Dr Deon “Div” de Villiers, 58, the Eastern Cape's most recognised frontline fighter in the war to protect wilderness and wildlife, was awarded his doctorate by Rhodes University on Friday.
This was 38 years after being rusticated (expelled) from the same university.
“I have never aspired to be 'Dr Div'. It is far more important that I got one side of the story told,” he said in an interview at King Phalo Airport on Thursday.
He is talking about 200 conservators from both sides of the Western-traditional divide — state rangers and chiefs and headmen, who have struggled for thousands of years to keep the Wild Coast wild.
Opening up his 454-page tome — “you could do curls with it”, he quips — he took the Weekend Dispatch through a previously unknown side of his life — his academic prowess.
It started badly — a unruly 19-year-old 31 Battalion frontline soldier burst on to the Rhodes University campus packed with young women and laboratory chemicals.
His BSc first year was explosive.
He showed us his burn marks. He lasted three months.
Schoolmasterly authority did also not sit well and a clash led to his rustication in 1983.
A job advert to sign up as a rookie law enforcement officer with CapeNature at the Thomas Baines reserve outside then-Makhanda opened the gate to the true wilderness and freedom he had craved since he was six.
A Johannesburg son of a Risidale railway clerk, Jaap de Villiers, he developed a passion for bunking school and going carp fishing, which was expanded into a love of the outdoors parks by a teacher.
Headmistress Jane Fraser took her pupils for walks in the wild and to Kruger Park.
When he matriculated in 1980 his dad, who rose to become an assistant director, took him to Sanparks head office to find out how to become a ranger. He was told he needed a degree, preferably a doctorate.
De Villiers opted for conscription — university study and severe disability was the only exemption for young white conscripts at the time
His all-round abilities saw him arrive in the Caprivi strip as a lieutenant in charge of a platoon of bushmen, or San. The intense camaraderie in war jolted his racially biased white view.
“We were all just the same okes."
As he made his way through the department of nature conservation, this sense of commonality grew.
“We worked together and shared tents in the veld together,” he said of his black colleagues.
De Villers and his team would later become renowned in taking down rhino poachers, but this recent victory took precedence over what had been happening in the background all his life as a ranger.
De Villiers has been churning out academic qualifications since his 20s.
At 23 he was an award-winning top student with 20 distinctions in his diploma in nature conservation from Cape Technikon.
Next was a diploma in forestry and conservation from Saasveld College in George. Again, he was the top student. His work started to take him through every part of the Eastern Cape which he knows “like the back of my hand”.
When democracy arrived, he applied and got the job in East Griqualand-Kei region as one of five regional managers of conservation in the newly amalgamated economic affairs, environment and tourism department (Dedeat).
By then he was deep in the formation of the transfrontier conservation area forged by leading conservationists, among them Ian Player.
De Viĺliers' attention was drawn to the Wild Coast and the eruption of tourism and land claims after 1994.
He watched with amazement at how some 30 researchers descended on his area and started publishing — “and I was providing all the information”.
He approached the then-University of Transkei, now WSU, and started a master's degree, on human affects on indigenous mammals in former-Transkei's natural forests, which he obtained in 2000.
He entered a period of popular writing, publishing two editions of “Mkambati and the Wild Coast” with John Costello — both sold out, but his short stories in 'The Poacher', telling the stories of rangers and conservators, led him to conceptualise his PhD.
From 2017 onwards he went on a huge drive to reconnect with old rangers and headmen and chiefs. The 200 interviews, 100 Western-style rangers and 100 traditional leaders, and productive time with his supervisor Professor Thembele Kepe at the University of Toronto, produced the tome: “Biodiversity of SA's Wild Coast through the years. Exploring tensions between Western-style and local traditional conservation practices”.
He says of his academic labours: “Four years, part-time, 3am boy. Stand up and start. It doesn't do much for family time.” But he loved the experience. Every old black and white ranger was so excited to tell their stories, and chiefs and headmen — friendships forged over decades — poured out their feelings an experiences. “I know my way around an upside-down paint tin sitting in the sun for hours,” he says of having to win trust and friendship among traditional leaders.
“They kept on calling me 'Dr Div', and I said wait I haven't got it yet, they said you will be getting it!”
De Villiers hopes he has finally filled in the story of both sides who sweated to conserve the Wild Coast while caught in the headlights of bigger politics: in the 1800s white colonialists trying to claim tracts of wilderness for logging and hunting, in the last century attempts being made to contain blacks in “the homelands” in terms of “betterment”, and then in the 90s attempts to create tourism and jobs.
He sees the side of traditional leaders trying to preserve their culture and natural assets through it all while trying to prevent the traditions of grazing and shellfish collection being stripped away by dictat.
And now the Wild Coast wilderness is being plundered by profiteering brigands from outside, for sand, timber, abalone. Although it looks like black people who are doing it, he says there is always a white, Chinese, Indian or Coloured person in the chain.
One gets the feeling feels that he hopes that with the missing element in the story having being told, that a new, more appropriate, inclusive, better-informed approach to defending this sublime natural heritage can be created.
De Villiers grabs his large suitcase laden with copies of his thesis — everyone wants one — and leaves the airport for his day job as director of environmental law enforcement and head of the Green Scorpions unit at Dedeat.
“Tomorrow I will be Dr Green Scorpion,” quipped one of the province's greatest raconteurs and nature conservators.
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