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.

 *****