No 152 - Living poetry in Southern Africa 3: Presences of the San

 

Rock paintings at Salem

A fascinating article appeared recently in the South African Sunday Times (26 January 2025). It reported that certain self-styled “Khoisan community” leaders, were being accused of stealing people’s money, contributions they’d elicited against promises of a mythical “reparations payout”. One such upstart claimed “she had annexed the whole of Southern Africa”, presumably on the grounds that Khoisan once did inhabit most of the subcontinent.

But who were and are the “Khoisan”? There’s no agreement about how coherent a culture ‘they’ were at any point in history; no agreement on what to name them (Khoekhoen, San, Bushmen, Abatwa?); no agreement on how to delineate such a community today; no agreement on who can claim legitimate leadership. There is an argument that, since the ‘Bushmen’ were subjected to thoroughgoing genocidal attacks by colonial invaders, they are entitled to some form of “reparations”. One might also argue that reparation need not involve or be confined to the financial, but ought to extend to the more intangible but equally vital restoration of some kind of cultural dignity, of historical identity. A sub-question that arises then is this: What does our poetry have to say about the Bushman, about their identity and belonging? Can it contribute to a form of “reparation”?

Now the Bushmen (let’s settle on this name for now) have been the subject of a massive amount of anthropological attention – some horribly exploitative, distortive or romanticised, more recently much more respectful and restorative. And in our literatures, the figure of the Bushman appears very frequently indeed. As far as I know, no one has done a comprehensive survey of this literary presence.

I got into studying the Bushman by a somewhat scenic route. Round about 2000, I began in my academic research and teaching to get into ecological concerns. It had long been clear that the global ecological emergency is the crisis of our times.  I mean, almost all our worries are going to seem trivial in comparison to the damage being wrought upon the planet’s living systems: its pervasive poisoning and depletion, its entangled collapses in biodiversity, soil viability, clean air, potable water, survivable weather and temperatures. It is blindingly evident that we cannot go on in our present numbers, destroying our own habitable systems and wielding economies of rampant extractivism.

Now one common move in the discourses of eco-dissent has been to turn to various indigenous or precapitalist societies for a counter-model: the Native Americans, the Amazonian Indians, and of course the Bushmen. Such peoples, the narrative goes, lived and sometimes still live in knowledgeable ‘harmony’ with nature, spiritually integrated with it, inflicting minimal damage upon it, drawing on deep animal wisdoms, and so on. Pre-eminently, the desert-dwelling Bushmen, minimalist and hardy, with their wonderful rock art, were what poet Douglas Livingstone called “symbiotic man”.

Of course, they were not all, and not always, either harmonious or desert-dwelling. As the rock art shows, they – small groups speaking maybe 200 often mutually unintelligible languages – lived right across the subcontinent in every imaginable environment. Here in the Eastern Cape, at the foot of rock faces on which the poet Don Maclennan tested my vertical nerves, we would find those little ochre depictions of flying men, bows and arrows and animals. Maclennan would write a whole collection of short poems entitled Rock Paintings at Salem, puzzling at their hidden, somehow ineffably poetic, meanings.

The rock art remains mysterious partly because, as everybody knows, its creators were practically eradicated by incoming white settlers, along with the wildlife. Bushmen were wildlife back then, “vermin” to be hunted down or, if they survived, enslaved. The early Eastern Cape poet, Thomas Pringle, participated in some of those lethal hunts in the 1820s. When he mentions, in his poem “Afar in the Desert”, riding along with a nameless, wordless Bushman boy running by his side, he is describing a captive slave. To be fair, though, Pringle was for his time a comparatively enlightened liberal, and at least tried to see things from the defiant indigenous perspective, in his poem, “Song of the Wild Bushman”:

[…] I am lord of the Desert Land,

   And I will not leave my bounds,

To crouch beneath the Christian’s hand,

   And kennel with his hounds:

To be a hound, and watch the flocks,

   For the cruel White Man’s gain […]

 

Some later Europeans also took a more sympathetic interest in the few shreds of Bushman society that survived. Pre-eminent among them was German linguist Wilhelm Bleek who in the 1870s, along with his daughter Dorothea and niece Lucy Lloyd, compiled an extraordinary 12,000 pages of testimony from /Xam Bushman prisoners in Cape Town. The Bleek-Lloyd Archive, now fully available online, has proved to be utterly bewitching and fruitful for a slew of writers, from Laurens van der Post in the 1950s to Pippa Skotnes seventy years later. There’s now a huge secondary literature around the Archive, its provenance and problems, its textural beauties and undeniable richness of linguistics and lore.

Julia Martin, for one, writes a lovely chapter on encountering the Archive, in her book A Millimetre of Dust. And the father of her husband Michael Cope, über-editor Jack Cope (1913-1991), was among the first to publish his own poetic ‘versions’ of selections from the Bleek-Lloyd records. He has been followed by, among others, Stephen Watson (Return of the Moon, 1991), Harold Farmer, Alan James (The First Bushman’s Path, 2001), and Antjie Krog (The Stars Say Tsau!, 2004). Each poet makes a unique selection, though they sometimes overlap; each brings to the material a slightly different sensibility and stylistic quirk. For these are not merely extracts, nor strictly translations (since no-one any longer speaks /Xam): they are ‘versions’, carved out of the raw ore of the testimonies and shaped on the page into artefacts that look like ‘poems’ in a recognisably modern, publishable sort of way.

You can probably smell the ethical dilemmas from where you sit. Is this sort of thing restorative or exploitative? Does it illuminate or distort? What do all these white writers think they’re doing? Are they assuaging residual racial guilt for the earlier genocide; or valorising commonalities between wildly disparate cultures; or reiterating the old prurient anthropological interest in ‘them’ precisely because they are so different – or, like van der Post and many since, using them as an exemplary lever against the ecologically destructive, alienating tendencies in industrial modernity? Elements of all these, perhaps – and the poets are keenly aware of the issues; Alan James discusses them at great length in his book.

For now, as an example, let’s just take a glance at a single piece – a fragment, really, since it was not originally conceived as a poem by either the informant Dia-kwain or by Wilhelm Bleek.

 This is how Bleek translated and re-arranged it for his 1911 distillation, Specimens of Bushman Folklore (a facsimile also available online):

People were those who

Broke for me the string.

Therefore

The place () became like this to me,

On account of it,

Because the string was that which broke for me.

Therefore

The place does not feel to me,

As the place used to feel to me,

On account of it.

For,

The place feels as if it stood open before me,

() because the string has broken for me.

Therefore,

The place does not feel pleasant to me,

On account of it.

 

How reliable is the translation? Like much of the archive, it would have been translated first into Dutch – the only language shared by both the German Bleek and the /Xam, who had already been overrun by, and had been sometimes working on, Dutch sheep-farms – and then translated again into English. Slippery, to say the least. This Dutch element especially intrigued the Afrikaans Antjie Krog, who produced both English and Afrikaans versions of The Stars Say Tsau! In the English, she reproduced fairly faithfully Bleek’s version of “The Broken String”; it was an example of how the testimonies often “fell naturally into poetry”, she said. There seemed at times to be this startling correspondence between the tenor of the /Xam fragments and the elusive, loose quality of the modernist ‘Western’ lyric. At the same time, the awkwardness of the grammar seemed to capture the very quality of broken-ness that is the poem’s subject.

Stephen Watson did something rather different in Return of the Moon. He retained some of the repetitiveness of the original, and the slightly archaic diction, but changed the format, the way the lines break:

Because

of a people,

because of others,

other people

who came

breaking

the string for me,

the earth

is not earth,

this place is

a place now

changed for me …

 

And so on. Watson literally strings the poem out; its form on the page mimicks its own content. He justifies the lines to the left, rather than centred, as Bleek had done. Watson also introduces telling changes of diction. The “people” who break the string are now explicitly “others”; a specific place becomes a generalised “earth”. Clearly, all this gives it a different feel, a refurbished meaning. This new angle is implicit in Watson’s own note to the poem: he claims it is “probably the most powerful single record of /Xam life losing its coherence under the impact of other encroaching cultures”.

This is a reading of the fragment that began I think with van der Post and has been amplified by many others. Neil Bennun takes it for the title of a whole book. In his 2024 poem “Strangeling”, Eastern Cape poet Brian Walter expands the image to include all manner of displaced or discomfited peoples: “So I am disempowered, the string/ broken, empty of words, meaning/ love// as words ring in the void” (Of Love and Bone, Ecca Poets).

The original piece was in fact about a single incident. Apparently a /Xam rainmaker named Nuin-kui-ten, going about at night “in the form of a lion” (whatever that entails in the /Xam mind), was shot (by whom is unclear, though a “Boer” was blamed) and consequently died. The piece laments that individual death: a particular connection, a “string”, has thus been broken. And as other testimonies show, the image of the “string” or “thong” was especially used to figure the connection of the shaman with the “rain-bull”. It’s arguably as much an environmental as a personal loss. Nevertheless, it has been repeatedly expanded to become symbolic of a whole culture’s downfall.

There’s so much more we could say about all this. But let’s end by returning to the central question. Is this ‘string’ of white poetry a legitimate, heartfelt and valid illumination, however partial, of a fantastically complex culture and language that would otherwise vanish entirely? Or is it symptomatic of a kind of pseudo-nostalgia, an anxious desire by relatively recent invaders to truly belong here in the deeply integrated way those autochthonous, or First Peoples did? Or do we take comfort in the opinion of /Kabbo, Wilhelm Bleek’s chief informant, who was glad to see his story/songs, or kukummi, migrate into print, since all such stories, he said, “float on the wind”, and belong to no one?

 

If you’re interested, I’ve written more extensively on this material elsewhere, including:   ‘//Kabbo’s Challenge: Transculturation and the question of a South African ecocriticism’, Journal of Literary Studies. 23/3, 252-270; ‘”Now strangers walk in that place”: Antjie Krog, modernity, and the making of //Kabbo’s story’, Current Writing 19/2, 49-71, reprinted in Judith Lutge Coullie and Andries Visagie, eds. Antjie Krog: An ethics of body and otherness. UKZN Press 2014:215-240; and a chapter in my Seven Southern African Poets and the Natural World (Atelier, 2024).

 

 

 

No 154 - Jock of the Bushveld: A multispecies reading

Percy FitzPatrick's classic dog story has come under some 'postcolonial' scrutiny in recent years, but I think there's an unexpected degree of subtlety and interest in it - especially regarding its many non-dog animals. I might just work this conference presentation into something more comprehensive, but FYI here is the paper. 

JOCK OF THE BUSHVELD: A multispecies reading 

Literature, Heritage and Ecology Conference, Makhanda, 2026 

Percy FitzPatrick’s Jock of the Bushveld (1907) looms large in South Africa’s literary history, though I don’t know how widely it’s read these days. In an interview with Stephen Gray in 1970, Guy Butler called it “an innocuous, pleasant book” [Contrast 24, 105] – a disappointingly shallow reading. Such superficial enthusiasm persists in the general public, of course: a good example is the recent video about Jock on the YouTube series “Lost History Files”. ‘Doctor Philip’ the narrator gushes on single-mindedly about the “pluck and loyalty” of the little dog and his touristic persistence in the landscape of the Lowveld. But he barely penetrates the surface. Of course Jock is the story’s primary non-human character, and I will say one or two things about his depiction, but my question for today is broader: What about all the other animals in the story? For they are ubiquitous and, I suggest, foundational to it in a number of ways. 

I’m taking as springboard a quotation from Neel Ahuja’s 1987 article, “Postcolonial critique in a multispecies world”, in order to begin to delineate an “ecology of representation” that 

trace[s] the ways in which the historically situated zones of contact between peoples and nonhuman species create the conditions of possibility for semiotic activities in defined fields of social power. [559]

To bring this down to earth and the case of Jock of the Bushveld: the Lowveld of the 1880s provides the contact zone out of which FitzPatrick is enabled to write an animal-rich novel, in relation to the existing fields of late British-Imperial norms and dynamics of social power. Those social dynamics include the business of transporting goods and chattels from Delagoa Bay to the burgeoning mines around Barberton, the enterprise in which the unnamed narrator is engaged. 

As a merely practical baseline, it’s clear that the humans depicted in the narrative are one hundred-per-cent dependent on both wild and domesticated animals for their very survival: for food (their diet being largely meat), protection, companionship, entertainment, transport, traction, hides for leather clothing, shoes, hats, riems, whips and more. I want to go further, though, to suggest that the animals themselves wield a certain agential influence; they are more than mere objects or victims within the narrative. In a fully multispecies conceptualisation, they need to be incorporated within our definition of “social power”. I think a comprehensive understanding of the novel is impossible without this. 

Let’s begin with three ways in which animals influence the structure of the novel itself. Firstly, of course, it’s held together by the life, from birth to death, of the dog Jock – a biography of sorts, or if you like a bildungsroman, since the education of the dog and of the callow narrator are deeply similar, almost interchangeable. Stephen Gray reads this as a case of Freudian projection, the dog as a mere cipher for the human’s imagined Anglo-imperial virtues – but speaking as one raised by a preternaturally effective dog-trainer, I find FitzPatrick’s portrayal of the relationship’s development entirely persuasive and authentically sensitive. 

A second structural feature is dictated by the smallest but arguably most consequential of animals: the tsetse fly. The novel also attends at points to ants, bees, mantises and locusts, but it is mosquitoes and tsetse fly (and their attendant diseases) that dictated (in both real life and the fiction) when and where the transport-riders could operate at all. “The fly” essentially confined operations to a particular route, ecosystem, setting, and time-frame (the novel concentrates on just three short winter seasons). Moreover, tsetse-borne sleeping-sickness finally does in the narrator’s trek-oxen, bankrupts him, and obliges him to leave, which indirectly leads to Jock’s unfortunate demise. 

Cross-hatching that narrative trajectory and the geo-historical setting is a markedly episodic structural device. This is evident just in several chapter titles: The impala stampede; The kudu bull; The leopard and the baboons; Buffalo, bushfire and wild dogs; Monkeys and wildebeest; The old crocodile; The fighting baboon. Interspersed throughout are also invertebrate encounters – spider and scorpion – and reptilian – tortoise, snake, lagavaan – and avian – partridge, chicken, guinea fowl, vulture, parrot, go-way bird, honey-guide. Don’t forget that one of Jock’s earliest educative encounters is with fowls, a comical incident tragically mirrored at the end, as he is shot believed to be raiding a chicken-pen. 

But mostly it’s the mammals that command attention: goat, donkey, ox, horse, mouse, rat, hare, lion, ‘tiger’, ‘wolf’, hyena, monkey, duiker, steenbuck, rietbuck, sable, and more The concentration on mammals is understandable since, as FitzPatrick himself said, the book is primarily a “hunting tale”. Jock exists largely to aid in the hunt. Now, hunting, and late imperial hunting literature – Cumming, Bryden, Selous and others – naturally generates an episodic structure. Each hunt is necessarily short, sharp and, usually, lethal. There is no overarching teleology; the bloodlust is its own justification; the kill is the end; we must gallop on to the next helter-skelter attempt. Further, within each of these mini-narratives, each move, stalk, stumble, run, manoeuvre, mishap and shot, must be related in exquisite detail, as a military historian might detail every movement in an unfolding battle. In one chapter, for example, it takes a full ten pages for the dog and his human to bring down a kudu. I personally find this pretty tedious; and indeed, FitzPatrick shows he’s aware of this narrative danger: “To tell all that happened would be to tell the same old story many times over” [154]. 

And after the hunt? The animal is chopped up and its bits tossed into the communal, constantly bubbling campfire pot. Around that fire, repeatedly, the transport-riders and other human hangers-on gather to eat – and to tell stories. The hunt, the trophy, is pointless without the fireside telling of it. The consumption of animals and of stories is virtually coterminous. FitzPatrick captures this essential nexus on the first page of the first chapter: he intends to portray a “hunter’s paradise [where] the ‘wildest tales were true’ … men passed to and fro and swapped lies …” [14-15]. While proclaiming unvarnished truth for his own tale (also a staple gambit of hunters’ accounts), our narrator frequently, usually with indulgent humour, upbraids his fellow-adventurers for their inventions and exaggerations. Jock of the Bushveld is nothing if not a story about story-telling. 

So FitzPatrick was responding simultaneously, integrally, to both animal agencies and the semiotic norms and opportunities characteristic of antecedent literatures: hunters’ accounts pre-eminently, but also explorers’ travelogues; popular animal stories for children such as those by Jack London and Rudyard Kipling (Kipling advised FitzPatrick during the writing); and imperial adventures such as those by Rider Haggard (also present in Southern Africa and publishing around that time). FitzPatrick was, as his biographers Duminy and Guest note, “very much the product of his age”: he “accepted, unquestioned, … many of the ideas that were then current in the English-speaking world, [and] many of the habits and prejudices of the class it was his good fortune to join” (241). FitzPatrick chose consistently to champion an idealistic vision of the British Empire and its avowed “civilising mission”, and infused his novel with its imagined “manly and excellent” character-ideals of “fearlessness, determination, modesty, generosity, duty, and absolute straightness”. That’s from a Rhodesia Herald eulogy to the hunter Frederick Courtney Selous – one of FitzPatrick’s models in both life and writing. The ideal Imperial Man, in this context, required a paradoxically ethics-free wilderness, replete with wild animals to kill, in order to become this ideal ethical self. The point here is that FitzPatrick wasn’t merely the passive amanuensis of animal agents, Imperial propaganda, or generic precedents. FitzPatrick chose. After all, it’s not as if dissenting ideas were not available (a comparison between FitzPatrick and his close contemporary Olive Schreiner might prove illuminating here). 

So the story becomes telling not only for its choice of contents, but for what it leaves out. Seventeen years after that interview with Butler, Stephen Gray mounted a characteristically acerbic attack on the novel, claiming, among other things, that the novel is “suspiciously selective”. Picking up on this, I’d say there are at least three major elisions in the book. 

First, the contextual horrors of the migrant-labour system to the mines. Indigenous Africans are largely skipped over, and where they are presented at any length, are treated with racist derision, including animalisation. 

Secondly, women. This is very much the imperial frontier manosphere: men teach the boy to be a man; and the pup Jock learns the same values in tandem. 

The third elision is of the contemporaneous extirpation of almost all wildlife, a kind of genocide (faunicide?) in which the narrator is gaily engaged, though avowedly taking only “something for the larder and having some sport” [i.e. killing for killing’s sake]. Obviously FitzPatrick wants to transport his readers into a kind of pre-colonial idyll, at times ‘naturally’ dangerous but also liberating, featuring a bottomless wildlife cornucopia in which ecological and societal damage need not be considered. In Michael Brett’s words, Jock of the Bushveld is a “profoundly nostalgic” account of a “paradise lost, although the author appears blissfully unaware of this reality”. I’m not sure that one can be both “nostalgic” and “unaware”; or that blissful ignorance is compatible with the “thinly veiled ideological purposes” Brett goes on to reveal [Brett 2020:2]. After all, by 1906-7, when FitzPatrick is writing the novel, he could hardly have been unaware that the Great White Hunter contemporaries he says he admires had already for some time been lamenting the scarcity of big game occasioned in part by their own cavalier destructiveness – in precisely the borderlands of what would become first Sabie and then Kruger game reserves, set up precisely to conserve those same species for the hunting fraternity. Multiple ironies lurk there, and the novel, almost despite itself, provides evidence of the inner contradictions in our conservation history. 

For one thing, FitzPatrick (and/or his narrator) does not entirely excise an awareness of the rifle’s destructiveness. Just one example must suffice here, concerning trophy-hunting:

 [A]ll were hunters of a sort, but the great hunters – the hunters of big game – were apart; we were the smaller fry, there to admire and to imitate. Trophies, carried back with pride or by force of habit, lay scattered / about, neglected and forgotten, … Horns and skins lay in jumbled heaps in the yards or sheds of the big trading stores. The splendid horns of the Koodoo and Sable, and a score of others …, could be seen nailed up in crude adornment of the roughest walls, and then unnoticed and forgotten! [14-15]

 There is certainly some sense of the terrible waste here, indicated partly by the words “splendid” and “beautiful”. This broaches the question of why and how humans find some animals beautiful and others repugnant is a deeply puzzling philosophical issue, and Jock of the Bushveld provides much material for thought here. Even among trophy-hunters, a certain aesthetic appreciation of the animal is frequently expressed, its very aliveness providing the thrill. Philosopher Holmes Rolston III argues that one primary aesthetic value of wild animals is that they exemplify “spontaneous form in motion” [Holmes 187]. Then the hunter snuffs out that same life, and a different static aesthetic is attached to the subsequent display of stuffed trophies. But there are many other criteria for animal beauty, of which FitzPatrick provides examples. Here’s just one. Late in the novel the narrator encounters “a magnificent waterbuck bull”: 

He was so close that I could see the waves and partings in his heavy coat; the rise and fall in his flanks as he breathed; the ruff on his shaggy bearded throat, that gave such an air of grandeur to the head; the noble carriage, as with head held high and slightly turned to windward he sniffed the breeze from the valley, the nostrils, mobile and sensitive, searching for the least hint of danger; and the eye, large and full and soft, luminous with watchful intelligence…. There was no thought of shooting: it was a moment of supreme enjoyment. Just to watch him: that was enough. [444] 

It’s finely observed, not just for spontaneous motion, but for its textures, colours, stance, and rhythms of breathing life. Most interesting to me here is the notice given to the eye. In a number of instances the text affords us this sense of the animal gazing back at the narrator (and therefore at the reader), the sense of an independent, individualised centre of consciousness [see Wendy Woodward’s The Animal Gaze]. The eye of course is embedded in a face. Pre-empting Levinas and Derrida, FitzPatrick several times highlights the face as an important element in cross-species communication and communality – and not only with domesticated and more readily individualised animals such as the dog or a particular trek ox, but also wild individuals. Another instance involves the most human-like available simian, a vervet monkey: 

[A]way up among the thick dark foliage I saw a little old face looking down at me: the quick restless eyes were watchfully on the move … face and attitude together a vivid expression of surprise and indignation combined with breathless interest. [360] 

Some might regard this as unwarranted anthropomorphism; I regard it more as an expression of a perceived or nascent kinship. It also, perhaps, evidences a paradox noted by Holmes Rolston: that appreciation of wildlife can involve an unsettling combination, recognising kinship and difference simultaneously. 

There are many, many more examples of animal influences in Jock of the Bushveld, but I hope I’ve been able to indicate the possibility for delineating a multispecies “ecosystem of representation” in which all the elements of context, human and non-human animal agents alike, are most intimately webbed together.

 ----------------------------

No 153 - Today's "Grapes of Wrath"

 For no particular reason, I recently picked up John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath. It was first published in 1939, and I last read it maybe 40 years ago. Now, passage after passage leaps out at me as illuminating certain constants in American social dynamics that we can see repeating themselves today.

I experience afresh the gut-wrenching tale of an Oklahoma family, the Joads, escaping their Midwest dustbowl smallholding, not only because of the drought but because they are literally bulldozed out of their homes by massive, impersonal, uncaring corporations (sound familiar?). They become refugees: harassed, exploited and vilified at every turn as they try desperately to find work on Californian fruit-farms (sound familiar?). Yet the farms completely depend on such seasonal workers to operate at all. Meagre rewards beckon, but death and marginalisation are more often the ‘fruits’. And what is such a situation likely to yield, Steinbeck argues, but eventual wrath? In between yards of dialogue in ‘Okie’ argot, authorial interpolations constitute a coruscating critique of capitalistic practice at the frontiers of poverty. Plus ça change…

Here are some choice passages (references are to my Pan edition).

 

. “And some of the [new] owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said: The Bank – or the Company – needs – wants – insists – must have – as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.” [p.36]

Steinbeck is wise enough not to homogenise the oppressors, and the psychological insight is acute. The overall situation has only ramified: for ‘mathematics’ read AI; for ‘Company’ read Silicon Valley, or ‘the internet’, weaving nets we must all be affected by, trapped into using it, without fully understanding how any of it works.

 

. “The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labour unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes … The causes lie deep and simply – the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times … hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times … If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself.” [p.159-61]

In other words, Steinbeck anticipated, from radical inequality would arise only violence, a revolution, a civil war. As history has shown a hundred times over, and will certainly do so again: just multiply Steinbeck’s notional figures by a factor of 100. And if you don’t address the “oranges of the problem” (as the Tangerine Tosser put it recently), consequences are likely to be terrible.

 

. “… And with all the wars – God knows what price cotton will bring. Don’t they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms? Get enough wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling.” [p.37]

And who exactly is making money out of all the present warmongering (ask Francesca Albanese)?

 

. “Well, California’s a big state.

            It ain’t that big. The whole United States ain’t that big. … There ain’t room enough, for your kind an’ my kind, for rich and poor together in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat. Whyn’t you go back where you come from?” [p.128]

There are the constants of American history: the classism, the othering and blanket denigration, the selfishness, the exclusion – even of white fellow-citizens. At other points in the novel, the immigrants are denigrated as animal, as a plague, as criminal, as pollution, as disease. Sound familiar? The ‘colour’ of today’s asylum-seekers may be different, racism more paramount, but the dynamic is eerily similar.

            The hopeful riposte is the hoary old American myth:

 

            “This is a free country. Fella can go where he wants.

            “That’s what you think! Ever hear of the border patrol on the California line? Police from Los Angeles – stopped you bastards – turned you back. Says, if you can’t buy no real estate we don’t want you. Says, got a driver’s licence? Let’s see it. Tore it up. Says you can’t come in without no driver’s licence.”

The borders may have shifted to the Rio Grande– or maybe there are no longer any borders – but attitudes repeat, and ICE’s methods, their disdain for documentation and bodily integrity alike, are not new. Nor was it new even in the Dustbowl years of the novel: one character is old enough to recall much the same treatment being inflicted on the Cherokee, iconic of the continent’s original inhabitants. "Land of the free" – sure, but only for some; giving the lie to the constant refrain by every party these days, that “the American people”, subscribing to “American values”, are somehow monolithic. Steinbeck shows there has never been such unity or agreement, however noble the ideal.

 

. “[W]hen I hear a business man talkin’ about service, I wonder who’s getting’ screwed. Fella in business got to lie an’ cheat, but he calls it somepin else. That’s what’s important. You go steal that tire an’ you’re a thief, but he [a salesman] tried to steal your four dollars for a busted tire. They call that sound business.” [p.129]

Time and again in the novel, the Joads encounter what Steinbeck suggests are fundamentals of capitalistic ‘business’: issuing false advertising, screwing the vulnerable if you can, buying a car for ten dollars and selling it for seventy-five, believing that mendacity is both necessary and acceptable. Anything different, independent or egalitarian (’socialist’ in current Republicans’ absurdly frightened characterisation), such as the so-called ‘Government Camp’ the Joads discover, is subjected to police harassment and violent raids by sponsored thugs. Sound familiar? As one character says: “I’m learning one thing good … If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to poor people.” Don’t bother knocking at Elon Musk’s door.

 

I could go on. If you haven’t done so before, do read The Grapes of Wrath. It’s long, and offers no hopeful solutions, but it’s profoundly humane, affecting and timeless.

Photo:Wiki.

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

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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.

*****