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Mafonyoke
The author was born in November 1938 and spent his first years of school in Ficksburg, Orange Free State. From those years onwards he had grown to love and cherish the times when they visited his f...view moreThe author was born in November 1938 and spent his first years of school in Ficksburg, Orange Free State. From those years onwards he had grown to love and cherish the times when they visited his father's farm in the far off Transvaal Lowveldt.
In the early fifties his father was appointed to run a huge cattle estate in the Lowveldt of Rhodesia, (Nuanetsi Ranch)while the youngster was ordained to finish his final school year in Kroonstad, Orange Free State, where his father had some business interests. As he spent most of his holidays in the Lowveldt regions, it dawned on him that the days of pristine nature as he had known it, seems destined to disappear in the wake of commercial exploitation, or what some people love to call progress. After school, he ventured on various travels to as it was then called, to Northern Rhodesia and parts of Tanganjika territory and was to observe for himself the havoc and destruction that overpopulation and unhealthy farming methods could cause. He then decided to do something about it, and upon his return to the Union, was appointed as Game Ranger in the Kruger National Park, a position he held until 1964 when he once again traveled the Afican interior.
Afterwards he bought a farm in the Transvaal Lowveldt where he cultivated tobacco and vegetables, but when after some years of sodbusting he was asked in 1968 by a friend who had a Game farm there, to assist in establishing a Game reserve on the western boundary of the KNP, he accepted. This reserve called the Klaserie was duly established and proclaimed in 1971 as a Private Nature Conservancy.
The author left when the reserve was fully airborne in 1973 and after various other ventures, now, as for the previous 22 years lives with his wife on their game farm in a nature reserve on the Olifants river.view less