From my Hide: A tribute to Dr Ian Player
David Holt-Biddle remembers the man and his work.
IT is difficult to know where to start with Dr Ian Player: sportsman, thinker, educationist, activist, writer, gentleman, but above all a giant among conservationists. Dr Player has died at his home in the Karkloof Valley near Howick in KwaZulu-Natal at the age of 87.
He was born and educated in Johannesburg, but it would seem that he always had one foot and his mind in the bush. He joined the-then Natal Parks Board as a young man in 1952, but not before he had founded, and won a number of times, the Duzi Canoe Marathon. Renowned as a rough ride, it gave rise to the universal expression covering anything that was a rough ride, ‘What a Duzi!’. The Duzi is still run 63 years later, but now it attracts more than 2000 canoeists from all over the world.
The young Ian Player soon shone at the Natal Parks Board and by 1962 he had been promoted to head the iMfolozi Game Reserve. The names of Player and the iMfolozi are inextricably linked to two great projects: Operation Rhino and the wilderness areas.
In Operation Rhino he took the grave situation of the rapidly declining numbers of southern white rhino very seriously and launched a unique programme, world famous today, where he brought the rhino back from extinction.
The wilderness areas project was equally unique, the establishment of purely wilderness areas, devoid of any human activity. These he established in both iMfolozi and at St Lucia on the coast, both the first such wildernesses in Africa.
The wilderness concept was to become central to Dr Player’s thinking. He established over the years his famous Wilderness Leadership School, the World Wilderness Congress and the Wilderness Foundation. Introducing people to nature through the wilderness trail became central to his thinking and in this he was greatly influenced by Sir Laurens van der Post, whom he met and with whom he became firm friends. Between them they in turn were to be much influenced by the thinking of Carl Jung, from came what is now the South African Association of Jungian Analysts.
Dr Player was also a writer, producing several books, endless articles and papers and a wildlife and wilderness column in The Daily News for 17 years. He was an activist and a controversial one at that. Some of his arguments were unreasonable for many mainstream conservationists and that’s the way it was right up to the end.
I don’t know when I first met and interviewed Dr Player – it must have been in the very early 1980s. He was a joy on the microphone, he always had plenty to say and always with a great passion for saying it. And always a gentleman, always that. I heard him speak many times too and he was a good speaker – often about the philosophies of Jung, often about his mentor and companion, Magqubu Ntombela
With Dr Ian Player’s passing a giant has strode off the world’s conservation stage, he will be sorely missed. READ MORE FROM MY HIDE HERE
