War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock
plough and harvest; what water could be drunk; which trees could be cut; and which animals could be hunted. Their subsistence traditions have given indigenous peoples an intimate knowledge of local plants and animals, and their dependence has generated practices of conservation.
This traditional conservation by indigenous peoples has not always been appreciated by outsiders. For example, a missionary wrote about the Ndebele: ‘The eyes of a heathen tribe … see no beauty or variety in earth or sky. The book of Nature is shut up and sealed: there is no music in the moaning of the wind. Nor loveliness in the golden-tinted sunsets’ (cited in Ranger, 1999: 16). The Jesuit missionaries in the area saw their evangelical task as bringing Christian culture into unredeemed and primeval nature, thus freeing Africans from their dependence on it.
Many other indigenous peoples did not distinguish between nature and culture, but saw themselves as one with plants and animals, rivers and forests, as part of a larger, all-encompassing whole. For example, the Matopos, the site of the Mwali shrines, now part of the Zimbabwe National Park, are much more than ‘wild nature’: they are also a cultural landscape. The historian Terence Ranger has described how the colonial appropriation of the Matopos has been countered by an African ideology of the land, which involves a quite different relationship between nature and culture. He writes:
the shrines represent a quintessential natural source of culture; the two are inseparable, so that human society bears no meaning without the rocks and pools and caves and they in turn are given meaning only by the residence among them of human beings (Ranger, 1999: 6).
In contrast to the notion that humans exist apart from nature and must dominate and control it, the indigenous vision is of a seamless unity, a fusion of nature and culture in a specific landscape.
For this reason, southern Africa’s indigenous people have been the custodians of much of our biodiversity. They have frequently established careful regulation of common resources, such as arable land and water. All traditionally had a strong identification with the land, the animals and the plants. Traditional healers such as Credo Mutwa have urged humankind to rekindle its links with nature:
Lakes and water control the life forces of every bird, fish and tiny creature, as well as man. [Nature] is a living entity. For centuries Africans had treated water with reverence, severely punishing anyone who polluted it. Our African forefathers have always known that you are not allowed to murder nature (cited in Carnie, 1999).
Recalling his initiation into traditional healing as a young boy back in 1937, Mutwa said his aunt had filled a pot with water and instructed him to look inside and tell her what he saw. She said to me: ‘You are in this water. Until you know that you are part of this water, you should not even try to drink it.’
I have often been slandered and ridiculed as a superstitious heathen for my beliefs since then. But I was only preaching the message that water is the lifeblood of our great Earth Mother. Let us conserve the beautiful song of nature. ... We must really feel the water and accept that the Earth is a living entity in which everything is joined ... We have to realise that when we pollute a stream or river, we start a chain of events which destroys life many kilometres away ... It is useless to preserve the trees and water if you have severed your connection with nature. You cannot conserve something which is not part of you (cited in Carnie, 1999).
For people like Mutwa, nature is a powerful source of ethnic identity.
NATURE AS A SOURCE OF IDENTITY
The designation of specific animals as totems is a strong marker of identity in Xhosa society. The great nineteenth century Xhosa chief Mhala, son of Ndlambe, was known as ‘Mbodla, the thing that walks at night’, which is an apt description of the nocturnal genet. Ethnic identity is often marked by relations with particular landscapes, plants, animals and foods. Culinary customs defining what and how one eats are important in all cultures.
The Zulu emphasis on a ‘sense of place’ was crucial in saving the St Lucia area from the threat of titanium mining. The Makuleke long emphasised their relationship with the particular piece of land that was appropriated for incorporation into the Kruger National Park. And the Kruger National Park itself played a crucial role in South Africa’s history in helping to forge an exclusive, Afrikaner identity. There is a good deal of mythology surrounding the park, symbolised by the (ironic) portrayal of Paul Kruger as a visionary who championed wildlife protection (Carruthers, 1995). The myth was appropriated by the emergent Afrikaner nationalism when it helped to unite opposed factions and classes in Afrikaner society in the post-World War I period. After 1948 the apartheid regime revived the Kruger wildlife protectionist myth in an attempt not only to rouse patriotism, but also to gain international respectability for the pariah state among its critics overseas. One of the difficulties of transformation after 1994 was changing the widespread image of the Kruger National Park as a white, Afrikaner playground, so as to make it attractive and accessible to all South Africans.
Of course, the larger challenge of transformation is to create a common society, to build institutions that unite us, and national parks could contribute to the creation of a shared national identity and a coherent national consciousness. It has been suggested that wilderness, understood as ‘virgin’ landscapes assumed to be untouched by humans, played an important role in the shaping of nationalism in North America. According to Nash, Americans embraced nature in a burst of nationalism around the middle of the last century. President Jefferson had hailed the new country as ‘Nature’s nation’ when it was founded in 1776, but it was the creation of the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872 that linked much of America’s identity to the wild. Nash has argued that ‘through the idea of wilderness they [Americans] sought to give their civilization identity and meaning’ (Nash, 2001: xiii).
The idea of wilderness was new in that, for the indigenous peoples, ‘wilderness’ had no meaning as a separate space:
Everything natural was simply habitat and people understood themselves to be part of a seamless, living community …. Civilization severed the web of life as humans distanced themselves from the rest of nature. Behind fenced pasture, village walls and later, gated condominiums, it was hard to imagine other living things as sacred (Nash, 2001: xiii).
For poor South Africans incarcerated in urban ghettos, or for the affluent who have retreated to gated communities, it is especially difficult.
NATURE AS A VEHICLE OF LIBERATION
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society (Thoreau, 1991: 71).
Visiting Walden pond, where Thoreau wrote these words, involved many distractions. The pond is still ‘remarkable for its depth and purity’, constituting ‘a clear and deep green well, half a mile long’, and the water very transparent, ‘like molten glass cooled’. But, on the day I visited it in a spirit of pilgrimage, the car park was full and the banks crowded with people from Boston and Concord. Thoreau’s message to live simply was drowned by the smell of car exhausts and the noise of radios. But it is an important message — especially in view of the waste and over-consumption that create so many environmental problems.
Thoreau also argued that living simply in tune with nature is a means of personal liberation, of becoming more self-aware and freeing oneself from prescribed identities and conventional scripts of appropriate behaviour. Nature was the means by which he tried ‘to recreate [him]self’. Thoreau was opposed to social and political conformity; the identity that he aspired to was that of a ‘sojourner’. This is an unconventional identity that values individuality and a self-reflective life above all else. For him, conformity is fatal to an intensely experienced life that is one’s own and none other. So he writes: ‘We need the tonic of wildness — to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and meadow-hen lurk ... To smell the whispering sedge where … the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground’ (Thoreau, 1854: 317).
But this perspective perpetuates a dualistic notion of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ as separate rather than interconnected. A more integrated perspective comes from the contemporary American environmental activist and poet Gary Snyder. He