No 63 – Creativity and Chaos: Writing Harare

            

If Someone hasn’t written a thesis on literary representations of Harare, Someone ought to. I’m sure there’s plenty in the socio-economic academic literature about Zimbabwe’s urbanisation, from its colonial beginnings in the 1890s, through the depressed first decades of the twentieth century, the halcyon years in the 1950s and ‘60s, to the overburdened simultaneous growth and decay of the last thirty years.  Though novelists and playwrights and poets have doubtless been writing continuously about city life, and the urban environment is frequently mentioned in the literary surveys, a cursory search hasn’t turned up a comprehensive study.

The city has come a very long way since 1890, when one of Cecil John Rhodes’ troopers raised the Chartered Company flag over a patch of ground in the shadow of a prominent kopje, and Fort Salisbury was established. The tiny colonial settlement remained for a considerable period a pretty miserable place to be. Hugh Marshall Hole wrote about it this way in 1894, in Old Rhodesian Days, envying what had already developed in distant Bulawayo:

In Salisbury we heard of these things and envied. ... We still had our dismal black swamp in the middle of the town, and our ramshackle ‘Kyas’ of wattle and daub. By 1894, it is true, there was a sprinkling of brick stores and a few wells had been sunk, but the majority of us lived in thatch huts and had to get our drinking water up from the river below the camp in barrels hauled by donkeys or perspiring natives. There was no electric light for us. Those who were bold enough to venture out after dark had to carry a lantern to prevent them falling into dagga-pits or the open ditches which drained the camp.

The racial segregation of the city began right then, with a tightly controlled ‘location’ being established the far side of the Kopje; this and other townships sprawled even as the plusher white northern suburbs did, and one of the fascinating things to trace in the literature is the way that that racial and economic division gets increasingly infiltrated, broken down in places and reinforced in others, even as the white population after the 1970s dwindled to a tiny and effectively irrelevant sliver.

In some sectors, even a century or so after Hole, the city doesn’t sound much better.  Here is the legendary bad boy of Zimbabwean literature, Dambudzo Marechera, in an unpublished piece written in 1985:

What is it about Harare? Is it the nightlife, the hotels, the nightclubs? Or the melancholy solitary walk back to the flat when a tawny, almost rubescent dawn is signalling from within the dark confines of another pent-up night? [...]

            Ah, Harare. Its mysterious method of living out of a suitcase, living in anonymously cheerless but expensive blocks of flats, living no longer on borrowed time as in the past but on borrowed money, hire purchase, the black market, and the small advances one may rarely extract from the employer’s reluctant clenched fist. Harare, where a scream in the night is the signal for all shutters to come down – it’s none of my business who is murdering who. Harare, with her thousands of world-wise schoolgirls tarted up for the lunch-time disco at Bretts and at Scamps, the raucous scenes at Queens, the National Sports Stadium with its visiting bands and its bogus Cerulloean evangelists.

(This is cited by Marechera’s devoted literary supporter and executor, German academic Flora Veit-Wild, in her survey of “Zim.lit”, Teachers, Preachers, Non-Believers.) Marechera is obviously projecting his own self-destructive angst on the city in some ways; he was well-known in his short, creative and sad life for sitting in Cecil Square – the site of the original Fort, later Africa Unity Square – hammering out brilliant, tortured and cynical poems on a battered manual typewriter. Irrepressible, acidic and generally miserable, Marechera extended his experiences of the seamy side of Salisbury/Harare life into the phantasmagoric urban psycho-scapes of his novels House of Hunger (1978) and Black Sunlight (1981).

Something of that nightmarish vision of Harare’s townships occurs also in Chenjerai Hove’s well-known novella, Bones (1988), when his main character Marita ventures out of her already tough rural existence into the vicious and confusing confines of (we presume) Harare.  Hove also wrote a more realistic collection of vignettes, Shebeen Tales: Messages from Harare (1994) – these kinds of snatched impression-stories have become a favourite form for Zimbabwean writers.  Shebeen Tales, in my view, is not especially well-written, often both clumsily repetitive and not profoundly insightful, but Hove does capture some fundamental dynamics, accompanied by some juicy and resonant characterisations.

I am alone now, walking down Second Street, passing near parliament, the house of empty promises, to the national newspaper, the media of omissions. I hear disgruntled voices, some speak of economic stomach adjustment...

One of the brief chapters is entitled “’First World’, ‘Third World’, and ‘Fourth World’ City”; others centre on the shebeen, on the sex shops, on the high walls and savage dogs of the luxury suburbs. And in another chapter, entitled “Cleaning the Streets for the Queen”, Hove reminds us that the Mugabe government’s tactic of clearing the impoverished off the streets only when foreign visitors were due, was a habit established long before the infamous Murambatsvina clearances of 2008. Hove’s tone is sardonic:

The Queen of England, yes, the Queen herself, has requested to visit one of the most run-down suburbs of Harare, Mbare. Now, there is a problem: who can stand up and say to Her Majesty, ‘No, Your Majesty, please go to the other places, Borrowdale, Greenside, not to the squatter-riddled Mbare.’ Mbare is chaotically planned and everything takes care of itself. Violence, drugs, illegal vendors selling anything you can imagine. And collapsing buildings, old ones built in nineteen-I-don’t-know-when.

Harare in the year of Murambatsvina, 2008, is the setting for Valerie Tagwira’s first and solitary novel, The Uncertainty of Hope – the title is symptomatic. The novel is a very creditable one, and it’s a pity that Tagwira has published nothing further, apart from a short story or two; an obstetrician-gynaecologist, she is presumably too busy saving lives. Her intimate – not to mention medical – knowledge of Harare shows in her portrayal. The city remains severely split between rich and poor areas, the latter a perpetual embarrassment to a government that promised so much and delivered so little: this is a city plagued by AIDS, water and electricity cuts, rampant inflation (a loaf of bread costs millions), and chronic shortages of fuel and medical supplies. However, what Tagwira shows especially finely is how the city divides are in fact (have always been) porous, as the lives of disparate characters like Onai, the marginal Mbare marketplace vendor with the abusive husband, and Tom, a jet-setting would-be tycoon with a farm dodgily acquired under the Land Reform frenzy, become strangely yet entirely authentically intertwined through family and employment connections. The various personal crises come to a head in conjunction with, indeed inseparably from, the destructive clearances of Murambatsvina.

Boundary-crossings also occur in the occasional white person appearing in Mbare or other townships: a displaced farmer shebeen-crawler in Bones; a white army man taking up a rather nice house in Mbare in Christopher Mlalazi’s story “Eeish!”, from Dancing With Life: Tales from the township (2008). Mlalazi’s title reminds us that, for all the penury and dissolution, there is always vigorous life, creativity and humour to be found in the townships, a tribute to the people’s extraordinary resilience.  And in between the plush suburbs and Mbare and Chitungwiza are “the Avenues”, the geometrically-arranged flat-lands so disparaged by Marechera. Here small businesses can be set up in the corners of residential blocks, such as the somewhat dishevelled salon in Tendai Huchu’s The Hairdresser of Harare (2010), a very funny little novel in which a white woman features in a condition of clientship and equality, rather than as the more usual remote and paternalistic employer. A sign of the times, even as some colonial institutions (quite mystifying to the novel’s narrator), such as a rugby match between Churchill and Prince Edward schools, complete with bagpipe band, persist in their strange bubble of privilege. The novel’s treatment of homosexuality is a bold intervention into a locally controversial area, another sign of the city’s shifting social undercurrents.

The critique of Mugabe’s governance underpinning many of these works has sent any number of Zimbabwe’s best writers out of the country; Hove himself died recently in exile in Norway. So voluminous has the diaspora been that Brian Chikwava can characterise part of London as Harare North – his novel of that title constituting a brave, if not quite successful, experiment in inventing a kind of ‘Shonglish’ for a ZANU-PF-supporting main character.

Another writer who has elected to live elsewhere, but continues to write about the homeland, is Petina Gappah.  Gappah’s first novel, An Elegy for Easterly, I thought very good but which, in the way of a number of first novels published elsewhere, I felt had had the pithy individuality edited out of it; it was so polished that a true ‘voice’ hadn’t been allowed to emerge. However, unlike too many young African writers who don’t survive the exaggerated accolades accorded to them by an apparently guilt-stricken international media, Gappah has gone on to write more, and to really find herself.  The Book of Memory (2015) relates perhaps the strangest of all crossovers between Harare’s adjacent worlds – an albino Shona girl named Memory who (so she thinks) has been sold by her father to a white man, who raises her devotedly; but she is in the infamous Chikurubi prison, having been accused of murdering her benefactor.  In her story, as she recalls it, are lingering residues of the entrenched divides of the more and the less privileged, the residents of Umwinsidale at one end of the scale, the Jo’burg Lines of Mbare at the other. 

Still more accomplished is Gappah’s latest, Rotten Row (2016), which, rather mysteriously, won the Guardian First Book Award.  Rotten Row is that street running in the lee of The Kopje, on which have always been located Harare’s criminal courts; the first of the book’s interconnected stories is, daringly, related in the voice of Rhodesia’s last (white) hangman – a considerable accomplishment in itself. In its deeply-informed ranging across social sectors and economic brackets, I rate Rotten Row as the most complex, compassionate and nuanced portrayal of Harare so far.

And what of the future of Harare? One can only imagine – as did Nancy Farmer, a multiple award-winning American writer who lived for a time in Harare with her husband Harold, himself an accomplished poet. Nancy Farmer wrote several Zimbabwe-set novels for teens (Young Adults, we call them nowadays), including The Warm Place (1996) and A Girl named Disaster (1998). The Ear, the Eye and the Arm (1995) is set in a fantasial Harare of the twenty-second century. The Ear, the Eye and the Arm are three bizarre characters comprising a detective agency, who are set by a certain General to find his missing children; we are led on a charming helter-skelter adventure through the various districts of the city. We begin with the suffocatingly securitised rich suburbs in which the General, appropriately, lives; through the bawdy and dangerous chaos of Mbare; vast, tunnel-riddled trash-lands ruled by a woman no less tyrannical than the General himself; the Mile-High city, which is a luxurious (very) high-rise complex, a kind of extension/combination of the boutiques of First Street, the gold-and-glass Sheraton hotel, and ZANU-PF headquarters; and Resthaven, which bears the name of an actual old-age home but in the novel is a walled-off enclave attempting to restore age-old traditional rural Shona values. 

            A wonderful story.

***

I have already gone on rather long – and have only scratched the surface of a rich lode of imaginings of a multi-faceted, turbulent yet attractive city just bursting with artistic talent and possibility.

*****

No.62 - The elephants’ women: in memoriam Daphne Sheldrick

Daphne Sheldrick, one of the African elephants’ greatest friends, has died at the age of 83. I met her once, very briefly, possibly in 1984, at her orphanage on the edge of Nairobi National Park in Kenya. I was in the company of my mother’s older sister Anne, who was then living in nearby Langata and was herself an honorary ranger on the Park, rather idiosyncratically studying bushbabies and hyenas (which she called “Poofies”). At the orphanage, we nuzzled baby rhinos and young elephants, some of the over 200 orphans Sheldrick and her team had saved from human destruction. Born near Gilgil, in western Kenya, not far from where my grandparents farmed, Sheldrick left only to study in the US. In the 1960s she worked with elephant pioneers Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton, and married David Sheldrick, then Warden at Tsavo National Park. When David died in 1977, Daphne set up the David Sheldrick Elephant Trust, and the orphanage just outside the Kenyan capital, in his honour. It will continue to run under the management of her daughter Angela.

Daphne related some her experiences – importantly the terrible drought of the early 1970s in Tsavo, which killed a lot of elephants and became a benchmark for pro-culling arguments subsequently – in her book The Tsavo Story (1973). In this she became the first of a remarkable group of women to research and write about the African elephants.

To focus on these women – in their way the Jane Goddalls and Dian Fosseys of the elephant world – is in no way to diminish the achievement of the even more numerous and committed male researchers, from Ian Parker in Kenya to India’s Raman Sukumar and South Africa’s Rudi van Aarde, nor of innumerable Africans whose critical role in conservation is too easily effaced. But I do think the women writers have collectively contributed uniquely to elephant studies.

In 1975, Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton published Among the Elephants, relating their experiences and studies amongst the elephants of Manyara in northern Tanzania. The rather unconventional Iain had pursued a PhD at Oxford, supervised by the equally unconventional zoologist Nico Tinbergen (Tinbergen also supervised the distinctly odd Lyall Watson, who would write the quasi-fantasy Elephantoms about the Knysna elephants). Among the Elephants boasts a Foreword by Tinbergen, in which he highlights Oria’s unique contribution.

Oria Rocco, a French-Italian who had been farming near Naivasha, fell in love with the “rather shy” Iain as well as the Manyara elephants, and wrote a substantial part of Among the Elephants. Iain loved the elephants, had learned to walk with confidence just feet away as he observed and mapped their intricate family dynamics, and writes well – but Oria’s narrative is more personalised, lyrical at times. More than researching animals, she became animal: “Our senses became so alert that like hunters, we could smell and track elephants long before we saw or heard them. ... Living amongst animals one becomes more like them. ... Distances had no limits, time no meaning ... I knew by the colour of the trees, the bushes and the flowers, which month it was.” After she gave birth to their daughter Saba, it was the matriarchal mores of the elephants to which she turned for maternal direction, for their “old fashioned virtues: loyalty, protection and affection”; stability, loving communication, females taking on “male” roles. It was often heart-breaking, rough, dangerous, this wild life, but they often felt themselves to have entered a “continuum” of “completeness and serenity” with the elephants. This sense of communality surfaces repeatedly amongst the women researchers.

Among the Elephants mentions other researchers only in passing (indeed, they are all rather reticent about each other – professional courtesy, I suppose), but includes Daphne Sheldrick and Sylvia Sikes, who would go on to write A Natural History of the Elephant (1971).  Inspired by the Douglas-Hamiltons, with whom she worked in the late 1960s, on the almost-neighbouring park of Amboseli, Cynthia Moss had set up another elephant research centre under the auspices of the African Wildlife Trust. She set about tracking the infinitely complex and fascinating family dynamics of the Amboseli elephants, writing four books and several films, notably centred on an elephant dubbed Echo. Echo became world-famous, probably doing more for the public’s understanding of elephants than any other pachyderm personality.

Moss followed Iain’s scientific methods, and eschewed the idea of a two-way friendship with the elephants she observed; she was not a participant; though she cared profoundly about their preservation, they did not realise it. Yet, like a novelist, she opens her book Elephant Memories (1998) with an account of elephant living that, while behaviourally precise and authentic, is not what she is observing; it is ‘imagined’. And when a matriarch she has been following for a decade or more is unnecessarily shot, or culling is mooted for the Amboseli elephants she has come to know in their every gesture, you can feel the heartstrings break beneath the measured surface of the prose:

I feel sick when I think of a team of marksmen, skinners and butchers moving into Amboseli and slaughtering whole families along with all their knowledge, their traditions and their memories. ... Elephants are not so many rodents to be exterminated; they deserve something better than that and I am not afraid to say that ethics and morality should be essential considerations in our decisions for their future.

Moss’s work has continued through many trying times – opposition, drought, poaching – for forty years. Joining her from time to time was a young biology major, like Moss educated at Smith College – Joyce Poole. Contrary to expectations that women would study matriarchal structures, Moss directed Poole to study the bulls – and discovered lots of fascinating things about musth behaviour and other boytjie things. The experiences were formative for Poole, who had grown up partly in Kenya and penned a deeply personal memoir significantly titled Coming of Age with Elephants (1996).

Poole found herself taking a keen interest in the investigations of another American woman, Katy Payne. Payne, along with her then husband Roger Payne, had been working on recording infrasonic (below human hearing-range) whale song. Now Katy was adapting the technology to record similarly inaudible communications between elephants. Silent Thunder, she called it in her 1998 book of that title. This book, like most of the other women’s, is written like a novel, full of conversations with fascinating people, places, societies, as well as accessibly showing that elephants do communicate infrasonically across great distances. Still, Payne remained humbled before the deep mysteries that remained; she compares scientists to fishermen, pulling up bits almost by chance from beneath swirling and beautiful but opaque surfaces, and often strangely “driven by unconscious motivation”. And science could not entirely shield her from emotional attachments to her subjects: “The women do not show the same composure as the men ... grieving has so exhausted them.”  She had to cope with the aftermath of culling in Zimbabwe’s Sengwa reserve, where she worked with Rowan Martin. Many of the elephants she had tracked and accompanied for months had been killed. She tries to devote her science to the memory of those lives cut short, quoting the World War One poet Wilfred Owen: “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns.” That devotion “started as a desire for them to have passing-bells, and for myself to ring them in the face of the grand indifference.”

           

Does the evident complexity of elephant communication, albeit untranslatable, amount to a “culture”? Canadian novelist Barbara Gowdy thought it a distinct possibility and, drawing on Poole and Payne’s work, wrote The White Bone (1998), a scintillating story of the world from within an imagined elephant consciousness – a kind of Watership Down for pachyderms. As for Zimbabwe, another woman, Australian Sharon Pincott, has been pursuing a lonely, ultimately rather despairing crusade on behalf of the so-called Presidential Herd of elephants of Matetsi in western Zimbabwe, recounting the story in a series of books including In an Elephant's Rumble (2004) and the Elephants and I (2009).

Building on Payne’s work, yet another American scientist, Caitlin O’Connell, began discovering, through some nifty experiments with wild Namibian and some captive elephants, yet another dimension – that in addition to airborne infrasonics, elephants can communicate quite nuanced messages through ground vibrations, picked up through the soles of those great padded feet. O’Connell, like her predecessors, was publishing articles in hardcore scientific journals, but her account for the general reader, The Elephants’ Secret Sense (2007), is I think the best-written of all of these narratives. She has since followed up with Elephant Don – the ‘biography’ of a particular individual she tracked, observed, understood. Through all the behavioural studies, this shines through – that every elephant has distinct and complex personality, and belongs – where we humans have not destroyed it – to a society that shows every sign of being a full, rich culture.

It would be too easy to stereotype these and the many other women studying and loving elephants as ‘emotional’ beings, and men as objective and detached. It would also be inaccurate to call them feminist, though some have deployed elephantine matriarchal structures in support of feminist agendas. Nor is it true that they care only for the animals to the exclusion of people, especially African people: one thing that links all these accounts is the awareness that human and elephant (and all other animal) cultures have co-evolved, have been and remain intricately intertwined, and are equally vital to the ecological and psychic health of our shared planet.

This is the burden of ecologist and psychologist Gaye Bradshaw’s brilliant book, Elephants at the Edge (2009). Like many of the field researchers, Bradshaw “felt wedged between worlds and struggled to bridge the chasm between the collectivity of science and [the] personal nature of suffering – between my role as objective scientist and the subjective experience of a living, feeling, sentient member of the animal world.”  Bradshaw’s subtitle is “What animals teach us about humanity”, but she doesn’t romanticise this relationship. Like much of humanity, she writes, elephant society is

riddled with violence, has had ethnic ... strife, has lost elders and the coherence of traditions, and suffers with no hope of restitution. Elephant society is also embedded in human cultures struggling with similar challenges and histories ... They and humans are asked to re-create culture, to redefine meaning in new contexts ... We are able to harness the volumes of scientific knowledge with the wisdom of indigenes, elephants and other animals to help re-create human culture. Once the shock of trauma sinks in, the possibility for renewal begins. ... 

The elephants have called. It is time that we join them.

*****

Dan Wylie’s Elephant is available from Reaktion Books; and his new study, Death and Compassion: The elephant in southern African literature, is due from Wits University Press in July.

*****

No 61 - Wonderful, many-legged life

White-barred gypsy moth - but what's with the green
bubbles around the head?

In my parents’ bookshelf, which I pored over endlessly as a child, was a book entitled The Living House. It wasn’t a gothic horror, nor did it mean “the house that one is living in”, though the pun occurred to me. It was a book about all the seen and too-small-to-be-seen creatures, mostly with six legs or more, that scurried across your ceilings and behind the skirting-boards, that lived in your carpets and inside the wood of your socks-drawers and even in the socks themselves. There were also (it still makes my nose itch to think of it) mites that lived in your left ear by day, and the right ear by night, and daily made an invisible trek across your face to get there.  So we were told anyway.

Our house, which is now close on a century old, was ideally decrepit to host innumerable such critters. So is my present abode, which may be just as old, and just as riddled with rot and hospitable cracks and crannies. Just the visible spectrum of  my diminutive housemates is endlessly fascinating. Most people, of course, regard themselves as desperately at war with the insect world – not entirely without reason. But most people fail to recognise that we could scarcely exist without insects, that the world of vegetation and oxygen and fertility on which we depend is intimately and irreplaceably serviced by them. Insects preceded us by millions of years, they outnumber us by an order of hundreds, and they will almost certainly outlive us. However our demise might transpire, it will very likely leave behind what Jonathan Schell, in his book on nuclear holocaust, The Fate of the Earth, dubbed “a republic of insects and grass”.

Who was it said caterpillars are longer-lived, more complex,
and just as beautiful as the butterflies they become?

Our war on insects has nevertheless succeeded in many places, and not only in our sterilised new urban architectures and pesticide-saturated monocultured fields. One perhaps unlikely place I experienced this was Germany’s Schwartzwald (Black Forest), within which I illicitly overnighted once. It was 1979, the days of acid rain, and forest life of all kinds had been devastated; all that night there was not a sound – not a cricket, not a bird – nothing. Brought up in a teeming African forest, I found this unnerving and lonely. Another place was a farm near San Diego, California – a farm, in summer, surrounded by orchards presumably pollinated by bees – yet their nights too were dead: not a stridulation, not a song, not a single moth fluttering to the lights. And I once saw a boy in England driven to the edge of hysteria by the presence  of a single fly in his sanitised house. All these incidents happened some time ago; now, entomologists tell us, a quarter of all flying insect species in large parts of Europe have been extinguished just in the last twenty years. A genocide of sorts.

Handsome fellow - a longhorn beetle?

I do not sentimentalise insects. Some sting, some are downright dangerous, and I’d be an idiot not to powder the fleas the cat brings into the bed, or squash the ticks that might kill her with biliary, or spray the mosquito plaguing my ear in the night – even if it’s a Bush Mosquito with its rather pretty stripy legs. But I am perfectly happy to coexist with the vast majority of them and, some minor altercations notwithstanding, valorise their short but complex, exquisitely mysterious, even miraculous lives.

This has to be the sweetest defence mechanism.

There are the many-legged ones, like the harmless nodding chongololo millipedes that apparently breed up in the ceilings, because they seem to drop out of nowhere, wander haplessly across the walls, or end up, desiccated and starved, dying behind a couch or cupboard before I can find them and put them out in the green world. And there’s the occasional centipede, swift and glossy as toughened plastic, a sting worse than a wasp’s but really just wanting to hide, with no malice aforethought.

Flattie snacking on a damselfly.

Always there are spiders, tiny ones that might bite, others like pinheads that abseil from the light fittings on filaments spun endlessly out of their own bodies. The daddy-long-legs perch on their overnight webs in the corners, shivering into paroxysms of defensive shaking, or lurch away from the duster on stilty legs as fine as horse-hairs. Always, of course, the Anyphops “flatties”, scooting behind the paintings to escape the cat. They seem panicky and vulnerable, but they too are predators, nabbing mosquitoes and moths and damsel-flies in their lunging pedipalps. Even each other. It’s an insect-eat-insect world. Now and then I find one of their nurseries – a shallow pale dome of sheerest silk stuck to a wall, which suddenly begins to appear bruised around the edges – until you look closer and the dark stain resolves into a spreading cloud of a couple of hundred of the tiniest flattejties, each one hardly a millimetre across. Just as well for us that not so many survive. The survivor grows, and periodically grows too big for its own skin, and so, niftily, just reverses right out of it, leaving it hanging in public like a golden ghost of itself, complete down to its very leg-hairs.

The six-leggers are even more numerous and varied than the eight-leggers – partly because many of them also have wings and like to gather at the windows at night, trying to get in, or inside during the day, trying to get out. Dozens of moths of unidentifiable species, even the tiniest of which are beautifully marked on close examination; and lost butterflies – Painted Ladies and Green-banded Swallowtails and, most commonly of late, Garden Inspectors. An occasional dragonfly flashes blue and frantic and metallic along the windowsills. Wasps of various kinds – the Polistes Paper wasps who build their clustered nests under my porch eaves, the Potter wasp who leaves her little amphora of mud stuck to a window pane, and the leisurely but menacing Yellowjacket, legs all a-dangle – an imported foreigner, like me. Flies, of course: big galleon-like flies off the neighbours goose-pen, down to the tiny fruit-flies hovering over that neglected banana, and the soft little triangular guys, Psychodid Moth Flies. who favour the toilet-bowl.

Philoliche aethiopica - I think.

Finally, one will never escape the ants, that most accomplished of all terrestrial societies. There is an occasional raid on my honey by a couple of glowing Spotted sugar-ants, but mostly it’s the little guys – the mop-it-ups – who find their way with uncanny speed to anything tasty or dead and swiftly devour and cart it away. On at least two corners of the house, trains of Argentine ants travel up and down, in greater numbers when it’s about to rain, servicing heaven knows what vast, diffuse cities beneath my roof and riddling my foundations. Not termites, thankfully, though every so often a suspicious drift of light brown shavings of something structural accumulates on the edge of the bath...

Chequered ladybird

So many more, from the giant red-and-black locusts to the powdery Ctenolipisma fishmoths that secretly devour the spines of my books – all feeding and breeding and building and swarming and, like the krill in the ocean, being in themselves the vital substrate of nourishment for hundreds of species above and around them. Apart from such ecological utility, though, so many of them are simply beautiful, and beautifully complex. Living with and alongside them all, keeping confrontation and damage to a minimum, could be a model for living with all kinds of vital wildlife.

*****

No.60 - Shaka resurgent, again

Shaka – that stubbornly legendary Zulu founder – keeps resurfacing, drawing me back into the debates concerning his character and times. The other day I was approached by one of Wikipedia’s participants – or compilers, or – it’s hard to know what to call the many non-specialists who footle about in the endless fields of knowledge trying to make it all better, sometimes with mixed results. (I tried to refurbish the “Shaka” entry some years ago, and haven’t had the nerve to go back to see how many dozens of people have arbitrarily edited it subsequently, and to what.) This particular person asked me to have a look at the Wikipedia entry for “mfecane” – the ostensibly Zulu word, usually translated as “the crushing”, which has been popularly used to designate the wave of subcontinental violence, scattering and depopulation beginning with Shaka in the 1820s.

The “mfecane” entry exemplifies many of the problems with the grand democratic enterprise that is Wikipedia. The earliest entries on Shaka were done by someone who had no specialist knowledge in anything, but decided he would try to fill the gaps in the Z’s, namely Zebra, Zimbabwe, and Zulu! Predictably, all the hoary popular legends received another shot in the arm, rather than up-to-date professional research. The “mfecane” entry has progressed only partly beyond this state, being presently a mish-mash of outdated myths, assumptions, and sources whose veracity has long been doubted, uneasily shackled to spotty coverage of some recent scholarly controversies. The accompanying “Talk page”, where one can follow some of the conversation that feeds into reworking the entries, is equally a tangle of the provocative, the useful, and the amusingly ill-informed.

One could start with the entry’s map, which captures the essence of the popular idea – that is, that a half-demonic half-genius Shaka conjured up, in under a decade, a militarised state so powerful and predatory that it sent neighbouring ‘tribes’ scattering in terror as far as Zimbabwe and Malawi, depopulating large areas in the process. One of the few eyewitnesses to Shaka’s rule, Henry Francis Fynn, estimated slaughter of up to a million; though he had no evidence for this whatsoever, that number was uncritically repeated for decades. Only in the 1920s was the term “mfecane” coined to describe this explosion, and it was consolidated into an orthodoxy by J D Omer-Cooper’s book The Zulu Aftermath in 1966.

In the early 1980s Julian Cobbing, historian of the Ndebele and teacher extraordinaire, got me excited about all this in his coruscating critique of the conventional picture. In 1988 he blew the whole thing open with an article in the prestigious Journal of African History, entitled “The Mfecane as Alibi”. He argued two main things: firstly that the regional “motor of violence” was not Shaka, but slave-raids from Mozambique and, a little later, Griqua raids from the west; and secondly, that the “mfecane” was essentially a cover-up for the far greater violence of colonial invasion. As you can imagine, there were howls of protest from the historical establishment, for whom the mfecane was a cornerstone of the national narrative. It was as if someone had tried to erase the Great Trek, or the Boer War.

Though aspects of Cobbing’s intervention remain arguable, I think he achieved one great thing: he dislodged Shaka from his iconic status as a sui generis explosive phenomenon, and instead located him within an envelope of forces unfolding on multiple fronts right across southern Africa. Shaka was aggressive and a state-builder, but both violence and state-building were happening before him and after him: colonial invasion within a decade of his death engendered violence and population movements far more damaging than anything he could have done.  In short, a number of historians, including John Wright, Gavin Whitelaw, Carolyn Hamilton, Norman Etherington, and Elizabeth Eldredge – and myself in two books, Savage Delight and Myth of Iron – expanded upon this complexity, though not always in agreement. In short, some of us argue that the “mfecane” as a free-standing, Shaka-inspired phenomenon simply melts away.

Most recently, John Laband has published The Assassination of King Shaka. Laband has devoted much of his career to the history of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, but in his big book Rope of Sand he ventured into chapters on the earlier Zulu leaders, Shaka, Dingane and Mpande. Even in so experienced a scholar, myths have powerful hold; though he cited my work arguing that the famous “Battle of Qokli Hill” was an invention, he still included that battle in his narrative. Now, I’m glad to see, he has dropped it, and in large part agrees with my view of Shaka’s reign.  He is not, he insists, writing another biography of Shaka: “Dan Wylie stole a march on me there,” he laments in his introduction. (Sorry, John; no malice aforethought, I was just blundering along at my own pace.)  Instead, he cleverly refracts Shaka’s career through the perspective of his assassination at the hands of his brothers in 1828, showing how his entire politics and situation culminated in that fatal moment. His perspective accords on the whole with mine partly because we both draw heavily on The James Stuart Archive, a six-volume collection of Zulu oral histories, edited largely by John Wright – a monumental, decades-long task of translation and scholarship. The JSA is tricky to interpret and use, but overall its testimonies support a narrative radically different to the popular “mfecane”. Laband deliberately doesn’t engage in scholarly debates, as I did, letting the story tell itself, as it were, in serviceable and readable fashion, and more fully describing Zulu cultural mores. Though we differ in emphasis and interpretation here and there, I think our books lie rather fruitfully alongside one another.

Myth of Iron has provoked some other interesting responses. One is to have had some influence on Shaka’s latest literary incarnation – the graphic novel. (It had to happen sometime!) With Shaka Rising, Luke W Molver and Mason O’Connor with Jive Media Africa (website here) has recently published an account of Shaka’s accession to power in a vivacious and thoughtful way. The artwork is powerful, rendered largely in rich ochres and reds, and the storyline is compelling – as Shaka’s rise from obscurity to power can only be. Shaka Rising is a fiction, of course, and some characters are conscious inventions deployed to enliven and sharpen the narrative. Relatively little evidence is available anywhere about Shaka’s childhood and youth, and different stories compete in the traditions. Molver and O’Connor have chosen a version in which Shaka goes into exile not as a child, but as an upcoming and potentially troublesome young man, earning his military kudos under Dingiswayo of the Mthethwa, who then boosts him into power over his brothers. (Shaka’s conflict with, and ultimate murder of brother Sigujana is a central thread of the story.)  If the images owe perhaps a little too much to the honed physiques of Henry Cele and the 1987 TV series Shaka Zulu, and the background architecture a little too much to that of North American stockades, it is a pretty complex and persuasive view of the period.

Most interestingly in the context of the “mfecane”, Shaka Rising follows the (still controversial and unproven) view propounded by Cobbing and endorsed, with some caveats, in Myth of Iron – the view that a primary stimulus of violence was slaving, crucially conducted by Ndwandwe middlemen who occupied territory between the Zulu-Mthethwa nexus on the Mfolozi rivers and Delagoa Bay (Maputo).  So, instead of the Wiki map, which has the usual bundle of arrows shooting away from the Zulu heartland, like sparks from a fire, in Shaka Rising we have a map in which the arrows emanate from the Ndwandwe. This, too, may be an oversimplification, of course, but at least it provides an alternative to the myth. Most gratifyingly, a section at the back of Shaka Rising lays out for readers all the questions I’ve raised here: it stresses the story’s fictionality, the possibility of other versions, the dubious nature of many of the sources, and the existence of ongoing controversy – inviting one into the debate, rather than closing it off. 

With my Mkhize mentors, and Zihlandhlo T-shirts!

I believe a sequel is in the works, and I look forward to it. Zulu history before the 1879 war remains rather neglected: we still await scholarly biographies of Dingane and Mpande, kings just as important to the foundation of the Zulu polity as their half-brother Shaka. I hope Zulu scholars are weighing in, though another consequence of Myth of Iron was a salutary reminder that university, on-paper scholarship is not the mode of history most relevant to most people. A couple of years ago, on the strength of my portrayal of the partnership between Shaka and his neighbouring Mkhize chieftain Zihlandhlo, I was invited to a Zulu-Mhkize reconciliation indaba at one of King Zwelithini’s rural palaces.

It was totally fascinating: politics in a mode that one almost never sees in the national press, conducted entirely in Zulu, dense with protocols and rich with undercurrents which this displaced white Zimbo could still only guess at. Thank goodness for the lovely Mhkize gentlemen who shepherded me through the day. It was history living into the future in a wholly different way, in which, one could say, the truth of the present is more important than the truth about the past – however one conceives of that.

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No.59 - The novels of Claire Robertson

South Africa is producing a slew of impressive new novelists. Among them, Claire Robertson is easing into special prominence. She has published three substantial novels –  The Spiral House (winner of the Sunday Times Fiction Prize), The Magistrate of Gower, and now Under Glass – all handsomely produced in hardcover by Umuzi. Robertson is mining a rich and distinctive vein of historical evocation; although each novel is set in a different time and milieu, they feel of a piece. There are certain similarities of voice between them, some overlaps in their circling around issues of women’s domesticity, repressed sexualities, conditions of entrapment of “sorry green colonialists” (Glass 84) in the almost forgotten cracks in greater societal forces. They are period-pieces of exquisite precision, in which world events – mostly the evolution of empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – revolve in a shadowy dance behind the primary scenes of a slave house, a kitchen, an isolated magistracy, a sugar plantation.

           

The Spiral House is set in two periods, narrated in interlocking chapters. The first is the 1790s in the Cape Colony, focused on the experiences of a Dutch-Malay woman, Katreijn van de Caab, caught in strange twilight zone, technically free but obliged still to live much as a slave, yet better-educated than many of her farm-owner ‘masters’. (There were apparently a goodly number of such, Muslim-educated women in the Cape.)  This novel follows a recent strong trend to focus on slave society, including the historical researches of Rob Shell and Nigel Penn, and the ‘Petronella’ novels of Andre Brink and Dalene Matthee.  In the dense intimaco of her own research, Robertson’s portrayal of a fictional but similar character reminds one of Dan Sleigh’s wonderful novel Islands.

The second strand of The Spiral House is set a century and a half later, centred on a mission station in the Limpopo borderlands and refracted through one somewhat rebellious Sister Vergilius. Despite some commonalities of theme, this structure feels a touch contrived: two novels, almost, struggling to escape a single cover. For Katreijn, Roberston invented a new voice, by which a non-English speaker’s sensibility is conveyed in a unique, exotic yet natural English argot: a triumph.  By comparison the other strand feels a little flat. Nevertheless, the novel is  a worthy prize-winner.

 The Magistrate of Gower, with its Hardy-like title, is more satisfactorily singular in its chronological line (roughly 1900-1939), even as the omniscient narration ranges across characters.  The main character is a ‘Boer’, in the late nineteenth-century sense, Henry Vos, who finds himself, unusually, in a British prison camp in Ceylon for Boer-War POWs.  He returns to negotiate the ambivalences of post-Union South Africa, launching a law career in Cape Town, before being offered the remote magistracy of Gower, a small Karoo-type dorp somewhere near Jamestown.  There, inhabitants are barely aware of either bigger cities or the surrounding countryside, let alone national or world events, and nothing more dramatic than an arson case transpires.  Yet plenty of interest and tension unfolds at intimate and subtle levels. Henry Vos’s tortured and covert sexuality is just one of many dynamics. One of Robertson’s strengths is conveying these individual struggles through details of objects and gestures, often beautifully intertwined with emotions and thoughts.  Here’s a representative passage:

Mrs Theron keeps both arms pulled in close to her body, with her handbag in between her and the woman’s accusations. “Mrs Sara Theron! And what do we have here?” The woman has her eyes on them but her head is tilted slightly away as she speaks, as though she is commenting on them to another, invisible, party. She is utterly different from Mrs Theron: how firm and upright and solid is her body against the gentler form of the younger woman, how definite are her colours; Mrs Theron and the other Gower women Adaira has seen this morning wear veld and forest colours – fawn, most of all, fawn with a print of pale small flowers or dim inorganic shapes, and shoes of brown leather, neat buttons. (Magistrate 130)

Every such detail is marshalled to define a character or offer insight into the whole society – a technique, akin to Jane Austen’s, which appears small-scale and trivial, but is never dull and always deftly, economically and often ironically delivered.

Under Glass, Robertson’s most recent and accomplished work, exposes another such unexplored space, yet one as common and crucial to white settlement: the sugar cane estate in peri-coastal Zululand in the mid-1800s. This is also a two-strand novel, but cannily integrated. The main strand is omniscient but centred on the character of Mrs Chetwyn, wife to an emergent sugar-cane farmer, mother of five. The second, alternating voice belongs to the youngest of the five, “Cosmo”, whose true position in the family emerges only in the last quarter or so. Only a second reading reveals just how cunningly the clues are laid – and omitted. In the opening pages, we learn only that certain household members are “loyal to [a] conspiracy”. And I won’t spoil it for you by revealing its precise nature here.

Again, I’m impressed by how a density of research is deftly integrated into the portrayal of everyday textures and the revelation of character – what Robertson might well call a “housewifely” use of “lore, vigilance and care with thoroughness, thrift and duty” (Glass 72). Each novel is a thoroughly persuasive period-piece without ever feeling didactic. Much is filtered through the primary purview of the domestic, even ruminations on wider dynamics of empire, agriculture or science. (Nascent sciences – the new Darwinism, paleontology and human origins, botany and entomology – keep surfacing as a minor theme, reminding me of Ingrid Winterbach’s novels – there’s a whole topic for a thesis in this subtle presence of science in our fiction. Indeed, at times there is a cool forensic distance in Robertson’s narration which echoes that of her scientist-characters.)  Rather than being told by the omniscient narrator what to think of the characters and situations, what is not said is equally important: almost every sentence is resonant with implication. The richness lies somewhere between the intellectuality of George Eliot and the metaphoric lyricism of Australia’s Patrick White.

In all three novels, Robertson has developed a mode of present-tense narration which is influenced by the cadences and vocabularies of the depicted period, but which still feels unique – both authentic and invented, as it were –  a sort of ‘neo-archaism’.  In the case of Cosmo, the sensibility of a child, despite being considered from a point of adult sophistication, is almost magically conveyed in the present tense.  If there is a tiny criticism to be made here, it is that the passages of interiority briefly accorded to the Zulu manservant/guide Fuze, or to the indentured Indian maid Griffin, are not strongly enough differentiated from Mrs Chetwyn or, for that matter, Magistrate Vos. A danger, perhaps, of  falling victim to one’s own success.

Though our fashionable shibboleths of race, patriarchy, class and gender are present throughout, they are filtered through the everyday complexities of real relationships, a strategy refreshingly free of cant, gross binarism and sentimentality. Building character pixel by pixel, as it were, Robertson places a lot of faith in her reader to sense the implications. Consequently, there is scarcely a dull sentence in the entire novel, scarcely a paragraph not worth re-reading for its balance, resonance, and lyricism. A representative passage:

“The land is uneasy. Almost uncanny,” he [Chetwyn] says. He makes a picture of suspicious homesteads and women alone and marks of newness and strange patterns in the way cattle are herded and rivers forded. He speaks of a sense of tremors, the quivers that will sweep across the flanks of a horse hours after it has been in a carriage wreck – tremors under the surface, startlement never far, nerves rinsed and taut. But oh, the look of it. “It has a way with hills,” he says, and strokes the air as if stroking an animal’s flank, and speaks of hills that follow one another in successive swells to the north, or cut off to the east, all sharing the same blunt, sudden end ... (Glass 55).

Beautifully done: the sentences unfold rhythmically, and a compact indirectness is preferred over loose dialogue; the metaphors evoke the self-same lifeways, and there is the satisfying assonance of “blunt, sudden”. These are hallmarks of a novelist who is, in my experience, writing as well as anyone in the country today.

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No 58 - Rhinos vs Elephants: Myths and realities

For at least two millennia, the notion has persisted that the rhinoceros and the elephant are sworn enemies. Really? One can see why the idea is attractive: the world’s two heftiest land mammals, animal superhero hulks, if you like, having it out in the arena of WWPachyderm. But is there much to it outside the arena of the imagination?

            In her book Rhinoceros (Reaktion Books, 2008), Kelly Enright traces it all back to a Persian myth about a bad-tempered, isolated, one-horned creature named the Karkadann. Elephant, not knowing of the Karkadann’s habitual anger, comes ambling by. They hate each other at first sight. They fight, the Karkadann ducking under the rearing elephant and piercing its stomach. The elephant collapses on top of the Karkadann, irretrievably trapping it. At which point a huge bird arrives, plucks both of them up, carries them off to its nest, and feeds them to its babies. Fortunately for everybody no such gigantic bird exists, but the motif of the rhino stabbing the elephant in the stomach would be renewed centuries later. Enright includes an illustration of the fight from a 1550 copy of the Persian text Ajo’ib al-Makhluqat (“Wonders of Creation”), but doesn’t speculate on how old the legend itself might be. One of Wikipedia’s sources notes the appearance of the Karkadann – the name is derived from a Sanskrit word meaning “Lord of the plains” – in a tenth-century tract by  Al-Biruni.

Bishan Das, "Emperor Babur shoots a rhinoceros", c. 1590.

Centuries on, the Indian Mughals tried artificially to pit captive elephants and rhinos against each other, with what success I don’t know.  It’s possible that the impression of the pachyderms’ enmity was exacerbated by some Mughals’ habit of hunting rhinos from elephant-back. The invading British followed suit, naturally, and in his compendious British Cyclopedia of Natural History (1837), one Charles Partington described exactly such forced hunting encounters, adding that “nobody has ever recorded, and probably nobody ever saw, a battle between an Elephant and a Rhinoceros in the state of wild nature.”

            The ancient Greeks and Romans were also fascinated by both elephants and rhinos, and in his Natural History Pliny compared the two. The elephant was, in his view, closest to man in intelligence: it understood languages and was trainable, while its enemy the rhino just irascibly sharpened its horn on hard stones, preparatory to poking the elephant in the stomach. Pliny didn’t claim to have witnessed any such encounter – and when the Romans, with their characteristic blood-lust, put an elephant in the arena with a rhino, they seemed entirely uninterested in fighting each other.

            Both creatures disappeared from European life for a millennium after the Roman period; artists’ impressions became increasingly distorted and improbable, until imperial travel brought a few captive animals to the menageries of the rich and powerful.  In 1515, Muzafar II of Gujarat sent King Manuel of Portugal an Indian rhinoceros. Manuel did the manly thing and put the rhino-elephant enmity to the test. Once again, no dice: the two animals just moved warily away from each other. (I’ve found only one scholarly article relating to this meeting and its implications – in Portuguese.)

           

Anonymous, 'Genuine portrait of a live rhinoceros ... Paris"
Clara - 1749 (detail)

Nevertheless, artists who began attempting portrayals of elephants and rhinos couldn’t let the idea go. In 1741 a Bengal rhino named Clara was adopted as a pet by a director of the Dutch East India Company, brought to Europe and shown to King Louis XV in 1749. An anonymous engraver commemorated the occasion with a portrait of Clara, with now conventionally exaggerated ‘armour-plated’ hide – and a rhino-elephant tussle going on in the background.

Similarly Peter Kolb, who visited the Cape in 1730 and should have learned better, but was largely concerned to recycle hoary myths about Africa, reproduced a bad copy of an Albrecht Dürer engraving of a rhino-elephant fight, complete with obligatory horn puncturing the obligatory tummy.

Hendrik Hondius, "A rhinoceros fights an elephant", Dutch, c.1610.

In the West, this legendary rivalry would persist right into the twentieth century, to reappear in popular form in de Brunhoff’s Babar the Elephant stories: the bad-tempered rhino Rataxes, seeking revenge for having a firecracker attached to his tail, leads a whole rhino army against the elephants, but is really rather dim-witted and the rhinos are defeated by Babar’s superior elephantine intelligence. This same desire to see the biggest animals in conflict ramifies into numerous websites and publications which speculate fruitlessly on which would win in a fight. And one Isabel Thomas has produced a whole children’s book entitled Elephant  vs Rhinoceros.

Africans had their own legends about rhino-elephant conflict.  Cobus van der Vlies, in his book Southern Africa Wildlife and Adventure, relays an unsourced and rather unspecific legend:

Folklore has it, that when the Great Spirit created Rhino, he was very jealous of Elephant and attacked him wherever he found him. Not having horns, Elephant was defenceless against Rhino, and many were killed. Elephant went to the Great Spirit and asked to be given horns, so that he could defend himself against these attacks. The Great Spirit told Elephant that to give him horns, would make him, as the largest animal, much too dangerous, but consoled Elephant by giving him beautiful tusks. To prevent Rhino from killing any more elephants, the Great Spirit took Rhino’s horns from his head and placed them in a row on his nose. He also took away Rhino’s sharp eyesight and replaced it with very poor eyesight, to prevent him from aiming and thus still being able to attack Elephant.

Kelly Enright also records two African stories about the rivalry. One concerns the relative size of dung-bolls; another is an Ndebele tale in which Rhino, wounded by Elephant in a fight, borrows a quill from Porcupine to sew up his wounds. He loses the quill, and thinking he’s swallowed it, spends the rest of his days looking in his poo for it. Both stories serve as explanations for why the rhino habitually scatters its dung about.  And no rhino dies.

With the advent of the national park in the twentieth century, animals could be monitored, scientifically studied, and photographed by tourists more comprehensively than ever before. So one would imagine that if elephant-rhino battles were true or widespread, someone would notice. Social media, notably YouTube and Instagram, do indeed throw up two or three incidences. And I mean two or three.

There is, prominently, one film clip which shows a couple of minutes of non-contact, show-off, argy-bargy between an elephant and a rhino, with the latter quickly deciding on a judicious retreat. This sort of thing probably happens fairly regularly, when a female rhino is sheltering a baby, or a bolshy young male elephant is strutting his stuff. I’ve observed similarly wary but respectful manoeuvrings between elephants and crusty old ‘dagaboy’ buffalo bachelors. Unfortunately, this particular clip has been repeatedly recirculated and successively pumped up into some mythic titanic battle “in the African jungle”.

This exaggeration isn’t helped by a slew of other images you can find, via Google, of slashing, blood-spattered battles between elephant and rhino, pictures which only a dunce would fail to see are crudely photo-shopped and clearly fake. Unhappily, these revolting bits of gratuitous violence seem rather popular.

In fact, fatal rhino-elephant encounters are very, very rare, and have probably occurred only under unusual circumstances. The single genuine instance of a fatality I could find was filmed by a couple in an unnamed park: an elephant male, possibly in musth, attacked a mother rhino, rolled and crushed her; she died after three days, leaving a half-grown calf. Like apparently random and gratuitous murders among humans, there is probably a back-story, some build-up of tension, a fright, a hidden injury or toothache bothering the elephant – to which no human was privy. Again, sadly, this aberrant incident has been sensationalised out of all proportion: the elephant is “testosterone-fuelled”, “crazed”, “brutal”.

Of course, the most famous rhino fatalities were those of 1999 in the Pilanesberg reserve – and these occurred as the result of a single management miscalculation. Young male elephants translocated from Kruger into a strange place, with little life experience other than post-cull trauma, and no supervision from older elephants, “ran amok” and tried to mount and/or kill a number of black and white rhinos. A kind of elephantine Lord of the Flies. Some “rogues” were shot, but long-term, remarkably, the importation of  some adult elephants reined in the wayward behaviour. It taught us a lot about the power and intricacy of elephant family dynamics.

You will also find numerous shallow and sensational retellings of the Pilanesberg aberration on the Internet, which are best ignored. Notably, the Pilanesberg case is the only such noted by Raman Sukumar, India’s leading elephant expert, in his comprehensive book, The Living Elephants. The best accounts are by elephant expert Rob Slotow, who has published several detailed studies of the problem. Slotow observes that other rhinos have in fact died under attack from elephants in Umfolozi-Hluhluwe and elsewhere; these incidents, too, were consequences of translocation. If there is ever fatal competition over grazing or browsing resources, in which (according to Graham Kerley in his chapter in Scholes and Mennell’s Elephant Management) aggressive elephants might play a role “analogous to predation”, this would appear to be infrequent and almost certainly the result of human-imposed constraints on the animals’ ranges and therefore relationships.

In short, rhino-elephant conflict happens, but extremely rarely, and even more rarely without our having interfered at some level. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

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