48 



In the vicinity of roads and other exposed places, fences, or ditches, or stone walls, are 

 useful. In the Eastern Province of the Cape, the fencing of the forests is being 

 undertaken on a large scale. Wire fences, with sneezewood posts are used ; the cost 



averaging only 25 a mile. 



DESTRUCTION BY NATIVES. 



Natives alone have perhaps been as destructive to the forests as fires and cattle put 

 together. They have industriously cut out nearly all the young trees from the majority 

 of the Natal forests for wattles of which they use an immense number for poles, for 

 kraalwood, or for firewood. I find that fully a thousand wattles are required on an 

 average for the construction of each hut. Taking the number of huts in Natal at 

 91,789,* and the life of each to average thirty years, it may be computed that over three 

 million sticks, mostly young trees, are destroyed annually for the purpose of providing 

 wattles. The young timber trees are taken first, because they grow straight and make 

 the best wattles. Large quantities of small timber are also cut surreptitiously by the 

 Natives for making cattle kraals, which need to be renewed every few years, and a& 

 firewood, for which large trees are considered unsuitable owing to the greater amount of 

 labour that would be requisite. The result is that most forests are now absolutely denuded 

 of young growth this constitutes, in fact, the most striking characteristic of a Natal forest.. 

 I have wandered in some for half an hour or more before I could find a young plant, of 

 any useful timber species, capable of taking the place of the standing trees. With 

 sawyers cutting the large timber, natives cutting the young trees, and cattle destroying 

 the rest of the vegetation, it is not surprising that the forests in which work has been 

 carried on should have failed to recover, and become " cut out " and converted into a 

 tangle of inferior trees and thorny scrub, except in the less accessible kloofs and krantzes. 

 The life of any forest in which the young trees are destroyed as they spring up is 

 necessarily limited to the life of the full-grown timber, and it may be shortened at any 

 time by a wholesale destruction of old trees either for timber or from natural causes, such 

 as unusual droughts or storms, or the spread of an insect enemy. 



It is thus indespensable that wattle- cutting should cease in demarkated forests, but 

 how to achieve this result in a satisfactory manner, is a problem not without difficulty,. 

 Primitive races like the Kafirs are slaves to ancestral custom, to even a greater degree 

 than civilized men, and it would be idle to expect that mere legislative enactments would 

 suffice to alter their habits and induce them to build huts of stone or sod. 



The simplest way of meeting this difficulty will be to provide wattles, from other 

 sources than Crown forests, by establishing small plantations of Australian wattles at 

 each forest station. Acacia decurrens, var. dealbata is the best wattle for the purpose. 

 This variety is hardier and a better coppicer than var. mollissima ; it can be grown easily,. 



* Report of the Natal Native Commission, 1881-82, p. 40. 



