No 80 - Studying Zimbabwe: Some recent work

It is with unutterable distress that we watch Zimbabwe descending into another cycle of repression combined with economic shortages, militarisation of daily life with arbitrary persecution of the poorest, and yet another play at launching a local currency backed by, as far as one can tell, nothing at all but an unpronounceable acronym.

Events move so fast it’s hard to keep up. It’s equally impossible to keep up with the academic work being churned out, even though by its very nature such research tends to lag behind current developments. At the same time, the slow-brew of academic production fruitfully clarifies longer-term trends, sometimes offers unconventional approaches to old issues, and gets to grips with case studies which reveal complexities ignored or oversimplified by popular media. By its very nature, too, academic study tends towards the dense and ponderous, is sometimes over-burdened with fashionable and indigestible theory, and mostly languishes all but unread in university libraries or specialised journals.  It is seldom absorbed by the people who need it most – policy-makers, politicians who are allergic to complexity, and financial power-houses. 

I can’t even begin to be comprehensive, but I think it’s worth advertising some of the serious work going on. Most inaccessible to the general public are the numerous theses and dissertations produced at universities. A goodly number of Zimbabwean postgrad students gravitate to Eastern Cape universities: NMMU, Fort Hare, and Rhodes, where Kirk Helliker anchors the Zimbabwe Studies Unit. Helliker himself, followed by some of his students, has worked mostly on the role of NGOs, which have often had a contentious relationship with the ZANU-PF government. A number of studies, unsurprisingly, focus on the Fast-Track Land Reform process: case studies, such as Loveness Chakora on women in Goromonzi, Manase Chiweshe on Mazowe, and Esther Chigumira  on Kadoma, provide much-needed nuance to a field often stereotyped as either grand success or chaos. Other studies tackle the Murambatsvina ‘cleansings’ of 2008, the relationship between mysticism and Mugabe’s rule, the rural elderly, climate change adaptation, forest management, social accountability in Bulawayo, and the situation of ethnic minorities such as the San and the Tonga. Journalism departments have also produced any number of studies of various media’s treatment of subjects such as witchcraft and HIV.

And that’s just a smattering from my corner of the academic subcontinent.

Then there’s the work being produced within Zimbabwe, including from the slew of smaller universities established over the last fifteen years or so. Despite Zimbabwe’s economic woes, local publishers (albeit often with overseas funding) have managed to produce, in book form, several collections of articles. These can tend to be a little doctrinaire, driven by ‘developmental’ agendas, lingering on anti-colonial rhetorics and reticent about critiquing the government of the day. What prolific scholar Maurice Vambe identified, in his contribution to a ground-breaking volume, Versions of Zimbabwe (ed. Mponde and Primorac, 2005), as a “poverty of theory” in literary study, might also apply to much of this body of work. It all has a bit of a hothouse feel about it, a coterie of local academics collaborating with and reviewing each other, not always attuned to latest theory elsewhere. As is usual with such collections, quality can be uneven, but some of it is very good, eloquent and challenging.

“Multi-disciplinary” perspectives seem especially in vogue, as are very long titles: Dialoguing Land and Indigenisation in Zimbabwe and Other Developing Countries (ed Z Makwavarara et al, 2015); Indigenous Knowledge and Technology in African and Diasporan Communities: Multi-disciplinary perspectives (ed.E Chiwome et al, 2000); and Culture and Development: Perspectives from the South (eds Chiwome and Gambahaya, 1998). As these titles indicate, a great deal of energy is expended on confronting and undermining ‘Western’ and ‘neo-colonial’ views. This can get a bit wearisome, as can the repetitive discourse of what I think of as the ‘bureaucratisation of the sociological’. Scholars’ use of this machinery, ploughing a similar furrow over two or more decades, is paradoxical and fraught, often hanging off the coattails of Western-generated theory even as African-centred perspectives are validly and fascinatingly offered. This is partly the result of new local scholars learning the field and yet to attain innovative independence; interesting, however, is the difference in feel from many of the essays in Versions of Zimbabwe: that volume sported such established luminaries as Preben Kaarsholm, Terence Ranger and Ranka Primorac, but bears the hallmarks of a cool intellectualism redolent of the Western academy. Local writers are nothing if not passionately engaged.

            

Being a literary dude, I am especially interested to see the number of essays devoted to literature in Zimbabwe’s vernaculars, as in the collection Zimbabwean Literature in African Languages: Crossing language boundaries (eds Chiwome and Mguni, 2012), which builds on the pioneering work of Alec Pongweni, Robert Muponde and Maurice Vambe. It makes for a fascinating parallel to well-worn studies of internationally-known fictions and memoirs by English-language writers, from Chenjerai Hove to Yvonne Vera, from Doris Lessing to Alexandra Fuller.  The latter group have now been exhaustively unpacked by Anthony Chennells, Ashleigh Harris and Ruth Eppel, to name just a few Zimbabwean scholars in this field – another little hothouse specialisation.

Gender has also emerged as a scholarly preoccupation, as in the collection African Womanhood in Zimbabwean Literature (eds Mguni at al). This concentrates not only on validating literature in Shona and Ndebele primarily, but also asserts various Africanist perspectives in opposition to Western models of feminism which are adjudged (as did Vandana Shiva in relation to Asia) inappropriate to African realities. This agenda is prominent also in the ponderously titled Rediscoursing African Womanhood in the Search for Sustainable Renaissance (eds Muwati at al, 2012), even as it is stimulated, and a bit over-determined, by the African-American inventor of “Africana womanism” Clenora Hudson-Weems, who supplies a foreword.  Here is evident a strong conservatism – meaning an avid defence of ‘traditional’ Shona dual-gender mores as distinct from ‘white’ Western feminism. Entirely absent is any discussion of one of the fiercest gender-struggles elsewhere: the definition, role and rights of homosexual, transgender and other ‘fluid’ identities. Such were anathema to Mugabe and still, it appears, to considerable swathes of African opinion.

These are just those few collections I’ve chanced upon. By their nature they are unlikely to be encountered by the general public; more accessible and available perhaps are monograph (single-author, book-length) studies. Among these, the land problem, especially in its post-2000 Fast Track manifestation, looms understandably large. A ‘first wave’ of studies ranged from the brilliant – such as Donald Moore’s Suffering for Territory (2005), through Ian Scoones et al’s somewhat doctrinaire and economy-orientated Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and realities (2010), to the subsequently roundly-criticised Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land by Joseph Hanlon and others (2013) – too closely aligned to ZANU-PF for the comfort of some scholars. Other provocative studies have explored dimensions of so-called whiteness – such as David Hughes’ Whiteness in Zimbabwe (2009) and William Wolmer’s Lowveld farmer-focused From Wilderness Vision to Farm Invasions (2007) – or on ZANU-PF politics, as with Stuart Doran’s monumental  Power, Glory, Kingdom (2016).

But I want to just glance at three recently published monographs which take the study of Zimbabwe in more unusual directions. 

Like Wolmer, Andrew Hartnack examines the white farmer community, but from a hitherto neglected angle – the role of farmers’ wives and their sundry ‘charitable’ and outreach activities. His Ordered Estates (2016) is slightly cheekily subtitled Welfare, power and maternalism on Zimbabwe’s (once white) highveld. Before 1980, many farmers’ wives oversaw farm-based clinics, schools, craft workshops, women’s clubs and orphanages, partly as a way of generating loyalty amongst workers, but also as a means of surveillance, behavioural inculcation, and control. The early twentieth century’s settler regime of overt violence was gradually supplanted by ’soft’ forms of power, legislative and economic, which helped extend and reinforce an avowed paternalistic ‘civilising mission’, at times strongly church-based.  After independence, and even more so after the dispossessions of the early 2000s, these welfare efforts were often invoked to justify the white farmers’ continued presence on the land. There are both continuities and ruptures in this shift, and Hartnack unpacks with exceptional subtlety the interactions of farmers and workers, of government structures with NGOs, of colonial-style patriarchy with land-use and women's domestic routines, with all their "awkward articulations" and contradictions.

My second example is Joost Fontein’s Remaking Mutirikwi: landscape, water and belonging in southern Zimbabwe (2015). This study overlaps to a degree with Scoones’, also being based in the Masvingo region, but Fontein is more interested in the complex interactions between the many players involved in and affected by the building of Kyle Dam (Mutirikwi). Fontein shows – again contrary to those who characterise the land-reform process simplistically as successful, chaotic, or top-down – how complex negotiations were between various traditional authorities, rainmakers and chiefs whom even ZANU-PF could not afford to ignore, war veterans and dispossessed people pursuing contradictory agendas, largely white leisure organisations, National Parks rangers still implementing colonial-style conservation ethics, commercial farmers and agricultural extension officers. For my taste, Fontein is rather too fond of injecting flights of theoretical jargon – which begin to sound more and more circular as he repeats them. (This also characterised his earlier book The Silence of Great Zimbabwe (2006).) Remaking Mutirikwi is also oddly structured – why is the earliest event, the establishment of the dam at Kyle itself, only covered in Chapter Six? But the detail, the product of years of immersion in the communities around the dam, multiple interviews and archival research, is fascinating – a lot of it unfortunately reduced to footnotes, but gritty and illuminating nonetheless.

As Fontein’s book is centred on water control – damming, irrigation, leisure-fishing – so too is my third book of interest, Muchaparara Musemwa’s Water, History and Politics in Zimbabwe: Bulawayo’s struggles with the environment 1894-2008 (2014). This, like Hartnack’s book, is the ultimate fruit of PhD research (Hartnack was at UCT, Musemwa at Missouri); and like Hartnack, he is good at placing his study in the frame of wider theories and approaches without becoming pretentious or obscure.  Musemwa intimately documents how water, its provision and control, played a crucial role in the establishment of Bulawayo. In an already arid region, the centrality of water seems blindingly obvious – but so much so it has been generally overlooked. As world-wide water issues gain prominence, however, this neglect is changing.  Musemwa reveals the often antithetical strategies of the British South Africa Company, the early municipality, national government and residents, over how to bring water to a n expanding urban population. Whatever one’s opinion of that ‘cash-box bandit’, as Bulawayo poet John Eppel called Cecil John Rhodes, Rhodes’ plans for the city were pretty enlightened. But they did not extend to the burgeoning black township of Makakoba, which was established and maintained for cheap labour, distanced but interdependent. The colonial authorities paid ad hoc attention to its layout and conditions, never taking full responsibility but also sporadically concerned to ameliorate health hazards and political unrest. The differentiation in water provision between the two poles of the urban area is the main thread in Musemwa’s story, which he brings up to date with ZANU-PF’s studied neglect of Matabeleland, not least in the funding of water resources.

It’s impossible to do justice to the richness and fascination of all these works in so short a space, but they all deserve to be read. May fruitful inferences be drawn from them, especially by the people who can influence our fraught futures.

*****

No.79 - Makhanda Unravelled 4: Roja adrift

“Roja!”

            The dog spun round at the sound of his name. The others in the pack took a moment to turn on him and nip his flanks.

            “Oy!” the man shouted, coming, running and stumbling over the piles of trash, waving. The dogs scattered and then returned to their business, mauling some scrap in amongst the debris.

            “Oh, Jesus,” the man cried, “what is that? Is that a dead baby?”

            The dog turned and turned, confused.

            “Roja, Roja,” the man said, “Come, you know me, it’s Jessie.” The voice was friendly, it was familiar to a degree; the dog pricked his ears and sniffed warily, the man’s scent barely discernible from the reek of smoke that billowed around them. The man knelt and called again, and Roja moved forward. “Come boy, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you at home? Where’s Rebecca?”

            The dog’s ears worked, trying to parse urgency from friendliness in the voice.

            “Let’s look at you, oh Lord, you’ve been bitten, haven’t you? What a mess you’re in.”  Roja winced as the man took the burned pads of a forepaw in his hand.  “Come on, let’s get you home, I can’t imagine how you got into this hellhole.” The man shucked his backpack and took out a length of thin rope. “At least you still have your collar, there we are, come with me now.”  From the pack a thin yowl rose. “No, that’s my kitten, not edible.”  He tugged on the rope. “Let’s go now.”

            But there were other shapes emerging through the acrid drifting smoke, lean and threatening. Feeling tied down and vulnerable, the dog was torn between plunging away and pushing up against Jessie’s leg for support.

            “Ay, mlungu!” a voice rasped out.

            “Molweni, injani,” Jessie replied evenly.  The figures circled, like dogs themselves, hungry-looking, ragged as the dumpsite they seemed to have been born out of.

            “What you want here? This is our place,” the lead youth said.

            “I just came to see what all the smoke was about. Amazing, even after all that rain, things dry out and  these fires start up again.”

            “We want that fat dog,” the youth said.

            Jessie laughed shortly.  “What, to eat? No chance, this dog belongs to someone else.  You can have one of those ones.”  He had unslung his long stick from his shoulders and waved it at the pack, which was itself wary of these two-legged strangers, lunging in opportunistically to snatch at the bundle they had been ravaging.

            The youths shifted warily from side to side, foot to foot.

            “We want your gun,” the leader said, though less certainly than before. Roja sensed Jessie’s unease and whined.

            “Sorry, no can do.” Jessie started backing away up the slope of the dumpsite; the youths spread a little and made threatening gestures, though the dog could sense that they were afraid, too.

            “You want one of those dogs?” Jessie said his voice cracking a little. Roja dragged at the rope, and Jessie tugged, “C’mon, boy, it’s okay.  I shoot one for you,” he called out.

            The youths shrugged and stared, non-committal. Jessie and Roja lurched and stumbled backwards up the slope towards the top edge of the dump. Jessie was coughing in the pungent smoke, Roja felt his eyes smarting, his tongue desperately dry.

            “You go, mlungu!” the lead youth yelled, “This is our place!”

            “You can have it,” Jessie yelled back. They reached the dump’s edge, negotiated a half-fallen fence of barbed wire snaggle-toothed with streamers of rotting plastic, then they could cross a strip of old bush and break out onto a road.

            “Whew, that was a bit unnerving, hey,” said Jessie. Roja sensed the relief and even a promise of safety, and limped more readily alongside the hurrying man.  “Shame, boy, your feet are sore, hey? It’s not far to get home, though, you can do it. Hell’s teeth, what a dump, literally! I haven’t been there for years, I can’t believe those fires have got going again, probably one of those idiots lit a cooking fire or something. I tell you, if we don’t die of thirst or get blown away by a cyclone, we’ll choke ourselves to death on plastic, hey boy?”

            Roja pricked his ears momentarily, felt how the man was gabbling away his fear, as walking along the road became a little easier, and breathing slowed. Jessie glanced behind, no one seemed to be following, except long flurries of smoke. He pulled up and dropped the pack. “Here, boy, I’ve got some water, you want some water? Course you do.” From a bottle he poured water into the cupped palm of his hand; Roja slabbered it up.  From the pack the cat was mewling, and Jessie extracted it, so small it almost disappeared in his hand.  He dabbed water into its pink mouth.

            “Roja, this is Siberia, the tiger who came in from the cold.  Not that it’s been that cold, global warming and all that.” Jessie showed Roja the kitten, which flare and hissed and took a swipe at Roja’s curious nose with a fistful of tiny claws. Roja jerked back, almost lifted a lip.  “No, Roja, she’s not for lunch.  Be friends, okay!  Come on, let’s go, maybe Rebecca will spare some of your biscuits for Siberia, if she has any.”  He stuffed the kitten back in the pack, and coaxed Roja back into walking.

            The wind shifted and swathes of thicker smoke descended on them, and Jessie tried to hurry a little more.

            “Come on, we can take a shortcut through these old factory grounds,” he said. They twisted through a gap in a fence, skirted some buildings grey with abandonment, though suddenly a voice hailed them. “Oops, a guard, imagine that,” Jessie muttered, and he called out, bright with friendliness, “It’s okay, we’re just cutting through to Hill 60, sorry, no problem!”

            They hurried on, ducked under another fence, crossed another strip of thin and ragged bush. “Yuss, this bush is sad, hey,” Jessie said. “First it shrivels in the drought, then its roots get washed away by the storms. Nothing even for the birds left. Thought I might shoot you a hare or something, Roj, but nothing left here, hey.”

            They emerged onto a street that Roja recognised now, he had walked here before, and he began to whine and pull on the rope, sniffing for familiar sign.

            “Ah, now you know where you are, hey boy! Almost there, easy now.”

            The houses, most evidently empty, were gloomy and ethereal behind the blanket of blue smoke that drifted and stung the nostrils.  Round a corner they spotted a bulky figure hurrying away, a smaller figure alongside. Jessie said, “Hey, isn’t that – ?” He called out, “Ai, Sis’! Sisi Mpum’!” But the woman just sped up, only the child dragging at her hand looked back, seeing them, or seeing the dog, and screamed, and Roja too squirmed and bristled and growled. Then the two turned the corner and vanished.

            “Wow, that was weird, is there a history between you guys? I don’t like the feel of this, Roj, I don’t like it at all. They were friendly enough last time we met, why are they running off like that? Shit, I  hope nothing’s happened.”

            Roja detected the rising anxiety in the man and looked up and whimpered.

            “Well, on we go, nearly there, one more street down. I think. Why the devil would anyone go off with all the street signs, anyway, huh?”

            As they turned another corner at the beginning of Roja’s street, and the dog began to strain and cough on the rope, a vehicle approached, lurching through potholes, its headlights strangely orange and wavering in the blue-grey smoke.

            “Ah, a cop car,” said Jessie, “that’s all right.”

            The bakkie drew alongside, and a brawny brown arm crooked out of the driver’s window.

            “Well, well,” said the policeman, “Mister Man with the Gun again! Johannes, yes?”

            “Jessie, actually, hi.”

            “Everything all right, Mister Gun?”

            “Ah, no, I’m not sure, actually. I just found this dog on the rubbish dumps, it belongs to Mrs Cochrane, it’s weird, and someone, this woman who normally stays with her, or has been for a week or two anyway, I’m sure I saw heading off, but she wouldn’t stop.”

            The cop frowned. “You mean Sis’ Mpumelelo? I also saw her, you’re right, she didn’t want to stop and chat, that’s for sure.”

            “I was just going to Rebecca – Mrs Cochrane’s house. D’you wanna come and check it out with me, it’s weird.”

            “Sure.” They eased along the road together.

            “How’s it going with you guys?” Jessie asked.

            “Hm, hmpf!  What a mess, ay. At least since the rain stopped this week we’re getting some more supplies through, it’s taken the heat out of things a little bit.  But people are stressed, ay, they get het up over nothing, take it out on the foreigners, or on their wives and I don’t know what.  And yesterday it was people poaching giraffe for nyama, can you believe it? Giraffe! Here we are, isn’t it?”

            They stopped at Rebecca’s sliding gate. It was securely chained and locked, from the outside. Roja scratched at the bottom of the gatepost and whined. Through the haze of blue smoke they bobbed and peered.  The car was still parked in the driveway. And half hidden behind the front wheels they could see the hem of a dress, a shoe, the paleness of a fallen ankle.

            “Oh, Jesus,” said Jessie. “That’s Rebecca.  Rebecca!” He rattled the gate. The foot did not move. “Rebecca!”

            Roja sat back on his heels and raised his nose and began to howl.

*****

No 78 - A short meditation on Long Walls

"The fate of walls" (c) Dan Wylie, 2019

After I aired my little cartoon about Trump and The Wall a couple of weeks ago (below), a friend challenged me to provide a solution – “O wise one”, he added, with (I suspect) a touch of sarcasm. Ha ha. I make no claim to wisdom, O challenging one, let alone solutions, but – as is my wont – I am led to do a little pondering and research into Long Walls.

Donald Trump – whose own German immigrant grandfather  would surely have been mortified to have been turned back by a wall of real steel and human hostility – recently proclaimed that “they had walls in the Middle Ages – and they worked!”

There are, of course, walls and walls and walls. Walls have, to state the obvious, protected us from wildlife, violent weather, and predatory humans, ever since we graduated from caves and humpies of hide or sticks. They’ve grown bigger and more sophisticated, tangible vectors of pride and fear, in unison with developing technology. One profound effect has been, it seems to me, to cut us off increasingly from the natural world as well as from one another. I am fascinated by the modern trend towards refined sky-piercing spikes of glass – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, ‘the Shard’ in London – buildings which seem to want to transcend their own ‘wall-ness’, to be both transparent and impenetrable, flaunting their sterilised, pointy pointlessness, fatal to birds and humility alike.  A long (or high) way from the functionality of domestic comfort or protection in war.

Trump was right that there were massive defensive walls in mediaeval Europe (he was presumably thinking only of Europe), but they were very different to what he envisages for the Mexico-US border. Mediaeval Europe was divided largely into tiny principalities, city-states in a more or less constant state of bickering. Walls were built around these city centres, coming periodically under siege from an unfriendly neighbour, or an army sent by some overarching power such as the Holy Roman Empire, or the Papacy. Those broader blocs were only here and there roughly aligned with a self-identifying ethnicity – more EU-like. Of course these conflicts produced refugees, though distances and time was experienced very differently: when Dante was sent into exile from Florence by just such a city-state squabble, he fled scarcely a couple of days’ good walk away. But the problems those walls were designed to overcome were a world away from those of contemporary North America.

Trump was also right to claim that those walls ‘worked’, though they did so only in very limited ways, and for very short periods. Walls had the predictable effect of stimulating more sophisticated technology for breaching them: bigger siege machines, ultimately artillery, beginning with the “Horrible Bombard” that finally broke through the walls of Constantinople in 1453. Or cunning deceptions – think of the walls of Troy and the Trojan Horse. People would always search for ways of escaping or infiltrating walls: climbing over them, tunnelling under them (as in Israel today), or ballooning across them (as with the Berlin Wall). City walls could also have the problematic effect of becoming involuntary prisons, trapping the defenders in their own pit of starvation and disease. In the longer term, deeper societal currents simply made them redundant: they could not contain growing populations, and the formation of larger ethnic or nationalistic ‘states’ – France, Germany, etc – made the ‘city-state’ itself irrelevant. New technologies, networks, even moralities transcended the mediaeval version of the laager: I’ve walked around the walls that mark the limits of mediaeval York, now lost in the urban vastness, crisscrossed by cars, trains and aeroplanes, reduced to the merely picturesque.

Shorter walls are certainly effective in limited ways. The Israelis claim that their 400-km wall along the West Bank border has been effective in curbing suicide bombers, though this seems a narrow if understandable reason for the wall’s massive expense. It doesn’t prevent attacks by means of rockets, kites, seaborne boats, or knifings by Palestinians already living in Israel. This case also exemplifies another by-product of such walls: it intensifies “Othering” – the demeaning and stereotyping of the Outsiders.  Unlike the bluff but friendly neighbours, mutually repairing the wall between them in Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Building a Wall”, government-sponsored walls usually work only to the benefit of one side. The wall becomes as much a seam of invigorated conflict as a comforting divide, and muzzles or defers any collaborative efforts to address the underlying issues.

But what of Long Walls, the thousand kilometre-type monsters of the kind Trump envisages, ranging from coast to coast, over hill and dale? Such are fewer in number historically, though according to David Frye in his recent book, Walls: A history of civilisation in blood and brick, some 70 nations around the world today have built a variety of long-distance border barriers. The key word there is “nation”: these “hard borders” are, unlike most predecessors, associated with the notion of “national sovereignty”, often itself aligned with some or other form of ethnic purity or avowed cohesion. As any student of history will know, such purity is a myth – though no less a psychological force in the world for that. In practice, most of those barriers remain more or less porous – like that between South Africa and Zimbabwe, which some 2 million Zimbabweans have found to be no barrier at all.

This is true of the ancient walls, too. The most famous example, the Great Wall of China, built up and added to over many centuries, ostensibly to keep out nomadic raiders (Mongol or Hsiung-nu “barbarians”), was as much an imperial/nationalist pride-project, along with Ch’in canal and palace projects. It was constructed at appalling cost in human life, and, to judge by the minimal role accorded to it by Harry Gelber in his history of China, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils, it did little to fulfil its original function. Indeed, it became as much a conduit for trade and cultural exchange as anything. Again, the modernisation of the globe has reduced it to decaying ruin in most parts, a romanticised tourist-trap in what’s left. Such walls, in the long run, cost too much to keep up: the $5 billon demanded by Trump for his wall would be only the beginning of endless and disproportionate maintenance costs.

Digging Hadrian's Wall, 1984

The same can be said of the less well-known, 5th-century  “Red Snake” wall of Gorgan, stretching 120 miles east from the Caspian Sea. Hadrian’s Wall, the 80-mile Roman wall across northern England, was also touted by some Roman writers as being responsible for a period of peace in the Roman Empire. However, modern historians – including the archaeologist I briefly “dug” with in the 1980s – argue that the Wall was only very temporarily effective, too low and poorly manned to really keep people out. In any event, many “barbarians” were already inside the imperial bounds: that’s in the very nature of empires, and the city of Rome was already irreversibly cosmopolitan. Indeed, Rome was arguably at its best when it welcomed “others” as resources rather than enemies. And it was still overrun by the Visigoths, walls or no walls.

There seems little reason to doubt that a physical US-Mexico border wall won’t eventually suffer the same fate, whatever short-term satisfaction it might bring some people. It’s unlikely to add much to the already intense network of surveillance (heat-sensitive cameras, drones, motion detectors, dog and helicopter and vehicle patrols, detention centres, and sometimes deliberately cruel and discriminatory legislation) that has already cut actual immigration to a trickle. These modern migrants may not all be angels, but they are not Visigoths or Huns; they are not Al Qaeda or Boko Haram. Nor are they drug-lords: the wall will do nothing to curb the import of drugs so long as Americans keep taking them. The only real solution for these people’s plight is renewed collaborative efforts to elevate the well-being and functionality of the states they come from.

As in the case of Rome, the 'enemy' is already within the gates. White Americans largely seem to forget that those southern border areas were first occupied by Spanish invaders who (in tandem with the eradication of native Americans and the imposition of imported black slave-colonies) were evicted south of the Rio Grande by Anglo-Saxon/imperial force or strong-armed ‘land-purchase’. Despite that, the more recent flourishing of southern states has least in part been built on the labour of Hispanic immigrants; and the rate of criminality among such immigrants – as every government and independent source (barring Trump) attests – is markedly lower than that among American-born inhabitants.  Recall that not a single American has died at the hands of an “immigrant terrorist” since the Twin Towers attack in 2001, whereas a mass shooting (defined as 4 or more shot at one time) by a locally-born American has happened virtually every day in 2018 alone.

"Ozymandias: or, Desert Hubris" (c) Dan Wylie, 2019

So, to answer my Challenging Friend, it’s very, very complex, and I don’t know what “the solution” is, if there is a single one.  We should not be distracted by Trump’s simplistic obsession with The Wall from the real-world complexity of the US response to immigration. In any event, a solution is hardly going to emerge when the problems are inaccurately diagnosed from the get-go, and when those who ought to be treated in the first instance with compassion are met instead with misdirected hostility. “The Wall” seems to me an embodiment of all that is ugly and unfruitful in human relations, doomed to expensive failure. In the best scenario, it will be doomed by the angels of our better nature.

*****

No 77 -: Makanda Unravelled 3: Roja’s People

 [A third, wholly fictional vignette, imagining Grahamstown-Makhanda cut off from the world in - shall we say - late 2019.]

Hill Street, flooded. (c) Dan Wylie

Roja’s furious barking brought Rebecca Inglis to the kitchen window. It was still raining, though apparently the worst of the cyclones were over for now. She could make out a huddled figure, or figures, outside the gate-that-wasn’t-automatic-now, chained and padlocked since the power had gone down. She was a bit more paranoid about security since the blackout: various neighbours’ evacuated properties on Hill 60 had been raided or illegally occupied.

And she was alone, apart from Roja.

Moreover, her cellphone had run out of juice, so if she were to get into trouble there was no way to contact anyone. She was reluctant to charge it in the car, since she had very little fuel left, and wanted to use that to get up to the soup kitchen in Duncan Village the next day. In fact, she’d been contemplating walking over to the university, where she could hook up to the Pharmacy generator, the only one still running for restricted hours. Though the university had been formally closed since halfway through the six-month drought, a few hardy or perhaps just foolishly loyal academics hung around. It was comforting to gather occasionally in the Pharmacy tearoom and swop stories and survival tips; in fact Rebecca, in normal times rather stuck away up the hill in Journalism’s media centre, had found herself chatting to lecturers from disciplines she would never otherwise encounter – Accounting, Botany. Not that they talked academia much: in these straitened times, the utter irrelevance of so much of it had become as stark as a starveling’s rib.

And Roja was still barking at immediate reality.

As Rebecca peered through the rain-frosted window, the figure at the gate spotted her, and waved. A woman, rotund in the classic Xhosa way; and Rebecca could make out one of those big checkered fibre bags at her feet. Then a smaller figure detached from the woman’s side, a child.  Sisi Mpumelelo, that’s who it was, with her little grandchild – what was her name again? Rebecca had met the somewhat forbidding, often harshly vocal Sisi Mpum’, as she was known, just a few times at the soup kitchen; she was a stalwart of the Sacred Heart church up in the location, and like so many oldsters had taken over raising the child of younger parents who had died or absconded. A situation only intensified by the drought and the floods, the substantial exodus in which mostly the men left for work in the Cape or Joburg – as if the old migrant-labour system had never really stopped.

Rebecca couldn’t imagine why they were at her gate, or even how they knew where to find her. Mysterious township networks. She slung on a poncho and went out; the pair looked bedraggled and forlorn and she brought them quickly under the shelter of her porch. The child – Khaya, she was reminded – was terrified of Roja, though in fact Rebecca was trying to stop the retriever from licking the little girl to death.

“Actually, Roja adores children,” Rebecca laughed, but the terrified child buried her face in her grandmother’s skirt.

And then there seemed nothing for it but to invite them right in, offer towels to dry their faces, and put the kettle on. (Fortunately, she still had gas, which she’d always cooked on.) They sat in the kitchen and had tea with the longlife milk Rebecca was now pulling out of storage. Sisi Mpum’ was reticent at first, characteristically grumpy, but gradually Rebecca pieced some of the story together.

Sisi Mpum’ had always lived in Joza, it seemed, and must be pushing seventy now. She had had four children: one dead in childbirth, one son killed in a bar brawl at twenty-one, and a third, successful as things went, had found his way overseas and not been heard from since. And the fourth, Khaya’s mother, had fallen pregnant out of wedlock to a feckless individual who had absconded, before she herself died of AIDS. Khaya, left with her grandmother, was nearly nine but looked about six; the last year of drought and strain couldn’t have helped her growth, Rebecca reflected. And her own, much older husband was dead now eight years or more. Sisi Mpum’ tutted and groused from under her damp doek; Rebecca wondered how one person could withstand so much tragedy.

“Hm, men,” she was concurring. “My husband left, too, you know?” Sisi Mpum’ affected surprise. “He never liked it here, but I did; when the drought came, he wanted to leave, but I did not. Then when my daughter’s school closed, she went to join him in Pretoria.” Sisi Mpum’s English was none too good, so Rebecca kept her words simple, and interspersed with such isiXhosa as she knew. Of course the situation had been more complicated, the breakdown of the relationship more gradual and entangled. But the drought had proved the snapping-point, the subject of the last furious argument – their marriage a victim of climate change. As for their fifteen-year-old, Simone – she had stayed until even her relatively self-sufficient school had succumbed to lack of water and sewerage; she had hung in, sort of home-schooling, until the cyclones hit. The extended power outage was the proverbial last straw: when kids could no longer easily access social media by phone or iPad, their entire social world, their very sense of identity, collapsed; Simone had been almost catatonic with the feeling of loss. So just the week before, they had found her a lift out of town with friends with a 4x4 that could negotiate the damaged Bedford road, and she too was gone.

And now, while Rebecca rattled disconsolately about her large house, Sisi Mpum’, apparently, was suffering a rather more dramatic loss: her home had survived the dust-storms but not the cyclones, her roof ripped off, her little garden stripped bare by vandals and buried under mud.

“We want to stay here,” she said bluntly.

“Ah.”

Rebecca mused briefly on the town’s – the country’s – history of division, hatred and misunderstanding, For all her work with the Black Sash in the apartheid years, and more recent charitable efforts at the soup kitchen and reading groups, her social interchange with Xhosa folk had remained superficial and desultory. She had occasionally entertained folk from the townships, but never had anyone stay overnight. Suspicion had, if anything, intensified under the latest climatic upheaval. Rebecca had the sense that the 1819 Battle of Grahamstown – which in some low-grade fashion had perhaps never ceased – was being renewed as Xhosa destitutes increasingly raided westwards into the ‘white’ suburbs.

Now, however, there seemed no question of turning her visitors away. She recalled Mrs Curran, the protagonist of J M Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron, her discomfiture at the invasive presence of the vagrant Verceuil. But this was different: Rebecca in fact felt a bit relieved, trusting, companionable, even a bit self-congratulatory as she installed them in the spare bedroom. Khaya wanted to sleep with her gran, as she was accustomed to.

They returned to sit at the kitchen table, which at this time of day seemed more appropriate than the lounge, or leaving the still somewhat awkward guests in the bedroom. Rebecca wondered what now to do with the rest of her day. There were limits to how much ‘entertaining’ she could do. Maybe just go to the university as she’d intended, even take Khanya; or retire to her study to work on a PhD chapter (she was working on a study of sexism in selected Zimbabwean newspapers of the 1990s, though nothing seemed more irrelevant right now).

There was, for example, what to have to eat, since the supermarkets had been eviscerated. In truth, Rebecca had stuff still in storage, tinned and dried foods. Her husband Jack had been a troubled and troublesome character in many ways, but in his favour he had been pragmatic and prescient, in a gloomily apocalyptic sort of way. “El Nino is looming,” he’d say. “The desert will encroach,” he’d say; or “This municipality will never get its act together”; or, “Mark my words, Eskom is in a death spiral.” Hence he had stockpiled food and a bit of petrol, installed an array of rainwater tanks and solar panels for LED lights and water-heating, and a small gas fridge for emergencies. He had left Rebecca a lot better off than most townspeople, who had generally done little to hedge against even a mild disaster. Even so, now in the third week of the province-wide power outage and the reduction of fuel and food resupply to an ad hoc trickle, her margins felt exceptionally thin. Only water was suddenly abundant again.

But Sisi Mpum’ was opening up a plastic bag onto the kitchen table: a carton of Cokes, packets of two-minute noodles, cans of chakalaka relish, crackers, some carrots, teabags. She did not, evidently, intend to stay for nothing, without the dignity of contributing.

“Goodness,” Rebecca exclaimed, “how did you get this stuff, not from shops, surely?”

“I have friends, the taxi-drivers,” the old woman said. “They go to the break in the PE road, then they walk to the other side, they come back with these things.  You want batteries, I can get; even petrol, I can get for you. Sometimes expensive, but we can get.”

“Boer maak plan,” Rebecca quipped, and they had a little warm chuckle together. Always, in times of stress and even violence, some people got together, forged unlikely alliances, gave with uncommon generosity. Out of the blue, for example, one of her students,  Jesse van der Vleis, a boy she scarcely knew, had several times now taken it upon himself to bring her biltong, once even some fresh venison he had shot on his parents’ farm, and declined recompense. Around the soup kitchen, too, as vicious depredations and even death – a Zimbabwean storekeeper had been murdered just two days before – swirled around, sweetness and sharing also blossomed, like flowers in the Richtersveld. What was that book by her namesake, Rebecca Solnit, something like Building Paradise in the Middle of Hell – about such generosities and beauty in the midst of disasters?

“You might like to come with me to the soup kitchen tomorrow,” she said to Sisi Mpum’, you could help me a lot just by being there.”

“I will come,” the Xhosa woman replied.  “You are a good woman, Mama English.” They looked at each other across the table, then reached out and held hands for a moment. “We are together, ne?”

Roja barked, as if in agreement, and for some reason that made even Khanya laugh.

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No 76 - John Eppel publishes "O Suburbia": a review

When I started teaching at Rhodes University in the 1990s, we entertained (and still do) a substantial number of Zimbabwean students, some of whom had come through Bulawayo high schools and recalled with both fondness and hilarity their former English teacher, Mister Eppel.  At once warm, maverick and acerbic, John Eppel, now retired, still teaches on the side, runs writing workshops – and continues unabated to produce and publish poetry, short stories and novellas. I think it is safe to say that his accumulated works are the most substantial by any single author in Zimbabwe since Doris Lessing.

Eppel sprang to prominence with his satirical schoolboy novella DGG Berry’s Great North Road, and with his first substantial volume of poetry, Spoils of War (1989). Most of his work is locally set in or near Bulawayo’s suburbs or school environs, so familiar to Eppel; and most is acidically satirical in nature, a feature almost designed to marginalise him. Satire generally has not been a prominent or easily assimilable mode in Zimbabwe’s literary traditions. Eppel’s coruscating portrayal of his ‘own’ white settler society has not always endeared him to his peers; and subsequently ZANU-PF’s cultural commissars have narrowly misconstrued as racist his satirical take on all Zimbabwe’s groups, from political leaders to suburban madams to NGOs.

His poetry, while generally less bitingly or lewdly satirical than the stories, has also incorporated two ‘traditional’ elements which have not been kindly received by Zimbabwean commentators and the occasional post-colonial scholar. The first is the consistent if varied use of traditional English stanzaic forms, as well as the sonnet, sestina and villanelle; the second is a high degree of concentration on the poet’s relation to the natural world. Both of these have laid Eppel open to accusations of an anachronistic adherence to foreign, imported models of poeticisation, especially the English Romantics. While Eppel acknowledges his indebtedness to the Romantics, and insists on the primacy of crafted form as a vital element in good poetry, to confine a reading of him to these elements alone is, I believe, to do the work a considerable disservice. Most recently, Eppel has responded to current events in two ways, one by writing more trenchant and undisguised gripes about politics, Mugabe’s autocracy, and municipal failings; secondly by collaborating with other Zimbabwean writers, notably Together (with the late Julius Chingono, 2011), and Textures (with the young, highly intellectual poet Togara Muzanenhamo, 2014). They make for interesting conversations across racial, cultural and age categories, and signal an increasingly wide acceptance across former divisions, including amongst academics.

O Suburbia, now out from Weaver Press, revisits many of the themes and motifs of earlier collections; indeed, to judge by the dates attached to some of the poems, they may be resurrections or rewrites of poems written decades ago. But Eppel also brings us up to date, as in one poem alluding to the deaths of civilians during last year’s ‘coup’. (Events overtake us so fast, as of course there has been another flurry of repressive violence in Zimbabwe this past week. Anyway, it’s ‘situation normal’, only more so – securing the ongoing relevance of the poetry despite its topical references.)

The collection, indeed, is a bit of a rattle-bag, with no discernible order: childhood memories jostle with political satires, haikus with villanelles, gentle love-poems with hard-edged critiques. A poem about a dog-meat vendor rubs up against a meditation on teaching King Lear; something scatological up against a light-hearted philosophical squib. Some readers might enjoy this anarchic feel; others might wish that some sort of shape had been imposed on the whole. If there is a common thread, it may be that Eppel just revels in language itself – we live inside language, as he says in one poem – and he wields his linguistic and literary resources with both glee and precision.

Where ‘shape’ continues to be prominent is, as ever, at the level of the individual poem. Eppel is truly gifted at constructing a finely-tuned machine of a poem, rigorous in rhyme and even syllable-count, while maintaining so fluid and chatty an air that the mechanism is all but invisible, especially when read aloud. This is less so with the several villanelles included, which are intrinsically rather more stark in their repetitions-with-minor-variations. Villanelles are clever, fun to construct in the manner of good crosswords, but I find them less satisfying than some of the many sonnets, a favourite form of Eppel’s.  To give you a taste, here is one especially beautiful yet playful one, “Waxbills” (he has of late very often written about birds):

Like my safari-suit, same powder blue;

like the plumbago (Cecil’s favourite

flower) that hedges me in; like the few

remaining stills of my father’s eyes; bit

by bit, little by little, hippityhopping

from place to place; pecking at shame,

at stubble, at grains of time; frequently

splashing your chums in the bath; far too tame

for your own good (my cat is on a quest);

like Bulawayo skies… you absorb me.

My home sits also near a hornets’ nest:

will they impound it? Will they let me be?

Underneath the thorns, you pick and you choose;

your tremolo gets me singing the blues.

As always, Eppel is intimately observant of the natural world around him, as here in “Tracks I Remember”:

Paths with banks of tick-heavy grass tilting

to caress the thigh; roads where dipping

hornbills lead the way, mopani scrub on

either side; tok-tokkies doing headstands,

their fused wings harder than fingernails, taptapping

messages of love; antlion

larvae (doodlebugs) crafting pits of death

where the critical angle of repose

slides crawling insects to their doom;

stink of formic acid, of resin, of

crushed locusts, wings in threatening display.

But Eppel is no displaced Wordsworth-like Romantic just revelling in natural diversity or beauty (though he does that, too): the second stanza of this poem is about human violence, warmongers and soldiers dying and laying their own death-traps. And at times, the natural is deployed to political ends, as in “Winds behaving badly”, where the final bombshell line reveals that the image of the wind has been symbolic all along:

The clouds descend, the firmament grows grey,

a churning wind, bone-cold, assaults the trees,

blowing petals and little girls away

before relaxing to a shirtless breeze.

Again it rises flapping doeks and scarves,

banging casements, matrons, widows, wives...

whistling through cracks, keyholes, while it carves

that look in daddy’s eyes. Run for your lives.

The clouds ascend, the firmament blows blue,

the rising wind lifts skirts and lashes hair –

what’s true is false, my child, what’s false is true –

the white sheets shaking, raking underwear.

Behaving-badly-winds will not subside

till you, my dears, commit tyrannicide.

This kind of observation is, for some in the decolonising camp, hard to stomach, coming from a white “settler” – a word Eppel still uses to describe his status in Zimbabwe. But he seems to have reached a point in his life where he is defiant about this, as in “A Settler’s Taunt”:

You can deny me

my birth status but

you cannot deny

me my death status:

death will fix me in

the soil forever.

Eppel knows – and as this collection shows – he has written with a wry humanity about members of all sectors of Zimbabwean society, has sent up the pretensions of all groups, not least his own – and not least himself: he is willingly satirical about his own “will-to-form”, for example. He has, in some exemplary ways, transcended a narrow ‘settler-dom’.

It is impossible here to really exemplify the full richness and variety of this collection, which at times shows off Eppel at the height of his humane powers, at other points descends unabashedly into bathos and brief whimsies. It is substantial, at over 80 pages, and as welcome on the subcontinent as anything Eppel has ever written.

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No.75 Dogs in Southern African Literatures: A new book of essays

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a piece about dogs in some eighteenth-century South African art and travelogue (Blog no.19). The dog theme has bubbled and steamed along since. Piggy-backing on Wendy Woodward’s highly successful Animal Studies colloquia at the University of the Western Cape over the last few years, we cooked up a conference on dogs in Southern African literatures. The organisation of this was bravely taken on by Andries Visagie and Joan-Mari Barendse, and efficiently carried off at Stellenbosch University in April 2017.

Finally, we have worked up a fascinating special edition of the journal Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (55.3), published also as a book by van Schaik Publishers, edited by myself and Joan-Mari.  Nothing quite like this has been done in South Africa before – nor, indeed, for the literary presence of any other animal in South Africa. We have fond hopes of setting a trend.

After a Foreword by prominent American dogs-scholar Karla Armbruster from Webster University, who delivered the conference’s keynote lecture, the volume looks like this:

The collection opens with an essay by Cape Town artist Wilma Cruise, one of whose sculptures adorns our cover. Cruise ruminates on her own art in relation to contemporary theory on animal communication, and communication with animals, including that which lies beyond spoken and written language.

Australian scholar Henrietta Mondry’s article startlingly levels J M Coetzee’s novel Disgrace against a Ukrainian-set documentary about an isolated dog-rescuer. Both texts are unsettling borderland narratives that question all kinds of former political and ethical assumptions and positions, and are linked by the mythological trope of the “Dog-man”.

            A second north-south comparison is offered by Catherine du Toit, whose article investigates parallels between Michel Houellebecq’s French-language novel, La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and Op ’n dag, ’n hond (2016) by John Miles. Du Toit also takes us back to the millennia-old trope of the dog as guide.

            Wendy Woodward’s contribution treats of a genre too much neglected: lyric poetry. She dips into what is doubtless an extensive archive of dog-related poetry, showing how human-canine entanglements, both convivial and adversarial, manifest in the works of poets ranging from Ruth Miller to Mongane Serote.

            A number of articles treat of canid appearances—domestic dogs as well as wild hyenas and jackals—in Afrikaans literature in particular.  They explore facets of dog entanglements with Afrikaans identity itself, and range from the earliest works in self-identifying Afrikaans to the most recent. A useful ‘book-end’ is Willem Anker’s recent novel Buys, which re-imagines the peripatetic, morally challenging 1840s’ career of the maverick Coenraad de Buys. Anker (who attended the original conference himself) anchors the final section of Gerda Taljaart-Gilson’s article, which provides a useful survey of a range of Afrikaans works.  Most intriguingly, Gilson shows how these dog tropes owe as much to African as to European folkloric or mythic antecedents.

Jacomien van Niekerk, like Taljaart-Gilson, looks both to wild canids and to African —specifically Khoi—folklore as the origin of the Afrikaans jakkals and wolf (hyena) stories gathered and published by G. R. von Wielligh, and then circulated and re-told in numerous forms so as to become almost ineffably ‘Afrikaans’. 

Joan-Mari Barendse then analyses in intimate detail a single work, Oswald Pirow’s 1955 story, Ashambeni, one of the few works explored in this collection which is named for and centred on a dog-character. It is, importantly, a reminder that not all cross-cultural or cross-species imaginative ventures are intrinsically benign, inasmuch as Pirow depicts an African man’s story through a thoroughly offensive right-wing lens—an aspect of Afrikaner identity now for many uncomfortable to recall.

Even more discomfiting in this respect is the work of Eben Venter, whose novel Wolf, Wolf is examined by Wemar Strydom.  Strydom attends to conjunctions between racism, sexism and speciesism—in Venter’s case refracted through canine masks, games and actual animals.

Finally in this Afrikaans-related set, Bibi Burger takes us into the futuristic nightmares of Deon Meyer’s recent thriller Fever, in which dogs, especially a roaming and uncontrolled pack of dogs attack the protagonists; this attack provides an opening for Burger’s meditation on crucial contemporary debates about humans’ capacity and propensity to control nature (exemplified by the domestication of the dog) as opposed to recognising our more complex entanglement with its wildness.

Mathilda Slabbert focuses on two very recent short stories, one by Ken Barris, the other by Sally-Ann Murray. Both feature dogs strongly as metonymic of their human protagonists’ politics, gender conceptions, and senses of belonging in a divisive and racialised suburban South Africa, and symptomatic, in Slabbert’s view, of South Africa’s communal failure to address the needs of the vulnerable.

            A trio of essays takes us north of the Limpopo. Innocent Dande and Sandra Swart provide a wide-ranging survey of canine representations in Zimbabwean archival sources, popular media formats, and Shona-language literatures. They show how dog evocations in traditional and proverbial lore ramify complexly into the politics and literatures of unfolding phases of Zimbabwe’s conflicted history.

Pat Louw takes just one short story of the Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing’s extensive oeuvre, “A tale of two dogs”. Louw shows how the differing treatment of the dogs therein reflects tensions and flaws within Rhodesia’s colonial society, and argues that even in this early piece Lessing exhibits what might be termed a post-colonial stance.

Finally, I bring us into the contemporary period, examining two novels set in the turmoil of Zimbabwe’s post-2000 land acquisitions, Graham Lang’s Place of Birth and Ian Holding’s Unfeeling. This exploration exhumes the ever-present role of dogs on all sides of the farm takeovers, and argues for contextualising them within a more comprehensive multispecies history. Above all, dogs emerge here as victims.

Any exploratory collection like this one leaves many gaps and suggestions: many periods – the eighteenth century among them – and many regions need further attention. Namibia and Botswana’s dogs are conspicuous by their absence. So is the role of dogs in various of the subcontinent’s indigenous cultures’ literary productions. And surely there ought to have been a new postcolonial reading of Jock of the Bushveld? This remains for some adventurous scholar to do. Still, we think the collection offers some useful parameters and theoretical stances, and opens up numerous passages for further exploration and argument.

Hovering behind all this, of course, is the question: Why bother to study the literary role of animals at all? For me, it’s a sub-section of the study of animals’ role in our lives more broadly. Dogs are something of a special case, to the degree that they are our closest non-human companions through history – as predators, fellow-hunters, companions and symbols, appearing as bothersome strays and police co-oppressors, trackers of thieves and guides to the blind – and offering, of course, the closest we are likely to know of unconditional love.

What the cat thinks of dogs

But every species is a special case, each with unique properties and functions. Humans are just another unique animal case; indeed, the critic Jacques Derrida went so far as to call the conceptual division between “animals” and “humans” a crime. It is a crime because it has led to our unthinking and unabated destruction of perhaps 70 percent of all non-human species –  mammals, birds, fish and insects alike – with incalculable impacts on the sustaining ecosystems which depended upon those animals to be sustaining. Instead, we have replaced functioning ecosystems with grazing and housing for billions of captive animals bred solely for slaughter and consumption, bolstered by poisons and hormones, while giving absolutely nothing back.

So any initiative or study which helps raise consciousness of our current relationships with animals, both wonderful and damaging, can only be a good thing. You can help by spreading the news about this book, and carrying the work a little further.

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