Future Primal. Louis G. Herman
I feel like I am an African back in Africa.
At other times I also feel myself to be a Jew, an Englishman, an Israeli, and a kama‘aina, a dweller in the land of Hawai‘i. My quest began as a search to find myself in a world where identity could be a matter of life and death. Today, identity can still be a matter of life and death, and since the pieces identifying me do not make a familiar category, I risk being badly misunderstood by all.
My Jewish identity preoccupied me for much of the first three decades of my life. The time I spent working on a kibbutz and soldiering in the Israeli army empowered and healed me. But more surprisingly, Jewish nationalism opened me to the wisdom of indigenous peoples. I found myself participating in activities that gave me insight into some of those archetypal experiences that define what it means to be human, and this, paradoxically, helped liberate me from a purely “tribal” identity.
Biblical Israel was the site for the original monotheistic revelation and marked the beginning of written history as a drama of divine revelation in human affairs — what Eric Voegelin called the “leap in being.”* Modern Israel may well prove to be the catalyst in history’s next unfolding — another leap in being — or its catastrophic unraveling. Today the Middle East can be seen as the epicenter of the global crisis. Israel is armed with nuclear weapons, led by a hard-line government, and caught in a regressive cycle of fear, anger, and brutality. The surrounding Arab governments are rushing to become equivalent powers. At the same time, their people are starting to assert a form of direct democracy in an “Arab spring,” whose course currently oscillates between Islamic fundamentalism and Western consumerism but is still pregnant with the promise of something truly creative.
Beneath the furiously battling, bleeding tribal religions is the contested territory — an expanding, drying desert containing some of the largest remaining oil reserves on the planet. Climate change, drought, limited fresh water, and a rapidly degrading ecosystem threaten the protagonists as well as everyone else. For simple practical reasons all of our problems are now increasingly interlocked. A sustainable resolution to the Middle East conflict cannot be separated from global concerns about living on a habitable earth. Clearly, a bigger story of meaning and identity is required — something that goes to the shared “indigeneity” of both Israeli and Palestinian. Ultimately, this needs to express a shared love for the single indivisible homeland that is planet earth — a primal-planetary culture.
It took my own self-imposed Hawaiian “exile” to distance me sufficiently from my various homelands to recognize a deeper dynamic working in my life. Life in these warm, welcoming islands helped me envision a politics within which the unique stories of individuals, tribes, and nations could express the truth of their particularity and still flourish in a single planetary community.
So, I offer my story as a personal example of the dynamic of the future primal politics I advocate. Telling my story is simultaneously an invitation to the reader to recognize the role of his or her own story in the collective, cooperative creation of meaning that is at the living center of a future primal politics.
Exile in Eden
Just beyond the suburbs and pavements of my hometown, Port Elizabeth, are miles of spectacular beach and bush. The city is situated in a region where two very different climates meet and mix, creating one of the most unique and ancient ecosystems in southern Africa. To the west along the southern coast is the winter-rainfall Mediterranean climate. The beaches are fringed with fynbos, rich with the remains of the first human seafood culture. In the background, following the ocean and watering the coastal plain are serried ranks of mountains. To the east and north is the summer-rainfall region of the tropics. Where they meet east of Port Elizabeth is a transitional zone of extreme contrasts and diversity — the distinctive tangled bushveld of the Eastern Cape.
The Fish River marks the end of this intermediate region and the beginning of the undeveloped Wild Coast of the Transkei north to Zululand. About two thousand years ago, cattle-owning Bantu-speaking people migrated down the east coast, where there was rich pasture for their herds and a suitable climate for their summer-rainfall crops. As they moved south they displaced the original first people, the San Bushman hunter-gatherers, and their close relatives the pastoralist Khoikhoi. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dutch and English settlers moved from the southern coastline to the east and north. They met the Xhosas just east of Port Elizabeth, where they clashed in the Xhosa wars, which were more numerous and bitterly fought than the better-known Zulu wars. This was the true frontier separating climate, people, and culture. It was settled by the British, who developed a relatively enlightened attitude to the native population and started a number of mission schools and universities. This British-educated area was the home of some of the great leaders of the struggle against apartheid — Nelson Mandela, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, and Steve Biko.
The frontier land itself is full of contradictions. Some seasons are wet and rainy, others stone dry. This gives the Eastern Cape bush an utterly unique quality symbolized by the bitter-juice aloes and their bristle-topped, red-hot-poker “flowers of thirst.” Gray beard lichen hangs from the tangle of thorn bushes, giving the impression of a primeval forest. Noel Mostert, the historian of the Xhosa wars, describes in his book Frontiers the intense impression this landscape makes on the traveler:
[Here] nature flowers and fruits in a willful and undependable manner, in a fantasy of colour of feverish combinations, the soft and the delicate with the violently brilliant, blooms that poison and bulbs that feed the starving, all of it expressing the alternating bounty and generosity and malevolent caprice of the land itself.…One moment it is a land that seems to be all English meadows, parkland. Roses and carnations bloom, orchards hang with soft fruit.…Then, at no distance at all …mere yards it sometimes can seem, one confronts the other side of it all: drought, dust, despair. It is here that the aloes burn, among vast cracked granite boulders that radiate heat like furnaces, and serve as altars for coiled and venomous serpents, which add a new aberration to their threat by spitting their venom unerringly into the eyes. And all about, mile after mile, stretches thick mimosa bush, a hardy greenery, wielding massed thorns the size of small daggers, which stab and strike at whatever passes.…Sometimes in this country there is a breezy freshness blowing in from the distant, hazily seen ocean: vinegar for the crucified.1
In the heart of this wilderness around Sunday’s River is an area called Addo, named from the Bushman (Khoisan) Kadouw, meaning “river crossing.” It is one of the few relatively intact fragments of the ancient ecosystems that once covered the paleo-continent of Gondwanaland two hundred million years ago. In the early nineteenth century, miles of impenetrable mimosa thorn bush were alive with the full complement of big game. The only way to move through the bush was to follow paths made by elephants and the aggressive black rhino. One professional big-game hunter called it “a hunter’s hell,” meaning it was also “animal heaven.” This allowed a unique subspecies of the African elephant to flourish. Addo elephants were slightly reddish in color to match the earth, and many females were tuskless, probably an adaptation to intense hunting pressure. The original San Bushman hunters were driven into the mountains, but the tall, thick bush, full of spekboom — a dark green succulent also called “elephant’s food” — made it possible for the elephants to survive repeated attempts at extermination.
Today the elephants prosper in Addo, which is now the only game reserve in southern Africa extending down to the ocean and hosting the “big seven” — with whales and great white sharks in addition to lion, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, and leopard. As a child, I was moved deeply by our family weekend outings to Addo. Driving out of the city on dirt roads into the bush in the hope of encountering elephants was like traveling back to some incredibly wild and wise old Africa. I felt deeply connected to the place and the animals, but I had no story to make meaning of my experiences, no way of connecting them to the rest of my city life.
I grew up as an Orthodox Jew in racist South Africa during the fifties, when the Nazi death camps were still fresh in Jewish memory. The president of the country during the time I discovered politics was Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, who had developed his