No 148 - Me, myths and the Middle East

 

As we know, memory has a way of reconstructing itself, but I like to locate the origin of my enduring but rather puzzling interest in the Middle East in a single image. As a youngster I’d regularly receive a copy of the wonderful Look & Learn magazine. In one issue appeared a full-colour satellite photograph of the Sinai peninsula – a view quite novel in those days. Something about the startling contrast between the bleached sands of the desert and the deep, deep blue of the surrounding sea, something about the great wedge of it, like an ancient stone hand-axe, bewitched me.

 I began reading, in a patchy and desultory way. On school-free afternoons I’d slither into Umtali’s Turner Memorial public library, hook out the massive black-and-gold volumes of Keesing’s Contemporary Archives – a cumulative file of distilled world news reports – and start making notes on events in Israel and its neighbours. I started nowhere in particular and had no defined goal – typical of the slew of misconceived and uncompleted projects that litter my life. I suppose I learned something. Why the Middle East? A mystery.

Part if it was probably that, in white colonial Rhodesia, Israel was much admired for its military courage and success; we lapped up the drama of the 1967 Six-Day War. Both countries were, in their ways, artificial creations and pariah states, both seeing themselves as under siege from undisciplined hordes of terroristic barbarians. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s taking Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics did much to consolidate that impression. (In that grim precursor to the October 7 Hamas attack, all the athletes were killed.) When Israeli forces freed more hostages from a hijacked airliner at Entebbe in Uganda in 1976, we Rhodesians crowed as if we had done it ourselves. I admiringly read a biography of Israeli general Moshe Dayan, and found his eye-patch dashing. A parallel biography of the scrofulous-looking Yasser Arafat, I approached with my metaphorical nostrils pinched, and retained nothing of it.

 With the end of Rhodesian rule in 1980, suddenly the tables turned: the new Mugabe government vilified Israel as oppressive, colonial and more-or-less white, and hosted the country’s first Palestinian ambassador. We unreconstructed whiteys vilified him, or at best regarded him with intense suspicion. At that juncture, as an undergrad student at Rhodes, I happened to embark on a years-long immersion in Christian activity. I became interested less in the myth-laden moralising than in the historicity or otherwise of the three thousand year-old textuality on which Christianity is founded: Werner Keller’s The Bible as History (1955) I remember as a key text. In the end, thanks in part to William Blake and Ed Echeverria’s philosophy course on the Problem of Evil, I failed spectacularly to become a faith-filled Christian. But I did become better versed in the complexities of the Israel-Palestine situation – a conflict that has rumbled on ever since David slung a rock at the Philistine Goliath in exactly the territory now known as the Gaza Strip.

 Over the years, I’ve kept on circling over the region. I read Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews with interest, though a Judaic (not Jewish) historian friend of mine said he didn’t think highly of it. Later, Austrian-Israeli historian Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) fascinated me, especially as I’d been studying an arguably parallel case, the ‘invention’ of Zulu ‘statehood’ and identity. Sand argues that, given the fluid centuries, multiple evictions and wars and invasions and redrawings of borders, and given the porousness of self-identifying Jewish/Israelite groups to genes from non-Jewish neighbours, neither claims to territory on Biblical grounds nor assertions of ethnic purity hold a great deal of water. Predictably, this provoked howls of protest. A South African Jewish colleague, currently ducking missiles in Tel Aviv, whose intellect I admire enormously, told me she thinks Sand is “a lunatic”. Nevertheless, I thought that if the maverick historian had stirred up that much controversy, he must have touched a raw nerve somewhere, and not just because he once said that Israel’s “a shitty place to live.” Most recently I’ve been reading the voluminous Story of the Jews by Simon Schama, as brilliant, versatile and eloquent an historian as you’ll find anywhere. He too is disparaging of Sand, but the implications of his own research rather tends to support him. And over four decades I’ve read a slew of related stuff, from T E Lawrence to Mahmoud Darwish.

 All that said and done, I’m far from being an expert in the area. I’ve never physically been there, I know scarcely a single Palestinian, and am only mildly acquainted with a handful of Jews, who themselves manifest a slew of wildly differing views. I still don’t know quite what to make of it all. Nor is it the only baffling regional conflict I repeatedly visit and read about: my father being an Ulsterman, the centuries-long Irish situation has always been closer to my heart. But even there I don’t feel any strong partisan loyalties. As for the Israelis and Palestinians, I really don’t care how they style their identities, or even what they think of each other. But like many, I react viscerally and sadly to the atrocities occurring right now (yet again), as I do to those occurring in other comparably vicious and even more destructive theatres: Myanmar, Ukraine, Sudan, the DRC. While having a rather hopelessly jaded view of human nastiness and stupidity, I do fervently wish the brutality could be somehow ameliorated. Some might well tell me to butt out; saying almost anything about the conflict is bound to upset someone somewhere. But none of the present participants seem to have any viable ideas, and maybe my position as a detached outsider conveys some advantages (as I think it did in the Zulu case).

 So I’m going to stick my neck out and float an idea, and the logic behind it. I’ll try to be non-judgemental. As my mother often said, in most disputes everybody is right, to some degree, and recognising that provides a better base for negotiation than taking sides.

 Obviously the situation is ferociously complex. I think it was David Grossman who wrote that just the tunnels beneath Gaza make it a three-dimensional problem, not just a two-dimensional territorial one – let alone the many dimensions of historical mythologies, the intangible attachments and grievances going back centuries. Still, the same used to be said of Northern Ireland, a colony since 1660; that conflict may not be solved entirely, but at least the violence has been largely defused. With sufficient compromise, ingenuity and negotiated empathy, the Gordian Knot might just be cut again. I’m well aware that far cleverer and more powerful people than me have tried repeatedly to do that, and repeatedly failed. I’d be surprised, actually, if someone at some point hasn’t floated something like my idea already. But if the current horror is not to just grind on indefinitely, something quite radical has to shift.

 Ideally, both sides would undergo a radical shift in mentality, from simplistic hatred to mutual empathy, or at least non-lethal co-existence. Unhappily, the extreme brutality of the present war has catapulted almost everyone a long way from that miracle. And yet. There is also a venerable history of peaceful co-operation between Muslims and Jews; Schama relates a number of examples, from mediaeval Spain to Azerbaijan, of mutually fruitful relations that persisted until some deluded or self-serving rabble-rouser would fire up the ancient shibboleth of antisemitism, provoke another pogrom and exile. But if you’re going to call on history to justify present actions, as everybody does, why not take the history of peace as your benchmark, rather than the persecutions and wars?

 Moreover, there are not only two sides. Both Palestinians and Israelis are internally fragmented. Months of demonstrations in Israel show that many disagree with the incumbent hardline government and its tactics. Palestine is equally fractious, with no one sufficiently in charge to negotiate anything – a circumstance the Israelis have been able to exploit. It’s reflected in the way both Gaza and the West Bank have been sliced up, zoned, barricaded, infiltrated with settlements and checkpoints, subjected to the world’s most intensive surveillance system. Yet there are many Palestinians living in Israel, and numerous groups advocating and practicing co-existence and mutual understanding. The other day I watched Israeli and Palestinian musicians getting together to create beautiful sounds. Such initiatives seem frail in the context of the cycles of murderous revenge, but there they are, showing what’s possible.

 Still, we may have to accept that a more widespread shift of that kind is unlikely any time soon. It would entail the decentralisation of sundry fiercely-defended myths: myths of racial difference, of being special, of being at existential risk, of complete domination or obliteration, of religious rectitude, of divinely sanctioned possession or reward, and more. Very, very hard, if not impossible, things to dislodge, but perhaps – as elsewhere – these myths can at least be dampened, laid aside as less important than the imperative to avoid more suffering and death now. But practically speaking the conditions for that shift will have to be created first. Therein lies my grand idea. (I’ll get there; are you enjoying the suspense?) Just two more preliminary observations.

 The first preliminary is to note that over the centuries the region’s territorial boundaries have been repeatedly redrawn – by Persians and Romans and Turks and the French and the British – most pertinently by the last-named, through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, leading to the volcanic creation of the Israeli state in 1948. Maybe it’s time to redraw the boundaries again.

 A big part of the problem is that the borders were imposed from without; the Balfour Declaration explicitly stated that “the Arabs are not to be consulted”. That short-sighted policy set the stage for, or at least exacerbated, the uneven wars of the ensuing century. Ideally, a new redrawing would happen with a majority acceptance of both parties; an awful lot of preliminaries would have to be emplaced, not least a ceasefire and hostage deal. Right now, even that looks out of reach. But the diplomatic noise does seem to be growing. Hope must persist.

 The second preliminary point concerns the perpetual tussle between the One-state and Two-state “solutions”.  It seems entirely beyond Israel’s capacity to contemplate the One-state option (though it’s effectively one state now, under military control); and there’s little enthusiasm for the second option either. But there appears to be no third plan, except to grind on and on, merely deepening the crisis of hate. One thing is certain: neither belligerent has the capacity to wipe the other “from the face of the earth”, whatever the extremists on either side might encourage or boast. And as anyone who has studied civil and guerrilla wars – or lived through one, as I have – should know, purely military solutions are chimerical. Paradoxically, the more you kill people – the line between ‘civilian’ and ‘combatant’ always being fuzzy – the more you drive the population into antagonism, and the worse it gets for you. At some point of stalemate or political intervention, the warring parties always have to talk about humane co-existence. 

 Maybe part of the impediment is that everyone is looking for a solution. There is no solution, no finality; there can only be an incremental process of mitigation and defusing. The more the opportunities to safely flourish, the less the attraction to, or perceived necessity for, extremist movements. To move definitively towards that condition of shared safety and flourishing, it seems to me some radical break to the present impasse must be made. 

 SO HERE IT IS: THE IDEA!

 It would appear that there’s a stark choice between the One- and Two-state scenarios. But my idea takes elements of both. First, the Two-state element. Palestinians will never be happy without their own sovereign state. At present it’s in two disjointed bits; as the grand apartheid “homelands” scheme in South Africa demonstrated, such fragmentation is ultimately unworkable. So how to forge Palestine into a single unit? Some people talk of “liberation from the river [Jordan] to the sea”. Now you can’t just join Gaza and the West Bank by some form of corridor, since that would divide Israel in two: no good. I think the only way is through a territory swap.

 So here’s the plan. The Palestinians abandon Gaza, which is largely unlivable now anyway, and give up some edges of the West Bank already heavily occupied by Israeli settlements. In return, the West Bank is extended north to the Golan Heights, whose occupation by Israel has anyway been recognised as illegal since 1967, then across to the sea and the ports on the Mediterranean (an area already partially evacuated because of the conflict with Hezbollah). This would afford Palestine less fettered access to both east and west, enhancing trade opportunities and the feeling of viable independence. From the Israelis’ perspective, this would provide a buffer zone between them and both Syria and Lebanon, loci of constant irritation. An intricate compromise would have to be made to make the swap roughly even in both territory and the number of people making a move from one state to the other. This number would be considerable, but it could hardly be worse than the present dislocations. An upheaval, to be sure, but at least not one involving mass slaughter. (My border-lines on Map 2 are straight because they are schematic, just to illustrate the principle.)

 Simple in principle, but … This idea emphatically does not pretend to be an entire solution in itself, and one can already anticipate a hundred valid objections and obstacles. But once the main principle is accepted, those obstacles will manifest as localised issues. Where exactly would the new border run? Which illegal settlements would have to be evacuated as Israel effected a complete withdrawal from the West Bank? What to do about access to ever-problematic holy sites? How open or closed to make the borders? What level of international oversight might be required? These are troublesome details, but still, in relation to the main move, details, intrinsically more manageable and negotiable.

 One major likely objection would be people’s understandable reluctance to move from places they have always inhabited, or to which they feel that non-rational but powerful sense of historical attachment or right. This is where the One-state element of the idea comes in. People need not be forced to move; there’s been more than enough of that. But ‘remainers’ in either state – Palestinians in Gaza, say, or Israelis in the north – would have to be reassured that they will be safe and enjoy the rights of any other citizen, as in a One-state scenario. Perhaps some form of dual citizenship arrangement would help. There would doubtless be endless niggles on the ground, but, as I mentioned, there are already many Arabs living more or less peaceably in Israel. Both peoples are afraid of being numerically overwhelmed by the other; this consolidation of Palestine would reduce ‘remainers’ in both states to a less threatening minority. As South Africa has shown, despite its high crime and murder rates and its persistent inequalities, the vast majority of us are at least co-existing without tearing each others’ throats out. Our situation also shows, nevertheless, how much work needs to be done to get there; our shortfalls underline how long it might take, and how fragile the gains are.

 I wouldn’t be particularly sanguine about the chances of acceptance of some such scheme, let alone of success. The hatreds run deep, and deepen every day another Palestinian child is dismembered or a misguided missile descends on Tel Aviv. Religiously-inspired terrorism won’t ever quite disappear, but its raison d’être can be diminished. The consolidation of a coherent and inviolable Palestine would not solve wider Middle East issues, such as the roles of Saudi Arabia and Iran, but it would certainly help clarify some of the present muddy diplomatic waters. Something needs to break the deadlocks. All most people want is to have the chance to flourish, to nourish an identity, to live their lives in some sort of fulfilment and safety. To reiterate, I offer not a solution, but a sturdier foundation for the laborious work of reconciliation, the never-quite-ending road towards that shared peace

Pass the idea along. Anyone know anyone in the UN?

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No 147 - The end of our wildlife?

 

Habitat I. All acrylic/oil on board, 103x61 cm.

On 8 March the government gazetted a revised National Biodiversity Economy Strategy (NBES). They gave the public two extra weeks to respond. On 18 March a punchy Daily Maverick article by Don Pinnock raised a number of red flags.  Pinnock questioned the absurdly short time-frame for public response, and berated in particular the encouragement of game-farming and trophy-hunting. Is the article over-alarmist? Are we about to see our natural resources entirely sacrificed to Mammon?

The 60-page NBES document would require as many pages for a comprehensive response, but I have a few thoughts. Firstly, the NBES needs to be evaluated in relation to other existing conservation legislation. It is neither a stand-alone document, nor the whole of conservation policy. It is a set of guidelines, not law as such. Broadly it relates to the White Paper on Conservation, gazetted in Parliament on 14 June 2023; this was years in the making, and states its Mission thus:

To conserve and manage South Africa’s biodiversity, and ensure healthy ecosystems, ecological integrity and connectivity, with transformative socio-economic benefit to society … (p.11)

The NBES itself has also been around for a while; this is a revision responding not only to the White Paper, but also aligning itself with the goals and recommendations of various international biodiversity agreements to which South Africa has signed up. These include the 1996 Convention on Biological Diversity and the Kunming-Montreal framework agreed at COP15 in 2022. Whether or not one agrees with the precepts of the Global Biodiversity Framework is another question, though as laid out in brief in the NBES they seem to me largely laudable.

The point is this: the NBES explicitly focuses narrowly on the business-opportunity aspect of our wide variety of wildlife, aka biodiversity.  It’s therefore unsurprising that the document is saturated with ghastly commercial jargon – ‘consumptive use’, ‘leveraging’, ‘beneficiation’, ‘value chains’, etc. If you accept that commercial utilisation of our natural wealth is to some degree inevitable, the kind of policy guidance envisaged in NBES is also inevitable and necessary. Much of what the document covers is happening already. These ‘opportunities’ range from trophy hunting to recreational fishing, from traditional medicinal-plant harvesting to Big Five tourism – a daunting complexity that makes any overarching strategising pretty tricky. Does this effort succeed?

Before going on, it will be useful to cite the NBES itself on what it’s trying to do. The grand aim

Habitat II

is to optimise biodiversity-based business potentials across the terrestrial, fresh water, estuarine, and marine and coastal realms, and to contribute to economic growth with local beneficiation, job creation, poverty alleviation, and food security, whilst maintaining the ecological integrity of the biodiversity resource base, for thriving people and nature. (p.4)

This is refined into a number of more specific goals, with associated Actions. These include expanding the hectarage of conservation areas, collaborating with the private sector, and ensuring that benefits are equitably distributed to the Previously Disadvantaged (their capitals). The document lists four obvious so-called ‘Enablers’, perhaps better termed pre-conditions: effective monitoring and implementation, increased capacity and innovation, financing, and market access. All this, it is confidently asserted, ‘will’ add a whole lot more boodle to the GDP over the next ten years (or by 2036, or 2040, or 2050, depending on which bit you’re reading). Ten years, the NBES feels, is ‘relatively long-term’ (p.15)! Is anyone projecting for the next 50 or 100 years (within the purview of our present youths’ grandchildren) – the time it actually takes for conservation restoration, wildlife population recovery, and healthy ecosystems to build up? In achieving this, the document places repeated emphasis on ‘co-operation’ between ‘stakeholders’, job creation, equitable beneficiation, and ‘innovative’ solutions.

            To its credit, the NBES recognises a number of problems (sorry, challenges), among them the inherent fragmentation of the conservation realm, the increasing instability of climatic impacts, already pressing over-exploitation, alien-species invasions, inadequate financing, ‘uneven governance’ and weak implementation. Perhaps most importantly, it notes that the existing slew of conservation-related legislations is already a ‘contradictory’ patchwork that needs to be sorted out. Given that multiple government departments are necessarily involved, and given the snail’s-pace at which Parliament usually works, that alone will take a good decade. Meanwhile, I fear that this policy statement will only add to the confusion, or worse.

            Many of the goals of the NBES seem, in and of themselves, laudable. Overall, the idea of setting up a ‘positive feedback loop’ between expanded biodiversity resources and expanded derivative business sounds sensible enough. It is at least recognised that ecosystems need first to possess the resources that are destined for exploitation. It nods in the direction of ‘ecosystem restoration’, and notes that there exist a number of successful models that might be emulated. As is shown by the tabulated projects detailed over several pages at the end of the NBES, some of the projects envisaged are already under way or at advanced stages of planning. Nothing too startling to panic about there.

           

Habitat III

All that said, there are aspects of the NBES I find disquieting.

            Although the document explicitly omits definitions in order to save space, there seems no real comprehension of what ‘biodiverse ecosystems’ are, or what they supply. As it is, South Africa is already so fragmented, overrun with roads, fences, mines and towns, there can hardly be said to be a functioning ecosystem anywhere except at very restricted levels. Even then, the NBES makes no mention of the vital health of ecosystems such as river catchments, estuaries or wetlands. All these, as in so many parts of the world, are already seriously degraded and threatened; many will require at best decades of well-resourced dedication to be restored, especially taking into account the burgeoning human population. The projected expansion of conservation areas, at first blush laudable, is in practice utopian; the stated figures of projected revenue are wild thumb-sucks; the ideas for raising finance to get it all going look patchy and speculative. There seems no recognition – and it should be an absolutely foundational assumption – that natural systems do and must continue to supply the indispensables: oxygen from plant life, potable water, and self-sustaining soils. I loathe the term, but without these priceless ‘ecological services’, we’re all toast. The compilers of the NBES seem to believe that ecosystemic ‘integrity’ can be restored and maintained even as human consumption – and therefore physical intrusion and infrastructural impact – is increased. This is a dangerous fantasy.

            Rather, the thinking appears to be governed by the ‘If it pays, it stays’ school. All is ultimately subordinated to capitalistic offtake: the emphases are on game-ranching, aquaculture, herbal harvesting, the number of tourists seeking the ‘Big 5’, the revenue from trophy-hunting, and the like. All of these can in sundry respects be arguably as damaging to ecosystemic health as they are profitable to their practitioners. All of them skew land-use towards a few money-earning species, often to the detriment of the subtler inner workings of truly functional ecosystems. More tourists mean more pollution, trash, sewage, building, roads, disruption of non-human creatures’ safety and health; there is no hint here of curbs on all this, of the kind that other destinations, from Venice to Bali, have been forced to implement.

            And sorry to say, where there’s money (exacerbated by deep inequality), there’s corruption, an inescapable systemic problem that the NBES studiously ignores. The public-private-community co-operation the document rightly valorises is not immune; indeed, it all too frequently mutates into downright criminality and gangsterism. (Look at what’s happened to coal-trucking into Richards Bay.) This is especially uncontrolled in the wildlife trafficking arena – The Extinction Market, researcher Vanya Felbab-Brown calls it. By advocating an expansion of hunting and trade in wildlife ‘products’, from killing trophy leopards to eating insects, the NBES threatens to open the floodgates to further unregulated extirpations.

At the other end of the scale, Don Pinnock rightly avers, by subjecting wildlife to an agricultural mindset, it threatens to exacerbate the problems associated with existing breeding programmes, whether for pseudo-trophies or meat. (The canned-lion hunting enterprise, which Minister Barbara Dallas Creecy seems reluctant or unable to can for good, is only the most egregious example.) Anyone who thinks that this government has the means and will to monitor, audit and police ten thousand scattered and radically different wildlife-utilisation enterprises, let alone prosecute offenders, is deluded. Witness the signal failures to curb the perlemoen, cycad and pangolin trades. Among the few ‘successes’ the NBES disingenuously lays claim to is the rescue from extinction of the rhinoceros; lay that against the fact that 307 rhino were slaughtered by poachers last year in Umfolozi alone, enabled largely by the government’s inability to decisively solve a fencing contract dispute.

            In the last analysis, I think the NBES in its current form is fatally self-contradictory in its assumptions and aims. Though it purports to promote a system beneficial to both people and nature (what others call a ‘circular economy’), in practice it buys into an open-ended extractivist model of human motivations, a profiteering form of capitalism that, as Naomi Klein argues in her book This Changes Everything, is simply incompatible with the health of natural systems. It is not based on promoting what humans can give to sustain ecosystems, only on what can be taken. It conceives of nature not as habitat, only as resource. The cynic can be forgiven for suspecting that an element in government is really focussed on creating another cash cow for its own benefit, with the same disasters likely to follow as have trashed other state-run enterprises. Narrow, short-term extractivism is a global as well as local issue, of course, with no clear solution anywhere. The NBES calls repeatedly for innovative ideas, but in itself is the opposite of innovative. It is effectively derivative of and dependent on outdated notions of, among others, 'conservation' and 'community'. It appears bent on entrenching rather than ameliorating the worst aspects of a one-sided, domineering mindset that estranges humanity from nature rather than valorising co-dependence. One foundational ‘enabler’ – the necessity to educate our population, from littl’uns to ministers – is confined to one brief mention (p.37), and there it appears to mean education in the skills of utilisation, rather than into an attitude of respectful understanding and co-existence. This just one element of long-term groundwork that surely needs to be laid down on a national scale before anything like a NBES plan can become workable.

            The contradictoriness and confusion is evident in the very language. The policy is at many points simply badly written, with ambiguous concord errors, incoherent sentences, and meaningless statements. It trades heavily on the common oxymoron of ‘sustainable development’, itself now widely recognised as an unsustainable mask for rapacity. That’s echoed in this document’s very title, the ‘Biodiversity Economy’, or the phrase ‘ecological infrastructure’: there is no such thing. Contradiction is also inadvertently encapsulated in the idea of ‘cross-cutting imperatives’, these being essentially so-called social (read racial) ‘transformation’ and ecosystemic integrity; the discussion indicates that these are to be read as equally necessary and mutually beneficial. But they are cross-cutting, which is to say arguably entirely incompatible. That’s just one of several weirdly inapposite terms used. The tedium of the aforementioned business-speak is amplified by some resonant-sounding and ambitious but vacuous phrases like ‘mainstream[ing] into cross sectoral planning’ or ‘mega-living’ (which apparently means creating a ‘mosaic’ of some sort, as if we aren’t already in a mosaic).

           

Habitat IV

I could say more, obviously; each individual aspect is highly complex and subject to conflicting arguments. All the initiatives listed need to be tackled on a case-by-case basis. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not so romantic a lover of wilderness that I believe monetary utilisation can or should be shut out of the picture. It would be churlish to quibble with the broad aims of job creation and historical restitution – the question is what kind of jobs, to what ends. And I do not mean to impugn the wonderful work that a horde of devoted conservationists do achieve, even as they may profit by it. We unquestionably need a Biodiversity policy of some sort. Though there are encouraging aspects within it, I don’t believe that this NBES is quite it.

******

A copy of this has been sent to the government contact. It is a personal view, representative of no institution or organisation.

 

No 146 - Different shades of sorrow: i.m. Byron Santangelo

 My friend and fellow-ecocritic Byron Santangelo has died in the US, after a protracted struggle with a ferocious form of cancer. Byron was professor of literature at the University of Kansas, and we crossed paths at a couple of the conferences held in the US by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). In return (I forget exactly in what order) he twice came out to South Africa, in particular to attend one of our Literature & Ecology colloquiums at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, and to engage with my own university students. He had a grand scheme to bring more American students out for an immersive ecocritical experience, to be based at Bulungula on the Wild Coast. An ambition destined not to be fulfilled.

            On his visits, apart from much discussion about the state and promotion of ecologically-sensitive literature and literary criticism on the African continent, we trundled around looking at elephants and giraffe, and puzzled over the phenomenon of Love. He was known then as Byron Caminero-Santangelo, but was in the throes of uncomfortable divorce, which he related sadly but without bitterness, along with adoring comments about his children. It was a tender time, privileged ruminations spilling as I drove him all the way to Cape Town, I guess to catch his plane home. We just had to go via Jeffreys Bay, as in his time he’d been an avid surfer and wanted to see this iconic venue – a bit disappointing as the day was dead calm and the sea as flat as a surgical table.

            At the time we first met, Byron was best known for a book on Joseph Conrad, the study of whom had spawned further thoughts about the legacy of colonial incursions, imperial rule and lately neocolonial globalisation on Africa’s environmental policies. His characteristic, endearingly chesty laugh disguised a forensic intelligence which eviscerated many unthinking (especially Western, and including some of my own) assumptions about Africa and African writers’ engagement with ecological realities. Unlike prevailing dichotomous and hierarchical approaches that severely divided humanity from ‘nature’, Byron pursued notions of justice that might incorporate both human-social and natural, biodiverse well-being. He sought also to (re)validate Africans’ autonomous attitudes towards ecology – a little tricky, given his own ‘outsider’ position, but sometimes it takes just such a person to rupture inherited and ossified attitudes.

            This he effectively did in two subsequent books, both of which remain essential reading in the realm of African ecocriticism. The first is a collection of essays that Byron co-edited with Garth Myers, entitled Environment at the Margins: Literary and environmental studies of Africa (Ohio University Press, 2011). Covering writers from Ngugi to Gordimer, Bessie Head to Mia Couto, the essayists were mostly non-African, though included ‘ex-pat’ Southern African fellow-pioneers in the field Rob Nixon, Anthony Vital and Amanda Hammar.  In a review I published at the time, I summed up: 

The [editors] studiously interrogate essentialisings of “Africa” as place and concept, promote “dialogue” as vital to the book’s purpose, and acknowledge its inevitable limitations. These features embody the crucial and specific contribution of literary studies to this interdisciplinary venture: unlike the social and developmental sciences, and indeed history, which tend to seek realisable solutions and definitive accounts, poems and novels open up questions and unpeel layers in ways deliberately unsettling to theory.  In the words of Caminero-Santangelo’s chapter – he is quoting Gordimer – there is “never a final solution”. This solid book nevertheless shows just how valuable this kind of investigation – essentially of the symbiosis of imageries, language and material conditions – is to our understanding of African realities. It will unquestionably be an essential touchstone in this embryonic, but vital field.

So it proved, being a useful stimulus to various then-budding, now well-established African ecocritics such as Philip Aghoghovwia, Syned Mthatiwa and Iheka Cajetan.

 Byron followed up with a more densely thought-through, cross-disciplinary monograph, Different Shades of Green: African literature, environmental justice, and political ecology (University of Virginia Press, 2014). Byron ranges across disciplines, several African countries and a slew of literary works, with four major goals: 

"First, to bring into question the assumption that Africa has produced little environmental writing; second, to explore how African literature can challenge dominant Western assumptions regarding African environments and environmentalism and how it can offer powerful counternarratives; third, to interrogate widely accepted definitions of of environmental writing and the underlying constructions pf nature and conservation embedded in them; and fourth, to explore tensions in global environmental justice, political ecology, and African environmentalist writing by putting literary texts in contrapuntal dialogue." 

Byron and I also engaged over the years in rather sporadic ‘contrapuntal dialogue’. Though attenuated by trans-Atlantic distances and time, as these relationships can get, I will miss it. We ecocritics will all miss this amiable, ethical and sturdy scholar.

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No 145 – Fictions of bigotry

 

About three weeks ago I had a dream in which I was stumbling through some dark and shattered buildings, demolished by war, I surmised. I happened to look through an open doorway and saw, abandoned amidst the wreckage with its legs reflected in a skim of dirty water, a grand piano. It was so poignant, I thought (still in the dream), “That would make an amazing black-and-white photograph,” and made to go and fetch my camera. At some point, and at some other level of consciousness, I realised I could paint it. Here is the painting.

 While in one way this is a made-up image, a fiction independent of any conscious source, it is also a faithful reproduction of what my dream-imagination presented to me. So I feel there’s a kind of documentary fidelity to it – a truth-in-the-fiction. Now, I did not then (in the dream) explicitly connect the image with the current Gaza war.  All wars smash up the beauties of culture. (This is unlike an earlier painting, also reproduced with exactitude from a dream-presentation, which is obviously derived from the newsreel images saturating the TV channels. See it at the end of this essay; what the green panels symbolise remains mysterious, but there they were in the dream.) But it evokes a little frisson of congruence, as I read the other day an article by Moustafa Bayoumi in the Guardian about his one-time teacher, the Palestinian-American scholar-activist Edward Said. As well as being a fine and feisty writer, Said was a concert-level pianist.

Edward Said died in the same year as my father – 2003. By then I had read Said’s best-known book, Orientalism (1978), one of many works that helped me in the laborious task of undoing the colonial bigotries of my upbringing. My father was a terrific and beneficial personality in many respects but, like so many self-manufactured ‘white Rhodesians’, he was unrepentantly racist. Part of our collective racism incorporated an unreflective admiration of that parallel beleaguered state, Israel. As we waged our own anti-insurgency war, we almost gloated over the military prowess of the still-young Israel over the Arab hordes: I vacuumed up accounts of the Six-Day War and biographies of Moshe Dayan, the eye-patched smirking general. The Palestinians, on the other hand, were – much like our black countrymen – beneath notice, except as faceless barbarians. Our responses were governed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s lethal hostage-taking at the 1976 Munich Olympics (an event with some chilling parallels to Hamas’ attack last October 7). Yasir Arafat was the devil incarnate, and when, after Independence, a Palestinian ambassador was invited to Zimbabwe, the whites, still reeling from their overthrow, vilified him.

 How things have changed – and not.

 Meanwhile, back at the hermitage, I’ve been reading lots of other stuff. Some is obviously related, such as The Story of the Jews by Simon Schama, perhaps a British-Jewish kind of counterpart to Said. Alongside, I’ve been reading a bunch of Eastern Cape Frontier Wars works, original accounts as well as later scholarly histories and fictions. This material seems less related to the Israel-Palestine morass – and yet …

 For example, there is a positively tedious novel, set in my corner of the Eastern Cape, entitled The Settler’s Eldest Daughter, by one F Bancroft. This was written to celebrate the centenary of the arrival of the 1820 settlers, and is accordingly saturated with the missionary message of Britain bringing civilisation to the benighted blacks. Indeed, Anne Ashe the heroine is bullied into joining her father at Salem by the importunings of a dark and mysterious voice from nowhere, which turns out to be the spirit of an amorphous ‘Africa’, begging her to come and conquer and rescue the continent from devilish and ignorant heathenism. Still, behind this self-justificatory tosh and between acres of glutinous dialogue and heartfelt maunderings about difficult men (it is after all a Romance, with the Frontier Wars as mere backdrop), one finds more complex and contradictory sparks. Bits of conversation show that Bancroft, almost despite himself, was aware there was debate about whether the British ought to be there at all, and how they should be conducting themselves.

 In depicting various characters, Bancroft recognises that within the imperial enterprise there were “moderates” and “extremists”, the Jingoist and the Militarist, divisions between class attitudes, and tensions between Boer and Briton. While there are characters who see murderous blacks behind every bush, worthless and irredeemable savages who should be obliterated along with elephants and leopards, others see them as “open to reason”, capable of being “tamed and transformed by … strict justice”, and even “noble in their savagery”. In a rare instance, a Xhosa man named Maputa is permitted his say: “The white man pretends to be honest and friendly; but look! Since ever they set foot in this land the black man has been pushed bit by bit further and further out of his place till now he must make his kraals in a strange place – in the kloofs and fastnesses across the Great [Fish] River.”  Hence the mistrust, the mutual cattle-rustling, the spasms of open warfare in which men give in to the temptations of a “God of Force” instead of that God of “Peace, Love and Goodwill” who, in Bancroft’s predetermining presentation, is bound to usher in “the new life of the Earthly Paradise”. Evidently he thought that by 1920 this had been pretty much achieved in the Zuueveld/Albany – as conveniently foretold by some of his characters a century before. In a manner analogous to the Jews, these Bible-wielding Britons thus see themselves as a people divinely chosen to establish an enlightened (and controlling) reign in a forbidding land; indeed Bancroft uses the term “our Zion of Refuge”.

 Moreover, the demeaning, dismissive, self-justifying rhetoric used by the less enlightened, militaristic settler-soldiers in the novel is strikingly similar to that used by racists elsewhere, whether it be 1970s Rhodesians, Spanish Muslims vilifying and slaughtering Jews in the 1100s (as I’ve been reading in Schama), or the current Israeli government doing much the same to Palestinians in Gaza. But I want to return to the little pronouncement accorded to “Maputa”, quoted above. This speech closely resembles a longer one quoted by the poet-settler Thomas Pringle in an account he wrote of  Xhosa prophet-leader, Makanna or Makhanda. Upon Makhanda’s capture in September 1819, one of his councillors, unnamed, upbraided Colonel Willshire. It remains intensely moving, despite (as Pringle noted) his third-hand “bald translation”: 

“The war (he said) is an unjust one, for you are determined to extirpate a people whom you have forced to take up arms. When our fathers, and the fathers of the boors, first established themselves in the Zuurveld, we then lived together in peace … until the herds of the Caffers [amaXhosa] increased so as to make the hearts of the boors sore. What these covetous men could not get from our fathers for old buttons, they took by force … The boors made commandos on our fathers. Our fathers drove them out of the Zuurveld, and lived there, because they had conquered it. There we were circumcised; there we got wives; and there our children were born. The white men hated us, but could not drive us away. When there was war, we plundered you. When there was peace, some of our bad people stole, but our chiefs forbade it. … You sent a commando – you took our last cow – you left only a few calves – which died for want, along with our children. … Without milk, - our corn destroyed – we saw our wives and children perish – we saw that we must ourselves perish; - we followed, therefore, on the spoor of our cattle into the Colony. We plundered, and we fought for our lives … for you began the war. We failed – and you are here. We wish for peace; we wish to rest in our huts; we wish to get milk for our children; our wives wish to till the land. But your troops cover the plains, and swarm in the thickets, where they cannot distinguish the man from the woman, and shoot all …”

 Willshire was unmoved, and the colonial military continued for decades to inflict collective punishment. Similarly, what Edward Said wrote 35 years ago in  An Open Letter to American-Jewish Intellectuals (1989), uncannily, unnervingly, sounds like it was written yesterday: 

I cannot understand how raw, naked evidence can be overridden by American intellectuals just because the “security” of Israel demands it, But it is overridden or hidden no matter how overpoweringly cruel, no matter how inhuman and barbaric, no matter how loudly Israel proclaims what it is doing. To bomb a hospital; to use napalm against civilians; to require Palestinian men and boys to crawl, or bark, or scream ‘Arafat is a whore’s son’; to break the arms and legs of children; to confine people in desert detention camps without adequate space, sanitation, water or legal charge; to use teargas in schools: All these are horrific acts, whether they are part of a war against ‘terrorism’ or the requirements of security. Not to note them, not to remember them, not to say, ‘Wait a moment: Can such acts be necessary for the sake of the Jewish people?’ is inexplicable, but it is also to be complicit in these acts. The self-imposed silence of intellectuals who possess, in other cases and for other countries, supremely fine critical faculties is stunning.

 How appallingly close is that to the plea of today’s ordinary Palestinians, who beg on our television screens only to be accorded an equal humanity, a minimum of peaceable autonomy and freedom to flourish? And how closely does that, ironically, echo Shakespeare’s famous fictional-but-true Jew, Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, complaining: 

If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? (III,i)

 

 

*****

 

 

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.

 

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