The Land Came Back, the Village Did Not
In 1969 the Makuleke were moved at gunpoint off the triangle between the Luvuvhu and the Limpopo so that it could be added to the Kruger National Park. They won it back in 1998, and then held meetings and decided not to move home.
At the top of the Kruger National Park the public road ends at a survey beacon on a bank above the Limpopo. This is Crooks' Corner, where the Luvuvhu comes in from the west and three international borders meet in the water, and where fever trees stand in pale stands along the floodplain behind you. Nothing on the ground tells you that you crossed an ownership line about twenty kilometres back. There is no fence, no gate, no board. The road surface does not change.
It changed anyway. In 1998 roughly 24,000 hectares at the northern tip of the park — the whole triangle between the Luvuvhu and the Limpopo, every hectare of it inside the park boundary — were transferred out of state hands and into the name of the Makuleke Communal Property Association. It was the first land restitution claim settled inside a South African national park, and what the community then did with the title is the part that has been studied ever since.
What was taken
In 1969 the state extended Kruger north to the Limpopo. Ten Makuleke villages stood in the triangle between that river and the Luvuvhu, on ground with permanent water, riverine forest and floodplain gardens. People were moved out at gunpoint, told to set fire to their own houses, and trucked south-west to Ntlhaveni, in what was being assembled as the Gazankulu homeland. The new villages sit against the western fence of the park; you can see the boundary from the road. The distance that mattered was not the eight kilometres to the fence but the fifty to the rivers, and the difference between soil that floods and soil that does not.
The claim
The Restitution of Land Rights Act 22 of 1994 opened a window for claims arising from dispossession after 19 June 1913, the date the Natives Land Act took effect. The Makuleke lodged theirs in 1995. The park's early position was defensive in the way institutions are: a successful claim inside Kruger, the argument ran, would put every boundary in the country in play. The case went to the Land Claims Court and was then settled by negotiation rather than judgment, in an agreement dated 30 May 1998 and amended that December. The land was restored. What the community did with it in the months afterwards was not what the park had been bracing for.
They had just won the right to plough it, mine it and live on it. In a run of community meetings they voted to do none of the three.
What they chose
The instrument they used is called a contractual park. Title sits with the Makuleke CPA; the land stays inside Kruger under a fifty-year agreement running to 2048; there is no mining, no cultivation and no residence; and a Joint Management Board of three SANParks and three Makuleke representatives runs it day to day. The commercial rights — lodges, concessions, the tourism income — belong to the community rather than to the park. The reasoning was not sentimental. The soil is poor, the Luvuvhu floods hard, malaria in that corner is the worst in the country, and a tourism concession on riverine forest and floodplain is worth more per hectare than anything anyone could grow on it. They kept the land as a park because, as a park, it was the most valuable thing they owned.
Where the first money came from
A title deed does not pay wages. In 2000, before a single lodge existed on the concession, the community sold the rights to hunt two elephants and two buffalo and raised about R520,000. The reaction from abroad was what you would expect it to be. The Makuleke answer was that they had been handed two hundred and forty square kilometres on condition they conserved it, with no capital whatsoever to do so, and that four animals bought the first professional capacity they had ever had. It is a decision that can be argued with. It was made by the people who would live with the consequences, which is more than can be said for most decisions taken about that triangle in the previous century.
What it pays, and what it does not
The concession now carries a full-board tented camp operated in partnership with the community, a self-catering bush house, and a field-guide training school that runs students through it in cohorts; the lease fees and bed-night levies go to the CPA, and the guides, trackers and camp staff are drawn from Ntlhaveni. The wetlands were listed under the Ramsar Convention on 22 May 2007 — 7,757 hectares, and the first Ramsar site anywhere owned and co-managed by a community. Against that: the revenue is modest once it is divided among several thousand people, a lodge that closes for a season stops it dead, and the internal politics of who is a member of a CPA, who signs for it and who is paid by it has been the recurring failure of South African restitution rather than a Makuleke peculiarity.
The model travelled only a little. In 1999 about 50,000 hectares of what is now the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park went to the ǂKhomani San and the Mier community on a broadly comparable footing, and the Richtersveld in the far north-west had been run as a contractual park since 1991 — but across the restitution programme as a whole most settled claims have been paid out in cash rather than in returned land, because cash is faster for the state and easier for a claimant to bank. Choosing land means choosing an asset that has to be managed for decades by an organisation that did not exist before the claim. Which is the thing to hold on to at the beacon: the reason you cannot see the boundary is that the arrangement was designed to be invisible — the same animals, the same road, the same park, under different owners — and the only evidence in front of you is that the guide walking ahead belongs to the CPA and can point across the floodplain to where the pans used to have gardens beside them. In 2048 the agreement comes up for renewal and the community decides again, which is not a loose end but the actual mechanism.