I’m probably always
pursuing too many ideas at once, too many interests. Occasionally two
independent strains of enthusiasm will intersect and spark something
intriguing. I try, for example, to keep something of an eye on the literature
coming out of my homeland, Zimbabwe. At the same time, colleagues here at
Rhodes University and at the University of Stellenbosch have cooked up a
conference, with hopefully a book of edited essays to follow, on dogs in
southern African literature. We hope to fill an obvious gap in local
animal-studies scholarship; I’ve alluded in previous blogs to how pervasive the
presence of dogs is, yet there’s been little sustained study. The conference,
taking place at Stellenbosch next fortnight, will begin to address the neglect.
So I decided to
address the two interests at once, and present a paper on the presence of dogs
in some recent Zimbabwean fiction which deals with the post-2000 ‘land reform’
process. Two novels in particular – Graham Lang’s Place of Birth and Ian Holding’s Unfeeling – incorporate a strong canine presence. Dogs are, in the
first instance, guards and companions, especially to the white farmers’
youngsters who are protagonists in these stories. Some dogs accompany these
youths as they hunt little game across their farms; other packs of dogs
accompany black youths doing much the same. Above all, though, the dogs are
victims of political processes and associated violence in which they have no
agency. In both novels, the white farmers’ dogs are slaughtered as violent land
take-overs unfold: they become ciphers, stand-ins, symbols, for all the land
dispossession and racist abuse local peoples feel to be the driving dynamic of
their recent history. The animals generally are also soft targets, both in the
sense of being unable to defend themselves and as a vector for emotional vulnerability:
killing them can strike at the heart of whites’ affection and psychological
well-being. In fact, I have entitled my conference paper, “Auntie Marsha, they’ve
killed the dogs” – the first post-attack cry from Holding’s traumatised young
protagonist.
These novels are far
from the first to include a canine element in the Rhodesia-Zimbabwe land story.
In the 1970s, Laurens van der Post wrote a somewhat prescient novel of black
military take-over and white flight, A
Far-Off Place, and then its sequel, A
Story like the Wind. The fleeing young farmer-boy protagonist, Francois, is
importantly accompanied by a super-supportive dog Hintza (named after the Xhosa
chieftain). Hintza is, perhaps inevitably, a Rhodesian Ridgeback.
Someone mentioned
that an even earlier writer, Doris Lessing, had written a dog-related story. I’m
not sure I’ve discovered the story in question, but I’ve been struck, in
re-reading Lessing’s 1951 collection, This
was the Old Chief’s Country, of the frequency of animal victims in
them. Several are related in some detail:
animal presences were seen as important to a fluid and fragmentary white
community searching for an ethical centre. The examples I find illustrate perhaps
three fundamental, and intricately interlocking, facets of white belonging on the land: the defended
homestead; agriculture; and the wilderness.
In the first aspect,
dogs feature regularly as guardians of the rural farmhouse – and suffer for it.
Lessing’s story “Little Tembi” foreshadows much later white Rhodesian fiction,
including the fate of the dogs in Lang and Holding. Tembi is a Shona orphan
partly supported by a farming family; but the subtle abuses he suffers he
avenges by stooping to theft. So the family buys two large fierce dogs. The
wife, Jane, resents being
greeted on her way
from house to storerooms by the growling
of hostile dogs who treated everyone, black and white, as an enemy .... They
bit everyone who came near the house, and Jane was afraid for her children.
However, it was not more than three weeks after they were bought that they were
found lying stretched in the sun, quite dead, foam at their mouths and their
eyes glazing. They had been poisoned ...
Such are the hazards,
Jane’s husband Willie grumbles, of living in “this damned country”. Of course, many
whites continued to live there, sometimes bound by an undeniable love.
Part of that love
seemed to be for the activity of agriculture itself – the second aspect. Here too
Lessing was both unsparing in her depictions of grimy and fractious white
domestic lives, and generously adventurous in her portrayals of black characters.
Some of her Rhodesian contemporaries vilified her for it. Her portrait of a cattle driver, ‘The Long One’,
in her story “The Nuisance”, is a subtle concoction of admiration and ethical
doubts:
In his own line he
was an artist – his line being cattle. He handled oxen with a delicate
brutality that was fascinating and horrifying to watch. ...It was like watching
a circus act; there was the same suspense in it: it was a matter of pride to
him that he did not need to use the whip. This did not by any means imply that
he wished to spare the beasts pain, not at all; he liked to feed his pride on
his own skill. Alongside the double line of ponderous cattle that strained
across acres of heavy clods, danced, raved and screamed the Long One, with his
twelve-foot-long lash circling in black patterns over their backs; and though
his threatening yells were the yells of an inspired madman, and the heavy whip
could be heard clear across the farm, so that on a moonlight night when they
were ploughing late it sounded like the crack and whine of a rifle, never did
the dangerous metal-tipped lash so much as touch a hair of their hides. If you
examined the oxen as they were outspanned, they might be exhausted, driven to
staggering-point, so that my father had to remonstrate, but there was never a
mark on them.
In this situation,
the lines between cultural norms and compassion, between cruelty and mere
utilisation, are blurry.
And thirdly, the
wilderness, as threat or refuge, always looms on the edge of the domesticated
fields and gardens. It can be full of
its own, independent violence: in “A Sunrise on the Veld” the boy-focaliser
comes upon a buck being consumed alive by ants. He doesn’t bring himself to
shoot the dying animal, since “this is how life goes on, by living things dying
in anguish”, and he is overwhelmed by a “swelling feeling of rage and misery
and protest”. So some characters seem to express that protest by exercising a
countervailing compassion upon wild animal life; others respond by being
indifferent to it. This is the difference between Major Carruthers, ethical
English landowner, and Van Heerden, rough Afrikaner potential employee, in the
story “The Second Hut”. The shabby quarters Carruthers offers Van Heerden have
been colonised by a spider, “vast and glittering, shaking gently, glaring at
them with small red eyes, from the centre of the web. Van Heerden did what
Major Carruthers would have died rather than do: he tore the web across with
his bare hands, crushed the spider between his fingers ... ‘It will do fine’ he
announced.”
The ethical split
starkly represented here, symbolic of a certain racism, is captured within a
single character in the story “Leopard George”. The young farmer George finds
himself having to hunt down a man-eating leopard. The build-up is related with incremental
delicacy, the outcome with wrenching ambivalence:
 |
| Image by Cindy Dardagan Britz |
The low,
ground-creeping thing showed a green glitter of eyes, and a sheen of moonlight
shifted with the moving muscles in the flank. When the shape stilled and
flattened itself for a spring, George lifted his rifle and fired. There was a
coughing noise, and the shape stayed still. George lowered the rifle and looked
at it, almost puzzled, and stood still. There lay the enemy, dead, not a couple
of paces from him. Sprawled almost at his feet was the leopard, its body still
tensing and convulsing in death. Anger sprang up again in George: it had all
been so easy, so easy! Again he looked in wonder at his rifle; then he kicked
the unresisting flesh of the leopard, first with a kind of curiosity, then
brutally. Finally he smashed the butt of the rifle, again and again, in hard,
thudding blows, against the head. There was no resistance, no sound, nothing.
Such killing is, in
the end, utterly empty. Inflicting death on the animal, in the end, reveals
nothing but the emptiness within ourselves.
******
