Draper 2003 - Going Native - Trout and Settling Identity in A Rainbow Nation

Going native?
Trout and settling identity in a rainbow nation

MALCOLM DRAPER
I will explain to him [my young son] as an acceptable

realpolitik: if the trout are lost, smash the state. More
than any other fish, trout are dependent upon the
ambience in which they are caught. Whether it is the trout
or the angler who is more sensitized to the degeneration
of habitat would be hard to say, but probably it is the
trout.
Thomas McGuane1
The Last Day of Salmon

When James Henderson left Scotland to seek his fortune in South Africa
during the 1890s, after much searching around Natal, he finally bought,
settled on, and began to farm a piece of land he named Balbrogie in 1897.
There in the Waschbank area between Ladysmith and Newcastle, he made
good and his dynasty lives on a century later. The home he built was
decorated in an understandably nostalgic fashion, but little could have been as
deeply melancholic as the turn-of-the-century monochrome print of a
1.
Malcolm Draper researches and teaches around the interplay of sociology, history, the
environment and identity in the School of Human and Social Studies, University of Natal,
Pietermaritzburg. He would like to thank the many friends and colleagues who commented
on earlier drafts of this essay presented in Bulawayo, Durban and Johannesburg in
particular Gerhard Mar and Liz Gunner whose detailed reviews either saved Historias
editors much effort, or him the sting of rejection. Jeff Guy is responsible for the paper
having some archival references. When Draper failed to be persuaded by Guy that
searching archives can be as exciting as fishing, he made a cast prospecting for trout,
found some likely lies and passed on the rod which was not used until Ben Carton
eventually dragged the reluctant convert into the Pietermaritzburg depot.
T. MCGUANE, The Longest Silence: a Life in Fishing, (London, Random House, 1999), p.
110.
Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.
waterscape and fishing scene titled The Last Day of Salmon.2 According to
his late son Charles, the view of the Biggarsberg reminded him of the
landscape of his home district, Perthshire.3 That the Scots settler could
identify with the distinctly African bushveld, perhaps shows he harboured no
hope of reproducing his life at home. Still, he stocked the land with European
cattle and sheep and planted imported trees around the homestead that were to
overshadow the flat-topped acacias. While The Last Day of Salmon refers to
the close of the Scottish season, for Henderson it symbolised a resignation to
permanent exile from fly-fishing for his national fish. Attempts at
acclimatisation of the king of fish in South Africa never succeeded. This was
not true, however, of the lesser salmonidae, trout.
The Last Day of Salmon
Source: M. Draper
When setting out to uncover little known aspects of settler and post-colonial
South African identity, trout are a great guide. As Adrian Franklin has shown,
2.
3.
The last day of salmon. 1902, Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd. London, Paris and New York.
Publishers by appointment to their Majesties the King and Queen Alexandra, printed in
Vienna. Painted by Alfred Parsons. Thanks to Callie Henderson for allowing me to
photograph her heirloom.
Pers comm late Charles Henderson, 4 June 2000.
56
animals are good to think with.4 With a similar historical frame as Franklin,
but a different geographical focus, I want to show that the acclimatisation of
trout is a powerful metaphor for appreciating, at the level of the elite at least,
a search for identity in a settler society. What piscatorial naturalists wanted to
see was not so much an empty landscape, but a vacant ecological niche into
which their favourite fish not only harmlessly slotted but, in so doing,
enriched life in the southern hemisphere. By contemplating water and the life
therein, anglers not only saw a reflection of the sustainability of their own
communities in question although usually unconsciously but were forced
to confront the socio-economic processes causing environmental
deterioration. Through tracing a few significant biographies in the Cape and
Natal provinces, the role of trout in conservation leadership is made apparent.
The close connection with museums and debates over heritage management is
drawn in the still unfolding, but very telling, history of state conservation
bureaucracies turning their backs on such exotic fish. State withdrawal leaves
the fate of trout in non-government and private hands. In Franklins book
angling and fly-fishing have a complex historical relation to capitalist
industrialism and can be both a cultural product of as well as resistance to
such values.5 Without rehearsing his deliberations on this theme or that of
masculinity in blood sports, I show that fly fishing provides a metaphor for
the form of non-violent, inter-racial male bonding that played a crucial role in
the elite pact which ushered South Africa away from apartheid. The same
holds true in contemporary labour relations at a national level. To provide an
analysis beyond the level of the elite, the role of ordinary African people in
the trout story is touched upon, along with that of the changing importance of
fish in a rural African community and attempts by organised fly fishers to
share the gilt-edged benefits thereof.
Issues of identity and environment have to be seen in the context of
globalisation. Trout originate in the northern hemisphere, but are not entirely
exotic to Africa. The brown trout (Salmo trutta) are natural inhabitants of the
Atlas Mountains, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco eastwards to the
Mediterranean. It was not from there that they came south, but from Britain
where they are also a native species, as they are elsewhere in Europe.
Rainbow trout (Salmo gairdneri later renamed Oncorhynchus mykiss) came
from North America. These two species were successfully and widely
established wherever rivers sufficiently cool and clear occurred. The lengths
that settlers went to in importing and naturalising these fish were extreme but
fitting considering that salmon are considered the king of fish, and trout the
4.
5.
A. FRANKLIN, Animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in

modernity, (Sage, London, 1999), pp. 2, 7.
Ibid., pp. 117, 121.
57
prince. In more recent times in South Africa, trout are close to following the
Scottish thistle onto the list of invasive alien species to be eradicated from the
local ecology. Such a line of reasoning should lead one to Alfred Crosbys
ecological imperialism thesis of biological succession being a more important
engine of world history than deliberate forceful conquest. Yet trout slip out of
and highlight big holes in Crosbys sweeping historical net. Most obviously,
by Crosbys own definition, Southern Africa is not among the Lands of
Demographic Takeover where
European pioneers were accompanied and often preceded by
their domesticated animals, walking, sources of food,
leather, fibre, power and wealth, and these animals often
adapted more rapidly to their new surroundings than their
masters. To a certain extent, the success of Europeans as
colonists was automatic as soon as they put their tough, fast,
fertile and intelligent animals ashore.6
Also, rainbow trout are a species that went the other way: from western North
America to Europe where they have successfully colonised considerable
bodies of water, at the expense of indigenous species in some cases.
Nevertheless, as is seen when wading into the biological debates below, trout
can be located within what John Mackenzie has called the apocalyptic view
of the environmental history of empire.7 Richard Groves alternative narrative
of green imperialism is also apposite for many reasons deeper than the
strong Scottish connection. As he has revealed, men whose intellectual, and
aesthetic sensibilities had been shaped by the Scottish Enlightenment, which
emerged in nationalist tension to English imperialism, put down settler
environmentalist roots in the nineteenth century Cape. By the mid nineteenth
century, romantic landscape tastes and a school of landscape painting
paralleled the contemporary intellectual dominance of the Scots in all fields.
Thomas Pringle, whose writings stimulated many a settler imagination during
this time, made much of the comparability between Scottish and African
landscapes.8 This tradition might well explain James Hendersons willingness
to identify with the African savannah in the foothills of the Biggarsberg. As
we shall see, the redemptive environmentalist mission of acclimatisers and
6.
7.
8.
A. CROSBY Ecological Imperialism: the overseas migration of Western Europeans as a

biological phenomenon in D. WORSTER (ed.) The Ends of the earth: perspectives on
modern environmental history, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988) p. 109.
J. MACKENZIE, Empire and the ecological apocalypse: the historiography of the imperial
environment, in T. GRIFFITHS, and L. ROBIN (eds, Ecology and empire: environmental
history of settler societies, (University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1997), pp. 215228.
R. GROVE, Scotland in South Africa: John Croumbie Brown and the roots of settler
environmentalism, in T. GRIFFITHS, and L. ROBIN (eds), Ecology and Empire, pp. 139,
142.
58
trout men in the Cape has continuity with Groves naturalist clergymen. But
this internationalist trajectory what Nigel Clark calls environmental
cosmopolitanism has been intercepted and unsettled by more recent
nationalist concern about invasive alien organisms.9 The Commaroffs have
highlighted the xenophobic social parallels of such apocalyptic moral panic
with a focus on the contemporary Cape on a largely postcolonial canvas.10 By
going back some decades and revealing trout being dubbed an eco-terrorist,
a label which found more disfavour with Afrikaner conservationists than
former terrorists or African nationalist freedom fighters, it is hoped that
some complicating texture is added to the picture. In contemporary times, the
pursuit of this fish has become an ironic hallmark of class and character
amongst significant members of the African nationalist elite and therefore
reveals an antinomy of the African Renaissance.
Pisciculture, the domestic cultivation and breeding of fish, dates back to the
early Egyptian dynasties, but received a European impulse in Germany during
the mid 18th century. It was inaugurated in Britain in 1837 with effort initially
concentrated on salmon.11 In the 1860s trout and salmon ova were transported
to Australia in the refrigeration chambers of ships. The success of those
efforts stimulated local interest. Act No. 10 of 1867 was passed by the Cape
Government for the purpose of encouraging the introduction into the waters
of this Colony of fishes not native to such waters. In The Guide to South and
East Africa for the Use of Tourists, Sportsmen, Invalids and Settlers, the
Union-Castle Company claimed that their man, Lachlan Maclean,
who, after personally importing a consignment of ova in
1884, induced the Government to take the matter up in 1892,
the year, by the way, in which work first commenced on this
guide book.12
The editors of the guide also pointed out that the

first successful attempts to introduce trout was due to
Macleans representations to the government, his own
9.
10.
11.
12.
N. CLARK, The Demon Seed: Bioinvasion as the Unsettling of Environmental

Cosmopolitanism in Theory Culture and Society, 19(1-2), 2002, pp. 101-125.
J. COMAROFF and J. COMAROFF Naturing the nation: aliens, apocalypse and the
postcolonial state in Journal of Southern African Studies, 27(3), 2002, pp. 627-651.
F. SHAW, The complete science of fly fishing and spinning, (Fred Shaw, London ,1920), p.
97. Domestic cultivation has proved to be the salvation of the wild salmon in Scotland, but
has not been without negative environmental impact.
A. SAMLER BROWN and G. GORDON BROWN (eds), The guide to South and East Africa for
the use of tourists, sportsmen, invalids and Settlers, (For the Union-Castle Company, 23rd
edition, Sampson Low, Marston & Juta, London & Cape Town, 1917), p. 765.
59
efforts, like those efforts in Natal beginning in 1875 without

state support, must have resulted in failure.13
Popular histories in the Cape and Natal compete over which won the race to
successfully import trout. Natal appears to be the victor by an insignificant
margin. Private individuals formed a committee in Natal and, with financial
assistance from the Natal Colonial Government, managed to hatch and release
brown trout fry in the Umgeni and Bushmans Rivers in May 1890 which
survived and self-propagated. These were imported from Scotland where fish
farming techniques provided a model for the world to follow.14 In 1926 a
monument at Trout Bungalow in the Nottingham Road area was erected to a
man reputed to have released the first brown trout into the Mooi River. In
1990 a delegation of pilgrims made a pilgrimage to the shrine in a celebration
of a century of trout in South Africa. According to the Natal Parks Boards
fresh water scientist, Jake Alletson who organised the event, many of the
visitors from were from overseas and included amongst their numbers were
members of royalty and aristocracy.15 The sundial monument is inscribed
with the following tribute:
ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF

JOHN CLARKE PARKER
By Lovers of the Gentle Art of
TROUT FISHING
By His Untiring Efforts
TROUT
Were First Introduced Into
NATAL
CIRCA A.D. 1884
Thereby Giving Much Pleasure
To
Many Persons
1926
13.
14.
15.
Ibid., p. 765.
R.S. CRASS, Freshwater fishes of Natal, (Shuter & Shooter, Pietermaritzburg, 1964), p. 30;
Trout Fishing in Natal, (Daily News, Durban, 1971), p. 6; Trout in South Africa,
(Johannesburg, Macmillan, 1986); T. LIVERSAGE, The history of the introduction of exotic
trout into the waters of KwaZulu-Natal, (Unpublished Honours Dissertation, University of
Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1996), pp. 3-22.
J. ALLETSON, Celebration of the Centenary of Trout in South Africa, in Flyfishing
(Official Journal of the Federation of Southern African Flyfishers) 3 (12), 1990, p. 12.
60
In spite of such success, the Natal enthusiasts had to learn the hard way about
their fishs intolerance of warm water. Organised fisherman began to press
for a closed season for six months of the year, only applicable to protecting
trout. The Western Districts Game Protection Association was formed in
1890, to which Trout was added in 1902, and assumed responsibility for the
introduction of the fish to the Western Cape. Growing out of this body, the
Cape Piscatorial Society was formed in 1931 and today still proudly upholds
the credo of Extending and encouraging the culture and protection of Trout
and other desirable freshwater fish in the Cape.16
Much of the details of these histories are of little consequence here. It is
sufficient to note that the importation and acclimatisation of brown trout was
successful before the close of the nineteenth century, and rainbow trout
followed soon thereafter. This required considerably more resources than
private individuals could muster and succeeded as a result of co-operation
between non-government and government institutions dedicated to the cause,
as well as the movement of ova between the provinces. By 1911 a South
Africa railways guide to Natal advertising trout fishing as an attraction,
demonstrates that there is no reason for settler melancholy on this score. One
of the saddest moments when packing up to move to this land, writes an
Army Officer, in the South African Field,
was when I came to my fishing rods, and surmised that they
would probably for years, hang idly on their nails; but reality
has proved far different, and I can now say without
exaggeration that the man without well preserved water on
his own land has out here a better chance of sport than in
Great Britain.17
Grove has shown the relationship between Scottish nationalism, a fervently

puritanical Calvinism and nascent environmentalism in the mid-nineteenth
century Cape. Such values provide an impulse to this tale but, as is seen
below, soon thereafter become a tributary indistinguishable from the
quickening flow of South African nationalism and nativist ecological thought.
The most accessible way to relate fly fishing and trout to Groves themes is
through Norman Macleans writing set in early twentieth century Montana,
USA. A river runs through it, which, with the help of Robert Redford, Brad
Pitt and Columbia pictures, romanticised the pursuit in the public imagination
in an unprecedented fashion. Macleans autobiographically inspired writing,
as he put it turned out to be Western stories as one publisher said in
16.
17.
E. HERBST, The Cape Piscatorial Society: Sixty-eight years of service to angling and
conservation, (1999) at http://www.smallstreams.com/cps.html,. accessed 8 May, 2000.
A.H. TATLOW (ed.), Natal Province: descriptive guide and official handbook, (South
African Railways Printing Works, Durban, 1911), Chapter 16, Trout Fishing in Natal, p.
360.
61
returning them, These stories have trees in them. While fictionally

embroidered, his principle debt is to his father, a minister who restored his
soul walking the hills between sermons and fishing. The story opens as
follows:
In our family, there was no clear line between religion and
fly fishing ... As a Scot and a Presbyterian my father
believed that man by nature was a mess and had fallen from
the original state of grace. . . he certainly believed God could
count and that only by picking up Gods rhythms were we
able to regain power and beauty. Unlike many Presbyterians,
he often used the word beautiful. . . To him, all good things
trout as well as eternal salvation come by grace and
grace comes by art and art does not come easy. So my
brother and I learned to cast Presbyterian-style, on a
metronome.
Maclean believes that his stories are historically instructive. What might the
lesson be for us? His brother Pauls fly fishing reached a state of grace much
higher than his fathers and when he was casting the canyon was glorified by
rhythms and colors.18 Theologians refer to the above passage to point out
refuges of sanity, truth and grace in a world gone mad and make parallels
with ethical farming.19 Yet from his early aversion to his fathers oatmeal
porridge in the morning, hard work and asceticism held no attraction to Paul
Maclean. Like many famed fly fisherman, he was a gifted writer and
journalist, but this work was produced under the influence of a copious intake
of alcohol and his brother affectionately narrates his moral life falling in
smaller and smaller circles of decay. Perhaps another lesson is that pursuits
with religious roots can quickly become institutionalised in secular society
without any loss of vigour. Max Webers classic of historical sociology, The
Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, explores religious values of
salvation underlying hard work and capital accumulation which had
unintended consequences that may have changed the world.20
Fly fishing is not above commodification and as will be further explored
shown, manifests itself in contradictory ways. Reverend John Croumbie
Browns (1808-1894) words, according to Grove had thundered from a Cape
18.
19.
20.
N. MACLEAN, A river runs through it and other stories, (University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1976). pp. ix-5. I subsequently discovered that this passage has twice been used
in theological scholarship. See below.
W. FRIESEN, What are we fighting for? in Direction, 21(2), 1992, pp. 47-53; D. TOOLE,
Farming, Fly Fishing and Grace: How to inhabit a postnatural world without going mad
in Soundings, 76(1), 1993, pp 85-104. Many thanks to Steve De Gruchy for finding these
references after seeing an earlier draft.
M. WEBER, The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, (Scribners, New York, 1958
[1904-1905]).
62
Town pulpit with all the energy of Scottish ecological redemption.21

Although the details and pulpits were to change, nationalism, moral
righteousness and unintended consequences are themes that lived on through
the close relationship between conservation and trout in South Africa.
A worldly work advocated by Brown was afforestation the planting of
trees of righteousness in the moral wilderness. Grove does not tell us
which species, but in all likelihood, such trees would have been Scottish trees
such as the pine which today, among other exotics, are the subject of much
controversy for contributing to, rather than alleviating, what Brown called
dessication by consuming so much water, and blotting out indigenous
biodiversity. Work is underway to eradicate them from Table Mountain. As
we shall see, trout have been accused of having run afoul of endemic
biodiversity, a moral concept which, today, is the zeitgeist of conservation
science and management. Trout are not without their own flock of
worshippers whose politics centre on the need for clean water. This is an
understandably unexplored dimension in Donald Moores study of
environmental conflicts and cultural contestations in Zimbabwes Eastern
Highlands, which insightfully views the landscape as the historical
sedimentation of symbolic and material processes.22
He opens with a quotation from Norman Maclean:
A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to
know what it says to each of us.23
To appreciate what some rivers have to say to us, we have to listen closely to
their inhabitants, trout. As bearers of the spirit of capitalism, they carry
contradictions that have both divided and united South Africa. If one was to
follow the western fashion of environmental history and attribute agency to
nature, one could say that this is a story with not only trees in it, but also
toads, swans, damselflies, minnows and a princely fish-imperial which is
central to the forging of settler identification with the landscape, South
African conservation institutions, and a peaceful negotiated settlement. The
trout is contested heritage. It not only says things about how settlers wish to
21.
22.
23.
environmentalism, in T. GRIFFITHS, and L. ROBIN (eds), Ecology and Empire, p.151.
D. MOORE, Clear waters and muddied histories: Environmental history and the politics of
community in Zimbabwes Eastern highlands, in Journal of Southern African Studies,
24(2), 1998, pp. 377-404.
N. MACLEAN, A river runs through it and other stories, p. 102. Trout and fishing politics
do feature in the Zimbabwean case, and are extensions of empire which came via the same
route as the oaks, squirrels and starlings brought personally by Cecil John Rhodes and left
as an ambiguous living heritage for Cape Town. As conservationists today seek to
establish ecological corridors for the migration of wildlife from reserve to reserve, so
Rhodes dreamt of a British corridor and train line pushing all the way through to Cairo.
63
become naturalised, but also how natives can become restless settlers. We
now turn to the biographies which best illustrate the former.
Sons of Trout: the rapture of South African landscape24
Adolph Hey began his adulthood by being drafted into the Prussian army in
1870 from the small town of Schleusigen in Germany, which is situated on
the edge of the edge of the Thringen forest and on the junction of the river
Schleus. The river takes its name from the old weirs and sluices flowing into
the fishponds of the abbey of Vessra. His grandson, who is central to the
linking of trout and conservation, writes of this in the Cape one and a quarter
centuries later to indicate how far back water and fisheries go in his life. After
three years of service, Adolph Hey moved to Liege in Belgium to train as a
horticulturalist. In 1875 he set off to Scotland to further his education in
forestry. There he met Janet Drummond whom he married in Edinburgh in
1876. Lean times in Scotland made him look for opportunities abroad. He
successfully applied for the post of horticulturalist in the Cape Town Botanic
Gardens, but delays in their passage meant that when they arrived in Cape
Town in 1877, the post had been filled. He found work first as a gardener and
later as a policeman and retired as a Chief Constable in the Eastern Cape in
1908. Adolph and Janet Heys most remarkable achievement was parenting
eleven children, the fourth being S.A. Hey.
S.A. Hey married Sybil Dreyer, a sportswomen and teacher who shared his
love of walking in the outdoors. A disagreement with the brides Anglican
parson over the wedding details meant that they did not observe the Sabbath
in Keiskammahoek where S.A. Hey was appointed postmaster just after their
marriage and before the birth of their son, Douglas, in 1914. When censured
by the village elders for walking instead of worshipping on Sundays, S.A.
replied that he believed that he was closer to his Creator in the outdoors than
in a church. Given S.A. Heys mixed nationality and that his career spanned
the two world wars, his book, The rapture of the river: an autobiography of a
South African fisherman, makes a claim to identity but avoids politics and
personal detail, including his first name, and focuses instead on his selfinitiated passion: fish and angling, trout and fly fishing in particular.25 His son
Douglas, whose conservation career will be followed shortly, is more open on
24.
25.
Sons of Trout is the name of a South African pop band in a category dubbed by music
journalists as white-boy rock. I wrote to them asking about the origin and significance of
the name, but their cryptic and vacuous reply indicated nothing. This paper shows that
there is something in a name.
S.A. HEY, The rapture of the river: an autobiography of a South African fisherman, (A.A.
Balkema, Cape Town, 1957) p. 26. My emphasis. The authors first name is Sydney but I
prefer to refer to him by his initials, as he does.
64
matters personal and remembers his grandfather as a stern old gentleman of

martial bearing who listened to military marches on the gramophone I
have kinder memories of my grandmother, a frail careworn lady who
spoke with a soft Scottish accent she would croon her wee laddie to
sleep with Scottish lullabies.
S.A. Hey not only fished but, beginning with the Keiskama and Gxulu rivers,
stocked a great deal of water of the Eastern Cape with trout. The stock was
acquired from the Pirie trout hatchery located some 25 km from King
Williams Town. It was established in 1901 as a private undertaking by the
Frontier Acclimatisation Society of King Williamstown with the aim of
stocking what they termed the barren waters of the Province.26 S.A. Heys
telling of his close involvement with this society is the nearest sense he gives
of a political home. The river was probably a good place to escape human
conflict and a clashing identity. The Heys moved north to Maclear in 1927
which is surrounded by excellent trout water stocked in the early 1900s by the
Society, but far from its headquarters in King Williams Town. So the Heys
lived and fished remote from and with little influence on institutions of
significance until 1937 when Douglas Hey took a job as a biologist for the
Cape Provincial Administration at the Jonkershoek Hatchery on the Eerste
River near the town of Stellenbosch.
Douglas Hey matriculated in 1931 and went on to study at Natal University
College and Rhodes University, then did a three year stint of teaching to
repay a bursary. During this period, A.C. Harrison, who was to become a
mentor figure in Heys life, was appointed Inland Fisheries Officer. In that
same year he reconstituted the Western Districts Game and Trout Protection
Association as the Cape Piscatorial Society. Before following Douglas Heys
career, Cecil Harrisons deserves a word. It is best summed up by the
accolade given to him by the University of Cape Town in June 1960 when he
was awarded an honorary Master of Science:
Calmly, industriously, unostentatiously for more than 50
years Mr. Harrison has enriched the world of learning as a
freshwater biologist and piscatorial expert. His list of
scholarly publications on trout, bass, eels, the kurper and
many exotic fishes is long and impressive. He has found
time to serve as honorary secretary of the Cape Piscatorial
Society since its inception in 1931, and is the editor of its
excellent journal [Piscator]. For more than 20 years he has
been the Advisory Officer for Cape Inland Fisheries ...
Throughout his professional life he has striven to conserve
26.
D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, (Cape Nature Conservation, Cape Town,
1995), p. 180.
65
and safeguard the living beauty of nature from mans

destructiveness; and since 1952 he has been secretary to the
Advisory Committee for Nature Conservation. Such men,
Mr. Chancellor, who seek to keep alive our awareness of
nature in an industrialized world, are rare.27
A.C. Harrison, who died in 1980, embodied how tightly knit are particular
strands of government, non-government and academic institutions in the
world of fly fishing. Douglas Heys academic career while at Jonkershoek
hatchery continued at Stellenbosch University where his zoological research
on trout cultivation was awarded a Master of Science (Cum Laude) in 1938.
He continued to investigate trout as well as the propagation of the South
African clawed toad (Xenopus laevis) which was in greater demand by the
medical fraternity (for use in establishing early human pregnancy) than wild
stocks could supply. This work was rewarded with a Stellenbosch PhD in
1942. Douglas Heys work on trout took a number of directions. He
discovered that the reasons for poor fertility at the Jonkershoek Hatchery was
related to its being a far from ideal location for trout propagation. Moreover
he found that, as he put it
suitable waters for rainbow and especially for brown trout
are limited in South Africa due to factors such as high
summer temperatures, turbidity and fluctuations in
streamflow ... Many marginal waters therefore require
restocking and it was realised that if Inland Fisheries was to
acquire national recognition, it would have to be based on
more than the promotion of trout angling.28
Trout cannot breed at all in lakes and have to be repeatedly stocked unless a
suitable headwater exists which is rare in South Africa. Accordingly, the
hatchery broadened its scope to include the propagation of other species of
fish, both indigenous and introduced, which could improve the provinces
fresh water fisheries. Conservation was also seen as important, including total
protection of small indigenous fish in selected habitats. Both the owners and
anglers of various waters had made the hatchery aware of water pollution, and
attending to this was part of its brief. The province approved all this as policy
and established the Department of Fisheries in 1943. The work with toads
involved both collecting and propagating them in large numbers. During the
27.
28.
D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, (Cape Nature Conservation, Cape Town,
1995), p. 57.
66
Second World War when the hatchery was exporting 20 000 toads annually,
South Africa made its reply to Americas rainbow trout. As Hey writes;
An interesting sidelight is that clawed toads have become
established in the wild in California, Arizona and Virginia
and may pose a threat to the native fauna.29
Jonkershoeks aquacultural effort extended onto white-owned commercial

farms as well as the Transkei where work on promoting fish ponds as a
source of protein stole a march on a trend in development work which came
in the 1960s and 70s. Inland Fisheries publicised the untapped potential of
fresh water fish as a source of food, for recreation, tourism, the control of
insect pests and for ornamenting homes and gardens. It was responsible for
the promulgation of the Inland Fisheries Ordinance No. 12 of 1947: the first
legislation to protect aquatic resources from pollution, and responsibility for
upholding this law was uniquely devolved from the police largely to Fisheries
staff. Douglas Hey pioneered biological measures of water quality in South
Africa and, in 1950, began writing memoranda to the Provincial
Administration about the urgency of nature conservation more generally, and
the need for a government body with a broader brief than fisheries. He later
found out that his proposals never reached their addressee, the Provincial
secretary, but concluded, given subsequent developments, that they must have
had some influence.
In 1952 the Cape Department of Nature Conservation and Museum Services
was born, with Douglas Hey the Director a position which he retained for
27 years until retiring in 1979. He confesses that it was not the conservation
of contemporary natural life and its environs that motivated the creation of
the Department. It derived from a proposal to resuscitate, consolidate and
improve the finances of the five natural history museums of the Cape. The
unintended, but quickly following consequence was the consolidation and coordination of conservation policy, legislation and action in the province.
Although upon his retirement he was appointed Director of the National
Monuments Council, it was his experience of nature conservation which had
him invited to take up several visiting professorships at local and American
universities and earned the following laurels which were, among several
others, heaped upon him: member of honour of the World Wide Fund for
Nature in 1981, Civic Honours of the City of Cape Town in 1989 and an
honourary doctorate from the University of Stellenbosch in 1993. A
conservationist of national and global importance had emerged from a
hatchery in Stellenbosch. Natal conservation institutions were also
29.
Ibid., p. 73.
67
consolidated during the post-WWII apartheid era.30 The name which

establishes the close trout-forged link between the conservation bureaucracies
of the provinces, is Geddes-Page. Douglas Heys father, S.A. Hey, tells of
meeting a man called John Page:
a prominent and valued committee member of the Frontier
Acclimatisation Society and a fly fishing fanatic ... At the
time of writing [1957] his son, Colonel Geddes-Page, is
curator of the Government fisheries at the Pirie and GeddesPages son John is in charge of the inland fisheries for Natal.
This goes to show there must be something in heredity!31
In 1977 when the Capes Department of Nature Conservation celebrated its first 25
years, Douglas Hey was considered to have been the founding father. Source: Die
Burger 1977.
30.
31.
M. DRAPER, Zen and the Art of Garden Province Maintenance: The soft intimacy of hard
men in the wilderness of KwaZulu-Natal, 1952-1997, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 24,4, (1998).
S.A. HEY, The rapture of the river: an autobiography of a South African fisherman, p. 59.
68
S.A. Heys sociobiological conclusion probably applied as much to his own

family, for his son Douglas was central to this succession. Pirie hatchery had
run into difficult circumstances and could not compete economically with the
states Jonkershoek operation. Douglas Hey successfully recommended that
the Pirie operation be taken over by the Cape Administration as a satellite to
Jonkershoek in 1946. Colonel Geddes-Page, who had returned home after
being wounded in action and being taken as a prisoner of war, was appointed
curator. He made great strides in developing the Pirie hatchery, and his son
John helped him when on leave from the department of inland revenue. John,
in turn, joined Jonkershoek as curator in 1948. In six years he was to make
great advances in developing Inland Fisheries and promoting fish culture in
the Cape.32 His work attracted attention and in 1954 a personal letter from
Colonel Jack Vincent, the Director of the Natal Parks Board, recruited him
for Natal. Although the early name of the Board was clear about the interest
in fish, unlike subsequent directors, Vincent had no interest in fly-fishing.
Shortly after John Geddes-Page became incumbent at Queen Elizabeth Park,
an incident occurred which he only made public half a century later.
I had settled in comfortably and was picking up the
requirements of the new job from The Colonel and from
the Fisheries Research Officer, Bob Crass, when the Judge
(who was a member of the Board at that time, and who shall
remain nameless!) called me to his Chambers. Imagine! I
was somewhat overawed. Well, I was duly informed that he
was the Chairman of the Trout Fishing Liaison Committee
of the Natal Parks Board and he then spent a monologuish
twenty minutes telling me exactly how I should run the
Boards Inland Fisheries Department in general and how I
should attend to the best interests of Natals trout fishermen
in particular.33
The night after threatening Geddes-Page who pointed out that the Judge was
acting out of his jurisdiction as a board member, the Judge died which
prompted Vincent to jestingly accuse his new recruit of witchcraft. The
humorous anecdote speaks volumes about power, trout and conservation
bureaucracies. John Geddes-Page filled Col. Jack Vincents shoes as Director
in 1963 where he remained for 25 years until his retirement in 1988. Trout
fishermen were well served in his term and that of his successor, George
Hughes, a reputed conservation biologist who was trained in Scotland. The
32.
33.
D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, pp. 55, 56.

J. GEDDES-PAGE, New boy in the board in The Game Ranger (Official Mouthpiece of
the Game Rangers Association of Africa(, (Commemorative Edition, February 1994).
69
transforming KwaZulu-Natal conservation bureaucracy replaced Hughes with

Khulani Mkhize in 2002.34 Debate about the place of trout in conservation
work, which Hughes used to put a lid on because trout are sacrosanct to
him, has surfaced.35 Trout, along with all freshwater fish stand to lose their
protected status in KwaZulu-Natal. Although it was initially an official with
an Afrikaans name raising questions about trout in the Natal Parks Board, and
a Zulu nationalist heading the KwaZulu-Natal Conservation Service as it
begins to attempt to cut loose its exotic roots, such anti-imperial sentiment is
located, as we see below, in new ecological paradigms which stress
conserving the integrity of native ecosystems. Before Hughes and his trout
came under the guillotine, exotic trees in the provinces parks began to fall.
If John Croumbie Brown had advocated planting fishes of righteousness in
South African waters, they would have, in all likelihood, been salmon and
salmonids. The Frontier Acclimatisation Society planted, amongst other
species, righteous trout in what Brown called the moral wilderness, but
these were both Brown and Rainbow, thus both old and new world fish. The
work of the Frontier Acclimatisation Society was, it seems, less about
landscaping the country in the image of a particular European nation and
more about forging a new national identity which identified with the local
landscape and transcended lines of nationalist conflict between Europeans.
S.A. Hey used to enjoy Afrikaans hospitality on his fishing trips and referred
to his closest fishing companion by a Xhosa nickname. As John Geddes-Page
recently quipped when I questioned him about this pedigree; they were just a
bunch of chaps who loved nature and the country.36 S.A. Hey echoed
Browns concerns about soil erosion which he ascribed as being responsible
for the fishing in 1957 no longer being what it used to be:
The cause of the deterioration which has taken place during
the last twenty years may be ascribed mainly to the
exploitation of the soil. . . silt has been as deleterious to the
estuary fishing as to the trout fishing.37
34.
35.
36.
37.
Mkhizes career was built in the KwaZulu conservation bureaucracy. See Draper, Zen and
the Art of Garden Province Maintenance for background underscoring the political
significance of such origins.
Personal communication with a senior officer bearer who retired in 2001. (October 2000 &
April 2001).
Personal communication, September 2000.
70
He considered, but never did anything about organising anglers in defence of

their waters. As revealed below, a threat to the protected status of trout
initially mobilised fly fishermen as conservationists at a national level.
A Vacant Ecological Niche? Truth and trout
In the Cape during the late 1970s, a swansong prelude signalled the opening
of the drama in which the relationship between trout and state conservation
began to come undone. Douglas Hey tells of a feral colony of mute swans
established through a historical accident in the Kromme River near
Humansdorp. Residents of the area requested that they be protected, and so
they were granted total protection in terms of the Wildlife Ordinance in 1952.
For reasons both aesthetic and ecological, in consultation with an authority on
waterfowl, Peter Scott, it was decided to establish a second colony on
Groenvlei in the Goukamma Nature Reserve. During the 1970s, these birds
grew in number in the Lakes District, while the original group dwindled. Hey
believed that these birds could be an asset and a tourist attraction:
A flight of these birds seen against the evening sky was a
breathtaking sight. In the words of Sir Peter Scott after a
visit to the Cape: Keep an eye on these swans, Douglas,
they are worth looking after. Unfortunately, my successors
did not share this view and being alien birds, considered
them undesirable in a nature reserve. Within two years of my
retirement the last swan had disappeared from Groenvlei.38
This avian story marked a swift about-turn in ecological thought as

viewpoints of the landscape, and how it should be gardened, radically
diverged. In 1985, a few years after the swan had bowed out of the Cape
conservation picture, controversy began to heat up over the status of trout in
the provinces cool water. Under Douglas Heys successor, Wolf Morsbach,
who had literally been at Heys side when the original swan project had been
undertaken, Drs Kas Hamman and Johan Neethling led the charge against fly
fishers. This came soon after they had concluded the sport of allegedly
removing the imperial swans with shotguns, personally.39 Exotic trout had
been afforded more protection than indigenous species of fish, they reasoned.
This did not square with the mission of conservation as these men understood
it, so they aimed to tilt the bureaucratic balance in favour of the endangered
indigenous minnow species such as the redfin and the Cape galaxias.
38.
39.
D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, p. 180.

Personal communication, senior Cape Conservation Official, December, 2000.
71
When Douglas Hey wrote that the mute swan has the distinction of being the
only alien fauna to be declared protected wildlife in the Cape, he was
referring to total protection.40 Being an angling species of wildlife that could
be preyed upon within limits by sanctioned humans, trout had partial legal
protection until 1987. The threat and eventual loss of protected status brought
about an unprecedented unification amongst the devotees of this fish which,
according to Fred Croney, the first president of the Federation of Southern
African Flyfishers (FOSAF), a century of effort had failed to achieve. The
late Croney, a seasoned Eastern Cape journalist and newspaper editor,
identified the prime movers in the change of the whole scene as being the
clubs in his area. Perhaps seeing their future threatened by the then impending
handover of the Provincial hatchery at Pirie to the Ciskei government, they
formed the Federation of East Cape Trout Angling Clubs in1982. This was a
success and provided the confidence for them to lead the way in forming a
national body when Cape Conservation provided the catalyst by moving
against protection for trout. Yet at the outset and in the same breath, Croney
was explicit in dispelling the notion that FOSAF came into being solely to
protect the interests of trout fishermen. As proof he cites their constitution as
originally formulated. Sure enough, it does not mention trout and puts the
bottom line on catchment and river conservation where FOSAF sees its
major task in the future. He quotes Douglas Hey whose publications after his
retirement have confronted this ghost and repeatedly maintained that water is
the source of life thereby provided trout defenders with a strong position to
which they have regular recourse: It is regrettable that a number of species of
particular scientific interest have become rare. But viewed in retrospect,
however, I believe that the introduction of trout to South Africa has proved to
be an asset to our country.41
Before FOSAF was launched and formed its own journal, Flyfishing, Fly
fishers used to publish in and read club-based journals such as the Capes
Piscator, Natals The Creel and general commercial angling magazines. In
one, wherein the launch of FOSAF was announced, the Cape Nature
Conservation Department officials were called radical conservationists by
well-known trout author and Pietermaritzburg medical doctor, Tom Sutcliffe.
This label, rare for a government department, rested on the basis of a lack of
scientific proof being presented for the case that trout are:
rapacious villains of the peace guilty . . .of causing certain
species of redfin minnow ... to hover on the very edges of
40.
41.
D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, p. 180.

FEDERATION OF SOUTHERN AFRICAN FLYFISHERS (FOSAF). FOSAF Update, Flyfishing:
The official Journal of the Federation of Southern African Flyfishers, 1, 1, 1987, p. 29.
72
extinction ... Exotics are unwanted in any environment

because they have the potential to upset it ... Some exotics,
however, may slot very neatly and peacefully into a foreign
area simply by chance. I would contend that the trout in
South Africa is an example of this phenomenon. In the
words of one famous South African fisheries scientist, trout
filled a vacant ecological niche in this country. 42
At a presentation to the Natal Fly Fishers Club in that same year, 1986,
Sutcliffe maintained that we should not be as concerned with minutiae but
should focus on the real attack on all fish, big and small: water extraction, soil
erosion, pollution and so forth.43 These were Douglas Heys concerns for the
Eerste River at Jonkershoek, and he relied on trout-focussed people to keep
vigil on such matters. Yet for others such as Kas Hamman, who followed
Heys path from leading aquatic science at Jonkershoek to heading up Cape
Nature Conservation, the loss of three species of minutiae is also of
concern, and he saw trout as guilty and said they could not do anything about
it in Heys day. When I pointed out to Hamman during an interview in 2000
that Cape Nature Conservation was literally and figuratively built on the
foundations of the trout hatchery at Jonkershoek, from where John GeddesPage emerged to lead conservation in Natal, he responded that this is
unfortunately so.44 By 2002, however, Hamman had reconciled himself with
what he called the the chequered history of conservation authorities and
embraced FOSAF Yellowfish Working Group as an ally in freshwater
conservation in face of government fragmentation and neglect. He also
acknowledged that it was more than the Cape and Natal who owed
Jonkershoek for providing conservation leadership:
For many environmentalists and especially for those of us
actively involved in conservation, Jonkershoek is
synonymous with the trout hatchery established during the
early 1890s. More importantly, however, Jonkershoek
provided a founding platform for conservation in South
Africa. It is here at this well-known fish hatchery that the
directors of the former four provincial conservation
departments of the Cape, Free State, Transvaal and Natal had
their initial training as fisheries officers.45
42.
43.
44.
45.
T. SUTCLIFFE, A federation of flyfishers is bornin SA Fishing, 9(1), 1986, my emphasis.

Personal observation, 1986.
Personal Communication Dr. Kas Hamman, 27 June 2000.
K. HAMMAN, And it all Started at Jonkershoek in P. ARDENE (ed), Proceedings of the
6th Yellowfish Working Group Conference in Cederberg, Western Cape, 21-23 March,
2002.
73
FOSAF convened a symposium in April 1986 where the countrys leading

aquatic scientists and conservationists debated trout. According to the
defence, the consensus amongst delegates was that Cape Nature Conservation
should not remove the legislative protection. Yet Hamman believes that his
case was also vindicated and, although seen as more benign than other species
with a wider threshold of tolerance of temperature and water quality variation
such as large and small-mouthed bass, trout did not emerge completely
purged of all guilt. It was recognised that evidence for extinctions does not
exist; trout certainly preyed upon some and displaced other indigenous
species. Hamman believes that this about-turn in attitude to trout by Cape
Conservation might have created conflict, but was necessary in order that
differences with the angling fraternity be resolved. By the late 1980s and
early 1990s, a spirit of pragmatic compromise began to prevail in which the
value of trout was resuscitated. In Grahamstown, at an angling exhibition at
the JLB Smith Institute in 1990, Mike Bruton (the then head of this
organisation which is the centre of ichthyology in Southern African) was
reported as saying that trout should be seen as naturalised aliens and part of
our cultural heritage.46
Yet in 1997 a former student of Brutons, Jim Cambray of the Albany
Museum of Natural History in Grahamstown, reopened this healing wound
when he took his position to the press:
Between 1850 and 1950, there was a dramatic increase in the
rate of animal extinctions, which coincided with European
colonial expansion. Many alien plants and creatures were
introduced to colonised territories, some with disastrous
consequences. One of these was the rainbow trout, which is
still being moved, in many cases illegally, around South
Africa, New Zealand, Australia and other countries. It is still
being introduced into river systems where local species have
been living and evolving for many thousands of years. In the
light of present-day knowledge, this is truly eco-terrorism ...
We have just passed through a period of political terrorism:
let us now move away from eco-terrorism, even if it means
the end of trout. 47
The following week, two journalists, Ed Herbst and Robert Kirby, waded into
the fray and in separate strident defences of trout, trotted out the familiar
46.
47.
Mail & Guardian, May 16-22, 1997

Mail & Guardian, May 9-15, 1997.
74
ecological and economic defence. Herbst concluded that Cambrays case did
harm to the green cause and might explain why universities have a funding
crisis. Kirby, who had recently published a book Fly Fishing in Southern
Africa,48 accused Cambray of silliness and concluded thus:
A distinction always needs to be made between desirable and
undesirable exotic species. Clearly the elegant trout falls into
the former category. If it does not, we may as well go all the
way in obeying the frenzied counsel of the Cambrays of this
world. While we are getting rid of all our trout and bass, lets
uproot all our fruit trees and our wheat and maize fields,
vineyards; lets slaughter all the exotic cattle and sheep,
goats, dogs, poultry, rip up all the ornamental bushes and
shrubs, the flowers and vegetables. Lets go back to eating
grubs and maroela berries? And while were about it, for
heavens sake lets eradicate as many facile academics as we
can identify. Hustle back into your museum, Dr Cambray,
and spend your fruitful mind in the contemplation of other
well-stuffed artefacts.49
In 1998 a local environmental publication kept the debate alive by enquiring

how green is trout fishing?.50 When an opinion was solicited from the office
of the Cape Piscatorial Society, Kirbys tirade echoed almost word-for-word.
The secretary, Jean Farrell, recently told Dean Impson, Cape Nature
Conservation fish scientist and FOSAF member, that the trout is a lovely
noble fish and the redfin is a useless minnow. Thank goodness you werent
around when the dinosaurs were here or youd want to save them too! It was
to this office that Cape Nature Conservation conferred responsibility for
administering angling in the Witte, Elandspad, Smalblaar and Holsloot rivers
and when former Director Johan Neethling retired in 1997, he apologised for
all the fuss kicked up about trout.51 Kirby maintains that all of Cambrays
arguments were long ago discounted as being illusive by better scientific
minds than were at the disposal of the bureaucrats.52 Here one detects more
than paradigmatic conflict in the scientific community deriving from
differences in spiritual sensibility. There is too a faint odour of nationalist
divergence of vision. Jane Carruthers has shown that through succession and
affirmative action, control of the Kruger National Park around the mid-
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
R. KIRBY, Fly fishing in Southern Africa, (Struik-Winchester, Cape Town, 1993).

Keeping Track, February/March 1988.
Personal communication. Jean Farrell, 27 June 2000.
75
1990s shifted from imperialist sportsmen to Afrikaner scientists and

bureaucrats who set about clearing alien invaders. While a case could be
made that this was so in Cape Conservation, it is too simple an explanation.53
Douglas Hey is a fly fisher of trout therefore a sportsman, but imperialist? He
is also a Stellenbosch-educated scientist. If there is nationalism at play then it
has become submerged under revisionist ecological thought reacting against
the mingling of species brought about by globalisation. Such a vision sees
trout a castrophic in contrast to the erstwhile cornucopian conception. In the
current world of environmentalism, biologists and conservationists are
divided amongst themselves on this question. Fearfulness of the effects of
globalisation is not only found in the view of scientists and state conservation
agencies, but also by non-government monitoring organisations such as the
Worldwatch Institute. For their scribe, Chris Bright, the ecological scenario of
the era of imperialism was only the beginning of disastrous processes, which
have been speeding up as quicker and higher volumes of travel shrink the
world, bringing about what he calls evolution in reverse. A culprit he cites
of being a bio-invader is the rainbow trout:
In various places around the world from South African

streams to Siberias Lake Baikal it is being blamed for out
competing or eating native fish, and its aggressive foraging
is almost certainly working other changes in aquatic food
webs. (In South Africa, for instance, it has nearly eliminated
at least one insect species: an ancient rarity called the
Gondwana relict damselfly).54
Whether or not trout have run their course or not is a moot point in the debate.
Cambray maintained that trout were recently introduced in the upper Krom
catchment. Yet Herbst avers that he needs to substantiate his inference that fly
fishers routinely adulterate virgin water with trout. The Mail & Guardian
editors declared the debate closed before empirical evidence could be
produced in that forum. Yet in 1999, when accepting the responsibility
conferred on it by Cape Nature Conservation to administer angling in various
rivers, Herbst said that the Cape Piscatorial Society rededicates itself to its 68
year-old credo of extending and encouraging the culture and protection of
Trout and other desirable freshwater fish in the Cape. Although, constituted
53.
54.
J. CARRUTHERS, The Kruger National Park: a social and political history, (University of
Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1995), pp. 103-120.
C. BRIGHT, Life out of bounds: bio-invasions in a borderless world, (London, Earthscan,
1999), pp. 1, 101.
76
several decades after the arrival of trout in the Cape, the Societys history is
inextricably entwined with this Prince of Fish.55
Whether or not extending and encouraging the culture of trout includes
assisting in bio-invasion is not entirely clear, but Cambray feels that there is
no room for complacency about biodiversity and that the regulation and
penalties for transgression ought to be as severe as they are in Australia.
Herbst cites the Natal Parks Boards repeated claim that whatever impact
trout had when introduced a century ago, it is not quantifiable because no
research was done at the time. Michael Samways whose work on the relict
Gondwana damselfly was cited by Bright to condemn rainbow trout, cautions
against such an alarmist position as that of the Worldwatch Institute. His
work is based on experiments using the baseline of a waterfall, which
interrupts trout migration, rather than a longitudinal time-line. There are,
therefore, other factors which could be responsible besides trout, such as
wattle infestation, cattle trampling, erosion and so forth.56
The Fisheries Research Officer from whom John Geddes-Page learnt his job
when he came to Natal was Bob Crass who is today a regular correspondent
to The Natal Witness on a variety of subjects. His original view of trout has
until recently been the orthodoxy in fly fishing and KZN conservation circles:
In the upland valley sections of all the major Natal systems,

trout have found a niche that was not filled by any
indigenous fish. . . . they have caused remarkably little
disturbance to the indigenous fish fauna.
He does go on to admit that Barbus anoplus may have been exterminated by

trout in certain places, moreover, Amphilius natalensis as well as Barbus
natelensis (Natal Yellowfish) have possibly decreased in numbers in the
upper reaches of some streams.57
The first warden of the Kruger National Park was a Scott, James StevensonHamilton. His pioneering conservation career in the first half of the last
century has been well documented in the work of Jane Carruthers.58 Soon
55.
56.
57.
58.
Personal communication, Prof. Michael Samways, October, 1999.
R.S. CRASS, Freshwater Fishes of Natal, pp. 30,31.
See, most recently for example, J. CARRUTHERS, Wildlife and warfare: the life of James
Stevenson-Hamilton, (University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2001).
77
after his retirement in 1946 he drew naturalists attention to the neglected fresh
water of South Africa, which swarm with indigenous species. Much to his
delight, he had discovered that some of the warm water species could be
caught on both salmon and trout fly. Although he had not mastered the
techniques that obsess contemporary anglers, he pointed out that of South
African freshwater species, the tiger fish stands out easily the king On the
whole I doubt there is a fish in the world which for its size can put up so
game a fight. He did however subscribe to the vacant niche thesis:
Exceptions are some of the rapid-flowing, and cool streams
which drain the uplands of South Africa, and these, destitute
of natural denizens, have wisely been utilized for the
introduction of rainbow and brown trout. The experiment
was first made if my memory serves me correctly in the
Mooi River in Natal about 1890, and so successful did it
prove, that it was extended to many other streams of a
similar character in South Africa.
Stevenson-Hamilton was thus able to write trout, as well as other imported

fresh-water species into Wildlfe in South Africa.59 So was Douglas Hey,
except his view is not of a vacant niche, but that of most of the Capes species
being of such little sporting and table value that other varieties were
introduced from Europe and America. His trout history is very Cape-centric
and one he hoped to pass off to Natal. I have a copy of his Wildlife Heritage
of South Africa inscribed as follows:
To my good friend Col. Jack Vincent. May this promote our
common endeavour. Doug. 2/7/66.60
Recent exchanges in The Natal Witness are helpful in extending the vacant
ecological niche thesis, or that of worthless occupants, to social issues.
Former Inkatha Freedom Party politician Arthur Konikramer wrote in his
capacity of Chairman of Amafa aKwaZulu-Natali (Heritage, KZN) to refute a
claim made in a Springvale Festival Supplement:
I do not believe it wise to allow Witness readers to live with
the impression that those who came to Nottingham Road [a
59.
60.
J. STEVENSON-HAMILTON, Wildlife in South Africa, (Cassell,and Co., London, 1947), p.

336, 337.
D. HEY, Wildlife heritage of South Africa, (Oxford University Press, Cape Town, 1966).
78
major trout Mecca for trout fishers] from Perthshire under

the Byrne immigration scheme in 1849 were the first settlers,
the only other inhabitants being Bushmen and wild animals
to choose the copy writers indelicate use of language.
African iron age settlements were scattered over the whole
of KwaZulu-Natal, the earliest having been carbon-dated to
the first century after Christ.61
There may be a relationship between a willingness to overlook the loss of a

few minor species of fish and the imperial enthusiasm for running roughshod
over, sometimes exterminating, those who were considered to be lesser
peoples. On the issue of the history of slavery and the agenda of the World
Racism Conference in Durban, 2001, Bob Crass joined the melee laying his
position bare. He argued that Kevin Durrheim (the social scientist to whom he
replied) is attacking capitalism rather than racism and
fortunately for South Africa our ANC government has
embraced capitalism as an essential element in building the
new South Africa We may also hope that there will be no
attempts to hold present-day members of society responsible
for the actions of their ancestors.62
Crass, who researched and propagated trout for recreational purposes in Natal
for most of career, provides the themes for the section to follow.
Trout and reconciliation: re-creation and fishers of men

Herbst and others smugly pointed out in 1998 that in South Africa a parastatal conservation body, The Natal Parks Board (now KwaZulu-Natal Nature
Conservation Services) routinely breeds trout, distributes them in its parks
and actively encourages fly-fishing. When the controversy over trout emerged
in the Cape, the Natal Parks Board attracted great approval from FOSAFs
Croney who called the antagonists draconian and the Natal counterpart
progressive for its position pledging to continue its long-held philosophy of
serving public recreation as well as environmental protection. Trout said
Sutcliffe
have actually done some good by encouraging progressive
conservation through attempts to create an environment to
61.
62.
Natal Witness, 1&6 August, 2001.

Natal Witness, 7& 10 August, 2001.
79
suit their rather narrow requirements for pollution-free

water.63
Trout thus highlight an old tension in the mission of conservation. The term
progressive conservation was coined in the United States during Roosevelts
administration and sought a utilitarian approach often clashing with aesthetic
imperatives of wilderness preservation. As a 1911 guide to trout fishing in
Natal opens
It is a shallow as well as a dismal scheme of life which
ignores or undervalues the importance of recreation.64
Indigenous African people who were excluded from the public, for whom this
social good was provided, are an integral part of this history. In 1902, the
Natal Anglers Association made an application to Native Affairs for a Native
to act as river guard for the Trout Fishing Conservancy on the Umgeni
River.65 In 1909, An ardent Transvaal angler reported that to access and fish
the Mooi River near Rosetta and Nottingham Road,
saddle horses or a trap and horses may be hired at very
reasonable rates and the services of a Zulu or two are
procurable for next to nothing The railways guide which
published his words also points out that there are several
bushman caves adjacent to the river, some of which are in
very good condition No artificial bait is allowed, except
on certain portions of the river No coloured people are
allowed to fish.66
A 1937 publication advertising South Africa in a photograph titled The

Gentle Art in Natal shows a white and African man, both in European
clothing, not fishing but seeding a river with trout. It emphasises exciting
potential: the standard of fishing should grow better every year.67 Whether
or not freshwater fish provided any refuge from the pull of the expanding
capitalist economy is difficult to discern. In S.A. Heys time in the Eastern
Cape, although some of the trout streams he fished were in a
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
T. SUTCLIFFE, A federation of flyfishers is bornin SA Fishing, 9(1), 1986.

A.H. TATLOW (ed.), Natal Province: descriptive guide and official handbook, pp. 359373.
NAB, 1/IPD, 3/1/2, 1902.
A.H. TATLOW (ed.), Natal Province: descriptive guide and official handbook, p. 363.
Wonderful South Africa (Johannesburg, Associated Newspapers Ltd, 1937), p. 144.
80
thickly populated Native area, where droughts and semistarvation were not uncommon, I neither saw nor heard of a
Native who fished or would eat fish. The Natives I
questioned about their aversion to fish said they would as
soon eat a snake. Trout poaching, I have found, is confined
to Europeans, half-breeds and coloureds.68
If S.A. Hey is to be trusted, he provides some important ethnography of

culture in transition. He points out that in the Transkei around the mid-1900s,
Africans living near the coast had begun to take to fishing and fish eating.
Whether or not Africans fished, organised trout fishermen took a very
proprietary view of the trout finding refuge from their artificial flies in
African areas: the members of this [Natal Angling] Association who are all
prominent sportsmen might do a great deal to assist in the protection and of
trout fishing and in the enforcement of Law and Regulation, if they were
given permission to fish such [Native Location] waters. The Chief Native
Commissioner granted their application, not as a right, but as a privilege
which could be revoked at any time.69 Such a scheme has continuity with
current fly fishers interventions, but with a far more human face.
Recent work by Thembi Haltshwako in the Nsikeni area near Umzimkulu (a
pocket of the Eastern Cape or former Transkei within KwaZulu-Natal) set out
to determine the importance and river fish in the peoples lives, and the
potential for fly fishers to contribute to community advancement.70 Without
going into details, fish is a significant resource in the community with many
artful anglers who value trout above the indigenous yellowfish, but behind the
eel, which is more prolific in the lower reaches of their water. The project
sought to evaluate the potential of fly-fishing eco-tourism as a strategy for
natural resource utilisation. The principle being that fly fishing and other
forms of eco-tourism could yield income for little effort and cause no loss of
resources since fly fishers could practice catch-and-release: a motto of the
sport. The community in turn would also be assisted to manage and control
their rivers, the principle threat emanating from commercial agriculture
upstream. The Natal chapter of FOSAF funded the project, which I
supervised. This is a happy irony since some of the FOSAF members are the
very ones with whom I have clashed over racial issues in the Natal Fly
Fishing Club in 1988. Let me explain.
68.
69.
70.
NAB, SNA, I/1/294, 1901. NAB, CNC, 380 B, 1919.
T. HLATSHWAKO, Fly fishing and tourism: a sustainable rural community development
strategy for Nsikeni? (Unpublished M.En.Dev, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg,
2000).
81
This club is a descendant of the Natal Angling Club formed in 1901 and
organises access to water on private water for a small number of members.
After spending many years on the waiting list, as a member, I tried to take an
African student of mine fishing as a guest. When it was discovered that my
guest was black, I was told that farmers would object. One farmer, I was told,
said that blacks could fish in his bass dam, but not for his trout. In the end, the
club changed their rules so that guests could only be family of members, and I
left. There were, during the transition of the 1990s some new recruits in the
order, including Ilan Lax fly fisher, human and land rights activist as well
as a lawyer who served on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He
made it one of his tasks to drag FOSAF into the new South Africa, with
some of the old guard kicking and screaming.71 He, together with Bill
Bainbridge who used to be in charge of the Forestry Department of the Natal
Drakensberg, oversaw Thembi Hlatshwakos work from FOSAFs
perspective. Another character worth mentioning is Wolf Avni who has a
trout fishery in the Drakensberg and provided valuable input. He is something
of the Hunter S. Thompson of South African fly fishing literature whose
response to being questioned about the ecological integrity of trout by my
students, inspired the theme of this paper:
I am not Eurocentric. I am the whitest kaffir (in the best
sense of the word) and proud of it! How long do I have to
live here before I can be called African?72
Like himself, he prides his trout on being wild, subjected to natural conditions
and thus locally adapted and environmentally friendly unlike those in
Mpumlanga where conditions tend to be more artificial with a negative
ecological footprint, and the fishing more canned.73
Avni and the Underberg-Himeville Trout Fishing Club organise an annual
fly-fishing festival which emphasises non-competitiveness and the wild
character of the fishing, and the natural management of the fishery. The club
also manages water on tribal land, admitted black membership during the
time the NFFC baulked at the idea and is keen to assist the Nsikeni project
with its booking, networking and management expertise. At the festival in
2000, the guest was Ronnie Kasrils, the Minister of Water Affairs and
Forestry who is reported as saying that
71.
72.
73.
Personal Communication 2000.

Interview with Wolf Avni, Bill Simpson and Harry Tully, Underberg-Himeville Trout
Fishing Club, 14 September, 1999.
W. AVNI, A mean-mouthed, hook-jawed, bad-news, son-of-a-fish! Fish fingers and trout
tails and other South African fly-fishing stories, (Struik, Cape Town, 1997).
82
I came here and found myself up against a mystical,

existential world, part art and part science . . . This is
wonderful, wonderful water country . . . but elsewhere in
South Africa many people cant turn on a tap for pure fresh
water.74
For good reason fly fishermen were seducing Kasrils. In that area, irrigation
by big farmers is killing some of the rivers and forums seeking to exert
control from downstream have reached an impasse. Revolutionary new water
legislation, which nationalises a formerly private resource, was passed by the
former freedom fighters predecessor, Kader Asmal, and makes the task
easier, but a long struggle lies ahead. Kasrils should understand the arguments
in favour of wild versus canned put and take fishing since environmentalists
in Mpumalanga have asked him to put a moratorium on trout hatchery and
pond building which is having an adverse effect on wetlands.75 But trout are
all not bad in that province. In his declaration of interests as an MP, Kasrils
has indicated that among the gifts he has received were four fresh trout.
Kasrils actually caught the trout, during an inspection trip to a river in
Mpumalanga that had been cleared of alien vegetation on the Working for
Water Campaign begun by Asmal. According to editorial; For one who used
to mock members of the ANC who took to trout fishing in exile, it represents
quite a turnaround.76 But Kasrils might have recognised that trout as well as,
in his words, trees can provide healing for the soul and serve as living
monuments in remembrance of the past and painful episodes.77
The change did not begin, however, with a former exile, but with Cyril
Ramaphosa who started persuading fellow parliamentarians give trout fishing
a try when the new government was formed in 1994. The following year, he
claimed to have made an enthusiast of Valli Moosa, significantly the current
Minister of Environment and Tourism. Ramaphosas enthusiasm for the
gentle art has often been held up as blatant evidence of the former trade
unionists sell out to bourgeois values. Another example is Rams Ramashia,
the charismatic director-general of the department of labour who has been a
fly fisher since his student days at Turfloop. He sees fly-fishing as a form of
negotiation between the trout and himself. The trout becomes symbolic of
Cosatu, big business, the minister of labour or his overworked staff.78 When
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
Natal Witness, May 20, 2000.

Mail & Guardian, February 4, 2000.
Mail & Guardian, October 1-7, 1999.
C.RASSOOL, The Rise of Heritage and the Reconstitution of History in South Africa in
Kronos, 26, 2000, p. 20.
Mercury Business Report, 19 April, 2001.
83
Nthatho Motlana announced in 1996 that Cyril Ramaphosa was to join his
New Africa Investments Ltd (Nail) and lead the bid to acquire Johnnic from
Anglo American, the worst fears of critics were confirmed. However, as
Mark Gevisser notes, this is not a historically unique to African nationalism:
As the Randlords harnessed capital in the service of Empire
and the Broeders harnessed it in the service of Afrikaner
Nationalism, Ramaphosa goes to battle for Black
Empowerment. In all three of these phases of South African
capitalism, there is a synergy between the ideological
aspirations of a ruling class and the personal ambitions of the
entrepreneurs themselves: it is not inaccurate, on one level,
to compare Ramaphosa to a Rhodes or a Rupert.79
Before turning his attentions to business, Ramaphosa was considered equal in

stature to Thabo Mbeki who has recently won media mileage through taking
up golf. Once it became clear that Mbeki was going to succeed Nelson
Mandela as President, analysts maintain that Ramaphosa had to be given an
attractive alternative to parliament for he is too powerful a figure to operate
under Mbekis shadow. Ramaphosa, capitals former principal opponent, has
not entirely lost his critical opinions. He has argued that privatisation and
syndication was responsible for making trout fishing elitist and that state
support was needed for making more waters public and stocking them with
fish, so that anyone can enjoy it: My mission is to draw more and more
people into this noble sport. He claimed to have piqued the interest of
Brigitte Mabandla, former Deputy Minister of Arts and Culture.80 Nelson
Mandela was said to have benevolently humoured Ramaphosas less than
politically correct passion, since he felt it was good for making friends and
allies for the ANC.
Urban legend has it that this paid off handsomely in 1992 when Ramaphosa
and the National Partys Roelf Meyer went trout fishing together and bonded
firmly, thereby saving the Kempton Park negotiations from a deadlock and
thus carrying the country away from the brink of war to a rainbow nation
future, or, in the eyes of critics, facilitating an Elite Transition to
neoliberism.81 According to Ramaphosa, Roelf Meyer didnt know how to
fish hes a hunter. Meyers clumsy attempts at casting succeeded only in
catching himself by the finger in which the barb of the fly became embedded.
79.
80.
81.
Mail & Guardian, October 11-17, 1996.

Mail & Guardian, May 26- June 1, 1995.
P. BOND, Elite transition: from apartheid to neoliberalism in South Africa, (University of
Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 2000), p. 101. See also Bonds Fly fishing in Southern
African Review of Books, May-June 1995.
84
Over a stiff whiskey, Ramaphosa pulled it out with pliers, saying as he

prepared to do so: If youve never trusted an ANC person before, youd
better get ready to do so now.82 Ramaphosas victory over Meyer was to
assert the superiority of a vigorous but gentle form of masculinity. Returning
to Macleans A River Runs Through it for a further historical lesson, we can
see that the incident illustrates the Nationalists failure to submit power to
grace:
Until man is redeemed he will always take a fly rod too far
back and loose all his power somewhere in the air. . . . since
it is natural for man to try and attain power without
recovering grace.83
According to Fred Shaw who attempted to encode the art of casting as science
a century ago, one should
use the least possible force to in order to achieve your best
cast Remember always that it is not violence but vim
which results in a correct cast.84
Not Violence but Vim: A Century of Trout in South Africa

Elements of trout fishing, environmentalism and capitalism deriving from
Calvinistic Puritanism and Scottish nationalism have, in South Africa, come
such a long way from home so as to be virtually unrecognisable, but shards
still pop up. Dullstroom, Mpumalanga (the erstwhile Eastern Transvaal), is
reputed to be the town with the biggest boom in the country, thanks to trout
and relative proximity to the highest concentration of wealth in Africa,
Johannesburg. Inns are given quaint Scottish names and staff wear kilts in the
evening. S.A. Heys old fishing ground attempts to compete through the
market brand of the Eastern Cape Highlands, home of the Wild Trout
Association. Much fly fishing business is conducted in the Scottish idiom. A
President of the Cape Piscatorial Society is heralded by a Scottish piper,
while various brands of Scotch whiskey sponsor trout festivals. At one stage,
those that did good environmental fly fishing deeds were called Dewars and
awarded a prize. Interestingly Dewars Whiskey used to be known as The
Fair Maid of Perth. Perthshire, from whence many South African settlers
sprang, is a district where landscape reclamation was particularly busy in
82.
83.
84.
Mail & Guardian, Dec 24-30, 1994, May 6-12, 1995.

N. MACLEAN, A river runs through it and other stories, pp. 2-4.
F. SHAW, The science of dry fly fishing (Fred Shaw, London, 1905); F. SHAW, The
complete science of fly fishing and spinning, pp. 136, 154.
85
centuries past.85 Redemptive religious roots have not altogether been shed,
but have undergone substantial transformation. A century later, Ramaphosa
becomes lyrical about the Zen of trout fishing: it reconnects you with
nature. You get to be at peace with your surroundings. When I fish, all else
melts away.86 At first glance trout fishing in South Africa appears to be an
obvious form of neo-imperialism. However, from the biographies traced
above, it is clear that trout fishing helped settlers make peace with their
surroundings and begin to think locally and ecologically.
As Ramaphosa argues, to outwit a fish, one has to think like one. Once a trout
is empathised with, one begins to appreciate the importance of clean water
and river conservation. Indeed, a notice outside the KZN Wildlife trout
hatchery at Kamberg says exactly that. From Scotland to the United States,
anglers have fought and succeeded to reclaim rivers for their fish from
exploitation and pollution. Conservation and ecological insight is very often
associated with Aldo Leopolds phrase, thinking like a mountain. It could
just as well be thinking like a fish. In Scotland and the United States,
however, the emphasis has been on native species. For instance, Trout
Unlimited, the American angler organisation on which the local FOSAF was
modelled, is currently cooperating with a range of state conservation bodies
on a river and catchment conservation campaign called Bring Back The
Natives such as the cutthroat and bull trout. Concerted conservation effort
directed at indigenous yellowfish species of which are under great threat
is made by organised fly fishermen. FOSAFs Yellow Fish Working Group is
a major actor in the freshwater conservation scene. When Avni cynically
asked Impson at their last conference why the brown trout is still FOSAFs
publicity icon, Impson replied we are still in a process of development. In
the same breath Avni said the greatest danger to fly-fishing was the
preponderance of WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) men in the sport
and made a reference to himself and Ilan Lax as being categorised as such,
revelling in the irony of their Jewish identity being subsumed by that of the
South African white male.
The reported finding that rural Africans in the Nsikeni area find the rainbow
trout more palatable and prolific than the indigenous yellowfish, coupled with
Impsons case that yellowfish can be invasive aliens when stocked for sport
fishery purposes outside of their natural distribution range, was also relished
grist to Avnis mill. This has led to FOSAFs yellowfish genetic
fingerprinting project. But, on the basis of the argument that trout is an
important natural resource, Lax and Bainbridge made a case for uniform
85.
86.
environmentalism, in T. GRIFFITHS, and L. ROBIN (eds), Ecology and Empire.
Ibid.
86
legislation and protection for all freshwater species throughout the country As
the war over trout loomed over the garden province, piscatorial people whose
identity, livelihood and recreation is so closely tied to this fish, have taken up
the cudgels. Yet, as we have seen, the perspective is far from being speciescentric. Whilst fish oriented settlers originally saw South African freshwaters
as barren, the opposite is true of some fly fishers who today describe water
infested by alien, rather than indigenous, fish as sterile.87
With the help of people such as Avni, trout also foment other wars over the
distribution of fresh water. Trout anglers have observed the declining quality
of rivers in the southern Drakensberg over the last few decades. This is
directly attributable to the extraction for irrigation by commercial farmers
who claim that the state will have to send in the army to stop them.88 For
users downstream including impoverished rural communities whose interest
in fish is more for subsistence than sport flyfishers are a potential ally.
Trout, the princely fish-imperial, was originally responsible for setting these
healthy contradictions and alliances in motion. In this respect and that of
political reconciliation, trout in South Africa lend support to David
Lowenthalss critique of nativist dogma in the context of post-imperial
ecologies. It is hegemonic in Australia where bureaucrats closely police
biological boundaries.
With chauvinist exclusion goes worship of biological purity,
to be saved from contamination by introduced aliens. But
indigenous purity is neither possible nor desirable. The
mixing of species, as of human races, is an unavoidable
process and, in most contexts, its consequences are more
desirable than otherwise. Nature and culture alike generally
benefit from creative intermingling.89
87.
88.
89.
At the 2002 FOSAF Yellowfish Working Group delegates donned bathing costumes and
goggles and directed by an enthusiastic Dean Impson inspected the fish populations above
and below the waterfall, which acts as the current barrier to smallmouth bass. Delegates
were amazed by the differences in the fish community above and below the falls. Above
the falls, pools were filled with redfins and young yellowfish whereas below the falls
where smallmouth bass occur, the fish community as one delegate put it was sterile
being devoid of the smaller indigenous fishes. The proposed plan is to erect a second
barrier some 7 km downstream and then remove aliens from this stretch before
repopulating it with indigenous species such as Clanwilliam sawfin and sandfish which
have completely disappeared. Press Release, 23 March 2002.
Interview with Wolf Avni, Bill Simpson and Harry Tully, Underberg-Himeville Trout
Fishing Club, 14 September, 1999.
Personal observation, Himeville, 29 April 2001. Dean Impson When yellowfish become
an invasive alien species mistakes of the past.; M. DRAPER, Communal-areas flyfishing project in P. ARDERNE and M. COKE (eds), Proceedings of the 5th YellowFish
Working Group Conference, Federation of Southern African Fly Fishers, Himeville, 27-30
April, 2001.
87
However, the assertion of nativist dogma has made the proponents of trout
more self-conscious about their ecological footprints. As with particular
forms of economic activity, certain kinds of trout fishing can be
environmentally harmful and the impact is usually directly related to the
degree of conscious cultivation and commodification. In 1989 FOSAF funded
research by the Natal Parks Board into breeding a hardier strain of local trout.
The letter of recognition from the scientist noted that trout are going to
increasingly require user, rather than state subsidy.90 Such transactions
perhaps unconsciously anticipated the transferral of power from political to
economic reservoirs of capital that settler adaptation to post-colonial
circumstances entails. Naturally, such a transition is smoothed by the
ambience of a neoliberal government policy environment. Iconic cultural
capital is, however, at risk. Let the following two extracts speak for
themselves. The first is Kirby satirising the renaming game:
Such a name, with its derivation the Ndebele iLimphopho,
meaning river of waterfalls, slides easier off the tongue than
Northern Province, but is hardly justification for a process
that is principally a way of wasting unseemly amounts of
money that might otherwise be spent on more pressing needs
... As one of select colonial stock I find it annoying to hear
todays politicians imply rather selectively that much
brought to this continent by my forebears is abhorrent ... as
Shakespeare said in the wonderful discourse on virginity at
the beginning of Alls Well That Ends Well: There was
never virgin got until virgin was first lost. Nor is there ever
colonialism shed without colonialism still welcome.91
The next is Avni debating in the KZN Wildlife guest magazine whether trout
is a social hero or eco-terrorist:
The remaking of South Africa is a bold and noble
experiment and Amandla! is a cry that rolls easily off the
tongue. . . In the carpet-bagger atmosphere that all revolution
carries about it, opportunism flourishes and inevitably, a few
babies get flushed out with the old bathwater. . . Was it wise
to strew them [trout] so freely around pristine African rivers?
Of course not! . . . But . . .the entanglement of the past
cannot be so easily undone. Aside from stripping the
90.
91.
Letter from R. Karssing of the Kamberg Hatchery, Flyfishing (The Official Journal of
FOSAF), 1(7), 1989, p. 27. Karssing wrote that I am glad to see FOSAF among the
Dewars!
Weekly Mail and Guardian, 23 Oct 2002.
88
environment and regional communities of valuable resource,

their removal would do nothing to restore riverine habitat.92
Avni argues that trout provide socio-economic as well as environmental

benefits. But the fly fishing fraternity is hardly all of apiece with regard to
what is ecologically sound. Even Avni, who makes much of natural selection,
saw the necessity of re-seeding rivers with trout fry after the 1992-3
drought.93 Project Trout 2000 undertook this in the Eastern Cape in 1994,
ensuring trout a future in the integrated democratic rivers of the region. Avni
and the Underberg-Himeville Club advertise the natural fishing of KwaZuluNatal as uncompromising of ecosystem integrity compared to that of
Mpumalanga where canned put-and-take fishing has negative environmental
consequences in places. However, local flyfishing celebrity and best-selling
author Tom Sutcliffe revealed a good deal when reviewing one such
destination after a weekend on the house:
Philosophically, one of the greatest areas of resistance to
work of this sort is the departure it brings from the natural
state. Man-made weirs and hand fed trout are not
everybodys cup of tea, but if it is a choice between that or
nothing at all, Id opt for the weirs and the hand feeding
every time.94
Environmentalists condemn such tinkering, yet trout are also associated with
river rehabilitation along natural lines and locals make pilgrimages abroad to
learn such principles. One such destination is Scotland, where the salmon has
successfully been turned back from the brink of extinction. Like in many of
the countrys rivers, in the strictly protected wilderness of the MalotiDrakensberg mountains of KwaZulu-Natal, trout live uncultivated and wild
the only exotic species which is not actively rooted out of the landscape. The
new head of KZN Wildlife, Khulani Mkhize has, in response to the trout
debate which arose once again in the press this year (2002), stated that his
organisations trout propagation policies have been reviewed and are no
longer seen as in line with its conservation mission and policy as custodians
of the provinces biodiversity.95 Upon bowing out, Hughes, the former
92.
93.
94.
95.
W. AVNI Trout: social hero or eco-terrorist? in Wildside, 2(2), 2002, pp. 34-35.
W. AVNI, The True Meaning of Life: Natural Selection or Pick n Pay? Fly fishing,
12(55) 1999, pp. 66-68. W. AVNI, A mean-mouthed, hook-jawed, bad-news, son-of-a-fish!
Fish fingers and trout tails and other South African fly-fishing stories, p.81.
T. SUTCLIFFE, Perspective in Flyfishing, 3(12), 1990, p. 3.
Khulani Mkhize Reponds in Flyfishing 15 (69), 2002, p.35.
89
incumbent, reminisced about beginning his conservation career at Giants

Castle in the Drakensberg where he perfected his trout fishing skills. As
CEO he had received many petitions for him to declare non-indigenous trout
an honorary local species.96
Conclusions: some piscatorial profundity

Following Franklins observation that animals are good to think with, this
essay set out with trout as a metaphor and guide. But in pursuit of such
animated ideas, unfortunately, the narrative was led astray since, as he points
out, at the centre of a sociology of human-animal relations in modernity,
one is more likely to encounter paradox than consistency. Such a conundrum
is compounded by differentiations in meaning that stem from class, ethnicity,
region, gender and religion (among others).97 These are all themes that have
been touched upon, but largely skirted around, along with many others. But
trout serve to remind us that the twists of the past wrap themselves around all
such dimensions in such intimate and intricate ways that a little
disentanglement serves only to show how tightly complicated the knot really
is. Turning for guidance to Donna Haraway, the feminist theorist, historian of
science and animal-human relations, has led me to suspect that perhaps trout
are not too different from dogs (which currently occupy her mind) and are a
companion species: a much bigger and more heterogeneous category than
companion animal, and not just because one must start including such organic
beings as rice, bees, tulips, and intestinal flora, all of whom make life for
humans what it is and vice versa. She is adamant about the agency of her
canine subjects and unapologetic about the complications inherent in allowing
nature to run rampant through relentlessly historical layers of practice:
Dogs are not surrogates for theory here; they are not here
just to think with. They are here to live with. Partners in the
crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the
get-go, wily as Coyote Instructed by evolutionary
population biologists and bioanthropologists, I know that
multidirectional gene flow multidirectional flows of
96.
97.
Farewell for Dr George Hughes, Wildside, 2(1), 2001.

A. FRANKLIN, Animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in
modernity, p.7.
90
bodies and values is and has always been the name of the
game of life on earth. 98
Trout are thus greater than a metaphor. David Quamman who tries to make
facts not just talk but yodel, uses a more potent figure of speech: A biologist
would use the term indicator species. . . I speak instead of a synecdoche. We
both mean that a trout represents more than itself but that, importantly, it
does also represent itself.99 As we have seen, though, in recent times the
biological spotlight has honed in on minutiae. The title of a recent text
Invertebrates as Webmasters in Ecosystems is prosaic proof that the global
information flow no longer privileges the larger and apparently more
charismatic creatures.100 Yet the irresolvable case of the Gondwana relict
damselfly, reveals that the trout could be serving as a scapegoat for the wider
environmental ailments of industrial agriculture. Ironically, it is to fly fishers
that water authorities repeatedly turn for monitoring and reporting on such
entomological detail, for such anglers expend a good deal of amateur effort
studying and imitating such forms of life. Such a limnological focus has led
them to appreciate the intrinsic and sporting value of endemic species. Yet the
presence of wild trout in rivers indicates watershed health more surely than
most endemic species of yellow fish with wider tolerance. Moreover, wisely
sited impoundment of small streams for trout can raise biodiversity. It can
certainly be observed that trout and fly fishing arouse biophilia a term
coined by the famous entomologist and sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson.
Predictably biologically determinist, Wilson refers to an innate tendency in
human beings to focus on life and lifelike process. He believes that such a
propensity is still underrated in philosophy and religion and that our existence
depends on this wellspring of propensity on which hope rises.101 Apart from a
subtle yet substantial addition to the story of sport hunting in the conservation
story, trout sharpen our wits and clarify the need for finely tuned histories to
fill in the gaps in Crosbys ecological imperialism thesis. South Africa may
be an exception to the rule of demographic takeover, but not in certain
temperate, high-lying ecological niches. The nation-state is perhaps too
ecologically diverse to serve as a unit of analysis for such comparative
environmental histories. The future of trout in South Africa is not only going
98.
99.
100.
101.
D. HARAWAY, Cyborgs to companion species: reconfiguring kinship in technoscience,

in D. IHDE and E. SELINGER, (eds.), Chasing technoscience: matrix of materiality,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, in press for 2003). Quotations from a non-galley
draft.
D. QUAMMAN, Wild thoughts from wild places, (Scribner, New York, 1998), p. 20.
D. COLEMAN and P. HENDRIX (eds), Invertebrates as webmasters in ecosystems, (C.A.B.
International, Oxford, 2000). M. SAMWAYS, Webmasters in NU Interactive, 13(2),
2002, pp. 17-18.
E. WILSON, Biophilia (Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1984); S. KELLERT and E.
WILSON (eds), The biophilia hypothesis (Island Press, Washington D.C, 1993), p. 36.
91
to depend upon economic forces, but the mundane details and vicissitudes of
environmental impact assessments wherein science is a tool of an essentially
political process, with varying outcomes in each locale. This is likely to be
the optimal solution since the case of trout shows how science, far from being
omnisciently independent, is subject to what Durkheim appropriately called
social currrents. Scientists are but one actor in what Haraway calls an
evolutionary drama. Her forthcoming Companion Species Manifesto follows
her Manifesto for Cyborgs, cheekily published in the Socialist Review in
1985.102 So, while capitalist economics have been identified as a major
tributary of such currents, companion species are not another version of a
Marxist humanist dialectic of nature remade by labor. The making goes in too
many directions.103 In other words, biophilia, can be engendered by the
bourgeois aesthetic and, in turn, lead to philanthropic concern. The following
statement circulated by FOSAFs Yellowfish Working Group makes this
abundantly clear:
Many diseases of poverty are carried by unhealthy rivers.
Unhealthy rivers affect the poor most as they are dependant
on rivers for their household water needs. Socio-economic
diseases are a drain on the fiscus. Fish are a key indicator of
river health. Sport fishing turns healthy rivers into a
sustainable economic resource through effective fishery
management. River management, therefore, is a socioeconomic issue.104
What is so striking about the war over trout is the vigour of righteous moral
and ethical conviction in both camps. Trout in South African wilderness such
as the Maloti-Drakensberg reminds us that such a landscape, which we view
as natures dominion, is also a garden with culture and politics thriving in its
water-features. When we read that to catch a brown trout is to catch a piece
of history, we need to realise that, like any heritage it is contested.105
Depending on ones viewpoint, this can be either catastrophic or cornucopian,
evolution in forward or reverse gear economic and ecological enrichment,
102.
103.
104.
105.
D. HARAWAY, A Manifesto for Cyborgs in Socialist Review, no. 80, 1985, pp. 65-108.
D. HARAWAY, Cyborgs to companion Species: Reconfiguring Kinship in Technoscience,
---- The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness,
(University of Chicago Press, Prickly Paradigms series, Marshall Sahlins, general editor,
forthcoming 2003). ). Many thanks to Donna for providing a preview of these ideas.
From: T. HARDING <TonyH@gpg.gov.za>To: B. MINCHER <securirail@mweb.
co.za>Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2001 9:39 AM.
R. BAERT, To catch a brown trout is to land a piece of history, Flyfishing, 12(56),
1999/2000, p.17.
92
or impoverishment.106 In the United States, fish stocking in high elevation

wilderness lakes has also become contested and some conservation agencies
have gone so far as to poison waters with non-endemic species107 South
African conservation policy has not gone to such extremes. The United States
does not have the same issues of identity to settle as post-colonial states.
Trout have served to remind us that acute concern about dangerous aliens
loomed large long before the postcolonial period focussed upon by the
Comaroffs.108 By bringing the term terrorism (eco- and otherwise) into the
discussion, trout wars may have awoken us to the possibility that, post
September 11 (2001), such anxieties may be even more acute in the American
body politic than in postcolonial states. As Nigel Clark recently argued,
awareness of bio-invasion has everywhere unsettled environmental
cosmopolitanism. He cites Tim Low (an Australian biologist) whose
conclusion that acclimatisers were true internationalists with the whole world
in their sights, Clark sees as despairing.109 The story of trout in South Africa
can also be interpreted as that of a rainbow of hope transcending blinkered
claims of national identity. It impresses upon us the importance of allowing
ambivalence, even paradox, into our reading of the past and future.
Opsomming
Onderweg na die inheemse? Forel en die vestiging van identiteit in n
renboognasie
Forel staan uit in n lang rits van plante en diere wat gekultiveer en ingevoer
is met die doel om die landskap na hule eie beeld te herskep. Bruin- en
renboogforel is vis wat suksesvol in Suid-Afrikaanse en suider-Afrikaanse
waters met die wending van die vorige eeu ingevoer is. Forelhengelaars het
sedertdien uitgestaan as skrywers wat vaardig met die pen helder en
omvattend oor hul onderwerp van passie kan skryf. Derhalwe is forelle en die
106.
107.
108.
109.
This is a recurrent dichotomy in contemporary environmental worldviews no doubt

continuous with Mackenzies take on apocalyptic view of empire discussed in the
introduction. See S. COTGROVE, Catastrophe or cornucopia: the environment, politics and
the future, (John Wiley, Chichester 1982).
D. DUFF, Fish Stocking in US federal wilderness areas - challenges and opportunities in
International Journal of Wilderness, 1(1), 1995, pp. 16-19; Personal communication,
Wayne Freimund, Director, Wilderness Institute, School of Forestry, The University of
Montana, June, 2002.
J. COMAROFF and J. COMAROFF Naturing the nation: aliens, apocalypse and the
postcolonial state in Journal of Southern African Studies, 27(3), 2002, pp. 627-651.
N. CLARK, The Demon Seed: Bioinvasion as the Unsettling of Environmental
Cosmopolitanism in Theory Culture and Society, 19(1-2), 2002, pp. 101-125; T. LOW,
Feral future, (Viking, Ringwood Vic, 1999).
93
verwante kultuur n besondere manier waarop die omgewingsgeskiedenis

belig kan word. Dit spreek in baie opsigte boekdele van die
kultuurveranderings- en identiteitsvormingsproses wat sedert die vorige eeu
beslag gekry het. Deur middel van n biografiese beskrywing wat uit die
vorige eeu dateer maak die geskiedenis van forel en die hengel van die
besondere vis bepaalde mededelings omtrent natuurbewaring.
94

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Going native?

Trout and settling identity in a rainbow nation

I will explain to him [my young son] as an acceptable

The Last Day of Salmon

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

The Last Day of Salmon

A. FRANKLIN, Animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

A. CROSBY Ecological Imperialism: the overseas migration of Western Europeans as a

The editors of the guide also pointed out that the

N. CLARK, The Demon Seed: Bioinvasion as the Unsettling of Environmental

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

efforts, like those efforts in Natal beginning in 1875 without

ERECTED TO THE MEMORY OF

Grove has shown the relationship between Scottish nationalism, a fervently

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

returning them, These stories have trees in them. While fictionally

Town pulpit with all the energy of Scottish ecological redemption.21

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

matters personal and remembers his grandfather as a stern old gentleman of

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

and safeguard the living beauty of nature from mans

Jonkershoeks aquacultural effort extended onto white-owned commercial

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

consolidated during the post-WWII apartheid era.30 The name which

S.A. Heys sociobiological conclusion probably applied as much to his own

D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, pp. 55, 56.

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

transforming KwaZulu-Natal conservation bureaucracy replaced Hughes with

He considered, but never did anything about organising anglers in defence of

This avian story marked a swift about-turn in ecological thought as

D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, p. 180.

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

D. HEY, A nature conservationist looks back, p. 180.

extinction ... Exotics are unwanted in any environment

T. SUTCLIFFE, A federation of flyfishers is bornin SA Fishing, 9(1), 1986, my emphasis.

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

FOSAF convened a symposium in April 1986 where the countrys leading

Mail & Guardian, May 16-22, 1997

In 1998 a local environmental publication kept the debate alive by enquiring

R. KIRBY, Fly fishing in Southern Africa, (Struik-Winchester, Cape Town, 1993).

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

1990s shifted from imperialist sportsmen to Afrikaner scientists and

In various places around the world from South African

In the upland valley sections of all the major Natal systems,

He does go on to admit that Barbus anoplus may have been exterminated by

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

Stevenson-Hamilton was thus able to write trout, as well as other imported

J. STEVENSON-HAMILTON, Wildlife in South Africa, (Cassell,and Co., London, 1947), p.

major trout Mecca for trout fishers] from Perthshire under

There may be a relationship between a willingness to overlook the loss of a

Trout and reconciliation: re-creation and fishers of men

Natal Witness, 1&6 August, 2001.

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

suit their rather narrow requirements for pollution-free

A 1937 publication advertising South Africa in a photograph titled The

T. SUTCLIFFE, A federation of flyfishers is bornin SA Fishing, 9(1), 1986.

If S.A. Hey is to be trusted, he provides some important ethnography of

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.

Personal Communication 2000.

I came here and found myself up against a mystical,

Natal Witness, May 20, 2000.

Historia 48(1) May/Mei 2003, pp. 55-94.