Melville Koppies

LIVING LAB

As back yards go, Wits’ is pretty spectacular. The Melville Koppies have long been an adored Eden and outdoor classroom for Witsies.

BY UFRIEDA HO

This year Melville Koppies celebrates 60 years of being declared a nature reserve. That status owes a lot to Wits’ first botany professor. Nearly 100 years ago, Charles Edward Moss took regular walks along the rocky outcrops west of what would become the university’s main campus. He collected numerous specimens of plants from the koppies and his collection became part of the herbarium at Wits (named after Moss) when the university opened its doors in 1922. There are 548 plant species from Melville Koppies catalogued in the herbarium, nearly 500 of them indigenous.

The koppies were clearly a natural treasure, but also a contested space in a mining town that had grown into a city by 1928. Moss knew this and was an early proponent of securing protection for the koppies. The Transvaal Horticultural Society and the Tree Society of Southern Africa, too, kept up the pressure to conserve this green lung.

It would take nearly 30 years after Moss’s death in 1930, though, for Melville Koppies to be declared a nature reserve in 1959. City councillor Dr HMJ “Sporie” van Rensburg earned himself the title of “Father of Melville Koppies” for his efforts promulgating the legislation.

Today the reserve also has two heritage blue plaques. The inscription on one sums up the richness of what the koppies offer. The site “carries the evidence of cultures from Johannesburg’s distant past”, the plaque reads. It’s a nod to the ancient hunter-gatherers and early Bantuspeaking farmers and communities who left imprints on the hillsides.

Wendy Carstens (PDipEd 1975) is the current chairman of the Friends of Melville Koppies (FOMK), which was formed in 1993. The group took over from the Johannesburg Council for Natural History, a body which included many academics and oversaw conservation and education outreach in the early days of the reserve. The area has provided material for many academic and other publications on its flora, archaeology and geology, and students still do fieldwork in this open-air laboratory.

Carstens says it’s thanks to people like Moss and numerous other ordinary citizens through the years that the treasure was saved. They spared the koppies from being levelled to make room for an old age home, which was on the cards some years ago.

Carstens’ own connection to the koppies is also a love story. Twentyone years ago she and her husband David (BSc Eng 1961, MSc Eng 1986) moved from Benoni to Melville and happened to join a guided walk during one of Melville’s Mardi Gras events.

So smitten was Carstens after her introduction to the koppies that she signed up as a volunteer before she’d even dusted off her hiking boots. She says she learnt a great deal about the place from the late Richard Hall, a statistician and Botanical Society member.

“What’s not to love about the koppies? I could be here the whole day, every day,” Carstens says, making her way to the highest point at 1720m.

On a rain-rinsed day the Magaliesberg mountains peek out on the western rim, and to the east the cooling towers of Kelvin Power Station stand sentinel. The views win hands down, but Carstens is also fascinated by the small things. She counts termite mounds, rolls away rocks looking for scorpions and shares the bounty of plump, tart wild medlar fruit (mmilo).

“I haven’t stopped teaching,” the ex-school teacher says of being able to share a living classroom with school groups (and curious grown-ups) who are regular visitors to the koppies.

At an enclosed excavation site Carstens unlocks a protective cage to show chunks of fossilised trees, stone tools and pottery shards. She recounts stories of early communities whose iron smelting here was part science, part magic more than 500 years ago.

The site here holds the remains of an Iron Age furnace that was found in 1963 by Professor Revil Mason, who was Head of the Archaeological Research Unit at Wits. Later Mason found a second furnace further down the slope as well as remains of ancient stone walling.

“Iron smelting was a skill passed down from father to son and there were superstitions attached to smelting ore. Women of menstruating age weren’t allowed near the furnaces, for instance, so the men who tended the fires for hours with bellows were brought food and provisions by old women or young girls.

“We also know that one iron hoe head in the late Iron Age period was traded for ten bags of grain. So being able to smelt and forge was highly advantageous,” Carstens says.

The Friends of Melville Koppies have erected information boards on the reserve and offer guided tours, hikes and field trips. The reserve is also used for bird ringing and other research projects.

The koppies are divided into three sections: East, Central and West. Access to Central is controlled; East is popular with dog walkers; and West is known for its quartzite cave, which also has blue heritage plaque status and is visited by members of African independent churches.

Most Sundays up to 400 worshippers from different church groups arrive dressed in traditional robes of white, navy or green and hike up to the highest points on the koppies, above the West Park Cemetery.

Three church members have become full-time conservation employees of FOMK. They clear alien vegetation, pick up litter and help educate visitors.

One of them, Clement Ndlovu, joined FOMK in 2008. “I love everything about the reserve,” he says. “My wish is for it to stay as it is for future generations.”

Melville Koppies Central is protected but in the East and West sections it is under threat from crime, developers and unsustainable use. The reality is that one person’s joyous praying, singing and drumming is another’s noise pollution; one person’s entry ticket for a guided hike is someone else’s version of exclusion; and even conservation may for some be a luxury of skewed priorities.

The Friends of Melville Koppies may not have all the answers for balancing everyone’s demands of an urban reserve. If the reserve is to celebrate another 60 years it will need old and new friends to keep cheering it on.

*For more information about FOMK and the 60th anniversary celebrations, visit www.mk.org.za or the Friends of Melville Koppies Facebook page.