Agent Orange — cross-boundary cooperation is key to reversing the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in grasslands

Indigenous foragers were following grazing herds through the eastern grasslands as much as 30,000 years ago, if not longer. The rock paintings on sandstone walls here are about 3,000 years old and remember a time when people experienced everyone and everything as connected, animate beings. Africa’s prairies are still the breath of life for families, cultures and local economies. (Photo: Leonie Joubert)

By Leonie Joubert

11 May 2025

Lives depend on keeping SA’s old-growth grasslands healthy. They feed our herds, they’re water factories and they mop up carbon pollution, which stabilises the climate. Protecting them from overuse, invasive trees and increasingly volatile weather extremes calls for collaborations that straddle national borders, private fence lines and the boundaries of overburdened commonages.

The foothills of southwestern Lesotho are like a burn victim who has barely survived their injuries. As if they’ve been doused with napalm, the once-plump, glowing skin of soil and grass is reduced to scar tissue, drum-tight over the jutting sandstone bones beneath. The wound is trying to heal, but the erosion gullies are keloid scars that can’t mend.

This is a full-body wound, stretching as far as the eye can see, and the South African side of the Tele Bridge border crossing near Sterkspruit in the Eastern Cape isn’t in better shape.

The Agent Orange that has stripped both sides of the border to the bone is a toxic mix of over a century of exclusionary land ownership laws — think: 1913 Land Act and apartheid-era Bantustans — followed by decades of changing economic forces that have reshaped how farmers manage their wealth, livelihoods and livestock.

The Lesotho lowlands and the Eastern Cape highlands might fall on two sides of a border created by the recent notion of the nation-state, but grasslands don’t care for administrative divides between neighbouring states or neighbourly farmers. Efforts to repair damaged grasslands need to straddle fences and think big, ecologists and conservationists agree.

The custodians of these grasslands in Lesotho and South Africa — indigenous communal stockmen and commercial farmers alike — can’t return to a time when the national border didn’t exist, or when there were fewer mouths to feed off of a seemingly boundless prairie. Their herds can’t roam as they once did, with relative freedom across unfenced and un-owned grazing.

A new model of shared custodianship is emerging here, though, which draws working farmlands into the conservation fold, and may swing the compass towards a better way to protect and even restore these life-giving prairies. Lives will depend on it working, as pressure continues on this overstretched ecosystem in an increasingly volatile climate.

About 60% of rural Basotho live below the poverty line, although if their grazing remains healthy, so will their herds and crops, a form of wealth that predates the cash economy and the title deed. (Screenshot: Supplied)

Straddling fences, crossing divides

“Farmers are farming grass and water, not sheep,” says Thembanani Nsibande, grasslands programme manager with the conservation non-profit WWF. He’s speaking of the landowners in the Eastern Cape highlands who have agreed to be part of an embryonic grasslands national park that’s aimed at getting agriculturally productive farmlands into a semiformal protected area agreement that should boost farming outputs, preserve biodiversity, repair these mountainous “water factories” and mop carbon pollution from the atmosphere.

It’s been a decade-long journey, but the declaration of the park — roughly 30,000 hectares in size and likely to be called the North Eastern Cape Grasslands National Park — is imminent, according to conservation management authority SANParks, which is working with the WWF to pull the initiative together.

Read more: A tale of two dams: grasslands restoration as important as engineering solutions for SA’s precarious water future

Sheep and cattle depend on the grasslands for food, says Nsibande. The quality and quantity of grazing depends on the particular alchemy of healthy grasses, living soils and ample water. First and foremost, farmers are custodians of that natural magic — what happens beneath the hoof is as important as what happens above it.

Only 2.2% of the country’s grasslands are protected, most of the rest is in the hands of private landowners or in a communal arrangement and 60% is irreversibly changed, according to the Endangered Wildlife Trust. Rescuing this embattled ecosystem needs an approach that moves beyond the old “fortress” style of conservation.

“We can’t continue with the old way of establishing protected areas and implementing conservation, where we put fences up and chase people out,” he says, explaining the structure of the park, which is a voluntary land stewardship arrangement.

“[Farmers] continue to own the land and manage their properties, but do it with the different stakeholders to ensure it’s done in a sustainable manner,” Nsibande explains.

SANParks has identified an area of grasslands across the region that needs collaborative conservation across extensive landscapes, not small or fragmented patchwork interventions. Almost half of this area falls under communal landownership; most of the rest is privately owned. Both forms of ownership have unique challenges in terms of farming sustainably and being part of a conservation initiative — issues which facilitators at SANParks and WWF are negotiating slowly.

Some 60 percent of rural Basotho live below the poverty line, although if their grazing remains healthy, so will their herds and crops - a form of wealth that predates the cash economy and the title deed. (Supplied: WWF)

The quid pro quo is that farmers get the kind of support once offered by state extension officers, such as advice on veld-friendly agro-ecology methods: going chemical-free and returning to age-old rotational grazing that allows veld recovery. They’ll also get funding to clear invasive plants, and help with wetland restoration and erosion control.

Communal farming families with limited water access will benefit from help with natural spring protection.

“These [grasslands] are a water factory, but our people who live in those mountains don’t have access to water, so we do natural spring protection to allow them access to clean water,” Nsibande concludes.

Reversing the “tragedy of the commons”

Are the notoriously overgrazed communal areas in these former Bantustans, and across the border in the Lesotho lowlands, an example of the tragedy of the commons, where too many people selfishly plunder the commonage, taking more than their fair share?

Or is the tragedy in the capturing of the commons, where the powerful elite in a society have been able to claim large parts of the commonage for themselves for over a century, pressing more and more commoners onto smaller parcels of land?

Roughly half of the proposed park falls on land that are tightly-packed and artificially shrunken commonages — apartheid-era “tribal reserves”. Much has been written about why these are threadbare from overuse, and there are complicated historic reasons for it, explains professor Stefan Grab from the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of Witwatersrand.

“It has a lot to do with the soil. It's overgrazing, poor grazing management practices, and subsistence farming, where people are farming small plots and trying to get the maximum out of their land,” he says.

The strong contrasts between that condition of commercial and communal farmlands in the grasslands are due to different farming practices, and the fact that commercial farmers are generally able to use less intensive farming methods, Grab explains.

While commercial farming is a risky business with low margins, a landowner has more say over land management decisions such as how many head of livestock to run on the land, how often to move them between fields, what pastures to cultivate for supplement feeding, camp size and spread of water sources, all of which determine veld health.

The commonages that have fed so many Indigenous families for generations have shrunk as commercial farmers have been given priority access to what was once shared land. The population has also grown in the commonage-dependent communities, meaning each hectare of grassland in the former homelands needs to support more families.

What befalls the hills, hammers the dales

Shepherd Moeketsi Makhoali’s dogs lope around him with an exuberance that is as old as the allegiance between hound and human. One bounds in circles; the other, anxious at an approaching stranger, jumps up against him for reassurance. Here, at the top of Lesotho’s Mahlasela Pass, the soundscape is a weft of restless air, throaty rumbles from an approaching storm, and the gadong-dong-dong of sheep bells. Makhoali's flock wanders hock-deep in the alpine grass and wild flowers 3,222 m above sea level. All seem at home in the lean air that leaves visitors from the lowlands gasping for breath.

These grasslands are close to the highest point in the mountain kingdom. The rain that’s about to fall will seep into the spongy wetlands, trickle into a lattice of ancient stream beds, and eventually flow into a river that traces an eons-old 2,432 km path to a place that could be a universe away: Alexander Bay where South Africa and Namibia meet on the desert-like Atlantic coast.

Indigenous foragers were following grazing herds through the eastern grasslands as much as
30,000 years ago, if not longer. The rock paintings on sandstone walls here are about 3,000 years
old and remember a time when people experienced everyone and everything as connected,
animate beings. Africa’s prairies are still the breath of life for families, cultures and local
economies. (Photo: Leonie Joubert)

Makhoali’s home is in the headwards of the Orange-Senqu River, one of the most important water catchments on the sub-content.

These slopes, where stockmen like him have tended their flocks for generations, are in much better shape than the excoriated Lesotho lowlands a few hours’ drive away at Tele Bridge. It might be that they’re protected by the harsher climate that makes living, herding and cropping here much tougher.

Both landscapes, though, are a record of the decades-long forces that shape how their custodians have treated the veld, and why the region needs cross-boundary cooperation to protect them.

What happens to the veld here hurls a storm-front downstream, even up to hundreds of kilometres away. Stripped soils clog up rivers and dams; seeds scattered by invasive wattles wash downriver and pollute others’ lands; mega-dams like the Gariep choke with silt; those reliant on the Orange-Senqu River feel the boom-and-bust water flows of harsher droughts and flooding.

This is why Sissie Matela and Nicky McLeod from the non-profit Environment & Rural Solutions (ERS), based in Matatiele in the Eastern Cape, have been lobbying for years for a trans-frontier conservation arrangement that could span the North Eastern grasslands in South Africa and south-eastern Lesotho.

An erosion gully near Quthing in the Lesotho lowlands, close to where the Orange-Senqu River
flows into South Africa at the Tele Bridge border crossing, is as deep as the mature trees growing
inside it are old. Boom-and-bust cycles of droughts and heavy rain leave the ground open to this
kind of scarring, and the resulting damage is felt for hundreds of kilometres downriver.
(Photo: Leonie Joubert)

“It’s a porous border here, and it makes sense to have contiguous conservation of these grasslands,” says McLeod.

It’s not only that the people living here clearly move back and forth across this made-up boundary line — local family names show how people on both sides of the border have mingled and married — but the natural veld doesn’t care for such markers either, says Matela.

Whether it’s a hungry wildfire, or hungry cattle, they’ll follow the grass.

To make a trans-frontier conservation project here work needs more of the same, according to Matela: the kind of on-the-ground collaboration that’s already happening between institutions and communities working with commercial and communal landowners on the embryonic North Eastern Cape Grasslands National Park, and in the negotiations happening around a similar protected environment initiative to the east of the park that will extend all the way to the provincial border between the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. This includes mostly communal grazing lands in the Matatiele area where ERS is working with about 35 different rangeland associations, WWF, and the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency.

“It’s called the Maloti Thaba Tsa Metsi Protected Environment,” says McLeod. “It's not going to be run by any state entities, but by civil society. We now have six chiefs who have signed up (to the initiative).”

A grasslands-focused trans-frontier park between South Africa and Lesotho remains a moon-shot for those working in grasslands conservation here, and there are no quick fixes to what’s damaging the veld there. It took millions of years for these grasslands and their fecund soils to form, and just over a century for fast-changing human dynamics to strip over half of them bare, possibly irreversibly.

A shepherd’s life, like Moeketsi Makhoali’s, may not be easy. He is likely amongst the 60 percent of rural Basotho who live below the poverty line and who many might say has been left behind on the development path.

Indigenous foragers were following grazing herds through the eastern grasslands as much as
30,000 years ago, if not longer. (Photo: Leonie Joubert)

But these old ways might point to a compromise of sorts, where the fast-paced extractive use of the landscape yields to the lighter-touch Indigenous ways of relating to the land, from a time before the capturing of commonages. Rural families like his could be judged as “poor” in the monetary sense of the word, but if their grazing remains healthy, so will their herds and a form of wealth that predates the cash economy and the title deed. DM

This is part of the Golden Threads series for the Story Ark – tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points project, which investigates the state of the country’s old-growth grasslands, the free natural services they offer, and what South Africa needs to do to conserve and repair them.

The series is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, which supports investigative journalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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Straddling fences, crossing divides