U-M South Africa Initiative		The things going bump in the night could well be hippos

One day this summer Catherine Picard found herself face to face with a community rebel wanted by the police. Another day she was splattered with hippo guts when she got too close while photographing butchers. And every day she talked with people who ranged from outspoken racists to ingratiatingly hospitable, to just plain hungry. Projects for master's degree students at the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment can have challenges, but Picard has had more than her share.

As a Moody Fellow funded by a Ford Foundation grant through the U-M's Center for Afro-American and African Studies, Picard spent the summer living in a cabin in a game reserve in South Africa's Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park, researching communities in conflict over conservation. The park, which protects five separate ecosystems within approximately 645,000 noncontiguous acres, exists in an uneasy balance between three residential communities, the South African Parks Board and commercial mining interests.

On the day of her arrival, in the dead of night, a park ranger drove Picard to her cabin in a Land Rover. "He called the next day to say he'd totaled the vehicle after hitting a hippo in the road. It turns out hippos' eyes don't reflect light the way a cat's or deer's eyes do. They're just a big black blob. This hippo was the size of a Honda Accord, he said. It bounced right back up after the collision and ran off into the darkness."

The park is roughly 160 miles from Durban, making it one of the closest pristine beach and game areas for urban vacationers. "I am trying to get a grasp on how local communities perceive and benefit from the Greater St. Lucia Wetland Park," Picard says. "I have focused on three very different socioeconomic communities, which are adjacent to one another, yet they share very different realities regarding this Park.

"One community is the town of St. Lucia, which is populated by White South Africans who run tourist related businesses, and the other two are Zulu communities about three miles away, with obviously significantly lower levels of income generation, employment and education. These diverse communities are all dependent upon the park, so how do their perceptions and benefits of the park differ?"

St. Lucia relies heavily upon both South African fisherman and ecotourists visiting the park. Fishing is seasonal, nicely complementing the growing tourist trade. However, as the fishery continues to decline, St. Lucians increasingly rely on tourism for revenue. They run guesthouses, fishing and snorkeling excursions, game drives, restaurants, shops and other services. Their community has paved roads, gas stations, banks and all the other amenities associated with a small resort.

The irony of Whites now battling to protect the remaining wetlands is not lost on Black residents, whose way of life on the margins of the park is coming under increasing scrutiny and control. The two Black communities' relationship with the park is based on subsistence agriculture and the hope for jobs. One Black community, Dukuduku North, is a recognized settlement. The people who live there agreed to be relocated from more sensitive areas in or near the park, and in exchange they received assistance with housing, schools and other such amenities. Their neighborhoods are still muddy, many of the homes tiny. Chicken and cattle roam the dirt roads. But the people of Dukuduku North are eager to move up in the world, to purchase cars, build larger houses, buy more televisions, refrigerators, even send the kids to college. For the people of Dukuduku North, they expect the park to offer jobs. Perhaps due to lack of experience, they do not think of having their own businesses, as the Whites do. "What every person wants is a salary," Picard observes.

In the all-White community of St. Lucia, civilization ends at the security gate guarding their neighborhood. "I love South Africa, but this area is fraught with some of the greatest racial tension I have ever witnessed" says Picard, a University of California-Berkeley graduate who lived in Rwanda, Senegal, Swaziland, Namibia and South Africa while growing up. "It's so hard to interview someone who feels this way; but understanding their perspective is important. Everyone has significant roots and ties to this place. People have grown up here and have firm beliefs, and reconciling these issues of race and identity are complicated and will take a long time. Unfortunately, this often results in blame being placed upon local Zulu communities for destroying the nearby forest and discouraging ecotourism."