Almost 40 years ago when I was still a student, I encountered a particularly colourful but unfamiliar snake, with orange and black bands and a jet-black belly, in the former Transkei. Although it looked very different from the drab inland specimens, I knew it was a rinkhals when it flopped over and played dead. I took it home and kept it in a glass case, where it became very tame, but one day it somehow escaped and there was no sign of it for months. T hen I got a call from a friend of mine, the herpetologist at the Transvaal Museum.
He’d received a report of a colourful banded rinkhals in a storm-water culvert about a kilometre from my home. He knew that, although the species occurred in our area, this colour variety wasn’t indigenous to the Transvaal and could only have come from either the Eastern Cape or an isolated population still remaining on Zimbabwe’s eastern highlands. Knowing that I’d visited the former area not long before, he suspected it was my snake. I wasted no time going to look for it, but it took a couple of visits before I managed to recapture it. Somehow, things didn’t end there, and I ended up marrying the younger sister of the lady who lived there. hat incident shaped my opinion about what is indigenous and what isn’t. When my bride and I established our own garden and attempted to make it purely indigenous, we collected plants from the veld immediately surrounding us. Since they were adapted to the local climate, they never needed watering and flowered even before the first rains came. What defines indigenous? But most people have other opinions.
Many consider a plant or animal to be indigenous if it occurs within a country’s political borders. To my mind this is scientifically incorrect. Political boundaries are lines on a map and irrelevant when it comes to the distribution of plants and animals. really determine what qualifies as indigenous, one needs to think more widely. he face of the world is constantly changing. Throughout the ages water eroded the earth and washed it to the bottom of the sea. New mountain ranges developed and volcanic eruptions enriched the land with minerals from the planet’s core. Where there were once steamy tropical swamps or towering forests and fertile grasslands, today there are deserts. Climate change and increased rainfall turned once frozen landscapes into gloomy rainforests. With changes in plant life came drastic changes in the distribution of animals.
Many became extinct. had their populations fragmented and were cut off from others of their kind, developing new identities in their isolation and becoming subspecies. However, many species that occur over vast ranges, often extending over many international borders, show considerable variation. Take the blue wildebeest. A number of colour varieties exist, from the “white-bearded gnu” of the Serengeti to the “brindled gnu” of the south. The various subspecies into which they are divided are invalid, since gaps in the range only exist where the gnu have been shot out. They’re all one species, and can interbreed. Does it make sense to say one of these individuals is “indigenous” and another an alien? Species variations in the Kruger Likewise there are many geographically separated populations where identical individuals occur, such as the black-backed jackal, bat-eared fox, aardwolf, springhare and steenbok. In contrast, the giraffe occurs in at least 20 separate regions and has numerous regional varieties all the way to the Sahara. But you don’t have to go that far. During a recent visit to the Kruger Park I witnessed the extreme colour variation in a single giraffe population. Some of their markings were almost black while others were so light they seemed bleached.
There are indications that giraffe once occurred right across the African continent. Must we now consider some varieties indigenous to South Africa, and others aliens merely because they occur north of the Limpopo? An excellent example of split populations locally is the blesbok and the bontebok. At one time blesbok must have been much more widely distributed over Southern Africa’s grasslands than they are now. But the centre of their range, the Karoo, became increasingly arid. The blesbok couldn’t adapt and its population split up. Like our rinkhals, the southern blesbok were more colourful than those up north and eventually formed an isolated, homogenous population that we know today as the bontebok. But, essentially, they are still blesbok and can still interbreed with their northern counterparts. Can we really say the bontebok isn’t indigenous to the Free State? The Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism (DEAT) recently stipulated that animals are considered alien to, and may not be introduced into, areas where they didn’t “originally” occur. This means game farms in the Waterberg can’t keep nyala, although bush encroachment has created an ideal new habitat for them. Another result is that an intensive breeder of sable antelope in the Karoo was unable to sell, move or hunt his animals because they didn’t occur there “originally”.
When was “originally”, and who can say that animals didn’t occur in a particular area at that time? Fossil records indicate the Karoo was once inhabited by dinosaurs and sea monsters. And what about the recent attempt to outlaw kikuyu and ryegrass? With a global shortage of milk and world dairy prices going through the roof, it was proposed to make it illegal to sell, buy or plant these mainstays of dairy farmers without a permit. If they outlaw kikuyu because it’s not “indigenous”, what about all the other “aliens” on your farm? Your chickens, your cattle, goats, pigs, dogs, maize, wheat, your tomatoes and potatoes all came from the other side of the globe! The only farmers that may be safe are those growing rooibos and marulas, and maybe watermelons, possibly derived from “indigenous tsammas”. The best thing to do is to use indigenous species whenever possible. I have tried to promote this principle throughout my life.
But lately, hasn’t the government’s obsession with both the terms “indigenous” and “biodiversity” gone just too far? Does it have to extend to the plants and animals we farm with? It seems that officials think up legislation and regulations with a single purpose – to disrupt the lives of both field sportspeople and farmers alike. In reality very few humans in South Africa today are indigenous. While white people invaded from Europe, black people invaded from more northerly regions of Africa. The only humans that “originally” lived here were probably the Khoisan, unless we want to go back to Australopithecus. We must accept that habitats change constantly, and so do the organisms inhabiting them. If those making the laws don’t know this, it’s just the latest proof that the departments entrusted with managing our environment lack the most basic ecological knowledge – and that’s scary. – Abre J Steyn
Contact Abré J Steyn on 083 235 4822 or e-mail [email protected].
