Introduction

Charles is a landowner in an area of KwaZulu-Natal province known locally as the Midlands. Over the past decades he has built up a profitable business as a cattle breeder. Now however, there is pressure for him to participate in a land-use change fuelled by the tourism industry: the conversion of some sixteen privately owned farms in the area into an upmarket wildlife-based lifestyle development called the Gongolo Wildlife Reserve (GWR). Charles's farm is located inside the area that would constitute the proposed GWR, so he finds himself in a difficult position as the only ‘hold-out’ against the move to a tourism-oriented wildlife-based future.

Charles has reluctantly agreed to participate in the venture, but worries about the future of the people who currently live and work on his land. Resulting from a complex agrarian history in which African families have lived, worked and kept cattle on white-owned farms in the region for generations, Charles has a total of twenty-five imizi (homesteads) located on his land. Currently they are continuing to do what Charles says they have done for three generations: looking after his cattle when they move down to the ‘thornveld’ grazing during the summer, and for the remainder of the year maintaining fences and tending to their own cattle. These people will however have to move if and when the GWR becomes a reality. The farm dwellers' current homes will be in the middle of a ‘Big Five’ game reserve populated by dangerous wild animals – it would no longer be safe to live there and they would be unable to keep cattle.