No.32 - Social notes from the hermitage

  

Sangomusha - my first hermitage

An article in a recent newspaper reports that after an extensive survey of 841 scientific studies, a University of California professor has concluded that solitude might be good for you: “single people tended to be happier in their jobs, more likely to stay in touch with friends and family, more self-reliant and less inclined to negativity.”

Well, I could have told them all that about three decades ago, when I went on the first of many ventures into temporary hermeticism in some or other tattered cottage.  So could a plethora of hermits, recluses, wanderers, monks and mystics over the last couple of millennia. Not that all such solitaries were entirely balanced, I suppose: living for years on top of a stone pillar like Simon Stylites is seriously weird.  But having been brought up in forested mountains, an only child thrown largely on his own devices, I worked up skills of self-sufficiency, of facing fears alone, and of joyous kinds of discovery that don’t need to be shared with anyone for their power.  A condition Socrates called autarkeia.  (How distant that seems from the Age of the Selfie, where the Selfie doesn’t actually exist until narcissistically revealed to the world via Facebook or Instagram, so it’s really an Otherie.)  It’s not that I don’t treasure conversation and comradeship, I do; but I am still most profoundly content when I am alone, a fact which bemuses and doubtless frustrates certain friends.

It’s kind of warming to find solitaries down the ages – who are rarely entirely solitary in practice – indirectly affirming my life-style.  Solitude is not after all – as Anthony Storr also argues in his psycho-analytic study, Solitude (1988) –  a pathology to be shunned, but a “valuable resource”.  At the same time, Storr concludes, it’s not about achieving some perfect and lofty state of enchantment: “If life is to continue, one cannot linger forever in a state of oceanic tranquillity: ... the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realisation that something is missing, from awareness of incompletion”.  Indeed, many solitaires whose accounts I’ve read seem at once wisely in equilibrium and soulfully restless.  Solitude is something of a paradox.

I’ve recently been reading Peter France’s book Hermits (1996), which devotes chapters to various sets of recluses and monkish types, from the early Christian Desert Fathers to the poet Robert Lax on Patmos.  I do like deserts and islands, but am ‘naturally’ drawn most strongly to forests, and so I find this thought, from the “small, rather weak and very ugly” Russian monk Macarius, writing from the Siberian forests around 1834, especially attractive:

Man finds peace of mind and benefit for his soul in forests.  We see that in former times people used to withdraw into thick forests and there, away from worldly vanity, through prayer and ascetic labour, sought salvation.  Just one look at the evergreen conifers of our homeland gladdens the eyes, portraying a symbol of our hope for eternal life which people go to the deserts to seek ... The forests which surround our monasteries should be preserved from destruction by all means in order to prevent the word ‘wilderness’ from finally losing its meaning.

This is echoed by the four-stage Hindu path.  The third stage is vanaprastha, the forest ascetic: “When the householder sees wrinkles in his skin and grey in his hair, and in the son of his son, let him retire to the forest.”  The final stage, sannyasa, total renunciation, is that towards which a person naturally matures.  As the guru Sri Ramakrishna put it: “The last part of Life’s path has to be walked in single file.”

Peter France includes a chapter on the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, easily my favourite Christian writer.  Like quite a few of these alleged solitaries, Merton was a compulsive communicator and writer.  And not only about the monk’s chosen life of solitude and meditation.  I return frequently to his volume Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968), not because of its religious thought, but because Merton was so in touch with the public world: he discusses the Vietnam War, American racism, modern materialism and multiple other subjects with a razor-sharp analytic mind.  He says much that we could all apply to our own situations even today.  Another volume of his essays entitled On Peace (1962) should be required reading for every power-inflated world leader, from Mugabe to Trump.   In fact, in Conjectures, Merton writes only once about solitude: “Solitude is to be preserved, not as a luxury, but as a necessity; not for ‘perfection’ so much as for simple ‘survival’ in the life God has given you.”  This is not so that you become insulated or removed, but so that you are better placed to love those who most closely depend on you, much as their demands might disturb your peace of mind: “Unlike the great benevolent and public movements, full of noisy and shared concern, [this basis for love] is not foggy, diffuse, devouring and absurd.”

I first encountered Merton’s work in 1985 when I was cycling rather aimlessly through New England, puffing across the bottom end of New Hampshire, when I accidentally bumped into the outer fringes of Hurricane Gloria.  I took shelter from the thrashing winds near what turned out to be a monastery, known rather Pooh-ishly as Hundred Acres Monastery.  Which it wasn’t really, or was no longer.  It had been a Trappist monastery once, but only one of the original monks remained – the now elderly Father Paul – surrounded by various waifs and strays, some religious, some not, some even women.  I asked Father Paul whether, given this motley crew, whether he was still able to run the place on Biblical principles, or what?

He mulled gently on that for a while, then said: “I find the Bible very puzzling.  It’s very opaque to me.”

I cheered inwardly: here was a man who been a monk for literally half a century, who still found his faith’s founding text mysterious, who did not pretend to have The Answers.

I pressed, “But you must have some sort of rules to keep the place together, and functioning.  What rules for residents do you have?”

He thought about that for a while, too, then said: “Supper is at six.  That’s all.”

And so it was, as I discovered, living there for a few weeks while I earned some badly needed funds working for a blasting company.  Amongst the residents of Hundred Acres at the time was one Wayne Teasdale – odd and gangly, very intense, hyper-intelligent, vastly read and a prolific writer on mysticism; we spent hours walking the roads through those wonderful autumnal New England woods talking of faiths and mystics from Rumi to Meister Eckardt, from Bede Griffiths to Merton, most of whom I had never heard of.

 

Forest view from the present tattered cottage

Wayne Teasdale claimed to have had a vision of God – with the aid of a spot of LSD.  There was another resident, Barry, as Christ-like a being as I had ever imagined, compact and unthreatening in mind and body as a block of basalt.  He agreed Wayne had had a profound vision, but not as deep as his own experience of the ‘Godhead’, or the ‘One Principle’, or the ‘Ground of Being’ – I was impressed that he didn’t want to affix a name to ‘it’.  Barry was building himself a real hermitage back in the woods. Vision or not, he was taking no chances: as an engineer he was building it like a land-based survival raft that would safely ride out the upheavals of any miscreant earthquake.

More lyrical, meandering and personalised than Peter France’s survey is Isabel Colegate’s account of hermits and solitaries, A Pelican in the Wilderness (2002).  The title comes from my favourite Renaissance poet, Thomas Traherne: “A man that Studies Happiness must sit alone like a Sparrow upon the Hous top, and like a Pelican in the Wilderness”.  Ironically, she notes, few hermits were ever truly solitary; they were often quite social, living in coenobitic communities, or awkwardly being pursued by a public hungry for wisdoms.  Colegate ranges widely, from Syria to the Skelligs, from Krishnamurti to Charles de Foucauld in the Sahara.  But that’s as far south as she or Peter France go.

Really, have there been no sub-Saharan African hermits?  The search is on...

*****

No.31 - Laurens van der Post's ecological vision

I’ve been trying to put together an article on the latest surge of literature invoking the “Bushman” as the potential saviour of our messed-up world.  Goodness knows we need a philosophy and lifestyle that generates less toxic waste, curbs rampant population growth and consequent habitat destruction, urban alienation, and insoluble warfare.  Whether the so-called “Bushmen”, or what’s left of such hunter-gatherer communities, can really help us in our modern malaise – that’s a moot question.

James Workman, one of the world’s top water experts, argues in his book Heart of Dryness that, since shortages of water will be a defining feature of the global future, Bushmen’s frugal ways of surviving desert conditions may prove to be vital skills.  White writers, perhaps seeking to compensate for the genocide of the Khoi-San peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are resurrecting old folktales and testimonies into modern forms.  Don Pinnock, in his young-adult novel Rainmaker, figures Bushman shamans – one named Mr Khabbo – as the rescuers and mentors of a young lad from the ‘Coloured’ ganglands of the Cape Flats.  In The Way of the Bushman Bradford Keeney, himself initiated into Ju/hoansi (Kalahari Bushman) shaman-hood, relays the insights of “the elders”, who claim both that the anthropologists have got it mostly wrong, and that their own wisdom is essential to “saving the world”.  Most recently, journalist Sylvia Vollenhoven has published her intriguing memoir The Keeper of the Kumm.  As a ‘Coloured’, Vollenhoven can claim a certain direct ancestry in /Xam Bushmen, and finds, through both shamanistic ritual and reading /Xam kukummi (stories), a route to health that Western allopathic medicine couldn’t.

Behind all these, and other books and efforts to refurbish the Bushman, hovers the inevitable figure of Laurens van der Post.  More than any other writer, van der Post was responsible for launching the image of the Bushman as essentially peaceful, leisurely, ascetic, deeply spiritual and intuitive, and in touch with nature – completely reversing the image of previous centuries of Bushmen as a primitive and verminous nuisance.  On the strength of a mere few weeks in the Kalahari in the 1950s, he wrote The Lost World of the Kalahari and then The Heart of the Hunter, made a film for the BBC, and delivered dozens of lectures around the world.  The “Bushman within” – a way of thinking and being he claimed had been largely lost by the industrialised West – became a central facet of his public persona.  Quite likely he came to believe a lot of it himself.

Van der Post has come in for a lot of schtick of late.  J D F Jones’ 2001 biography, Storyteller, has been particularly damaging.  Jones argues, with a mixture of regretfulness and exasperation, that just about everything van der Post ever told anyone about his life was retrospectively doctored, exaggerated, misremembered or downright invented.  Almost twenty years before that, anthropologist Ed Wilmsen was pointing out inconsistencies in van der Post’s various accounts of his encounters with Bushmen, and questioning the accuracy and originality of his Bushman information.  Certainly, most of the folktale material included in The Heart of the Hunter was derived from the work of Wilhelm and Dorothea Bleek of Bleek-Lloyd Archive fame, with only tangential acknowledgement from van der Post.  Many of those stories came from the informant //Kabbo (see my previous post on him).

Okay, so van der Post confabulated a philosophy for himself, one that he considered useful in a disturbed and disturbing world.  Perhaps we can stop worrying about whether he made stuff up, or about how historically or anthropologically “wrong” he got the Bushmen.  Aren’t all philosophies confabulations – composites of story, poetry, abstractions, assertions, rituals – farragoes of the imagination?  It’s striking how the critiques of van der Post I’ve read are uniformly focussed on historical accuracy and on questions of racial identity – South Africans’ Number One Obsession.  Very little has so far been said about either van der Post’s literary style and quality, or about the ecological dimension to his philosophy.  The latter is especially surprising, seeing as the “Bushman philosophy” that everybody examines or espouses is so intricately tied into their physical and animal environment.

So what was Laurens van der Post’s ecological vision, of which the Bushman mythology was a part, but not the whole?

He expressed it compactly in the series of interviews published as A Walk with a White Bushman:

Every bit of unspoilt nature which is left, every bit of park, every bit of earth still spare, should be declared a wilderness area as a blueprint of what life was originally intended to be, to remind us.  When we do see that, it is like having a religious experience, we are changed by it.  This act of instinctive re-remembrance sparks off a most dynamic sense of guilt and horror at what we are doing, and an immense longing not just to conserve but to rehabilitate the earth. ... Finally, nature will always take care of itself even without man.  But man without nature is unthinkable and, known or unknown, his spirit needs it ...

Broadly speaking, these sorts of ideas are widely held by many people.  Bushmen, in van der Post’s construction, exemplified an intuitive belonging within nature which made daily living a “religious experience”.  He is regularly accused of romanticising the Bushmen, and perhaps he did, but he was also fully aware that we can’t all just “go back” to such a lifestyle:

[T]he Bushman finds himself in the power of a very highly conscious, highly organised civilisation which finds everything he represents totally unimportant, totally discredited.  So the problem is, what does one do about this?  Well, I thought that the only way that I personally, as a human being, could tackle it would be to translate this Stone Age idiom into a contemporary one and to try to show that it is important to us...

Translating age-old Bushman idiom, “totally incomprehensible to us now”, into a contemporary one is what most writers, from the Bleeks to Pinnock to Sylvia Vollenhoven, have also been trying to do.  Van der Post did what they all do, what the original //Kabbo professed himself happy with – seeing the original kukummi and testimonies transmute into print and drift away to different communities.  That is precisely what stories are supposed to do: they belong to no one and every one.  Stories “float on the wind” – a //Kabbo phrase, taken out of context but now the popular mantra.

Van der Post thus tried to propound this philosophy from yet another different angle, in two sequential novels, A Story Like the Wind and A Far-Off Place (1974).  The main character is 14-year-old Francois, whose family is slaughtered by “terrorists” somewhere in Southern Rhodesia.  He happens to have rescued a stray Bushman – named, inevitably, Xhabbo – who now is able to lead Francois, his girlfriend Nonnie, and his own wife on a months’-long journey, a thousand miles across the deserts to the West Coast.  Xhabbo teaches Francois, and so the reader, all sorts of bush-lore in a manner repeated in numerous such works, both fictional and non-fictional.

A Far-Off Place is frankly pretty dreadful, the action sequences clumsy, the whole narrative implausible, the dialogue inauthentic.  Matthew Fike’s welcome article on these novels unpacks complex Jungian references, but says little about ecology. In the course of Place’s laboured unfolding, however, van der Post’s ecological philosophy sparks through, not only in Xhabbo’s knowledge (tracking, communing bodily with animals, finding tsamma melons and other water sources, the inevitable honey-guide, etc etc) but also in epiphanic moments of communion with nature, supported by considerable detailed knowledge.  At these moments, van der Post’s often pompous and ponderous prose can modulate into the richly lyrical.  There is this passage, for example, on honey and the bee – prescient, in fact, given current reports of catastrophic collapses in bee populations around the world today:

[Honey] was a substance of a mystical kind, which in the eating was transubstantiated in the blood of the eater to become a thing of spirit, making him a different person.  As one ate, so one became, and for him it was therefore, however instinctive and unconscious the deed, an act of as great meaning as the sacrament in which bread and wine were believed to be transubstantiated into living flesh and blood. ... It is the bee that produces the honey and whose ways Solomon in all his glory exhorted the men of his day to study in order to be wise.  It is itself involved in a partnership with flowers, plants and matter, so that it plays a great intermediary role in bringing together in a single creative purpose, four dimensions that would otherwise be separate...

The organic, interconnected vision described here is echoed many times in the novel.  For Francois, the dawn call of a intimately-described dove – “small, neat, precise in figure, and immaculate in a dress of mauve and purple with a buff cravat held in a jade-black ring to a delicate throat” – evokes a holistic view that owes something not only to Bushmen but also to Jung, Jan Smuts and Christianity:

 [A]bove all the view was unpolluted, not just free of the unnatural smog human beings inflict on the earth that they inhabit, but in the more subtle and profound sense that it had never even suffered the intrusion of sophisticated minds and civilised eyes, acute and slanted with calculation of how to exploit it for their own ends. ... creation for creation’s sake.

One can have all sorts of problems with Laurens van der Post’s portentous vocabulary of mysticism which, like many of the books I mentioned earlier, can drift off in the direction of New Age-type vacuousness.  One can gripe at his historical inaccuracies, his self-promotion, even a lingering paternalism, but I’m far from convinced that there isn’t something of important ecological value to be rescued from van der Post’s untiring imagination.

*****

No.30 - Hope rekindled?: A Zimbabwe episode

The pale cream of my university’s clocktower glows in surreal smoothness in a slightly chilly evening sky.  The hands of the clock have been stuck for months now at twenty-to-four. Around the moon-globe lights a pair of drongos hawk for insects, oblivious to the highly charged human event happening below them.  I have driven into town to attend, the richest sunset of violent scarlet I have ever seen here backing the slowly-turning blades of the ridge-top wind-turbines.  In a moment of uncharacteristic superstition, I hoped it did not presage blood.

It did not – or not directly.  The event is one of many gatherings around the world of the so-called #ThisFlag movement in Zimbabwe.  We are all here to express support for a peaceable transition to a caring and responsible government in the country of our birth or domicile or affection.  Candles have been lit, endowing our globule of darkness with a certain sanctity.  Indeed, the whole thing takes on a Christian air – not, the organisers hasten to assert, to the exclusion of any other beliefs – with opening and closing prayers to the Almighty to bless the congregation.

The Zimbabwe national anthem is sung – very tentatively, it seems – and it’s a recent, ZANU-PF-created one, not the “Ishe Kumborere Afrika” I used to sing with our school-kids in the halcyon days of the early ‘80s.  It evokes ‘Chimurenga’, its ideals now in tatters; only a line about the probity of ‘our leaders’ is emphasised with ironic force and answered with cheers.

The lanky organiser – a co-ordinator, not a leader, he insists; this is a leaderless movement – and his supporters are draped in Zimbabwe flags.  (There is also, oddly, a Ghanaian flag waving above the moderate crowd, and even an ANC banner.)  With charming self-deprecation he recalls the role of pastor Evan Mawarire, who seems largely to have coalesced the #ThisFlag movement in its spin-off of trader- and taxi-operator shutdowns in Beit Bridge, Bulawayo and Harare.  And he reads the movement’s six fundamental principles – dignity, accountability, democracy, non-violence... – like Mosaic pronouncements from on high.  They are compact, they seem unarguable – like a distillation of core liberalism, ubuntu, the Freedom Charter and satyagraha – so unarguable that it seems momentarily mystifying that any government should respond with brutal oppression and random terrorisation of the general populace.

But of course, they – gangster governments everywhere – do exactly that, over and over again.

The intermittently blaring bullhorn changes hands.  An exegesis of the colours of the Zimbabwe flag is undertaken, interpretations to suit the new tenor of peaceful resistance to abuse and destitution.  Says one student, she had lost all pride in this flag, it had become so associated with state terror and corruption, but here we are, renewing its national validity and charge and pride.  The association of the red star with international Communism is quietly omitted, as is the question of how and whether ‘Zimbabwe’ should ever have become a ‘nation’ in the first place.  Too intellectual for this occasion: this is about solidarity and grief and tentative hope.

And tears.  After the more formal brief speeches by three or four organisers, the floor – or step – is opened to spontaneous contributions.  One after another student comes up, almost all climbing out of depths of shyness or hesitancy, in a variety of skin-tones and clothing and accents.  They are intensely moving.  One young woman can scarcely deliver her story  for weeping – a story of how her mother, herself and a 3-year-old broke down near a Zimbabwe military barracks and were unnecessarily terrorised by soldiers.  Another burly young man visibly overcomes his fear, both of the occasion and the general situation, and asserts the mantra ‘Enough is enough’.  He mentions a recent discovery of 60 bodies beneath a soccer field, legacy of the Gukurahundi massacres of Ndebele in the 1980s.  Another laments how his family was destroyed by the hyperinflation of 2008.  So many wounds.  A white lad unselfconsciously describes himself as African, says how pessimistic he was just a week ago, driving back to university from Zimbabwe – but now he sees hope again.  Again and again, the speakers assert their peacefulness as well as their impatience, tired of the corruption, the hypocrisy, the failures.  ‘We were always told,’ says one, ‘that education was the key; now I have the key, but when I go back home, they have stolen the door!’

And there is a final sobering and necessary warning, also delivered in a sudden flood of irrepressible tears, for everyone to be careful, not to tag photographs or say anything unwise on social media.  ZANU-PF agents are everywhere, poised to harass and even kill.

It’s only too true.  More than a decade ago now I attended another such gathering in the lee of the cathedral in solidarity with the disappeared, the displaced, the exiled, and hurt and starved of Zimbabwe.  For a while we fasted in suitably-labelled black T-shirts in a frail gesture of solidarity with the destitute.  I was asked to speak then, and did.  I began by saying the purpose was not about party politics, or regime change, and certainly not about violence.  A week or so later I was ‘reported’ in the Zimbabwe Herald newspaper as being an ex-Selous Scout (wrong) bent on fomenting violent revolution in order to resurrect British colonialism (wrong again).   I wrote a letter back, couched in heavy irony, pointing out that this was precisely the opposite of what I’d said.  Surprisingly, they published it.  Still, in subsequent years I have been twice detained by Zimbabwe officialdom for nothing more than being in possession of a camera.  Though ultimately harmless, the arrests were salutary reminders of the vulnerability and helplessness that so many experience at the hands of authoritarian governments everywhere.

And as this small but robust and beautifully polite gathering closes with a minute of silence in honour of the disappeared, the maimed, the exiled, that is a final impression: something warm, fragile, and indescribably precious.

The drongos – nhengure, in Shona, an epithet once given to hypocritical whites, after their forked tails – go on flitting about like bats, feeding.

*****

No.29 - Our language/s: constraint and creativity

 

Brueghel's famous imagining of the Tower of Babel

“I gotta use words when I talk to you”: so grumbles a character in (I think) a story by Raymond Chandler.  Whose words?  In what language?  With what level of understanding and intelligibility?  Embodying what hidden power dynamics?

In the welter of current debates about education, cultural diversity, and curricula, from primary school to university, these questions are inescapable.  Hardly a week goes by without the print media fielding an article about language.  To take just two recent headlines: “Othering SA languages stops here”, and “Language can be a powerful cohesive tool”.  The first article laments the destructive influence on ‘minor’ languages of world-dominant languages (pertinently, English); the other reminds us that language, in the broad sense, can bind us together, too.

We have recently commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprisings, in which the imposition of Afrikaans on certain school subjects ignited deeper embers of dissent.  Also recently, schools in Thembisa demonstrated because Afrikaans as a teaching medium was being threatened.  The country’s African languages are almost all feeling beleaguered  to some degree.  Another newspaper columnist a few weeks ago lamented that she was losing touch with her original isiXhosa, because she used English more in her working life; she even described her isiXhosa as “corrosive”, which – if she meant what I think she does – is a terrible shame.

World-wide, unhappily, from the Amazon to Australia, dialects and complete languages, only ever spoken by tiny groups of people, are becoming extinct at almost the same rate as natural species.  Some feel this is tragic, others that it’s just the course of things, the ‘natural’ progression of a kind of Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’.  Throughout history, ‘imperial’ languages have usurped or snuffed out others.  As Nicholas Ostler details in his wide-ranging book, Empires of the Word, these languages have included  Aramaic and Arabic, Greek and Russian, Bantu and Austronesian, Chinese and Egyptian.  Sometimes the process is imposed by conquest , at other times it’s more willingly accepted or assimilated.  Mostly there’s a complex mix of motives and cross-influences.  While the ‘Nguni’ languages such as isiZulu and isiXhosa can be said to have had an ‘imperialistic’ role in marginalising San/Bushman communities and their multiple dialects, the reverse influence of Bushman language on isiXhosa is obvious in the clicks and in certain vocabulary.  Nothing is static in language, yet we cling so tenaciously to notions of purity!

My university has been debating and re-formulating its language policy for years.  The bottom line is that (despite it being the first language of only some 10% of South Africa’s population) English is apparently unassailable as our lingua franca.  This is obviously firstly due to our imperial-colonial history, secondly to the global dominance of American media.  It has gone beyond mere forcible colonisation, though: when a Moroccan umpire oversees a tennis match between a Serb and a Spaniard in Beijing, he uses – English.  So while we might deplore the violent aspects of colonial-language dominance in certain places and phases in the past, and continue to deplore the decline of other indigenous tongues in the present, the current mantra of ‘decolonisation’ is likely to prove an unattainable chimaera.   Colonisation is not something like the common cold that we can just exorcise or get over, returning to some former state: it’s more like an amputation, something whose consequences we will have to live with forever.  We just have to get on with it, finding creative ways of responding to the current state, in whatever languages available to us.

I have travelled enough to understand the frustrations and feelings of disparagement suffered by the ‘second-language’ speaker – the Xhosa person obliged to use English in new contexts, for example.  (I don’t even have a competent second language – only a slew of more or less dodgy ‘third’ languages: Shona, French, bits of still others.   My most recent efforts to learn isiXhosa are bedevilled by uncontrollable spasms of French or German or Spanish which pop up instead.)  At the recent National Arts Festival, the conceptual artist  Lerato Shadi fielded a video of herself (?) wrapping her tongue round and round with red wool, then taking the whole bundle into her mouth – a vivid representation of the muffling, even choking experience of having to use another language.  She eventually works her tongue free and spits the bundle of wool out: ‘decolonisation’, I guess.  But I think we all know it’s never going to be so simple.

In our local Tower of Babel, I don’t know how to navigate all the splits and dilemmas.  I don’t want any language die out or be demeaned: I find all languages equally fascinating and valid and beautiful.  Time, resources and unstoppable global forces make it hard to implement equality, though.  At the same time, it’s unthinkable that we devolve into another form of conflictual apartheid – languages in silos.  We have to talk to each other.  Learning one or another local language can take us only part of the way, but it’s a start.  Translation studies should be a much more fundamental part of education curricula than they are.

Most of all, I think, learning another language – even if it’s one with a problematic colonial history – is best seen as an expansion of oneself, a fund of new opportunities.  It doesn’t automatically demean my home language to learn another.  Moreover, there is no longer a single ‘English’ anyway – and never was.  Even in England, Standard or Queen’s English is only spoken by a minority: the rest is a patchwork of dialects and accents, many of which even I have experienced as almost unintelligible. (I felt hardly more at home in Putney than in Patagonia!)  And English is so successful partly, perhaps, because it seems to be unusually flexible and able to assimilate local influences and varieties. 

Hence writers globally have been able to reinvent ‘English’ continually to their own purposes.  The late Russell Hoban, for example, reinvented a rural English dialect for his post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker (still one of the very best of the genre).  It opens like this:

On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.  He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come onto my spear he wernt all that big plus he lookit poorly.  He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and made his rush and there were wer then.  Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy.  I said, ‘Your tern now my tern later.’

Once you tune your ear into this, it becomes quite bewitching.  Never mind what Scots writers and poets, from Robbie Burns to Hugh McDairmid and Kathleen Jamie, have achieved in Scots English.

And writers across the globe, from the Caribbean to Kenya, have set about reinventing the language of their oppressors for their own ends.  Nigerian writers have been especially inventive, it seems.   This is the opening of Gabriel Okara’s little novel, The Voice, a kind of metaphysical search story which deliberately uses indigenous Igbo grammatical and idiomatic constructions to lift English into a distinctly new register:

Some of the townsmen said Okolo’s eyes were not right, his head was not correct.  This they said was the result of his knowing too much book, walking too much in the bush, and others said it was due to his staying too long alone by the river.

            So the town of Amatu talked and whispered; so the world talked and whispered.  Okolo had no chest, they said.  His chest was not strong and he had no shadow.  Everything in this world that spoiled a man’s name they said of him, all because he dared to search for it.  He was in search of it with all his inside and with all his shadow.

Even more inventive is Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, related through the naive viewpoint of a youngster caught up in civil war.  It draws on Nigerian Creole (or Krio) – creoles are themselves astonishing inventions – as well as on highly individual quirks and neologisms.  No one on earth speaks exactly this language, yet we as we read we get to comprehend it entirely.  Again, the opening:

Although, everybody in Dukana was happy at first.

            All the nine villages were dancing and we were eating plenty maize with pear and knacking tory under the moon.  Because the work on the farms have finished and the yams were growing well well.  And because the old, bad government have dead, and the new government of soza and police have come.

            Everybody was saying that everything will be good in Dukana because of new government.  They were saying that kotuma ashbottom from Bori cannot take bribe from people in Dukana again.  They were saying too that all those policemen who used to chop big big bribe from people who get case will not chop again.

At perhaps no time in our history has such creativity been more necessary.  And with all our global media resources, never have opportunities for fruitful interchange been more available.  Precisely because the clashes of established identities and historical grievances bedevil our desires for peace, we have to have faith in the endless human gift for inventiveness.  Such acts of the imagination are acts of respect, empathy, possibility and connection.

                                                                           ***

No 28 - "Swim-the-Seas": An inconvenient history

Shaka statue at Ulundi

On the wave-pounded beach at St Lucia, north of Durban, a boat overturned in the surf.  A punch-up ensued between the drenched occupants, one English, one Xhosa.  The Xhosa was a prisoner of sorts; he knocked the white man down and ran, disappearing into the interior.  It was 1823.  The man was taken by locals to Shaka, leader of the amaZulu.  Because he had apparently emerged from the ocean, the man was named Hlambamanzi, or ‘Swim-the-Seas’.

Writing about Shaka in my previous post reminded me of a long-standing but dormant possible project on Hlambamanzi.  From time to time I’ve talked about him with local historians Hazel Crampton and Julie Wells, both equally intrigued by his turbulent career; and recently KwaZulu-Natal amateur historian Roger Gaisford sent me his own notes, hoping I might ‘do’ something.  But I have so many projects on the go already...

This week I saw the Sibikwa Arts Centre’s play Ilembe, playing in Grahamstown at the National Arts Festival.  “Ilembe” is an axe – one of Shaka’s praise-names.  It’s a visually vivid and conceptually adventurous play, escaping from clichés into puzzlement.  It’s gratifying to see Shakan history presented as a set of contesting stories, rather than someone’s blinkered propaganda narrative, either of heroism or monstrosity.  Cannily, Shaka himself never appears in the play; stories of him are told by a set of ‘minor’ characters: his ‘bodyguard’ Mbopha, the white trader Fynn, Shaka’s sister Nomcoba – and Hlambamanzi.

Why is he so intriguing?  He is one of the many in-between characters of history, defying borders and classifications, inhabiting different worlds at once, an inconvenient figure for those who like things etched in clear divisions.  He was a “misfit in the margins”, to quote Malvern van Wyk Smith’s recent article (in English in Africa) on the sundry such personalities in African history.

Our man was born Msimbithi (or some such) not 40 km from where I write in Grahamstown, under headman Botoman, in the territory of Xhosa chief Ndlambe.  Boer traders and British military invaders were already warring with the Xhosa, and the young Msimbithi quickly got involved in a series of frontier skirmishes and cattle raids, learning to play sides off one another, and learning some Dutch in the process.  Eventually he was arrested for cattle theft and transported to Robben Island, where he almost coincided with another Xhosa chieftain, Makhanda (or Makana, after whom our present municipality is named).

He sailed to the Cape Colony under an ex-Navy chancer named James Saunders King, who was allegedly kind to him in his seasickness.  Hence Msimbithi (now dubbed by the whites as Jacob, sometimes Jakot) was picked up as an ‘interpreter’ by an acquaintance of King’s, Captain W F W Owen.  Owen was surveying the south-east coast, and took Msimbithi with him.  He was supposed to be grateful, apparently, but he was still only too glad to take the gap when he got the chance at St Lucia.

Henry Francis Fynn

A year later, in 1824, other white adventurers of King’s circle, including the (in)famous Henry Francis Fynn, managed to make their way from the coast near Durban to Shaka at kwaBulawayo.  Imagine their surprise when they discover, amongst Shaka’s coterie, none other than Jacob Msimbithi.  Complete with an umuzi settlement and wives of his own.  He had ingratiated himself with Shaka, he told them, by repelling a faked attack by bewitched wildcats.

He had also evidently told Shaka that the whites were violent, rapacious and deceitful, and not to be trusted.  They would take his land.  Shaka seemed nevertheless disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt, and provided them with many of their needs.  While they manoeuvred behind Shaka’s back to move guns, slaves and ivory, he tried to use them to provide firepower in his raids and to open up trade with the Cape.  In a mish-mash of plots and counterplots, betrayals and suspicions, Jacob Msimbithi acted as ‘interpreter’ and escort. He accompanied expeditions sent by Shaka both to Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth) and Delagoa Bay (Maputo).  Alternately valued and suspected by every party, he played his own ambiguous game.  Just how competent an interpreter he was is open to question: at least, there must have been ample room for both inadvertent and deliberately manipulative mis-interpretation.  (Ilembe has some fun with this.)  

It was all bound to end badly.

We can’t believe much of what Fynn and Co. said of him, but we don’t have much in the way of other sources.  I’m not sure we have enough to write a substantial history of him.  I’ve thought of writing a novel; it would make a great novel.  But I’m daunted by the mass of research that would have to be done to bring it to life.  The textures of everyday life in all the places he visited, the whole length of the subcontinent; the appearance and demeanours of all the other historical personalities he crossed; the necessary invention of explanations to fill the gaps in the record.  Think of what one would have to do to flesh out just this little extract from Fynn’s account of machinations unfolding in 1830, when Dingane, Shaka’s successor, and the whites were at serious loggerheads:

The following morning he requested me to go with 4 of his chiefs and Jacob to argue over the report Jacob had brought from the Colony.  Jacob began by stating that he had been sent to the Colony by Dingan with a present to the Governor and to bring back what might be sent.  The Governor refused the present.  Met a man of the Indwandwo nation on his way to the Colony who mentioned to him [Jacob?] he had heard of an attack being intended upon the Zoolas, and that the 4 principal Kaffir chiefs Gaika, Slambi, Vosanie and Dushani were dead and a consultation was about to be held by the remaining chiefs as to the best way of freeing themselves from the white people.  A servant called in by Jacob repeated the same statement, and another man who had been with Ogle to the Colony repeated the same.  Col. Somerset came unto Cane and asked who Jacob was.  Said it was Jacob, when Col. Somerset replied: ‘Oh, it is the villain?  I will send him back to his chief Botman’!

It’s hard to know what was really going on.  And how did the exchanges summarised here unfold?  With what tones of voice?  What did each personage look like?  What clothes, what gestures, what motives?  How would one tell the story overall?  Through a third-person omniscient narrator who could tell the back stories?  More dramatically through Msimbithi himself (surely a Xhosa writer would do that most successfully)?  Through a medley of different voices?  Each strategy would offer strengths and limitations.

Dingane

As I said, Msimbithi’s career was destined for a sticky end.  Not long after the exchange quoted here, Dingane colluded with the whites – or simply ordered them – to get rid of this stray and problematic Xhosa.  The man delgated to do the deed, John Cane, couldn’t, and passed the job on to one Henry Ogle.  Ogle invited Msimbithi to his umuzi on a pretext, took him round the back and shot him, or got his retainers to do it.

Yet there is something very telling in Msimbithi’s career, something more common than we might expect.  In the current atmosphere of hardening racial and political lines, it can be forgotten that very many southern Africans are not ‘pure’ this or that; they have mixed ancestries, tangled allegiances, multiple identities, mingled cultural influences, bundled languages.  One way or another, we are almost all ‘in-betweeners’, potentially bridging rather than dividing communities.  I certainly am – and I hope this inner cosmopolitanism will ultimately prove to be fruitful, rather than fatal!

***

No. 27 - Yet another manly Shaka?!

Some battles have to be fought over and over again.

Matthew Savides reports in the most recent Sunday Times ('King Shaka to rise again, more manly this time', June 19, 2016) on the long-awaited replacement statue of Zulu founder-leader Shaka at uShaka International Airport near Durban.  I’ve been through that bleak, military-grey monstrosity recently and observed the two bronze cattle standing forlornly alongside a space that originally boasted Andries Botha’s Shaka statue.  That version was immediately rejected by King Zwelithini because it apparently made Shaka look more like a herd boy than a warrior. That was in 2010.

Peter Hall’s replacement statue – like most depictions of Shaka – is said to be based on what Savides calls the “only recognised portrait of Shaka” – the picture on the left.  This is, indeed, a kingly portrayal: tall, elegant, poised on the lip of an imperious promontory.

But let’s look at this portrait again.  And I mean again – I argued about this picture in my first book on Shaka, Savage Delight: White myths of Shaka (2000), in my second, Myth of Iron: Shaka in History (2006; both UKZN Press), and yet again in the pocket biography, Shaka (Jacana, 2011), not to mention numerous lectures and journal articles in between.  But given that university subsidy machineries still studiously neglect to reward the propagation of academic work into more popular formats, it’s not surprising that delusions continue in public mythologies.

Simply put, this is emphatically not a credible portrait of Shaka.  It does not date from the 1880s, as Savides wrongly asserts, but from a book produced by one of the few literate observers of Shaka’s reign, Nathanial Isaacs’ Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, first published in 1836, eight years after Shaka’s death.  Isaacs himself was a teenager at the time and only semi-literate: his travelogue was worked up by a ghost writer in London (no original notes or diaries exist) – and so was the portrait.  It was said to have been based on an original “sketch” by Isaacs’ companion and small-time entrepreneur, James Saunders King.  Since King died even before Shaka did, it’s not clear how such a sketch could even have reached England.

Even assuming that it did, we can safely assume that the eventual artist had never been to Zululand; he was therefore obliged to work the portrait up from assumptions and inheritances from other sources.  One was the stance: hand curled, head turned away, one foot lifted on the toes.  This stance, as we can see from the other drawings below right 

(Da Vinci, Dürer, and depictions of other African leaders), was one embedded in conventional European figure-drawing over centuries.  Moreover, the shield is vastly oversized, the spear ridiculously puny, and the finery only vaguely accurate.  In short, this is an imagining, not a portrait from first-hand observation.

A second oddity is that this stance is one generally accorded royalty or nobility; so is the regal positioning on a promontory or hilltop.  But this is the exact opposite of what Isaacs writes in the text of Travels and Adventures: there, he is concerned to paint Shaka as a degenerate savage, a mass murderer, “a beast in human form” who revelled in seeing the blood of his victims flowing at his feet.  In 1832, when he corresponded with fellow-adventurer Henry Francis Fynn, Isaacs urged Fynn to “make Shaka out to be as bloodthirsty as you can.”  So began nearly two centuries of almost groundless vilification.

Isaacs’ ‘ghost’-portrait of Shaka provided some of the basis for hiring soccer-star Henry Cele – hyper-lean and mean – to play the lead role in the 1987 TV series Shaka Zulu.  This awful piece of historically inaccurate hysteria is still being re-screened today, and many people think of Shaka as Cele-in-disguise.

Cover based on a 'berserker'-like depiction
in Ian Knight's Anatomy of the Zulu Army

In fact, we have no idea what Shaka looked like.  Neither Fynn, nor the only other contemporary witness-writer, the neglected Charles Rawden Maclean, left a detailed physical impression of him.  Zulu oral histories – which are tricky because those we have were collected only fifty to sixty years later – are contradictory.  One elderly informant to the six-volume James Stuart Archive of Zulu oral history (UKZN Press), who was only four at the time of Shaka’s assassination, thought he had the lean tight buttocks of an athlete and dancer.  Another informant recalled his father, who had been in one of Shaka’s regiments (ibutho), saying that Shaka had the broad buttocks of true royalty.  There is just no way now of really deciding which informant is the more reliable, and there’s no other corroboration.  The only other physical detail recorded is that Shaka had an unusually hefty nose that “sat like a frog on his face”, and from which he was habitually dashing the sweat.

Any depiction of Shaka, then, is inevitably not a portrait of the historical man, but a projection of propensities treasured by the image-makers.  When he rejected Botha’s original statue, King Zwelithini wanted to perpetuate the “fierce warrior” image that began with Isaacs’ picture and that has been reproduced in sundry media, until it has become an integral part of Zulu historical consciousness.  A modern cross-cultural myth, in short.

Indeed, in my explorations of the creation of this mythology, I began to question this ‘fierce warrior’ status itself.  The stories are legion, of course: that Shaka distinguished himself as a warrior under Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa; that he slaughtered his way to power; that he built an army in no time by getting trainees to stamp on devil-thorns; that he crushed the Ndwandwe at the battle of Qokli Hill; that he wiped out entire tribes and sent others scattering across the continent (conveniently clearing vast areas for later white settlers); that he executed thousands; that he invented the stabbing-spear, led his troops into battle and never lost; and that despite all this he somehow “unified the Zulu nation”.

I concluded that, the first statement excepted, every one of those stories was fundamentally wrong.  He did have some opponents, including a half-brother, killed when Dingiswayo boosted him to power, but few compared to the dozens that Dingane, Shaka’s assassin, had to in 1828 in order to counter Shaka’s popularity.  The devil thorns were invented by E A Ritter in his thoroughly misleading novel Shaka Zulu (1955).  Ritter also invented the battle of Qokli Hill, which actually never happened.  Though Zulu military might was certainly immeasurably enhanced by Shaka, his ibutho were as much social units as military, suffered losses as well as victories, and seldom slaughtered wholesale.  Shaka needed to incorporate people, not to kill them off or chase them away.  Instead, around a core of Zulu direct rule perhaps 100 km across, between the Mfolozi and Thukela rivers, he established alliances, some pressured but most cordial, with neighbouring ‘client-chiefs’.  These he cemented with joint expeditions, marriage alliances, massaged genealogies, verbal propaganda, sharing of resources, and so on.  The ‘unity’ was partial: those surrounding peoples – the Mkhize, the Hlubi, etc – retain independent identities to this day. 

In short, in my view, Shaka was as often diplomatic as he was forceful, largely but not seamlessly successful.  He was unquestionably a toughie, with a sometimes nasty sense of humour: but adding up every possible case recorded in all the histories we have, even including the most dubious, it seems to me he ordered the judicial execution of fewer people than George W Bush did as Governor of Texas – which was 70.  Surprise surprise: Shaka was neither a superhero nor a monster, but a real and complex human being, doing the best he could in difficult and real political and environmental conditions.

What interests me, then, is why, in our present era in which diplomacy, democracy, negotiation, rainbow-ness, tolerance of differences, reconciliation, and cosmopolitanism are the progressive societal watchwords – why should anyone want to promote the violent image of the “fierce warrior”?  Why not the image of the statesman, the unifier, the canny if tough negotiator, that Shaka actually was?

*****

No.26 - Don Maclennan, music and poetry

Poetry in performance, often in conjunction with music, seems hugely popular.  Written poetry, on the other hand, struggles.  Hardly any major publisher in South Africa even accepts poetry submissions now; the small magazines battle to keep afloat.  It’s not for lack of people writing: that wonderful, humorous poet and publisher Gus Ferguson once joked, not entirely inaccurately, that there are 523 poets for every reader.  Even poets seldom buy one another’s volumes.  Young poets, even those doing creative writing courses, often seem to think that reading others’ poetry is unnecessary.  Hence, for all their frequently courageous exploration of new and urgent themes, a lot of it is simply mediocre, a recycling of phrases sucked up from the banal swamplands of popular music.

Try being an ageing white male poet steeped in the textuality of previous ages.  Even worse, try being dead.  Don Maclennan, one of our finest and most prolific poets, passed on some eight years ago now, and despite some lovely reviews (see P R Anderson's in the latest issue of English in Africa) and the publication of both his Collected Poems and a volume of essays on his work, No Other World, he is yet hardly a mainstream figure.

This is grossly unfair. (OK, OK, he was my teacher, mentor, and great friend, and I had everything to do with producing the two aforementioned volumes – but it is still unfair.)  He is a phenomenally lucid and humane poet who, whatever walk of life or age you might be, has a great deal to teach and, just as important, to think about.  He may not seem to address some of the Big Issues of Today, like race, politics, and rape – but he does, just from a different angle.  He sees those issues as embedded within even larger ones; he obliges us to reassess our politics by revealing the beauty that persists despite politics’ griminess; he addresses rape by exploring its difficult opposite, love and ecstasy.  There is no difficult question of being, relating, writing, dying that he shies away from.

I mentioned music earlier.  Don lived with and within music always.  He played the violin, he listened to and understood a great deal of music, and he often wrote about it.  One of his very first volumes was a collaboration with music lecturer Norbert Nowotny, entitled In Memoriam Oskar Wolberheim.  Some of his poems were memorably set to music by South African composer Michael Blake, and Don conducted a spirited conversation about music with Blake’s wife, Christine Lucia.  His poem “Autobiography” is all about his playing music.  He had been raised on music by his Scottish father, as he wrote in an early poem, “To my father playing his bagpipes”.  Don imagines him playing the instrument across the veld at sunset, as after a battle, “with a sense of sweet massacre” yet somehow taking possession of “the tilting planes of light”.  Music fills the world.  Don then compares that braying instrument to a captured bird, trapped under the player’s armpit:

You clasp under your arm

a giant northern bird

one wing lame

the other hugely spread

like fingers of some universal hand.

You hold this creature

solicitous and afraid

for reasons far too ancient to express

coaxing him to utter his distracting cries.

Proudly and with military care

you have begun to strut bird-like

protecting the wild creature

and yet twisting his lame wing.

Out of his long black beak

pocked as branches in the sea

wail the ebony endless cries,

bird music ancient as stones.

There’s so much one could say about this, reading from various perspectives.  But if Don wants us to see the musician as a kind of poet, or a model for the poet, as I think he does, it’s especially interesting.  Music and poetry, Don used to insist, had evolved together, from social and biological origins too mysterious now to really comprehend, for “reasons far too ancient to express”.  He wrote to Christine Lucia:

I have never bothered to ask where words come from.  Language is quite mysterious enough. ... In this respect poetry is like music.  Where do melodies and harmonies come from when you sit composing at the piano?  From all the other music that was ever written, of course, but from deep inside you, at the root of the ear’s Venetian canals, at the roots of the tongue.

At the same time the bagpipe music’s funny and weird, both proud and distracting, both protecting and twisting – not an easy or simple process.  It’s also self-deprecating: unlike some of our heroically noisy and self-promoting youngsters, Don knew that poetry is a fragile defence against the depredations of the changing world.  He ends the poem: “It is the end of a time ... It will soon be dark/ and that will make an end of it.”  The poem is its own elegy.

Don hints here, too, that the origins of music are even pre-human.  Perhaps in the earliest stage of human consciousness we first imitated the primordial music of birds: the “mourning” of owls, the “conversation of the pigeons”.   His poem “Bokmakierie” reads, in full:

Rising liquid

he repeats his phrase

to the rising sun.

Can we estimate

whether he’s begun

loving the fresh day

from a broken bit

of future tense

stuck in his throat?

Take each note,

its originality –

can we say?

Rising liquid

he repeats his phrase

to the rising sun.

The repetition of a phrase: that’s it, that’s the first step of music.  Its provenance is simple but mysterious, even if we accept David Rothenberg’s theory, in his book The Survival of the Beautiful, that beauty is intrinsic to such displays as birdsong and vivid feathers, that the pursuit and appreciation of beauty, even amongst non-humans, was always necessary to evolution.  And by writing another poem, we repeat the note.  Only in that way does it outlast its own dying into silence, as every musical note must.  It might even survive the writer.

On crucial occasions, then, Don connects music with death, too. There is the music that is played at funerals, for instance, a music laden with both tribute and loss.  This is clear in various poems about his sister, who herself was truly musical.

In the end, Don humbly thinks, poems – or the musicality, attentiveness, challenge, humanity and craft intrinsic to good poetry –

... might just do

 – reveal the arc of light

that touches earth

and makes us sing.

Don seems to me to be asking: What leverage do we have against the world’s self-evident ills if our response does not embody what we love, if we do not sing praises to the beautiful even as we labour and dread?

Moreover, there are not just poems about music: there is the musicality of poetry itself.  The echoes of birdsong within words and combinations of words.  Despite the apparent conversational simplicity of Don’s characteristic short lines, many poems are subtly rhythmical and musical.  Of course, if rhythms and patterns get too rigid, you induce a head-banging numbness.  Don sent this up in one of the pieces in Oskar Wolberheim.

A la marcia      With military gestures

1          2          3          4

1          2          3          4

1          2          3          4

1          2          3          4

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang

bang    bang    bang    bang    it goes on   you see

bang    bang    bang    bang    steadily      orderly ...

And on it goes, until “the damned thing gets a hold of you ... stoppit ... stoppit”.

Compare that with the wavering and nuanced effects of “Funeral I” from The Poetry Lesson:

 

Don Maclennan's own carving,
"Poet Declaiming"

From the tired sky

the low-angled sun has burned

a dead robinia to gold

and gold a mulberry tree.

Two owls that laboured

through the failing light

are mourning in the folds

of darkness out of sight.

I, too, in the dark mourn

the death of my belief,

my small, uncertain faith that life

is proof against its own defeat.

It is just beautifully done.  Neither mechanical nor meandering, lightly stitched together with lines balanced against each other (“robinia ...gold / ...gold ... mulberry”; “mourning ... darkness ... dark mourn”), occasional rhyme (“light ... sight”), vivid contrast (“gold ... dark”; “faith ... defeat”).  The owls and the speaker are fused into a single feeling of complex loss, the loss of the nameless person of the funeral seeping out into something existential that anyone can identify with.

Don Maclennan wrote some 600 poems, all included in the Collected Poems, published by PrintMatters.  The book makes a wonderful gift, even for people who might not normally read poetry, but who could hardly help responding to these lucid yet elusive, questioning explorations of issues we all know, in some form, in our very souls.