No.57 - Plagiarism: A lecture on a blight

"But Prof, I plagiarised so ACCURATELY!"

Three weeks into the first university term and already we are encountering the first cases of plagiarism in students’ work. It is the most infuriating blight on our academic and pedagogical life. I know I won’t have a chance physically to lecture our students at length about this mushrooming problem, so here is a written version of what I want to tell them.

Sources and motives

Why? Why do some of you – you students –  resort to plagiarism as a way through your academic work (and it is not only our literary studies)? I have characterised plagiarism as the blight, a disease, but in some ways it is a symptom of deeper undercurrents.  Seldom is it a matter of real malice or sneaky intent, though it happens.

More common I guess is uncertainty and fear. Insecurity in the face of a daunting task: all the assignments we give you are likely to feel daunting, precisely because it is our job to stretch your minds. That can be scary. It is especially prevalent in a society that is increasingly losing the reading habit: plagiarism goes along with an increasing reluctance by students, even at third-year level, to sit down and read longer works of literature. It’s understandable that you sometimes cope with this insecurity by leaning too heavily on someone else you think knows better: an internet site, a friend, a former student.

Fear of losing marks: schools have taught you to be obsessed with marks, rather than with the learning process itself.

Fear of failure: you are afraid that if you fail something you will be thought of as a ‘bad person’, and it feels easier and safer to plagiarise – to offer up something you feel will please the marker, regardless of whose work it actually is. This seems especially acute in our narcissistic times of Twitter and Instagram and selfies, in which one’s public profile and popularity ratings have become central to notions of self-worth. Save face at all costs seems to be the watchword. 

Last-minute desperation: you have, as usual, left doing your assignment until midnight before hand-in day, and you suddenly find you don’t quite understand what to do – and you resort to some ghastly internet site to help you out; you cut and paste some paragraphs which seem appropriate, add a few of your own hasty comments, and whack it in.

So the reasons are many and mixed. In every possible way, however, plagiarism is BAD STRATEGY.  Here’s why.

"But Prof, my girlfriend wrote it, and she's BRILLIANT!"

My main objections are pedagogical rather than legalistic.

Conditions of trust

The teaching-learning situation and process, for me, is not a matter of power-over, lecturer versus student.  We are here to help you get better at certain skills and knowledges we know to be useful to you in the world of your future, and to help you evaluate your progress. It is a mutual journey of discovery and advancement. It is not a competition between us. We progress assignment by assignment. These are not the be-all and end-all of life or learning, and they are not about who you are.  We evaluate your work; we do not judge you.  The teaching-learning situation, while obviously not equal in every respect, is nevertheless dependent on conditions of trust. You trust us lecturers to train you up to a requisite level of knowledge and skill; we trust you to do the work to the best of your ability, so that we can truly help you improve.

Plagiarism fatally compromises that condition of trust.

Authenticity

First and foremost, I have to trust that the work you are handing in is really your own.  Anything other than this is utterly useless. Put yourself in my shoes, as your marker-evaluator. I spend some time annotating your script, trying to point out aspects for praise and improvement – only to discover that in fact what I’ve been correcting are not even your mistakes. And what is the point of that? I have learned nothing about your abilities; you have rendered me powerless to help you. I don’t care what level you’re at, what the source and nature of your successes and errors. I care only to see you improve from wherever you are. Plagiarism makes this impossible.

Skill up!

Say we have assigned the simple task to summarise a chapter from the novel Nervous Conditions. You decide to take the easy route and just copy out a summary off SparkNotes or whatever. You have just deliberately prevented yourself  learning how to summarise.  And guess what: a little further along you will be asked to do it again – and you will be as clueless as before. Maybe you somehow survive your whole university degree failing to learn how to summarise – then you are practicing law, or business, or journalism, and your boss demands a summary of some big document yesterday –and guess what, you can’t do it. Guess what: you’re fired.

It’s a bit like watching a game of cricket on TV, and then trying to pretend you can bat like Hashim Amla.  It’s not merely dishonest: it’s self-deceiving. Obviously, learning a sporting or practical skill means getting out on the actual field or the actual workshop and start practicing, doing it over and over, honing the muscles and the techniques, making mistakes, over and over until you get it right most of the time. Why would you think mental and academic skills are any different? Why, in effect, by plagiarising, would you deliberately deprive yourself  of the opportunity to hone these skills?

Conditions of slavery

I ask you: do you valorise slavery, or freedom? Being a follower, or an innovator? Being stuck, or being dynamic?  Being regarded as a parasite, or a useful citizen? Pathetic, or strong? Cowardly, or robust? I’ve yet to meet anyone who opts for the first in each of those pairs. Yet that is precisely what plagiarism condemns you to. You slavishly follow others’ ideas rather than your own; you lose control of your own life and development; you stay trapped in the same unskilled spot you began in. No one is ever going to praise you for that.

Is lying clever?

Some plagiarists evidently think they have outwitted the system, and that this is rather clever. Some obviously even spend a considerable amount of time and effort first finding something to plagiarise, then trying to cover it over. Some pile lie on lie in order to avoid facing the fact of having been caught.  This is just pathetic and sad. A few get away with it, and feel terribly smug. Sure, it’s a skill of a sort – but isn’t one that will get you very far. Unless you’re going into politics, maybe. Lord knows governments everywhere are chock-a-block with people who have lied their way to positions of influence for which they are not skilled – but only at enormous cost to others, and inestimable damage to the well-being of society. Shame on you if such venal creeps are your role models. You may develop a superficial, manipulative skill of jimmying the system – but what will you do when confronted by a problem which can’t be solved by evasion and copying?

The ultimate insult

Can you imagine a lecturer, turning up for work every day, lecturing, tutoring, marking, trying to help you – then the plagiarist comes along, basically saying, I don’t give a toss for what you are trying to teach me, I choose to ignore it, subvert it, demean it. Plagiarism is also an insult to the intelligence of your tutors, who are trained to pick up exactly when a text rings false – and some plagiarism is so obvious as to appear profoundly stupid. Most galling of all it is an insult to your own intelligence – are you not the intellectual elite of the country, just by being here? Yet you choose to insult the discipline you signed up to study, the university itself, and all the people (ultimately the taxpayers) who are forking out millions to keep you here. Take responsibility for your life, and for its impact on everyone around you.

"You mean I actually have to READ the thing???"

Crime and punishment

Finally, plagiarism is deemed a crime – both at university and in the wider world.  In one ugly and notorious case, one South African university leader was belatedly found to have plagiarised his PhD from a Rhodes University MA thesis. He was of course fired on the spot.

So what’s needed, should you be tempted to plagiarise, is a serious change in attitude. For every assignment in our department, you sign a declaration stating that you understand what plagiarism is, and that you are not committing. This is in the nature of a legally-binding contract. If you sign it in bad faith, either not knowing what plagiarism is or knowingly plagiarising, you are committing a legal offence. Though we try to be understanding and generous on a first offence, thereafter the university has every right to take action against you, including excluding you altogether. Don’t even think about risking that.

What may be required is a serious change in attitude.

Self-worth.

Place your self-esteem in the right place.  Your sense of self-worth is pretty fragile if it’s based only on lies and ‘saving face’. Rather it should be based on actual achievement – which means doing the job, working through shortfalls, feeling your mental muscles develop. As a teacher, nothing is more satisfying to me than seeing a student puzzling something out, working at it until the lights come on – fantastic.

Humility.

We are all ignorant and unskilled in all sorts of ways. This is not a humiliation, just the recognition of a reality. We need first to recognise the limits on our knowledge and skills. That feeling, “Oh, I don’t know that,” or “I don’t know how to do this”, is not an attack on your being; it is where you start from. Not making that recognition condemns you to remain stuck exactly where you are. That condition of necessary humility before the vastness of knowledge and possibility doesn’t leave us. Not ever. Get used to it.

Courage.

There’s no doubt that making the step from recognition of our limitations to doing something about it takes courage. You have to sort of swallow, put your shoulders back, and say, “I am going to deal with this, I am not going to run away.”  It means putting in some extra hours; or seeking out a tutor for assistance; asking questions. This is in the nature of learning. Just do it. Plagiarism is a form of cowardice. It is a bigger kind of failure than the failure to earn three marks.

Stamina.

It is also in the nature of learning that few if any skills come naturally or immediately. They accumulate gradually, with much practice and patience required. Old bad habits of writing and thinking take time to conquer and improve upon. Often it will feel like you are treading water despite hard work. You just have to keep at it. Plagiarism is a tempting way to ease the pressure, but in the long term it just makes it worse.

Negotiate the grey areas.

One grey area is knowing how much discussion with classmates eventuates in plagiarism. Many cases of plagiarism involve commonality between two or more students’ assignments; the excuse is often that discussion with a friend “inadvertently” results in certain phrases are repeated. The excuse is usually bull: plagiarism that is detected will by definition involve much more than just the odd phrase, more entire paragraphs, even a whole essay. Discussion of course is not a bad thing – but make sure that collaboration ends there. Write your essay on your own, for yourself. 

A second grey area is between “research” and plagiarism. Many schools seem to regard  cutting-and-pasting material off the internet as “research” – in the academic context a disastrous technique.  Hence students battle to distinguish between using secondary sources fruitfully, and being dependent on those sources’ ideas to the point of plagiarism. This, too, takes experience to get right. When in doubt, acknowledge and reference your sources fully. At most, use them sparingly. Never cut and paste.

Don’t take short-cuts.

Never use a secondary source – especially the student-help sites like SparkNotes and GradeSaver – as a short-cut. They are often misleading anyway, their interpretations no more valid than yours.  What we are after is your thinking about the primary text; declining to revel in the wonders of the original novel or poem or play, refusing to explore it for yourself, is both feeble and self-defeating. Nothing is more disappointing or galling to your teacher than to get a garbled and inauthentic mishmash of already poorly-expressed secondary sources, instead of your response. Your time and energy should be spent reading the primary text, making your own notes, your own summaries, your own character sketches, not subverting your individuality by burying yourself under others’ opinions.

"So I changed all the 'ands' to 'buts'; that's my argument..."

Be critical. Studying literature involves appreciating original artistry, and offering critical commentary on form and content alike. It also involves critically assessing others’ arguments or perspectives on the primary texts. If you consider a secondary source, take an independent and critical view of it, and build that critique into your own writing.

The double mantra through all of this is: BE HONEST, THINK INDEPENDENTLY.

******

No 56: Whither trophy-hunting?

I guess in these blogs I’ve generally steered clear of obvious controversy. A while ago, though, I passed on one of those quite possibly ineffectual Facebook petitions, this one calling on US President Donald Trump to reconsider his project to reinstate trophy-ivory imports to the US – especially those from Zimbabwe. (The ban was instituted under Barack Obama because Zimbabwe was perceived as too corrupt and unregulated in its elephant conservation; this is seen to have recently improved, and elephant populations appear pretty healthy, hence the proposed reversal.)

An old school friend – let’s call him TC – accused me of jumping on the “Trump-haters” bandwagon, and challenged me to suggest an alternative to trophy-hunting as a tool of conservation. It has been a welcome prompt to pull together some thoughts that have been brewing behind my years of reading of elephant-related literature, and I’ve taken my time to put together a considered response. (Settle in: this is a longer one than my usual posts.)

The ethics of trophy-hunting is not, and never has been, an easy topic. Emotions run high and allegiances run deep on every side. The issue of whether, and in what ways, international trophy-hunting can or does aid conservation is a complex and ever-evolving one. Few generalisations are likely to hold, so I’ll try to avoid making too many. Perhaps the only immutable generalisation is that trophy-hunting, by definition, inevitably results in the death of an animal, and in the translation of that life into some or other form of death-mask display-trophy.

Hate is wasted emotion. Though I do find Trump loathsome, my concern is broader than just him: the concern is for the elephants, and thus for the state of global legislation which will help save them from imminent extinction. (Though southern African populations are healthy for now, there is no room for complacency; elsewhere an elephant is killed approximately every fifteen minutes, in some estimations.)  China is set to ban ivory imports in 2018. The US (the world’s second-largest emporium for both legal and illegal ivory) and Europe will likely be playing catch-up – if they decide to.  But Trump and his ilk’s gun-happy, hunter-friendly, environmentally denialist impulses run counter to the world’s increasing recognition that the health of animal-, bird-, fish- and insect-rich ecosystems is also our health.

TC also seemed surprised that I might want to prevent trophy-hunting, referring to my mother Jill Wylie’s well-known devotion to the saving of wildlife. Which is odd, since she was and is adamantly opposed to hunting, indeed to any form of exploitation of animals for mere human luxury. I, too – I nail my colours to the mast here – find the whole idea of trophy-hunting abhorrent. I can understand hunting for the pot when necessary; I can understand killing for mercy; I can understand the adrenaline rush of the kill – I have done all these myself. I can understand the need to cull animals in certain artificially constrained situations – though we humans usually have only ourselves to blame for such horrible scenarios. But killing just to stick a head or skin or tusk on a wall – this I find incomprehensible.

Having said that, I am prepared nevertheless to entertain the notion that in certain ways trophy-hunting is “good for conservation” as TC seems to assume. And having said that, I want to stress again that it is almost impossible to generalise about this. There are hunters and hunters and hunters, professional and occasional, ethical and unethical. There are hunting operations of every imaginable stripe, regulated and otherwise.  Motivations are highly variable. I have no doubt that some hunters do deeply know and even love the wild, even as they hunt – not a contradiction I personally could live with, but I guess we all live with some such contradiction or compromise.  Moreover, there is little agreement as to what ‘conservation’ actually means, and how ‘it’ might best be attained and sustained. Nor have hunters, their critics or the philosophers arrived at any agreement as to what ‘ethics’ might apply to trophy-hunting. So, while almost any critique is bound to upset someone, any one defence of trophy-hunting is equally unlikely to hold in all cases.

Given this mush, I want to isolate three distinct aspects around which to air a few thoughts, without trying to be comprehensive or dictatorial: history; economy; and psychological motivation.

A troubled history

I think it’s hugely important to view the present against the history of hunting in Africa. We are all complicit in, and products of, that history. It’s deeply ambivalent. Irrupting into the relatively low-impact hunting practiced by aboriginal Africans, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European hunters gaily obliterated literally millions of southern Africa’s wild animals, all but denuding vast areas. The tide of slaughter was barely halted by the gradual and messy shift to conservation and the establishment of the first national parks. Ironically, hunters played no small part in this; they wanted to preserve their prey and their playground. These enclosed, originally racially exclusive areas – now usually termed ‘fortress conservation’ – remain the basis for almost all ‘conservation’ operations today, even as more inclusive ‘community-based’ models are being tried out. This includes private conservancies, reserves and hunting concessions – a thousand or more just in South Africa.  The old pattern holds: ‘wilderness’ areas are ever more securely separated from the rest of the country, and the bulk of the population becomes more and more ignorant of, even frightened of, and therefore at war with, the ‘wild’. Meanwhile, the (usually) rich white male jets in on exclusive packages to highly controlled and fenced-in locales, pays up, shoots and heads for home.

On the one hand, I am delighted that there are many more wild animals alive in southern Africa today than there were in, say, 1910.  I do feel, given humans’ overwhelming destruction of  habitats, that those wild-ish areas are more valuable than ever, despite their besmirched history. And in many areas, wildlife is healthier for the environment than agriculture: kudu do better in, and are better for, marginal Karoo areas than overgrazing sheep, for instance. Hunting revenues sustain a number of these ‘rewilded’ ranches and havens.

On the other hand, sheer numbers conceal serious anomalies. The areas devoted to wildlife are tiny compared to the animals’ precolonial range, and severely fragmented. Very few ‘conservation’ areas function as viable ecosystems, or do so only for some species at certain scales. Which species flourish, and at what level, do so only due to highly interventionist human management. That management is driven largely by commercial concerns, which are in turn driven by touristic whims, lethal and non-lethal. Hence many mammal species are flourishing only because of intensive and lucrative breeding programmes, auctions and cattle-like redistribution of animals for photographs or the hunter’s bullet. The canned-lion industry is only the most egregious of these efforts. In short, while hunting revenue is indeed partly to be credited for the expansion of ‘conservation areas’, what and how that ‘conservation’ is being implemented is often highly artificial and problematic. One does not have to be a ‘decolonisation’ apparatchik to worry that this kind of elite ownership and access will turn out to be politically vulnerable, if not unsustainable – as it has proved in various parts of Africa, including Zimbabwe. History weighs heavily upon us in this part of the world.

At best, philosopher Lawrence Cahoone concludes in his article “Hunting as a moral good”: “The wildlife management argument is a legitimate and important, but limited justification of contemporary hunting.” Just as unrestricted sport-hunting reached its limit a century or so ago, it may be that, in an era of postcoloniality, ever-increasing human population pressures, unprecedented species extinctions, and global climate change, historic modes of trophy-hunting have now had their day. Of course, trophy-hunting has a much lower impact on species such as elephants than illegal poaching for ivory and the like, and much lower than habitat destruction. And, as hunters often point out, their practice is far more targeted, knowledgeable and “honest” than the mass destruction of animals for meat in covert abattoirs. This is what the philosophers call the “least harm” argument. But, for the animals, it is harm nevertheless.

Economies of death

The dynamics of commerce have also shifted over time. Where the early hunters often made a living in part by selling the products of their slaughter (ivory, hides, meat), today’s hunters make different economic arguments for their practice.

One strong and persistent assertion is that trophy-hunting brings in revenue that is ploughed back into conservation. At times this is so fervently expressed you would think that, paradoxically, no wildlife would exist were it not for the loving attentions of the trophy-hunter. The claim is not untrue, but often exaggerated. The comprehensive South African government figures for 2014 indicate that trophy-hunting brought in  just one-fifteenth of all wildlife-related revenue; non-lethal game-viewing, while fraught with its own pressures, is overall far more lucrative. ‘Conservation’ on the broad scale could thus survive pretty well without trophy-hunting. The broad figures do conceal huge differences between operations: some will be wholly dependent on hunting revenue, others only incidentally; some will also have a decent whole-ecology philosophy, while others care only for the prey-as-prey (especially those trucking in extra-limital and foreign species to that end, and that end only). There is plenty of debate and critique amongst hunters themselves about this sort of thing.

A second claim is that hunting fees fund not only conservation, but also ‘community’ projects to build clinics, schools, and so on. Some instances of the now largely defunct CAMPFIRE projects in Zimbabwe are a case in point.  Some operators in my own region appear exemplary in this regard. But overall in fact the trickle-down effect has proved limited, albeit significant in individual cases.

Thirdly, hunting operators point out that central government garners significant income through taxes. True, but little if any of this is fed back directly into conservation, which is under-emphasised in the South African fiscus and positively starved in the Zimbabwean.

Instead, massive amounts of money are ploughed not into ‘conservation’ as such, but into infrastructure such as luxury lodges and expensive fencing. The vast bulk of the profit goes to just a few individuals – the ranch owners, mostly; a few taxidermists; some animal breeders – with fairly low long-term job-generation compared to other fields of work. The whole enterprise is ineluctably elitist, its economic benefits palpable but pretty narrow in distribution. And not a little is deliberately diverted; I have it on good authority that substantial hunting revenues gathered in Zimbabwe are siphoned off into accounts in Botswana, South Africa or elsewhere.

This should not surprise us: instance after instance in history shows us that any activity that becomes dominated by purely commercial concerns provides fertile fields for illegal exploitation. It is not an indictment of honest hunters to remind ourselves that in too many areas legal and illegal extraction of wildlife ‘products’ have  become almost impossible to disentangle. Obviously, this is worst in poorly regulated countries, as Zimbabwe has been; the recent case of Cecil the lion is just one revolting case. But even amongst ‘legal’ operations, commercialisation can mean that animals are reduced to monetised ciphers in powerful humans’ games, mere pawns to entertainment. This is clear from the language of Bill Morrill, for example:

The African elephant is a natural resource that lends itself to assignable ownership and that ownership, couples [sic] with benefits produced from hunting, provides an incentive for conservation. ... Hunting of the African elephant by foreign tourists has a long-standing tradition and is one of the uses of choice by many African nations today.  Africans were hunting elephants before Eastern peoples or Europeans arrived in Africa.  ... Hunting of elephants by tourists is cost effective, profitable and easily monitored ... Foreign hunters are willing to convert [assignable ownership] from an asset capital in exchange for a cultural experience compatible with the history and use of the elephant.

I find this instrumentalisation of animals, this sanitising language, more chilling than any of the numbingly brutal hunters’ descriptions of actual elephant killings. It is also self-contradictory and self-deceiving. Would elephants, could they speak, agree that they “lend themselves” (as if voluntarily) to  “assignable ownership”, that their wholly unnecessary death is somehow  a valid “cultural experience” supported by a seamless “history”? It is human, not elephantine, “tradition”, at work – and such ‘traditions’ are historically fleeting, mutable, and culture-specific. They have changed over time, and can (and will, and probably must) mutate again as our world changes. The ‘tradition’ argument is as weak as saying we should  continue publicly to stone women for adultery as described in the Old Testament, just because it is an “archaic” or “neo-traditional” practice.

Commercialisation has further skewing effects. Some species become valued as trophies above others, with incalculable effects on animal genetics, diversities and distributions, and their intricate relations with natural ecosystems – which, as I’ve already hinted, effectively cease to exist. In her comprehensive and level-headed book, The Extinction Market, Vanda Felbab-Brown notes that

private ranches in South Africa are increasingly keen to stock non-indigenous species for hunting, such as fallow deer and wild boar from Europe, even though they may have a highly detrimental impact on local species. [They] are also increasingly interested in stocking and breeding animals with certain desirable trophy hunting traits, such as specific colours, thus interfering with natural selection and negatively influencing the genetic stock of species.

A more insidious effect of rampant commercialisation is a demeaning of humans’ own involvement in the world – a self-centredness which no longer owes allegiance to any wider or higher concern beyond profit or egotism. It will be protested that hunters (or at least what National Geographic’s recent [October 2017] discussion of trophy-hunting calls “enlightened hunters”) do both hunt and revere such loftier ideals. But to the extent that such ideals are occluded, it is to fail to be fully human, to fully engage our most valuable intellectual and emotional assets. Appealing solely or primarily to self-indulgent boastfulness is – well, unappealing. I’ll return to this in a moment.

The main point I want to make here is this: it is not the death of the animal per se which funds the conservancies or the anti-poaching patrols or whatever – it is the money which funds them. The money exists independently of the animal’s death, before and after; it could be made available without anybody having to die.

“A most delightful mania”

This brings us to the third focus: the psycho-social motivations for trophy-hunting itself. Why do these men (it is mostly men) hunt at all? There are probably as variable a mix of reasons as there are hunters, and justifications have also shifted somewhat over the last century or two. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hunters in southern Africa routinely saw themselves, rather contradictorily, as both vanguards of imperial ‘civilisation’ and as escaping the strictures of conventional society. Killing animals was rebelliously adventurous fun, “a most delightful mania”, as one put it – at once an assertion of control over nature, and an indulgence in unleashed ‘natural instincts’. Modern hunters have not entirely escaped either motive, even as they try to advance the ethic of the “sportsman”, later “professional hunter”. The latter project themselves as hunters with some kind of morally-supportable fairness and cleanness in the hunt, as opposed to the uncaring “gunner” or “poacher”.  It’s all about precision, control, technology, coolness.

This framework of intricate and rational planning and execution runs counter to another oft-expressed notion (treated at length by Matt Cartmill in his brilliant book, A View to a Death in the Morning; Hunting and nature through history). Many hunters aver that hunting is the expression of an ancient embedded brute spirit within man, a real kind of savagery that is somehow more authentic than the allegedly thin veneer of civilised society. Hunting, according to hunter-philosopher Ortega y Gasset, humbles the man and “lowers him towards the animal.”  A century before that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Western men had been reduced to a sick ineffectuality by the slave morals of Christianity and commercial over-indulgence. Healthy men, he wrote,

revert to the innocence of wild animals: we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank ... Deep within all these noble races there lurks the beast of prey, bent on spoil and conquest.

We are “depraved animals” ourselves, in this view – and somehow giving in to this depravity is seen as more authentic than any of the gamut of other emotions we might feel. Critics of hunting, that addicted animal-killer Theodore Roosevelt scoffed, are “nature-fakers”. This sort of thing is sometimes uttered in conjunction with some version of Robert Ardrey’s infamous “hunting hypothesis”, the idea that hunting was fundamental to the emergence of homo sapiens. Both ideas have been pretty thoroughly debunked now; how otherwise can 9 out of 10 men – or it may be even 999 out of 1000 – ignore, never feel, or sublimate these alleged hunting instincts in other non-lethal activities? I would agree that humans can be depraved in all sorts of ways, but not that giving in to bloodthirstiness is more authentic than the appreciation of beauty, reverence for life, awe at nature’s complexity, a nurturing sense of responsibility, or just pleasure and love that I feel when I’m in my local forest. Though rough-and-tough hunters are liable to dismiss these feelings as somehow namby-pamby or flimsy or feminine, they are as anciently embedded, as vital to our evolution, and as intrinsic to our humanness, as propensities towards competition, violence or the hunt.

Now many hunters do experience those feelings, too: indeed, they may feel them oddly heightened precisely by the act of inflicting death, precisely because at that moment all those other impulses must be put aside. I suspect that the pathology of the compulsive trophy-hunter derives its sensation of power not just from the intoxicating capacity to command a death, but from the ability to suppress those emotions – compassion or empathy or awe – that might spare the animal’s life. This is to be manly, too, perhaps just one manifestation of a much wider sociology of masculinism. Where that expression of attaining full masculinity has to be compulsively repeated, an underlying insecurity reveals itself. (Which is why the naturalist John Muir asked Roosevelt when he was going to grow up and stop killing things.) The famous hunter Frederick Courteney Selous made this syndrome explicit, as he admired a scene filled with “noble” and “majestic” elephants:

The whole picture is so vast, made up of the great beasts with their trunks and ears swinging ever to and fro, and the huge forest with its mighty trees and glorious vegetation, and the contrast of the tiny little human being amongst it all is so great that I feel it is really hopeless for a person to try and picture it ... I will therefore leave my own feelings at once, and ...

- so he proceeds directly to the hunt. Similarly, some latter-day hunters I have read admit to ambivalent, even remorseful feelings on killing a beautiful sable or giraffe or whatever – but obviously those feelings of awe or beauty or appreciation or regret must be, and can be, set aside in order to execute the killing. Further, the appreciation is transmuted from something independent, living and elusive, into another thing – the trophy – which is owned, dead and locked into an effigy of false permanence. The underlying ambivalence of this seems obvious to me in the conventional way the prize, shortly after being shot, is propped up for the obligatory photo in a semblance of a living stance, and later in the way the beheaded lion is taxiderm’ed into a fixed snarl, the buffalo’s liquid eyes replaced with staring glass. Personally, I find this simply grotesque. On the level of psychological theory, the ability persistently to entertain this contradictoriness amounts to a pathology.

Some hunters claim a certain superiority in their bushcraft, their knowledge of the habits of the animal they stalk, their tracking or their camouflage or their stamina or their patience. (This obviously doesn’t apply to those who pay guides to do that hard stuff for them, who shoot from safe and distant vehicles or hides or helicopters.)  I too valorise bushcraft: I learned with my mother to stalk animals; we tracked, got close, observed and understood them – and finally backed quietly and respectfully away. No one’s bushcraft has to eventuate in a death, nor justifies it. All hunters take pride in their marksmanship, too, and in their weaponry: the hunting magazines repeat and relay obsessively the details of armaments, when and where to hit an animal. I was also taught from an early age to shoot, and took pride in improving my accuracy. But I did not feel the need to use this skill to kill for the sole purpose of boasting later; and I found other ways of growing into courageous adulthood (unlike many in my local farming community, who assume and teach that killing something is crucial to that transition). Like most of the arguments, these are post-event rationalisations, a poor basis for a fundamental ethic.

In the end, pure self-gratification is the central motivation. Some seem happy to be quite explicit about this, like Donald Prizio:

The hunt itself may be the least important and least gratifying phase of the sport, without the equally gratifying anticipation and recollection to complete the experience. [In the anticipation phase, y]our imagination is your guide.  You are in control.  During the recollection stage, you are blessed with the gift that erases the bad memories and enhances the good ones, allowing the story to mature and improve much like fine Bordeaux wine.  Reality is the root of the realisation phase, however.  It comes on someone else’s terms, and you must tackle it with storybook imagination or selective memory.

Avoidance mechanisms at their finest. It is, it seems, not the death of the animal that is important, but the story of the death. In a way, the story is the real trophy, the lion’s head with its rictus snarl just a visible cipher, the staring glass eyes speaking only of the whole thing’s ultimate emptiness.

Alternatives?

All these points can be argued at greater length – and have been by people more eloquent than I am. Lawrence Cahoone sums up what he sees as trophy-hunting’s values: “Regulated, ethical hunting embodies the goods of trophic responsibility, ecosystem expertise, anachronistic self-sufficiency, a rare experience of animal inter-dependence, and a kind of honesty.” These all seem weak to me; all these goals are achievable without death. The argument is circular, presupposing an unspecified ethics in the first instance. And too many hunters hunt without any of these values in place.

But to return to the beginning. TC challenged me to suggest an alternative to trophy-hunting, and I thank him for the prompt.  The alternative seems to me perfectly simple. If these trophy hunters have all these tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of dollars to devote to the hunt, and if they are serious about contributing to conservation, then why not just donate that money to clearly targeted conservation efforts? Buy land that can retain or be restored to at least a semblance of wilderness, especially in vital water catchment areas, wetlands, and rain forests, all of which are being destroyed at a mind-blowing rate. Educate farmers into management techniques better than indiscriminate shooting or poisoning every perceived threat. Curb illegal wildlife trafficking. Educate our children into living alongside nature rather than at war with it – they are the ones who will have to live with the monumental fuck-up our generation has made of nurturing the planet.

Repellent, egotistically jejune and anachronistic as I find trophy-hunting, I am not about to advocate a total ban on it (only on already endangered species). Trophy-hunting has had at least some positive spin-offs, and in the grand ecological scheme of things, it’s perhaps one of the least of our worries.

******

Dan Wylie’s book, Death, Compassion and Elephants in Southern African Literature is forthcoming from Wits University Press.

No 55: Ursula K Le Guin: A short tribute

Just yesterday I was dipping into Ursula Le Guin’s collection of essays and occasional pieces, The Wave in the Mind; this morning I discover that the Grand Dame of sci-fi/fantasy has died in Oregon, aged 88. It is somehow significant she was born in the same year as my mother.

            I’ve referred to Le Guin before in this blog, and especially to her most famous, prize-winning novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. I chanced to take over teaching this other-worldly work from a departing colleague back in the ‘90s; and more recently have reintroduced it to the first-year university syllabus. A few students are put off by the other-planetary setting, but fewer than in previous years, when the academic prejudice against sci-fi and fantasy was stronger. And some students who have little long-fiction reading experience behind them find the multi-strand, episodic structure of the narrative a bit tricky. But few fail ultimately to be seduced by its central adventure-journey, its lively and dense evocation of a wholly weird society, and its challenge to gender stereotyping.  Above all, though published more than 50 years ago, Left Hand treats fundamental issues of sexual exploitation, political power, and cross-cultural (mis)understanding that are more relevant to South African society than ever.

            Much of Le Guin’s fiction is at bottom about culture and ways of wresting companionship from conflict. This is not surprising given that both her parents were anthropologists. Her novel Always Coming Home is a particularly slow anthropological portrayal of an imaginary California-set society, but the societies depicted on altogether other imagined planets also gain in realism from her understanding of how mental, material and linguistic features build and intermesh to constitute a “culture”. Perhaps most importantly of all, her heroes are a far cry from the bragging, heavy-shouldered, weaponised macho-men of so much American fantasy fiction and television: Le Guin understands more than anyone that the courage required to compromise is far greater than that required to start a war, not to mention more subtle and intelligent. She begins from a foundation of humility, selflessness and pleasure, as captured in some of my favourite passages from Left Hand. If anyone is a mouthpiece for the author in that novel, it is Faxe the Weaver, a self-deprecating but wise practitioner of the Handdara religious sect; Faxe says: “Ignorance is the ground of thought...”  He echoes the philosophical aims of the Ekumen, the novel’s interplanetary organisation of non-forceful co-operation: “The intensification and amplification of the field of intelligent life. Adventure. Curiosity. Delight.” Le Guin’s attraction to Taoism – crudely, the philosophy of yin-yang balance – shines through here and elsewhere.

            I’ve not made a particular study of Le Guin’s work more broadly, though I’ve read a good number of her 20 novels, and at least a portion of 100-odd short stories. The work ranges unexpectedly widely in genre and audience, from children’s stories, through the Young Adult series of the “Earthsea Quartet” and the later somewhat similar series Powers, Gifts, and Voices, to the almost post-modern Changing Planes. Amongst the more adventurous novels is Lavinia, Le Guin’s imagining of the founding of Rome as seen by Aeneas’s wife Lavinia, who is accorded a mere two lines in Virgil’s second-century epic The Aeneid. It’s perhaps just a little too self-consciously feminist, and too self-aware of its own story-telling to be quite satisfactory, but it’s risk-taking in a way I appreciate.

            One ought not to forget, either, her many generous but perceptive reviews of others’ works, especially in my experience in the Guardian Review of Books. Most often, however, I go back to her essays, especially in the volume Dancing at the Edge of the World, and especially the essay “The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction”. Throughout her career, Le Guin promoted the value of fiction as a “thought-experiment” way of addressing real-world issues, and the saving value of the imagination itself. If anything is lacking in our conflict-riddled world, and in the world leaders who generate those conflicts, it is the imagination to think of new and compassionate ways through and out, and indeed the courage to imagine at all.

            Finally, Le Guin was concerned with the health and robustness of language itself, as both theme and vehicle. Though perhaps not as mellifluous or poetic as some of her contemporaries, she was nevertheless a stylist of great felicity. Yesterday I marked a short passage from her essay-talk, “A Matter of Trust”:

I have enormous respect for my art as an art and my craft as a craft, for skill, for experience, for hard thought, for painstaking work. I hold those things in reverence. I respect commas far more than I do congressmen. People who say that commas don’t matter may be talking about therapy or self-expression or other good things, but they’re not talking about writing. ... If you want to be a writer, find out where the comma goes. Then worry about all that other stuff.

That’s typical of her tone, too: at once firm and chatty, wise and slightly acerbic and generous all at once. Ursula Le Guin is one writer I really would like to have met. Too late now – but if her work has not exactly 'changed my life', it has opened up doorways for me that might otherwise have remained forever closed. And there is more of her work I have yet to discover and enjoy: fiction as a “carrier bag” of life-wisdom that will persist, I believe, for generations to come.

*****

No 54 - The solace of birds

'Batis and acacia' (c) Dan Wylie

Most mornings, for a few months, I’ve been awakened at first light by a rattling flurry of sharp sound. The cat would startle up; I’d wonder if someone was knocking, or tossing hard seeds onto the roof... We got to know soon enough that it's a testosterone-loaded little Cape Batis, very neatly dressed in black, white and russet suit, but positively furious at seeing his reflection in the dawn light on the eastern window. You’d think after a couple of weeks he would twig that this was not a rival male, but a virtual bird, a fake-news bird, not worth expending all those calories on. But no, self-recognition not being a strong point, or maybe actually enjoying a kind of gym session, on and on he goes at it. Sometimes he is joined by an African Paradise-Flycatcher, resplendent in breeding brick-red colour, or a Dark-capped Bulbul. Are they learning from each other?

I wonder if a Klaas’s Cuckoo chick somewhere is being deprived by this distraction, as the Batis is a prime sucker for the cuckoos to foist their eggs on – and already I can hear an immigrant cuckoo lilting, My-iki, my-iki in the pines upslope of my cottage, its white belly making it all but invisible against the paling sky. Nearer to hand, the Batis churrs and grouses. As Terry Oatley has written, this is a hard sound to describe; he finds the only satisfying one is C J ‘Jack’ Skead’s, likening it to pebbles being rolled together. I think of it as more woody than stony, a sort of rolling gurRRR-rrRRRrrr-rrr. But it has always been a problem for the bird-guide compilers to describe bird-song. The old Roberts guide (eds. McLachan & Liversidge) was quite richly poetic: I think it was the Pel’s Fishing Owl’s call that was compared to the cry of a desperate soul falling into the pit of hell! No one ever having heard such a soul, actually, this would not do for the more recent scientific generation, as represented by Gordon Maclean, compiler of the 1984 Roberts, the hefty edition with its handsome maroon dust-jacket. Though the descriptions of songs became blander, Maclean did include sonograms, little graph-like diagrams like ECG printouts, which I found very useful in gauging relative smoothness or harshness of calls, time intervals, and more. In the yet more recent Roberts field-guide (Chittenden, 2007), much pared down in the interests of making it more convenient to carry about, the sonograms have disappeared. For the Batis, Maclean repeated the “two stones” notion, as does Chittenden; but without amplification it’s not so useful.  The massive seventh edition (Hockey et al), despite being 1200 large-format pages long, has done away with the apostrophe after Roberts, the sonograms and the stones: the Batis now says chewarra-warra-warra, which is quite good, even if it reminds me of Tigger trying unsuccessfully to be fierce in Winnie the Pooh.

Why do I even possess these books – alongside two huge volumes of the Bird Atlas project, the two beautifully-illustrated volumes of Geoff McIlleron and Peter Ginn’s Ultimate Companion, Peter Steyn’s Birds of Prey, a battered Newman’s field guide, and still others? After all, I am far from being a dedicated “twitcher”, more a sporadic observer, and these books are far more technical and detailed than I will ever need. I blame the bird atlas project, which my mother and I participated in for a time in its first round; that educative experience drew me into buying the atlases when they were published (obviously, since our names were in the back, hoo-hah!). Then I bought more, and more... Apparently South Africans buy more bird books per capita than any other nation on earth. Yet I do like to know who I’m seeing and attach a name. A name confers a certain intimacy on a raw observation, allows me to feel more at home and attuned, even if the bird itself doesn’t give a tiny white poep about your human sense of intimacy.

The clumsiness of our attempts to describe birdsong means: dump the books, go out and listen. There is no experience but the experience. I take a chair onto the front lawn, look out over the forest tree-tops, the coastal plain beyond, sit and listen. A certain kind of knowledge and layering of meaning comes from the books, to be sure; a different kind from memory and experience. A number of species in this forest also occur in my home forest of eastern Zimbabwe, so are heavy with evocative memory. And they are all present this crystalline morning, talking to and past and over and despite one another.

The Batises (Batii?) are worra-worra-ing and chirping; White-Eyes chitter in a little group dashing from erythrina to wild-olive; Dark-capped Bulbuls sound fruity greetings from the leaf-tops of hubris. These are the little people, but soon along come the royals, first bounding along the branches, half-kangaroo half-bird, eyebrows strikingly painted white on green, jungle geishas, then with a growling churr launch through the air between trees with a flash of wing as crimson as a caesar’s robe. Knysna Louries – sorry, Turacos (I’m of that generation still stuck with the ‘old’ names). One, and another, three, and four: then the arching, raucous call: graaah, graaah, graah. My mother used to say that that call, depending on strength and rhythmic duration, presaged mist or summer storm. I was a bit dubious: it was both the rainy and the breeding season, so the two were likely to coincide quite a bit anyway. But it was a little myth that I nurtured, part of how we identified with and interpreted those who shared the forest with us. Damn the taxonomists, who now insist that what we had back in the Vumba were Livingstone’s turacos, with a slightly pointier crest and a slightly bluer tail. Well, they are like enough, and remain as magnificently aristocratic and broad-voiced, aristocrats and criers of rain.

There are other littlies who will talk down kings, whose voices are louder than climate-change denialists’, exceeding their bodily importance a thousand-fold. Most vociferous this morning is the Bar-throated Apalis; I think of him as frenchified, dapper and lively and piping Phil-IPPE, phil-IPPE, phil-IPPE. The indefatigable Jack Skead noticed that some individuals’ throat bars were thicker than others. Theories competed like waxbills at a birdbath. Was it dimorphic? Was it a sex symbol, like a flashier cravat? Was it just that the feathers lay at different angles at different times? Lately, it’s said that a thicker bar signifies greater territory and dominance. How would that even work? OK, my territory is one hundred and twelve wingbeats wide, let me add two millimetres to my bar, like a corporal promoting himself to a sergeant? There remain profound mysteries in such relationships between colour and behaviour.

The middle classes are also coming into voice: Lesser Striped Swallows taking an interest in my back porch with little gazoo-like squeaks; Rock Pigeons’ chesty love-notes on the roofline; one Southern Boubou shranking out a sound like shook foil, answered by another with a high bright cry, clearer than a bell. Forget your legend- and poetry-saturated English lark and nightingale – colourless calls in comparison with our Oriole’s ringing clarion, or the Burchell’s Coucal’s falling-and-rising bubbling, somewhere between clarinet and harp. It is an orchestra this morning, albeit one thoroughly disorganised and aleatory. A clatter of vociferous Redwinged Starlings, too, creaking and glurping and scolding the cat. They're often accused of excessive aggression, but none of my books mention that they mourn. I once saw a group, on a road in town, surrounding the body of a flock member that had been killed by a car. They said little or nothing for a while; then by some secret signal one starling hopped forward and covered the body in a flurry of frantic shivering feathers and wings. This was explained to me as a pseudo-sexual act, perhaps a futile effort to revive the dead; but, as that individual backs off and, after a quiet interval, another comes forward and does the same, it looks more like a ritual, respectful and concerned and arranged.

Who is this - Steppe Buzzard?

Now the thermals rise with a seaborne sough, bringing in some of the big guys: raptors. Never all at once, of course, but there is the drawn-out kwheee of a Long-crested Eagle, who is often to be seen perched on poles alongside the cuttings near town. I can anticipate the sharper yelp of the Jackal Buzzard, or the spiralling continuous yow-yow-YOW-yow-yow of a Crowned Eagle displaying and looping for his mate. A little worry for my cat, who could be easily taken by this huge predator: I have a vivid memory from the Vumba of a Crowned Eagle snatching a young Somango monkey off an acacia tree-top right below my bedroom window. And maybe a Fish Eagle will wander up from a coastal watercourse, to utter that silvery thrilling cry that is in my memory forever welded with the dawn honking of hippos and the booming of Ground Hornbills and the powerful silky slide of the Zambezi River.

The thermals are also lifting a cabal of White-necked Ravens into the lively sky. There are far fewer of them than just a few years ago; has there been some shift in local migratory patterns, or have too many been poisoned by farmers putting out toxic carcasses for the odd jackal and rippling destructively and blindly out into vast ecosystems? At any rate, these croaking priests of the air are playing on the wind – it is surely playing, a cavorting that has nothing to do with preparing for a hunt: a revelling in the gift of flight, a passing fixation on formation-flying, an occasional mock aerial joust. In his fascinating book, Pleasurable Kingdom, Jonathan Balcombe argues that seeking of pleasure is as potent an evolutionary force as Darwinian competition for resources. Birds, he thinks, enjoy singing; he cites philosopher and ornithologist Charles Hartshorne:

'Raven Games' (c) Dan Wylie

There is no conflict between ‘birds sing for pleasure’ and ‘they sing to maintain territory or attract mates.’ The more essential an activity in the whole life of the bird, the greater the proportion of the bird’s pleasure which is realised in that activity.

And it’s just about impossible not to feel that pleasure and pride inflect the singing in the thickets below me of a Red-capped Robinchat (the old Natal Robin; only a committee could rename a bird whose cap is not at all red but at best, according to the guides, “cinnamon-brown”). At any rate, this Robin is going great guns, mimicking a Crowned Eagle, sliding into a flycatcher screek, a riff of gardener’s lazy whistle, a couple of inventive sequences of his own, back to a modified snatch of eagle – astonishingly variable,  unique to this individual and, well, happy. Balcombe also quotes Joseph Wood Krutch, writing in 1956:

When I hear a particular robin singing on a bough – I do not think: ‘Irritable protoplasm so organized as to succeed in the struggle for existence’.

I could go on and on, just with what I’ve heard in an hour – a web of sound-textures melding with the scent of sap rising off complexities of vegetation as the day heats up. In our addled, politicised, monetised world, the birds are my distraction, solace, unselfconscious Mercurys of wisdom and unalloyed delight. So many people are oblivious to all this; even most of my eco-literature students have proven woefully ignorant of the extraordinary interlacing of sound and colour, texture and scent that makes up such a multidimensional sensory experience: their smartphone-centred world, for all its globalised reach, can come nowhere near to so deeply engaging the complete person. 

And without learning to love all this, how can we know we need to save it, or would want to? 

*****

No.53 - Robert Mugabe and the fragility of power

"Blow, winds, blow!" (c) Dan Wylie

Some friends have asked whether I am going to write about the Zimbabwe situation. After all, I am ‘from there’, so I should, no? As it happens, I have no more an inside track on developments there than any other outside observer, though I have followed events with great interest. I plan to go to Zim soon, and will report back on my experiences.

In the meanwhile, anyone who has any kind of historical consciousness will be neither surprised by Robert Gabriel Mugabe’s ouster, nor particularly utopian about the immediate future. We have to be grateful that it has happened with minimal bloodshed and public upheaval, while recognising that the coup consists of little more than a shuffle amongst the incumbent stalwarts of the party. Emmerson Mnangagwa has been the staunchest securocrat of them all, the organiser-in-chief behind the suppression of ZAPU and the Ndebele from even before 1980, more viciously in the 1980s, including the Entumbeni clashes of 1980-81, and the massacres of Gukurahundi (his denials notwithstanding), the serially rigged elections. His recently announced cabinet does not have a man in it under the age of 65; despite their pragmatic noises since the coup, this doesn’t feel like a team that is going to radically change direction to reboot production, resolve the cash crisis, open up genuine reconciliatory dialogues to address the buried past, or transition smoothly to truly transparent electoral democracy. We can but wait and see.

Meanwhile, I share the national delight that at least RGM (the Rogue Grand Manipulator) and his poisonous wife have been sidelined. As it happens, I have been reading Stuart Doran’s great doorstopper history of ZANU(PF), Kingdom, Power, Glory, which was published before the coup but offers a densely-documented backdrop to it – especially Mugabe’s willingness to use violence at any point to gain his ends.  Doran cites Mugabe himself, speaking in 1981:

Our methods will differ according to the situation. If a situation warrants we use vicious methods, I can assure you that we will use vicious methods. ... If other people are planning coups, planning revolts, then let them be warned that we are well prepared for such eventualities. Once again, if it is to be an eye for an eye, well, we will remove two eyes for one eye. (Doran, p.270)

Talk about being hoist with one’s own realpolitik petard! It is only too ironic that Mugabe’s deposition, for which he seemed wholly unprepared, happened so non-violently – not the norm amongst the world’s tyrants. There has to be some psychological link between tyranny and short-sightedness – for who, gazing down the bloodied steppes of history, would dare become one? A sorry outcome would seem fore-ordained: look at Caesar, Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Mengistu – overthrown by outsiders they have provoked into war, assassinated by trusted brothers, driven into exile... Live by the sword, etc.

"Et tu, Brute?" (c) Dan Wylie

It so happened that I have also recently seen an excellent Al Jazeera documentary on the 2016 trial of Chadian strongman Hissène Habré. At almost the same moment as Mugabe’s Fifth Brigade was killing off Ndebele ‘dissidents’ in the south of his country, Habré was doing the same in the south of Chad. Like Mugabe, Habré had come to power through the entanglements of a civil war, occasioned in part by colonial boundaries having shackled together historically incompatible peoples in a new ‘nation’. Like Mugabe, he was well-educated in the ways of the West – each gained several degrees –  which helped persuade some powers to overlook his obvious abuses. Habré was propped up by France and the United States because they could use him as an ally against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who had invaded disputed territories on Chad’s northern border. With French help, Gaddafi was repulsed, eventually to meet his own bloody demise. Habré himself lasted only eight years as leader of his horrifically abusive one-party regime, from 1982 until his overthrow by Idriss Déby in 1990. Habré fled into exile in Senegal, but his crimes, which included rape, sexual slavery and ordering the deaths of 40,000 people, followed him. After protracted negotiations to get him extradited from Senegal, Habré was finally brought to trial by a supra-national African court. On 30 May 2016 he became the first ex-dictator to be convicted of crimes against humanity in such a court.

It has often been asserted that Mugabe had been clinging gamely and lamely onto power because he is afraid of being hauled up before such an international court himself. The question may now be moot, seeing as how his former henchman, now usurper-successor, Mnangagwa has granted him immunity – though on what divinely-appointed judicial authority one man can immunise another for mass murder is a perennial mystery. And one doubts that conscience is much of a driving force amongst such people. Mugabe will probably, like some other ex-tyrants, die in muffled and luxurious isolation.

It also so happened that while the Zimbabwe coup was unfolding I was marking exam scripts – students responding to a question on Shakespeare’s magical play The Tempest. Nowadays one is pressured to interpret even such ‘old’ works in a ‘decolonising’ or ‘post-colonial’ context – or be deemed irrelevant, if not white supremacist. Since the story involves an Italian-European magician, Prospero, taking over an island from its pair of native inhabitants, Caliban and Ariel, The Tempest is indeed susceptible to such a reading. (Another colonised islander, Caribbean writer Aimé Cesaire, did just that with his counter-play, Un Tempête, which our students also study.)

"Monster/Magician" (c) Dan Wylie

But The Tempest is about nothing if not power and usurpation of power: Prospero is exiled on the island following his overthrow in Naples by his very own brother; and not only the oppressed Caliban is scheming to overthrow him – so are some of Prospero’s own countrymen, themselves shipwreck victims. This is, it seems, Shakespeare’s symbolic vision of history: cyclical dislocation and chaos breed unseemly squabbles for position and patronage – not to mention getting the girl.

As I’m sure many commentators have observed before, Shakespeare was positively obsessed with the usurpation of kingly or tyrannical power, returning to the theme in play after play. Hamlet opens famously with the eponymous hero confronting the ghost of his father, murdered and usurped by his own brother. Macbeth strives in vain to atone for his lethal royal sins and avoid being ousted by his erstwhile lieutenants. Julius Caesar is assassinated by men he has always known, including even his closest colleague, Brutus. King Lear (sort of) voluntarily hands over power to his daughters, but the unexpected consequences drive him into crazed exile, raging at the storm which is also the upheaval in his mind. (What a scene: I was immediately provoked into painting tableaus from these plays!) The History plays – all those Henrys – are about little else than the moral legitimacy or otherwise of kingship, and the mechanisms by which one ruler takes over from the last. In Henry V Shakespeare penned the immortal, rightly oft-quoted line about the fragility of any tyrant’s hold on power:

            “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

If I remember right, I first encountered that line as the title of a biography of King Hussein of Jordan. Anyone – decolonised or otherwise – who argues that Shakespeare is irrelevant or passé has either never truly read him, or is too narrow-minded to understand. Few writers are more incisively observant about those psychological blind-spots that make the lust for power both so dangerous and so fragile.

In contemplating these commonalities of human political behaviour, the patterns that go on repeating themselves, century after dispiriting century, I always find myself going back to another doorstopper book, St Augustine’s City of God, written around the year 400:

"His father's ghost" (c) Dan Wylie

Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale? What are criminal gangs but petty kingdoms? ... If this villainy wins so many recruits from the ranks of the demoralised that it acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues peoples, it then arrogates to itself the title of kingdom, which is conferred on it in the eyes of the world, not by the renouncing of aggression but by the attainment of impunity. (IV.5.4)

Augustine had your measure, RGB, 1700 years ago. Please read the script, Emmerson.

***

No 52 - How (not) to write a dystopian novel

Once it became known that I was teaching Ursula le Guin’s wonderful, other-planetary novel The Left Hand of Darkness, science-fiction and fantasy buffs were so thin on the academic ground that ‘work’ on those areas – thesis supervisions and examinations and article reviews – started drifting my way. 

I was no buff, having read very little science-fiction at all. I do remember that, as a kid, I enjoyed the ‘Trajan Empire’ comic-fantasy serial in my Look & Learn magazines – a sort of offworld/hi-tech/Roman-Empire mixture. And at high school at one point we ‘did’ a volume of sci-fi stories called The Stars & Under. This included a story about a time-travelling sport hunter being taken back to the Jurassic to shoot a dinosaur, wandering off the carefully non-intrusive pathway and trampling a butterfly – with all sorts of subtle and unforeseeable consequences, including derailing the anticipated landslide outcome of a US presidential election. (Obviously, something like this happened in early 2017.) 

But I wasn’t attracted to fantasy particularly, though I read the obligatory Lord of the Rings. Many years later I encountered a bookish little boy on the Montreal metro, and asked him what he was reading. Harry Potter; it had just come out. ‘Very good’, I said, ‘never stop reading, it will be the greatest treasure of your life,’ and got off the train. I hadn’t a clue who Harry Potter was. In time, I read the available volumes of the series, intrigued at the condemnation by Christian friends of mine – Harry Potter was Satanic, they alleged. I thought the books were good enough tales for twelve year-olds, though rather obviously derivative of classical and mediaeval models – and definitely not Satanic. Even later, ironically, I found myself supervising an academic thesis on precisely those derivations, happily proving my point.

By that stage, of course, science-fiction and fantasy was being incorporated more readily into academic programmes – indeed, was fast becoming the chosen reading field of so many youngsters, intersecting with their more mind-numbing rage for epic film and computer-games. I had myself rather accidentally incorporated a sci-fi story into my PhD work on white myths of Shaka: I somehow discovered that the doyen of science fiction, Arthur C Clarke, had written ‘The Light of Darkness’, about a modern African dictator, also named Chaka, who ultimately gets his eyeballs fried by his own hubristic satellite-dish observatory. It has to count as the most badly written short story in the genre I had ever come across – though there may well be worse out there.

As I migrated from Shaka to ecological concerns in literature, sci-fi hove into view more strongly, just because so many futuristic novels and stories are concerned with where we as humans are headed on our present environmentally-destructive trajectory. Ursula le Guin, Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood were regularly chosen for study by my eco-literature students; and I have found myself supervising and examining theses on these and other speculative/fantasy writers, ranging from brilliant (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Wahington series) to the awful (Game of Thrones). I read two volumes of Thrones, and there was not a single sentence I wanted to go back and read again for its beauty or finesse – and many, many sentences I wanted to feed immediately to that silly woman’s derivative dragons. There is some serious infantilisation of our adult readership going on, and by and large I prefer to consider the future through non-fictional works such as climatologist James Hansen’s Storms of my Grandchildren or Jacques Attali’s A Brief History of the Future. Attali considers scenarios involving banking, international commerce, insurance, sanitation, and cultural nomadism – subjects largely ignored by novelists who prefer the spectacles of high-tech warfare, the power of surveillance, and the prurience of manipulating sexuality and reproduction. The apocalypse may well be rather humdrum, and boringly lacking in zombies.

I also became aware – though the field is expanding fast – that Southern African speculative fiction is thin on the ground. There is J M Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, which is vaguely futuristic; and Jane Rosenthal’s Souvenir, set mostly in the Karoo; Nancy Farmer’s Harare-set The Eye, the Ear & the Arm; an edgy story by Henrietta Rose-Innes, ‘Poison’, as well as her more recent novel, Green Lion; Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City; Andrew Miller’s Dub Steps; a scattering of stories for younger readers... More is emerging, but we’re still in our infancy. There was certainly nothing futuristic set in the Eastern Cape, so as usual when confronted by such a gap, I sort of inwardly shrug and sigh, ‘Oh, well, I’ll just have to do it myself...’

The result was The Wisdom of Adders (available from PrintonDemand, and electronically on Amazon/Kindle here). I had great fun playing with the landscape and a deeply-changed ecology and climate, and with what might have evolved in language and place-names by the year 2170. It’s not sci-fi in the sense of other-planetary influence, alien visitors, time-travel or spectacular technology: it’s entirely grounded in realism, and there is, in my envisaging of a kind of slow global apocalypse over the previous century, not much high-tech left. Like Le Guin, I am really more interested in a particular human situation – in this case the coming-of-age journey of a feisty and impulsive young woman through a landscape partly blighted, partly open to opportunity, a landscape I hope the reader can imaginatively inhabit.

In that respect, the novella is not utopian, but nor is it dystopian in the way of Cormac McCarthy’s now legendarily bleak The Road, with which we are also terrifying our first-year students.  Adders is perhaps more like Jim Crace’s lesser-known future-America journey novel, The Pesthouse, or Le Guin’s anthropological ‘study’ of a future California, Always Coming Home. One gets the oddest questions, which make one wonder if one has written it ‘right’. But what exactly happened in Nummers? (Well, I don’t know, if it isn’t in the novel, it doesn’t exist.) How does she get batteries for her torch? (I don’t know that either; make something up!) What does the jackal mean? (Sorry, haven’t a clue; it’s just there.)

My slightly crabby replies might conceal important questions – questions that resurface as I contemplate writing a story parallel to Adders. (Neither a sequel nor a prequel, what is that – a paraquel? And no, I do not intend to call it ‘The Foolishness of Subtractors’, as waggish Reg Rumney suggested.) Those questions include: Just how much ‘back history’ can one incorporate without slowing up the narrative or sounding didactic? How much ‘future technology’ has to be explained, given that the physics for it may not even have a vocabulary yet? How much ‘meaning’ is best left to the reader’s imagination, how much ‘misinterpretation’ risked? And which current developments and trends does one choose to extrapolate into the future, and why? Is it a matter of simple logical extension, or of one’s own psychological disposition?

Nat Segnit’s recent review article in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘Dystopian’s Dilemma’, is sub-titled ‘Invention at the expense of storytelling.’ He notes how one recent American dystopia overloads the narrative with made-up words for new tech (though such must surely emerge, and Adders is a bit guilty of that); how another has a theory about the future driving it, but the novel attached to it feels merely ‘dutiful’; how another ‘pours in a mass of contrivance and alternative history ... having to explain the world at the cost of inhabiting it.’ Many balances to be struck.

And there are still deeper questions about extinction and hope. Many argue that we humans are destined for extinction, and maybe our extinction is the world’s best hope. But while writers are still writing for readers, it’s a question of how one projects human hope despite everything. To write a dystopian novel utterly without a future for humans would be to destroy the purpose of writing itself. On the other hand a dystopian tale, leavened with hope, to that degree ceases to be dystopian. So there may be no pure dystopia, only dystopic tendencies: in all the stories I’ve now read (though I know I’m still far from buff-hood), there are characters who embody some stubborn desire to go on, to rebel, to survive. This is true even of The Road; of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, now screening on TV; and of that very early story, still in my view as good as any for its haunting vision of a yet-possible future, ‘The Machine Stops’, written in 1924 by E M Forster (yes, he who wrote A Passage to India).  I’ll say no more about it – just read it, while I see if I can rake up any reasons for hope on which to base the next novel...

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