“They called a meeting. That’s what they told us: it was a meeting and we would sit and talk.
“But they didn’t come to talk with us: they came to tell us that they were closing the sea [to us]. Dis geen vergadering nie: die see is nou toe!”
Cecil Wentzel, 69, was among a 40-strong group of fishers from Alexandria who gathered at the Paardekraal entrance to the Woody Cape section of the Addo Elephant National Park last Tuesday. With them on the farmland side of the barbed wire fence were around 10 local farmers, and a group representing the Korana’s Ndlambe Links led by the new paramount chief, Gaokx’aob Johannes Opperman.
Close enough to reach across and touch hands, just the other side of the fence in the shade of the same tree on that very hot day were a dozen SanParks rangers. Keeping a watchful eye from a short distance was a modest contingent from the local police station.
The fishers, farmers and tribespeople all claim strong links to that stretch of coast and have united in a push for the access to the shoreline they grew up on. It’s been a bitter decade of expensive lawyers, arrests and fruitless deputations.
Listening to them all was MP Athol Trollip. He had already taken their cause all the way to parliament and promised to use his position to take it further.
Subsistence
Along with the beautiful NG Kerk, historic homes and an avenue of bright-red coral trees in bloom, a picture preview of Alexandria will probably take you west along a dirt road that winds through extremely green pastures. To your left, beyond the pastures and a lot of fat, happy looking cows, you’ll see a band of indigenous coastal forest. Beyond that, Alexandria’s famous dunefields and beyond that the sea.
Many of the farmers who own those pastures have land that goes all the way down to the sea and their families have lived there for three or more generations.
And for about three generations recreational fishers and Alexandria’s subsistence fishers have crossed those pastures and forests, climbing three kilometres of dune to get to that rich shoreline.
In 2005 the 95-year-old land-based Addo Elephant National Park (AENP) was expanded to include Bird and St Croix islands in Algoa Bay. Juvenile white sharks, dusky kob, abalone, African penguins and Cape gannets were just some of the species set to benefit.
Ten years later, the farmers got wind of a plan to turn a section of the coast abutting their land into a marine protected area.
Like national parks on land, marine protected areas are intended to protect areas of the ocean and the marine animals that live in it. There are 42 MPAs along South Africa’s coast and around its islands. What you’re allowed to do when you’re in a MPA depends on the level of protection it is assigned.
Acutely affecting the Alexandria farmers and the subsistence and recreational fishers to whom they provided access would be the Sundays inshore Restricted Zone (SIRZ) from the highwater mark to 200m seawards of that, from a point about 10km east of the Sundays River Mouth to the rope ladder at Woody Cape.
A Restricted Zone, also called a “no-take” zone, is the strictest. It’s intended to act as a nursery where fish stocks can be replenished and ecosystems recover. Fishing and gathering shellfish there are completely banned.
THE MPA was established as part of Operation Phakisa, a government project meant to be a key to boosting South Africa’s GDP through ocean-based industries and tourism.
Information
In March 2015 the Alexandria farmers asked Addo guardians Sanparks for more information. A letter from their Cape Town based lawyers documents their efforts to engage what was then called the Department of Environmental Affairs.
Farmer Mark Lake described what happened after that.
The Sanparks representative told them they would be invited to a separate stakeholder participation process – but only after then environment minister Edna Molewa had gazetted her intention to declare the proposed Addo MPA. In March 2016, the four farmers affected were represented at public participation meetings in Alexandria and Colchester.
In the May 2016 letter to the deputy director-general of environmental affairs for oceans and coasts, the farmers objected to the draft regulations. They argued that promoting sustainable development, a requirement for developing South Africa’s environmental laws, required social, economic and environmental factors to be taken into account. They said they hadn’t been identified and consulted as stakeholders when the Addo management plan was revised between 2007 and 2013 – even though they would be the newly extended reserve’s nearest neighbours.
The farmers viewed the declaration of a restricted zone at that site as unreasonable and irrational, particularly given how difficult it was to access (so relatively few people fished there) and the fact that it wasn’t home to overfished species. They cited scientific evidence to support their case.
They asked for the regulation of that area to be amended to allow sustainable fishing with a permit; and for that section of the MPA to be made a controlled zone rather than a restricted zone.
Frustrated
In 2019 an official proclamation declared the Addo MPA, with the restricted no-fishing area south of the Alexandria farms part of it.
Frustrated and out of pocket, the farmers were reluctant to take the resources-rich state to court and have lived with that status quo for the past five years.
But driven by need and with the sea practically in their blood, many Alexandria fishers continued to make the weekend trek to the sea.
Among them is Annie Tities, 77, who at last Tuesday’s meeting described growing up in Alexandria in a family that relied on fishing to put food on the table. That tradition born of necessity continued as she raised her own family and her daughter, Sharllaine Fischat, is also a lifelong fisherwoman.
“There have been 11 or 12 people arrested in the past four years,” Wentzel said. “Some of those cases are still dragging today. Some of those people had their fishing rods confiscated and they still haven’t got them back.”
Manhandled
More recently, the Ndlambe Links Korana tribe led by Goakx’oab Doup Johannes Opperman, has joined the call for access to coastal sites.
He and Kaikhoes Dankx’aos (senior headwoman) Zelda Masimla wrote to the Sanparks regional manager in August 2023, requesting free access for Ndlambe’s Khoi-san to the Paardevlei and Woody Cape sections of the coast.
“The reason for our request will be to practice our culture, tradition and heritage,” they wrote. This included monthly full moon celebrations, rituals and sacred naus, visiting ancestral graves and heritage site and identifying traditional herbs and medicine.
Doing those practices, they wrote, would also assist their application for recognition in terms of the Traditional and Khoi-san Act.
Speaking at last week’s gathering, Alexandria resident Steve Potgieter described seeing Opperman manhandled and bound with cable ties by rangers after the tribespeople set up a tent inside the entrance to the reserve.
“We did it to get the Minister to come to us, to give us an answer,” Opperman later explained. “We never got a response to our request.”
It was the second time they’d sought to get the attention of the environment minister and for the past two years Opperman, charged with trespassing, has been travelling to Gqeberha from his home in Port Alfred to attend court appearances.
Parliament
Trollip, in a parliamentary question to the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment at the end of October, highlighted the plight of Alexandria’s subsistence fishers.
He asked why they’d been prevented by Sanparks from fishing at Perdevlei and Cornville, where their forebears had fished for generations. He pointed out the contradiction in that similar communities had been granted fishing rights in the Tsitsikamma MPA.
Trollip asked whether the Minister’s department would take immediate steps to review and align policies in the Addo Alephant National Park to ensure that traditional and subsistence fishing rights of local communities in Alexandria are recognised and restored.
In his reply, the minister Willie Aucamp, said Perdevlei and Cornville were biologically important and that each MPA was established and managed “within a unique ecological, social and management context”. He said considerations at the Alexandria sites were different from those at other MPAs such as Tsitsikamma.
“Management measures, including fishing restrictions, are designed to respond to site-specific ecological characteristics, conservation priorities and stakeholder dynamics,” Aucamp wrote.
“The DFFE remains open to constructive engagement with affected communities and relevant stakeholders,” he said.
Trollip also put a question to the National Assembly about two cases arising from the attempts of community members to access fishing in the MPA. He asked why two cases, in June 2024 and the other in August 2025 had been repeatedly postponed.
Part of the response by the minister of justice was that “The accused did not make a warning statement claiming any customary right to fish in that area.”
At last Tuesday’s gathering, Trollip emphasised that he would not support any illegal activity: “Die wet is die wet,” he said.
“But I will put myself on the line to support your struggle for the right to fish where your forebears fished.”
Trollip has vowed to follow up with the department regarding access to the MPA and concessions for local fishers.
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This article was first published in Talk of the Town, December 18, 2025. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays
