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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