The vast Hluhluwe-Umfolozi national game refuge, four hours' drive from Durban, was once the hunting ground of both Zulu kings and colonialists and its rolling savannah is still home to the iconic mega-fauna that the west so loves and fears - lions, leopards, elephants, buffalo, rhino, giraffe, baboons and others.
You can stay in fancy hotels and ride around in Land-Rovers , or for £100 a night - what a local might earn in two months - you can be taken in to Umfolozi's 25,000-hectare "wilderness". Here, in an area almost the size of the Isle of Wight, there are no roads or buildings, no telephone or electricity lines, no wells, wires, pumps, pipes, cultivation or development. No people may live here and no cars may enter by law.
Walk with the beasts in this part of the park and you must observe not just the laws of nature. You must follow a white man with a loaded bolt-action rifle, take your food in, carry out your waste. Your ranger guide expects you to be humble and, before going in, invites you to meditate or perform a ritual, such as asking permission of the land to enter. Above all, he wants you to show respect for a world without humans and pretend you were never there. You must bury your faeces, literally sweep the ground and leave no human trace. It is, in many ways, an awe-inspiring and humbling experience.
But it is a also a white lie. Although the park looks wild and complex, the land is as manipulated and controlled as Hyde Park. The whole park is surrounded by a high fence, the animals have been introduced from elsewhere, are culled if they breed too much, and are even traded for profit. The grasses are regularly burned off to encourage species. This people-less park is no more "wild" than the average suburban garden.
Most people who come to Umfolozi's wilderness are rich, white and unaware of this artifice. Many say their lives are improved by just being under the immense sky with the animals and without noisy, destructive humankind. The Umfolozi wilderness attracts people seeeking personal growth and modern rites of passage, wildlife lovers wanting dangerous encounters or "harmony with nature", and, especially, people influenced by the writings of romantic imperialists like TE Lawrence and the late Laurens van der Post, who believed strongly that the spiritual impact of wild places brings better understanding of themselves and humanity's relationship with the earth.
Their romantic spirit is very much alive, today. "Wilderness is a sacred, archetypal place," says Ian Player, the brother of the golfer Gary. Player is one of southern Africa's most eminent conservationists and, like Van der Post, who he knew well, a Jungian. "These areas are modern temples. People should not live in the wilderness, but come and go. There is not one wilderness area in the world not under threat, yet without it we will not survive. It is the most important part of our lives to go there".
Some 300 million ha of the world are now described by IUCN, the world conservation union as wilderness and the push is on to designate far more with money from the World Bank and others. But a fierce debate is taking place about how to define wilderness and make it relevant to people who are neither elite nor rich and to the people who always lived there. It draws in conservationists, philosophers, academics, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, historians, businessmen, the poorest people on earth and governments. At the recent Seventh World Wilderness Congress in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, more than 400 people from 40 countries came to discuss the issues.
If the main proponents of people-free wilderness areas say that the world must have places that are untouched and where the non-human world can prosper, the main charge against them is that excluding people from living there is morally repugnant, ecologically incoherent, intellectually indefensible and politically dubious. The whole wilderness concept, say the critics, is an elite European/ American construction which is not applicable or desirable today.
It is a debate that has largely bypassed Britain, where the only area we could describe as wilderness might be the Highlands of Scotland, where tens of thousands of people were brutally evicted from the mid-18th century onwards largely to make way for sheep-farming.
But it is thanks to 19th-century American romantic visonaries like John Muir, Henry Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Ralph Emerson who fought to save Yosemite, Sequoia, the Grand Canyon, Petrified Forest and other spectacular places in the US from development and human habitation, that the concept is still very much alive.
The Dunbar-born Muir led the defence of America's wild places and is now hailed as the father of modern global conservation. With a vision as much poetic and spiritual as aesthetic, Muir regarded wild nature as fundamental for human physical and psychic survival. "In God's wildness lies the hope of the world, the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilisation drops off, and wounds heal", he said.
Muir came to wilderness preservation via some of the fiercest religious training of the day. Born in 1838, he was brought up in a Scottish presbyterian sect that rejected orthodox Calvinism as too liberal. By 10 he could recite, without stopping, the whole New Testament . When he was 11, his tyrannical father uprooted the family and became a preacher with an Ohio-based community of Cambellites, a rigid, deeply bigoted sect of zealous Christian fundamentalists set up by another Scotsman and his son who sought a primitive church. Muir recalls being whipped and persecuted by his father in the name of God, but inspired by secret readings of Wordsworth, Shelley and the English Romantic movement, and then by Humboldt and the scientists of the age, he rejected his father's crude belief that God had made nature for man's dominion.
Instead, following years spent exploring alone the mountains and Sierra of America, he developed a gospel of nature which is still prevalent today. Modern American philosophers such as Max Oelschlager now say that while never rejecting God, Muir converted to "a bio-centric wilderness theology", one which which gives equal importance to all living things.
But his wilderness vision had a dark side which has filtered through to governments and conservationists everywhere. Says American philosopher Baird Callicott: "Wilderness is a legacy of American puritanism. It played a crucial role in masking colonial genocide and ethnic cleansing. It is a powerful conceptual tool of colonialism." Muir and the pioneer wilderness romantics gave barely a thought to the native American people, some of whom had lived in these wild places since time immemorial. Many had been killed anyway in the push for new frontiers, but those still there were forced to flee or were killed to make way for national parks. Yellowstone, the world's first, was created only by expelling the resident Shoshone and as many as 300 are believed to have been killed in clashes in 1872 when it was designated.
Muir's idea of people-free national parks "where man goes but does not stay" was picked up by the new breed of conservationists as well as British and other colonialists. After clearing great tracts of Australia, Africa, India and Latin America of people, they set about doing the same all over again in the name of preserving the wilds. Most of today's national parks and wilderness areas, argue some, have a history of genocide or brutal repression behind them.
Muir died in 1914. Since then, many millions of "tribals", "marginals" and indigenous peoples who had long lived successfully in forests, mountains, deserts and marginal areas - what the west today would call "wilderness" - have been ruthlessly thrown off the land on which they relied for their culture and existence. The World Bank estimates that between 1986 and 1996 alone, about 3m people were forced to move from forests and other areas as a result of both development and conservation schemes.
Excluding people in the name of wilderness is still happening, says Dr Martin von Hildebrand, a former Colombian environment minister and anthropologist, who has spent 30 years fighting for landrights of the indigenous peoples in the Amazon. "The designation of these areas is mostly done at the expense of local communities", he says.
Only last month, it was reported that communities in both Kenyan and Bangladeshi forests were to be moved out to make way for "eco-parks". The Chinese government, too, has announced it is setting aside a large portion of north-west Tibet as a wilderness area, something it can do only in the wake of the genocide of the people there.
But the very word "wilderness" is flawed, say the ecological critics. No places, except perhaps parts of Antarctica, are entirely removed from man's influence. "There is no such thing as wilderness," says Hildebrand. "Almost everywhere has been significantly modified by tens of thousands of years of human presence. Many peoples do not even have a word for nature and do not see themselves in any way separate from the whole environment in which they live. The forests of Amazonia are only there because the indigenous peoples have kept them for generations. They are the custodians."
If wilderness is an alien concept for much of the world, the idea of protecting land "for nature" is bizarre and offensive. "There is no such thing as wilderness," says Indian ecologist Vandana Shiva. "Instead of this American worldview of places, which separates people from nature and defies evolutionary science as well as justifiying the destruction of species everywhere else, the need today is to encourage 'wildness'."
Shiva, a nuclear physicist who fought alongside the tree-hugging Chipko women trying to save their forests in Uttar Pradesh in the Himalayas is a leading critic of bio-technology, and argues that governments and conservationists should just let nature and people be. They should not seek to take the wildness out of it by trying to manipulate and control it, she argues. "In India all our learning has been based on the wild forest. [The poet] Tagore said that that it was from the wild forest that we learned democracy"
Wildness, she says, is what is most valuable in life. "It is the opposite to the cultivated, the captive and the controlled. In wildness, there is true diversity. It is somewhere where everything has a multiple function. In the wild, every species, including humans, is self-organised. In captivity it is centrally controlled." And just as Muir rejected the American pioneers' desire to dominate and manipulate nature, Shiva, Hildebrand and others especially in the developing world reject the conservationist industry which he gave birth to and which seeks to manage nature ever more closely.
At the congress in Port Elizabeth, they proposed a radical new definition of the land, based on the belief systems that people who traditionally lived in wild places had developed over centuries. "The very concept of land should be understood to refer not only to the earth but to the peoples of that land and everything in it , the flora and fauna, the minerals, the graves, the spirits, insects, wind, the rivers, seeds, and everything that expresses itself through that land," they said.
"What we are saying is that we must make efforts to understand other cultures and logics," says Hildebrand. "As long as we exclude people who think differently, we get nowhere. We have to relate to others' knowledge. Instead of judging and rejecting something if it does not touch our reason or our soul, we should try to understand."
Traditional science-based western conservationists, world bodies and governments who want strictly controlled land find this approach mostly impossible to understand and impractical.
"If you want wilderness for everyone, then it will just be diluted and there won't be any left," says Ian Douglas Hamilton, one of the world's leading elephant conservationists. "There are just too many humans." He sees no reason to include everyone in decision- making about the land. But unless a completely new approach is taken to wild places, there may be few left. All over the world, people whose descendants were excluded from wild places want to return and pressures are building up.
Stand on any of the hills in Umfolozi, where people lived from the Iron Age and probably earlier until they were removed by the South African authorities in the 1940s, ostensibly to protect them from the tsetse fly, and you can see the problem that the conservationists face.
Hard against the high wilderness fence are many new, burgeoning land-hungry settlements which have sprung up as pressure on the land grows. Mining corporations, meanwhile, seek to dig vast open-cast pits on the edge of the park. It is only a matter of time before Umfolozi is invaded or is given away to private businesses, say many South Africans.
For Solomon Cedile this would be terrible. Generations of his family came from the Umfolozi area, but he is now an unpaid community worker in a Capetown township. His wife's family came from Umfolozi, and he was invited to the wilderness area this year for the first time, with the South Africa Wilderness Leadership school. Being with the animals and in the immensity of the land changed his life, and, he says, reconnected him to his roots . Now he tries to raise money to take people from the townships out to the country.
Cedile has never heard of Muir or the other wilderness pioneers whose ideas on another continent 100 years ago have indirectly determined his life. "In my culture you used to go into the 'wilderness' for a month as an initiation. But there is no difference between a prison and my community in Cape Town. There are no trees or animals. The army has been replaced by gangs. Its more likely that kids will die of Aids or gunshots than anything else.
"Yet we, the people, are integral to the whole of nature. All our cultures seem to be divorced from the environment, but they are not." The very idea that people should be excluded, or that only the rich, white spiritual or wildlife tourists are allowed in is alien. "Wilderness is for us all. We are as much of that land as the animals", he says.
