No 66 - "The Sand-grouse"

THE SAND-GROUSE

My father was dying.

The sun was also dropping in the west, off to my left as I drove up the Great North Road. The tawny grasses were turning to russet in that mid-afternoon light. I had been driving all day, my eyes were scratchy with distance and dust.

I was looking forward to a coffee stop at the Capricorn Monument, its defaced obelisk needling the bouldery ridge north of Polokwane. I always stopped there on my drives to and from Zimbabwe, I liked its elevation and its dishevelled solitude. Now, though, I wondered if stopping would feel disloyal:  I should keep racing on, in case I didn’t get there in time. But I would have to pause and recharge somewhere.

As it happened, I had to stop sooner than I anticipated. I had no time even to take my foot off the pedal as two large birds exploded out of the long grass of the verge. One swerved safely away, but the second slammed into my bakkie’s radiator grille. It jammed there, I could see a wing fluttering in the rush of air above the curve of the bonnet.

I hate hitting birds; swearing and already remorseful, I found a place to pull over, put on my hat and went round to the front of the vehicle. The air was dead still, heated almost to blood temperature; the Capricorn ridge was visible a couple of kilometres to the north.

It was a sand-grouse, I guessed as I eased its still-warm body from between the cracked ribs of the plastic grille. It was so beautiful, the cooling feathers so exquisitely patterned in subtle fawns and reds, dark barring and pale freckles. Heavy at heart, I laid its limpness gently down amongst the grasses and tiny flowers and ants, away from the hard road, there where it would be gradually broken down and absorbed back into the hidden materia of the swirling world.

I crouched there a while longer, wondering about the other grouse, the one that had evaded death. I wondered if sand-grouse mated  for life, whether it would grieve for its mysteriously disappeared mate, or whether it would quickly forget and just fly onward, calling.

I straightened up only when I heard a vehicle draw up behind mine and toot its horn. Not a policeman wondering what the hell I was doing there – a civilian car, someone looking for directions, perhaps. The passenger-side window was sliding down as I approached. A new-model RAV, iridescent blue: an up-and-coming pretentious Somebody, I was guessing as I stooped to look inside.

There was only one person, the driver – a large woman resplendent in a dress of shimmering gold with purple trim, a matching doek massed on her head, sparkling wrist-bangles offsetting the dark gloss of polished skin. Seriously up-and-coming.

“Hi,” I said, “What’s up?”

“I am sorry to disturb you,” she said rather formally, and then just stopped, her hands still on the wheel. Her speech was accented but precise, but I thought her cheeks were shaking slightly; I wondered if she was ill, or about to have a heart-attack, though she could not be older than her mid-forties.

“That’s okay,” I said, “are you lost?”

“No, no. I – I was driving from Johannesburg, from Soweto. I went there to identify my son’s body. He was stabbed in Soweto.” She went on in a rush:  “I got this far and I suddenly just had to talk to someone, and I saw you stopped here, and I just thought to myself, I can talk to this man.”

I momentarily considered the deep irony in this, here and now in contemporary South Africa – that an evidently rich and perhaps highly connected black woman should choose a stranger – and not so much just a stranger, but a stranger who must have looked like the archetypal Boer: white bakkie, broad-brimmed leather hat, grizzled beard and pinkish skin, khaki shirt and shorts, agricultural boots.

But here I was, starting to make noises of commiseration which seemed in my own ears muffled, impossible to make sound sincere, while she gripped the steering-wheel and began to wail hoarsely, “Why my first-born, why me, why, he is my last, I ask God, why me?” She sobbed for a bit and, in tears myself, I found tissues in her glove-box. She extended a hand vaguely in my direction; I took it in mine and held it while she sniffed, and when we had mopped up a little and regained some control, I began to ask her questions, not so much about her son, but whatever seemed to keep her talking and distracted. Gradually, in fragments and loops, her story emerged.

She was the wife of a powerful provincial Chief who, in the way of such things in this country, had not only garnered considerable clout under customary law, but had cornered extensive business interests – hence her ostentatious, power-woman outfit and vehicle. He had given her three sons. One had died very young of some unspecified medical complication; the middle one had been killed in his teens in a car accident, through no fault of his own, not far from where we now sat. And now her eldest, still in his twenties, had been murdered in some grimy bar brawl in Soweto. No wonder she was wondering why she had been singled out for such appalling loss.

Her husband the chief had not gone with her to identify the body. In fact, he had long abandoned her to her own devices, blaming her for his sons’ deaths, her affections displaced by two new, younger wives. So she had branched out on her own, shamelessly using his money and status to get herself a degree in tourism management, thence to work with the provincial tourism authority – and indeed there were bundles of brochures on the passenger seat below our clasped hands. More, she was also headmistress of a junior school, attached to which was an orphanage she had founded.

She was, in short, an extraordinary person, and beneath the ravages of her recent loss I could feel her driven energy, her pragmatic intelligence, her compassion.

Yet all her wealth and influence, her personal power and initiative, could not shield her from the savagery of the ordinary and the arbitrary – the domestic strife and the accumulated, inexplicable losses.

“Why me?” she cried again. “I pray to God to give me a reason, but I cannot get any answer.”

And I had no answer for her, beyond my own belief in a universe ruled not by an inscrutable god, but simply by variable degrees of systemic chaos. We are all as vulnerable to mischance as the sand-grouse subsiding into the grass behind me, always hoping that order will prevail, always to be astonished by the mindless irruption of the unpredictable, like the cancer that was ravaging my father’s body and mind.

I didn’t voice any of that, just softly kneaded the lady’s pudgy hand until she had talked herself out and felt ready to drive on.

My back had grown hot with sun and stiff with leaning through the car window.

“You are a kind man,” she said, “I knew when I saw you there I could talk with you. Jesus has sent you to me.”

I didn’t learn her name. I left her my card, not expecting her to make contact again.

I somehow didn’t feel like stopping at the Capricorn monument after that, but pressed on into the reddening evening light, hoping I would get through the border in decent time, and perhaps even reach my father before he died.

*****

No.65 - Restoring Sydney Clouts, defending poetry

Sydney WHO??

Exactly.

How is it that a poet whom J M Coetzee himself called the “purest poetic talent" of his generation has become quite comprehensively forgotten? Some of you might have encountered in your school anthology one or two of his more accessible poems like “Dawn Hippo” or the beautiful love-poem “The Sleeper”.  Otherwise, even in university literary circles the poetry of Sydney Clouts is almost completely ignored.

Is this fair? Maybe he deserves to be lost. After all, he is dead – rather a disadvantage in our age of obsessing with the new and the instantaneous. He was also white – which these days can be a serious disqualification for being taken, well, seriously. Add to that being male – bad, bad, original sin – and he’s done for. There’s more: Clouts was Jewish, which threatens to condemn him to a minority interest; and he lived and wrote in an insignificant coastal dorp named Cape Town.  Who would be interested?

One anonymous publishers’ reader seemed positively offended that I should even attempt a book-length study of Clouts's poetry, informing the publisher that it would be “politically and intellectually” inappropriate and inadvisable to publish it. (They didn’t.) This of course just spurred me on, and I’ve adopted the comment as my main advertising slogan. After all, isn’t that what we academics are for: to ferret out the unusual, stand up for the neglected, challenge the orthodoxies of the day, open readers’ minds up to the strange and unfamiliar?

In our current phase of intensive decolonisation and the steady Africanisation of our literature syllabus, it’s now teaching Dickens, Eliot (whether George or T S) or Sydney Clouts that can appear most strange, culturally challenging, and unorthodox (not to say ‘conservative’ or even ‘retrograde’). The politics of all this is generally ugly, opportunistic and intellectually shallow, apparently calculated to demolish individualistic appreciation of literature itself. I wrote a critical study of Clouts simply because I loved his poetry from the first time I read it. Writing about it has been the most intellectually challenging and personally satisfying extended project I have ever done. It’s hard to say exactly why I loved it – only that it scintillated and intrigued, and if I felt poetically stuck myself, just reading some Clouts would get me going again.

Sydney Clouts was born in Cape Town in 1926, went to SACS and UCT, and married Marge Leftwich (who still lives in England and has been wonderfully supportive of this whim of mine). 'Work' was never central to his being, though he trained and was employed as a librarian in London, because all he wanted to do was write poetry. He was a poet’s poet, devoted to the craft in a rigorously unself-centred way. Despite this dedication, or because of it, he published astonishingly little – just one slender volume, entitled One Life. (It did win both the Olive Schreiner and Ingrid Jonker poetry prizes.) Deeply unhappy with the unfolding of apartheid, despite a relatively cosy suburban existence, Sydney, Marge and their three sons left for England in 1961. The move eviscerated Sydney’s poetic confidence, and though he produced literally hundreds of pages of drafts, he published very little more before he died of cancer, aged just 56. Even his Collected Poems, posthumously compiled by Marge and his twin brother Cyril in 1984, amounts to a mere 120 pages.

Not that either a slender oeuvre or neglect in one’s lifetime necessarily condemns one to obscurity forever. In our era of instant self-publishing, internet access and blogging, it’s easy to forget that John Donne’s poetry circulated only amongst his friends in handwritten copies; William Blake was considered a nutter who had to etch and print his own works; and were it not for Rupert Brookes’ rescue job the world would never have seen the mind-bending poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins – all poets who eventually had incalculable influence on global literatures in English. And T S Eliot’s Collected Poems is only a couple of dozen pages longer than Clouts’s, also enjoying massive influence despite their ferocious level of difficulty.

Politics, awkward timing and personal reticence all contributed to Clouts’s marginalisation, but just as responsible was the perceived difficulty of his poetry. Like Eliot – and like many other contemporaneous Modernists whom Clouts read and loved – Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Osip Mandelstam, Roy Campbell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens – the poems make stern demands on the reader’s imagination. There are few obvious narrative lines, no logical arguments. Lines can leap inexplicably from one image to another; vivid elements and sensuous tesserae are compressed together as if under extreme heat. Take these lines from “The Feeding of the Doves”:

Clouts visiting rural Transkei, 1956

Doves beleaguered me,

            turtledoves, ringdoves.

            Nuts and breadcrumbs I had,

            and a thought taking wings,

            of the pensive diet

            digested on eaves

            of the city, on windowsills

            glancing seaward.

An ordinary scene develops increasing compaction and interconnection, until doves and food and poet’s thoughts all seem to become part of each other – an ecology. But whatever this might ‘mean’ is only hinted at, never directly stated. Even Clouts’s best friends and staunchest supporters admit that they don’t always know what’s ‘going on’ in the poems, but they sense unspoken richness beneath the surfaces. His mother Feodora, on receiving her copy of One Life, said it as well as anyone: “I know that One Life is something good, honest and deep in meaning. Of course this implies that I shall have to read many of the poems again & again until I begin to have glimmerings of their ‘intimate lightning’.”

Despite his modernist techniques, Clouts was often regarded as a Romantic nature-poet – a label he vigorously rebutted. Nevertheless, it was partly Clouts’s repeated invocation of trees, birds, rock, mountain, weather that – being a peripatetic mountain-forest dweller myself – attracted me to him. Cape Town city itself might as well have been a beachfront dorp for all that it’s mentioned; it was the surrounding coastlines and weathers that energised the poetry. This opened Clouts up to accusations of promoting some sort of primitivist Noble Savage state, and of ignoring the tortured contemporary politics of the intensifying apartheid regime. Though understandable, neither accusation is entirely accurate or fair. It’s a mistake to assume that a writer thrusts every aspect of life and thought into poems, or that a person can be adequately psycho-analysed through them – especially one like Clouts who strove to excise himself from the poetry. Drafts, letters, collections of clippings show that he was knowledgeable and gravely concerned about those politics and their terrible impact on the majority and the poor.  And his poem “Professor Gulf” is an acidic allegorical portrayal of Hendrik Verwoerd. My own impression is that his ‘nature’ poetry was less an escape from than a conscious riposte to apartheid’s grimy oppressions; he saw humans as enveloped in far greater and more fundamental ecological systems – indeed, he was ahead of his time in this increasingly relevant insight. In the midst of distress, he searched out articles of beauty – a move easy to dismiss as diversionary, but which is in its own way courageous and dignifying, affirming a humane relation to the world which is just as important  as political freedoms.  Take his intimate observations of a simple beach walk:

I breathed the first shivers of daylight

on lowtide lagoonbed grasses,

shallow ledges of slime in the seawind.

I went between spouting crabholes,

tottering oilgreen spindles that roved on the waterfilm;

over systems of sharp red,

mauve and brightblue

speckles of aragonite, like blown seeds:

Shelley’s dome transformed into fertile splinters.

Life breaks life and stores the concise fragments.

It’s nature-appreciative, to be sure, but there is also a hint of violent dynamics: “life breaks life” into “fragments” – but it also “stores” those shards for our paradoxical delectation. Pay careful, caring attention to all of life’s minutiae, is Clouts’s consistent call.

This is not to deny that, as a person of his race, class and resources, he was no public revolutionary, was relatively sheltered, and could emigrate when he felt the need, where most could not. Clouts was, of course, not the only writer to choose or be forced into exile in the 1960s. I’ve just read our colleague Andrea Thorpe’s new essay in English in Africa on Peter Abrahams, who was in London at the same time as Clouts, though I’m not sure they ever met. Abrahams’s work has been equally neglected by critics and academics, despite his politically kosher colour and ideological affiliations. This points to a wider syndrome: the critical neglect of poetry generally in South Africa. Deeply considered studies and biographies, beyond specialist journal articles and some unpublished theses, are few and far between. This applies to poets of every stripe, creed, language and political persuasion, not only DWMs. Moreover, poetry is generally poorly taught in schools, if at all; the bulk of our university students, apparently terrified or disdainful, avoid it if they can; and even postgraduates are much more likely to study fiction or jazzy new digital forms. So, while some poetic expressions flourish in various quarters, the traffic between poets and critics, which ought to be vigorous, voluminous and ultimately beneficial to poetry itself, is lacking.

If so few people read poetry, and hardly any of those have read Sydney Clouts, I don’t know who is likely to read a dense and substantial study of him! But I must remain optimistic, and hope that this book is the beginning of a tsunami of poetic-critical popularity. Or at least that this one poet can be rescued from obscurity, revealed once more like the flash of a bolt of “intimate lightning”.

***

Dan Wylie’s book  Intimate Lightning: Sydney Clouts, poet is published by UNISA Press.

*****

No.64 - Public intellectuals: Dreams and realities

I suppose that, on the cusp of my early retirement, my subconscious is telling me it might just be a good moment to assess my career as an academic and so-called intellectual. At any rate, I had a dream – a full-on, deep, proper dream – in which I discussed with various shimmery interlocutors the writing of An Intellectual History of South Africa. In the dream at least, nothing of this kind had been attempted before. The dream got fragmented with my usual phantasmagoria (which I am reliably informed not even the good Dr Jung could explain), and half-waking episodes in which my brain mulled over possibilities, like olive pips accidentally being blended into a smoothie.

All in all I had a very bad night – but in this manner, of course, all profound ideas are born.

Until the morning – of course – when a bit of Googling naturally revealed that about 700 people had already thought about this very area, and had even written at length about it. Still ... no one seems, on the face of it, to have done what my dream community was cooking up.

For example, high in the Google pile is a collection of articles edited by Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton and Estelle Prinsloo, Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, individuals, institutions. This is organised by themes rather than personages – the development and implications of intellectual ideas such as Marxism, feminism, Black Consciousness, some religious traditions, and so on. [See Henk van Rinsum’s review.]  This is well and good, but not quite my thing ...

Most cited by Google is a recent book by Michael Onyebuchi Eze, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa. This is not a history of intellectuals so much as a tract in defence of the concept of Ubuntu; it seems to have been widely praised but what I could read of it online is so badly written I quickly abandoned it – and in any case it, too, isn’t anything like what my dream-merchants were proposing.

Through all this certain questions (olive pips) were revolving in my mind. What is an ‘intellectual’ anyway? Is there a difference between an ‘academic’ and an ‘intellectual’, or – in the common term – a ‘public intellectual’?  Is lecturing several hundred students every week not public enough? Does a public intellectual have to be within a university in some capacity, or even be university-educated? If I am an intellectual at all – which is debateable – does my blog make me ‘public’? How public is public?

Such questions arise because I don’t think that university – for all the intellectual pleasures it has brought me over three decades – is the be-all and end-all of intellect, let alone intelligence. I want to believe that intellectuals can and do occur outside of universities, in the manner of, say, Samuel Johnson or Mahatma Gandhi – not to mention Xhosa praise-poet SEK Mqhayi.  These were all men who published and performed widely, and had inestimable effects on broader society – precisely what one supposes a public intellectual is meant to do.

These questions also arise partly because I’ve become rather disillusioned with a certain disconnect between academic production and the broader public. We (at least those of us in the humanities) pump out articles for a select range of institutionally-approved academic journals; as universities have expanded the journals have become ever more specialised and ever more competitive. The editor of a prestigious American journal explained to us the other day their ferocious and multilayered processes of submission, vetting, reading, editing and re-editing. For every article accepted for ultimate publication, nine or more are rejected, and it can take two years or more for the thing to appear, by which time you have either forgotten what you wrote, or have changed your mind about it, or have developed so far in the meantime you now think it’s naive and embarrassing tosh.  Between six and twelve editors and readers might have gutted and commented on your piece before it finally appears – which, according to some surveys, is twice the average number of readers an academic article will get anyway. Not terribly public.

Meanwhile, back in your Department, you are likely becoming increasingly estranged from your colleagues as you dig yourself a specialised niche of expertise, writing stuff in which they are not particularly interested or which they even cannot comprehend.  And if you step beyond your expertise? Your dilettantism is likely to be spurned as just that – a shallow intrusive paddling in areas you clearly know nothing about. Furthermore, while publication of a specialised, peer-reviewed article or book earns your university a substantial government subsidy (of which the writer sees little to nothing directly), any effort to spread research into more popular or so-called ‘creative’ formats gets no subsidy or institutional support at all. The disjunct is reflected in the current pressure for academics to add to their research, so-called ‘community engagement’ – which frequently means running well-meaning but sporadic, necessarily non-academic activities for disadvantaged sectors of society, for which one may frankly be poorly equipped.

(I don’t mean to be all negative about this: personally I’ve had a fabulous time of it. I’ve never had to teach or write about topics I’m not enthusiastic about; there is also great collegiality; the peer-review system, when well-conducted, is educative and clarifying for all concerned and helps advance best-thinking practice; and there are wonderful community projects emanating from my own and other universities.)

But the disjunct is there, and it affects the presence and impact of the so-called public intellectual. Such an animal is defined by Richard Posner, in his excellent book Public Intellectuals, as one who writes “for a broader than merely academic or specialist audience, on ‘public affairs’ – on political matters in the broadest sense of that word.”  This is potentially to exclude many disciplines, especially the hard sciences, and even economics, psychology and the like. But such definitions, as Posner notes, are ever murky and arguable. Posner subtitles his 2001 book A Study of Decline: in his view, the contemporary public intellectual is virtually toothless – and in large part he blames the universities, a) for having become a more or less monopolistic repository of intellect, while b) getting so specialised that few academics can become the authoritative generalists that an effective public intellectual needs to be. “Having slipped his moorings, the cautious academic specialist throws caution to the winds. He is on holiday from the academic grind and all too often displays the irresponsibility of the holiday-goer.” He (or, less often, she) is thus exposed to derision and perceived irrelevance.

In our local context, some related points are made by Jonathan Jansen, former Vice Chancellor of Free State university and widely published in popular media – a prominent public intellectual in his own right. In various places – including William Gumede’s collection of essays entitled The Poverty of Ideas – Jansen has argued that increased university managerialism, egregious state interventions, manipulation of funding, and various forms of covert censorship have served to diminish the intellectual’s authority, autonomy and freedom to speak either within or outside university parameters. Jansen is not the only one to paint a grim picture: witness such gloomy article titles as “The slow death of the intellect” in the Mail & Guardian and “South African democracy and the retreat of intellectuals".

Chris Thurman (former student of ours, now professor at Wits and himself a public commentator of growing repute) fielded a sharp intervention in 2013.  He points out, among other things, that in the internet age the definition of ‘public’ has shifted, and perhaps the role of public intellectual, defined as an ‘active citizen’, has inevitably become less the haughty legislator of previous centuries than something more interpretative and communal.  He also notes that what is lacking is not so much intelligent public commentary, but a debilitating lack of political will in the circles of governance to hear, absorb and implement the ideas of those who have considered them most deeply – indeed, the refusal to read anything, even to be antipathetic to intellectualism of any kind. When key government ministers evidently regard universities as hotbeds of inconvenient dissent rather than as resources for intelligent responses to present and future problems, and therefore for years incrementally cut funding, who can be surprised that our education sector is such a disaster zone? Nevertheless, Thurman is more sanguine about the future of the public intellectual than either Richard Posner or Jonathan Jensen, perhaps hoping (as we all do) that he himself will, despite everything, be taken seriously.

But back to my dream... A number of names surfaced in that muddled mental night-walk, people ranging from Sol Plaatje and Jan Smuts to Achille Mbembe and Mamphele Ramphele... Perhaps what the dreamers had in mind (or my mind had in dream) was a study of intellectual affect via a series of individual portraits – something along the lines of Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals (1988). Not with his tone, though: Johnson sets out to demonstrate that public intellectuals are in decline not because they have been displaced from academic rigour but because they are frauds. In his portrayal they are posturers so governed by egotism, deceit and private moral turpitude that they deserve to be ignored – and Johnson has evidently gone out of his way to find a gallery of drunks, bigots, wife-beaters and liars who will prove his case.

No one’s perfect, but I think South Africa can offer better.  Through all the tragic thickets of racial, gender and economic imbalances of the last two centuries, public-minded writers and thinkers, from John Philip to Steve Biko, have sprung vociferously to life in defence of right living and clear informed argument. More than ever in our history, perhaps, is the public intellectual needed to deliberately brave controversy, puncture the pretensions of the idiots, and provide dispassionate balance to the distortions of the ambitious.  Meanwhile, a massive parallel task looms: to educate the broader public into taking such thinking more seriously than violence, cheap rhetoric, and politically-correct grandstanding.

I don’t feel equipped to write up my own dream, but somebody out there ...?

*******

No 63 – Creativity and Chaos: Writing Harare

            

If Someone hasn’t written a thesis on literary representations of Harare, Someone ought to. I’m sure there’s plenty in the socio-economic academic literature about Zimbabwe’s urbanisation, from its colonial beginnings in the 1890s, through the depressed first decades of the twentieth century, the halcyon years in the 1950s and ‘60s, to the overburdened simultaneous growth and decay of the last thirty years.  Though novelists and playwrights and poets have doubtless been writing continuously about city life, and the urban environment is frequently mentioned in the literary surveys, a cursory search hasn’t turned up a comprehensive study.

The city has come a very long way since 1890, when one of Cecil John Rhodes’ troopers raised the Chartered Company flag over a patch of ground in the shadow of a prominent kopje, and Fort Salisbury was established. The tiny colonial settlement remained for a considerable period a pretty miserable place to be. Hugh Marshall Hole wrote about it this way in 1894, in Old Rhodesian Days, envying what had already developed in distant Bulawayo:

In Salisbury we heard of these things and envied. ... We still had our dismal black swamp in the middle of the town, and our ramshackle ‘Kyas’ of wattle and daub. By 1894, it is true, there was a sprinkling of brick stores and a few wells had been sunk, but the majority of us lived in thatch huts and had to get our drinking water up from the river below the camp in barrels hauled by donkeys or perspiring natives. There was no electric light for us. Those who were bold enough to venture out after dark had to carry a lantern to prevent them falling into dagga-pits or the open ditches which drained the camp.

The racial segregation of the city began right then, with a tightly controlled ‘location’ being established the far side of the Kopje; this and other townships sprawled even as the plusher white northern suburbs did, and one of the fascinating things to trace in the literature is the way that that racial and economic division gets increasingly infiltrated, broken down in places and reinforced in others, even as the white population after the 1970s dwindled to a tiny and effectively irrelevant sliver.

In some sectors, even a century or so after Hole, the city doesn’t sound much better.  Here is the legendary bad boy of Zimbabwean literature, Dambudzo Marechera, in an unpublished piece written in 1985:

What is it about Harare? Is it the nightlife, the hotels, the nightclubs? Or the melancholy solitary walk back to the flat when a tawny, almost rubescent dawn is signalling from within the dark confines of another pent-up night? [...]

            Ah, Harare. Its mysterious method of living out of a suitcase, living in anonymously cheerless but expensive blocks of flats, living no longer on borrowed time as in the past but on borrowed money, hire purchase, the black market, and the small advances one may rarely extract from the employer’s reluctant clenched fist. Harare, where a scream in the night is the signal for all shutters to come down – it’s none of my business who is murdering who. Harare, with her thousands of world-wise schoolgirls tarted up for the lunch-time disco at Bretts and at Scamps, the raucous scenes at Queens, the National Sports Stadium with its visiting bands and its bogus Cerulloean evangelists.

(This is cited by Marechera’s devoted literary supporter and executor, German academic Flora Veit-Wild, in her survey of “Zim.lit”, Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers.) Marechera is obviously projecting his own self-destructive angst on the city in some ways; he was well-known in his short, creative and sad life for sitting in Cecil Square – the site of the original Fort, later Africa Unity Square – hammering out brilliant, tortured and cynical poems on a battered manual typewriter. Irrepressible, acidic and generally miserable, Marechera extended his experiences of the seamy side of Salisbury/Harare life into the phantasmagoric urban psycho-scapes of his novels House of Hunger (1978) and Black Sunlight (1981).

Something of that nightmarish vision of Harare’s townships occurs also in Chenjerai Hove’s well-known novella, Bones (1988), when his main character Marita ventures out of her already tough rural existence into the vicious and confusing confines of (we presume) Harare.  Hove also wrote a more realistic collection of vignettes, Shebeen Tales: Messages from Harare (1994) – these kinds of snatched impression-stories have become a favourite form for Zimbabwean writers.  Shebeen Tales, in my view, is not especially well-written, often both clumsily repetitive and not profoundly insightful, but Hove does capture some fundamental dynamics, accompanied by some juicy and resonant characterisations.

I am alone now, walking down Second Street, passing near parliament, the house of empty promises, to the national newspaper, the media of omissions. I hear disgruntled voices, some speak of economic stomach adjustment...

One of the brief chapters is entitled “’First World’, ‘Third World’, and ‘Fourth World’ City”; others centre on the shebeen, on the sex shops, on the high walls and savage dogs of the luxury suburbs. And in another chapter, entitled “Cleaning the Streets for the Queen”, Hove reminds us that the Mugabe government’s tactic of clearing the impoverished off the streets only when foreign visitors were due, was a habit established long before the infamous Murambatsvina clearances of 2008. Hove’s tone is sardonic:

The Queen of England, yes, the Queen herself, has requested to visit one of the most run-down suburbs of Harare, Mbare. Now, there is a problem: who can stand up and say to Her Majesty, ‘No, Your Majesty, please go to the other places, Borrowdale, Greenside, not to the squatter-riddled Mbare.’ Mbare is chaotically planned and everything takes care of itself. Violence, drugs, illegal vendors selling anything you can imagine. And collapsing buildings, old ones built in nineteen-I-don’t-know-when.

Harare in the year of Murambatsvina, 2008, is the setting for Valerie Tagwira’s first and solitary novel, The Uncertainty of Hope – the title is symptomatic. The novel is a very creditable one, and it’s a pity that Tagwira has published nothing further, apart from a short story or two; an obstetrician-gynaecologist, she is presumably too busy saving lives. Her intimate – not to mention medical – knowledge of Harare shows in her portrayal. The city remains severely split between rich and poor areas, the latter a perpetual embarrassment to a government that promised so much and delivered so little: this is a city plagued by AIDS, water and electricity cuts, rampant inflation (a loaf of bread costs millions), and chronic shortages of fuel and medical supplies. However, what Tagwira shows especially finely is how the city divides are in fact (have always been) porous, as the lives of disparate characters like Onai, the marginal Mbare marketplace vendor with the abusive husband, and Tom, a jet-setting would-be tycoon with a farm dodgily acquired under the Land Reform frenzy, become strangely yet entirely authentically intertwined through family and employment connections. The various personal crises come to a head in conjunction with, indeed inseparably from, the destructive clearances of Murambatsvina.

Boundary-crossings also occur in the occasional white person appearing in Mbare or other townships: a displaced farmer shebeen-crawler in Bones; a white army man taking up a rather nice house in Mbare in Christopher Mlalazi’s story “Eeish!”, from Dancing With Life: Tales from the township (2008). Mlalazi’s title reminds us that, for all the penury and dissolution, there is always vigorous life, creativity and humour to be found in the townships, a tribute to the people’s extraordinary resilience.  And in between the plush suburbs and Mbare and Chitungwiza are “the Avenues”, the geometrically-arranged flat-lands so disparaged by Marechera. Here small businesses can be set up in the corners of residential blocks, such as the somewhat dishevelled salon in Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare (2010), a very funny little novel in which a white woman features in a condition of clientship and equality, rather than as the more usual remote and paternalistic employer. A sign of the times, even as some colonial institutions (quite mystifying to the novel’s narrator), such as a rugby match between Churchill and Prince Edward schools, complete with bagpipe band, persist in their strange bubble of privilege. The novel’s treatment of homosexuality is a bold intervention into a locally controversial area, another sign of the city’s shifting social undercurrents.

The critique of Mugabe’s governance underpinning many of these works has sent any number of Zimbabwe’s best writers out of the country; Hove himself died recently in exile in Norway. So voluminous has the diaspora been that Brian Chikwava can characterise part of London as Harare North – his novel of that title constituting a brave, if not quite successful, experiment in inventing a kind of ‘Shonglish’ for a ZANU-PF-supporting main character.

Another writer who has elected to live elsewhere, but continues to write about the homeland, is Petina Gappah.  Gappah’s first novel, An Elegy for Easterly, I thought very good but which, in the way of a number of first novels published elsewhere, I felt had had the pithy individuality edited out of it; it was so polished that a true ‘voice’ hadn’t been allowed to emerge. However, unlike too many young African writers who don’t survive the exaggerated accolades accorded to them by an apparently guilt-stricken international media, Gappah has gone on to write more, and to really find herself.  The Book of Memory (2015) relates perhaps the strangest of all crossovers between Harare’s adjacent worlds – an albino Shona girl named Memory who (so she thinks) has been sold by her father to a white man, who raises her devotedly; but she is in the infamous Chikurubi prison, having been accused of murdering her benefactor.  In her story, as she recalls it, are lingering residues of the entrenched divides of the more and the less privileged, the residents of Umwinsidale at one end of the scale, the Jo’burg Lines of Mbare at the other. 

Still more accomplished is Gappah’s latest, Rotten Row (2016), which, rather mysteriously, won the Guardian First Book Award.  Rotten Row is that street running in the lee of The Kopje, on which have always been located Harare’s criminal courts; the first of the book’s interconnected stories is, daringly, related in the voice of Rhodesia’s last (white) hangman – a considerable accomplishment in itself. In its deeply-informed ranging across social sectors and economic brackets, I rate Rotten Row as the most complex, compassionate and nuanced portrayal of Harare so far.

And what of the future of Harare? One can only imagine – as did Nancy Farmer, a multiple award-winning American writer who lived for a time in Harare with her husband Harold, himself an accomplished poet. Nancy Farmer wrote several Zimbabwe-set novels for teens (Young Adults, we call them nowadays), including The Warm Place (1996) and A Girl named Disaster (1998). The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1995) is set in a fantasial Harare of the twenty-second century. The Ear, the Eye and the Arm are three bizarre characters comprising a detective agency, who are set by a certain General to find his missing children; we are led on a charming helter-skelter adventure through the various districts of the city. We begin with the suffocatingly securitised rich suburbs in which the General, appropriately, lives; through the bawdy and dangerous chaos of Mbare; vast, tunnel-riddled trash-lands ruled by a woman no less tyrannical than the General himself; the Mile-High city, which is a luxurious (very) high-rise complex, a kind of extension/combination of the boutiques of First Street, the gold-and-glass Sheraton hotel, and ZANU-PF headquarters; and Resthaven, which bears the name of an actual old-age home but in the novel is a walled-off enclave attempting to restore age-old traditional rural Shona values. 

            A wonderful story.

***

I have already gone on rather long – and have only scratched the surface of a rich lode of imaginings of a multi-faceted, turbulent yet attractive city just bursting with artistic talent and possibility.

*****

No.62 - The elephants’ women: in memoriam Daphne Sheldrick

Daphne Sheldrick, one of the African elephants’ greatest friends, has died at the age of 83. I met her once, very briefly, possibly in 1984, at her orphanage on the edge of Nairobi National Park in Kenya. I was in the company of my mother’s older sister Anne, who was then living in nearby Langata and was herself an honorary ranger on the Park, rather idiosyncratically studying bushbabies and hyenas (which she called “Poofies”). At the orphanage, we nuzzled baby rhinos and young elephants, some of the over 200 orphans Sheldrick and her team had saved from human destruction. Born near Gilgil, in western Kenya, not far from where my grandparents farmed, Sheldrick left only to study in the US. In the 1960s she worked with elephant pioneers Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, and married David Sheldrick, then Warden at Tsavo National Park. When David died in 1977, Daphne set up the David Sheldrick Elephant Trust, and the orphanage just outside the Kenyan capital, in his honour. It will continue to run under the management of her daughter Angela.

Daphne related some her experiences – importantly the terrible drought of the early 1970s in Tsavo, which killed a lot of elephants and became a benchmark for pro-culling arguments subsequently – in her book The Tsavo Story (1973). In this she became the first of a remarkable group of women to research and write about the African elephants.

To focus on these women – in their way the Jane Goddalls and Dian Fosseys of the elephant world – is in no way to diminish the achievement of the even more numerous and committed male researchers, from Ian Parker in Kenya to India’s Raman Sukumar and South Africa’s Rudi van Aarde, nor of innumerable Africans whose critical role in conservation is too easily effaced. But I do think the women writers have collectively contributed uniquely to elephant studies.

In 1975, Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton published Among the Elephants, relating their experiences and studies amongst the elephants of Manyara in northern Tanzania. The rather unconventional Iain had pursued a PhD at Oxford, supervised by the equally unconventional zoologist Nico Tinbergen (Tinbergen also supervised the distinctly odd Lyall Watson, who would write the quasi-fantasy Elephantoms about the Knysna elephants). Among the Elephants boasts a Foreword by Tinbergen, in which he highlights Oria’s unique contribution.

Oria Rocco, a French-Italian who had been farming near Naivasha, fell in love with the “rather shy” Iain as well as the Manyara elephants, and wrote a substantial part of Among the Elephants. Iain loved the elephants, had learned to walk with confidence just feet away as he observed and mapped their intricate family dynamics, and writes well – but Oria’s narrative is more personalised, lyrical at times. More than researching animals, she became animal: “Our senses became so alert that like hunters, we could smell and track elephants long before we saw or heard them. ... Living amongst animals one becomes more like them. ... Distances had no limits, time no meaning ... I knew by the colour of the trees, the bushes and the flowers, which month it was.” After she gave birth to their daughter Saba, it was the matriarchal mores of the elephants to which she turned for maternal direction, for their “old fashioned virtues: loyalty, protection and affection”; stability, loving communication, females taking on “male” roles. It was often heart-breaking, rough, dangerous, this wild life, but they often felt themselves to have entered a “continuum” of “completeness and serenity” with the elephants. This sense of communality surfaces repeatedly amongst the women researchers.

Among the Elephants mentions other researchers only in passing (indeed, they are all rather reticent about each other – professional courtesy, I suppose), but includes Daphne Sheldrick and Sylvia Sikes, who would go on to write A Natural History of the Elephant (1971).  Inspired by the Douglas-Hamiltons, with whom she worked in the late 1960s, on the almost-neighbouring park of Amboseli, Cynthia Moss had set up another elephant research centre under the auspices of the African Wildlife Trust. She set about tracking the infinitely complex and fascinating family dynamics of the Amboseli elephants, writing four books and several films, notably centred on an elephant dubbed Echo. Echo became world-famous, probably doing more for the public’s understanding of elephants than any other pachyderm personality.

Moss followed Iain’s scientific methods, and eschewed the idea of a two-way friendship with the elephants she observed; she was not a participant; though she cared profoundly about their preservation, they did not realise it. Yet, like a novelist, she opens her book Elephant Memories (1998) with an account of elephant living that, while behaviourally precise and authentic, is not what she is observing; it is ‘imagined’. And when a matriarch she has been following for a decade or more is unnecessarily shot, or culling is mooted for the Amboseli elephants she has come to know in their every gesture, you can feel the heartstrings break beneath the measured surface of the prose:

I feel sick when I think of a team of marksmen, skinners and butchers moving into Amboseli and slaughtering whole families along with all their knowledge, their traditions and their memories. ... Elephants are not so many rodents to be exterminated; they deserve something better than that and I am not afraid to say that ethics and morality should be essential considerations in our decisions for their future.

Moss’s work has continued through many trying times – opposition, drought, poaching – for forty years. Joining her from time to time was a young biology major, like Moss educated at Smith College – Joyce Poole. Contrary to expectations that women would study matriarchal structures, Moss directed Poole to study the bulls – and discovered lots of fascinating things about musth behaviour and other boytjie things. The experiences were formative for Poole, who had grown up partly in Kenya and penned a deeply personal memoir significantly titled Coming of Age with Elephants (1996).

Poole found herself taking a keen interest in the investigations of another American woman, Katy Payne. Payne, along with her then husband Roger Payne, had been working on recording infrasonic (below human hearing-range) whale song. Now Katy was adapting the technology to record similarly inaudible communications between elephants. Silent Thunder, she called it in her 1998 book of that title. This book, like most of the other women’s, is written like a novel, full of conversations with fascinating people, places, societies, as well as accessibly showing that elephants do communicate infrasonically across great distances. Still, Payne remained humbled before the deep mysteries that remained; she compares scientists to fishermen, pulling up bits almost by chance from beneath swirling and beautiful but opaque surfaces, and often strangely “driven by unconscious motivation”. And science could not entirely shield her from emotional attachments to her subjects: “The women do not show the same composure as the men ... grieving has so exhausted them.”  She had to cope with the aftermath of culling in Zimbabwe’s Sengwa reserve, where she worked with Rowan Martin. Many of the elephants she had tracked and accompanied for months had been killed. She tries to devote her science to the memory of those lives cut short, quoting the World War One poet Wilfred Owen: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” That devotion “started as a desire for them to have passing-bells, and for myself to ring them in the face of the grand indifference.”

           

Does the evident complexity of elephant communication, albeit untranslatable, amount to a “culture”? Canadian novelist Barbara Gowdy thought it a distinct possibility and, drawing on Poole and Payne’s work, wrote The White Bone (1998), a scintillating story of the world from within an imagined elephant consciousness – a kind of Watership Down for pachyderms. As for Zimbabwe, another woman, Australian Sharon Pincott, has been pursuing a lonely, ultimately rather despairing crusade on behalf of the so-called Presidential Herd of elephants of Matetsi in western Zimbabwe, recounting the story in a series of books including In an Elephant's Rumble (2004) and the Elephants and I (2009).

Building on Payne’s work, yet another American scientist, Caitlin O’Connell, began discovering, through some nifty experiments with wild Namibian and some captive elephants, yet another dimension – that in addition to airborne infrasonics, elephants can communicate quite nuanced messages through ground vibrations, picked up through the soles of those great padded feet. O’Connell, like her predecessors, was publishing articles in hardcore scientific journals, but her account for the general reader, The Elephants’ Secret Sense (2007), is I think the best-written of all of these narratives. She has since followed up with Elephant Don – the ‘biography’ of a particular individual she tracked, observed, understood. Through all the behavioural studies, this shines through – that every elephant has distinct and complex personality, and belongs – where we humans have not destroyed it – to a society that shows every sign of being a full, rich culture.

It would be too easy to stereotype these and the many other women studying and loving elephants as ‘emotional’ beings, and men as objective and detached. It would also be inaccurate to call them feminist, though some have deployed elephantine matriarchal structures in support of feminist agendas. Nor is it true that they care only for the animals to the exclusion of people, especially African people: one thing that links all these accounts is the awareness that human and elephant (and all other animal) cultures have co-evolved, have been and remain intricately intertwined, and are equally vital to the ecological and psychic health of our shared planet.

This is the burden of ecologist and psychologist Gaye Bradshaw’s brilliant book, Elephants at the Edge (2009). Like many of the field researchers, Bradshaw “felt wedged between worlds and struggled to bridge the chasm between the collectivity of science and [the] personal nature of suffering – between my role as objective scientist and the subjective experience of a living, feeling, sentient member of the animal world.”  Bradshaw’s subtitle is “What animals teach us about humanity”, but she doesn’t romanticise this relationship. Like much of humanity, she writes, elephant society is

riddled with violence, has had ethnic ... strife, has lost elders and the coherence of traditions, and suffers with no hope of restitution. Elephant society is also embedded in human cultures struggling with similar challenges and histories ... They and humans are asked to re-create culture, to redefine meaning in new contexts ... We are able to harness the volumes of scientific knowledge with the wisdom of indigenes, elephants and other animals to help re-create human culture. Once the shock of trauma sinks in, the possibility for renewal begins. ... 

The elephants have called. It is time that we join them.

*****

Dan Wylie’s Elephant is available from Reaktion Books; and his new study, Death and Compassion: The elephant in southern African literature, is due from Wits University Press in July.

*****

No 61 - Wonderful, many-legged life

White-barred gypsy moth - but what's with the green
bubbles around the head?

In my parents’ bookshelf, which I pored over endlessly as a child, was a book entitled The Living House. It wasn’t a gothic horror, nor did it mean “the house that one is living in”, though the pun occurred to me. It was a book about all the seen and too-small-to-be-seen creatures, mostly with six legs or more, that scurried across your ceilings and behind the skirting-boards, that lived in your carpets and inside the wood of your socks-drawers and even in the socks themselves. There were also (it still makes my nose itch to think of it) mites that lived in your left ear by day, and the right ear by night, and daily made an invisible trek across your face to get there.  So we were told anyway.

Our house, which is now close on a century old, was ideally decrepit to host innumerable such critters. So is my present abode, which may be just as old, and just as riddled with rot and hospitable cracks and crannies. Just the visible spectrum of  my diminutive housemates is endlessly fascinating. Most people, of course, regard themselves as desperately at war with the insect world – not entirely without reason. But most people fail to recognise that we could scarcely exist without insects, that the world of vegetation and oxygen and fertility on which we depend is intimately and irreplaceably serviced by them. Insects preceded us by millions of years, they outnumber us by an order of hundreds, and they will almost certainly outlive us. However our demise might transpire, it will very likely leave behind what Jonathan Schell, in his book on nuclear holocaust, The Fate of the Earth, dubbed “a republic of insects and grass”.

Who was it said caterpillars are longer-lived, more complex,
and just as beautiful as the butterflies they become?

Our war on insects has nevertheless succeeded in many places, and not only in our sterilised new urban architectures and pesticide-saturated monocultured fields. One perhaps unlikely place I experienced this was Germany’s Schwartzwald (Black Forest), within which I illicitly overnighted once. It was 1979, the days of acid rain, and forest life of all kinds had been devastated; all that night there was not a sound – not a cricket, not a bird – nothing. Brought up in a teeming African forest, I found this unnerving and lonely. Another place was a farm near San Diego, California – a farm, in summer, surrounded by orchards presumably pollinated by bees – yet their nights too were dead: not a stridulation, not a song, not a single moth fluttering to the lights. And I once saw a boy in England driven to the edge of hysteria by the presence  of a single fly in his sanitised house. All these incidents happened some time ago; now, entomologists tell us, a quarter of all flying insect species in large parts of Europe have been extinguished just in the last twenty years. A genocide of sorts.

Handsome fellow - a longhorn beetle?

I do not sentimentalise insects. Some sting, some are downright dangerous, and I’d be an idiot not to powder the fleas the cat brings into the bed, or squash the ticks that might kill her with biliary, or spray the mosquito plaguing my ear in the night – even if it’s a Bush Mosquito with its rather pretty stripy legs. But I am perfectly happy to coexist with the vast majority of them and, some minor altercations notwithstanding, valorise their short but complex, exquisitely mysterious, even miraculous lives.

This has to be the sweetest defence mechanism.

There are the many-legged ones, like the harmless nodding chongololo millipedes that apparently breed up in the ceilings, because they seem to drop out of nowhere, wander haplessly across the walls, or end up, desiccated and starved, dying behind a couch or cupboard before I can find them and put them out in the green world. And there’s the occasional centipede, swift and glossy as toughened plastic, a sting worse than a wasp’s but really just wanting to hide, with no malice aforethought.

Flattie snacking on a damselfly.

Always there are spiders, tiny ones that might bite, others like pinheads that abseil from the light fittings on filaments spun endlessly out of their own bodies. The daddy-long-legs perch on their overnight webs in the corners, shivering into paroxysms of defensive shaking, or lurch away from the duster on stilty legs as fine as horse-hairs. Always, of course, the Anyphops “flatties”, scooting behind the paintings to escape the cat. They seem panicky and vulnerable, but they too are predators, nabbing mosquitoes and moths and damsel-flies in their lunging pedipalps. Even each other. It’s an insect-eat-insect world. Now and then I find one of their nurseries – a shallow pale dome of sheerest silk stuck to a wall, which suddenly begins to appear bruised around the edges – until you look closer and the dark stain resolves into a spreading cloud of a couple of hundred of the tiniest flattejties, each one hardly a millimetre across. Just as well for us that not so many survive. The survivor grows, and periodically grows too big for its own skin, and so, niftily, just reverses right out of it, leaving it hanging in public like a golden ghost of itself, complete down to its very leg-hairs.

The six-leggers are even more numerous and varied than the eight-leggers – partly because many of them also have wings and like to gather at the windows at night, trying to get in, or inside during the day, trying to get out. Dozens of moths of unidentifiable species, even the tiniest of which are beautifully marked on close examination; and lost butterflies – Painted Ladies and Green-banded Swallowtails and, most commonly of late, Garden Inspectors. An occasional dragonfly flashes blue and frantic and metallic along the windowsills. Wasps of various kinds – the Polistes Paper wasps who build their clustered nests under my porch eaves, the Potter wasp who leaves her little amphora of mud stuck to a window pane, and the leisurely but menacing Yellowjacket, legs all a-dangle – an imported foreigner, like me. Flies, of course: big galleon-like flies off the neighbours goose-pen, down to the tiny fruit-flies hovering over that neglected banana, and the soft little triangular guys, Psychodid Moth Flies. who favour the toilet-bowl.

Philoliche aethiopica - I think.

Finally, one will never escape the ants, that most accomplished of all terrestrial societies. There is an occasional raid on my honey by a couple of glowing Spotted sugar-ants, but mostly it’s the little guys – the mop-it-ups – who find their way with uncanny speed to anything tasty or dead and swiftly devour and cart it away. On at least two corners of the house, trains of Argentine ants travel up and down, in greater numbers when it’s about to rain, servicing heaven knows what vast, diffuse cities beneath my roof and riddling my foundations. Not termites, thankfully, though every so often a suspicious drift of light brown shavings of something structural accumulates on the edge of the bath...

Chequered ladybird

So many more, from the giant red-and-black locusts to the powdery Ctenolipisma fishmoths that secretly devour the spines of my books – all feeding and breeding and building and swarming and, like the krill in the ocean, being in themselves the vital substrate of nourishment for hundreds of species above and around them. Apart from such ecological utility, though, so many of them are simply beautiful, and beautifully complex. Living with and alongside them all, keeping confrontation and damage to a minimum, could be a model for living with all kinds of vital wildlife.

*****