- A Thonga community on South Africa’s northeast coast is the custodian of a centuries-old fishing custom and its ecological knowledge with a light touch on migrating juvenile fishes.
- These fishers have limited access to their ancestral lands and lakes now, since they were evicted when the region was declared a protected area four decades ago, which later became the iSimangaliso Wetland Park.
- Three generations of fishermen talk about how they’re trying to keep the culture alive in a fast-changing world.
- The park’s management authority says they are inclusive of communities in public participation processes while officials promise that tourism would be the most viable development boost for the area.
KOSI BAY, South Africa — “There’s a way to hold the spear,” Fano Tembe says, aiming a traditional fishing spear at the sand to show the tourists how they’ll be stabbing a fish in a trap they’re about to visit.
“This is your aiming hand.”
He cradles the middle of the pole in his left, palm-up, fingers open.
“The other is your throwing hand.”
His right clutches the top of the spear at shoulder height.
“You don’t push the spear, you throw it.”
The tool becomes a javelin, skewering the sand.
The 28-year-old has been spearing fish since he was a boy. Now he’s employed by a local tour operator introducing the visitors to his peoples’ Thonga-style fishing method in Kosi Bay, a remote estuary and four-lake system on South Africa’s east coast, about four kilometers (2.5 miles) south of the Mozambican border.
For this demonstration, Tembe is a giant, standing over a tiny, meticulously built model of a fish trap, explaining how the Thonga people have used this unique method to harvest fish for over four centuries, according to written records, although locals will say it goes back more than 700 years.
Be wary of the mullets (Mugil cephalus), Tembe warns.
“When they get tired, they hide between your feet. Don’t try to spear that fish [then].”
Tembe is about to pad barefoot across the sandy lake shore towards the real deal — traps which his father, grandfather and great-grandfather have tended since before Kosi Bay became part of the iSimangaliso Wetland Park in 2000, the country’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site. Before it became part of the Kosi Bay Nature Reserve in 1988. Before a national border was drawn between South Africa and Mozambique.
It’s harder to tend the traps these days, though, since families no longer live on the banks of the lakes as they had for generations. Most were forced to move in the late 1980s, when the state declared that people wouldn’t be able to live here once it became a reserve. Many still work their traps, but now must travel on foot or by car from outside the park.
For some, it’s a costly job. How do you fill a fuel tank from the takings of a handful of fish?
Now that Kosi Bay’s Thonga people no longer live on the edge of the lakes, tourism may be the most viable way to keep Thonga culture alive, some locals hope. But many feel excluded from the industry, and from state planning that shapes how the sector develops. And for many Thonga fishers, who have carried the knowledge of a trapping technique that has a light touch on fish stocks, they feel disconnected from their ancestral lands and excluded from the tourism industry that is supposed to keep their customs alive.
Local knowledge
“July, we call it uNtulikazi, [because] it’s windy and dusty,” says Mthokozisi Nsele, 37, his hand resting lightly on the wheel as he maneuvers the flat-bottomed boat through the channels linking the lakes.
July is when the mullets come.
“That’s why we call the mullet ‘ntuli’.”
The locals know that the weather and the fish work in concert, as if by some ancient agreement. When certain weather conditions roll in, women used to materialize along the shore in anticipation of the men returning with an ample catch. Traditionally, Thonga fishermen — it’s still mostly a man’s job according to custom — check the traps every morning. Mostly it’s to collect food for the table, but if there are a few extras they’ll pass them on to local women who sell them at a nearby market.
Nsele also grew up tending traps, and some of his family are still in the game. Today, like Tembe, he brings his own Thonga knowledge to a tour guiding experience he runs, Kosi Thonga Safaris, and explains to visitors how his people have built and configured the traps for as long as memory holds.
The kraal — an Afrikaans word which alludes to corralling farm animals and which has been adopted by the Thonga to describe their unique fishing structures — is a fenceline made of loosely spaced poles in the shallows of the first two lakes. The kraal curves away from the shoreline, drawing stray fish from the flanks of migrating shoals as they head out to the ocean to spawn. The fence sends them down a chute, towards a funnel-shaped basket whose slim rods interlink like fingers. There’s a gap at the bottom that’s just the right size to allow smaller fish to wiggle through and continue on their way. The bigger ones stay corralled. This is where the spearing is done.
Most of the lakes’ fish species spawn at sea, and replenish the lake population when the returning juveniles mature in these sheltered nurseries. The kraals are positioned in such a way that they don’t catch and prevent the flow of the returning young. This ensures a light-touch impact on fish numbers, according to the now retired Robert “Scotty” Kyle, who back in the early 1980s was the first fisheries scientist to be appointed here.
“Fish are using this channel to move from lake to lake to make it back to the ocean to lay their eggs,” Nsele says.
“When the fish come [back] from the ocean, they have the right of way (from the mouth) up to Fourth Lake. [The kraals] only catch the mature fish when they are coming from Fourth Lake and [going] back to the ocean.”
Back in the early 1980s, not much was known about fish stocks or how locals interacted with natural resources. Kyle’s first job, back then, was to do a study that answered this question. The work, which earned him his doctorate, also allowed him to see that the local community already had a well-governed fishing arrangement amongst themselves, whose customs ensured a low-impact relationship with the lakes.
Even though trap catch numbers eventually climbed in the decades that followed, they still remained relatively sustainable, compared with the offtake from recreational fishing and illegal gill netting.
Then came the rupture. The declaration of the protected area in the 1980s was a boon for the conservation of endemic species. But for the Thonga fishers who spoke to Mongabay, it was the end of a way of life.
Lore of the land
Jerry Mngomezulu, 68, remembers it well. He was eight or nine when his grandfather was trampled by a hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) while wading through a channel on his way to check the family trap. He took a serious blow to the head, an injury that claimed him about two months later.
Many Indigenous cultures in the region use the branches of a buffalo thorn tree (Ziziphus mucronata) to lead the spirit of their dead to their final resting place and will mark the burial site by planting a buffalo thorn as a living headstone. The marker for the grandfather’s resting place joined the copse of trees already throwing a canopy over the place where the family had laid their ancestors to rest for generations.
Then, in the 1980s, the Mngomezulus learned of the impending evictions. The memories of that time are still too painful, Mngomezulu tells Mongabay. But he recalls how the family collapsed their reed-and-thatch homes, and with neighbors’ help, carried everything on foot to a new site about 2 km (1.2 mi) away, outside the new boundary fence. But they would later have to move from here, too.
His was among the 120 families in the northern part of the reserve — an estimated 1,800 people in all — who became a diaspora, choosing to move before the state could come in with a heavy-handed eviction.
Families settled wherever they could find land, says Jackie Sunde, an environmental scientist at the University of Cape Town’s One Ocean Hub small-scale fisheries research team.
Some settled immediately outside the reserve. Some moved to Manguzi, a town about 25 km (15.5 mi) away. Some trekked as far afield as Richards Bay, a port city about four hours’ drive south, where Mngomezulu now lives.
“They were not compensated in the end,” Sunde says, clearing up a confusion that people sat with four decades ago.
Today, Mngomezulu heads up the Kosi Bay Displaced Communities Committee (KBDCC), representing descendants of the evicted Thonga families. The group held a march in September 2025, in which they gave a petition to iSimangaliso officials. It listed years of grievances, but the central charge was that they feel excluded from the protected area’s decision-making and planning, including the development of its Integrated Management Plan, a new estuary management plan, as well as a decision to join iSimangaliso with Mozambique’s Maputo National Park.
The iSimangaliso Wetland Park authorities have responded to the petition, which it shared with Mongabay. In it, they address each point of grievance, noting that many of the issues raised fall outside of this management authority’s jurisdiction.
The management authority maintains that they have been inclusive of this community in the various public participation processes. The park’s mandate is to ensure consultation with Indigenous communities who lived here and have claim to the land. These decisions also impact on how the tourism sector grows and who benefits from it.
But even if bureaucratic and public participation processes are adhered to or explained away, locals fear it cannot return to displaced families what they say was taken from them 40 years ago.
“The community fabric was dismantled,” writes Mngomezulu in the KBDCC’s communique with the management authority. “We left our homesteads, grazing land, farming/agricultural land, abandoned our fish kraals as some of our communities left and settled far away.”
Gone and slowly forgotten
Today, most of the thorn trees that marked the Mngomezulu graves are gone, either cut down or razed by fire. There’s a rangers’ building and parking lot in the vicinity, but only an old-timer like Jerry Mngomezulu will remember where the graves are, or be able to identify the one or two remaining thorn trees that signal a resting place of an ancestor.
Now, if the descendants of the displaced want to visit their ancestral lands or the graves, they have to do so by the park’s rules, during opening hours, and with its permission.
“It is not fair to be restricted in our own forefathers’ land,” Mngomezulu says. “Tourism is not saving us. We were moved [to] allow tourism. [It is] like creating a playing ground for the elite to come and enjoy our place.”
iSimangaliso was unable to give figures showing visitor numbers for the protected area between 1988 and 2000 when it fell under the previous management authority, or from 2000 until 2021 when it came under the current administration. However, from 2021 until 2025, annual visitor numbers have been between 173,000 and 290,000. According to the latest World Bank figures, iSimangaliso brought in 1,600 direct jobs and 6,000 indirect jobs in the year 2015-16.
But Nsele has similar reservations to Mngomezulu about how far-reaching the tourism benefits are for the Thonga fishing community. Mongabay found examples of people employed by the formal tourism sector as guides or at lodges, some benefitting from roadside trade in hand-made baskets and reed mats or curios, some who have gone through tourism training, or been helped to start a small business. But we also found many cases of people unable to access the industry formally or informally.
“The only people who benefit from the reserve are us, in tourism,” Nsele says. “Someone who is not in tourism is not benefitting. That’s why they feel excluded.”
If the park wasn’t protected, people like Nsele and Fano wouldn’t have what they have now, says Nsele. But for those who had to leave in order for this protection to happen?
“You can’t expect them to protect [the reserve] if they don’t have anything to eat,” he says, referring to the stress of poverty and lack of alternative livelihoods.
Leonie Joubert is on a multi-year mobile journalism project that’s investigating how the climate crisis is unfolding on our doorstep, in our lifetime. Story Ark – tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points is an award-winning collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which supports investigative journalism.
Banner image: Benches for tourists on a dock at Kosi Bay. Image by Leonie Joubert.
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