Grasslands of the World.pdf - Disasters and Conflicts - UNEP

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Grasslands of the world
PEOPLE
Hominids have occupied southern Africa for three million years (Volman,
1984), and although the ancestral forms used fire (Thackeray et al., 1990),
there are no artefacts that enable us to quantify the extent of their impact.
They undoubtedly burnt large tracts of land in the interior, thereby promoting
the development of grasslands, and early hominids must be regarded as a
significant agent in the evolution of grasslands in South Africa .
Contemporary South Africa is a multicultural nation, with many ethnic
groups and colonial nations represented in its populations. It is this wide
variation in the origins of its people that make understanding the management
of its natural resources so challenging. The remaining San people of the
southern Kalahari represent the oldest traditional users of natural vegetation for
survival. San people are still able to subsist as hunter-gatherers in the most arid
regions of the country, providing some evidence of how it is possible to sustain
small human populations in this region. San exhibit a strong understanding
of resource limitations and probably follow the principles embodied in the
disequilibrium theory (Ellis and Swift, 1988) the closest of all southern African
people. Until the end of the nineteenth century, San also survived in the
mountainous regions of the Drakensberg and along the Great Escarpment. The
evidence of their history is found in the numerous rock paintings and other
artefacts that occur in caves along the Great Escarpment. They hunted on the
grasslands of the mountainous interior.
The Nguni people of the eastern seaboard are graziers with a long
(>10 000 years) history of maintaining domestic livestock. These people comprise
the Seswati, AmaZulu and AmaXhosa nations, and occupy the leasehold
lands in the former homelands of Gazankulu, KwaZulu Natal, Transkei and
Ciskei. The society is organized around a village, comprising dwelling units,
cultivated lands and grazing lands . Their early cattle were of Bos indicus stock
and this line is being developed and protected in recent years with the establishment
of an Nguni studbook. Situated on the eastern escarpment and in the
Drakensberg is the mountain kingdom of Lesotho, the home of the Basotho
people. Lesotho falls entirely within the grassland biome and the Basotho people
are cattle and sheep farmers, depending largely on the natural grassland for
production. Almost all of Lesotho is communally managed and the challenges
to managing the grasslands sustainably remain the same as those of communal
rangeland in South Africa .
Europeans of Dutch descent first arrived in South Africa in 1652, and settled
initially at the supply station in Cape Town. These settlers were joined by
French Huguenots, who brought with them a knowledge of viticulture and
animal husbandry (mainly sheep ). Descendants of the early Dutch settlers
began moving into the interior of the country with the abolition of slavery,
and developed the extensive cattle and sheep farming enterprises that currently
occupy land in the Kalahari, central Free State and the North West Province. It