No 144– The interpreters

In a country of multiple languages like South Africa, as many scholars and commentators have observed, interpreters and translators have always played a key role. In pre-colonial times, translation must have occurred between, say, Nguni or proto-Xhosa speakers and Khoi or San-speakers, until such time as the languages partially merged. The arrival of Dutch and English-speakers of course added a whole new power dynamic. Very different cultures struggled to understand one another; where they failed, they fought. Yet cultures changed, languages shifted, fruitful and destructive lessons were learned and shared. Culture-change could not have occurred without the translator or interpreter – an ambivalent intermediary who might be at once a bridge and internally torn, who might be a powerful agent of events as much through failings as through successes. Even today, when many if not most South Africans have learned at least one other official language, thus dispensing with the intermediary, translators remain crucial – take the example of the key role of the ‘court interpreter’ today.

Especially during the initial two centuries of conflictual colonisation, sundry interpreters found themselves at the literal frontiers of negotiation, war, culture-clash, and conciliation. They might often have been the actual engineers of events. Even the best-known were often patently poor or limited translators, so there were endless opportunities for mistranslation, misunderstanding, manipulation and deliberate deceit. The interpreters I’ve been reading about of late were almost all both troubled and troublesome, as suspect as they were necessary.

In Jan van Riebeeck’s tenure at the Cape in the 1650s, interpreters were crucial to the Dutch East India Company’s often hapless efforts to obtain cattle and sheep from local ‘Hottentot’ (Khoikhoi) transhumance herders. Perhaps the first intermediary was one Autshumao, variously spelled, colloquially known as ‘Harry’. Autshumao was a Goringhacoina, a Beachcomber or Strandloper, who even before 1652 had acted as unofficial postmaster to passing Dutch ships. So useful was he that he had been taken to Bantam in the Far East, so had facility in both Dutch and English, not to mention a slew of Khoi dialects. When van Riebeeck arrived, Autshumao was probably in his fifties and seriously destitute, but in his burgeoning role as interpreter and cattle broker, he cannily and rapidly built up considerable wealth in livestock of his own. By 1656 he had 100 cattle and 200 sheep, which was more than the Company could boast. Having joined a peninsular group known as the Capemen, he shamelessly played the Dutch and the often mutually fractious Khoi segments off one another, a power that hinged on the Dutchmen’s inability to master the clicking local tongue. After a few years he announced he would no longer interpret. He was, van Riebeeck fulminated in his journal, ‘a sly rogue’ whose word could not be trusted, but he also exemplified indigenous intelligence which became ‘sharper every day’. In contrast to the prevailing prejudice against the indigenes, van Riebeeck was forced to recognise that ‘they were certainly not so savage and stupid as beasts’.

Autshumao continued to accumulate his herds, while the stubborn Khoi reluctance to part with any but the most meagre livestock obliged the Dutch to start colonising pasturage and trying to establish their own crops and stock. The competition over pastures inevitably spawned an outbreak of vigorous resistance, starting in May 1659, with Autshumao a chief instigator. Lured into the Dutch fort, he was imprisoned on Robben Island, an early victim of that ugly, centuries-long institution. Foreshadowing the Xhosa prophet-chieftain Makhanda 150 years later, Autshumao escaped in a leaky boat; unlike Makhanda he didn’t drown, and improbably was back interpreting by 1660. The interruption of exile seems to have done him in, however; he died in 1662, as destitute as he had begun. His intermediate position at the nexus of animal- and land-control is especially illuminative of the dynamics that would dominate the next three centuries of South Africa’s ‘fractured and fractious society’, as Sandra Swart concludes in her lovely new book, The Lion’s Historian.

            Autshumao’s regrettable absences obliged van Riebeeck to call on other interpreters, among them Autshumao’s niece, Eva or Krotoa, and a man named Doman. They formed, as Noel Mostert lays it out in Frontiers, a curious trio: Autshumao the ‘self-interested go-between’; Doman an ‘embittered anti-European’ who led the 1659 resistance; and Eva, the ‘first cross-cultural product of Europe’s arrival’. Doman ingratiated himself to van Riebeeck by squealing on ‘Harry’, and was accordingly sent to Batavia (Indonesia) for a year’s further education in Dutch. His initial apparent devotion and attachment to Christianity turned rapidly to bitter enmity. He was shocked at Dutch depredations on both environment and indigenes in Batavia, and quickly recognised the same monopolistic rapacity emerging at the Cape. Vilifying Eva for squealing on him to the Dutch, Doman led the Khoi in ravaging the Dutch fields and forced a withdrawal to the fort. Wounded, however, Doman was obliged to sue for peace, even as he complained vociferously about ‘free burgher’ encroachments.

 

           Mostert doesn’t record what became of Doman; we know more of Eva-Krotoa. Largely raised from an early age in the van Riebeeck household, she transcended her status as ‘Hotnot meid’ to be married, aged 15 or 16, in the fort to a Netherlander or Danish seafarer named Pieter van Meerhoff. To him (and perhaps others) she bore an alleged six children, three stillborn. If so, she must have been almost continuously pregnant as van Riebeeck despatched her on interpretation jobs (she learned Portuguese as well as English), and obsessively on ventures further inland in search of the gold of ‘Monomotapa’. Over-used and much abused, to echo Janis Ian, she not only reverted to Khoi skins and habits periodically, but descended incrementally into debauchery and drink. Initially indulgent of her evident split between cultures, van Riebeeck eventually bundled her off to ‘rehab’, which is to say Robben Island. She died there in July 1674, aged 22, to become exemplary of a quasi-historical, quasi-literary trope: the ‘Hottentot Eve’.

Her divided, unhappy life foreshadows that of subsequent ‘Hottentot’ concubines, including the traveller LeVaillant’s squeeze Narina, Bain’s ‘Kaatjie Kekkelbeck’, Sara Baartman, and Athol Fugard’s Lena, thus foreshadowing also the unhappy splitness of ‘Coloured’ folk more widely. So argues, at least, Stephen Gray in his still-challenging 1979 survey, Southern African Literature.  Dan Sleigh fictionalised Krotoa in his fine novel, Islands, and Dalene Matthee imagined the life of one of Eva’s daughters, Pieternella van die Kaap. A still more recent addition to this literary genealogy is Trudie Bloem’s biographical novel, Krotoa-Eva: The woman from Robben Island.

            Robben Island seems a persistent node in the story of the South African interpreter. Incarcerated there alongside the aforementioned Makhanda in 1819 was another Xhosa man, an habitual livestock thief, allegedly. This was Msimbithi, colloquially known as Jacob or Jackot. I have written at length about this extraordinary character in a previous blog, so won't repeat it all here. Suffice it to remind you that he had acted briefly as an interpreter to Major Fraser on the eastern frontier, and was plucked off Robben Island for that purpose when William Fitzwilliam Owen was conducting a Royal Navy survey of the whole east coast. He later escaped, only to be rediscovered living with Shaka’s Zulus, and subsequently wove a chequered career as interpreter between Shaka and the first white adventurers in that region. Like Autshumao and Doman before him, he repeatedly attracted opprobrium and suspicion – deserved or not is moot – so much so that in 1832 Dingane ordered the whites to kill him. Which they duly did.

             Captain Owen dropped anchor in Delagoa Bay (now Maputo) in September 1822. Msimbithi was hopeless in this context as an interpreter, and Owen was obliged to resort to a local interpreter, a Tembe man named ‘Shannuahguahvah’ [Hlanguava?], colloquially called ‘English Bill’. He is a yet more colourful individual, chameleon-like in his adaptability, less torn between cultures than revelling in the possibilities of his position. Lt Thomas Boteler, one of Owen’s companions, left a memorable description:

He was a thin slight man, about thirty-two, of middling height, meagre aspect, and keen, uneasy, cautious, yet vivacious eye. With an infinite fund of cunning, trick, and finesse, he possessed great talents for humorous mimicry and grimace, together with an unbounded impudence … Affected dignity and mystery were weapons with which he often carried a point … He was a consummate politician and courtier in a savage state …

  ‘English Bill’ accompanied Owen’s boats as they explored and mapped the major inland rivers. So charmed were the sailors, they took the man all the way to the Seychelles, and thence back to Cape Town, where he consorted with the Governor himself. Though Boteler transcribes his speech as no better than a rough pidgin, ‘English Bill’ was more useful to Owen than Msimbithi. Hence, on returning for a second run at the east coast, Owen offloaded Msimbithi at Algoa Bay (Port Elizabeth) – the recipient being trader James Saunders King, and the rest belongs to the history of Zululand. As for ‘English Bill’, he was returned to his Tembe people, and what became of him thereafter I have yet to discover.

           

Though every transaction between speakers of different languages required interpreters, those who made interpreting their business often remained suspect. A little later, as Roger Levine has written, the mission-trained Jan Tzatzoe, who would travel from Xhosaland as far as England, was destined to end up rejected and alone.

These exemplars of a unique metier were hardly angels, but one feels they somehow deserved better.

 

*****

 

No 143 - James Clarke: environmental writer-warrior

 

Does South Africa have a tradition of engaged environmental philosopher-writers analogous to that of the United States? If not, why not? Are there lurking somewhere in our libraries works equivalent to David Thoreau’s Walden, Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, and others, through to Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass? What am I missing?

            Laurens van der Post fancied himself something of a philosopher; I find his thought on the natural world a bit on the simplistic side. Who else? At a pinch, Jan Christiaan Smuts. It’s not like we lack literate lovers of nature and the wild: game rangers and botanists and ecologists and ornithologists. No shortage of current excellent scholar-writers, like Julia Martin and Duncan Brown, or of gifted journalists writing at book-length, like Leonie Joubert and the inimitable Don Pinnock – perhaps the closest we have today to such a popular ‘natural philosopher’. But a tradition of writers who truly treasure the natural world, producing books that have become classics? Has anyone really looked? Southern Africa yet lacks a literary survey to match Roderick Nash’s magisterial Wilderness and the American Mind.

            James Clarke would probably not consider himself a philosopher, and I wouldn’t claim him as one. To judge by what pops up on Google, he is most fondly remembered as a humourist, mostly expressed in his long-running ‘Stoep Talk’ column in The Star. But he took his professional journalism a lot further than most: he was concerned deeply with the human impacts on the southern African environment, and published a number of pertinent books. Though he pronounced some years ago he had ‘retired’ from environmental writing (whether or not out of despair I don’t know), but this body of work deserves, it seems to me, wider recognition than it has received.

            Of his 25-odd books, I have just four to hand.

           

The earliest is Our Fragile Land: South Africa’s environmental crisis. In it, Clarke wrote of the rampant degradation of South Africa’s already meagre soils; of the worst air pollution yet recorded over the Reef; of unregulated mine tailings and oil tanker spills; of the paucity of water on the subcontinent and an over-burden of sheer human numbers. All depressingly familiar issues. Apart from the plethora of alarming figures he wields in evidence, he touches on the bigger picture and the long view. He notes that humans obliterated many megafauna in prehistoric times; and having created through fire savannahs suitable for herbivores, set about obliterating those herds in turn: the bison and the springbok and the elephants. At the same time humans were gradually becoming better informed about the finite, self-enclosed nature of our planet, its uniqueness startlingly underlined by the 1969 Apollo moon-shots. We became ‘Spaceship Earth’, foreshadowing James Lovelock’s Gaia concept. For when Clarke published Our Fragile Earth, those moon-shots were still fresh; it was 1974. South Africa didn’t even have television then, let alone the internet, and Clarke worried that South Africans were grossly uninformed about the crisis literally engulfing them.

But don’t say we weren’t warned.

            Exactly fifty years later, has the thousand-fold explosion of media and scientific knowledge made things better? Clarke’s own signature optimism notwithstanding, it would seem not. ‘The most dangerous ingredient in the air of South Africa,’ Clarke wrote, ‘is complacency.’  Now, one must add mendacious greenwashing, deliberate misinformation, political blackmail and short-term profiteering by the poisoners themselves.

           

Indeed, Clarke found it necessary to write his ‘crisis’ book twice more. He updated it in 1991 as Back to Earth, and with the contribution of David Holt-Riddle once again in 2002, now titled Coming Back to Earth: South Africa’s changing environment. This survey covers similar ground to its predecessors, but is bigger, more comprehensive, and more holistic. Much new knowledge has been generated, as have new rhetorics – ‘sustainable development’, ‘biodiversity loss’, and ‘climate change’ are beginning to shift the terms of debate somewhat. The old issues remain – chapters are devoted to the greenhouse effect, poisoned rivers and soils (including the mind-numbingly stupid reintroduction of DDT), atmospheric pollution, population pressures and waste (non)management. But he can also deal with more recent issues such as the hole in the ozone layer and the impact of AIDS. Clarke now pays more attention to the effects of apartheid’s skewed economics on environmental inequalities. (We’re moving at this point towards ‘environmental justice’ and ‘climate change’ as the favoured terms.) Even more than before, Clarke ranges across the planet in search of parallels and established and potential solutions – of which there are plenty, by the way, if only policy-makers had the spine and imagination to implement them. Clarke is feisty and direct about this ‘poor sense of moral responsibility’: unlike the pussyfooters at COP28 recently, who seem less concerned with saving the planet than with avoiding each other’s toes, he isn’t afraid to call a spade a shovel. He is readable, thoroughly informed, at times funny. Even twenty years on, with all the hurtling changes that might have rendered some of his information redundant and views a tad dated, Coming Back to Earth still strikes one as essential reading if you’re to understand anything about why we are where we are now. Up shit creek without a candle, basically.

            Clarke hasn’t been absorbed only in the pernicious effects on natural and human health of rampant commercialised industrialisation and urbanisation. As a founding member of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, he has also been deeply concerned with the fate of wildlife as a component of the continent’s crisis. Our third and fourth books deal with this theme.

            So-called ‘fortress conservation’ – the colonial-era carving-out of regions devoted exclusively to wildlife – retains some kudos but is also being superseded by more integrative models. Much wildlife exists outside protected areas. Whatever the situation, a constant is human-wildlife conflict – so pervasive it has earned its own abbreviation, HWC. This is the burden of the third book, Save Me From the Lion’s Mouth (2012).

          

  Clarke ranges beyond Southern Africa, especially into Tanzania and Kenya, providing case-study chapters on ten species (including primates and snakes). Mostly these are the biggies, from lion and leopard to rhino and elephant, not a little based on Clarke’s own participation in lion-tagging operations and the like. A vast proportion of HWC involves the simultaneous, paradoxical vulnerability and exclusion of poor communities from conservation benefits. Those benefits include those derived from eco-tourism and controlled trophy-hunting, the latter a particularly emotive and divisive issue. Though he remains ambivalent about hunting, Clarke doesn’t shy away from it in his concluding chapter. Whatever one’s view, Clarke provides a more richly nuanced examination of the complexities than a mere blog can summarise.

Clarke has long been obsessed with the notion of ‘overkill’. He used it in passing in Our Fragile Earth, then explored it more thoroughly in Coming Back to Earth. If there’s a philosophical concept tying his works together, this might be it. Like the proverbial fox in the henhouse, killing way beyond necessity, humans too, Clarke suggests, at times indulge in orgies of destruction inflicted on other creatures as well as on each other. The massive overconsumption of resources by some people and sectors may be a societal expression of this. Clarke repeats the argument in Overkill: The race to save Africa’s wildlife (2017). Much of Africa’s wild species avoided the fate of the mammoth and the passenger pigeon because they had longer to co-evolve human-avoidance strategies – until white men with firearms arrived in the nineteenth century. Their egregious overkill, now amplified by habitat encroachment, Far Eastern syndicated plunder, and alien-species invasion, means that much is newly threatened with extinction. Alongside the historical view, Clarke offers chapters focused on some big and conventional species – lion, rhino, elephant – but also, more unusually, the equally dire depletion of our ocean resources. Still, Clarke remains determinedly upbeat in light of increased awareness, local initiatives, and shifts to more workable and just models of habitat conservation.

James Clarke may not be the most lyrical or philosophical writer on environmental matters, but he is surely one of South Africa’s most informed and informative, and passionately engaged, commentators. A career to be resoundingly applauded.

 

***  

           

 

No 142 - Beautiful whales, beautiful words

 

My photo of a right whale off Puerto Madryn

It may be that I was a whale in a previous life: such is the intensity of emotion with which I respond to them. Deepwater pleasure at seeing them; coruscating grief at merely reading of unfeeling slaughter or their mystifying mass strandings. I remember that after seeing the film The Whale Rider I had to walk around the block before I could bring myself under control again. Strange, given that I’ve not seen them in their massive flesh all that often – mostly Southern right and Bryde’s whales spy-holing alongside our tour boat in Algoa Bay, also breaching off the coast of Puerto Madryn, Argentina. Now and then characteristic spouts spotted off our southern shores.

            Naturally I’ve read a fair bit.

            Much of the literature is dominated by two ur-texts. The first is of course the Biblical tale of Jonah being swallowed by a ‘big fish’ and then, thanks be to God, disgorged again. Trying to endow this gnomic parable with realism is futile: no whale is known ever to have spat up a human. But this fanciful depiction of God’s beneficence has been fatal for the whale: it became the archetypal sea-monster, the Leviathan, all but Satanic for the terror and disgust its imagery generated in the Western and Christian world. Not, it should be stressed, in at least some indigenous societies, such as the Inuit, which regarded the world’s greatest mammals with suitable awe and reverence. The historical Christian shuddering disdain for this element of the natural world has much to answer for; it arguably laid an essential foundation for commercial exploitation.

            This is clear from the several pages of literary quotations that preface the second ur-text, Herman Melville’s whale-sized novel, Moby-Dick. Many of those quotations are from the Bible: these and every single subsequent one over a millennium and a half characterise the whale as the fearsome monster, the savage Leviathan, vengeful, revolting, even as its oil becomes financially as attractive as gold.

            Melville’s 1851 novel – a very strange palimpsest of texts-within-texts, postmodern a century before postmodernism – is predicated upon that monstrosity. Though little approaching compassion infects this hunting story, it’s moot whether Melville didn’t regard his manic, possessed protagonist Ahab as the greater devil. Moby-Dick the whale is triply monsterised in being huge, albino, and responsible for taking Ahab’s leg. A revenge tale, then, as well as one of overweening machoism, brave little men tackling Leviathan with primitive equipment. Viciously obsessed, Ahab meets with his almost inevitable fate, going down with the whale. Serves him bloody well right.

            There is nevertheless much cultural wisdom and psychological depth in Moby-Dick. It works as a powerful foundation-text in Darren Aronofsky’s 2022 film The Whale, for which Brendan Fraser won a Best Actor Oscar. (The film has nothing to do with whales as such, but … I’ll say no more: just watch it!)

            Moby-Dick also powerfully underwrites one of the few Southern African literary texts centred on whales. It’s intriguing that such works are so sparse. Likewise, there seems to be no comprehensive history of Southern African whaling, unless there’s some material in Norway, the Norwegians being largely responsible for setting up the industry on our shores. Indeed, it’s a Norwegian captain who anchors, so to speak, the whaling quest in Laurens van der Post’s The Hunter and the Whale (1967). Arguably van der Post’s best novel, the story also involves the hunt for an especially large sperm whale (not the more common humpback or right whale). The van der Post-like narrator Pete (van der Post did claim he’d been out on a whaling expedition off Durban) promises captain Larsen access to shooting a famous elephant tusker in return for joining the whale hunt. Like Ahab, however, Larsen perishes in action – as does, one is left to presume, the harpooned whale.

            A century after Moby-Dick, however, attitudes had evidently shifted. Like virtually all other fauna on the subcontinent, driven to the brink of extinction by white men’s guns, whales were becoming scarce. Van der Post’s narrator, as well as other characters, tend to side with the whale in the struggle, and the whale itself is described quite lovingly in a couple of van der Post’s more lyrical passages. The whale's spouting is

             

a shining poplar of pearl in a mirage of early afternoon flame before it lost its silver stem in the dark-blue sea, to gather itself up swiftly into a cloud of mist and dissolve with the same suddenness that it had come. 

I thought it one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen: it reminded me of Tennyson’s description of the arm clothed in white samite which came out of the black water of Avalon to receive Arthur’s great sword back into its waters, which I had read two years before. Even today this whale spout holds place in my heart with the manifestations of nature that I treasure most.

 

 It would not be long before the economic bottom fell out of the blubber, oil and baleen market, and the whaling stations at Durban, Betty’s Bay, Donkergat and elsewhere were abandoned, to become the gaunt and haunted remnants of touristic whale tours today. Our poet Douglas Livingstone wrote of the station on Durban’s Bluff:

 

The old whaling station is ship-wrecked:

corrugated roofs, zinc walls flaking;

most of the cataracted panes smashed;

the sea clean now, the sand still tarry.

[...]

Intestines, hoses sliding about;

vats bubbling; the crane-chains clattering

– all that has stilled; the factory closed,

but always, I think, a bad prospect.

           (“Beach Terminal”)

 

Already we’re heading towards the kind of sacralising lament exemplified by Heathcote Williams’s Whale Nation (1988), its photographs interspersed with poetry, and backed by a more explanatory afterword. Though I wholly identify with Williams’s sentiments, I find the poetry a bit on the blunt side, some resonant phrases excepted. There is a certain numbing fascination in his listing of all the uses to which whale-bone, baleen and blubber-oil was put by Western civilisation, from propping up dowagers’ boobs to contributing glycerine for bombs.

            A better text, though of much the same sympathy, is Philip Hoare’s Leviathan (2008). This is part personal travelogue, part Melville-centred literary criticism, part paean to the bio-society of the whale. His responses to whales appear much like mine: he gives the lie to that old monstrous imagery of Leviathan, in prose that is consistently informative and mellifluously readable.

            Heathcote Williams famously also produced a parallel text, Sacred Elephant. And yet another text that links the greatest land and sea mammals is Lyall Watson’s Elephantoms (2003). Watson, (in)famous for his maverick Supernature, claims to have witnessed a Knysna forest elephant communing through infrasound with a Blue whale (the biggest species of all but exceedingly rarely seen on our coasts). Biologists assure me that such communication is highly improbable, the scene most likely invented. Still, the discovery of such communications, out of normal human hearing but quite amazing, far-reaching, mysterious, self-evidently complex yet essentially untranslatable, has revolutionised attitudes towards the value of whales. Interestingly, one pioneer of whale-song study was Roger Payne, as related in his book Among Whales (1995). (See also David Rothenberg’s more recent Thousand-Mile Song.) Roger Payne’s then wife, Katy, went on to adapt their equipment to record elephant infrasonic conversations (see her book, Silent Thunder).

            Communion of another, also invented nature is the core of Zakes Mda’s novel, The Whale Caller (2005). Set in Hermanus, it involves a kind of love-affair between the human ‘whale-caller’ and a Southern right whale named Sharisa. (There is a ‘whale caller’, apparently, though his kelp horn serves to summons tourists, not the whale.) It’s not in my view one of Mda’s better novels, but my colleague Wendy Woodward has made much of it as an example of more recent trends in granting animals increasingly more dignity, emotionality, individuality, and agency. Certainly, it shows how far we (bar some retrograde Norwegians, Russians and Japanese, who hopefully will die out before the whales do) have come from Moby-Dick.

  

This cover depicts killer whales,
which don't actually feature in the novel

          An interesting parallel text is set in a kind of Western Australian equivalent of Hermanus, in Tim Winton’s novel Shallows (1984). It’s a densely textured portrayal of Angelus, a rather rough little place whose sense of community, such as it is, has historically centred on whaling. One character reads excerpts from an ancestor’s whaling journal, which is roughly contemporaneous with Melville’s account. (Moby-Dick hovers throughout.) In the novel’s present, the last of the whalers, now equipped with big diesel boats, radar and explosive harpoons, are harassed by whale-loving protestors in Greenpeace-style rubber dinghies. While different views are thereby aired, Winton is too canny a writer to portray whalers as unmitigated evil, or the do-gooders as somehow unimpeachable.

            The sense of historic community – ‘Whaling is in our blood’ – is often raised as a reason to continue slaughtering animals for products we no longer need. One of the things Winton’s and the other novels highlight, however, is that communities and cultures are ever in flux, subject to vagaries of environment and economics. Moreover, because we are such inventive and mobile creatures, we can shift. Learn different jobs, inhabit different places. Whales, despite inhabiting such vast stretches of ocean, have in some ways a much, much narrower set of options and envelope of conditions within which they can live. May we ever leave them be, to sing the seas in their own unique way.

 

*****

No 141 – The use and abuse of animals: Albany 1820-21

 

Baines' painting of Grahamstown, ca.1850, shows animals as present but marginalised.

From my south-facing windows I look across the coastal plain towards Port Alfred and Kenton. The landscape is etched and scarred with innumerable human interventions: new roads and the traces of abandoned roads, new fences and the traces of old ones, fields of grass carved out of the infamously thorny Albany thickets. Powerlines and firebreaks and buildings.

            The “scratches on the face of the country”, so characterised by the early traveller John Barrow, pretty much began in this area with the arrival of the 1820 settlers. No doubt the plain had been variously modified by human presence, Khoekhoen, Bushman and Xhosa, long before the colonial invaders came. In 1820 there was scarcely a wagon-track between outposts; mostly they still followed trails opened up by the elephants. But they were quickly setting up surveyed farms on the land from which the Xhosa had been ejected, establishing homes and roads and mission stations and tiny outposts like Graham’s Town.

            The history of these often hapless and ill-equipped settlers has often been told, whether in hagiographic or embittered decolonial terms, but not, as far as I know, much with animals in mind. Jack Skead has exhaustively catalogued the early mentions of wild animals in the travelogues, but not the domestic. Sandra Swart’s admirable history of the horse in South Africa, Riding High, rather leaves the Eastern Cape out. Craig Patterson’s PhD study somewhat fills that gap. But what of all the other species, wild and domestic, whose presence was constant, but mostly only casually remarked? It seems to me there’s much yet to be explored of the intimate network of animal uses and abuses in this period. For it’s clear that in every aspect of society, whether Bushman, Xhosa or white settler, dependency on animals was total. They simply would not have survived without animals.

(This may still be true: I look down on the one hand on the white flecks of cattle let loose in the bush much as they were two centuries ago; some of them get periodically stolen, just like two centuries ago. One prominent cluster of buildings houses a dairy and a slaughterhouse; the business calls itself “Beefmasters”, which says all you need to know about the power dynamic there. On the other hand, several former farms have been amalgamated into a broad game ranch: with binoculars I regularly spot impala and eland and giraffe – all “extra-limitals”, by the way, which did not occur here in 1820. The grazers perpetuate the distinction between grassed fields and thicket, but new pressures on the vegetation are showing: the thorn trees that dominated one patch have been eaten down to the nub by the giraffe. The point is: exploitation of animals remains key to local human well-being.)

What of 1820?

I dip here into only three of the sundry diaries and memoirs dating to 1820 and 1821. It would take much wider reading to confirm or modify the impressions one gains from this limited sample. But here we go.

One is The Journal of William Shaw, edited for the Graham’s Town Series by WD Hammond-Tooke. Shaw was a Wesleyan missionary specifically assigned to the 1820 settlers of the Albany district (now Makana), later to the Kat River settlements further east. His journal for the years 1820-21 is sketchy compared to later years, and one hopes his sermons were less dull. He batted back and forth between farms and embryonic centres like Salem and Bathurst, praising God for everything, good or misfortunate. When he was thrown off his horse, he praised God that he’d suffered no “material injury”. When his horse gave out and was abandoned on the road, he praised God that the delay saved him from running into an elephant. No word on the fate of the horse.

This is typical of the offhand attitude he brought to animal presences. He rode here and rode there, but says next to nothing about the animals themselves. Though he did a good deal of exhausting walking, it’s clear that travel was entirely dependent on animals. Wagons come and go, but he says nothing of the teams of oxen that drew them under threat of the whip. Animals must have been looked after, but in a purely instrumental way. At outspans they were just left to find their own grazing. Inevitably, some would get lost, or rustled by Xhosa raiders, or taken out by lion, leopard or hyena. More than once Shaw’s horse couldn’t be found in the morning, obliging him to walk. Some horses, he recorded, succumbed to a “very peculiar complaint”, which he attributed to “an almost entire want of food”. Especially in drought conditions, the prevalent sour veld (Zuurveld) offered meagre pickings. In short, they starved.

As for wild animals, they were around. In some tracts “one is surrounded with bushes and hears nothing but an occasional scream from the Jackalls, a dismal hungry toned howl from the wolf”. Shaw recorded that one man, on a Sunday, set off to walk to Graham’s Town, but was turned back by two lions “en couchant”. So the fellow had to attend church after all, praise the Lord. Once he himself had to take refuge for a night in a “Hottentot” kraal; having no bread, they fed him broiled buffalo and milk. Interestingly, Shaw seems reluctant to eat “flesh as a substitute”. He may have been a closet vegetarian, but most people on either side of the shifting frontier were largely dependent on animal flesh for survival, whether ‘ranched’ or hunted in the wild. But, looking back on his first year in the district, Shaw wrote: “Within one year, desert places have been taken possession of by a multitude of men, the beasts of the field have very generally retreated to make room for them.”

Another source is the chronicle of the rather less well-educated Jeremiah Goldswain, recently made available in a new edition by Ralph Goldswain. Again, the feisty Goldswain was more focussed on his innumerable setbacks than on the role of animals. Nevertheless, the settlers’ dependencies on animals is clear. Like Shaw, he rode horses or oxen when he could and walked when he couldn’t. Wild encounters were regular, as when he ran into “a very large buffalo. Had it not been for our dogs we should have been in a very awkward position.” Indeed, dogs are omnipresent, but seldom if ever individualised. He also followed tracks pioneered by elephants, though they didn’t always lead to your intended destination. Amongst his many commercial endeavours he tried bartering cattle, suffering like everyone else rustling by Xhosas or Bushmen; the former were often trying to retrieve beasts the settlers or British military had stolen from them in the first place. He mentions the heavy reliance on meat-eating, noting, for instance, supping off a sheep hanging up in a settler hut and roasted. This was after having his own house burned down, leaving him with nothing but his “sheepskin jacket”: the settlers were almost as dependent on animal-skin clothing and leathers as the Xhosa were. (All these examples being drawn from just two pages of Goldswain’s account.)

By far the most eloquent and liberal-minded chronicler of 1820-21 was the Scottish poet Thomas Pringle. He did write some poems regarding animals, as well as innumerable letters; the latter, finely edited into a volume by Randolph Vigne, are overwhelmingly involved with the legalities of land ownership and seeking relief from drought and Cape Town censorship of his views, and seldom linger on the animal presence. More fruitful for our theme is his memoir, African Sketches (accessible online). Here the constant background of conflict over domestic beasts and with wild beasts emerges more strongly; he devotes a whole excitable chapter to hunting anecdotes, not all his own, foreshadowing the popularity of African hunting-adventure books throughout the nineteenth century – the imperial century that would see the extirpation of almost all wildlife under the assault of European firearms. The effects are already evident in 1820.

But I want to focus on just one remarkably fine-grained description, which almost inadvertently reveals how deeply the animal was implicated in daily household living on the frontier. From his allocated Glen-Lynden, near Bedford, Pringle takes a ride towards Cradock, on “the light and hardy horses of this district”, following mountain paths cut by quaggas. In the Tarka valley, he drops in on the homestead of one Winzel Coetzer – named Elands-Drift, rather misleadingly translated as Ford of Elks. (Even names are animal.) Pringle regards it as a “fair average sample” of a Dutch-settler establishment. He is first greeted by a “host of some twenty or thirty dogs”, “growling guardians” fully primed to tear a suspicious visitor to shreds, dispersed only by the Coetzers “hurling at them a few of the half-gnawed bones and bullocks” horns which are lying about in profusion. A minor industry of stock-raising, slaughter and meat-eating lies behind this detail – mostly mutton in summer, when beef could not be properly cured. “Flesh, and not bread,” Pringle writes, “is here the staff of life”, and it’s not thought odd to have a dead sheep hanging in the voorhuis. The stock attendants – “Hottentots” – live in reed huts known as hartebeest-huijses. The more substantial Coetzer house reeks, probably literally, with animal products. The floors are made of the peculiarly hard prepared earth gleaned from ant-hills, though only those already raided by the aardvark – otherwise, Pringle almost chuckles, you’re liable to have another termite colony erupting under your feet. A skimming of cowdung on floors and walls also helps keep the fleas down. The unglassed windows are closed at night with untanned quagga skins; the reeds comprising the front door are lashed with thongs of bullock-hide. On the walls are hung a variety of animal-derived accoutrements: “hunting apparatus, dried flesh of various kinds of game, large whips of rhinoceros and hippopotamus hide (termed sjamboks), leopard and lion skins, ostrich eggs and feathers”. The men are wearing trousers of home-manufactured sheep or goat skin, and – sometimes – veld-schoenen of raw bullocks’ hide – a Hottentot invention. Juffrow Coetzer sometimes sold leather clothing she made; Pringle bespoke a jacket of springbok skin, with a gesture towards a localised fashion aesthetic in facings of leopard-fur, for 13 rix-dollars, about a pound sterling. He also purchased a leopard skin for a handful of gunpowder. The home-made soap certainly contained animal fat. All of these imply complex processes of economies far and near: the crafts of weapon- and whip-making, of the progressive obliteration of wild animals, of their hides’ integration into a commerce of prideful display and conquest.

            Though the family had established quite extensive orchards and gardens for a variety of imported fruits and vegetables, old Coetzer regarded his cattle as “de beste tuin” – the best garden. Pringle describes a complex of kraals and folds for the cattle and sheep, enclosed with thorn branches against “the nocturnal assaults of the hyenas, leopards and jackals”. Some of those sheep would be driven – on foot, that is – seven hundred miles to Cape Town. One heck of a journey. Though Coetzer possessed what Pringle estimated at 700 cattle, the herders seldom counted them, but could nevertheless quickly discover whether an individual was missing. It expressed, Pringle goes on to note, local Africans’ “interest in the welfare” of their herds, since by custom every youngster grew up with a cohort of beasts to cherish for the future, not least for paying dowry. Pringle shows at least some understanding of the profound cultural significance of cattle to the Xhosa people. This of course would reach a catastrophic denouement in the 1856 Cattle Killing. Pringle had by then long departed, but Jeremiah Goldswain witnessed it.

            Whichever way you look at it, the animals had a pretty rough time of it, most often fatal.

            This pinprick of a spot-check reveals both the ubiquitous dependency on the animal, as well as the paucity of attention yet paid to it. Get to work, O ye scholars!

            Incidentally, so far I have found no mention of either the domestic cat nor the donkey – both equally ubiquitous modern presences in Makana cultures. When exactly did they come in, I wonder?

 *****

Animal products more central in Baines's 1849 painting of an ivory sale in Grahamstown.

 

 

No 140 - Drunkenness in Graham's Town, 1830s version

Graham's Town, 1830, looking down High St, sketch by Guybon Atherstone.

In 1831, Graham’s Town wasn’t much to look at, though it was trying. The local European farmers were battling. Their sheep and cattle were constantly being stolen by Xhosa or Bushman raiders. The weather wouldn’t co-operate. There were water availability issues (ha ha). But trade was beginning to pick up, in all manner of goods, from hairbrushes to horses, wagons to wine. New jobs were being advertised. A court was trying and punishing people according to finicky statutes drawn up in Cape Town. There were several prisons (now mostly cafés). People complained that an abattoir was dumping its offal in the street, stinking the place out. 

And evidently a substantial number of people were getting drunk.

 An extraordinary number of pages in the opening issues of The Graham’s Town Journal – the predecessor to Grocott’s Mail – are devoted to the attempt to establish a Temperance Society. The correspondence about it took the better part of a year to run its course – often long-winded, obscure, intemperate, and inadvertently hilarious. Court records, also summarised in the paper, make it clear that there was certainly a problem. Some horrendous, heart-wrenching stories involved alcohol. For example, in early 1832 one “Adam Robinson, European, stood indicted of Culpable Homicide, in having caused the death of Mary Wild, an infant of four years old, by giving her one teaspoonful of Brandy.” It seemed unlikely that a mere teaspoonful would have killed her, but other witnesses alleged it had been a whole cupful, or more. An autopsy was conducted by the famous Dr Atherstone, who used to live at the top end of High Street (the building is now another café). He found a lesion at the base of little Mary’s skull, apparently from being clubbed by a boy a week before, causing a slow internal bleeding. So, although the brandy might have been a precipitating factor, Robinson was found not guilty. 

Not surprisingly, the military was a particular vector for drunken violence. In April 1832 one S Webber was “charged with having contravened the 10th sec. Ordinance 34, by permitting liquor to be drunk in his house between the hours of 9 in the evening and six in the morning, on the 16th day of March last”. It seemed that four soldiers of the 98th Regiment, keen “to celebrate the festivities of St Patrick … had gone (as they expressed it) a little queer to the house”. That is, they were sozzled when they arrived, got increasingly unruly and, according to Webber, forced themselves back in when he tried to evict them. Someone drew a bayonet, a constable was injured. Your common-or-alehouse pub brawl, then. Webber was nevertheless fined 5 shillings. 

There was also no end of common theft, not least on the part of so-called Hottentots, allegedly particularly susceptible to the lures of grog. One Hendrick Michaels, for instance, was “charged with stealing from a wagon journeying from Algoa Bay to Graham’s Town, a quantity of wine, the property of Benjamin Norden” – Norden being a prominent trader and auctioneer who weekly advertised his traffic in various alcohols, among other goods. In court, it was recalled by “one old Hottentot with a wooden leg” that five casks had been tapped and “from 15 to 20 gallons were deficient”. Michaels “saw Dolph drunk, who gave him a cup, and told him to bring some wine out of one of the casks; [Michaels] did so, and drank one half of it, Dolph the other half”. He was given 12 months imprisonment, with hard labour. 

Petty as these instances seem, they were evidently pervasive enough, and the numerous extant regulations sufficiently weak, that a major meeting to establish a Temperance Society was held on 30 December 1831. It was spearheaded by local commander, Lt-Col Somerset, who testified “That the unhappy propensity to the use of distilled spirits is indulged to a most alarming extent in this colony, and is the chief cause of poverty, disease and crime … [A] most improper practice of giving Hottentots and other coloured persons sopies, or drams, had obtained too generally, … with very injurious consequences." He himself had witnessed "the appalling spectacle of six men led out and shot by their comrades [in the Native Corps] in expiation of the offences committed while under its baneful influence!” Not so petty. 

A later correspondent echoed the concern in an “analyzation of brandy”: "brandy, sir, … is so bewitching a poison, that it seems to entice a person on to destruction under the flattering idea of its being the only remedy for those evils which itself alone has created; for instance, sir, those alarming tremblings in the stomach … [B]randy, sir, also has a tendency to impair the intellectual faculties, by rendering the memory less retentive from its frequent attacks on the brain – the dignified seat of human understanding ..."

Still, Somerset’s points, however sensible, would be vigorously debated, even opposed. Prominent townsman Daniel Moodie had a very mild conception of a potential Temperance Society’s aims: "Members of Temperance Societies did not trust to precepts, they employed the mild influence of example; they did not pretend to be above temptation, but began by reforming themselves. Many persons opposed this society by sneers, because they thought it in vain to stem the torrent; but no one offered any argument against it."

Well, there would be plenty of argument. One early respondent, on 13 January 1832, claimed to be a “well-wisher to Temperance, but an anti-humbug”. Much of the subsequent correspondence would throw back and forth accusations of “humbug”. One persistent writer, who styled himself “Mountain Dew, alias Highland Whiskey”, trumpeted, “I confess my utter inability to perceive that the Temperance Society affords even a chance of compassing its object.” But there was no agreement on what that aim might be. In answer to Mountain Dew on 3 February, “Mountain Breeze” acknowledged the problem, but rather hard-heartedly opined that “this appalling vice ought in his opinion to be to be left to itself, and no merciful hand put forth to save others from approaching a gulph of wretchedness into which millions have been precipitated.” There was recourse to Plutarch and various poets, and to various American examples. Someone suggested replacing the dop wage with candy. 

A fortnight later, “Mountain Dew” alleged that “Temperance Societies are neither more nor less than associations of the wealthy for depriving the poor of the only restorer of ‘man overlaboured with his beings strife’ which their limited means afford them”. So there was a class element, too; as well as some sympathy for the tough lives of slaves and the otherwise impoverished. Why deprive them of a wee dram of comfort? And a week after that, “Lowland Common Sense” told Mountain Breeze that temperance societies “lead to deceit, hypocrisy and lying. … [He] has got into the clouds and would do well to descend from such airy regions”. Indeed, he said, one might as well establish an Anti-Sheep Stealing Society, for all the good it would do. 

Another correspondent noted that “even the Christian Divines of this Colony have been, and are, distillers, from the very parsonage and Glebe lands, and from their private estates, for the sake of furnishing the spirit to their fellow creatures.” We aren’t about to accuse our own pastors of humbug and cruelly depriving the poor, are we? 

Besides, there was a lot of trade going on; people worried that a Temperance Society would damage their businesses. “A Decayed Tapster” summarised the divisions of opinion: “I tell you the opinion of the world goes for nothing, besides they can’t all read. One refuses [support] because there are 2,000 signatures on the Temperance list; another because the scheme ‘has not even a chance of compassing its object’; one because no effort is required; another because our best efforts would be of no avail.” He cited a “former customer” who, when he asked the latter “to taste a ‘leetel’ drop more, said to me, I can’t drink any more, but pour it over me, I love the smell on’t.” Meanwhile “Tapster” had lost half his custom, and the price of brandy dropped 25%. He threatened to leave altogether, for some place where sincerity prevailed. Good luck with that. 

And what, “A True Briton” asked in trumped-up working-class argot, if these “new fangled Temporal Sisyties, as the parsons is now making sich a devilment about”, actually succeeded “to cast the gifts of Providence in his teeth”? Why, next thing you know “they’ll soon be getting up a Sisyty to prevent prevent people from eeting beef and muttin, because some dokters says that vegetable dyet is more holesomer as haminal food.” Vegetarianism! Horrors! Meanwhile, “em speetchified and preetchified so long about drunkenness, and blackened the Christemens and whitewashed the Ottentots so much, as you never seed in your born days.” In short, “its my pinion that such a Sesyty will cause nothing but ‘ternal skwabbels, and be a hexellent skool for pokrisy.” They should stick to their “Spiritual” activities and leave the rest of us to enjoy our “Temporal spirits”. 

There’s a great deal more of this argy-bargy, until the steam seemed to go out of the effort. By January 1833, a correspondent could write: “Pray Mr Editor, what has become of our Temperance Society? Have those who lately in your columns so nobly advocated its cause become thus soon cold and indifferent to its interest?” They had “become the butt of ridicule to those who have all long been opposed to it”. 

Meanwhile, men continued to fight each other and rape women while under the influence; others to complain about adulteration of grog with “some pernicious and poisonous mineral”, causing “violent spasms” and death. The Thompson Brothers continued to advertise for the well-to-do “a quantity of very superior claret”, while “Quarles, Harris & Sons celebrated Port and Sherry Wines”; and letter-writer “Q” would complain: “I wish some of your correspondents would inform me why so much Cape Beer is sent to Graham’s Town? We have two Brewers here, cannot they brew sufficient? Or is the quality so bad that the public prefer Cape Beer? In either case it calls aloud for competition.” 

The market prevailed, of course. If you are unlucky enough to get caught up in the broil of Grahamstown-Makhanda’s New Street of a Saturday night, two centuries later, you’ll be forgiven for thinking not much has changed. 

*****

No 139 - Imagining zoo animals

 

The huge black bear patrolled the edge of the water, pacing menacingly back and forth. Perhaps he was protecting a smaller bear slumped against a rock shelf behind him. No one said much. A baby squealed; a man flicked a cigarette butt which fizzled out in the moat. The bear paid not the slightest attention to either. He paced on, back and forth, until you noticed that on each and every pass he made his great feet landed in the exact same rhythm on the exact same spots. You could see that those particular slabs were worn pale with repetitive use. Far from being menacing, this bear was bored out of his skull. It was a classic case of a repetitive-movement syndrome exhibited by animals whose condition of unnatural entrapment has utterly crushed their spirits.

It was London Zoo in 1979, and I’ve loathed zoos ever since. Many have improved on the cramped, sterile quarters I saw that day, but many have not. Over the years some zoos have developed sophisticated scientific rationales for still keeping animals imprisoned, but I’m seldom convinced. Some try to breed endangered species, others characterise themselves as “orphanages”  or “sanctuaries” devoted to saving the animals from yet worse confinements. There’s something in that; but ... I visited a Big Cat Sanctuary in the US, where a black jaguar rescued from a circus paced its cage with the same repetitive motion of the London bear. Hopefully it was en route to something better, though he could never be wild again. Even in the Sanctuary’s bigger, more vegetated pens, a solitary serval was clearly stressed by the visitors peering in and making stupid kitty-kitty noises, which would have been interpreted by her as threats.

Just about all the world’s animals are now entrapped or constrained by human activity in some way, whether by “park” fences and walls and roads, by snares or gin-traps or bullets or hooks or strychnine, cages or garden fences, collars and chains, by the destruction of habitats and food sources, by the interruptions of migration routes on land and air and sea, by the intrusive sounds of shipping and airliners and chainsaws and wind farms, by the ravages of the wildlife trade that Vanda Felbab-Brown calls the “extinction market”. Less intentionally, perhaps, human activities have laid down a planet-wide, finely-meshed net of intrusion, poison, disease and deprivation that subtly but lethally affects even the most remote colonies of Antarctic penguins and the plankton-eaters of the deepest ocean trenches.

But zoos are a peculiarly self-serving variety of anthropocentric animal confinement.

It dawned on me that my bookshelves harboured a number of literary works concerning zoo animals. What does this literature have to say about the phenomenon?  Speaking of black panthers, it feels appropriate to start with Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous poem, “Panther” (here in my own translation from the German, which naturally I prefer to anyone else’s):

 

His eyes are so tired now that they observe

nothing beyond these circling bars:

to him, no furnishings but a thousand bars,

and behind the thousand bars, no world.

 

His supple grace, elastic and contained,

pacing and pacing his shrunken ring,

is a dance of power about the dying

centre where a massive will stands drained.

 

Just once, or twice, the curtained pupil

is soundlessly unveiled – an image gleams,

glides through that intensity of limbs –

and in the silence of the heart, is stilled.

 

Says it all, I think.

As Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier richly chronicle in their big book, Zoo, the history of zoos is a long one, entangled with the development of human power over the natural world, through increasingly powerful technology and the urbanisation that alienated many from nature. For centuries wild animals were captured for human entertainment, collected by or gifted amongst potentates as reflections of their power and self-regard. So rarely seen were some of these animals that they were walked literally across continents and became celebrities. At what psychic cost to the bound and chivvied animals one can only guess.

            Michael Allin relates just such an epic trek, by a giraffe whom humans named Zarafa. Zarafa (1998) is an historical account – Allin conceived it as a novel but found the facts quite compelling and colourful enough. By 1824, when Zarafa (the Arabic word from which ‘giraffe’ derives) was born and captured in the Sudan, 17th-century ‘cabinets of curiosity’ and the European elites’ 18th-century ‘menageries’ were giving way to less artificially designed ‘gardens’, later to be termed ‘zoological gardens’ – zoos. Colonial conquests were making more exotic specimens available, and after the French Revolution the gardens were increasingly taken out of aristocratic hands, democratised and commercialised. Muhammed Ali of Egypt’s gift of a giraffe to Charles X of France was a bit of a throwback, then, entangled with the aftermaths of Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt. Also, the zoological sciences were becoming professionalised, and an actual ‘scientist’, Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, was assigned to make sure the poor animal survived the 500-kilometre walk from Marseille to Paris. She did, despite what must have been the terrifying noise of enraptured crowds all along the route. She died in 1845, and remains, stuffed, in the museum at La Rochelle. Zarafa is a lively period-piece, though less about the giraffe’s experience than about the human culture she found herself entrapped by.

            The same might be said about a parallel story, J M Ledgard’s Giraffe (2007). Here the year is 1975, and a team of Czechs are in Africa capturing a whole clutch of giraffes to be shipped to Prague, home to one of the more prestigious European zoos. Colonial-style plunder continuing, in effect. The novel begins with a section related from the giraffe’s point of view, a tricky thing to pull off, especially when the giraffe starts naming boats and countries and relaying conversations translated from the Czech. There are only a couple more short such passages, however; the novel is otherwise about the humans’ journey into a country undergoing a kind of identity crisis as part of the “Communist moment”. The animals have to be transported by barge through West Germany, an ideologically unsettling experience for the crew. Among the latter is a Saint-Hilaire figure, a haematologist: how do giraffes pump blood  all that way up to their brains? After all this, little is learned; the giraffes are really just pawns in games of commerce, theatrics, and national pride – a sordid cocktail of motives governing most zoos ultimately. But the verbal flesh Ledgard puts on these bare bones is extraordinary: poetic, haunting, unflinching. The fate of the giraffes likewise: a grievous echo of Cold War paranoias about zoonotic pandemics – and prescient, given the more recent Covid outbreak.

            Most zoo animals are fated to be obtained by violence and to die behind bars. A few may be born in captivity; even fewer escape. But escape they will – like the tiger in South Africa recently that had finally to be shot by its ‘owner’/captor. Conservation value of all that: zero. Some inmates may be liberated by compassionate humans. This is the theme of Russell Hoban’s delightful and quirky Turtle Diary (1975), in which an ill-matched couple hatch a plot to liberate two turtles from London Zoo, and release them into the ocean at Polperro on England’s south coast. The unlikely thieves are deftly portrayed in the film of the book, by Vanessa Redgrave and Ben Kingsley. (I went on a Hoban pilgrimage to Polperro, disappointed to find that this was clearly not where the film ended up, charming though it is.)  

            Another escape story, even more fantasial, is Nancy Farmer’s children’s novel The Warm Place. I’ve written about this elsewhere, so here will just say it involves a group of talking animals conspiring, with the help of one small human, to escape a North American zoo and get back to Africa. (Indeed, if you Google lists of zoo novels, the vast majority are children’s stories.)

           

A reverse sea-borne journey is described in Yann Martel’s magnificently odd novel, Life of Pi (2003). This might be explored in the colonial/postcolonial context, too, since the eponymous Pi is son to a zoo owner in Pondicherry, India, mimicking the dynamics of Western zoos. (Not that India doesn’t have its own venerable history of capturing and taming wild animals, notably elephants.) Pi’s Indian zoo has proved commercially unviable, however. As Pi puts it, zoos have become pretty “precarious ... neither big enough a business to be above the law nor small enough to survive on the margins. To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech ...” (Tell that to the Chinese, who have many zoos, some of them reportedly horror-shows – notoriously for Zimbabwean baby elephants, gifted in mediaeval potentate-style to President Xi.)  Pi tries to suggest that zoo animals, when adequately treated, are content to settle into conditions safer than the wild. Puzzlingly, many still try to escape. In the novel, the animals are not freed but shipped across the Pacific to other zoos in North American. Unfortunately, the ship goes down in a storm, leaving Pi stranded on a lifeboat with a few animals, including an orang-utan, a zebra, a hyena and the tiger. It’s a microcosm of wilderness, and a mocking echo of the Ark (which some zoos also call themselves). After all the cruelty, terror and deprivation, Pi is nevertheless rather miffed when ‘Richard Parker’ the tiger finally walks away from him without a backward glance. So would all wild animals, given the chance.

One more big cat, in local context. Henrietta Rose-Innes’ fine novel Green Lion (2015) is set in a slightly-futuristic Cape Town, centred on the remnants of a zoo alongside Table Mountain (fenced off as an enclosed reserve). One of two zoo lions has mauled its keeper; the second, of course, eventually absconds, to become the elusive, almost mythical terror of local urban civilisation. There are echoes here perhaps of Nadine Gordimer’s short story, “A Lion on the Freeway” (1980), whose setting is haunted by the roar of lions in the nearby zoo – tragic precisely because there is no lion on the freeway, reclaiming his country.)

Zoos, I hazard, are first and foremost venues of ‘power-over’ rather than ‘power-for’, places where the ‘wild’ can be trammelled and effectively subordinated to human society, consumed only in digestible bits, decontextualised, infantilised. Arguments that the public are fruitfully educated by viewing captive animals are flimsy, argues staunch and controversial anti-zoo writer and literary scholar Randy Malamud, notably his book exploring a swathe of older literary works entailing zoos, Reading Zoos. A very short version can be found in an article, aptly named “The Captivity Industry”. It is co-authored with elephant-activist Gay Bradshaw, who has also been involved in efforts to move a destitute elephant out of less-than-ideal conditions in Pretoria Zoo. That environment minister Barbara Creecy seems slow to act, and the Zoo proprietors are recalcitrant, exemplifies the subordination of the animals’ well-being to commercial self-interest and legalistic obstructionism.  They haven’t absorbed the lesson and emotional burden of our Arja Salafranca’s sensitive poem, “The elephant is unhappy” – a sadness read, as with Rilke’s panther, in pure body language.

            I’m not presenting a fully-worked argument about the value of zoos here, but it seems significant that all the works cited seem to valorise the animals’ escape. (Maybe I unconsciously self-selected, of course.)  But given that humans have wiped out at least half of non-human animal life since 1970, it is clearly human incursion on the rest that needs to be caged.

Oh, but AI robots will take over from humans soon, and they’ll have no need for nature, animals, potable water, functioning ecosystems, or anything else! Or would they?

******