NAMIBIA
Mercury Island Lüderitz
NAMIBIAN ISLANDS Di am
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ENLARGED BELOW Karbonkelberg Restricted Zone
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Cape Columbine
St. H elen aB ay
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Cape Town
TABLE MOUNTAIN N.P. d Hope of Goo Cape HELDERBERG
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national geo graphic • december
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anguish of declining catches and vanishing species is acute. But if there’s a crisis of fish, there’s also a crisis of fishing. Half of South Africa’s subsistence fishing communities are described as food insecure, because the foundation of their livelihood is in jeopardy. Yet in 1994, when Nelson Mandela was elected president of newly democratic South Africa, his African National Congress party saw fish as a social equalizer and an uplifter of the impoverished. The rainbow nation would offer its marine resources as an egalitarian pot of gold for all. Initially the prospects for social transformation looked good. Thousands of “historically disadvantaged individuals”—black and coloured (the accepted word in South Africa for people of predominantly European-African descent)— obtained fishing rights. By 2004 more than 60 percent of the commercial fishing quota was in the hands of this group, compared with less than one percent ten years earlier. But as the linefish emergency showed, the government had invited more guests to the buffet than there was food to feed them. Even worse, an entire category of fishermen had been left off the guest list. The new fisheries policy applied to commercial, recreational, and subsistence fishermen, the last group being those who fish only to eat, not to sell. Small-scale or artisanal fishermen weren’t included. They were neither strictly subsistence nor fully commercial. More important, they thought of themselves as part of fishing communities, not as individual operators. They sought collective rights and communal access to resources, and they found themselves out of step with a quota system based on privatized ownership. For these small-scale operators, exclusion from the allocation process felt like a stinging reminder of apartheid. And there was an additional source of alienation, something that in a perfect world would be their best friend: marine protected areas (MPAs), those fragments of coast and seabed that are set aside for either partial or total protection from human exploitation. MPAs are like oases in a desert. Marine life flourishes within each blue haven and spills over
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BETTY'S BAY WALKER BAY WHALE W WH HA SANCTUARY Saldanha MARCUS I. MALGAS I. LANGEBAAN LAGOON JUTTEN I.
SIXTEEN MILE BEACH 0 mi 0 km
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into neighboring areas, enhancing catches and sustaining livelihoods. MPAs are considered indispensable for conserving marine life and managing fisheries, and almost every marine nation has signed a United Nations treaty with the goal of protecting ten percent of the world’s oceans by 2020. For many small-scale fishing communities, however, MPAs rub salt in the wounds of inequality—especially if a no-take area lies on the community’s doorstep, as it does at Hangberg, where the Karbonkelberg sanctuary includes all the accessible shoreline for miles. Hangberg sprawls across the side of a hill overlooking the beach suburb of Hout Bay. Above its rickety shacks and bungalows looms a crag