From ‘land’ to ‘place’: communities and conservation in the Magaliesberg area, South Africa

Abstract

Between Pretoria and Rustenburg lies the Magaliesberg, a mountain range of ecological and cultural significance, until 1994 in the Transvaal Province, South Africa, and now straddling Gauteng and North West Province. In the 1960s, with damage from unplanned development and recreational over-utilisation, an important activist campaign was launched to conserve the Magaliesberg. Local and national initiatives were spawned which ultimately came to involve landowners, recreation, cultural and nature conservation interests, as well as various tiers of government. Acrimonious contest over the Magaliesberg eventually ended with a coalescence of interests and the evolution of suitable legal planning and management tools. However, owing to altered government priorities, the area is once again vulnerable to irreparable environmental damage. Using this example, the argument of this paper is that sites of contest often promote constructions of identity and the transformation of notions of 'land' (a resource or a commodity) into 'place' (sites which exemplify identity and other cultural values). During the apartheid years when political and economic participation were vital campaigns, environmental activism had an extremely low priority among the majority of South Africans. Current environmental issues are also not generally being addressed through public activism, but rather through the legislative and administrative channels which have operated since 1994. These are generally 'brown' environmental issues rather than 'green' ones. Demands are for clean water, worker safety or more land to be made available for housing and farming. Political agitation on 'green' conservation issues is limited to allowing