Some of the prints are stained with oil, used to stop children’s plaster
moulds from sticking to the rock. Cigarette butts lie around one frequently cast
fossil. A nearby rock face is defaced by graffiti.

It is a scene that is repeated around the world. Fossil sites that have
survived for hundreds of millions of years are threatened by weathering and the
enthusiasm of tourists. Some have been vandalised, plundered by fossil-smugglers
or destroyed by building and agriculture.

In an attempt to end the destruction, the UN-funded International
Palaeontological Association has launched a crusade to save important fossils
and is putting together a global list of endangered sites. So far it includes
about 50 locations from every continent except South America and Australia, says
Richard Lane, a programme officer at the National Science Foundation near
Washington DC and compiler of the list. Lane is pleading for more submissions.
The aim is to alert palaeontologists—and governments—to the plight
of these sites.

The biggest dilemma is what to do next. Some geologists would like to move
the most precious fossils to museums or ban visitors from the sites. This may be
best for science, but critics point out that the public also has a right to see
these fossils. What’s more, they say that people should be allowed to look at
them in their natural setting. This conflict is not confined to
palaeontology—archaeologists face the same problem with ancient monuments
(see Forum, 8 August, p 48).

The issue has come to a head in South Africa, where there has been a boom
both in palaeontological finds and the number of tourists visiting them. In
1995, David Roberts discovered a set of 117 000-year-old human footprints,
thought to be those of a woman and possibly a child, on the shore of Langebaan
Lagoon in South Africa’s West Coast National Park.

Roberts, a geologist at the government’s Council for Geoscience in Cape Town,
wanted the footprints moved, as they were exposed to wind, rain and waves as
well as the curiosity of the tourists attracted to the area by the unprecedented
media coverage. But the National Monuments Council thought they should stay.
Janette Deacon, head of the council, wanted the prints left where they were
found in accordance with international conservation guidelines drawn up by
UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee. Removal, she said, would destroy their
context, and therefore much of their significance.

However, when it became clear that visitors were damaging the site, the
council gave its backing to the move and, with funding from the National
Geographic Society in the US, the prints were taken to the South African Museum in Cape Town
(This Week, 11 July, p 12).
A replica of the prints will be created at Langebaan for tourists.

Just a few kilometres away from where the human footprints were found is a
piece of ground containing a greater diversity of fossils from the Pliocene
epoch, between 2 and 5 million years ago, than any other site in Africa.
Specimens include those of Agriotherium africanum, the first bear found
in Africa south of the Sahara, and Sivatherium hendeyi, a giraffe-like
creature that roamed the subcontinent until about 500 000 years ago. The site
contains valuable information about the period when the continent’s predominant
vegetation changed from wet tropical forest to dry savannah.

Unlike Langebaan, the fossils here will remain in situ. A kind of
outdoor museum will be built that allows tourists to walk around the site, watch
teams of archaeologists at work and inspect the uncovered remains of ancient
animal bones and carcasses. “We are acutely aware of the need to combine public
access with preservation,” says Pippa Haarhoff, project coordinator. “We will
use technical measures such as the creation of boardwalks and training of guides
to protect the fossils as much as possible. But in the end, the best way of
insuring against theft and vandalism is to make sure that the local community
benefits from the jobs and revenues that increased tourism to the area will
˛ú°ůľ±˛Ô˛µ.”

Brett Hendey, the finder of Langebaan’s Pliocene fossils and former head of
Cenozoic palaeontology at the South African Museum, agrees. He says that public
awareness of precious fossils and the benefits that tourism brings to local
communities will lead to increased pressure from the public to ensure valuable
sites are protected. This, he says, will far outweigh the risks that come from
opening the location up to tourism.

One of the most serious threats to fossils across the world is smuggling
(see “Psst… wanna Triceratops?”, żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ,
14 December 1996, p 12).
Lane says that important dinosaur egg sites are being wiped out by Chinese
peasants who hoe out eggs and sell them, encouraged by traders who smuggle the
fossils out to collectors in the West. The problem is not confined to China. Two
years ago, important Stegosaurus footprints were stolen from a coastal
site in Western Australia. Fossil smugglers have also been plundering important
lake-bed mammal deposits in the Aragon region of Spain.

Agricultural development threatens another Chinese deposit, the Lufeng fossil
beds in Yunnan province, which Neil Shubin of the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia has placed on Lane’s threatened list. The area contains mammal
remains from 200 million years ago. The fossils, says Shubin, “are exceedingly
well preserved”. But they are not as spectacular as dinosaur eggs, and nothing
is being done to protect them in the rapidly expanding agricultural region.

Indeed, a site may never receive proper protection—in either developing
or industrialised countries—if it is not able to excite the public. The La
Brea tar pits in the middle of Los Angeles survived only because scientists
found a spectacular set of vertebrate fossils there, including sabre-toothed
tigers from the ice age, says Lane. “If it was a tar pit of invertebrate
fossils, it probably would have been built over.”

A handful of sites in the US have now been covered to protect them from the
weather, such as a quarry rich in Jurassic fossils at the Dinosaur National
Monument in Utah. Yet covering everything would be prohibitively expensive. “I’m
not advocating covering every site, or even a small percentage of the sites,”
says Lane. But he does want to make people aware that these relics might be
washed away and lost.

As more sites are developed and others discovered, the debate over how to
protect them will hot up. South Africa’s National Monuments Council is planning
a palaeontology tourism route through the country, from the new finds in the
Cape to older sites in Gauteng province, where some of the world’s most
important Australopithecus remains lie.

“We will have to rely on boardwalks, viewing platforms, trained guides,
fencing and security to protect these sites, as well as educating people and
providing them with as much information as possible,” says Deacon. The success
of this project could decide how the rest of the world deals with its
palaeontological heritage.

David Roberts of the Council for Geoscience in Cape Town and Lee Berger of
the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg found both sets of prints.
They say that geological dating methods indicate the new print, which is
embedded in sandstone on the Eastern Cape coast, could be twice as old as the
Langebaan set, which was dated at 117 000 years old.

Roberts and Berger stress that they cannot be sure of its age or origin until
they have carried out a series of radiometric tests. “It is premature to make
any claims about these prints until all the tests have been run,” Berger told
żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ. “[But] it is possible that these are records of
anatomically modern humans.”

Radiometric tests can date fossils by measuring the radioactive decay of
uranium in the rocks in which they are found. The team will also carry out two
other tests based on thermoluminescence, which measures the energy built up in
the crystal structure of a material after years of exposure to cosmic
radiation.

The print was probably buried by a flood, which would explain why it was
preserved in sediment and fossilised. The tests will reveal when this happened.
“This will in turn indicate whether these are indeed the prints of Homo
sapiens,” says Berger. Homo sapiens is believed to have evolved
between 100 000 and 750 000 years ago.

The Langebaan prints, believed to have been left by a woman and a child,
aroused international excitement when they were discovered earlier this year.
This month they were cut out of the rock in which they were embedded and flown
to the South African Museum in Cape Town after visitors to the site started to
damage them
(This Week, 7 March 1998, p 24).

żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ of the latest find was announced at a conference hosted by the
International Association of Human Biologists and the International Association
for the Study of Human Palaeontology in Sun City near Johannesburg last week.

WILDLIFE scientists and conservationists are divided over claims that a
decision to relax the international ban on trade in ivory will increase poaching
in the volatile states of central Africa.

The 138 nations that belong to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species
(CITES) voted last week in Harare to remove elephant populations in Botswana,
Namibia and Zimbabwe from Appendix 1 of CITES. This could allow these countries
to start a limited ivory trade with Japan in 21 months’ time.

First, however, the three southern African states and Japan must convince at
least three CITES-appointed monitoring committees that they have set up
adequate controls to prevent the laundering of ivory poached from other elephant
populations.

Trade will be allowed only from existing government stockpiles of ivory,
tusks from which will be marked by stamps or labels. The volume of trade
authorised under export permits will be monitored to ensure that it does not
exceed the stockpiles.

“It would be very difficult for Japan or any of the three African countries
to launder illegal supplies of ivory,” argues Greg Overton of the Nairobi-based
African Elephant Specialist Group of IUCN, the World Conservation Union.

But other groups claim that the African states do not have the resources to
reliably weed out laundered ivory. And that, claims Chris Styles, an elephant
specialist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Johannesburg,
threatens elephants in central Africa, particularly in the forests of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire: “We predict there will be a
massive wave of poaching.”

Peter Jewell, a retired professor of zoology from the University of
Cambridge, who has worked in East Africa on ways of verifying the origins of
ivory stockpiles, says that a tusk’s origin can be confirmed by isotope
analysis. This involves examining carbon, nitrogen and strontium in the ivory to
reveal a “fingerprint” specific to a particular geographic location. “But this
is far too expensive to apply on a wide scale,” says Jewell. “Any programme for
marking ivory to certify that it is legal is open to forgers.”

The Democratic Republic of Congo is home to herds of forest elephants that
may constitute the biggest elephant population in Africa. Surveys have
identified 4470 animals, but population estimates run as high as 65 974. “Nobody
really knows what is going on,” Overton admits.

However, Overton argues that the CITES decision will actually help conserve
the forest elephants of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as it also includes a
provision to fund the first accurate census. In parts of the country, scientists
will estimate numbers by counting elephant droppings. “We can then use
statistical methods to extrapolate these findings,” says Overton.

CITES is also planning to monitor for signs of increased poaching,
and can shut down the trade if this emerges.

ASIAN medicine has traditionally been seen by Western conservationists as
a major obstacle in the fight to save endangered mammals. But a new conciliatory
approach to Eastern healing methods looks like being adopted at the meeting of
signatories to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Harare,
Zimbabwe, this week.

Rather than condemning the use of endangered animal parts out of hand, the
new approach seeks to help Asian researchers find alternatives. Along with the
governments of Britain, Japan and South Korea, TRAFFIC, which monitors the
global trade in wildlife and is funded by the World Wide Fund for Nature and the
World Conservation Union, submitted a report to the CITES meeting conceding that
medicine using animal parts is “legitimate” and can effectively treat
life-threatening fevers
(“Changing the game”, żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 7 June, p 14).
TRAFFIC has this week obtained support for its stance from the CITES
secretariat and looks likely to be backed by most of the convention’s 139 member
states.

“I think it is important to note that traditional medicines around the
world—even Western medicines—use plants and animals, and East Asia
feels particularly victimised that its medicine system has been targeted,” says
Judy Mills, TRAFFIC’s East Asia director. The view in the West that rhinos are
slaughtered to provide horn for the manufacture of aphrodisiacs and other
frivolous concoctions is a myth, she says. In fact, the keratin in the horn is
used in medicines that can save thousands of people from lethal fevers every
year.

The softer line seems to be getting a favourable response. In a message to
CITES delegates, the Chinese National Association of Medicine Practitioners and
Research expresses support for moves to prevent the poaching of endangered
mammals. The association says it is conducting a set of trials designed to
replace pharmaceuticals derived from animal parts with herbal medicines. China
has recently removed rhino horn from its official pharmacopoeia, replacing it
with water buffalo horn. Chinese researchers are also on the verge of announcing
an official substitute for tiger bone, which is used to treat arthritis, after
conducting extensive clinical trials.

“CITES is, for the first time, taking on traditional medicine as a separate
issue, realising it is not going to go away,” says Mills. “At the same time, the
traditional medicine community is getting the message that wildlife conservation
is not going to go away.”

THE first advanced field tests of contraception as an alternative to culling elephant populations in overcrowded game reserves are under way in South Africa. But the tests are turning out to be every bit as controversial as the slaughter they may replace.

Earlier this month, South African and American scientists darted 21 elephant cows in the Kruger National Park with a sedative, scanned the animals with ultrasound to ensure they were not pregnant, and injected each with pig zona pellucida (pZP) protein. The cows should now produce antibodies that will block the sites that sperm bind to on the surface of their eggs. This should prevent fertilisation.

Hank Bertschinger of the University of Pretoria, who heads the project, stresses that the cows will not be permanently sterilised: “Once immunisation is discontinued and blood antibody concentrations have fallen, animals gradually recover normal fertility.”

Meanwhile, a team of German scientists last month darted 10 cows in Kruger and gave them implants that will slowly release oestrogen-which should work just like the human contraceptive pill. Other researchers at the University of Pretoria are planning to test the “abortion drug” RU486, developed by the French company Roussel-Uclaf, for controlling elephant populations.

Park managers in many parts of Africa hope contraception can replace the bullet. Kruger’s annual elephant cull, in particular, came under attack from international animal welfare groups, which threatened to organise a tourism boycott of South Africa. Last year, the South African National Parks Board bowed to this pressure and suspended the cull.

The pZP experiments are part of the parks board’s attempts to find nonlethal methods of elephant population control. The tests, funded by the Humane Society of the United States, are being tried alongside moving family herds of elephants to new reserves. The board is also working on plans to give the elephants more space by taking down the fence that separates Kruger from game reserves in neighbouring Mozambique.

But the contraceptive experiments have already become the focus of criticism from local conservation groups and rural communities, which insist that the best way to control elephants is to allow some hunting. They argue that this can benefit communities bordering national parks, providing them with protein as well as an income through the sale of products and hunting licences.

“Elephants are something the world wants. They want to see them, and they want their products, and we’ve got them. But what do we do? We reduce productivity through contraception,” complains Jon Hutton, a project manager with the Africa Resources Trust (ART), a group that lobbies for the right of African people to hunt wildlife on a sustainable basis. Organisations backing the ART include the local branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Local people are even more vociferous in their criticism of the experiments. “We were moved out of there for Kruger to become a place of animals. We are the ones who suffer when the elephants come and destroy our fields,” says Alvis Madhlope, a representative of the residents of villages that border the park. Guaranteed income through elephant hunting is the least local people can expect, he argues.

The parks board, however, insists that the contraceptive experiments do not mean it has given up the right to control the elephants by culling. It also points out that elephant contraception is so expensive that, even if it works, it will most likely only be viable in smaller national parks, such as Amboseli in Kenya.

TWO years ago Tobias Zwane found his dream home. It is in the middle of
Johannesburg, next door to the plush, tinted glass building that houses the
city’s stock exchange. But Zwane is not a high-flying financier. He is
unemployed. And his home is no glittering creation of corporate architects. It
is built out of wooden planks and corrugated iron.

Today, some 250 families live without electricity, running water or toilets
in a maze of tin shacks that have sprouted on the half-hectare site next to the
headquarters of the city’s major financial institutions. “We took our name from
the Bible,” says Zwane, “and called it the Canaan Squatter Camp.”

Shantytowns are common in South Africa. Stephen Mayo, a housing specialist at
the World Bank, points out that South African cities display some of the
starkest contrasts between rich and poor in the world. The same cities that have
shantytowns in one district have mansions with swimming pools in wealthy suburbs
that not long ago were reserved exclusively for whites. In the greater
Johannesburg area alone, there are more than 190 squatter camps housing almost a
quarter of the city’s two million residents. In Cape Town and Durban a similarly
large proportion live in shantytowns.

Clem Sunter, author of a best-selling book on South Africa’s environment,
estimated in 1990 that these shantytowns were growing as quickly as those in
Mexico City. The Mexican capital is the world’s fastest growing urban area, and
it has a massive shantytown problem. South Africa’s housing ministry estimates
that one in every five of the country’s citizens—about eight million
people—live in places like Canaan. The ministry says that between 1.5 and
2 million extra houses are needed.

When the ANC-led government came to power after the country’s first nonracial
elections in 1994, it planned to transform the sordid shape of the apartheid
city. “Housing is a human right,” stated the government’s Reconstruction and
Development Programme. The ambitious five-year plan promised to build 350 000
houses a year. At this rate of construction the housing shortage would be
eliminated by the turn of the century.

The first housing minister of the new government was Joe Slovo, who was
general secretary of the South African Communist Party. Before coming to power,
the ANC had talked of nationalising housing and setting up a state housing
corporation. Much to the surprise of the banks and big property developers,
Slovo’s housing policy relied heavily on the private sector.

The main feature of the plan is a system of state subsidies to the homeless.
Homeless people are eligible for a subsidy from the state of between 5000 and 15
000 rand (ÂŁ700 to ÂŁ2100), depending on their income. They can use
this money to buy a plot of building land—or corrugated iron. The plan
envisaged that private building firms would put up enough houses to eliminate
the shortage.

But by the start of this year only 10 000 low-cost houses had been built. And
most of the housing budget was unused. Of the 3.15 billion rand allocated to
low-income housing, only 650 million rand, about 21 per cent of the total, had
been spent.

Slovo died of cancer in 1995. This August, however, the new housing minister,
Sankie Mthembi-Mahanyele, told parliament that an average of 5611 houses would
be completed each month in the second half of this year—a vast improvement
on past performance but still not enough to eliminate the housing shortage.

This gap between promise and performance has prompted a lively debate among
politicians and planners. Should South Africa be trying to eliminate the housing
shortage by building bricks-and-mortar houses? Or should its priority be to
provide basic services to the shantytowns?

Many civic activists, ANC supporters, and a group of left-wing economists at
the National Institute for Economic Planning in Johannesburg support the idea of
building brick houses. A recent paper by Patrick Bond, a senior researcher at
NIEP, entitled “Do Blacks Like Shacks?”, argues that South Africa is wealthy
enough to provide all its people with decent brick houses.

The huge sum that was earmarked for low-cost housing but never spent shows
that the public purse can afford to build more houses, Bond says. More money
could be raised by imposing a small tax on big industrial users of electricity
and water. These companies currently pay some of the lowest tariffs in the world
for these commodities. Bond says the revenue could be used to subsidise the cost
of providing sewers, heating, lighting and roads in working class districts.

The alternative strategy relies heavily on upgrading the existing shantytowns
and providing them with sanitation, water and electricity. It is backed by
nongovernmental organisations such as the Independent Development Trust, which
have been promoting the incremental improvement of shantytowns since the
1980s.

This strategy is based on the premise that South Africa’s ailing economy will
not be able to finance all the promises made in the reconstruction programme.
Extra taxes on the private sector and heavy state spending will further
undermine the already poor prospects for growth.

Opponents of this plan deride it as “toilets-in-the-veld” and argue that it
would perpetuate segregation in South Africa’s cities. But now
Mthembi-Mahanyele, who used to oppose it, has reluctantly accepted that it is a
pragmatic way forward. It has effectively become government policy, as South
Africa has come under increasing pressure to curb its budget deficit.

The debate has been further complicated by the reorganisation of local
government, which has caused an enormous administrative upheaval. Elections for
new municipal authorities to replace the racially segregated system of local
government were held only last year.

Chaotic administration

Local government housing departments are in the middle of a difficult period
of transition. Their staff includes a volatile mix of bureaucrats from the old
apartheid administration and new recruits who are strong on ideals but short of
experience. “The result is a public authority in chaos,” says Mike Oelofse, a
private consultant who specialises in revamping the inner city. “Local
government and its housing department is just ticking over. It can still do what
it is used to doing—clean the streets and make sure the lights come on at
night—but there is no ability to plan and implement something new. A
system for implementing policy is simply not there.”

Mary Tomlinson, senior research consultant at the Centre for Policy Studies
in Johannesburg, a politically neutral think-tank, points to a basic flaw in the
way the new housing policy has been developed. In all the debate about the
conflicting visions of the post-apartheid city one view has been missing, she
says—that of the homeless.

She carried out a series of in-depth discussions with residents of
shantytowns. In a report published last month she concludes: “A policy devised
without the participation of beneficiaries has indeed failed to consider some of
their important needs and perspectives.” She says that the strategy was more
concerned with satisfying the needs of property developers and politicians and
less with the people who have to live in the new houses.

Some of the shantytown residents who took part in Tomlinson’s research said
that they preferred their shacks to new brick houses. Although the people who
receive a state subsidy to help them with their housing can get a mortgage, the
banks consider the loans to be risky and charge high rates of interest. Some
people said they preferred to live in shacks rather than run into debt.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria has been testing a
range of technologies designed to reduce the cost of conventional housing. They
range from bricks made of clay and sewage sludge, to modern latrines called
pungalutho—a Zulu word which means “the thing that does not smell”.
But this is not tackling the main problem, says Oelofse. “Low-cost housing is
not a technological issue at this stage,” he says. “We have to come up with
systems of delivery first.”

According to Tomlinson, neither of the opposing strategies will solve South
Africa’s housing problem on its own. But whatever course of action the
government chooses, it must ensure that it takes into account the views of the
people who will live in these houses, she says.

Despite all the high-powered effort that has gone into planning a
post-apartheid city based on equity, it is the poor and not the planners who are
currently shaping the urban landscape. Armies of homeless people are building
shanties in the nooks and crannies of the cities or invading land on their
outskirts, equipped with planks and corrugated iron sheeting.

“Under current conditions,” says Taffy Adler, executive director of a
Johannesburg housing company specialising in affordable housing, “spontaneity
rather than policy implementation is by far the major force for creating shelter
in the city.”

Back at Canaan, Zwane is a little sceptical about what the government can do
for him, and puzzles about two sets of numbers that have been painted in black
on the doors of the shacks by local government officials. The officials recently
visited Canaan to make an inventory of shacks and the number of people living in
them. Zwane says that they “first came here and said we must move. We didn’t, so
they came and put numbers on the shacks. Then they came back and painted new
numbers on them. We haven’t heard from them again and don’t know what these
numbers will bring. So we will just carry on living as we are.”

LIKE children, young elephants need discipline if they are to grow up as
responsible members of society. Wildlife biologists say that orphan bull
elephants in South Africa’s Pilanesberg Game Reserve have turned delinquent
because they have never been taken in hand by their elders.

Rogue elephants have become a serious problem in Pilanesberg, a small
wildlife reserve about 250 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg. Earlier this
month, a young bull charged a group of tourists on a photo-safari. The next day
the same elephant attacked and killed a professional hunter who had been sent to
shoot it. These are not isolated incidents. Two years ago another tourist was
attacked, chased out of his battered car, and trampled to death in the
reserve.

Humans are not the only victims: in the past three years, 19 white
rhinoceroses have been gored to death by elephants in Pilanesberg. Park rangers
have also seen bull elephants trying to mount rhino cows.

żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs working for the Rhino and Elephant Foundation (REF), based in
Johannesburg, have now completed a study of the problem, and think they can
explain the elephants’ aberrant behaviour. Clive Walker, chairman of the
foundation, says that in each incident the rogue animal was from a group of
young male elephants brought into Pilanesberg from the Kruger National Park in
the early 1980s—after the rest of their herd was culled as part of an
effort to control Kruger’s burgeoning elephant population.

“We believe the stress these animals have been subjected to along with the
fact that they have never been subjected to the discipline and nurturing of a
matriarchal cow, which is a central feature of normal elephant family life,
accounts for their behaviour,” says Walker.

Marion Garaï, coordinator of the REF’s elephant research programmes,
says that some of the orphan elephants attached themselves to a herd of rhinos
after arriving in Pilanesberg. As they grew into young bulls, they tried mating
with rhino cows. “Either through frustration or territorial aggression, the
elephant bulls then turned on the rhino cows,” says Garaï.

GaraĂŻ agrees that a lack of discipline from older animals helped turn
the elephants into delinquents. “A contributing factor is the absence of older
bull elephants, who are known to discipline aggressive young bulls during the
mating season,” she says.

The park’s small size may also have played a part, however. The Pilanesberg
Game Reserve covers only about 35 000 hectares and is heavily stocked with large
mammals. It is also visited by a great number of tourists because of its
proximity to Johannesburg and a casino complex—which may place the animals
under stress. “These could be additional factors that cause territorial
aggression and unusual elephant-rhino interaction,” says Garaï.

The South African National Parks Board has now suspended its annual elephant
cull in Kruger, largely in response to pressure from international animal
welfare groups. Only whole families of elephants will be moved from the park to
other game reserves, which should mean that young bulls will continue to receive
the strict parental discipline they need.

The research was carried out in the Libode district of the Eastern Cape—a rural area which traditionally provides migrant labour to the South African gold mining industry. It was based on a sample of 500 former miners, randomly selected from 29 settlements in the district. The men were all subjected to a full hospital examination, including X-rays and lung function tests.

In the first part of the study, which appeared in last month’s issue of the South African Medical Journal, the researchers tested 150 retired mineworkers. Fifty-five per cent of them were found to be suffering from pneumoconiosis—a group of chest diseases characterised by scarring of lung tissue, and caused by the inhalation of excessive mineral or metallic dust.

In addition, 42 per cent of those miners with pneumoconiosis also had tuberculosis. Diseases caused by the inhalation of dust are believed to increase the risk of contracting TB. A second part of the study, which has not yet been published, examined a further 350 miners and produced similar results. The full study is now being examined by the ERU’s parent body, the Medical Bureau for Occupational Diseases.

The South African mining industry is required by law to compensate workers who sustain injuries or diseases at work, and has set up a national compensation fund administered by a private finance company. But Brian Williams, director of the ERU, says that if the results from the Libode study were extrapolated to include all former miners in this single administrative district, the bills for compensation in Libode alone would almost exhaust the national fund. And if the pattern were applied to other rural areas that supply migrant labour to the gold mines, “compensation could well run into several billions of rands”, says Williams. The industry’s occupational diseases fund, collected from a “dust levy” imposed on each mine, is currently worth some 80 million rand, or about £12.3 million.

Anna Trapido, one of the authors of the ERU report, has little doubt that the compensation fund is too small to cope with the problem. She says the fund has so far avoided bankruptcy only because facilities in the rural areas are so inadequate that former miners are unable to receive the medical checkups they need to determine whether they have contracted an occupational disease.

Fleur Plimmer, health and safety coordinator for the National Union of Mineworkers, says the industry will have to increase its dust levy. “The study is extremely disturbing. The implications are that there are potentially thousands of ex-mineworkers suffering from lung diseases who cannot be compensated under the current system.”

Bobby Godsell, chairman of the Anglo American Corporation, South Africa’s largest mining company, acknowledges that the study points to a “serious problem which the industry will have to address”. But he stresses that further research needs to be done to assess whether the situation in Libode is representative of the rest of the country.

THE people of Moutse, a group of rural settlements east of Johannesburg,
should not have to worry about water. They live close to the huge Loskop Dam,
which is fed by the Olifants River, one of the largest in the country.

Yet these settlements are parched. Water has to be trucked in every day, and
it is strictly rationed. Bizarre laws passed a hundred years ago mean that the
people are denied access to a basic natural resource lying on their doorstep.
The water from Loskop Dam belongs to a few white farmers who use it to irrigate
their vast fields of wheat, maize and orange trees. For in South Africa water is
not a national asset—it belongs to the individuals whose land it runs
through. So for the farmers near Moutse, the water from the Olifants is theirs
by right. The villagers must go thirsty.

Simon Forster, a private consultant and one of the country’s foremost water
experts, says the large white-owned farms below Loskop use so much water that
during the recent drought “there was literally not a cupful left” in the
Olifants River to supply the settlements of Moutse. Landowners, he claims, “are
technically and legally capable of pumping many rivers dry, particularly during
low flow periods”. He points out that a relatively small number of farmers
control most of the nation’s usable water.

This injustice is about to change, however. Kader Asmal, Nelson Mandela’s
minister of water affairs, is drawing up a controversial reform programme to
change the country’s antiquated system of riparian rights. He is employing an
army of scientists and technicians to devise a scheme which will ensure South
Africa’s water resources are used fairly and sustainably. In February, he
published a discussion document which promises that “there shall be no ownership
of water but only a right to its use”. The government, says Asmal, wants to
“provide a uniform system of allocation of water rights over which the state has
complete control”.

The reforms are long overdue. The villagers of Moutse are among 14 million
people, out of a total South African population of 40 million, who have
inadequate or no water supplies. In a report compiled by the South African
Labour and Development Research Unit at the University of Cape Town in 1994,
more than 56 per cent of people in the Northern Province listed clean water as
the single most important service they expected from a democratic
government.

Private asset

“The State has little control over what a private landowner does with his
private water,” writes Forster in a paper for the Land and Agriculture Policy
Centre, a research centre in Johannesburg that is helping the new government
with land and water reform. Riparian rights, he explains, form part of the title
deeds of land and were originally granted when river use was minimal. The
government’s aim is to supply all South Africans with enough safe water to meet
basic needs—some 25 litres per person per day. But it is facing stiff
opposition from landowners, who pay some of the cheapest prices for water in the
world and are unwilling to change to a system which would undoubtedly force them
to pay more.

Boet van Rensburg, an Afrikaans farmer who owns a huge maize estate in the
catchment of the Olifants River, says: “If the government is going to take our
water so it can be shared with others downstream, then it must value that water
and pay us for what is taken away,” he says. “Any form of water nationalisation
will create a heavy resistance from the Boers [white farmers].”

Geoff Budlender, a constitutional lawyer who helped draft the proposed water
reforms, acknowledges that resistance from conservative white farmers is likely
to be even more spirited than their opposition to the government’s land
redistribution programme, in which 30 per cent of land is to be handed to people
dispossessed under apartheid. Asmal, recognising that water-saving technologies
could ease the political pain of his programme, has asked his scientists to
develop a host of new technologies to conserve water.

Technicians at the Water Research Commission (WRC) in Pretoria visited Israel
to discover how it deals with problems of water shortage. They returned with
plans to develop state-of-the-art microspray and trickle irrigation systems.
“These are expensive and farmers here have never been induced to use them
because water is so cheap,” says the WRC’s chief water engineer, David van der
Merwe. “But the minister is sending signals about steep increases in water
tariffs and these are designed to encourage investment in technologies that will
help save water for our basic needs and ecological reserve.”

Guy Preston, a water ecologist and Asmal’s special adviser for conservation,
has spent the past two years adapting new American shower heads, taps and toilet
flushing systems to South African conditions. “A single 10-minute shower in the
suburbs consumes 200-odd litres which is enough to supply eight rural people
with their basic needs for the day,” says Preston. He is working on a special
pre-pay water meter that can be installed at homes in poor townships, where
local authorities are having trouble getting residents to pay for basic
services.

Engineers working in the industrial town of Phalaborwa, near the Kruger
National Park, for the Department of Water Affairs have developed a pre-pay
meter designed to serve an entire village. Last month they installed one in a
village near the Olifants, where residents used to pay 10 rand (about
ÂŁ1.70) for a 20-litre drum of water from private vendors who brought the
drums into the village on delivery vans. Now an elected village water committee
buys a “token”—which looks like a pencil made of metal—for 255 rand
to insert into the meter. The device activates a large hydraulic cistern which
releases 160 000 litres of water from a nearby reservoir into a number of
communal taps in the village.

“We estimate this supply is more than thirty times cheaper than the price the
residents were paying for water from the vendors,” says Louis Blom, an engineer
who helped invent the device. “The beauty is that it provides the department
with an efficient and upfront way of collecting revenues for providing this
basic service.”

According to Blom, scientists at the University of Pretoria who worked on the
prototype of the device have already received queries from Scottish water
authorities about the possibility of exporting it to Britain. “These are
exciting innovations that could ease the pain of change, but we must be careful
of lapsing into technological determinism,” warns Mike Muller, deputy director
of water supply and sanitation in Asmal’s department. “In the end, it is only
effective political change and tariff increases that will achieve our
´Ç˛úÂá±đł¦łŮľ±±ą±đ˛ő.”

In revamping South Africa’s water laws, the government also hopes to deal
with the country’s river pollution problems. Outdated agricultural practices and
technologies have loaded many rivers with a cocktail of silt, phosphates,
nitrates and other pollutants. The estates in the Olifants valley, for example,
use large amounts of pesticides and fertilisers, and huge irrigation systems
which spray water indiscriminately over a large area. This causes severe
salination as the water evaporates, leaving concentrated nitrates and phosphates
behind. The little water that runs from the fields back into the rivers is
heavily contaminated.

According to David Cooper, director of the land and agricultural policy
centre, South Africa presents a prime example of an international problem:
“Worldwide over a million hectares of land is lost every year through being
irrigated with saline water.” In Gauteng Province (formerly the Transvaal), he
says, farmland is being irrigated with water from rivers which already contains
high concentrations of salts.

The condition of the Olifants mirrors that of many other rivers. At its
source, about 150 kilometres east of Johannesburg, it is surrounded by coal
dumps which seep sulphur and other industrial toxins into the water. It then
flows northwards, through other collieries, into the Witbank Dam, site of a
massive coal-fired power station.

The power station was built on the edge of the dam so that it could use its
water for cooling. But at this stage in its course the Olifants is already so
polluted that the water creates a thick scale on the station’s cooling towers
and is threatening to corrode them. This forces the power station to draw
millions of litres a week from another reservoir about 250 kilometres away.

From Witbank, the Olifants pushes further north through more coalfields to
the Loskop Dam near Moutse. From here it flows through degraded villages until
it reaches a mountain escarpment and then drops down to Phalaborwa and into the
Kruger National Park. In the game reserve the river’s load of sulphates,
phosphates and suspended solids periodically causes catastrophic fish die-offs,
which have led to the local extinction of several rare fish-eating birds.

As part of its water reforms the government is promoting microspray and
trickle irrigation systems to pinpoint those crops which need watering, thus
preventing pools of excess water which run contaminated back into rivers. It
hopes to reduce the concentration of salts in rivers and at the same time cut
down on wastage.

But the government faces a struggle. It could be years before the new
technologies reverse the legacy of pollution. And the reforms will have to
satisfy the farmers as well as the people in the drought-stricken villages.