Taming and simulating Nature in an African metropolis.

Taming and simulating Nature in an African metropolis.

Dr. Mark Haywood,The Open University.

Mark Haywood, ‘African Elephant’ Johannesburg, 2007.

In February 2008, the United Nations’ Revision of World Urbanization Prospects

predicted by the end of that year, for the first time in human

history, more than half the world’s population would be living in

urban, rather than rural locations. Hania Zlotnik, Director of the

Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs

(DESA), which prepared the report, noted, ‘Although Asia and Africa

are the least urbanized areas, they account for most of the urban

population of the world.’i

It is increasingly predicted that the archetypal city of the twenty-

first century will be the non-Western (or southern hemisphere)

megalopolis. In light of this scenario, we will consider the changing

roles of two urban zoos in the burgeoning South African metropolitan

area of Gauteng. Though by far the smallest of the country’s

provinces, it is not only the most densely populated, but also has

the highest population (currently estimated at around eleven million

people).

South Africa has many internationally famous game reserves and

National Parks, but many foreigners may be surprised to learn that

the Johannesburg/Pretoria conurbation of which Gauteng is comprised,

is also home to two large urban zoos. Over the past century or so,

these institutions have evolved a narrative of interplay between

‘nature’ and urbanisation. The process began with colonial taxonomies

and mastery over nature that evolved into simulation and re-

evaluation, before now perhaps suggesting the future possibility of

hybridised urban spaces for animal/human interaction.

Our account will consider a series of distinct chapters in this

narrative. The first is from the turn of the last century, when the

Johannesburg Zoo was founded in the new suburb of Saxonburg, which

had recently been Europeanised by the mass planting of trees imported

from Germany. The second phase began in the 1930s, when Pretoria’s

National Zoological Gardens expanded by enclosing adjoining

indigenous bush veld. Finally, we will consider the present day

function of Johannesburg Zoo, which has become a safe recreational

haven in a city which suffers from one of the world’s highest crime

rates, inner city collapse and a dearth of safe public space.

However, it is this third seemingly desperate situation, that also

suggests a possible new future for metropolitan zoos, not just in

South Africa, but elsewhere.

Johannesburg was founded in 1886 and so is one of the world’s

youngest major cities. It is also probably the largest not sited on a

navigable body of water; the location was instead determined by the

discovery of rich gold deposits beneath the Highveld, a vast inland

savannah plateau with an average altitude of over 1,750 metres. The

city has been described as ‘the nineteenth century’s last great

boomtown’,ii for in only ten years a few small mining camps grew to

become an urban area of over 100,000 people who had been drawn there

from all over the world. From the outset Johannesburg developed

chaotically and, though its centre retains the original grid pattern,

little of the historic architecture has survived. In recent years,

even the modernist Central Business District has been abandoned by

big business and the Stock Exchange, who have retreated to the safety

of the suburbs. Johannesburg Zoo is one of the city’s last public

institutions still in its original location, a late nineteenth

century inner suburb called Saxonwold, that is one of the few older

areas to remain comparatively unchanged. To the south-west

Saxonwold’s skyline is dominated by the palatial cliff-top mansions

of the so-called Rand Lords who, a century ago drove the young city’s

astonishing burgeoning. The Zoo lies at the foot of this cliff and

its parkland is bisected by the wide Memorial Boulevard, which leads

the eye to Sir Edwin Lutyens’ imposing Anglo-Boer War Memorial on the

far edge of the Zoo.iii

Saxonwold’s name provides an improbable hint to its circumstances of

origin. In the late nineteenth century the area was a cattle farm

called Bramfontein that was speculatively purchased by Hermann

Eckstein, President of the Johannesburg Chamber of Mines. In 1891

after failing to find any gold beneath the farm Eckstein replaced the

original veld with a huge commercial plantation of three million

European trees imported from the Black Forest. He named the area

Sachsenwald after Bismarck’s estate in Lower Saxony and the first

manager of his plantation had previously held a similar post with the

Iron Chancellor.iv

Eckstein died in 1893 and, in the following years as the city grew,

the company he had founded subdivided the plantation into building

plots. In 1904 a two hundred acre site which today comprises the Zoo

and its adjoining lake was ceded as a Deed of Gift ’in trust for the

inhabitants of Johannesburg...to be used for the purpose of a public

park’.v It was requested the area be known as the Hermann Eckstein

Memorial Park, but over the following years the suburb’s name became

anglicised to ‘Saxonwold’, a formal park was laid out, and the small

animal collection that had been housed there became the Johannesburg

Zoological Gardens.vi

Thus an area of the Highveld, which as late as the 1880s had been

rich in indigenous fauna and flora was turned into European urban

parkland. In the years after the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902)

the Zoo was created in its midst as an ordered imperial

heterotopia. The form and content was modelled on the London Zoo;

it was planted with European trees and dotted with whimsical

buildings that housed mainly indigenous African animals such as

lions, elephants and rhinoceros. Geometries of spatial control

were imposed on the site through the creation of straight formal

avenues and the dominant Memorial Boulevard whose axis created a

sightline linking Sir Edward Lutyen’s imposing Anglo-Boer War

Memorial to the Westcliff mansions of the colonial Rand Lords (who

had funded the neoclassical monument).

We will return to the Johannesburg Zoo of the present day after a

second, contrasting study of the expansion of Pretoria’s National

Zoological Gardens during the 1930s. The two institutions are of

similar age, but their cities are very different, Johannesburg is

brash and cosmopolitan, whereas Pretoria is conservative and still

dominated by its sober Afrikaner culture. Pretoria was the older

city, but grew far more slowly and its zoo borders the city

centre. The NZG’s first Director, Dr Jan Boudewyn Gunning was very

progressive and familiar with the contemporary European movement

led by Carl Hagenbeck. In 1898 Hagenbeck had created an ‘Animal

Paradise’ at the Berlin Zoological Gardens by replacing some cages

and buildings with moated outdoor enclosures in which animals were

displayed against tiered, artificial cliffs made of cement. vii

Left: Veldt outside Pretoria that became the Northern Extension

of the NZG.

Right: Present day tiger enclosure, Northern Extension, NZG.

In 1902, Gunning initiated the purchase of thirty acres of pristine

hilly bush veldt bordering the Apies River, which at that time was

the Zoo’s northern boundary.viii The land then remained undeveloped

for several decades whilst the city grew and encircled it. By 1938,

sufficient funds were finally in place to formally incorporate the

river, its far bank and the hills beyond into the Zoo, whilst leaving

as much as possible of the original landscape intact. The new

development was known as the Northern Extension and its animal

enclosures were each about an acre in size, which made them the

largest in the world at that time.ix

This innovative strategy for incorporating indigenous landscape and

flora into the zoo environment led to Pretoria being ranked among the

world’s top urban zoos. It was also an historic shift from zoos

consisting of architecture that housed animals for display, to

environments with adjoining quasi-natural structures from which

humans could look out to observe animals. We might term the latter

‘non-architecture’ as animal enclosures that visually and

environmentally simulated the ‘natural world’ superseded the

ideological and overtly physical architecture of the colonial and

early modernist periods.

Our final study is set in an era when, as ever increasing numbers of

foreign tourists are experiencing South African wildlife in what

remains of its natural environment, much of Johannesburg’s rapidly

rising urban population have replaced their forebears’ traditional

understandings of indigenous animals with ones gleaned from school

and family visits to the Zoo. In recent years, Johannesburg has

become known as one of the world’s most dangerous cities and it is

tempting to contrast the imperial order of our first study with the

today’s chaos and lawlessness. However, this might be misleading, as

early Johannesburg has been described in the following emphatic

terms.

Conceived in avarice, the young city nurtured every species of vice. Banks and boarding houses jostled for space with more than five hundred saloons. Criminal syndicates with roots in New York City and London found fertile soil in Johannesburg. The predominantly male population provided a robust market for prostitution. ‘Ancient Ninevah and Babylon have been revived,’ a visiting journalist wrote in 1913. ‘Johannesburg is their twentieth century prototype. It is a city of unbridled squalor and unfathomable squander.’x

While Johannesburg has always had enormous disparities of wealth

distribution, in recent decades the social fabric of the city has

deteriorated further. There is little safe public space other than in

suburban shopping malls and few of its citizens walk anywhere by

choice. All but the poor live behind high walls topped by spikes and

six or eight strands of electrified wire. In these circumstances, the

city’s zoo has become a popular haven from the dangerous urban jungle

that surrounds it. Entry charges were introduced in 1961 as an

economic necessity, but the resultant restrictions have in recent

years made the Zoo appear a rare, safe environment, that has been

transformed from an open public park into a secure and popular week-

end haven.

Our account began at towards the end of the nineteenth century

when the origins of the Johannesburg Zoo made it a microcosmic

reflection of the stages of the colonial project. Indigenous bush

became a European livestock farm, which was then purchased with

the speculative intention of exploiting its mineral wealth. After

this venture proved futile, the landscape underwent a second stage

of Europeanisation with the creation of the Sachsenwald

plantation. Finally, urban geometries of spatial control were

imposed upon the site and it became a public pleasure garden

populated with indigenous species that had once roamed wild.

Our second study saw the preservation and subsequent

museumification of an indigenous landscape within a colonial urban

environment. Initially this continued to resemble the original

biome through its display of indigenous species, but it later

became hybridised with the introduction of animals from other

continents, such as Indian tigers and Kodiak bears from Alaska.

Finally, we viewed a situation where the city authorities are no

longer in control of the burgeoning urban environment. The African

mega-city is perceived by its inhabitants as a dangerous human jungle

and the European parkland of Johannesburg Zoo has become not just a

sanctuary for endangered indigenous species, such as the wild dog,

but also a safe haven for the city’s ever expanding human population.

We first encountered this last phenomenon some years ago while

researching re-wilded South African landscapes or hyperwildernesses, so-

called on account of their simulation of wilderness.xi It is worth

noting in passing that international discussion of concepts such as

‘wild’ and ‘landscape’ is sometimes hindered by these words of

Northern European origin lacking precise succinct, equivalents in

many Romance languages. In this respect, it is worth mentioning the

ecologist George Peterken’s term ‘condition of future naturalness’xii

as a synonym for re-wilding and in time it might become appropriate

to describe a future use of urban zoos. The current informal social

role of Johannesburg Zoo prompted reflection on the possible future

purpose of the urban zoo, an institution we had previously viewed as

lacking any redeeming features.

At the time of their emergence in the early nineteenth century, zoos

were aligned with other public educational institutions such as

libraries and art galleries. However, over the course of the

twentieth century urban zoos have increasingly struggled to maintain

this status. One of their biggest problems is that collections are

traditionally centred around ‘charismatic assemblies of large

mammals’xiii who are unable to sustain their normal social behaviour

and frequently display symptoms of psychosis. It is hard to see what

educational benefit may be gained from viewing such animals; indeed

the situation has uncomfortable parallels with London’s former Bedlam

Hospital for the mentally ill, whose seventeenth and eighteenth

century inmates provided entertainment for fee-paying spectators.

Mark Haywood, ‘Ghost’: Johannesburg Zoo, 2008

Perhaps, instead of thinking of the zoo as a place to view captive

animals, it could be perceived as a historically constructed human

environment that has had a series of shifting relationship with

the animal kingdom. Researchers at the Charles University in

Prague recently noted that although the city’s zoo is very

popular, visitors not only average only a few seconds looking at

individual animals, but also simply ignore much of the

collection.xiv However, many of Prague’s other residents use the

zoo as a convenient, very pleasant recreational space, for

activities such as walking, or jogging because it can be easily

accessed with inexpensive annual passes.

Prague Zoo, African Savannah Enclosure.

In recent years some large non-urban zoos have developed immersive

viewing environments and perhaps one could achieve something

similar in an urban zoo by removing large mammals, dangerous

carnivores and exotic species. The site would remain comparatively

enclosedxv, but be re-wilded, or ‘revert to some previous

condition’. (Peterken 1996, 13) The result would be a fairly

controllable ‘natural’ environment in which small, formerly

indigenous wildlife might only be glimpsed fleetingly, but

encounters would be all the more prized by those who took the time

and care to look.

Sources

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Haywood, Mark (2007) ‘Re-wilding or hyperwilderness - plus ça chánge?’ in The South African Journal of Art History, Vol. 22.2, 2007 (Pretoria,Tshwane University)

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Taylor, Peter (2005) Beyond Conservation: a wildland strategy (London, Earthscan)

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i UN News Centre.

ii Campbell 2010.iii Haywood-Britz 2008.iv ibid.v SAPRA, 2011vi (JZG Annual Report 2003).vii Rothfels 2002,165.viii van den Berg and Hopkins 2000, 34.ix ibid. 42-5.x Campbell 2010.xi Haywood 2007.xii Peterken 1996, 13.xiii Taylor 2005, 73.xiv

Conversations with Petr Gibas, Karolína Pauknerová and Marco Stella of the Center for Theoretical Study, The Charles University in Prague, June, 2102.

xv The sylvan environs of the Johannesburg Zoo and Saxonwold are already a popular resting place for migrating flocks of wild birds.