Most mornings for the last fifteen years or so I have gazed
out over the coastal plain, the sweeping triangle between Grahamstown,
Kenton-on-Sea and Port Alfred. To my right the skyline is formed by
Featherstone Ridge, beneath which rises one of the main sources of the Kowie
River. The river curls through the hills below, via sacred pools, game farms,
the Waters Meeting nature reserve near Bathurst, pineapple and cattle farms, to
its egress into the Indian Ocean at Port Alfred, whose lights I can see at
night, off to my left. Even further left, almost due east, are the hilltops
above the Blaauwkrantz River, another tributary of the Kowie; across one of the
Blaauwkrantz gorges ran the railway bridge which dramatically and fatally
collapsed in 1911. And at my back, just
over the ridge, is Grahamstown (Makhanda), through which wavers another source,
disparagingly known as the Kowie Ditch, so polluted and cramped a crease it has
become. At is highest reach, where it crawls through reeds and Rhodes
University’s playing fields, it was known in my student days as Kotch Creek –
apparently the spot of choice for barking up the effects of one’s drunkenness.
All this – roughly the district once known as Albany – is
the purview of Jacklyn Cock’s recently launched new book, Writing the Ancestral River: A biography of the Kowie, published by
Wits University Press. Jacklyn Cock is a sociologist with a distinguished list
of publications. She made a name for herself as a champion of social justice
with Maids & Madams (1990), a
study of domesticity, race-relations and womanhood that during the apartheid
years was daringly progressive. She
moved on to focus on links between gender and militarisation, and on environmental affairs, editing with Eddie Koch Going Green, a 1992 collection of essays
on South Africa’s parlous ecological state. Later Cock published The War Against Ourselves (2007), a
powerful study of how environmental degradation and the oppression of poor and
racialised people have so often gone hand in hand.
Cock brings these approaches to bear in Writing the Ancestral River, though it’s a much more personal book.
It’s personal because this corner of the Eastern Cape is her own ancestral territory: a scion of the legend-encrusted
1820 Settlers, she was raised here, and her affection for the river, its
history and its wildlife sparks through frequently. Often touted as exemplary
of the Settlers’ enterprise and tenacity, even moral worth, was Jacklyn’s own
great-great-grandfather, William Cock .
Jacklyn’s research forced her to face the dark side of
Settler history on two fronts. Firstly, as we have become hyper-aware in the
post-1994 era, this region hosted decades of violent occupation and open war,
followed by the more covert war of apartheid. The Kowie catchment area had been
inhabited, perhaps for millennia, by Bushmen, whose paintings still enliven
rock faces throughout these hills, Khoi herders, and at least a century of
Xhosa agriculturalists. Cock economically
rubbishes the hoary, self-justifying
myth that the English and the Xhosa arrived simultaneously, and/or that
the land was conveniently empty and wild, just longing to be tamed, improved
and redeemed from darkness. In fact, of course, the Xhosa were forcibly evicted
in successive waves of firepower and disease – our own Hundred Years War. In this, Cock is drawing on the work of a
number of revisionist histories, including Clifton Crais’ The Making of the Colonial Order, Ben Maclennan’s A Proper Degree of Terror, and Noel
Mostert’s monumental Frontiers. She
draws heavily on the recent work of Julie Wells on Makhanda, the Xhosa leader
responsible for the 1819 attack on the embryonic settlement of Graham’s Town
(which Cock relates in some detail). William Cock played a crucial role in
subsequent military operations and scorched-earth clearances, directly and
indirectly by supplying the armies with food and goods – at a handsome profit –
so he became Port Alfred’s “most distinguished son”.
Secondly, William Cock was central to the environmental
damage wrought by nineteenth-century settler enterprise. Settler firearms
rapidly obliterated almost all wild animals, and settler agriculture gradually
obliterated most forest and thicket. William Cock’s role was to promote Port
Alfred’s ambitions to become a major port by dredging out the mouth of the
Kowie, thus altering the flow, and damaging the health of the estuary forever. Jacklyn devotes a lot of space to this effort, and equally to the later
great modification of the estuary and wetland, the luxury marina. Local opinion
seems divided on the value or otherwise of this modern development, but Jacklyn is pretty clear that both port and marina have proved ecologically unsound
white elephants whose flaws have come back to haunt their promoters. Meanwhile,
almost entirely unaffected by the marina’s luxurious excess, the town’s black
townships remain as segregated, impoverished and environmentally unhealthy as
ever they were under apartheid.
Vervet monkeys survey the Kowie valleys |
The more personalised nature of Writing the Ancestral River has liberated Cock from too rigid a
structure, or too academic a style. So she can meander between historical
narrative, family reminiscence, and excursions into Xhosa sacred rituals at the
Kowie catchment’s deep hidden pools, or the fate of the endemic Eastern Cape
Rocky fish. The detail is impressive,
yet it is eminently readable, heartfelt, rich, enlivened by quotations on
rivers from poets and writers around the world, scientifically informed yet infused
by a note of elegiac lament for all that has been lost and damaged, both
natural and human. At the same time, it
is feisty and unflinching. She begins her excellent concluding chapter:
Rivers epitomise the connection
between social and environmental justice. Recording the story of the Kowie
River involves acknowledging the legacy and continuation of deep injustice: the
violent conquest of the indigenous population whose descendants continue to
live in poverty and deprivation, on the one hand, and the silting and pollution
of a river and the destruction of a wetland, on the other.
No ‘biography’ can be complete, and Cock has validly chosen
to focus on certain nodes in the history and nature of a complex catchment
area. A still fuller study might have said more about the ancient Bushman
presence, or the stories associated with the Blaauwkrantz tributary. She does
quote ecologist Jim Cambray to the effect that pineapple farming has done more
damage to the river than even the estuary modifications, but gives no further
details or tales relating to Albany’s primary crop, nor to the centres it
spawned, particularly Bathurst. And given her evident passion and feeling for
wildlife, it’s a pity we don’t hear her views on the transference of much of
the catchment recently to wildlife tourism or hunting reserves, especially the
impact of ‘extra-limitals’ like giraffe and impala which I can see from my own
ridgetop porch. But as I say, you can’t do it all.
I do particularly regret the lack of a detailed map or two,
so that one could follow some of her winding paths more closely – the omission
is doubly odd, given that the edge of such a map appears in the top half of the
book’s cover.
These quibbles aside, I recommend this book firstly to
anyone interested in the history and ecology of this micro-region, secondly to
anyone interested more generally in river health and how this can be viewed
through the combined lenses of human social justice and ecological
biodiversity. Cock demonstrates just how inseparable these dimensions are: it
is simply not possible to pursue capitalistic enterprise and ‘development’
without incurring severe environmental costs, and we ignore these at our own
peril. Already up to 60% of our rivers – in line with most parts of the world –
are all but fatally compromised by our toxic exudations: mine tailings,
pesticide runoff, untreated sewage, silting-up dams, hormonal residues and
plastics. We need such biographies of all our rivers, large and small, and we
need the ignoramuses in positions of influence to read them, and act decisively
in the interests of health instead of profit, sectarian allegiances and
self-interest.
Dawn over the Kowie sources (c) Dan Wylie |
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