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.

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