No.151 - Living poetry in Southern Africa 2 - Tools of stone

In this edition I’m going to sort of pick up where I left off in Living Poetry No.1, where we looked at poetic treatments of some of our most ancient fossils. Which is to say, moving forward in prehistory, I’m going to focus this time on … Stone-Age tools. Move over, Fred Flintstone! 

It’s not unheard of, in this patch of the Eastern Cape, when ambling along a road or in the open veld, to unexpectedly chance upon a chunk of rock that has patently been fashioned by human hand – a Stone Age hand-axe or blade or core. It might be several hundred thousand years old, but will look as if it was dropped there yesterday. I remember my own interest was piqued by my once-upon-a-time head of department, Malvern van Wyk Smith, who had in his office a whole table covered with stone tools he’d found, tastefully and intriguingly arrayed

.

 Our colleague and poet Don Maclennan (I had more to say about him in the previous post) wrote in a poem entitled “Progress”: On the sandy verge across the road I found an ochre Stone Age core. … In this suburb, when you dig, you find history casually touching our makeshift edges, handaxes that obtrude like archetypes to challenge who we are after a million years of progress. As he did with the even more ancient prehistoric fossils, Maclennan uses the stone tools to throw our own civilisations into sharper focus. The sheer heft and compact solidity of a handaxe, surviving unaltered all this time, makes our present cultures, obsessed with speed and newness and tinselly possessions, seem “makeshift”, ephemeral. Handaxes feel to him like “archetypes” – that is to say, conceptions that flow through and create meaning across different civilisations and human psyches on deeper and more enduring levels than the everyday. In the poem “Iringa”, the poet, camping in a tool-strewn gully in East Africa, feels an almost mystical commonality with the ancient artificers: … hands like ours had held these perfect shapes and watched the talking stars around their own log fires. What did they call a handaxe in their tongue? It didn’t seem to matter that half a million years had passed: cold, grey, symmetrical, the axes were a language in themselves. (The Necessary Salt, 2006) 

 On the other hand, Maclennan felt that this commonality wasn’t necessarily a pretty one: the Acheulian handaxe might be “beautifully shaped”, but it was “No different really/ from the swords/ my father owned/ whose rust, I thought,/ was blood” (“Death Valley”). The apparently timeless and ineradicable nature of human violence calls into question the place and efficacy of art itself. And if there’s one major theme undergirding Maclennan’s work, it’s chewing on the role and value of art and poetry in the obdurate real world. 

Now there’s a strongly emerging school of thought that places the very first recognisably modern hominids – tool-makers – right here in the southern Cape. Scattered evidence points to hominid activity from at least a million years ago onwards. Fossilised footprints found near Nahoon Point, East London, have been dated to 200 000 years old. In the recesses of Blombos Cave, a few hundred kilometres along the coast from me, was found an ochre shard scored with perhaps humanity’s oldest known deliberate artwork, dated to some 77 000 years ago. Much closer, just three kilometres down the N2 highway, is Howieson’s Poort. There, dark overhangs nowadays challenge rock-climbers and also witness regular Xhosa propitiation rituals. But they once sheltered late Stone-Age people who, some 60,000 years ago, produced a wealth of more refined stone tools and pottery: a whole nexus known as the Howieson’s Poort culture. From this region, the argument runs, early hominids gradually dispersed north – probably more than once – eventually to populate the entire planet. Controversies rage, of course, partly because of the rare and scattered nature of hominid fossil remains. Central to our understanding has been the series of discoveries in the Gauteng province of South Africa, a thousand kilometres north of me. The area is now publicised as the “Cradle of Humankind”. There, in the Sterkfontein cave complex in the 1930s and ‘40s, Robert Broom identified important skeletal remains, including the skull of the famous “Mrs Ples”, later classified as Australopithecus africanus, some 2 ½ million years old. Debates swirled, as Brian Warner punned in his poem, “Dr Broom” (in Dinosaur’s End, 1996): 

From Colin MacCrae, Life Etched in Stone.

The antiquities selected were calm and collected

 And weathered the furious squall 

As Broom brushed aside – and thus intensified – 

 The palaeontological brawl. 

 In the wake of the publicity surrounding Mrs Ples, teacher and shy poet Ruth Miller (1919-1969), living in nearby Johannesburg, wrote her poem, “Sterkfontein”. If anything, the prospect of encountering, or at least learning about, our most ancient hominid ancestors, seems to her even more unpromising than for Maclennan. She expresses no excitement whatsoever about the archaeological discoveries – indeed she barely mentions them at all. The bulk of the poem is devoted to comparing the inner architecture of Sterkfontein to that of caves in India. “In India,” she blithely asserts, caves are “smooth”, make one “shiver”, and “go Boom!” Our caves, in contrast, “have teeth”, make one “stoop and crouch” and feel “lowly”. They are “scarred” with modern graffiti, and their echoes “say No to Yes”. Pretty crushing. We happen to know that Miller never once left the borders of South Africa, and the diction shows that her imagining of an Asian cave was actually, not without irony I’m sure, plundered from E M Forster’s novel, A Passage to India. Back in the labyrinth of Sterkfontein, when she does reach “a cavern strewn with ancient teeth”, the skulls are “dumb” – “and who would dare say less?” she rather enigmatically adds. Her final stanza is congruent with the existential darkness that infuses most of her poetry: it’s scintillating and deftly crafted but unforgivingly bleak: And when we reach the light – bare veld and boulder Hard as the hidden bones within the caves – Stand in the wind, that wind which, growing colder, Will blow us to the kingdom of shared graves. We all die, Miller says: end of story – or as the local saying has it, finish en klaar. 

For his part Chris Mann, in his poem “Sterkfontein Ancestor” (from Heartlands, 2002), rather agrees with Ruth Miller that “There’s little splendour in the sight of splintered bones” in the “oozing limestone of a cave”, but he still pretends to address Mrs Ples with familiar directness, and still desires to “stretch a hand// across three million years and touch your ruin”. Mrs Ples may be our genetic “Earth Madonna”, but Mann does wonder if we’ve improved as much as we’d like to think. In contrast, undeniably excited by Stone Age discoveries, is Cape Town poet and jeweller Michael Cope. A lovely exercise is to read, alongside one another, his volume of sonnets Ghaap (2005), and his wife Julia Martin’s ‘historical travelogue’, A Millimetre of Dust (2008). Both books respond to an exploration of the Ghaap Plateau in the Northern Cape, as well as to an area just north of Kimberley known as Canteen Kopje. Kimberley, of course, was the site of the 1870s diamond rush, leaving the infamous “Big Hole”, now a tourist attraction. Martin writes: 

After the diamond diggers at Canteen Kopje came the archaeologists, digging, sorting, labelling, counting. Picnicking now beside the vandalised information boards of the outdoor exhibit, we read that the site is a Stone Age treasure trove, with maybe a hundred million artefacts […] enough specimens to fill a museum to overflowing, but even to build it of them also. […] And then I see. A few are strangely sharp and unweathered, but many of the big worked rocks are now so old and worn they are beginning to look like natural objects again. [They] are thought to be a million years old and more. (100-3) 

In the poem titled “Canteen Kopje”, Michael Cope also mentions the unthinking ransacking of the area by diamond seekers who “mined the hill into despair” – but after the “gleaming gems and whiskered fools/ are gone; the tools remain, again”. Like Maclennan, Cope can’t help comparing the solidity and antiquity of those tools with the tawdry fragility of our modern implements – “knives, forks, bowls/ stainless and formica”, and aircon units rattling in the dark. (And I suspect that Cope chose the time-honoured sonnet form – compact but complex, explicitly crafted yet versatile – precisely to echo the quality of a handaxe.) Unfortunately, inevitably, these artefacts are stubbornly silent about their makers and practitioners, about whom we know almost nothing except that they made these tools. “Nobody Knows” is the title and refrain in another poem in Ghaap. The silence is total, no matter how we might fondly and poetically imagine that the handaxes we fondle have a “language of their own” (Maclennan) or that we might hear “with the ear of the hand” (Cope): 

The tools are the thoughts of ancestors 

who should be called into the convocations of the wise, 

but they are still and patient, and their voices 

cannot reach through our walls – they do not rattle in the dark.

(“Tools”) 

 I can attest to how strangely moving it is to hold in one’s living palm a hefty handaxe, knowing that another hand much like my own must have wielded it with purpose a million years ago. But we are still left with a fundamental question: How, in the end, are we to think of and understand our relations to these peoples who are the progenitors of all of us? All of us.

 *****

No. 150 - Living Poetry in Southern Africa 1: Ancient fossils

The Waterloo Farm cutting © Dan Wylie

 Living poetry in Southern Africa 1

The aim of this “Living Poetry” series is simple: to have some fun exploring various aspects of Southern African life and history through its wonderfully rich traditions and strands of poetry. Poetry lives, I want to suggest, has always been and remains a living tradition, reveals lives and feelings and ideas in ways no other medium does. (So “Living poetry”: multiple puns – get it?)

My themes I anticipate will be entirely whimsical, with no pretence to a predetermined sequence, to comprehensiveness, or to coverage of academically fashionable issues. Each post will be more or less free-standing, so you can read or listen to them in any order. I’m hoping, in a fairly casual and accessible way, to entertain and inform even readers who might not ordinarily spend much time with poems, let alone poetry from the southern tip of sunniest Africa.

I’ve said ‘Southern Africa’ because, although I’ll concentrate on South Africa, the country I live in now, I anticipate straying into neighbouring countries too, especially Zimbabwe, where I was born and raised. We’ll see where my fancies take me.

For this first one, though, I want to go right back to the very beginnings of time. And also to begin with where I am. I’ll start whimsically with … road cuttings. I live near a small university town in the Eastern Cape, known successively through history as Graham’s Town, Grahamstown, and most recently Makhanda. Back in the 1980s, for rather dubious political reasons, the government re-directed the N2 highway round the southern fringe of the town, slicing deeply through a number of inconvenient ridges in the process.

Cutting © Dan Wylie

Artistically, I found these cuttings irresistible: chalky curvaceous shapes, aesthetically clean and shapely, but also painfully blade-like wounds in the green landscape. More importantly, the cuttings just incidentally exposed layer upon layer of sedimentary sandstones and shales. This whole region, when it was still part of Gondwanaland and was positioned much closer to the south pole, was once awash under turbulent seas and estuarine backwaters. Over millions of years, the sediments were deposited, compressing, hardening, entombing all manner of the earliest plants and creatures to inhabit the planet. These seafloor sediments were then disrupted by volcanic and tectonic upheavals, in places tilting them into crazed and slidey angles.

You can see this at the Waterloo Farm cutting, which I drive past on my way to town. At this section in particular palaeontologists, notably Dr Rob Gess, have for some years been unearthing – or un-shaling – a most extraordinary range of fossils. Many of them were previously unknown to science; their discovery is revolutionising global understandings of primordial eras, notably the Devonian period, around 400 million years ago. There are scorpions and lampreys, gymnosperms and charaphytes, and lobe-finned all-but-walking fish which, Gess argues, are our very earliest known direct ancestors.

Among the fossils Gess found is a baby coelacanth – a species of armoured fish which to this day, virtually unchanged, still swims at great depths in the Mozambique Channel and off the Comores. So improbably persistent is this fantastic survivor, and so marvellously ugly, that it has attracted mention by a number of poets. Douglas Livingstone (1932-1996) is one. In his poem “Address to a Patrician at Station 8” (from his 1991 collection A Littoral Zone), Livingstone precisely captures “Bwana” Coelacanth’s quirky and “pea-brained” but “regal” air, with its “jointed cranium” and “grim profile of a misanthrope”. As a marine biologist, Livingstone had no qualms acknowledging “Old Four-Legs” – as the coelacanth became fondly known – as one of humanity’s most ancient evolutionary ancestors, or at least “cousin”. So Livingstone’s poem celebrates the intricately entwined genealogies of all life-forms, all deserving the respect we give to family.

Albany Natural History Museum, Makhanda

Coelacanth, WikiCommons

At least two poets resident in Grahamstown responded to the fascination with fossils, even before Gess’s revelations. In “Orthosuchus”, the late Chris Mann describes chiselling out of scrub and rock the bones of a croc-like creature. Its shapes gradually emerge, like the sculpture of Atlas emerging from its matrix of marble, left thus unfinished by Michelangelo. Mann ends the poem:

… I saw it then. A few billion years

since life first stirred on this rock,

you, that impassioned Atlas and I

are still trying to drag our heads

out of a lump of primordial stone.

We may think we’re wonderfully evolved, Mann implies, but we still leave an awful lot to be desired

.

Similar thoughts occurred to Don Maclennan (1929-2009), who then lived diagonally across the street from Chris Mann. Maclennan was one of my undergrad lecturers at the town’s Rhodes University; I later became a lecturer myself in the same department, and Don became a supportive colleague, deep friend, and rock-climbing partner. Embedded, as it were, in his voluminous output of wry and lapidary poetry, are many references to the fossil histories that precede and underpin all our existences.

One poem is titled “Sandstone Pavement”. Maclennan was very conscious that the ground we walk on here “was once/ a seabed,/ had its origin/ in tons of silt/ the gravitation/ of the dead …” That word “gravitation” – much better than mere ‘gravity’ – so weightily conveys the deep process of settling and petrification of fossil remains.

And in a cabinet in Grahamstown’s Albany Natural History Museum, he could connect visually and viscerally with those signs of our primordial past. The following short poem appears in his 2004 collection Excavations:

In the town museum

a ten inch slab of seabed

on display reveals

hundreds of small creatures

crushed into each other

in a mass grave,

teeth biting into flesh and bone,

a deadly carnival turned to stone.

The very slab, still in the Albany Natural History Museum.

The poem makes no further comment on what this might mean, but it’s clearly a depiction of a Darwinian broil of predation and conflict. Grim stuff, not to be romanticised just because it’s prehistoric. I suspect it had more to do with Maclennan’s state of mind at the time than with the actualities of crustacean relations!

In a rather enigmatic story entitled A Brief History of Madness in the Eastern Cape (2001), Maclennan describes this same slab. He lightly fictionalises his own initial arrival in Grahamstown (which he calls Georgetown).

It was raining the day Mavis and I arrived in Georgetown. So we went to the museum. We whispered along the corridors of exhibits, the dumb past all entombed and labelled. There was one in particular – a piece of Mesozoic fossil beach. … It is a chunk of fossil life, with thousands of different shapes and sizes of crustaceans packed into each other, eating and being eaten, like a Notre Dame gargoyle, foot in mouth, shell overlapping shell, and endlessly impacted palimpsests.

Then there was also a collection of Settler culture – not so tightly packed as the fossil, but clearly in the making. Individual life agonies imprinted on these derelict possessions – spectacles, baby bows, bridal nighties, fading intimate diaries. Each one posed a question for the future.

He’s referring here to the British settlers and military who violently evicted the resident amaXhosa people in the 1820s, for a time under the leadership of Colonel John Graham himself. There’s a related example in the Excavations collection, which in fact centres mostly on the excavation of a typical British frontier fort. There, archaeologists fossick through the nineteenth-century rubbish-tip, finding a parallel palimpsest of “broken bottles, buttons, bullets,/ coins with the head of George V, pottery fragments,/ … clay tobacco pipes, and bits/ of rusted iron.” From this, as with the fossils, the scholars try to “reconstruct a way of life.”

Typically of his vivid but slightly elusive manner – drawing us in but also allowing us to draw our own implications – Maclennan leaves that “question for the future” itself unstated. But it seems fairly clear that he is posing the possibility – probability, really – that our historical bric-a-brac will also become fossils of a sort, another palimpsest for future archaeologists or even palaeontologists – or Martians – to puzzle through.

But beneath that, further dark and existential questions lurk. Are the Settlers (and by extension ourselves in the present) at bottom just another manifestation of that Mesozoic brawl of mutual violence? What makes us modern humans any different from those cannibalistic crustaceans? Are we not also destined for extinction in the unthinkably long unfolding of geological time? If so, why are we here at all? Can our art, our language and our poetry, unique to us though they be, really somehow redeem us?

Don Maclennan had many, profound if always provisional insights about all this, and not all quite so forbidding. But, as do his brief but beautiful, searching and self-deprecating poems, I’ll leave you to grope towards your own conclusions, if you dare.

We have lots more ‘palaeontological poetry’, but that’s enough from this old fossil, for now.

*****

No 149 - Trump the fascist?

 

There has been an awful lot of noise recently about whether or not Donald Trump can be described as a “fascist”. There have been a couple of relatively detailed and coruscating pieces by Sidney Blumenthal in the Guardian. Trump's former aides John Kelly and General Mark Milley both opine that he meets the definition of a fascist, and he is quoted as wishing he had “the kind of generals Hitler had … totally loyal” and obedient to orders. His first wife claims that he at one time kept Hitler’s tract Mein Kampf by his bedside. Certainly many of his pronouncements sound disturbingly dictatorial, vengeful and narcissistic.

How substantive is this Hitler-ian parallel? I mean, compared to the German’s savage lick of black hair, mean moustache and bear-trap mouth, and hysterical but razor-blade public delivery, Trump comes across as an ageing naartjie left out too long in the sun. He himself rails against fascists, communists and radical socialists indiscriminately; I am rather of the view of another renegade aide, John Bolton, that Trump has neither the intellect nor the coherence to know what he means, or to have any discernible philosophy at all, fascist or otherwise. Obvious absurdities aside – those that the media loves to foreground – is there more to it? Does the fascist label throw light on Trump’s self-evident capacity to generate a cult-like adoration from nearly half the American populace?

 A full year of my A-Level History studies – gosh, that was a long time ago – was devoted to European totalitarianism. I read everything available then, including William Shirer’s monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and Alan Bullock’s classic biography, Hitler: A study in tyranny. Another book, the one I’ve hung onto all these years, was Joachim Fest’s The Face of the Third Reich. Fest was German himself, a virtual insider, and took an approach as much psychoanalytical as historical. I know there has been a mountain of scholarship since, but in returning to Fest now, curious for another view, I find him as brilliant and insightful as I did back in 1977. His exploration of what he calls “modern man’s susceptibility to totalitarian rule” – especially given the current widespread lurch to the political right – feels horribly relevant.

So I find myself marking any number of resonant passages in Fest’s opening chapters. I’ll touch on some of them. 

… what smoothed [Hitler’s] path was not so much the millions that came into his funds (especially from heavy industry) as the lack of political sense and judgement on the part of millions of dissatisfied, embittered individuals, terrified of social levelling … who surrendered themselves ever more feverishly to the redeemer cult that was systematically developed … (Penguin edn, 13)

Several things here manifest in today’s America. Firstly, heavy industry (today the fossil-fuel and agro-chemical sectors, abetted by Musk the upstart media mogul) continues to fund the Republican right in America. Secondly, millions of citizens seem unable or unwilling to see through Trump’s conman-ship and lies, terrified of racial and gender equality; while Trump claims God himself has “saved” him from assassination in order to redeem the country. Trump cranks up the “terrible state” of the American state, though by any measure it is nowhere near as badly off as the collapsed Weimer Republic was in 1933. Thirdly, large sectors of the society seem similarly to exhibit “an increasing mass flight into irrationality, the mindless readiness to renounce reason, and an ever more uninhibited susceptibility to myth” (Fest, 17). Witness, among other things, increased suspicion of climate and medical science, and susceptibility to completely bonkers “conspiracy theories” such as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s assertion that meteorologists are controlling hurricanes. This is about as credible as blaming telescopes for creating eclipses. Finally, various forms of disillusionment go “hand in hand with a search for objects of blame and hate”, eviscerating any “realistic approach to life” (19). Yet this is no longer a risible fringe kind of belief, and both Hitler and Trump exhibit the gift of exploiting this mass deficit in critical thinking. Indeed, that deficit is both assumed of “the people”, and actively encouraged by the simplifications of propaganda. Hitler, as quoted by Fest, wrote:

 The chief function [of propaganda] is to convince the masses, whose slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information, and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind … [A]lways emphasise the same conclusions [and] the same formula. Then one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results … (39)

  “[M]aximum primitiveness, simple catchphrases, constant repetition”, a refusal to offer nuance or give reasons, induces a level of “suggestive paralysis” that eventuates in a “receptive state of fanatical devotion.” This is, as Hitler put it, “a tactic based on the precise calculation of all human weaknesses” (64), a tactic to be applied with “maximum harshness” (82). Pseudo-religious appeals are made to “plausible formulas of guilt, lashing catchphrases, vague recipes of power, Fatherland, honour, greatness and revenge” (65) – all also evident in Trump’s speeches. It works, as Trump’s numbingly repeated lie about the “stolen” election shows: millions still apparently believe this, despite having no evidence for it whatsoever. It becomes moot whether his meandering, mendacious pontifications and infantile name-calling are deliberately jejune or whether he really is an unhinged conman with the impulses of a twelve-year-old. Even truthfulness is subordinated to the single-minded harvesting of adulation: “The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth or not.”

Life in this view is pitiless Darwinian struggle; even compassion is wielded as a tool in a putative fight – weaponised, as they say nowadays. And if “the enemy within” does not exist, it must be invented. Amongst the many real, exaggerated or downright manufactured objects of hate and repression are racial Others. For the Nazis of course this was primarily the Jews; for Trump and Co., it’s mostly Latin American would-be immigrants. Both are vilified in the same terms, for their intrinsic criminality, their dirt, and above all for their alleged threat of “contamination of the blood”, that is, the blood of a barely-acknowledged White (Aryan) supremacism. Contradictorily – just as Hitler at first cannily courted certain political and social sectors to whom he was actually ideologically opposed – Trump is obliged in his presidential bid to appeal specifically to Blacks, Latinos, and women.

Most interestingly, Fest argues in psychoanalytic mode, what Others are condemned for is precisely what the would-be dictator fears or senses within himself. In Hitler’s case, “the Jews’ alleged obsession with revenge, their feelings of inferiority, their lust to subjugate and destroy, represent the transference on to his enemy of compulsive character traits which Hitler sensed within himself” (29). The parallels with Trump’s character traits are suggestive: multiple are the examples of Trump accusing others of precisely what he is doing himself. (Unrepentantly. My favourite Trump moment: Anderson Cooper in a CNN interview interjected, “With all due respect, Mr President, that’s the argument of a twelve-year-old.” Responded Trump with an irritated shrug: “Well, he started it!” Cooper’s point exactly.) This may be part deliberate political strategy (Hitler laid this out explicitly in Mein Kampf); part accidental but useful reflection of society in the personality; and part unconscious projection.

A further parallel – frequently deployed in other authoritarian governments, from Putin’s Russia to Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – is the selective use of “the law”. The assault on old institutions – the Reichstag, the Constitution – are opportunistically derided and utilised. So even as Trump attacks the judicial system and the FBI, he packs the former with sympathetic judges likely to do his bidding under a cloak of legality, and sends in the latter when the occasion suits him. The courts, its officials and decisions, can be derided or appealed to opportunistically; hence Trump can amazingly still run for President despite being a criminal convicted on 34 counts of fraud. The contradictoriness helps engender the very state of chaos, uncertainty and distrust which he claims he wants to fix. In Hitler’s case it spawned the Night of the Long Knives, in which the militia he himself had encouraged was brutally eliminated; in Trump’s case the January 6 assault on the Capitol – fortunately rather less murderous in its outcome.

I don’t think the Hitler-Trump parallel can be pushed too far. The background histories are markedly different; the systemic and institutional checks and balances rather different; the two characters share some traits but not others. If anything, he bears a closer resemblance to Mussolini, brutal, but also bumbling. But remember that Hitler, too, was dismissed as a maniacal clown whom others thought they could control. On the other hand, America has survived one term of Trumpery, and would probably survive another. I do fear, though, the potential damage to an already somewhat precarious democracy, to equally precarious global geopolitical stability, and (especially) to environmental health.

 *****

 

No 148 - Me, myths and the Middle East

 

As we know, memory has a way of reconstructing itself, but I like to locate the origin of my enduring but rather puzzling interest in the Middle East in a single image. As a youngster I’d regularly receive a copy of the wonderful Look & Learn magazine. In one issue appeared a full-colour satellite photograph of the Sinai peninsula – a view quite novel in those days. Something about the startling contrast between the bleached sands of the desert and the deep, deep blue of the surrounding sea, something about the great wedge of it, like an ancient stone hand-axe, bewitched me.

 I began reading, in a patchy and desultory way. On school-free afternoons I’d slither into Umtali’s Turner Memorial public library, hook out the massive black-and-gold volumes of Keesing’s Contemporary Archives – a cumulative file of distilled world news reports – and start making notes on events in Israel and its neighbours. I started nowhere in particular and had no defined goal – typical of the slew of misconceived and uncompleted projects that litter my life. I suppose I learned something. Why the Middle East? A mystery.

Part if it was probably that, in white colonial Rhodesia, Israel was much admired for its military courage and success; we lapped up the drama of the 1967 Six-Day War. Both countries were, in their ways, artificial creations and pariah states, both seeing themselves as under siege from undisciplined hordes of terroristic barbarians. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s taking Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics did much to consolidate that impression. (In that grim precursor to the October 7 Hamas attack, all the athletes were killed.) When Israeli forces freed more hostages from a hijacked airliner at Entebbe in Uganda in 1976, we Rhodesians crowed as if we had done it ourselves. I admiringly read a biography of Israeli general Moshe Dayan, and found his eye-patch dashing. A parallel biography of the scrofulous-looking Yasser Arafat, I approached with my metaphorical nostrils pinched, and retained nothing of it.

 With the end of Rhodesian rule in 1980, suddenly the tables turned: the new Mugabe government vilified Israel as oppressive, colonial and more-or-less white, and hosted the country’s first Palestinian ambassador. We unreconstructed whiteys vilified him, or at best regarded him with intense suspicion. At that juncture, as an undergrad student at Rhodes, I happened to embark on a years-long immersion in Christian activity. I became interested less in the myth-laden moralising than in the historicity or otherwise of the three thousand year-old textuality on which Christianity is founded: Werner Keller’s The Bible as History (1955) I remember as a key text. In the end, thanks in part to William Blake and Ed Echeverria’s philosophy course on the Problem of Evil, I failed spectacularly to become a faith-filled Christian. But I did become better versed in the complexities of the Israel-Palestine situation – a conflict that has rumbled on ever since David slung a rock at the Philistine Goliath in exactly the territory now known as the Gaza Strip.

 Over the years, I’ve kept on circling over the region. I read Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews with interest, though a Judaic (not Jewish) historian friend of mine said he didn’t think highly of it. Later, Austrian-Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) fascinated me, especially as I’d been studying an arguably parallel case, the ‘invention’ of Zulu ‘statehood’ and identity. Sand argues that, given the fluid centuries, multiple evictions and wars and invasions and redrawings of borders, and given the porousness of self-identifying Jewish/Israelite groups to genes from non-Jewish neighbours, neither claims to territory on Biblical grounds nor assertions of ethnic purity hold a great deal of water. Predictably, this provoked howls of protest. A South African Jewish colleague, currently ducking missiles in Tel Aviv, whose intellect I admire enormously, told me she thinks Sand is “a lunatic”. Nevertheless, I thought that if the maverick historian had stirred up that much controversy, he must have touched a raw nerve somewhere, and not just because he once said that Israel’s “a shitty place to live.” Most recently I’ve been reading the voluminous Story of the Jews by Simon Schama, as brilliant, versatile and eloquent an historian as you’ll find anywhere. He too is disparaging of Sand, but the implications of his own research rather tends to support him. And over four decades I’ve read a slew of related stuff, from T E Lawrence to Mahmoud Darwish.

 All that said and done, I’m far from being an expert in the area. I’ve never physically been there, I know scarcely a single Palestinian, and am only mildly acquainted with a handful of Jews, who themselves manifest a slew of wildly differing views. I still don’t know quite what to make of it all. Nor is it the only baffling regional conflict I repeatedly visit and read about: my father being an Ulsterman, the centuries-long Irish situation has always been closer to my heart. But even there I don’t feel any strong partisan loyalties. As for the Israelis and Palestinians, I really don’t care how they style their identities, or even what they think of each other. But like many, I react viscerally and sadly to the atrocities occurring right now (yet again), as I do to those occurring in other comparably vicious and even more destructive theatres: Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan, the DRC. While having a rather hopelessly jaded view of human nastiness and stupidity, I do fervently wish the brutality could be somehow ameliorated. Some might well tell me to butt out; saying almost anything about the conflict is bound to upset someone somewhere. But none of the present participants seem to have any viable ideas, and maybe my position as a detached outsider conveys some advantages (as I think it did in the Zulu case).

 So I’m going to stick my neck out and float an idea, and the logic behind it. I’ll try to be non-judgemental. As my mother often said, in most disputes everybody is right, to some degree, and recognising that provides a better base for negotiation than taking sides.

 Obviously the situation is ferociously complex. I think it was David Grossman who wrote that just the tunnels beneath Gaza make it a three-dimensional problem, not just a two-dimensional territorial one – let alone the many dimensions of historical mythologies, the intangible attachments and grievances going back centuries. Still, the same used to be said of Northern Ireland, a colony since 1660; that conflict may not be solved entirely, but at least the violence has been largely defused. With sufficient compromise, ingenuity and negotiated empathy, the Gordian Knot might just be cut again. I’m well aware that far cleverer and more powerful people than me have tried repeatedly to do that, and repeatedly failed. I’d be surprised, actually, if someone at some point hasn’t floated something like my idea already. But if the current horror is not to just grind on indefinitely, something quite radical has to shift.

 Ideally, both sides would undergo a radical shift in mentality, from simplistic hatred to mutual empathy, or at least non-lethal co-existence. Unhappily, the extreme brutality of the present war has catapulted almost everyone a long way from that miracle. And yet. There is also a venerable history of peaceful co-operation between Muslims and Jews; Schama relates a number of examples, from mediaeval Spain to Azerbaijan, of mutually fruitful relations that persisted until some deluded or self-serving rabble-rouser would fire up the ancient shibboleth of antisemitism, provoke another pogrom and exile. But if you’re going to call on history to justify present actions, as everybody does, why not take the history of peace as your benchmark, rather than the persecutions and wars?

 Moreover, there are not only two sides. Both Palestinians and Israelis are internally fragmented. Months of demonstrations in Israel show that many disagree with the incumbent hardline government and its tactics. Palestine is equally fractious, with no one sufficiently in charge to negotiate anything – a circumstance the Israelis have been able to exploit. It’s reflected in the way both Gaza and the West Bank have been sliced up, zoned, barricaded, infiltrated with settlements and checkpoints, subjected to the world’s most intensive surveillance system. Yet there are many Palestinians living in Israel, and numerous groups advocating and practicing co-existence and mutual understanding. The other day I watched Israeli and Palestinian musicians getting together to create beautiful sounds. Such initiatives seem frail in the context of the cycles of murderous revenge, but there they are, showing what’s possible.

 Still, we may have to accept that a more widespread shift of that kind is unlikely any time soon. It would entail the decentralisation of sundry fiercely-defended myths: myths of racial difference, of being special, of being at existential risk, of complete domination or obliteration, of religious rectitude, of divinely sanctioned possession or reward, and more. Very, very hard, if not impossible, things to dislodge, but perhaps – as elsewhere – these myths can at least be dampened, laid aside as less important than the imperative to avoid more suffering and death now. But practically speaking the conditions for that shift will have to be created first. Therein lies my grand idea. (I’ll get there; are you enjoying the suspense?) Just two more preliminary observations.

 The first preliminary is to note that over the centuries the region’s territorial boundaries have been repeatedly redrawn – by Persians and Romans and Turks and the French and the British – most pertinently by the last-named, through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, leading to the volcanic creation of the Israeli state in 1948. Maybe it’s time to redraw the boundaries again.

 A big part of the problem is that the borders were imposed from without; the Balfour Declaration explicitly stated that “the Arabs are not to be consulted”. That short-sighted policy set the stage for, or at least exacerbated, the uneven wars of the ensuing century. Ideally, a new redrawing would happen with a majority acceptance of both parties; an awful lot of preliminaries would have to be emplaced, not least a ceasefire and hostage deal. Right now, even that looks out of reach. But the diplomatic noise does seem to be growing. Hope must persist.

 The second preliminary point concerns the perpetual tussle between the One-state and Two-state “solutions”.  It seems entirely beyond Israel’s capacity to contemplate the One-state option (though it’s effectively one state now, under military control); and there’s little enthusiasm for the second option either. But there appears to be no third plan, except to grind on and on, merely deepening the crisis of hate. One thing is certain: neither belligerent has the capacity to wipe the other “from the face of the earth”, whatever the extremists on either side might encourage or boast. And as anyone who has studied civil and guerrilla wars – or lived through one, as I have – should know, purely military solutions are chimerical. Paradoxically, the more you kill people – the line between ‘civilian’ and ‘combatant’ always being fuzzy – the more you drive the population into antagonism, and the worse it gets for you. At some point of stalemate or political intervention, the warring parties always have to talk about humane co-existence. 

 Maybe part of the impediment is that everyone is looking for a solution. There is no solution, no finality; there can only be an incremental process of mitigation and defusing. The more the opportunities to safely flourish, the less the attraction to, or perceived necessity for, extremist movements. To move definitively towards that condition of shared safety and flourishing, it seems to me some radical break to the present impasse must be made. 

 SO HERE IT IS: THE IDEA!

 It would appear that there’s a stark choice between the One- and Two-state scenarios. But my idea takes elements of both. First, the Two-state element. Palestinians will never be happy without their own sovereign state. At present it’s in two disjointed bits; as the grand apartheid “homelands” scheme in South Africa demonstrated, such fragmentation is ultimately unworkable. So how to forge Palestine into a single unit? Some people talk of “liberation from the river [Jordan] to the sea”. Now you can’t just join Gaza and the West Bank by some form of corridor, since that would divide Israel in two: no good. I think the only way is through a territory swap.

 So here’s the plan. The Palestinians abandon Gaza, which is largely unlivable now anyway, and give up some edges of the West Bank already heavily occupied by Israeli settlements. In return, the West Bank is extended north to the Golan Heights, whose occupation by Israel has anyway been recognised as illegal since 1967, then across to the sea and the ports on the Mediterranean (an area already partially evacuated because of the conflict with Hezbollah). This would afford Palestine less fettered access to both east and west, enhancing trade opportunities and the feeling of viable independence. From the Israelis’ perspective, this would provide a buffer zone between them and both Syria and Lebanon, loci of constant irritation. An intricate compromise would have to be made to make the swap roughly even in both territory and the number of people making a move from one state to the other. This number would be considerable, but it could hardly be worse than the present dislocations. An upheaval, to be sure, but at least not one involving mass slaughter. (My border-lines on Map 2 are straight because they are schematic, just to illustrate the principle.)

 Simple in principle, but … This idea emphatically does not pretend to be an entire solution in itself, and one can already anticipate a hundred valid objections and obstacles. But once the main principle is accepted, those obstacles will manifest as localised issues. Where exactly would the new border run? Which illegal settlements would have to be evacuated as Israel effected a complete withdrawal from the West Bank? What to do about access to ever-problematic holy sites? How open or closed to make the borders? What level of international oversight might be required? These are troublesome details, but still, in relation to the main move, details, intrinsically more manageable and negotiable.

 One major likely objection would be people’s understandable reluctance to move from places they have always inhabited, or to which they feel that non-rational but powerful sense of historical attachment or right. This is where the One-state element of the idea comes in. People need not be forced to move; there’s been more than enough of that. But ‘remainers’ in either state – Palestinians in Gaza, say, or Israelis in the north – would have to be reassured that they will be safe and enjoy the rights of any other citizen, as in a One-state scenario. Perhaps some form of dual citizenship arrangement would help. There would doubtless be endless niggles on the ground, but, as I mentioned, there are already many Arabs living more or less peaceably in Israel. Both peoples are afraid of being numerically overwhelmed by the other; this consolidation of Palestine would reduce ‘remainers’ in both states to a less threatening minority. As South Africa has shown, despite its high crime and murder rates and its persistent inequalities, the vast majority of us are at least co-existing without tearing each others’ throats out. Our situation also shows, nevertheless, how much work needs to be done to get there; our shortfalls underline how long it might take, and how fragile the gains are.

 I wouldn’t be particularly sanguine about the chances of acceptance of some such scheme, let alone of success. The hatreds run deep, and deepen every day another Palestinian child is dismembered or a misguided missile descends on Tel Aviv. Religiously-inspired terrorism won’t ever quite disappear, but its raison d’être can be diminished. The consolidation of a coherent and inviolable Palestine would not solve wider Middle East issues, such as the roles of Saudi Arabia and Iran, but it would certainly help clarify some of the present muddy diplomatic waters. Something needs to break the deadlocks. All most people want is to have the chance to flourish, to nourish an identity, to live their lives in some sort of fulfilment and safety. To reiterate, I offer not a solution, but a sturdier foundation for the laborious work of reconciliation, the never-quite-ending road towards that shared peace

Pass the idea along. Anyone know anyone in the UN?

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No 147 - The end of our wildlife?

 

Habitat I. All acrylic/oil on board, 103x61 cm.

On 8 March the government gazetted a revised National Biodiversity Economy Strategy (NBES). They gave the public two extra weeks to respond. On 18 March a punchy Daily Maverick article by Don Pinnock raised a number of red flags.  Pinnock questioned the absurdly short time-frame for public response, and berated in particular the encouragement of game-farming and trophy-hunting. Is the article over-alarmist? Are we about to see our natural resources entirely sacrificed to Mammon?

The 60-page NBES document would require as many pages for a comprehensive response, but I have a few thoughts. Firstly, the NBES needs to be evaluated in relation to other existing conservation legislation. It is neither a stand-alone document, nor the whole of conservation policy. It is a set of guidelines, not law as such. Broadly it relates to the White Paper on Conservation, gazetted in Parliament on 14 June 2023; this was years in the making, and states its Mission thus:

To conserve and manage South Africa’s biodiversity, and ensure healthy ecosystems, ecological integrity and connectivity, with transformative socio-economic benefit to society … (p.11)

The NBES itself has also been around for a while; this is a revision responding not only to the White Paper, but also aligning itself with the goals and recommendations of various international biodiversity agreements to which South Africa has signed up. These include the 1996 Convention on Biological Diversity and the Kunming-Montreal framework agreed at COP15 in 2022. Whether or not one agrees with the precepts of the Global Biodiversity Framework is another question, though as laid out in brief in the NBES they seem to me largely laudable.

The point is this: the NBES explicitly focuses narrowly on the business-opportunity aspect of our wide variety of wildlife, aka biodiversity.  It’s therefore unsurprising that the document is saturated with ghastly commercial jargon – ‘consumptive use’, ‘leveraging’, ‘beneficiation’, ‘value chains’, etc. If you accept that commercial utilisation of our natural wealth is to some degree inevitable, the kind of policy guidance envisaged in NBES is also inevitable and necessary. Much of what the document covers is happening already. These ‘opportunities’ range from trophy hunting to recreational fishing, from traditional medicinal-plant harvesting to Big Five tourism – a daunting complexity that makes any overarching strategising pretty tricky. Does this effort succeed?

Before going on, it will be useful to cite the NBES itself on what it’s trying to do. The grand aim

Habitat II

is to optimise biodiversity-based business potentials across the terrestrial, fresh water, estuarine, and marine and coastal realms, and to contribute to economic growth with local beneficiation, job creation, poverty alleviation, and food security, whilst maintaining the ecological integrity of the biodiversity resource base, for thriving people and nature. (p.4)

This is refined into a number of more specific goals, with associated Actions. These include expanding the hectarage of conservation areas, collaborating with the private sector, and ensuring that benefits are equitably distributed to the Previously Disadvantaged (their capitals). The document lists four obvious so-called ‘Enablers’, perhaps better termed pre-conditions: effective monitoring and implementation, increased capacity and innovation, financing, and market access. All this, it is confidently asserted, ‘will’ add a whole lot more boodle to the GDP over the next ten years (or by 2036, or 2040, or 2050, depending on which bit you’re reading). Ten years, the NBES feels, is ‘relatively long-term’ (p.15)! Is anyone projecting for the next 50 or 100 years (within the purview of our present youths’ grandchildren) – the time it actually takes for conservation restoration, wildlife population recovery, and healthy ecosystems to build up? In achieving this, the document places repeated emphasis on ‘co-operation’ between ‘stakeholders’, job creation, equitable beneficiation, and ‘innovative’ solutions.

            To its credit, the NBES recognises a number of problems (sorry, challenges), among them the inherent fragmentation of the conservation realm, the increasing instability of climatic impacts, already pressing over-exploitation, alien-species invasions, inadequate financing, ‘uneven governance’ and weak implementation. Perhaps most importantly, it notes that the existing slew of conservation-related legislations is already a ‘contradictory’ patchwork that needs to be sorted out. Given that multiple government departments are necessarily involved, and given the snail’s-pace at which Parliament usually works, that alone will take a good decade. Meanwhile, I fear that this policy statement will only add to the confusion, or worse.

            Many of the goals of the NBES seem, in and of themselves, laudable. Overall, the idea of setting up a ‘positive feedback loop’ between expanded biodiversity resources and expanded derivative business sounds sensible enough. It is at least recognised that ecosystems need first to possess the resources that are destined for exploitation. It nods in the direction of ‘ecosystem restoration’, and notes that there exist a number of successful models that might be emulated. As is shown by the tabulated projects detailed over several pages at the end of the NBES, some of the projects envisaged are already under way or at advanced stages of planning. Nothing too startling to panic about there.

           

Habitat III

All that said, there are aspects of the NBES I find disquieting.

            Although the document explicitly omits definitions in order to save space, there seems no real comprehension of what ‘biodiverse ecosystems’ are, or what they supply. As it is, South Africa is already so fragmented, overrun with roads, fences, mines and towns, there can hardly be said to be a functioning ecosystem anywhere except at very restricted levels. Even then, the NBES makes no mention of the vital health of ecosystems such as river catchments, estuaries or wetlands. All these, as in so many parts of the world, are already seriously degraded and threatened; many will require at best decades of well-resourced dedication to be restored, especially taking into account the burgeoning human population. The projected expansion of conservation areas, at first blush laudable, is in practice utopian; the stated figures of projected revenue are wild thumb-sucks; the ideas for raising finance to get it all going look patchy and speculative. There seems no recognition – and it should be an absolutely foundational assumption – that natural systems do and must continue to supply the indispensables: oxygen from plant life, potable water, and self-sustaining soils. I loathe the term, but without these priceless ‘ecological services’, we’re all toast. The compilers of the NBES seem to believe that ecosystemic ‘integrity’ can be restored and maintained even as human consumption – and therefore physical intrusion and infrastructural impact – is increased. This is a dangerous fantasy.

            Rather, the thinking appears to be governed by the ‘If it pays, it stays’ school. All is ultimately subordinated to capitalistic offtake: the emphases are on game-ranching, aquaculture, herbal harvesting, the number of tourists seeking the ‘Big 5’, the revenue from trophy-hunting, and the like. All of these can in sundry respects be arguably as damaging to ecosystemic health as they are profitable to their practitioners. All of them skew land-use towards a few money-earning species, often to the detriment of the subtler inner workings of truly functional ecosystems. More tourists mean more pollution, trash, sewage, building, roads, disruption of non-human creatures’ safety and health; there is no hint here of curbs on all this, of the kind that other destinations, from Venice to Bali, have been forced to implement.

            And sorry to say, where there’s money (exacerbated by deep inequality), there’s corruption, an inescapable systemic problem that the NBES studiously ignores. The public-private-community co-operation the document rightly valorises is not immune; indeed, it all too frequently mutates into downright criminality and gangsterism. (Look at what’s happened to coal-trucking into Richards Bay.) This is especially uncontrolled in the wildlife trafficking arena – The Extinction Market, researcher Vanya Felbab-Brown calls it. By advocating an expansion of hunting and trade in wildlife ‘products’, from killing trophy leopards to eating insects, the NBES threatens to open the floodgates to further unregulated extirpations.

At the other end of the scale, Don Pinnock rightly avers, by subjecting wildlife to an agricultural mindset, it threatens to exacerbate the problems associated with existing breeding programmes, whether for pseudo-trophies or meat. (The canned-lion hunting enterprise, which Minister Barbara Dallas Creecy seems reluctant or unable to can for good, is only the most egregious example.) Anyone who thinks that this government has the means and will to monitor, audit and police ten thousand scattered and radically different wildlife-utilisation enterprises, let alone prosecute offenders, is deluded. Witness the signal failures to curb the perlemoen, cycad and pangolin trades. Among the few ‘successes’ the NBES disingenuously lays claim to is the rescue from extinction of the rhinoceros; lay that against the fact that 307 rhino were slaughtered by poachers last year in Umfolozi alone, enabled largely by the government’s inability to decisively solve a fencing contract dispute.

            In the last analysis, I think the NBES in its current form is fatally self-contradictory in its assumptions and aims. Though it purports to promote a system beneficial to both people and nature (what others call a ‘circular economy’), in practice it buys into an open-ended extractivist model of human motivations, a profiteering form of capitalism that, as Naomi Klein argues in her book This Changes Everything, is simply incompatible with the health of natural systems. It is not based on promoting what humans can give to sustain ecosystems, only on what can be taken. It conceives of nature not as habitat, only as resource. The cynic can be forgiven for suspecting that an element in government is really focussed on creating another cash cow for its own benefit, with the same disasters likely to follow as have trashed other state-run enterprises. Narrow, short-term extractivism is a global as well as local issue, of course, with no clear solution anywhere. The NBES calls repeatedly for innovative ideas, but in itself is the opposite of innovative. It is effectively derivative of and dependent on outdated notions of, among others, 'conservation' and 'community'. It appears bent on entrenching rather than ameliorating the worst aspects of a one-sided, domineering mindset that estranges humanity from nature rather than valorising co-dependence. One foundational ‘enabler’ – the necessity to educate our population, from littl’uns to ministers – is confined to one brief mention (p.37), and there it appears to mean education in the skills of utilisation, rather than into an attitude of respectful understanding and co-existence. This just one element of long-term groundwork that surely needs to be laid down on a national scale before anything like a NBES plan can become workable.

            The contradictoriness and confusion is evident in the very language. The policy is at many points simply badly written, with ambiguous concord errors, incoherent sentences, and meaningless statements. It trades heavily on the common oxymoron of ‘sustainable development’, itself now widely recognised as an unsustainable mask for rapacity. That’s echoed in this document’s very title, the ‘Biodiversity Economy’, or the phrase ‘ecological infrastructure’: there is no such thing. Contradiction is also inadvertently encapsulated in the idea of ‘cross-cutting imperatives’, these being essentially so-called social (read racial) ‘transformation’ and ecosystemic integrity; the discussion indicates that these are to be read as equally necessary and mutually beneficial. But they are cross-cutting, which is to say arguably entirely incompatible. That’s just one of several weirdly inapposite terms used. The tedium of the aforementioned business-speak is amplified by some resonant-sounding and ambitious but vacuous phrases like ‘mainstream[ing] into cross sectoral planning’ or ‘mega-living’ (which apparently means creating a ‘mosaic’ of some sort, as if we aren’t already in a mosaic).

           

Habitat IV

I could say more, obviously; each individual aspect is highly complex and subject to conflicting arguments. All the initiatives listed need to be tackled on a case-by-case basis. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not so romantic a lover of wilderness that I believe monetary utilisation can or should be shut out of the picture. It would be churlish to quibble with the broad aims of job creation and historical restitution – the question is what kind of jobs, to what ends. And I do not mean to impugn the wonderful work that a horde of devoted conservationists do achieve, even as they may profit by it. We unquestionably need a Biodiversity policy of some sort. Though there are encouraging aspects within it, I don’t believe that this NBES is quite it.

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A copy of this has been sent to the government contact. It is a personal view, representative of no institution or organisation.