It is one of South Africa’s largest nature reserves, where hippos, elephants and endangered black rhinos live among wetlands, savannah and lakes. But iSimangaliso wetland park, a Unesco world heritage site favoured by wealthy eco-tourists for its biodiversity, is also the site of an increasingly deadly battle, between the people who live there and the conservationists ostensibly tasked with protecting it.
The rural Nibela community in KwaZulu-Natal province, one of the country’s poorest regions, have fished in Lake St Lucia for generations. It is their traditional land, but it is also a marine protected area (MPA), with regulations that restrict gillnet fishing and access to the lake. The park authorities generate income via tourists, who can pay 2,000 rand (about £100) for a deep-sea fishing trip. But the local fishers – who gain little or no benefit from the park and are not allowed fishing permits – say they are labelled poachers by armed park rangers who patrol the lake.
Last year, the conflict left a fisher missing, presumed dead – the second in two years from the same family. Police are treating as murder and attempted murder the death and disappearance of two brothers at iSimangaliso. On 12 November 2021, Thulani Mdluli, 24, went missing and is presumed dead after an altercation with rangers. The park authorities claim the rangers were shot at by poachers; the fishers protest they were unarmed. A little more than a year before, on 16 September 2020, Thulani’s brother, Celempilo Mdluli, 30, was shot dead, allegedly by rangers, as he fished.
“We depend on fishing to put food on the table,” says Thomas Nkuna, 68, a fisher and father of 10 from KwaZulu-Natal. He says the struggling community has always fished to feed their families – long before permits were needed – and have no choice but to continue, even without permission.
“We have to fish at night, to hide from the rangers. But rangers patrol the waters and confiscate our tools,” he says. “Sometimes we run away. Fishermen have been killed by the rangers.”
The deaths are an extreme example of what has become a common problem. As scientists warn that biodiversity loss threatens to tip the world into its sixth mass extinction, many are pushing for a global target to conserve one-third of the world’s land and sea by 2030. From Antigua to Zambia, more than half of the world’s governments back this 30×30 target, which could be adopted at December’s biodiversity negotiations at Cop15 in Montreal.
On Tuesday, Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, warned that in its current form the 30×30 proposal was “a grave risk” to the rights of Indigenous peoples and to conservation. She urged world leaders in Montreal to place Indigenous communities at the heart of the agreement.
Far away from the international spotlight, small-scale fishing and Indigenous communities say they are being forced to pay for a biodiversity crisis they bear little responsibility for creating. From Colombia to the UK, they are fighting against marine protected areas and fishing bans, arguing they are being disproportionately affected compared with commercial fisheries.