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SA hunting business has a long history

HUNTING in this country is nothing new.

Between 3 million and 120 000 years ago, primitive men in the form of Australopithecus and Homo erectus roamed the South African Highveld.

Long after them, the Bushmen (including Strandlopers) and later the Khoikhoi sustained themselves and survived by hunting and gathering in Southern Africa for more than 40 000 years.

They used their legendary bows and poison arrows to hunt every animal, from a duiker to an eland, very successfully.

The Nguni tribes arrived here from up the east coast between 600 and 500 years ago, bringing with them throwing spears and hunting dogs.

Although they were cattle farmers, they only slaughtered and ate their animals on religious occasions.

This hunting was strictly regulated by kings and chieftains, who “owned” the game, and large areas were put aside for royal or personal hunting, thereby in effect introducing conservation areas for sustainable utilisation.

During the 1400s Portuguese explorers landed at Saldanha Bay, Table Bay and Mossel Bay and recorded in their ships’ logs incidents of shooting “deer” for fresh meat.

Jan van Riebeeck landed in the Cape in 1652, and within a year the Cape lion and the hippopotamus in the Liesbeek River became a threat to the VOC livestock and vegetable gardens.

Within another year, the hippo was shot into local extinction, while the Cape lion disappeared from the Peninsula, eventually becoming extinct in the mid-19th century.

Later, Governor Simon van der Stel was on a copper exploration expedition into Namaqualand, when his coach was attacked and wrecked by an irate black rhino near where Klawer is today. This led to the birth of rhino hunting in South Africa by Europeans.

By the early 1700s the Dutch Trekboers started moving north into the Karoo and Little Karoo, meeting up with the vast herds of springbok, quagga, blesbok and other antelope, and virtually lived off these for 200 years.

Towards the beginning of the 1800s the Eastern Cape was reached and ivory hunters started working on the herds of elephant, making their fortunes in selling ivory.

Hundreds of fortune-seeking ivory hunters of European as well as indigenous origin (mainly Griqua, Khoikhoi and Nguni), who thought the game would never run out, depleted elephant herds considerably.

In about 1837, the Voortrekkers started moving through the Free State, settling along the way to the Transvaal, thus starting the great South African love affair with sustainable hunting.

During the Victorian era, South Africa was seen by Europeans, as a hunting paradise. In 1860 “The Great Hunt” was organised for Queen Victoria’s middle son, Prince Alfred, on the farm Bainsvlei, just outside Bloemfontein.

On this occasion about one thousand mounted Barolong tribesmen drove about 30 000 head of game towards the Bainsvlei homestead, where more or less 5 000 head were killed!

The lion’s share of the meat was used by the families of the local tribesmen.

This column was written by Eastern Cape Game Management Association CEO Jokl le Roux and is the second in a four-part series discussing the development of hunting into a commercially viable economic sector.

http://www.theherald.co.za/herald/biz/02_21042006.htm

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