes University, then did a three year stint of teaching to

repay a bursary. During this period, A.C. Harrison, who was to become a

mentor figure in Heys life, was appointed Inland Fisheries Officer. In that

same year he reconstituted the Western Districts Game and Trout Protection

Association as the Cape Piscatorial Society. Before following Douglas Heys

career, Cecil Harrisons deserves a word. It is best summed up by the

accolade given to him by the University of Cape Town in June 1960 when he

was awarded an honorary Master of Science:

Calmly, industriously, unostentatiously for more than 50

years Mr. Harrison has enriched the world of learning as a

freshwater biologist and piscatorial expert. His list of

scholarly publications on trout, bass, eels, the kurper and

many exotic fishes is long and impressive. He has found

time to serve as honorary secretary of the Cape Piscatorial

Society since its inception in 1931, and is the editor of its

excellent journal [Piscator]. For more than 20 years he has

been the Advisory Officer for Cape Inland Fisheries ...

Throughout his professional life he has striven to conserve

26. D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, (Cape Nature Conservation, Cape Town,

1995), p. 180.


65

and safeguard the living beauty of nature from mans

destructiveness; and since 1952 he has been secretary to the

Advisory Committee for Nature Conservation. Such men,

Mr. Chancellor, who seek to keep alive our awareness of

nature in an industrialized world, are rare.27

A.C. Harrison, who died in 1980, embodied how tightly knit are particular

strands of government, non-government and academic institutions in the

world of fly fishing. Douglas Heys academic career while at Jonkershoek

hatchery continued at Stellenbosch University where his zoological research

on trout cultivation was awarded a Master of Science (Cum Laude) in 1938.

He continued to investigate trout as well as the propagation of the South

African clawed toad (Xenopus laevis) which was in greater demand by the

medical fraternity (for use in establishing early human pregnancy) than wild

stocks could supply. This work was rewarded with a Stellenbosch PhD in

1942. Douglas Heys work on trout took a number of directions. He

discovered that the reasons for poor fertility at the Jonkershoek Hatchery was

related to its being a far from ideal location for trout propagation. Moreover

he found that, as he put it

suitable waters for rainbow and especially for brown trout

are limited in South Africa due to factors such as high

summer temperatures, turbidity and fluctuations in

streamflow ... Many marginal waters therefore require

restocking and it was realised that if Inland Fisheries was to

acquire national recognition, it would have to be based on

more than the promotion of trout angling.28

Trout cannot breed at all in lakes and have to be repeatedly stocked unless a

suitable headwater exists which is rare in South Africa. Accordingly, the

hatchery broadened its scope to include the propagation of other species of

fish, both indigenous and introduced, which could improve the provinces

fresh water fisheries. Conservation was also seen as important, including total

protection of small indigenous fish in selected habitats. Both the owners and

anglers of various waters had made the hatchery aware of water pollution, and

attending to this was part of its brief. The province approved all this as policy

and established the Department of Fisheries in 1943. The work with toads

involved both collecting and propagating them in large numbers. During the



28. D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, (Cape Nature Conservation, Cape Town,

1995), p. 57.

66

Second World War when the hatchery was exporting 20 000 toads annually,

South Africa made its reply to Americas rainbow trout. As Hey writes;

An interesting sidelight is that clawed toads have become

established in the wild in California, Arizona and Virginia

and may pose a threat to the native fauna.29

Jonkershoeks aquacultural effort extended onto white-owned commercial

farms as well as the Transkei where work on promoting fish ponds as a

source of protein stole a march on a trend in development work which came

in the 1960s and 70s. Inland Fisheries publicised the untapped potential of

fresh water fish as a source of food, for recreation, tourism, the control of

insect pests and for ornamenting homes and gardens. It was responsible for

the promulgation of the Inland Fisheries Ordinance No. 12 of 1947: the first

legislation to protect aquatic resources from pollution, and responsibility for

upholding this law was uniquely devolved from the police largely to Fisheries

staff. Douglas Hey pioneered biological measures of water quality in South

Africa and, in 1950, began writing memoranda to the Provincial

Administration about the urgency of nature conservation more generally, and

the need for a government body with a broader brief than fisheries. He later

found out that his proposals never reached their addressee, the Provincial

secretary, but concluded, given subsequent developments, that they must have

had some influence.

In 1952 the Cape Department of Nature Conservation and Museum Services

was born, with Douglas Hey the Director a position which he retained for

27 years until retiring in 1979. He confesses that it was not the conservation

of contemporary natural life and its environs that motivated the creation of

the Department. It derived from a proposal to resuscitate, consolidate and

improve the finances of the five natural history museums of the Cape. The

unintended, but quickly following consequence was the consolidation and co-

ordination of conservation policy, legislation and action in the province.

Although upon his retirement he was appointed Director of the National

Monuments Council, it was his experience of nature conservation which had

him invited to take up several visiting professorships at local and American

universities and earned the following laurels which were, among several

others, heaped upon him: member of honour of the World Wide Fund for

Nature in 1981, Civic Honours of the City of Cape Town in 1989 and an

honourary doctorate from the University of Stellenbosch in 1993. A

conservationist of national and global importance had emerged from a

hatchery in Stellenbosch. Natal conservation institutions were also

29. Ibid., p. 73.


67

consolidated during the post-WWII apartheid era.30

The name which

establishes the close trout-forged link between the conservation bureaucracies

of the provinces, is Geddes-Page. Douglas Heys father, S.A. Hey, tells of

meeting a man called John Page:

a prominent and valued committee member of the Frontier

Acclimatisation Society and a fly fishing fanatic ... At the

time of writing [1957] his son, Colonel Geddes-Page, is

curator of the Government fisheries at the Pirie and Geddes-

Pages son John is in charge of the inland fisheries for Natal.

This goes to show there must be something in heredity!31

In 1977 when the Capes Department of Nature Conservation celebrated its first 25

years, Douglas Hey was considered to have been the founding father. Source: Die

Burger 1977.

30. M. DRAPER, Zen and the Art of Garden Province Maintenance: The soft intimacy of hard

men in the wilderness of KwaZulu-Natal, 1952-1997, Journal of Southern African

Studies, 24,4, (1998).

31. S.A. HEY, The rapture of the river: an autobiography of a South African fisherman, p. 59.

68

S.A. Heys sociobiological conclusion probably applied as much to his own

family, for his son Douglas was central to this succession. Pirie hatchery had

run into difficult circumstances and could not compete economically with the

states Jonkershoek operation. Douglas Hey successfully recommended that

the Pirie operation be taken over by the Cape Administration as a satellite to

Jonkershoek in 1946. Colonel Geddes-Page, who had returned home after

being wounded in action and being taken as a prisoner of war, was appointed

curator. He made great strides in developing the Pirie hatchery, and his son

John helped him when on leave from the department of inland revenue. John,

in turn, joined Jonkershoek as curator in 1948. In six years he was to make

great advances in developing Inland Fisheries and promoting fish culture in

the Cape.32

His work attracted attention and in 1954 a personal letter from

Colonel Jack Vincent, the Director of the Natal Parks Board, recruited him

for Natal. Although the early name of the Board was clear about the interest

in fish, unlike subsequent directors, Vincent had no interest in fly-fishing.

Shortly after John Geddes-Page became incumbent at Queen Elizabeth Park,

an incident occurred which he only made public half a century later.

I had settled in comfortably and was picking up the

requirements of the new job from The Colonel and from

the Fisheries Research Officer, Bob Crass, when the Judge

(who was a member of the Board at that time, and who shall

remain nameless!) called me to his Chambers. Imagine! I

was somewhat overawed. Well, I was duly informed that he

was the Chairman of the Trout Fishing Liaison Committee

of the Natal Parks Board and he then spent a monologuish

twenty minutes telling me exactly how I should run the

Boards Inland Fisheries Department in general and how I

should attend to the best interests of Natals trout fishermen

in particular.33

The night after threatening Geddes-Page who pointed out that the Judge was

acting out of his jurisdiction as a board member, the Judge died which

prompted Vincent to jestingly accuse his new recruit of witchcraft. The

humorous anecdote speaks volumes about power, trout and conservation

bureaucracies. John Geddes-Page filled Col. Jack Vincents shoes as Director

in 1963 where he remained for 25 years until his retirement in 1988. Trout

fishermen were well served in his term and that of his successor, George

Hughes, a reputed conservation biologist who was trained in Scotland. The

32. D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, pp. 55, 56.

33. J. GEDDES-PAGE, New boy in the board in The Game Ranger (Official Mouthpiece of

the Game Rangers Association of Africa(, (Commemorative Edition, February 1994).


69

transforming KwaZulu-Natal conservation bureaucracy replaced Hughes with

Khulani Mkhize in 2002.34 Debate about the place of trout in conservation

work, which Hughes used to put a lid on because trout are sacrosanct to

him, has surfaced.35 Trout, along with all freshwater fish stand to lose their

protected status in KwaZulu-Natal. Although it was initially an official with

an Afrikaans name raising questions about trout in the Natal Parks Board, and

a Zulu nationalist heading the KwaZulu-Natal Conservation Service as it

begins to attempt to cut loose its exotic roots, such anti-imperial sentiment is

located, as we see below, in new ecological paradigms which stress

conserving the integrity of native ecosystems. Before Hughes and his trout

came under the guillotine, exotic trees in the provinces parks began to fall.

If John Croumbie Brown had advocated planting fishes of righteousness in

South African waters, they would have, in all likelihood, been salmon and

salmonids. The Frontier Acclimatisation Society planted, amongst other

species, righteous trout in what Brown called the moral wilderness, but

these were both Brown and Rainbow, thus both old and new world fish. The

work of the Frontier Acclimatisation Society was, it seems, less about

landscaping the country in the image of a particular European nation and

more about forging a new national identity which identified with the local

landscape and transcended lines of nationalist conflict between Europeans.

S.A. Hey used to enjoy Afrikaans hospitality on his fishing trips and referred

to his closest fishing companion by a Xhosa nickname. As John Geddes-Page

recently quipped when I questioned him about this pedigree; they were just a

bunch of chaps who loved nature and the country.36 S.A. Hey echoed

Browns concerns about soil erosion which he ascribed as being responsible

for the fishing in 1957 no longer being what it used to be:

The cause of the deterioration which has taken place during

the last twenty years may be ascribed mainly to the

exploitation of the soil. . . silt has been as deleterious to the

estuary fishing as to the trout fishing.37

34. Mkhizes career was built in the KwaZulu conservation bureaucracy. See Draper, Zen and

the Art of Garden Province Maintenance for background underscoring the political

significance of such origins.

35. Personal communication with a senior officer bearer who retired in 2001. (October 2000 &

April 2001).

36. Personal communication, September 2000.


70

He considered, but never did anything about organising anglers in defence of

their waters. As revealed below, a threat to the protected status of trout

initially mobilised fly fishermen as conservationists at a national level.

A Vacant Ecological Niche? Truth and trout

In the Cape during the late 1970s, a swansong prelude signalled the opening

of the drama in which the relationship between trout and state conservation

began to come undone. Douglas Hey tells of a feral colony of mute swans

established through a historical accident in the Kromme River near

Humansdorp. Residents of the area requested that they be protected, and so

they were granted total protection in terms of the Wildlife Ordinance in 1952.

For reasons both aesthetic and ecological, in consultation with an authority on

waterfowl, Peter Scott, it was decided to establish a second colony on

Groenvlei in the Goukamma Nature Reserve. During the 1970s, these birds

grew in number in the Lakes District, while the original group dwindled. Hey

believed that these birds could be an asset and a tourist attraction:

A flight of these birds seen against the evening sky was a

breathtaking sight. In the words of Sir Peter Scott after a

visit to the Cape: Keep an eye on these swans, Douglas,

they are worth looking after. Unfortunately, my successors

did not share this view and being alien birds, considered

them undesirable in a nature reserve. Within two years of my

retirement the last swan had disappeared from Groenvlei.38

This avian story marked a swift about-turn in ecological thought as

viewpoints of the landscape, and how it should be gardened, radically

diverged. In 1985, a few years after the swan had bowed out of the Cape

conservation picture, controversy began to heat up over the status of trout in

the provinces cool water. Under Douglas Heys successor, Wolf Morsbach,

who had literally been at Heys side when the original swan project had been

undertaken, Drs Kas Hamman and Johan Neethling led the charge against fly

fishers. This came soon after they had concluded the sport of allegedly

removing the imperial swans with shotguns, personally.39 Exotic trout had

been afforded more protection than indigenous species of fish, they reasoned.

This did not square with the mission of conservation as these men understood

it, so they aimed to tilt the bureaucratic balance in favour of the endangered

indigenous minnow species such as the redfin and the Cape galaxias.

38. D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, p. 180.

39. Personal communication, senior Cape Conservation Official, December, 2000.


71

When Douglas Hey wrote that the mute swan has the distinction of being the

only alien fauna to be declared protected wildlife in the Cape, he was

referring to total protection.40

Being an angling species of wildlife that could

be preyed upon within limits by sanctioned humans, trout had partial legal

protection until 1987. The threat and eventual loss of protected status brought

about an unprecedented unification amongst the devotees of this fish which,

according to Fred Croney, the first president of the Federation of Southern

African Flyfishers (FOSAF), a century of effort had failed to achieve. The

late Croney, a seasoned Eastern Cape journalist and newspaper editor,

identified the prime movers in the change of the whole scene as being the

clubs in his area. Perhaps seeing their future threatened by the then impending

handover of the Provincial hatchery at Pirie to the Ciskei government, they

formed the Federation of East Cape Trout Angling Clubs in1982. This was a

success and provided the confidence for them to lead the way in forming a

national body when Cape Conservation provided the catalyst by moving

against protection for trout. Yet at the outset and in the same breath, Croney

was explicit in dispelling the notion that FOSAF came into being solely to

protect the interests of trout fishermen. As proof he cites their constitution as

originally formulated. Sure enough, it does not mention trout and puts the

bottom line on catchment and river conservation where FOSAF sees its

major task in the future. He quotes Douglas Hey whose publications after his

retirement have confronted this ghost and repeatedly maintained that water is

the source of life thereby provided trout defenders with a strong position to

which they have regular recourse: It is regrettable that a number of species of

particular scientific interest have become rare. But viewed in retrospect,

however, I believe that the introduction of trout to South Africa has proved to

be an asset to our country.41

Before FOSAF was launched and formed its own journal, Flyfishing, Fly

fishers used to publish in and read club-based journals such as the Capes

Piscator, Natals The Creel and general commercial angling magazines. In

one, wherein the launch of FOSAF was announced, the Cape Nature

Conservation Department officials were called radical conservationists by

well-known trout author and Pietermaritzburg medical doctor, Tom Sutcliffe.

This label, rare for a government department, rested on the basis of a lack of

scientific proof being presented for the case that trout are:

rapacious villains of the peace guilty . . .of causing certain

species of redfin minnow ... to hover on the very edges of

40. D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, p. 180.

41. FEDERATION OF SOUTHERN AFRICAN FLYFISHERS (FOSAF). FOSAF Update, Flyfishing:

The official Journal of the Federation of Southern African Flyfishers, 1, 1, 1987, p. 29.

72

extinction ... Exotics are unwanted in any environment

because they have the potential to upset it ... Some exotics,

however, may slot very neatly and peacefully into a foreign

area simply by chance. I would contend that the trout in

South Africa is an example of this phenomenon. In the

words of one famous South African fisheries scientist, trout

filled a vacant ecological niche in this country. 42

At a presentation to the Natal Fly Fishers Club in that same year, 1986,

Sutcliffe maintained that we should not be as concerned with minutiae but

should focus on the real attack on all fish, big and small: water extraction, soil

erosion, pollution and so forth.43 These were Douglas Heys concerns for the

Eerste River at Jonkershoek, and he relied on trout-focussed people to keep

vigil on such matters. Yet for others such as Kas Hamman, who followed

Heys path from leading aquatic science at Jonkershoek to heading up Cape

Nature Conservation, the loss of three species of minutiae is also of

concern, and he saw trout as guilty and said they could not do anything about

it in Heys day. When I pointed out to Hamman during an interview in 2000

that Cape Nature Conservation was literally and figuratively built on the

foundations of the trout hatchery at Jonkershoek, from where John Geddes-

Page emerged to lead conservation in Natal, he responded that this is

unfortunately so.44

By 2002, however, Hamman had reconciled himself with

what he called the the chequered history of conservation authorities and

embraced FOSAF Yellowfish Working Group as an ally in freshwater

conservation in face of government fragmentation and neglect. He also

acknowledged that it was more than the Cape and Natal who owed

Jonkershoek for providing conservation leadership:

For many environmentalists and especially for those of us

actively involved in conservation, Jonkershoek is

synonymous with the trout hatchery established during the

early 1890s. More importantly, however, Jonkershoek

provided a founding platform for conservation in South

Africa. It is here at this well-known fish hatchery that the

directors of the former four provincial conservation

departments of the Cape, Free State, Transvaal and Natal had

their initial training as fisheries officers.45

42. T. SUTCLIFFE, A federation of flyfishers is bornin SA Fishing, 9(1), 1986, my emphasis.

43. Personal observation, 1986.

44. Personal Communication Dr. Kas Hamman, 27 June 2000.

45. K. HAMMAN, And it all Started at Jonkershoek in P. ARDENE (ed), Proceedings of the

6th Yellowfish Working Group Conference in Cederberg, Western Cape, 21-23 March,

2002.


73

FOSAF convened a symposium in April 1986 where the countrys leading

aquatic scientists and conservationists debated trout. According to the

defence, the consensus amongst delegates was that Cape Nature Conservation

should not remove the legislative protection. Yet Hamman believes that his

case was also vindicated and, although seen as more benign than other species

with a wider threshold of tolerance of temperature and water quality variation

such as large and small-mouthed bass, trout did not emerge completely

purged of all guilt. It was recognised that evidence for extinctions does not

exist; trout certainly preyed upon some and displaced other indigenous

species. Hamman believes that this about-turn in attitude to trout by Cape

Conservation might have created conflict, but was necessary in order that

differences with the angling fraternity be resolved. By the late 1980s and

early 1990s, a spirit of pragmatic compromise began to prevail in which the

value of trout was resuscitated. In Grahamstown, at an angling exhibition at

the JLB Smith Institute in 1990, Mike Bruton (the then head of this

organisation which is the centre of ichthyology in Southern African) was

reported as saying that trout should be seen as naturalised aliens and part of

our cultural heritage.46

Yet in 1997 a former student of Brutons, Jim Cambray of the Albany

Museum of Natural History in Grahamstown, reopened this healing wound

when he took his position to the press:

Between 1850 and 1950, there was a dramatic increase in the

rate of animal extinctions, which coincided with European

colonial expansion. Many alien plants and creatures were

introduced to colonised territories, some with disastrous

consequences. One of these was the rainbow trout, which is

still being moved, in many cases illegally, around South

Africa, New Zealand, Australia and other countries. It is still

being introduced into river systems where local species have

been living and evolving for many thousands of years. In the

light of present-day knowledge, this is truly eco-terrorism ...

We have just passed through a period of political terrorism:

let us now move away from eco-terrorism, even if it means

the end of trout. 47

The following week, two journalists, Ed Herbst and Robert Kirby, waded into

the fray and in separate strident defences of trout, trotted out the familiar

46. Mail & Guardian, May 16-22, 1997

47. Mail & Guardian, May 9-15, 1997.

74

ecological and economic defence. Herbst concluded that Cambrays case did

harm to the green cause and might explain why universities have a funding

crisis. Kirby, who had recently published a book Fly Fishing in Southern

Africa,48 accused Cambray of silliness and concluded thus:

A distinction always needs to be made between desirable and

undesirable exotic species. Clearly the elegant trout falls into

the former category. If it does not, we may as well go all the

way in obeying the frenzied counsel of the Cambrays of this

world. While we are getting rid of all our trout and bass, lets

uproot all our fruit trees and our wheat and maize fields,

vineyards; lets slaughter all the exotic cattle and sheep,

goats, dogs, poultry, rip up all the ornamental bushes and

shrubs, the flowers and vegetables. Lets go back to eating

grubs and maroela berries? And while were about it, for

heavens sake lets eradicate as many facile academics as we

can identify. Hustle back into your museum, Dr Cambray,

and spend your fruitful mind in the contemplation of other

well-stuffed artefacts.49

In 1998 a local environmental publication kept the debate alive by enquiring

how green is trout fishing?.50 When an opinion was solicited from the office

of the Cape Piscatorial Society, Kirbys tirade echoed almost word-for-word.

The secretary, Jean Farrell, recently told Dean Impson, Cape Nature

Conservation fish scientist and FOSAF member, that the trout is a lovely

noble fish and the redfin is a useless minnow. Thank goodness you werent

around when the dinosaurs were here or youd want to save them too! It was

to this office that Cape Nature Conservation conferred responsibility for

administering angling in the Witte, Elandspad, Smalblaar and Holsloot rivers

and when former Director Johan Neethling retired in 1997, he apologised for

all the fuss kicked up about trout.51

Kirby maintains that all of Cambrays

arguments were long ago discounted as being illusive by better scientific

minds than were at the disposal of the bureaucrats.52

Here one detects more

than paradigmatic conflict in the scientific community deriving from

differences in spiritual sensibility. There is too a faint odour of nationalist

divergence of vision. Jane Carruthers has shown that through succession and

affirmative action, control of the Kruger National Park around the mid-

48. R. KIRBY, Fly fishing in Southern Africa, (Struik-Winchester, Cape Town, 1993).


50. Keeping Track, February/March 1988.

51. Personal communication. Jean Farrell, 27 June 2000.



75

1990s shifted from imperialist sportsmen to Afrikaner scientists and

bureaucrats who set about clearing alien invaders. While a case could be

made that this was so in Cape Conservation, it is too simple an explanation.53

Douglas Hey is a fly fisher of trout therefore a sportsman, but imperialist? He

is also a Stellenbosch-educated scientist. If there is nationalism at play then it

has become submerged under revisionist ecological thought reacting against

the mingling of species brought about by globalisation. Such a vision sees

trout a castrophic in contrast to the erstwhile cornucopian conception. In the

current world of environmentalism, biologists and conservationists are

divided amongst themselves on this question. Fearfulness of the effects of

globalisation is not only found in the view of scientists and state conservation

agencies, but also by non-government monitoring organisations such as the

Worldwatch Institute. For their scribe, Chris Bright, the ecological scenario of

the era of imperialism was only the beginning of disastrous processes, which

have been speeding up as quicker and higher volumes of travel shrink the

world, bringing about what he calls evolution in reverse. A culprit he cites

of being a bio-invader is the rainbow trout:

In various places around the world from South African

streams to Siberias Lake Baikal it is being blamed for out

competing or eating native fish, and its aggressive foraging

is almost certainly working other changes in aquatic food

webs. (In South Africa, for instance, it has nearly eliminated

at least one insect species: an ancient rarity called the

Gondwana relict damselfly).54

Whether or not trout have run their course or not is a moot point in the debate.

Cambray maintained that trout were recently introduced in the upper Krom

catchment. Yet Herbst avers that he needs to substantiate his inference that fly

fishers routinely adulterate virgin water with trout. The Mail & Guardian

editors declared the debate closed before empirical evidence could be

produced in that forum. Yet in 1999, when accepting the responsibility

conferred on it by Cape Nature Conservation to administer angling in various

rivers, Herbst said that the Cape Piscatorial Society rededicates itself to its 68

year-old credo of extending and encouraging the culture and protection of

Trout and other desirable freshwater fish in the Cape. Although, constituted

53. J. CARRUTHERS, The Kruger National Park: a social and political history, (University of

Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1995), pp. 103-120.

54. C. BRIGHT, Life out of bounds: bio-invasions in a borderless world, (London, Earthscan,

1999), pp. 1, 101.

76

several decades after the arrival of trout in the Cape, the Societys history is

inextricably entwined with this Prince of Fish.55

Whether or not extending and encouraging the culture of trout includes

assisting in bio-invasion is not entirely clear, but Cambray feels that there is

no room for complacency about biodiversity and that the regulation and

penalties for transgression ought to be as severe as they are in Australia.

Herbst cites the Natal Parks Boards repeated claim that whatever impact

trout had when introduced a century ago, it is not quantifiable because no

research was done at the time. Michael Samways whose work on the relict

Gondwana damselfly was cited by Bright to condemn rainbow trout, cautions

against such an alarmist position as that of the Worldwatch Institute. His

work is based on experiments using the baseline of a waterfall, which

interrupts trout migration, rather than a longitudinal time-line. There are,

therefore, other factors which could be responsible besides trout, such as

wattle infestation, cattle trampling, erosion and so forth.56

The Fisheries Research Officer from whom John Geddes-Page learnt his job

when he came to Natal was Bob Crass who is today a regular correspondent

to The Natal Witness on a variety of subjects. His original view of trout has

until recently been the orthodoxy in fly fishing and KZN conservation circles:

In the upland valley sections of all the major Natal systems,

trout have found a niche that was not filled by any

indigenous fish. . . . they have caused remarkably little

disturbance to the indigenous fish fauna.

He does go on to admit that Barbus anoplus may have been exterminated by

trout in certain places, moreover, Amphilius natalensis as well as Barbus

natelensis (Natal Yellowfish) have possibly decreased in numbers in the

upper reaches of some streams.57

The first warden of the Kruger National Park was a Scott, James Stevenson-

Hamilton. His pioneering conservation career in the first half of the last

century has been well documented in the work of Jane Carruthers.58 Soon



56. Personal communication, Prof. Michael Samways, October, 1999.

57. R.S. CRASS, Freshwater Fishes of Natal, pp. 30,31.

58. See, most recently for example, J. CARRUTHERS, Wildlife and warfare: the life of James

Stevenson-Hamilton, (University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2001).


77

after his retirement in 1946 he drew naturalists attention to the neglected fresh

water of South Africa, which swarm with indigenous species. Much to his

delight, he had discovered that some of the warm water species could be

caught on both salmon and trout fly. Although he had not mastered the

techniques that obsess contemporary anglers, he pointed out that of South

African freshwater species, the tiger fish stands out easily the king On the

whole I doubt there is a fish in the world which for its size can put up so

game a fight. He did however subscribe to the vacant niche thesis:

Exceptions are some of the rapid-flowing, and cool streams

which drain the uplands of South Africa, and these, destitute

of natural denizens, have wisely been utilized for the

introduction of rainbow and brown trout. The experiment

was first made if my memory serves me correctly in the

Mooi River in Natal about 1890, and so successful did it

prove, that it was extended to many other streams of a

similar character in South Africa.

Stevenson-Hamilton was thus able to write trout, as well as other imported

fresh-water species into Wildlfe in South Africa.59 So was Douglas Hey,

except his view is not of a vacant niche, but that of most of the Capes species

being of such little sporting and table value that other varieties were

introduced from Europe and America. His trout history is very Cape-centric

and one he hoped to pass off to Natal. I have a copy of his Wildlife Heritage

of South Africa inscribed as follows:

To my good friend Col. Jack Vincent. May this promote our

common endeavour. Doug. 2/7/66.60

Recent exchanges in The Natal Witness are helpful in extending the vacant

ecological niche thesis, or that of worthless occupants, to social issues.

Former Inkatha Freedom Party politician Arthur Konikramer wrote in his

capacity of Chairman of Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali (Heritage, KZN) to refute a

claim made in a Springvale Festival Supplement:

I do not believe it wise to allow Witness readers to live with

the impression that those who came to Nottingham Road [a

59. J. STEVENSON-HAMILTON, Wildlife in South Africa, (Cassell,and Co., London, 1947), p.

336, 337.

60. D. HEY, Wildlife heritage of South Africa, (Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1966).

78

major trout Mecca for trout fishers] from Perthshire under

the Byrne immigration scheme in 1849 were the first settlers,

the only other inhabitants being Bushmen and wild animals

to choose the copy writers indelicate use of language.

African iron age settlements were scattered over the whole

of KwaZulu-Natal, the earliest having been carbon-dated to

the first century after Christ.61

There may be a relationship between a willingness to overlook the loss of a

few minor species of fish and the imperial enthusiasm for running roughshod

over, sometimes exterminating, those who were considered to be lesser

peoples. On the issue of the history of slavery and the agenda of the World

Racism Conference in Durban, 2001, Bob Crass joined the melee laying his

position bare. He argued that Kevin Durrheim (the social scientist to whom he

replied) is attacking capitalism rather than racism and

fortunately for South Africa our ANC government has

embraced capitalism as an essential element in building the

new South Africa We may also hope that there will be no

attempts to hold present-day members of society responsible

for the actions of their ancestors.62

Crass, who researched and propagated trout for recreational purposes in Natal

for most of career, provides the themes for the section to follow.

Trout and reconciliation: re-creation and fishers of men

Herbst and others smugly pointed out in 1998 that in South Africa a para-

statal conservation body, The Natal Parks Board (now KwaZulu-Natal Nature

Conservation Services) routinely breeds trout, distributes them in its parks

and actively encourages fly-fishing. When the controversy over trout emerged

in the Cape, the Natal Parks Board attracted great approval from FOSAFs

Croney who called the antagonists draconian and the Natal counterpart

progressive for its position pledging to continue its long-held philosophy of

serving public recreation as well as environmental protection. Trout said

Sutcliffe

have actually done some good by encouraging progressive

conservation through attempts to create an environment to

61. Natal Witness, 1&6 August, 2001.

62. Natal Witness, 7& 10 August, 2001.


79

suit their rather narrow requirements for pollution-free

water.63

Trout thus highlight an old tension in the mission of conservation. The term

progressive conservation was coined in the United States during Roosevelts

administration and sought a utilitarian approach often clashing with aesthetic

imperatives of wilderness preservation. As a 1911 guide to trout fishing in

Natal opens

It is a shallow as well as a dismal scheme of life which

ignores or undervalues the importance of recreation.64

Indigenous African people who were excluded from the public, for whom this

social good was provided, are an integral part of this history. In 1902, the

Natal Anglers Association made an application to Native Affairs for a Native

to act as river guard for the Trout Fishing Conservancy on the Umgeni

River.65 In 1909, An ardent Transvaal angler reported that to access and fish

the Mooi River near Rosetta and Nottingham Road,

saddle horses or a trap and horses may be hired at very

reasonable rates and the services of a Zulu or two are

procurable for next to nothing The railways guide which

published his words also points out that there are several

bushman caves adjacent to the river, some of which are in

very good condition No artificial bait is allowed, except

on certain portions of the river No coloured people are

allowed to fish.66

A 1937 publication advertising South Africa in a photograph titled The

Gentle Art in Natal shows a white and African man, both in European

clothing, not fishing but seeding a river with trout. It emphasises exciting

potential: the standard of fishing should grow better every year.67 Whether

or not freshwater fish provided any refuge from the pull of the expanding

capitalist economy is difficult to discern. In S.A. Heys time in the Eastern

Cape, although some of the trout streams he fished were in a

63. T. SUTCLIFFE, A federation of flyfishers is bornin SA Fishing, 9(1), 1986.

64. A.H. TATLOW (ed.), Natal Province: descriptive guide and official handbook, pp. 359-

373.

65. NAB, 1/IPD, 3/1/2, 1902.

66. A.H. TATLOW (ed.), Natal Province: descriptive guide and official handbook, p. 363.

67. Wonderful South Africa (Johannesburg, Associated Newspapers Ltd, 1937), p. 144.

80

thickly populated Native area, where droughts and semi-

starvation were not uncommon, I neither saw nor heard of a

Native who fished or would eat fish. The Natives I

questioned about their aversion to fish said they would as

soon eat a snake. Trout poaching, I have found, is confined

to Europeans, half-breeds and coloureds.68

If S.A. Hey is to be trusted, he provides some important ethnography of

culture in transition. He points out that in the Transkei around the mid-1900s,

Africans living near the coast had begun to take to fishing and fish eating.

Whether or not Africans fished, organised trout fishermen took a very

proprietary view of the trout finding refuge from their artificial flies in

African areas: the members of this [Natal Angling] Association who are all

prominent sportsmen might do a great deal to assist in the protection and of

trout fishing and in the enforcement of Law and Regulation, if they were

given permission to fish such [Native Location] waters. The Chief Native

Commissioner granted their application, not as a right, but as a privilege

which could be revoked at any time.69 Such a scheme has continuity with

current fly fishers interventions, but with a far more human face.

Recent work by Thembi Haltshwako in the Nsikeni area near Umzimkulu (a

pocket of the Eastern Cape or former Transkei within KwaZulu-Natal) set out

to determine the importance and river fish in the peoples lives, and the

potential for fly fishers to contribute to community advancement.70 Without

going into details, fish is a significant resource in the community with many

artful anglers who value trout above the indigenous yellowfish, but behind the

eel, which is more prolific in the lower reaches of their water. The project

sought to evaluate the potential of fly-fishing eco-tourism as a strategy for

natural resource utilisation. The principle being that fly fishing and other

forms of eco-tourism could yield income for little effort and cause no loss of

resources since fly fishers could practice catch-and-release: a motto of the

sport. The community in turn would also be assisted to manage and control

their rivers, the principle threat emanating from commercial agriculture

upstream. The Natal chapter of FOSAF funded the project, which I

supervised. This is a happy irony since some of the FOSAF members are the

very ones with whom I have clashed over racial issues in the Natal Fly

Fishing Club in 1988. Let me explain.


69. NAB, SNA, I/1/294, 1901. NAB, CNC, 380 B, 1919.

70. T. HLATSHWAKO, Fly fishing and tourism: a sustainable rural community development

strategy for Nsikeni? (Unpublished M.En.Dev, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg,

2000).


81

This club is a descendant of the Natal Angling Club formed in 1901 and

organises access to water on private water for a small number of members.

After spending many years on the waiting list, as a member, I tried to take an

African student of mine fishing as a guest. When it was discovered that my

guest was black, I was told that farmers would object. One farmer, I was told,

said that blacks could fish in his bass dam, but not for his trout. In the end, the

club changed their rules so that guests could only be family of members, and I

left. There were, during the transition of the 1990s some new recruits in the

order, including Ilan Lax fly fisher, human and land rights activist as well

as a lawyer who served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He

made it one of his tasks to drag FOSAF into the new South Africa, with

some of the old guard kicking and screaming.71 He, together with Bill

Bainbridge who used to be in charge of the Forestry Department of the Natal

Drakensberg, oversaw Thembi Hlatshwakos work from FOSAFs

perspective. Another character worth mentioning is Wolf Avni who has a

trout fishery in the Drakensberg and provided valuable input. He is something

of the Hunter S. Thompson of South African fly fishing literature whose

response to being questioned about the ecological integrity of trout by my

students, inspired the theme of this paper:

I am not Eurocentric. I am the whitest kaffir (in the best

sense of the word) and proud of it! How long do I have to

live here before I can be called African?72

Like himself, he prides his trout on being wild, subjected to natural conditions

and thus locally adapted and environmentally friendly unlike those in

Mpumlanga where conditions tend to be more artificial with a negative

ecological footprint, and the fishing more canned.73

Avni and the Underberg-Himeville Trout Fishing Club organise an annual

fly-fishing festival which emphasises non-competitiveness and the wild

character of the fishing, and the natural management of the fishery. The club

also manages water on tribal land, admitted black membership during the

time the NFFC baulked at the idea and is keen to assist the Nsikeni project

with its booking, networking and management expertise. At the festival in

2000, the guest was Ronnie Kasrils, the Minister of Water Affairs and

Forestry who is reported as saying that

71. Personal Communication 2000.

72. Interview with Wolf Avni, Bill Simpson and Harry Tully, Underberg-Himeville Trout

Fishing Club, 14 September, 1999.

73. W. AVNI, A mean-mouthed, hook-jawed, bad-news, son-of-a-fish! Fish fingers and trout

tails and other South African fly-fishing stories, (Struik, Cape Town, 1997).

82

I came here and found myself up against a mystical,

existential world, part art and part science . . . This is

wonderful, wonderful water country . . . but elsewhere in

South Africa many people cant turn on a tap for pure fresh

water.74

For good reason fly fishermen were seducing Kasrils. In that area, irrigation

by big farmers is killing some of the rivers and forums seeking to exert

control from downstream have reached an impasse. Revolutionary new water

legislation, which nationalises a formerly private resource, was passed by the

former freedom fighters predecessor, Kader Asmal, and makes the task

easier, but a long struggle lies ahead. Kasrils should understand the arguments

in favour of wild versus canned put and take fishing since environmentalists

in Mpumalanga have asked him to put a moratorium on trout hatchery and

pond building which is having an adverse effect on wetlands.75

But trout are

all not bad in that province. In his declaration of interests as an MP, Kasrils

has indicated that among the gifts he has received were four fresh trout.

Kasrils actually caught the trout, during an inspection trip to a river in

Mpumalanga that had been cleared of alien vegetation on the Working for

Water Campaign begun by Asmal. According to editorial; For one who used

to mock members of the ANC who took to trout fishing in exile, it represents

quite a turnaround.76

But Kasrils might have recognised that trout as well as,

in his words, trees can provide healing for the soul and serve as living

monuments in remembrance of the past and painful episodes.77

The change did not begin, however, with a former exile, but with Cyril

Ramaphosa who started persuading fellow parliamentarians give trout fishing

a try when the new government was formed in 1994. The following year, he

claimed to have made an enthusiast of Valli Moosa, significantly the current

Minister of Environment and Tourism. Ramaphosas enthusiasm for the

gentle art has often been held up as blatant evidence of the former trade

unionists sell out to bourgeois values. Another example is Rams Ramashia,

the charismatic director-general of the department of labour who has been a

fly fisher since his student days at Turfloop. He sees fly-fishing as a form of

negotiation between the trout and himself. The trout becomes symbolic of

Cosatu, big business, the minister of labour or his overworked staff.78 When

74. Natal Witness, May 20, 2000.

75. Mail & Guardian, February 4, 2000.

76. Mail & Guardian, October 1-7, 1999.

77. C.RASSOOL, The Rise of Heritage and the Reconstitution of History in South Africa in

Kronos, 26, 2000, p. 20.

78. Mercury Business Report, 19 April, 2001.


83

Nthatho Motlana announced in 1996 that Cyril Ramaphosa was to join his

New Africa Investments Ltd (Nail) and lead the bid to acquire Johnnic from

Anglo American, the worst fears of critics were confirmed. However, as

Mark Gevisser notes, this is not a historically unique to African nationalism:

As the Randlords harnessed capital in the service of Empire

and the Broeders harnessed it in the service of Afrikaner

Nationalism, Ramaphosa goes to battle for Black

Empowerment. In all three of these phases of South African

capitalism, there is a synergy between the ideological

aspirations of a ruling class and the personal ambitions of the

entrepreneurs themselves: it is not inaccurate, on one level,

to compare Ramaphosa to a Rhodes or a Rupert.79

Before turning his attentions to business, Ramaphosa was considered equal in

stature to Thabo Mbeki who has recently won media mileage through taking

up golf. Once it became clear that Mbeki was going to succeed Nelson

Mandela as President, analysts maintain that Ramaphosa had to be given an

attractive alternative to parliament for he is too powerful a figure to operate

under Mbekis shadow. Ramaphosa, capitals former principal opponent, has

not entirely lost his critical opinions. He has argued that privatisation and

syndication was responsible for making trout fishing elitist and that state

support was needed for making more waters public and stocking them with

fish, so that anyone can enjoy it: My mission is to draw more and more

people into this noble sport. He claimed to have piqued the interest of

Brigitte Mabandla, former Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture.80

Nelson

Mandela was said to have benevolently humoured Ramaphosas less than

politically correct passion, since he felt it was good for making friends and

allies for the ANC.

Urban legend has it that this paid off handsomely in 1992 when Ramaphosa

and the National Partys Roelf Meyer went trout fishing together and bonded

firmly, thereby saving the Kempton Park negotiations from a deadlock and

thus carrying the country away from the brink of war to a rainbow nation

future, or, in the eyes of critics, facilitating an Elite Transition to

neoliberism.81 According to Ramaphosa, Roelf Meyer didnt know how to

fish hes a hunter. Meyers clumsy attempts at casting succeeded only in

catching himself by the finger in which the barb of the fly became embedded.

79. Mail & Guardian, October 11-17, 1996.

80. Mail & Guardian, May 26- June 1, 1995.

81. P. BOND, Elite transition: from apartheid to neoliberalism in South Africa, (University of

Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2000), p. 101. See also Bonds Fly fishing in Southern

African Review of Books, May-June 1995.

84

Over a stiff whiskey, Ramaphosa pulled it out with pliers, saying as he

prepared to do so: If youve never trusted an ANC person before, youd

better get ready to do so now.82

Ramaphosas victory over Meyer was to

assert the superiority of a vigorous but gentle form of masculinity. Returning

to Macleans A River Runs Through it for a further historical lesson, we can

see that the incident illustrates the Nationalists failure to submit power to

grace:

Until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far

back and loose all his power somewhere in the air. . . . since

it is natural for man to try and attain power without

recovering grace.83

According to Fred Shaw who attempted to encode the art of casting as science

a century ago, one should

use the least possible force to in order to achieve your best

cast Remember always that it is not violence but vim

which results in a correct cast.84

Not Violence but Vim: A Century of Trout in South Africa

Elements of trout fishing, environmentalism and capitalism deriving from

Calvinistic Puritanism and Scottish nationalism have, in South Africa, come

such a long way from home so as to be virtually unrecognisable, but shards

still pop up. Dullstroom, Mpumalanga (the erstwhile Eastern Transvaal), is

reputed to be the town with the biggest boom in the country, thanks to trout

and relative proximity to the highest concentration of wealth in Africa,

Johannesburg. Inns are given quaint Scottish names and staff wear kilts in the

evening. S.A. Heys old fishing ground attempts to compete through the

market brand of the Eastern Cape Highlands, home of the Wild Trout

Association. Much fly fishing business is conducted in the Scottish idiom. A

President of the Cape Piscatorial Society is heralded by a Scottish piper,

while various brands of Scotch whiskey sponsor trout festivals. At one stage,

those that did good environmental fly fishing deeds were called Dewars and

awarded a prize. Interestingly Dewars Whiskey used to be known as The

Fair Maid of Perth. Perthshire, from whence many South African settlers

sprang, is a district where landscape reclamation was particularly busy in

82. Mail & Guardian, Dec 24-30, 1994, May 6-12, 1995.

83. N. MACLEAN, A river runs through it and other stories, pp. 2-4.

84. F. SHAW, The science of dry fly fishing (Fred Shaw, London, 1905); F. SHAW, The

complete science of fly fishing and spinning, pp. 136, 154.


85

centuries past.85

Redemptive religious roots have not altogether been shed,

but have undergone substantial transformation. A century later, Ramaphosa

becomes lyrical about the Zen of trout fishing: it reconnects you with

nature. You get to be at peace with your surroundings. When I fish, all else

melts away.86

At first glance trout fishing in South Africa appears to be an

obvious form of neo-imperialism. However, from the biographies traced

above, it is clear that trout fishing helped settlers make peace with their

surroundings and begin to think locally and ecologically.

As Ramaphosa argues, to outwit a fish, one has to think like one. Once a trout

is empathised with, one begins to appreciate the importance of clean water

and river conservation. Indeed, a notice outside the KZN Wildlife trout

hatchery at Kamberg says exactly that. From Scotland to the United States,

anglers have fought and succeeded to reclaim rivers for their fish from

exploitation and pollution. Conservation and ecological insight is very often

associated with Aldo Leopolds phrase, thinking like a mountain. It could

just as well be thinking like a fish. In Scotland and the United States,

however, the emphasis has been on native species. For instance, Trout

Unlimited, the American angler organisation on which the local FOSAF was

modelled, is currently cooperating with a range of state conservation bodies

on a river and catchment conservation campaign called Bring Back The

Natives such as the cutthroat and bull trout

Documents

Draper 2003 - Going Native - Trout and Settling Identity in a Rainbow Nation