On the mountain top, two salamanders are making love. They are of the Alpine species, entirely dressed in black, including their large protruding eyes and their grinning, fleshy mouths. That and the fact that they are changing position so quickly, twirling each other’s bodies around, rubbing their heads against each other, entangling their long tails, holding on to each other with such fiery passion, make it impossible to tell them apart, male from female, or friend from foe: one could easily take their love making for a struggle for life and death, for they are not on a flowery meadow, but inside an old war trench.
The mountain peak, Kleiner Pal, constitutes the border between Austria and Italy. During WWI, it was part of the frontline, where the two armies of the new Republic of Italy and the old Austro-Hungarian Empire held each other in a tight grip, from May 1915 till the end of the war in November 1918, without ever changing the frontline, without having any effect on the outcome of WWI, but at the tremendous cost of the lives of almost a million soldiers. Austrians, Italians, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, and many more unknown soldiers, now lie buried at the various Heldenfriedhöfe, or under the eternal ice of the Alpine glaciers.
Boundary stone between Italy and Austria today
Before WWI, the so-called Karnische Alpen, a mountain ridge between Italy and Austria, were a popular hiking destination, as it is now again. The terrain is steep and demanding, the mountain tops a challenge for the experienced hikers and climbers. In the peaceful tranquillity of high peaks and (seemingly) pristine ice-blue lakes it is hard to imagine the smoke and rumble of mortars, of shooting and shelling from a century ago. And yet, trekking by the exuberant pink shrubs of blooming Alpine roses, along the well-maintained hiking paths, one frequently comes across dilapidated garrisons, trenches, or dug out caves that once functioned as barracks, as shelters, as loopholes, or as storage spaces. The hiking paths, now called Friedenswege – trails of peace – were in fact trodden into the steep terrain as a military supply line, where horses pulled ammunition, food, and equipment to the trenches on the top. Until the horses died from cold and hunger, and were replaced by cable cars, quickly built by night, often under hostile fire. From then on, only soldiers marched along the paths.
This Southern stretch of the Alps was one of the most brutal and inhuman battlefields of modern European history. Covered with snow for three quarters of the year, sometimes more, it is a terrain so tricky and precarious that one third of the soldiers there died not from enemy attacks, but from natural causes: avalanches and mountain slides, and the freezing cold that brought pneumonia or kidney inflammation.
Kleiner Pal shrouded in clouds
“Any soldier’s worth less than an animal.”
Infantry soldier Karl Außenhofer wrote into his diary (published in 2016). A Tyrolean, he felt home in the mountains, but he suffered from malnutrition – by 1918, the average weight of the Austrian soldiers was 55kg – and inadequate outfits. Uniforms were of a heavy fabric that, once wet, dried slowly; with Italian attacks imminent, the soldiers at the frontline were ordered to sleep with their clothes on.
“Undressed for the first time in three months tonight. Couldn’t sleep from the pleasure…” Karl Außenhofer wrote. The soldiers were also ordered not to scratch their itches, to prevent infections and skin diseases. In vain.
The Habsburg monarchy had not been prepared for a war. Their weaponry was technically outdated. The turn of the century had brought technical innovations – industrialization and motorization – but outside its glamorous capital Vienna, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still an agricultural economy, a Catholic, authoritarian monarchy, stuck in the past. Yet, Emperor Franz Joseph had rushed into the war in megalomania and bloodlust. The assassination of Arc-duke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Serb was a mere pretence to declare war on Serbia. The Vielvölkerstaat – the multi-ethnic empire – had long been troubled by rising tensions among the many peoples of the vast, sprawling empire. Now, the Kaiser wanted to deal with nationalistic, emancipatory tendencies once and for all in a short hit-and-run attack on a minor South Eastern neighbour.
Heldenfriedhof – war cemetery in Kötschach Mauthen near the Kleine Pal: A Czech, a Hungarian and two unknown soldiers share a grave.
“I caught lice from the Galicians,” Außenhofer wrote in his diary.
Ironically, in the trenches the different nationalities were for once united. But even in the face of death the tensions didn’t subside. Too long had prejudices been instilled into the minds of the “Austrians,” resulting in a social and economic gradient from the German speaking West to Slavic speaking East. Galicia, the utmost Eastern province, what is now Poland and Ukraine, was at the bottom of the scale. The discrimination of the Tschuschen – a pejorative term for Slavs sadly used to this day in Austria – continued in the military and was so harsh, that even Außenhofer felt pity when he wrote on July 17th 1915: “These poor Galicians don’t have shelter to lie down, poor devils, today it’s cold like midwinter, it’s raining so everyone gets wet to their skin.”
Vienna had tragically misjudged the Russians, who had vowed to support Serbia, and misjudged French loyalty towards Russia. Now their only elite regiments, the Tyrolean Standschützen, were involved in the unexpected heavy battle in the East, where they suffered great losses in a relatively flat terrain. Even though the monarchy had been able to draw 3.35million men at their general mobilization in July 1914, a year into the war, they were already lacking men. Then, in May 1915, Italy attacked from the South.
trenches at the Kleine Pal
The Italians sent their elite regiment, trained for the Alpine battle field, the Alpini, who now faced on the Austrian army of mainly Czechs and Hungarians: young men who often hadn’t seen a mountain in their lives before, and whose military training was as rudimentary as their equipment. Not surprisingly, the desertion rate was as high as the death rate, and at one point all white handkerchiefs were confiscated and exchanged for colourful ones.
Außenhofer, whose morale was also declining in the run of the war, did however not approve of the Czech deserters. A learned Austrian, the soldierly values of patriotism, duty, obedience, and bravery were deeply ingrained in his thinking – planted especially by the strict Catholic school system that was run military-style and featured physical and humiliating punishment. Disease and cowardly death were regarded as weaknesses, as failures. The brutality of war made Außenhofer even more detached.
“Today another mis-hap. A Standschütz took the cable car from Corvosa to Stern; when entering the station, his head was ripped off. Went to the Gasthaus at night, always full of people there.”
Natural border
The Gasthaus, the inn, Außenhofer mentions in his diary, is the Gasthaus Löwe in Galtür, which, by the way, is still operating to this day. Gasthaus Löwe was, like other inns, pensions, or hotels, where soldiers were accommodated when not serving at the front line. Ernest Hemingway, too, mentioned the Gasthaus Löwe in his short story “An Alpine Idyll.”
The American writer had arrived at the frontline in the final year of the war, in 1918, as a volunteer orderly for the Italian Red Cross, apparently in search of adventures, both amorous and heroic. His story about two Americans on a skiing trip doesn’t cast a favourable light on the Tyroleans. Hemmingway calls them beasts – but who wouldn’t, given a plot that involves a widower using the frozen corpse of his recently deceased wife as a hanger for his lamp? Who wouldn’t, given the merciless brutality of the war? But Hemingway only arrived at the very end of the war, and maybe the village people he describes were so callous and detached because they had been tested by hunger and loss of loved ones for four long years. For Austrians, the war was not an adventure.
View from the Kleine Pal
But, maybe, Hemingway had a point. The archaic societies of the inaccessible Alpine valleys were notoriously taciturn and rough, a demeanor that seems to come with the rawness of the scenery. Tyroleans were incomprehensible to the Viennese as well, both in their dialects and manners, and so held considerable exotic attraction, as was the case for Austrian writer Robert Musil, also stationed at the Gasthaus Löwe.
End of July. A fly dies: Worldwar, he wrote in his diary on July 28 1914, the day of the declaration of war. Like most upper-class men in the monarchy, Musil had attended military school and therefor held the title of officer. He immediately signed up for the front – albeit benefiting from an officer’s privileges: better pay, better accommodation, better food rations.
War. On the mountain top. In the valley peaceful like a summer holiday. Behind the barriers of the patrols one walks like a tourist, he wrote in 1915. The combination of the overwhelming beauty of the Alps and the adventure of war must have made for an intoxicating cocktail. Or was it rather his love affair with a certain “Gretel” from the village that impressed Musil, whose experience at the front differed so wildly from that of an infantry soldier. Yet, the ongoing cross-fires soon wore him out.
Big projectiles, not too high above our own posts, their sound making the air swell into a rumbling, a roaring with a metallic timbre. So it happened yesterday at Monte Carbonile, when the Italians were firing from the Cima Manderiolo to the Pizzo di Vezzeno, and the Panorotta above us to the Italians. It made the impression of an eery uproar within nature. The rocks were rumbling and roaring. The feeling of an evil futility.
A Griffon Vulture crossing the border to Italy.
Musil survived and went on to become a major European writer. He was however one of the very few writers dispatched as soldiers to the front. Contrary to other nations, who lost a whole generation of writers on the battlefields, the monarchy was aware of the importance of artists to boost morale within the population. Two institutions were established for writers to dodge the draft: the Military Archive, and the Pressehauptquartier, the military press headquarters, the latter a euphemism for propaganda, where acclaimed writers like Stefan Zweig, R.M. Rilke, or Hugo von Hofmannsthal eked out their lives. In safe distance from the front, and with varying degree of enthusiasm, they fabricated their eulogies.
“Victories, only victories; you never read of defeats,” infantry soldier Außenhofer wrote in his diary. He never experienced any heroic victories the field newspapers reported. Miraculously, Außenhofer survived the war, unlike nine million soldiers, unlike the emperor, who had passed away in 1916, and unlike the once proud Austro-Hungarian Empire, which disintegrated in 1918.
In local folklore, a salamander, is associated both with rain and fire, and the sky above the Kleine Pal is indeed growing heavy with dark clouds that threaten to bring both. But for the love-drunk salamanders, the trenches are deserted now. The Kleine Pal has become an Open Air Museum, where tourists can inspect the posts, the trenches, the caves, and even the old, rusty cable cars. But the museum, which is free of charge and not supervised, is scarcely frequented. The hike-up is steep and hazardous, so the signs at the bottom of the mountain warn, and should only be attempted in proper hiking gear and in perfect weather conditions. High up, seven Griffon Vultures are circling. Once hunted into extinction, they are a thriving, re-introduced species. Some Alpine swallows are plunging and rising, a marmot whistles in the distance. These are the only sounds. No rumbling, no roaring of rocks. Descending on the other side, one will be in Italy. No passport is required.
Friedenswanderweg with the Friedensglocke – the Peace Bell
It’s been seven years since Cecil’s death. The handsome, black-maned lion was shot right outside his home, Hwange National Park in Western Zimbabwe, by a trophy hunting American tourist. The dentist from Minnesota had paid USD 50,000 for the shooting rights. His action was hence legal under Zimbabwean law, however he had paid his helpers to use an elephant carcass to lure the lion from a protected area into a hunting concession.
Cecil’s agony lasted for well over twelve hours. The circumstances of this death could later be minutely reconstructed as he was collared and named as part of a research programme. Aside from the inhumane aspect of Cecil’s unnecessarily painful death due to the inexpert use of bow and arrow, his killing caused an uproar. The act of a rich American so nonchalantly shooting an African animal strongly echoed the not so long-gone days of colonialism.
It was, however, under colonial administration that Hwange National Park was established, namely in 1928, when present day Zimbabwe was the British colony Southern Rhodesia. Over the years Hwange has grown in the country’s largest national park, comprising of a variety of landscapes from dense teak and mopane forests to white Kalahari sands and golden savannas. It’s raw and diverse African landscape, as the safari marketing slogan goes. Hwange is also one of the best managed parks in the world, running various research, educational and conservancy projects. It is a place for endangered species to thrive.
The idea behind the park, though, was far from idealistic. First and foremost, a national park promised huge revenues from tourism to the colonial government. Wildlife conservancy was the means, a fringe benefit. But it was much more than a collateral damage that the establishment of the national park led to the near extinction of a people that like the lions had roamed the land for millennia; a people that mastered the use of bow and arrow, and who were able to turn themselves into lions: the Tjwao, the bushmen of Zimbabwe.
Sunset over Hangwe
If not physically, then legally, a National Park is a fenced-off area. The aim is not to lock in the wilderness, but to keep the rest of the world out, so the land appears pristine and raw, untouched by human hand: a glimpse of the world as God had created it. However, the land between the Zambezi river in the North, the train tracks to Victoria Falls in the East, and the Kalahari desert in the South-West, is by no means untouched by human hand.
In 1889, Queen Victoria of England authorized the adventurer Cecil Rhodes to economically explore and subsequently administer the lands North of the British Cape Colony. By this time, 35 year-old Cecil was already a diamond magnate, having made his fortune in South Africa. Now he showed great interest in the teak forests, as teak was a sturdy wood needed for the building of fast growing railroad tracks through Africa, as well as in the ivory urgently needed to quench the high demand of upright pianos in the US; Also, the land was rich in coal, another resource the west needed to fire the steam engines of the ongoing industrial revolution promised . He set out immediately.
Kudu in the Mopane forest
First, he tricked the local Madebele – a belligerent Bantu tribe that had settled in this region for generations – into granting them the rights to the natural resources. The naturally illiterate Madebele signed the British contracts, foolishly trusting the oral promises of the Rhodes’ agents. Then, under the pretext of hence broken promises, his rifle-savvy British South Africa Company battled them in the First Madebele War, which resulted in the Africans’ defeat. Subsequently, he consigned the Madebele as workers to build a railroad to connect the teak forests in the South with the coal mines in the North. Rhodes meant business indeed.
By the time of his early death, in 1902, the teak forests were cleared to the extent that they wouldn’t regenerate on their own, and the sandy soil wasn’t fit for agriculture, or husbandry, due to the Tsetse fly. On top, not only were the elephants starkly decimated, but all wildlife had been hunted to near extinction. The British considered hunting a noble sport, and killed predators as vermin, and kudus and giraffes and impalas as trophies. To reserve the remaining game for themselves, and for lack of better use of the sandy and dry soil, they turned the area into a private Game Reserve.
Cave painting in Mapotos NP
The Tjwao bushmen had foraged and hunted in these dry and sandy lands since the beginning of humankind, as archaeological evidence from the Old Stone Age suggests. Their life style, as that of other San (Bushmen) groups all over Southern Africa, was in complete harmony with nature. Their diet consisted primarily of foraged berries and roots, their game hunts were ritualized hunts that lasted for days on end – or longer. Their settlements were temporary, which enabled them to follow migrating game, as well as the rains. This flexibility was a valuable asset in a region so close to the Kalahari desert, a land prone to droughts and climate uncertainty. In their nomadism, they left no traces, no evidence of their presence. aside from carvings and cave paintings. They were invisible, blending into their surrounding.
Most fascinating about the Tjwao and other bushmen cultures though, was their understanding of the relationship between the natural world and themselves. They lived in the truest sense of the word inseparable from nature. All the landscape around them was considered alive, every boulder, every animal once was a human creature, or was inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or those yet to be born. Should the need arise, the Tjwao were also able to turn themselves into animals, into a kudu if they hunted one, or into an ostrich, or a lion.
“My aunt turned herself into a lioness. She sought for us, as she wanted to see whether we were still comfortable where we lived. She, when she had smelt our houses’ scent, she passed in front of us, she roared like a lioness because she wished that we should hear her, that it was she who had come seeking for us.” (from “Stories that float from afar” Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa)
The Tjwao lived outside the confinements of time and their own physical bodies, but immersed into their land, their identities inseparable from the natural world around them.
young lioness – Cecil’s granddaughter
By the turn of the 20th century, when the white settlers and Cecil Rhodes arrived, Tjwao families lived in scattered groups in what is now Hwange National Park. As Rhodes’ administration claimed the land, they relocated the locals to so-called Native Reserves. This was done on the legal basis of the Game and Fish Preservation Act of 1929. The British blamed the Tjwao for “poaching,” and the sudden loss of wildlife, which of course was irrational, given that the Tjwao had lived in these lands for thousands of years without decimating the wild animals, nor the trees. Rather, Cecil Rhodes had a hidden agenda; he considered the natives barbarians and thought that the sooner the Anglo Saxons subjugated the governed the continent, the better for the human race. It was, he said, their obligation. In a letter from 1888 he wrote:
“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.”
Although not the world’s first National Park, Hangwe was hence the first to evict indigenous inhabitants.
In the years to follow the expulsion, during the liberation struggle and after declaration of independence of the state of Zimbabwe, in 1980, the situation for the Tjwao didn’t improve. As a people who didn’t fit in with neither the Bantu societies, let alone the imperialistic Europeans, they were caught in the middle, victims of violence by the hands of the colonial forces as well as, post 1980, by the red berets, the notoriously brutal Zimbabwe Military Police. They were also victims of cultural ghosting. Unrecognized as an indigenous people, in the native reserves, their history and their culture were forgotten. Their homesteads in the Tholotso district south of Hwange National Park is the poorest district of Zimbabwe, their political representation not worth mentioning, their income the lowest in Zimbabwe due to their low literacy rate and lack of higher education.
The Tjwao language, which has no writing, is destined to die out, spoken by only a handful of people of advanced age. The young, who have never been to Hwange National Park, don’t understand it. They mostly speak Ndebele, the prevailing language in the region, and dream of a different future, where their children at least get better education and can find a better life, in Zimbabwe or abroad.
Only the old still dream of returning to their ancestors’ land, where their forefathers lay buried, the land that defined them as a people, and as persons. They still feel the phantom pain from missing the land from which they were once inseparable. To venture into the National Park, even only for foraging for their traditional foods (hunting is out of question within the confines of the park), they need to apply for a license, a bureaucratic obstacle they mostly fail, or are too scared too attempt, or are denied anyway.
Today, the number of Tjwao living in the homesteads surrounding Hwange is estimated to be around 1500 people. There are fewer Tjwao in Africa, than there are lions.
Mopane worm – traditional Tjwao food
Lions are an endangered species, as are wild dogs and cheetahs and giraffes, who all live in large numbers in Hwange National Park. In its wildlife conservation efforts of Hwange National Park is laudable. Situated in a dry region that has no rivers and waterbodies, the park management has since the 1930s installed 103 boreholes, first run by wind wheels, then by diesel generators and presently by solar power, to provide the large mammals with water. Without these artificial waterholes, the many large animals, and with them the lions and other predators, would have long died. This concerns especially the elephants, whose population has exploded since the establishment of the park, from ca. 1,500 elephants in 1920 to ca. 45,000 in 2020.
The sight of many playfully entangled trumps, of happy baby elephants as they splash in the waters against the tangerine African sunset is enlightening to the eyes of the paying visitor – affluent Americans and Europeans. The sparkling reflection of the sunbeams on the solar panels does not diminish their joy. Nor does the presence of rangers managing the waterholes or patrolling for poachers. For these licensed rangers, who are highly skilled in tracking and nature conservation, the National Park is not simply a job, or an income, but their love for wild life is evident – and contagious. Hangwe is not the raw African landscape as the marketing slogan goes; it is land carefully managed and lovingly cared for. As it was before it became a National Park, and before Cecil Rhodes ever set foot on the land that is holy to the Tjwao.
That Tjwao aren’t back to the land that complements them in their identity, that their lives have not been cared for, but falsely sacrificed for the lives of lions and elephants, is incomprehensible; it’s another wrong doing of Cecil Rhodes that should be righted before it’s too late, before their culture has vanished into oblivion.
Unlike his namesake, Cecil the lion was an old man at the time of his death. In the run of his long life he had fathered many new generations. His wives, his daughters and sons, and even his grandchildren are the lions that today hunt in Hangwe National Park and who carry with them the spirits of Africa, of those passed, of those yet to be born.
Humanity arose from the African savannas. As frequent lightning struck and set the grasslands in flames, homo erectus, a split-off from the ape lineage, learned how to control fire. The easily digestible calories from cooked meat were a tremendous advantage over competing species, like the chimpanzees and bonobos. Homo erectus started walking on their hind legs, which freed their front legs to carry weapons, and bounty, and their off-spring on the run. With their brain size enlarged, around 200,000 years ago, homo erectus evolved into homo sapiens. Into humans. Us. a lucky accident of primate evolution.
Like other large mammals of the savanna, the apes, wild dogs, elephants, and lions, early humans lived in highly organized societies marked by collaboration and division of labour. But at night, only the humans sat around the fire, and talked, and told each other stories. We know all this, because there are still some around who live very much like the first humans in Southern Africa: the /Xam, the Ju/’hoansi, the !Ko, the Nharo, the Heixom, the G/wi and other nomadic tribes more commonly known as San, or Bushmen. Hunters and gatherers who once travelled long distances, they are now confined to a small territory in the Kalahari desert of Namibia and Botswana, struggling to hold on to their ancient lifestyle, in tightly knit communities without chiefs or religious leaders, with a view of the world where everything is possessed by divine spirit. The San are what we once were, in the Garden Of Eden, before the Fall.
Northern Namibia
But of course, the savanna with its fierce competition among predators, with bushfires and torrential rains, never was a biblical garden Eden. And of course the San didn’t live in constant enchantment by the sprites of nature. Rather, they have been living in a state of respectfulness – granting animals the same rights as themselves, valuing nature as much as their culture; outsmarting predators and prey, knowledgeable of roots and grasses, savants of the changing skies. Quite unsentimentally, theirs was, or is, a lifestyle perfectly adapted to their environment, to the circumstance and age that age that brought about us humans: the Holocene, the Age of Mammals, which followed the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs. If ever there was a Garden of Eden, it was not a place, but a manner of living.
Obviously, we don’t live in this Garden of Eden anymore, but on a planet transformed by human activity, in a new age called Anthropocene. Why were we expelled from our garden Eden? Was it the original sin, as the bible says, or was it rather the combination of swift technological progress with the worst of human nature, as biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson said?
Grassland with Aloe Vera
Edward O. Wilson, regarded the greatest biologist and one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, has in his lifetime witnessed the so called sixth extinction, the alarming rate of extinction of species in the past fifty years. Half of the Earth’s living creatures, from animals and insects, are estimated to have been lost since 1971.
Biodiversity as a whole forms a shield protecting each of the species that together compose it, ourselves included. What will happen if, in addition to the species already extinguished by human activity, say, 10 percent of those remaining are taken away? Or 50 percent? Or 90 percent? As more and more species vanish or drop to near extinction, the rate of extinction of the survivors accelerates…. As extinction mounts, biodiversity reaches a dipping point at which the ecosystem collapses, Wilson wrote in 2016
Humanity as a species is perfectly adapted to excel in the Holocene, the biosphere and biodiversity of the past 200,000 years. In the Anthropocene, though, we find ourselves as vulnerable and helpless as we would have been in the Mesozoic period: an evolutionary cul-de-sac, easy to prey to a T.Rex called rising sea levels, or draughts and deluges, shortness of food, and water, and oxygen.
Endangered species: There are less than 6000 wild dogs living in the wild.
Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground, so the bible said. Consequently, there are very few places on this world left intact, free from human impact. Farmland and pastures displace natural forests and habitats. Oceans are void of fish, as air pollution blankets the planet, plastic swamps the waters, and debris lies scattered in the remotest places. It’s become an impossibility even to find a place free from human noise, or free from light pollution. Climate collapse, a direct consequence of extraction and burning of petroleum and carbon, has irreversibly altered temperature and weather patterns.“We thrash about, appallingly led, with no particular goal other than economic growth and unfettered consumption,” Wilson writes.
Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals. Farmed poultry makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The recently-updated Red List issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature classified 19,625 of the currently recognized 59,508 species as threatened.
“It’s only in the past fifty years or so that children have been brought up to think chickens come from the supermarket and Nature is a TV show. As with so many things, what we don’t know may kill us, and what we seem not to know right now is that without a functioning biosphere (clean air, clean water, clean earth, a variety of plant and animal life) we will starve, shrivel, and choke to death.” Wilson said in a talk with poet Robert Haas.
Edward O. Wilson fears we have already entered the next age, for which he has already coined a name: the Eremocine, the Age of Loneliness; a single species left in the world, having lost touch with nature.
elephant in the Okavango Delta
There are still a few intact places – not untouched, but habitats free from obvious signs of human activity. These places, such as remote forests in South America, the Congo Basin, or New Guinea make up less than five percent of the Earth’s land mass. In his book “Half Earth”, Wilson demands that half of the planet is restituted to nature as wildlands, for our own sake: to regenerate the biodiversity and biosphere we humans need to survive.
Only a major shift in reasoning, with greater commitment given to the rest of life, can meet this greatest challenge of the century. Wildlands are our birthplace. Our civilizations were built from them. Our food and most of our dwellings and vehicles were derived from them. Our gods lived in their midst. Nature in the wildlands is the birthright of everyone on Earth. The millions of species we have allowed to survive there, but continue to threaten, are our phylogenetic kin. Their long-term history is our long-term history. Despite all our pretensions and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world.
Okavango Delta
About 50,000 years ago, an earthquake caused the Okavango River in Southern Africa to crack up and spill into the Kalahari Desert. Thus, in the middle of one of the planet’s driest and loneliest regions, a lush fresh water oasis was created: The Okavango Delta, situated in nowadays Northern Botswana, is one of the world’s largest and last pristine ecosystems. The Delta is home to the Ba’Yei, descendants of the San, who have inhabited the Delta for centuries without impacting its ecological integrity, and to many endangered species according to IUCN, such as giraffes, Ground Hornbills, Wild Dogs, Rhinceros, Lions, to name but a few, and the world’s largest population of elephants. In 2013, the Okavango Delta was declared one of the Seven National Wonders of Africa, in the following years, 2014, UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing its “outstanding value to humanity.” It is in fact so naturally beautiful, it’s been dubbed the Garden Of Eden.
In January 2021, the Canadian oil and gas exploration company Reconnaissance Energy Africa started drilling inside a protected wildlife area in northeastern Namibia. ReconAfrica, has acquired exploration licenses valid until January 2023, which cover more than 21,000 square kilometers near the Okavango River. Although the Okavango Delta does not lie within the leased area, it will likely be affected. Pollution from oil and gas drilling – despite ReconAfrica’s contradicting claims – is inevitable, as experience has proven. Once the Okavango River is contaminated, pollution will accumulate in the Okavango Delta, as it has no outlet to the sea.
The drillings come on top of other threats. After years of scant rainfalls, and with commercial water use by farms in Namibia and Angola increasing, water has become scarce, and the Okavango’s water levels have fallen to an all-time low.
kingfisher caught a fish in the Okavango
As any pollution to the Okavango River would directly impact the ecosystem of the Okavango Delta, it would affect not only the Ba’Yei. The delta is the main source of water for the region. The livelihood of the San people of the entire Kalahari is under threat. Another paradise lost.
The world ends twice, Wilson wrote in “Half Earth”, Humanity started with fire, with social gatherings around the campfire 200,000 years ago, with stories told and re-told. And it will end in deadly loneliness – with a second, a final expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Welcome to the Misanthropocene.
“We should forever bear in mind that the beautiful world our species inherited took the biosphere 3.8 billion years to build. The intricacy of its species we know only in part, and the way they work together to create a sustainable balance we have only recently begun to grasp. Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world. Our own ultimate future depends upon that understanding. We have come a very long way through the barbaric period in which we still live, and now I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendental moral precept concerning the rest of life. It is simple and easy to say: Do no further harm to the biosphere.”
Edward O. Wilson passed away on December 26th 2021 at the age of 92. You can join the call for a moratorium of ReconAfrica’s drillings here
I started this website, wanderwarbler, in early 2017 not only to document my travels, but to contemplate and venture into terra incognita philosophically, by means of the books, the poems, the lores and legends of the places I visited. My research deepened my understanding of geography, biology, and of humanity as a whole, as art and abstraction always reveal the truth hidden underneath the banalities of travel schedules, or of daily life.
In the beginning I questioned the moral rightfulness of travelling in a world where travelling was a privilege reserved to a wealthy minority, yet equally a chance for the under-privileged to make a living in tourism-related jobs. I believed in respectful, openhearted and openminded travel, traveling beyond the pitfalls of mass tourism and neo-colonialism. The challenges and experience of travel no doubt made me a wiser, enlightened person. But would my tales and travels change this planet for the better?
Makokoba, Zimbabwe, 2019
My hope was to build an argument for cultural diversity in a world ever more McDonaldized, H&M-ized, Hollywood-ized. Wanderwarbler could make a case against Club Med, but support the family-run Beds and Breakfast’s. In short: emphasize the difference between tourism and travel, which means to respect and to treat every place as somebody’s home, and not a entertainment park.
For five years I kept travelling, learning, researching, writing, but not exclusively for my readers. I kept writing to come to terms with what was hard to bear, or witness: social injustice, scars of wars, the irreversibility of death.
Great Zimbabwe, 2019: 1000-year old stonewall –
Obviously, I am not a war reporter. I shy away from war torn places, or countries in turmoil and civic unrest, and my destinations are those everyone could visit without fearing for their lives. Still, wherever I went, on or off the beaten path, I came across poverty and illiteracy, pollution and destruction, and screaming injustice. I held on to the thought that sharing my experiences could change the world for the better, at least on some homeopathic level. Five years later, the world has changed dramatically.
Five years – in terms of planet Earth are nothing, but in terms of social dynamics, a lot had changed. Demagogues – the Trumps, Orbans, and Bolsonaros of this world – scarred communities. Social media didn’t knit us into a tight fabric of humankind, but entangled us in alternative facts and half-truths, in the fake, misogynistic, beauty-filtered world of Instagram. The pandemic and climate collapse, and with it the rapid destruction of habitat and disappearance of wild life, and the commercial conquest of outer space, have widened the gap between rich and poor, between left and right, between those who will have the means to save themselves, and those who won’t.
Franz and Innozent show off their Vogueing Poses in Maltahöhe, Namibia, 2018
For the last two years, Corona travel restrictions have prevented me from travelling far. My trips nowadays are mostly restricted to neighbouring European countries, and to journeys into the past, again and again revisiting those moments that in their intensity, and sometimes in their perilousness changed my life. It’s the African episodes of my travels that keep springing to mind most prominently, like lessons for life.
I often remember Lovemore, whom I met in the streets of suburbian Johannesburg. A tall, lanky man in his early thirties, Lovemore worked as a 24/7 security guard in one on the richest neighbourhoods where the streets are lined with blue blooming jacarandas and the sweet air filled with bird song. He spent his days in his little hut outside an electrified wall, which blocks the view of the villa behind, the pool, the lush garden and the luxury limousines that park in the drive way. Lovemore himself lived in the notorious Vodaphone tower in the city center, a sky-rise that after the fall of apartheid had been taken over by squatters, lacking of electricity, running water, and garbage disposal: a stinking hell in the hands of armed gangs. But Lovemore smiled. On his phone with the cracked screen, he showed me photos of his children, his wife, his family. He talked about the brother- and sisterhood of all people. And how people are misguided, abused, by politics. I wouldn’t be like Lovemore, I thought then. In his shoes, I’d be Loveless. But Lovemore appeared happy. He seemed to live a fulfilled life. We are still friends on facebook and maybe, today, I believe, I love more.
And I remember a journey through remote Tanzania, the Landrover staggering along the dusty red dirt road when we passed by a funeral procession. My driver, Salim, a Muslim, and my birding guide, Emanuel, a Christian, stopped the car, jumped out and ran to hug the grieving family, then shouldered the coffin and helped to carry it along. When they later got back to the car, I asked them whether they knew the deceased. “No,” they said. “That’s what you do. You pay respect.”
Tanzania, 2018
Of course it was those moments that exposed the transience of life that challenged me most in my morals and responsibilities as a human being.
I remember the night I got lost in the Kruger Nationalpark in South Africa. Shaking with fear from lions and buffaloes, I had to walk back to the camp after our car broke down in the middle of the savannah. The Milky Way sparkled above me, a tiara of zillions of brillilant stars in the black of the night, as my feet kept sinking deep into the lose sand, slipping with each step on fresh elephant dung. And I remember, years later, fearing for another creature’s life, when I got to observe three regal lionesses stalking an antelope in the bush of Botswana.
Botswana 2020
I was transformed when I reached the camp in the Kruger unscathed, and I was transformed when I watched the antelope look the lionesses in the eye with defiance. The lionesses abandoned the stalk and lazily lay down in the sun. Life, I learned in the wilderness, is a brittle little thing, and yet it’s only this brittleness that bestows value on it. Only when it seems to slip away, we want to hold on to our lives. Some with fear, some with defiance.
If we all realized that the world as we have known it – a planet filled with animals and birds, with trees and snow-capped mountains – is slipping away between our fingers like desert sand, and if we realize this means our lives, our memories, our values and even our possessions, all we’ve ever owned, will fade as well, will we love our planet, hang on to it like to our lives, fight for it, with fear or defiance?
A Tsessebi, Botswana 2020
No matter where I travelled, I was never alone. There were always other beings around me, humans and non-humans, and I realized that we’re all sitting in the same boat, struggling through troubled water. We all belong to the same ecosystem: a system that’s changing for sure, as we do in a lifetime, and one that’s as brittle as our lives are, and as unique. It is after all the only eco-system in billions of years that brought about human life. Maybe, if I keep telling about the lionesses, whose families are as organized complicated as ours, about the elephants and wild dogs, who take care of each other with love and tenderness just as we do, or the birds, whose songbook exceeds the Bach-Werkeverzeichnis, will it be evident that we are all the same, but speaking in a different language.
Family of Egyptian Geese, Tanzania, 2019
I had to travel to the other side of the world to realize that the life of dung beetle like Sysiphos forever rolling its ball is just as meaningful as mine. Travelling has taught me that I am just a tiny speck in this world, but that I am an important, essential part of it: That I am part of nature, part of humanity, part of every tribe in this world, part of every species. Everywhere is home.
Up a steep mountain road from the picturesque lakeside-town Bellagio, where a forest-covered hill reaches far into the crystal blue waters of Lake Como, there stands against a backdrop of high Alps a little church. Inside, there are no pews. Instead, there are old bicycles attached to the walls, with nametags like “Fausto Coppi,” “Gino Bartali,” or “Alfonsina Strada”. Underneath, the walls are covered with the yellowed portraits of men looking sternly into the camera: Italians, who, like martyrs, have lost their lives in (or off) the saddle.
Madonna del Ghisallo is not simply another church in Italy’s most cosmopolitan tourism hotspot. For centuries celebrities from the Shelley’s to the Clooney’s and even the Pope have set up summer residence at Lake Como in Northern Italy’s Lombardy. The little church, erected in 1623 in dedication to the Virgin Mary del Ghisallo, patron Saint of all travellers, really is a pilgrimage site for the disciples of Il Ciclismo. Cycling is a highly political and religious matter in the Italy’s history, where the fate of riders and races have mirrored that of the nation.
The bicycle was one of the most revolutionary inventions of the 19th century. When mass production of the “anti-horse” picked up in the 1890s, providing mobility and freedom to the poor, it had greatest impact on Italy’s economic and democratic development.
By the turn of the century, the young Italian state (the peninsula was only unified in 1861) suffered from political instability and economic inequality. Italian was rarely spoken in Italy as local dialects prevailed, a sense of identity still lacking. Opposing political currents like socialism, liberalism, anarchism and nationalism competed, often resulting in violent clashes. While industrialization drove the North towards democracy and wealth, the South remained stuck in feudalism and poverty. Bike – and tyre-making factories like Fiat, Bianchi and Pirelli were driving the economy in the North, but in the agricultural South, where there were hardly any roads, the bike found no footing. In the former Kingdom of Naples and Sicily the slow, obstinate donkeys remained the peasants’ means of transport, while the the bikes gave sped up the workers’ movement.
As the bicycle industry provided both the jobs and the means to commute, working was soon linked with owning a bike: to work was to pedal. The socialists were first to recognize the opportunities the bicycle offered when it came to organizing protests, strikes, unions, and blocking off strike-breakers. Soon, the “red cycling” movement was born. Brands like Carlo Marx-tyres catered specifically to the Italian “Comrades and Cyclists”, and low-priced Avanti!-bikes, that came with red Avanti!-shirts, were produced for workers on a large scale.
The bicycle not only became a symbol for the political left, but for women’s emancipation, and for social, individual freedom – and therefore was swiftly condemned by the conservative establishment, who framed it as catalyst for delinquency – bikes providing fast escape from police – and moral decay – the idea of women in saddles being too evocative. For a while, bikes had to carry license plates, and riding bikes after sunset was outlawed. The Vatican forbade their clergymen the use of bikes altogether.
Lake Como
On the other hand, cycling as a sport gained momentum. After the first Tour de France in 1903 a veritable cyclemania had taken hold of France, the Benelux, England, and even the United States. Italy, too, searched to establish its own national bike race and in 1905 the Italian sports daily “La Gazetta dello Sport” organized the first Giro di Lombardia/Tour of Lombardy. To this day, this race remains one of the world’s hardest and most prestigious one-day races.
Dubbed for its date in October, Il Mondiale di Autonno, or: The Race of the Falling Leaves, it challenges the riders not only by the irregularity of its course, from the foggy plains of the river Po to vertiginous Alps at the border to Switzerland, but also by its cold, rainy, in some years even wintery, weather conditions. Whoever, after having criss-crossed the waveless plain of Lombardy, bounded by the vaporous air, islanded by cities fair, in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, could still pedal up the steep Ghisallo was blessed by the pastor of Madonna del Ghisallo in person – and cheered by the masses that throng the road on this day.
Opposite the church Madonna del Ghisallo, where the view of the mountain panorama is best, there is a monument. Two riders, one on his bike with an arm outstretched in a winner’s pose , the other devastated, on the floor by his bike, having presumably crashed. Cycling is not for the faint of heart, and it was even less so in the beginning of competitive riding. In the run of a century many tales were written on the road leading up to Madonna del Ghisallo: dramas, epics, and even comedies.
In the long canon of male cyclists that raced up the Ghisallo one name stands out: Alfonsina Strada. She was the only woman having successfully competed in men’s races, from the Giro di Lombardia, which she signed up for when the race was still open to anyone, to the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, where Tsar Alexander presented her with a medal.
Alfonsina Morini was born the ca. tenth child into an impoverished family in a sleepy village in central Italy, in 1891, when women on bikes were sneered upon, and girls discouraged to even leave the house by themselves. Yet, the stout, boyish girl rode her brothers’ bikes anyway, outracing the other boys in her village, dreaming of a career as a cyclist. When she met the aptly named Luigi Strada (strada meaning road in Italian) a fellow biking enthusiast who supported her unladylike cycling ambitions, she married him and moved to Milan, a cosmopolitan city and a much more liberal place than her catholic village.
Alfonsina rode the Tour of the Falling Leaves in 1917 and 1918, when World War I, which cost Italy a dead toll of 600.000, was raging throughout Europe. But even then, under food- and gasoline rationing, and despite the horrors of the near-by frontline war, the North Italians were craving for the drama on the mountain.
Signora Strada, who “unashamedly showed off her muscular legs,” as a local reporter wrote, and had her hair cut short “bébé-style,” like Coco Chanel would later wear it, finished last in 1917, having crashed (the current ruling was that crashed riders were to receive no assistance), and she finished third to last in 1918.
During WWI Italy had made good use of the cycling-craze. Cycling volunteers were called into the army for transportation of supplies, and twelve cycling battalions were deployed in the conflict. These war-time cyclists made for good heroic epics, which the starving and battered state of Italy desperately needed.
After the war, bike races came in useful: the rivalry, the suffering on the ascent, the crashes on the descent, the pain and the blood of the riders were to become the glue to bind the Italian people into one nation. The Ghisallo was the perfect stage.
Alfredo Binda was from a humble background: a Lombardian family too poor to feed all their fourteen children. As a teenager, Binda emigrated to Nice to work as a plasterer. There, the poor emigrant took up the bike, and, by training hard with this uncle, he became the best rider of his time.
But Binda’s fame didn’t solely rely on his winning – in fact he won so easily, he rendered races boring and was finally paid for not competing. Binda made his name by winning with unmatched elegance and ease. He was a dandy, always dressed to the nines, a lady’s man who attracted a largely female public to the races; an eccentric who smoked, ate large quantities of eggs, infused his water with coffee or wine during races, and even had enough breath to play the trumpet after winning the Giro di Lombardia in 1927. The year before, in 1926, when the Giro di Lombardia was held on a chilling and rainy day, he won by twenty-seven minutes to the runner up. By the time the last riders were crossing the finish line, Binda, having long ago collected his prize and showered, was already on his train home. Some riders claimed that the thirty-four eggs Binda had eaten during the race should have accounted for doping. But that word had not been coined yet.
But the heroic image of the cyclist – a strong mind in a muscular, healthy body – also fit in too well with the ideals of the budding fascism. Soon cyclism was usurped by the right-wing nationalists under Mussolini, who had established himself as dictator in 1925. And, fascism found followers among the riders. Alfredo Binda was one of them.
Because of his allegiance with the fascists, and because of his dominance of the cycling world, Binda was nicknamed “il dictatore.” Until, at last, a rival came along, who would challenge and ultimately beat Binda.
Learco Guerra was born into poverty, too, and just as disciplined and head strong. Yet, unlike the flamboyant self-made man Binda, the learned bricklayer Guerra was a down-to-earth socialist. In his native city Mantua in central Italy, a socialist hotbed at this time, he campaigned actively for the dominant socialist party, and he was involved or witnessed the violent clashes between socialists and fascists. When the first world war broke out, Guerra signed up as part of the cycling battalions, and, upon return from the frontline, he took up professional cycling.
The competition between the elegant “dictatore” and the socialist superman Guerra, who was nicknamed “il locomotive” for his brutish endurance but lack of strategy, divided Italian cycling aficionados into “Bindarini” and “Guerrini,” but united the country. Even in the South, where cycling was still notoriously unpopular they inspired inspired the poor and underprivileged – especially Guerra – as the anti-fascist writer Carlo Levi remembered in his memoirs.
Mussolini, who didn’t care much about cycling himself but recognized its myth-building power, saw in Guerra’s 1934 victory over Binda a symbol for the superiority of the Italian man, and hence claimed Guerra for the fascist movement. It is commonly understood by historians that Guerra was merely exploited by the fascists – but following this bizarre twist of events, Guerra was suddenly the fascist poster boy, and the more refined Binda won fans among the oppositionists. Italian politics have always been complicated.
In 1938, Binda and Guerra became eclipsed by another rider. Gino Bartali, a devout catholic from poor background, nicknamed Gino Il Pio, Gino the Pious, won not only the Giro of Lombardia, but more importantly the Tour de France. Mussolini, sensing an opportunity to prove the world that Italians, too, belonged to the master race, asked Bartali to dedicate his victory to him. The cyclist refused. Rather, Bartali became a partigiano. As part of a catholic network he helped Jews to flee from Nazi rule in Northern Italy by couriering forfeited documents in the frame and handlebar of his bike.
Throughout WWII, as roads were damaged and petrol lacking, the Italian partisans relied on the bike for transport and communication. Often it was women who, like Bartali, rode their bikes at highest personal risk on behalf of the resistenza, the anti-fascist movement. The Germans, who occupied Northern Italy in 1943, saw bikes as a subversive danger: ‘every cyclist . . . a rebel ready to shoot’.
In 1945, when post-war Italy was still in rubble and ashes, and most Italians had to go hungry and homeless, the Giro di Lombardia resumed. (1943 and 1944 being the only years the race had not taken place). Now, in the newly built Republic of Italy – the monarchy had been abolished by plebiscite – former partisans rode shoulder to shoulder with former fascists, catholics and communists. In a peloton of cyclists, who only months before, would have shot at each other, the drama on the Ghisallo was heightened to the maximum.
Among post war Italy’s strongest riders were Fiorenzo Magni, who had fought with the fascists (and was briefly banned from racing in the Giro for this matter), and the communist Vito Ortelli, Gino Bartali, the arch-conservative catholic partisano, and Il Campionossimo, the bon vivant Fausto Coppi, who won the Giro di Lombardia five times.
During the war, Coppi had been deployed to Northern Africa, where he had become Prisoner Of War by the British. But the record-setting champion of all champions went down in history not only for his victories, but for his scandalous extra-marital love affair with Guilia Ochini. He was banned from cycling for two months for that matter. Even the pope implored Coppi to return to his wife – unsuccessfully.
His love affair with Giulia Ochini cost Coppi the victory of the 1956 edition of the Giro di Lombardia. His main competitor, Magni, had crashed, and, in his own words, wouldn’t have had the strength to continue had not Ochini passed him by in a support car and sneered at him: “Coppi is best!” Magni got so enraged that he jumped back up on his bike and beat Coppi at the finish line.
Yet, it’s Coppi’s bust that stands at the church Madonna di Ghisallo, with an inscription below:
‘God created the bicycle for men to use as an instrument of effort and exaltation on the hard road of life.’
Like most riders of this time, Coppi was born into a modest background and the bike was not merely a means of transport, of exercise or competition, but a means of pedalling out of misery. And maybe it’s the trials of cycling, the suffering and endurance of life in poverty that cycling represents, that the bicycle has become the pride of the underprivileged, the proletarians as well as the pesants.
In 1948 the church’s pastor, Don Ermelindo Vigano, had the idea to dedicate the church to the cyclists, and make the Madonna the patron saint of all cyclists worldwide. Pope Pius XII, who also remained notoriously neutral during WWII, kindled in his palace in Rome a flame, which was then carried by car and bicycle to the church, making it the most iconic place in cycling.
As a pilgrimage site, the church soon proved too small, and a giant museum was built by its side. The modern building holds cycling memorabilia that make the hearts of cycle aficionados beat faster, and dedicates the entire basement to the an exhibition about Fiorenzi Magni without mentioning his role in fascist Italy. Either the Madonna of Ghisallo has absolved him in, considering his deeds as a rider only, or he has atoned for his sins on the steep ascent of the Ghisallo.
80 years of peace and the economic stability granted by the European Union has also freed cyclism from its political undercurrent. If cycling has become troubled and political again, it is undoubtedly a self inflicted damage through doping. A fact that might have something to do with the race routes becoming ever more longer, steeper and demanding.
In 1960, an addition had been made to the Giro di Lombardia: an ascent so steep it is called a muro – a wall – in cycling lingo: the Muro di Sormano. At a length of less than 2kms, the road overlooking the city of Como ascends at an average of 15%, but peaks at hellish 25%. The incredibly steep slope is highly controversial, having led to many crashes and many riders have to get off the bike and push.
From 1974, when cycling was again dominated by an overly powerful rider, the Belgian Eddie Merckx, nicknamed the Cannibal, stems a funny anectode that might or might not be true. At the Giro di Lombardia, Merckx was challenged by his compatriot Order de Vlaeminck. De Vlaeminck had escaped early in the race, but later decided not to go for a solo ride. He hid behind a bush and waited for Merckx to pass, then rode up to him, asked him, whom Merckx was actually chasing, then sped off and won the race ahead of Merckx.
This Saturday, October 9th, the 114th edition of the race from Como to Bergamo, passing by the Madonna di Ghisallo, but not the Muro di Sormano, will be held again. The riders will face six climbs, completing a total elevation of 4500 meters during the race.
Even though cycling has changed so much in the slightly more than hundred years of its existence, many things have remained the same. Those who have chosen cycling as a hobby, let alone those who pursue it as a career, know that it is, despite all the gossip and politics involved, a lonely sport. No matter the quality of frame and tyres, no matter the steepness of the road, or the sting of the headwind, it is a humbling, meditative exercise, that strips the rider to the core. Once out of breath, once the legs have tired, there is nothing left but will, or, in other words, faith.
In the museum at the Ghisallo there is a quote by Albert Einstein. Life, he said, is like a bicycle. One needs to keep pedalling not to lose balance. And in the church, suspended from the wrought iron gate before the altar, there is the cyclist’s prayer:
O Madre del Signore Gesù, we beg you to help and protect our cyclist activities. We ask you to make the bike a vehicle of brotherhood and friendship, that can elevate us ever closer to God.
At last, after a long losing streak, the tables are turning. For three years of soaring unemployment, of closed shopfronts, deserted beaches, and soup kitchens, the future looked bleak. Now the golden sun sparkles on the turquoise waters of Lake Lugano again, the trees don’t shiver, but sway dreamily in the early summer’s breeze. Once again everything seems possible. Once again, the people of Campione d’Italia are gambling for high stakes.
Campione d’Italia is a little Italian town located at Swiss Lake Lugano. With stunning mountain views and clear waters, cypresses and palm trees, and dolce fa niente, the Italian enclave is indeed a piece of Italy in the middle of Switzerland. The name goes back to medieval landlord, Campione, who left his estates to a monastery in Milan. A Papal State that remained Italian when the Helvetic Protestants took their oath, Campione was for decades spoilt for success.
The rise of Campione started in 1917, during WWI, when with the sole purpose of spying on foreign diplomats, a gambling licence was granted to Campione to open a casino. After the war, the Casino di Campione was closed again, and the town fell back into provincial slumber, but in the 1930s, Mussolini, recognizing its strategic importance in the middle of neutral Switzerland, not only added “d’Italia” to the former name “Campione” in an imperialistic gesture, but he reopened the Casino. Tax-exempted, all profits were to go to “Campione d’Italia”.
The Casino soon became a hot spot of international intelligence. The US Office of Strategic Services – the precursor of the CIA – opened an office there, and, with diplomats of all sides rubbing shoulders at Roulette and Black Jack, the little town saw a fair share of secret service intrigue and 007. After the war, when Italy lay shattered in ruins and ashes, Campione d’Italia kept prospering.
The Casino provided jobs to a quarter of the 2000 locals, and a steady inflow of foreign currency. With the roulette’s wheel turning until 6am, nightlife was vibrant, with concerts and music festivals all year round. Restaurants, hotels, gyms, and boat clubs and upscale boutiques were flourishing as international High Society and VIP’s promenaded along the lido, the lakefront.
Campione had the best of both worlds. With Italian verve, it outshone luxurious, but staid Lugano on the other side of the lake. Cappuccino was ordered in Italian, but paid in with Swiss Franken. Telephone numbers were Swiss, as were car plates, and insurance policies. From rubbish collection to schools, municipal services were reliably provided by Switzerland, and paid for by the Casino. With gambling prohibited across the border, fortune smiled on Campione. Money kept rolling in and Champagne bottles kept popping, real estate prices soared.
But the rich didn’t flock to Campione simply for the fun. With a moderate income tax, no inheritance tax at all, nor gift tax or VAT Campione d’Italia was a tax haven.
Then Campione started pushing its luck.
In 2007, Casino was rebuilt. At the cost of more than 100 million Euro, Swiss star architect Mario Botta designed a block-shaped 36,000 square metre colossus that offered 56 tables and 1,000 slot machines to 3,100 gamblers at a time. Sitting at the lakefront, the ochre monster dwarfs the old town up the steep slope behind it. Instead of Italian charm or Swiss understatement, the Casino di Campione d’Italia oozes Sowjet megalomania.
The redesigning came at a bad time. The same year, new Italian laws allowed for gambling machines in bars and café, stealing Campione its unique selling point. Then Switzerland unexpectedly permitted gambling and soon three casinos opened near-by, one of them in elegant Lugano on the other side of the lake. Then, unforeseen online gambling became a thing. And really no one in Campione had thought about the possibility of the Swiss Franken gaining in strength against the Euro. Relying on Swiss services, Campione started amassing enormous debts.
So the unlucky streak began. When the Casino failed to come up with the maintenance costs of its high-priced municipality, one after the other, the city offices, the nursery schools closed down. The mayor resigned, and clerks were left waiting for months for their pay checks in offices they had no fuel to heat.
When finally, in 2018, the Casino declared bankruptcy and closed for good, the boutiques first lowered their prices, then the scrollbars. The gyms shut their doors, then the bars. Then the restaurants closed, and the soup kitchens opened.
But then things got worse. In 2000, after long legal battles, Campione was forced to join the European Union, an unwanted “Brexit al contrario.” Italy finally revoked Campione’s old tax exemptions. From one day to the other, people of Campione had to report to Como in Lombardy, crossing EU borders to get new car plates, telephone numbers, even to collect their amazon parcels, which were now delivered by Italian postal services. They realized with horror that no one in Campione had a tobacco license. For each package of cigarettes, they had to cross borders into Switzerland now.
Just when it looked as if couldn’t get any worse for Campione, the Corona virus spread over Europe, holding Lombardy in a tight grip. Cross border traffic between Switzerland and Italy came to a halt, bus service was suspended. The only way to get to Como was now to walk to the Italian border, and to quarantine.
Rien ne va plus.
“S-O-S. Campione is dead.” A banner the local Lion’s club had mounted on the lido read. People now had to rely on meagre Italian unemployment cheques, others went without pay. Debts to Switzerland counted 175 Million Franks. Neighbouring Swiss communities helped their suddenly impoverished neighbours with warm food and clothes. But while some felt desperate, it was a moment of catharsis to others.
“If you eat too much caviar, you will get sick,” the starred chef Baptiste Fournier said in an interview with the BBC. He saw a new beginning, a chance to re-organize the economic system, become independent from a single employer, or from another country. There is, after all, much more to Campione d’Italia than Baccara and Black Jack.
There are palm trees softly rocking in the breeze, there is the sweet scent of the ancient cypress trees in the ear. Red kites are whistling as they cross the cerulean sky, and flocks of black-headed gulls come sailing in to rest on the calm, turquoise waters. A group of old men are playing cards by the lake front. One of them, turned away from the group, is singing the old Italian song Volare, flying, in the delicate falsetto of old age. He looks across the lake, to Paradiso, Lugano’s cosmopolitan lakefront, the elegant lido against a backdrop of high mountains.
Then, luck turned.
This June, a court in Milan approved a refinance plan. By the end of the year the Casino is scheduled to reopen, people are re-employed, restaurants re-opened. The sun shines on Campione again, and again Campione d’Italia is counting on Fortuna. The ball is rolling.
In June 1945, in the outskirts of Lienz, a sleepy town in the Austrian Alps, British soldiers found an abandoned new-born in the shrubs. Certain of her mother being dead, drowned in the near-by river Drau, they handed the baby girl to a local family where she would grow up a “wolf’s child.” A cossack brat. The off-spring of the wild Cossacks.
WWII had ended less than a month ago, on May 8th. The British had arrived in Eastern Tyrol as a victorious army, the Cossacks only days before them. 25.000 Cossack men, women, and children had crossed the stormy and snow-covered Plöckenpass from Italy. It was a hazardous crossing, for they had travelled in their traditional Russian one-horse carts, which were suitable for the vast fields of the Eastern steppes, but not for the steep Alpine roads. The Cossacks had brought along all their possessions, their instruments and incomprehensible songs and wild dances, their jewelry and copper kettles, and a sheer uncountable number of horses, cattle and camels. The Eastern Tyroleans, in their inaccessible valleys had so far been spared from the horrors of war. Now, outnumbered by the strangers, they were in awe and fear.
Austro-Italian border, the Dolomites in the back
But the Cossacks hadn’t come as invaders but to meet up here with the British. Before setting out on this hazardous mountain crossing, in Tolmezzo, Italy, they had struck a deal, that the British army would take them as prisoners of war. The British, in God’s name, should take them, and not the Sowjets, who were advancing from the East, and who would execute them for treason, or the Italian partisans in the South, who had sworn revenge for what had happened in the war. Alas, it was the British who would fail the Cossacks in what would later be remembered as the tragedy at the Drau.
Valley of the Drau
Grievous times will sure befall thee,
Danger, slaughterous fire-
Thou shalt on a charger gallop
Cubring at desire;
And a saddle girth all silken
Sadly will I sew,
Slumber now my wide-eyed darling,
Lullaby, By-low!
The Cossack graveyard of Peggetz sits nestled in a tranquil residential neighbourhood in the outskirts of present day Lienz. Those who visit usually stumble here by chance and find themselves alone with the orthodox tombstones and Cyrillic inscriptions. The lush panorama of the serene Alps, the arias of the blackbirds and the soft gurgling of the river Drau belie the drama of the past. The inscriptions, translated into German “Unbekannte Kosaken” are all the same: “Unknown Cossacks”, and bear the same date, June 1st, 1945. Those buried here aren’t soldiers, a white print out at the gate informs, but at least three hundred women, children, and civilians, who had committed suicide when it became clear that the British were not keeping their promise, but handing them over to the Sowjets, where certain death in Stalin’s gulags awaited them.
Stemming from the wild fields, the vast uninhabited steppes of what is now Russia and Ukraine, the Cossacks were originally – some 1000 years ago – a loose community of freemen: anyone could join them, peasants fleeing the oppressive feudal systems of Poland or Russia, Jews or Christians alike. In the run of the centuries, their originally liberal culture was moulded by their role as eternal outcasts: By fending off frequent Tartar attacks, they gained their adroitness on the horse back and their military organisation. By standing up against Polish catholic oppression, they became fervent orthodox Christians. Organized in Hetmanats, democratic entities, the Cossacks soon started expanding their territories engaging in countless battles with the Ottomans, venturing far into the East, into Siberia and beyond.
Their military strength and ruthlessness soon became notorious. The great powers from the Russian tsars to the Austrian Habsburgers, and even the Vatican relied on Cossack merceneray armies. It is safe to say, that the Cossacks fought in every European war – they defeated the Ottomans when they besieged the Habsburger capital of Vienna in 1683, Napolean when he tried to invade Russia, the Prussians spoke in horror of the Cossack winters of the 19th century.
When I see thee, my own being,
As a Cossack true,
Must I only convoy gice thee-
“Mother dear, adieu!”
Nightly in the empty chamber
Blinding tears will flow,
Sleep my angel, sweetes dear one,
Lullaby, By-low!
The Cossack’s present day representation as national emblems of patriarchal, autocratic and nationalistic societies of Ukraine and Russia stands in a stark contrast and perversion of the Cossacks’ tolerant, democratic origins, and their role as oppressed minority in these very same countries. In fact, the Cossacks were outcasts, tolerated at most but never integrated in Poland and Russia. But the Nazi-chapter and British betrayal of the Cossacks may play an important part in this interpretation of Cossack identity. There is, however, another side of the story. Shalom Aleichem, the Jewish writer of the Tsarian Russia, called the Cossacks the protectors of the Jews. “When we hear the word Cossacks, we grow a new skin. We feel safe, and fear noone,” he wrote in his short story “Wedding without music”, in which the Cossacks prevent a Jewish Pogrom.
It was especially the Russian tsars who used the Cossacks for their political goals. In exchange for tax exemption and personal freedom, the Cossacks served the tsar as soldiers and police force, often exerting cruelty against political opponents and dissidents. There were however, both in Poland, Russia, and the protectorates poor Cossack peasants, who instead of fighting for foreign powers remained free and – oppressed. Accordingly, in the October revolution of 1918, the Cossacks were the first to fight the Bolsheviks – searching to keep their privilege – and the first to join the Red army.
In the USSR, the Cossacks were an oppressed minority because of their involvement in the October revolution. As aresult, when Nazi Germany pushed Eastwards, they offered Hitler support. Reluctant at first, Hitler installed Cossack battalions from 1942 on, as did the Sowjets. Doubtful that the Cossacks would fight and kill other Russians, the Germans deployed the 1st Don Cossack Battalion in the West Balkans to fight the Tito Partisans.
Thy return I’ll wait lamenting
As the days go by,
Ardent for thee praying, fearing
In the cards to spy.
I shall fancy thou wilt suffer
As a stranger grow
Sleep while yet thou nought regrettest,
Lullaby, by-low!
The fighting in the Balkans was abhorrent. The Don Cossack Regiment committed war crimes like mass rapes and executions, decimating the number of Tito partisans by the ten-thousands. Yet, with the Allied forces gaining upper hand in the war, the Cossacks had to withdraw. In another historic absurdity, the Germans now promised them a state of their own, in the Northern Italian region Friaul, right across the border from the Austrian Eastern Tyrol.
Dispossessing local Italian farmers, they established Kosakia in the steep Italian dolomites. Cossack families moved in from the East. Believing to move in for good, the Cossacks set up infrastructure, like hospitals, schools and orthodox churches, making the little town Tolmezzo their new capital. If they weren’t before, the dispossessions turned the local Italians into partisans who fought the Cossacks.
I will send a holy image
Gainst the foe with thee,
To it kneeling, dearest being,
Pray with piety!
Think of me in bloody battle,
Dearest child of woe,
Slumber soft within thy cradle,
Lullaby, by-low!
When defeat became inevitable in April 1945, the Cossacks packed their carts and fled to Eastern Tyrol, which was under British control. There, they set up camp in Lienz and waited to be taken to Great Britain as promised. Lacking a common language and mores, they had little contact with the local population. Some traded food, others medical help. But all in all, the Tyroleans remained sceptical of their uninvited guests.
In the meantime however, the British, fearing for their own prisoners on Sowjet territory, decided during the conference of Jalta, to hand the Cossacks over so as not to anger Stalin. When the news of their impending deportation East not West hit the camp, mass panic broke out.
In an act of passive resistance, the Cossacks held mass when the British arrived. The soldiers found them immersed in praying and singing. Some children from Lienz witnessed what happened next:
“We saw, how the British soldiers rounded up the Cossacks. And at the near-by rail road tracks, we saw the wagons waiting, and then only we heard the screaming and shouting and praying and when we looked closer, we saw that they had locked their arms, forming a tight circle around their pope who held up high a cross. And then we saw, how they pulled them up on the wagons. They were covered in blood.”
The British shot and beat those who resisted. Some Cossacks shot back, but most committed suicide, by shooting their children and themselves, by throwing themselves and their children into the waves of the Drau. Some escaped into the woods, where they were later found hanging from the trees. A few hundred lucky ones escaped to the snow covered high mountains.
At the end of the Day, June 1st, there were no Cossacks left in Lienz.
A handful of wolf-children grew up in the villages of Eastern Tyrol, strangers from the wild fields they had never seen, lacking the words to tell the story, unable to hear their mothers’ lullabies.
CRADLE SONG OF A COSSACK MOTHER by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, translated by Martha Bianchi Dickinson.
As a child in Southern Rhodesia, Doris Lessing used to listen to her mother playing Beethoven and Chopin on the piano, and at the same time the drums playing in the compound. She didn’t see any reason why these two kinds of music shouldn’t be played together. “You had to be much older to understand that African drums and Chopin weren’t really a part of the same phenomenon.“
The teenager Lessing, whose family had moved to the British colony benefiting from the Land Appointment Act of 1930, was beguiled by the endless sky, the cascades of the rains, the melodious crescendos of the kingfishers, and the traditional mbira-tunes of the African work gangs on the maize fields, but appalled by the piercing racism, the narrow-mindedness and the strict social confinement of the patriarchal European society. Like her alter ego Martha Quest, the protagonist of her Children of Violence-series, Lessing left Africa, to pursue a life as a writer and free woman in London. Africa remained in the dark, a tragic, mysterious continent under Western yoke.
Tsitsi Dangarmebga’s trilogy Nervous Conditions (1988), The Book Of Not (2006), and This Mournable Body (2018), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, also focuses on the coming of age of teenager girl in what was Southern Rhodesia then, but is Zimbabwe now. The writer, one of a growing number of black Zimbabwean voices is, next to Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, Novuyo Tshuma, NoViolet Bulowayo, or Panashe Chigumadze, one of the most prominent writers to shed light on the female African experience in the 20th century. Yet, unlike Dangarembga, who, like Lessing left Africa to study in Europe, and who names the Nobel laureate her literary idol, the trilogy’s protagonist never got the chance to leave.
The girl Tambudzai Sigauke also suffers from the injustice and confinement of tradition and patriarchy, but unlike Martha Quest rarely mentions the unlimited Africa sky, or the beauty of rains and kingfishers. For the Shona teenager from a rural village trying to make her way in or out a colonized country, from the 1950s to the year 2000, when Rhodesia turned Zimbabwe, the oppression is total.
Dangarembga’s trilogy zooms in on the lives of the women under oppression, under patriarchy, and most importantly the unerasable effects of colonialism. For all the gold and diamonds extracted from the sandy African soil, Christianity and Western erudition have been imported, turning post-colonial Africa into a battleground of two clashing cultures.
Property and Real Estate, the bible, self-fulfillment and the one-directionality of progress and growth stand opposed to Hunhu, the Shona equivalent to South African Ubuntu, an ancient spiritual view of the world shared by the Bantu tribes. In this belief system, history is multidirectional as the past, present, and future melt into one state of consciousness and the deceased live on as good or evil spirits. Empathy and respect must be offered to all other human beings, those of the past, the present and the future, since an individual can only exist in relationship to the others: their kinship, their family, their ancestors and off-spring.
If, by the British colonialists the Bantu tribes were regarded subhuman, and therefore property, like animals, it was because of their inseparability from nature and the supernatural, from animals, birds, trees, and spirits. And it was this lack of respect for fellow human beings, which cleared the whites off their humanity in the eyes of the Madebele and Shona.
Uri munhu here? Kuita kwemunhu here? Are you a human? Is this how a human being behaves?
Aiwa, murungu. No, it’s a white person.
It is of course an anodyne and only partially correct representation of Bantu culture as egalitarian or non-belligerent. The 1000-year old predecessors of present day Shonas, Zimbabwe’s biggest tribe, built the mystical Great Zimbabwe, which now stands in ruins near the city of Masvengu, were strictly hierarchical, wasteful and prodigal – traits which are believed to have led to their demise.
The long history of colonialization, which started in 1488 with the arrival of Bartholomeo Dias at the Cape of Good Hope, did not leave the tribal Bantu societies unchanged in their philosophy and view of the world.
Missionaries, most notably Jesuits and Domenicans, gradually displaced traditional teaching and medicine, and the ancient belief systems, and Hunhu, faded. Oppression, violation and traumatization have shaped the Shona, Zimbabwe’s biggest tribe. The struggle for liberation has become part of their national identity.
The spirit of Mbuya Nehanda, a woman who is said to have fought against the Portuguese when they invaded Southern Africa in 1530, has returned again and again in Shona women, who then became spiritual guides in the liberation wars, from the first against Portuguese invaders, to the first Chimurenga of 1890 (the liberation struggle against the British) against the Rhodesians during the second Chimurenga of the 1970s. Currently, Mbuya Nehanda is believed to possess a child in rural Zimbabwe.
The spirit keeps haunting Tambudzai Sigauke in Dangarembga’s trilogy, as the cultural rift doesn’t run between black and white, or oppressor and oppressed, but within those born into post-colonial Africa. The teenager Tambudzai, like Martha Quest a few decades before her, dreams of becoming a heroine, a self-possessed free woman, a European woman. But Tambudzai will remain an African heroine, inseparable from her culture and people, lost in the ubiquity of history.
Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in 1959, into colonial Southern Rhodesia. After spending her early childhood in Britain, where her parents pursued academic degrees, she returned to Rhodesia at the age of six to attend a private English speaking school. Her first language was English, she says, her native Shona the second. Only after hearing a beautiful Shona poem recited at a graduation celebration, did Tsangarembga realize that with Shona tradition being an oral one, not a written, there was a need for African writers and African literature with which she and other African women could identify. The experience was as enlightening as it was painful, she said: to think we’d lost so much of it.
Tambudzai is not Dangarembga’s alter ego, unlike Martha Quest was to Lessing. Rather, Tambudzai’s life story mirrors that of Zimbabwe as a country: Born as a colony, a unilateral declaration of independence from the mother country, a violent struggle into liberation, and a troubled adult existence in a failed state.
The rational, the political and the historical intersect in the personal, Dangarembga recently claimed in an interview with the BBC. In her three books she clearly locates this intersection in a woman’s body, the neuralgic breaking point of a generation, or a country. So much so, that Tambudzai is indistinguishable from Zimbabwe, from the land and history of the Shona people. The trilogy can be read a parable of how the subjugation of nature and of a nation, is the violation of women, of humans, of humanity itself.
Nervous Conditions starts with a shocking declaration, one sentence entirely at odds with anything Hunhu.
I was not sorry when my brother died.
At thirteen, Tambudzai, growing up in a village, has but one wish: getting an education, like her brother. But in traditional societies of the 1960s, only boys are educated and prepared for being the next family patriarch. Lacking other brothers, Tambudzai manages, after some considerable struggle, to take his place at her uncle’s missionary school. This uncle, once an excelling student in Europe himself, values academic merits as highly as family tradition. Gladly Tambudzai trades her calloused soles for patent leather shoes, the Mango tree and lantana shrubs in her family’s homestead for Latin declinations and mathematical equations, and the lazy winding river where she used to skinny dip when she was done with laundry, for the paved road leading up to the Sacred Heart. At this catholic convent Tambudzai, after being the best student at the missionary school, is one of only a handful of African girls chosen to receive a Western education.
I was infatuated when we turned into the school gates. The grounds were majestically spacious. I never did discover how many hectares of land those nuns owned, but to the eye it looked like hundreds. We drove, slowly, because there were humps, up past the tennis courts and the netball, yes, netball courts, to a thicket of conifers that seemed to signify that within this rich kingdom we had left the province of the physical and entered the realm of mental activity, because beyond these trees was a roundabout at the top of which stood the school buildings. The dormitories, bright and shimmering white in the clear summer sun, stretched towards us on one side of the roundabout, the classrooms stretched down on the other. Between them was an archway, supported by ornate plaster pillars in, I was to be told, the Greek style, not the Roman.
The Tambudzai of the first two instalments is an overly ambitious student, eager to grow, and willing to erase any trace of African heritage to transform herself into a vessel for Western erudition. This ambition and focus on career, to trade the past and present for a glorious future, and to make a name for herself stands in opposition to the traditional values of Shona society, where women are named after their firstborn.
Her family’s homestead is not a place of nostalgia to the student Tambudzai, but a dark past, a birth defect. Returning for a brief school holiday, Tambudzai observes:
The only affection anyone could have for that compound had to come out of loyalty. I could not imagine anyone actually wanting to go there, unless, like me, they were going to see their mother. This time the homestead looked worse than usual. And the most disheartening thing was that it did not have to look like that. The thatched roof of the kitchen was falling out in so many places that it would be difficult to find a dry spot inside when it rained. Great holes gaped on the crumbling mud bricked walsl of the tsapi, and the hozi was no more than a reminder of shelter.
As a village girl, Tambudzai is thoroughly African, instilled with the gentle African mind set of Hunhu. She is uncritical of the West since her experiences of injustice stem from her own village. From her family’s point of view, especially her mother’s, her striving for enlightenment, for rationality and science considered internal colonialization, a nervous condition, like Stockholm Syndrome.
Tambudzai’s mother is represented as passive-aggressive, a character suffering from her husband’s emotional absence, a woman falling short to fulfil the traditional chores of a mother: to provide nutrition for the family, which was historically a woman’s domain. The racist husbandry laws of Rhodesia, which attracted white British families like the Lessings, made land cultivation impossible for the natives. While white immigrants were assigned the fertile land, African families were relocated to dry and barren lands that yielded too little. Her daughter Tambudzai’s failure to recognize her as a role model represents a further humiliation.
“The business of motherhood is a heavy burden, she tells her daughter. …When there are sacrifices to be made, you are the one who has to make them. And these things are not easy; you have to start learning them early, from a very early age. The earlier the better so that it is easy later on. Easy! As it it is ever wasy. These days it is worse, the poverty of blackness on one side, the weight of womanhood on the other. Aiwa! What will help you, my child, is to learn to carry your burden with strength.”
The problematic relationship between daughter and mother remains a central point throughout the trilogy.
“In Zimbabwe, we are faced with multiple oppressions. We go back to traditional society and conservative patriarchal society in which women are not really expected to have a voice so that again is working upon women to silence them. And then you come into this postcolonial state where the material circumstances are such that women are heavily burdened in just managing that situation.“
To her mother, Tambudzai has become a Murungu, a white person. But in Rhodesia, she remains an African, a second-class citizen.
The second instalment, The Book Of Not, focuses on Tambudzai’s late teenage years at the convent, and the last decade of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. The white politician unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent from Great Britain in 1965. The hair-rising structural discrimination of blacks in this internationally shunned state, leads to banalities, such as missing sanitary installations to dispose of hygienic products, posing unconquerable problems to Tambudzai with dramatic outcomes.
The situation was this: I was in two aspects a biologically blasphemous person. This became interestingly clear as I walked, my head low, to the first lesson. My corporeal crime indicted me on two counts. First were the secretions that dripped crimson into the toilet bowl, or, stopped with cotton wool, clogged the school’s waste system. Then there was the other type of gene that made me look different from the majority of pupils. Even if these others ran the risk, as I did, of rendering the waste removal systems dysfunctional, at least they were different in appearance. How was I going to redeem myself, I wondered miserably?
The solution Tambudzai comes up with is simple: Work harder. With radical determination she immerses herself in her studies to make up for her two short-comings: being female and being black. Her idea of Hunhu gets sprinkled with a catholic sense of repentance and Mea Culpa. The thought of revolution doesn’t cross her mind, not as mortars are exploding in the nearby mountains as the liberation struggle gains momentum, not when one of her classmate’s father is being lynched by guerilla fighters, not when her younger sister Netsai, who joined the liberation struggle, steps on a mine and loses a leg.
In the 1970s, the second Chimurenga, the liberation struggle against Rhodesia, was in full swing. It was a decade of violent bloodshed. Revolutionary armies frequently held moraris in the villages, revolutionary night-time gatherings to boost morale and recruit fighters, or terrorize villagers by executing those who they believed to collude with the Rhodesians or a rival revolutionary army.
However, the Shona culture is traditionally non-violent, so much that the colour red, as it is the colour of blood, is shunned. Yet the Book of Not is blood-soaked – arterial blood, menstrual blood. Dangurmebga makes a strong point subtly linking womanhood to victimhood.
Despite all the bloodshed, Zimbabwe’s independence wasn’t gained on the battlefield. In 1980, following British intervention, a treaty was signed in London, granting political majority rule to Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party, whom the British wrongly regarded as the least radical of the revolutionaries, but maintenance of economic power for the white minority of landowners.
The Book of Not begins with the fear and confusion of a violent morari, and ends in the new Zimbabwe, after 1980, in the euphoria of new beginnings, of first independence and hope. The pain simmering in the pages comes from the reader knowing long before Tambudzai that the doors on which she so desperately knocks will never open to her.
The third book, This Mournable Body, short listed for the Booker Prize in 2020, is written in the urgency of Present Tense and the second person PoV. This can be read as an emphasis on the universality of Tambudzai’s story, but also as Tambudzai’s further estrangement from the world and more importantly from herself. If The Book of Not, could be understood as a tale of African female self-erasure, now the “I”, the identity of Tambudzai and Zimbabwe, are lost completely.
Set in the last decade of the 20th century, a sense of doom lingers over the book, over Tambudzai and the country. After a short phase of euphoria, Zimbabwe experienced from 1990 on a steep economic decline. White structural privilege had not disappeared, but Robert Mugabe and his winning ZANU-PF had installed a system of corruption and personal enrichment. Fifteen years of war and genocide against the Ndebel nation, Zimbabwe’s second biggest tribe, had left the country traumatized as the horrors of the past remained present.
“There’s a whole question of what is self,” Dangarembga says, “We had a self that was, and still is to some extent, part of a tribal structure. But this nation self was born in violence, and we haven’t confronted that.”
In the book, Tambudzai is in her late forties and still living in a cheap students’ hostel in Harare. Her world is a brutal social wilderness, devoid of any Hunhu, of solidarity or empathy. Instead, in the first pages unrolls a shocking rape scene of Tambudzai’s young and beautiful roommate Gertrude, in which the protagonist plays a doubtable role.
They throw her onto the ground where she sags with shock. The crowd draws in a preparatory breath. The sight of your beautiful hostel-mate fills you with an emptiness that hurst. You do not shrink back as one mind in your head wishes. Instead you obey the other, push forward. You want to see the shape of pain, to trace out the arteries and veins, to rip out the pattern of its capillaries from the body. The mass of people moves forward. You reach for a stone. Your arm rises in slow motion.
Rape has many layers, many perpetrators. A scarcely clad young woman is lynched by a mob to reinstall a patriarchal system. But as a metaphor for the raping of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo rivers, first by Cecil Rhodes, then by Ian Smith, and finally by Robert Mugabe, the question of personal complicity remains. History books are written by and for victorious men, women are eternally victimized and omitted, their story not told, nor remembered.
Like a wounded animal, Tambudzai roams the quarters of Harare in search for shelter and an income, some dignity. After all these years, she is still trying to make a name for herself. Desperation governs her actions. Haunted by spirits that crawl on her skin like invisible ants, or laugh like hyenas, she is driven into madness.
“The political trajectory in Zimbabwe has been so negative. If you have a negative trajectory the space for people to operate shrinks and everybody is pushed into this very narrow tunnel.” Dangarembga explained in a BBC Hard Talk interview in April 2021. “If the trajectory had been positive there would have been so many possibilities for a character to develop that I could have had many different stories but because everything has shrunk and everyone, one way or the other, is fighting to survive, it meant that was the story that could be told.”
There is, however, one economic branch flourishing in Zimbabwe, providing both jobs and perspectives for the dominantly rural population, as well as for African fauna and flora to recover from a century of exploitation: Ecotourism. National parks and lodges are drawing capital into the country while investing into wildlife conservation and sustainable lifestyle. Yet, as Tambudzai seizes the opportunity and is hired by a Safari agency catering to the European market, another can of worms is opened. Now blond, pink-skinned tourists armed with high tech photo gear and expectations of exotism, are arriving colonial style; management hierarchy goes along racial lines; racial stereotypes and even slum tourism are promoted.
Nonetheless, in the trilogy, we meet other Zimbabwean women, who dealt with history differently. There are those who joined the army, like Tambudzai’s aunts and sisters, those who were lucky enough to escape to Europe, like her cousin Nyasha, and those who stuck to the traditional ways of living, like her mother. Tambudzai is not merely flotsam in the currents and undercurrents of politics and history. Instead, it seems, that it’s her obsession with success, or rather a specific, European kind of success, set against the ancient African values, that keeps Tambudzai fighting upstream.
Again, after long absence, she visits her homestead where she wants to set up accommodation for foreign tourists.
A couple of dogs are asleep in your family’s homestead. Their bloated tongues spill onto the earth. They pant with shallow breaths. Ribs expanding like the hoods of cobras, which gentle motion nevertheless does not disturb the flies that buzz about the animals’ sores. Neither animal barks at the Mazda’s wheels, nor bays to alert a family member. Your vehicle stops under the old mango tree, gnarled and drooping now, that had stood guard over the family members’ arrivals and departures for decades.
“Ewo, Tambu,” she greets you. “You of the years. Isn’t that right, so many years? If this womb agreed, this mouth would say you are one from afar, nothing but a foreigner visiting. Only the womb knows better.”
You swallow your frustration, smile and embrace her again. Patience is both weapon and victory. How much of it have you deployed in your life? Come what may, and soon at that, whether the people here know it or not, you will be queen of the village.
In 2017, after a successful coup in 2017, geriatric dictator Robert Mugabe was finally replaced on the grounds of human rights violations and hyperinflation by Emmerson Mnangaga from the same party, ZANU-PF. However, Mnangaga’s prominent role in the Ndebele genocide is not forgiven, and with climate change, droughts and corruption still adding to the mix of already overwhelming troubles, the country cannot recover. The Corona pandemic has finally dealt the last blow to a brittle economy and a barely existent health system. The toll on women and their bodies again heavy, with hunger, illegal prostitution and AIDS becoming widespread problems.
Zimbabwean society, Dangarembga finds, has long turned away from Hunhu and towards a transactional society, where not solidarity is a person’s main concern, but the question the personal survival, if necessary, on the cost of the next one. It is, in fact, a deeply capitalist society.
With the character of Tambudzai’s cousin Nyasha, Dangarembga has written herself into the book. Like Nyasha, Dangarembga studied in the United Kingdom and at a film school in Berlin, and, having returned to Zimbabwe with a German husband and trilingual children, she now lives as a writer, film maker and political activist.
After an arrest last July for protesting the government, Dangarembga has withdrawn from politics, as did most of Zimbabweans. The dire daily situation which consumes all energies makes it impossible to further invest oneself, as do corrupt political structures. Instead, like cousin Nyasha in the book, Dangarembga relies on the force of creativity, on filmmaking and storytelling to instill power into people and most importantly women by giving them a voice, and most importantly, their narrative.
“The lives of black women are mournable, although society doesn’t mourn,” she says. “We are still trapped in a colonial past. It is important to experience oneself not as a second class citizen – be it as a person of color, a woman, or an older person. The engaging from a perspective of recognition, of oneself, of the other will do that, no matter what country. A people – not angels but not rudimentary souls either.”
Doris Lessing was a fan of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s. In a BBC special from 1993 she praised “Nervous Conditions” to the British public. In an interview with the New York Times, in 1982, the school drop-out Lessing said:
“I’m glad that I was not educated in literature and history and philosophy, which means that I did not have this Euro-centered thing driven into me, which I think is the single biggest hang-up Europe has got.”
Nervous Conditions – ayebia 1988
The Book Of Not – ayebia 2006
This Mournable Body – Gray Wolf Press 2018
Photos were taken during a trip through Zimbabwe 2019
I was born in Vienna, in a grey, treeless quarter close to the main train station. The parallel steel trails cut through the blocks of run-down, four-storey high apartment buildings like a wild ravine, lined with prickly shrubs that bore like berries the trash tossed from the whistling trains, and teeming with wildlife, with rats and martens, and fluttering pigeons. The cobbled streets were thronged with parking cars, and at night, when the street lights lit up like stars, in their yellow light columns I could see from my window the ladies in thigh-high boots smoking cigarettes between red-tipped fingers.
Naturally, when we were little, my sister and I weren’t allowed to play outside. We were confined to our apartment, which we only left for our short way to school, for a shopping trip to the fresh food market clutching my grandmother’s hand, and for the tramway ride to our ballet school in the city centre. But even in our urban seclusion, where the vast world was televised, but not experienced, seasons did not pass unnoticed.
Winters were humming radiators, and school commutes in the dark, and the constriction of winter coats and lined leather boots. Spring was the freedom of light clothing, the bouncy walk in ankle-free slippers, and the morning air soft and warm against our pale cheeks. Summer was the nauseating odour of dog turds baking in the midday sun, and light gauzy curtains flapping in the breeze. Autumn was chills and colds, and icy rain seeping in by the collar of my between-seasons coat. Seasons were a question of outfit.
Yet, I was always aware of this other world called nature, where there were trees and flowers, mountains and rivers, and wild African animals, where there were floods and avalanches, draughts and volcano eruptions. Nature was an abstract word, like war or hunger, which I had never experienced either. And even though nature had a beautiful connotation, something pristine and biblical, like the garden Eden, it was ultimately a place of danger. Nature was wilderness, like the world outside our windows, full of rats and cruising cars, and strange men I must never ever talk to. Safety was an apartment with central heating.
Since this was the only world I had learned to live in, I couldn’t imagine living any other way. As a teenager, I looked down on the country children, who didn’t have the privilege of cinemas, punk concerts and coffee shops. As an adult, my life, a dancer’s life, was strictly indoors.
It was only in my forties that my world changed. On a tour through South Africa, I decided to offer myself a short holiday, and booked, unknowingly, a cabin at a self-sustaining, permaculture farm in the endless, wind-beaten semi-desert of the Karoo. My cabin at the far end of a bumpy dirt road had no address, just GPS data. It had no electricity either. The nights, illuminated by the brilliant Milky Way, were filled with the bawling of baboons and giggling of jackals. The days I spent squatting at the door of my little cabin, staring at the bushes, where weavers were busy building their intricate nests, and koorhaans strutted in the dry grass, displaying their beauty under the yellow Southern sun. It was there, nibbling on a pomegranate, ignored by the weavers and the koorhaans, that I realized I was part of this world. I wasn’t barricading myself, I wasn’t invading anyone’s space. Nature, I felt, welcomed me.
If environment moulds a person, if landscape is imprinted on a child like a native language, then this is what I am: a creature of the urban jungle. The rattling as the tramway passed by below our window was my ocean surf. The light beams of cruising cars running across the ceiling were my meteorites. The flickering blue glow of the windows of the building across the street was my night sky.
Now, in the second half of my life, I redefined my world. I find in the bird song, in the whistling of the wind, in the immensity of the night sky unobscured by light pollution the peace of my child hood home, the night in wilderness as exciting and alluring as the streets below my window. Nature is not a place of good or evil. Nature is home.
“There should be a history of this Italy, a history outside the framework of time, confining that which is changeless and eternal, in other words, a mythology. This Italy has gone its way in darkness and silence, like the earth, a sequence of recurrent seasons and misadventures. Every outside influence has broken over it like a wave, without leaving a trace.”
In 1935, the anti-fascist activist Carlo Levi was arrested by the Mussolini administration in his hometown Turin in Northern Italy and exiled to Lucania, today’s Basilicata -region, the instep of the Italian boot. He spent a year in the two villages Grassano and Aliano among the poverty stricken peasants. After the war, he published his memories in his book, “Christ stopped in Eboli”, which turned into an immediate best seller – and led to social reforms.
Lucania was an impoverished province deep in the South, far from Rome. A barren landscape jagged with ravines and steep gorges, dented by barren peaks, freezing in winter and suffocating in summer, when Malaria was buzzing in the air. A hostile place, so outlandish, it was barely part of Italy, barely part of Europe, and, as Levi was to find out, barely part of this world.
The vast land lies confined under a heavy, billowing sky. Nature is not an all-embracing source of life here, but a grim, heart-breaking beauty, a moody goddess that demands sacrifice and worship. Packs of wolves and wild boars patrol the valleys, claim their territory in moonlit nights. The villages sit on the hill tops, dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape. Little stone houses huddled together, leaning into the mountain, to hide from the winds: the burning Scirocco that brings the Sahara heat, and the cold storms from the North, that bring the rains. But rains don’t fall in Lucania. They pour down in violent torrents. Until the end of the last century, landslides regularly took with them whatever was in their way – trees, the peasants’ humble stone huts, the little country churches – and left swamps that housed the dreaded mosquitoes.
Levi, then 33 years old, a doctor by training and painter by vocation, was appalled by the living conditions of the peasants. Paralysed by malnutrition, malaria, and various other consuming diseases, they stoically lived on a meagre diet of dark bread with the occasional crushed tomato or a thin slice of sausage. The soil didn’t yield much. The land is fit for olive trees, not wheat, as the peasants were to cultivate, and the goats, the peasants’ only source of revenue, were heavily taxed by the Mussolini regime. Most farmers couldn’t afford their goats anymore and had to kill them. Whether as small-scale farmers or working the fields of the rich landowners in a quasi-feudal system, the peasants barely managed to feed their children. Their life was a struggle, but a struggle they were willing to keep up, for centuries, or rather: since time began.
I was struck by the peasants’ build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips. Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and history has swept over them without effect.
The Lucanians had been living here since 500 BC, working their fields, which they rarely owned. Foreign powers passed through the land on their conquering sprees, the Langobards, the Byzantines, the Saracens, the Swabians, for whom Lucania was only of strategic importance. After the Italian unification in 1961, landownership passed, not to the peasants, but to local aristocracy, or Northern investors, or international companies. But no one ever settled here. They all stayed in their far away palaces in the big cities, and the peasants were left on their own.
Lucanians themselves dreamed of a promised land. Lucania was their homeland, but they wished for another place where they could leave all their hunger and misery behind. They dreamed of America.
When Levi arrived, more men had emigrated to New York than remained in the villages. But many would return after a few years and pick up their previous peasants’ life right where they had left it. Lucanians were, quite literally, inseparable from their land.
Their footprints mark the ancient paths, crossing clearest mountain springs, of which every gurgle transports the voice of the ancestors, a song that sweetens the memories. Hidden in the shadowy shrubs the paths climb uphill to where rusty windmills chew time. Here dreams are made of dust and innocence, and days are uncertain, provisional, and turn to ash in the cry of thunderstorms, in the hurling of landslides, in the growling of earthquakes. Here, where the imaginary is engraved in the sandstone, only the rough fingers of the peasants can decipher what the furious winds have written, her children, in the darkness of Earth.
This is the beginning of Vito Ballava con le Streghe, (Vito danced with the witches), a traditional tale of Lucania. (translated by wanderwarbler from Mimmo Sammartino’s book). It beautifully explains how the peasants’ self-awareness, their identification is entangled, or dependant on their land. Each being is inseparable from the nature that surrounds them: like a leaf to a tree, the peasant belongs to Lucania, like a falcon to the sky. There is no boundary between the world of humans, animals, and spirits. Everything is ensouled. Everything is – not symbolically, but actually – divine.
Like a drop of water in the steady flowing river, the peasant was not individual, but part of a community – a community of peasants, villagers, humans, living beings, of the material world, or the spiritual world. Where everything is connected, acts upon each other, the lines are blurred – between dream and awakening, between yesterday and tomorrow is blurred. Or like Carlo Levi expressed it: They live submerged in a world that rolls independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land can conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature.
Because of this pagan view of the world, Levi called his book: Christ stopped at Eboli. Eboli is the last train station before entering Lucania from the North. Jesus Christ, so the peasants say, never came to Lucania. They meant that in their misery they were forgotten even by God. But it also meant that despite the village chapels scattered all over the land, and numerous catholic festivities, the teachings of the Catholic church had never entered their minds. The peasants didn’t believe in free will, and pursuit of happiness, or some personal holiness. They believed in the eternal rule of an ever repeating cycle of nature, where everything is determined before.
Destiny is already written in stone for everyone, so the peasants say.
Stoically, the Lucanians accepted their fate, a fate that is not compassionate or partisan, nor merciful. A fate needed to be faced in patience and silence.
Of what use are words? None. What can you do? Nothing.
What was strictly separated though, was the world of men from that of women. While the man were working the fields, it was the women who peopled the village during the day.
They seemed to me all alike, with their faces framed by a veil folded several times and falling over their shoulders, pale cotton blouses, wide, dark bell-shaped skirts that went halfway down their legs, and high boots. They stood erect with the stately posture of those accustomed to balancing heavy weights on their heads and their faces had an expression of promitive solemnity.
Of course Lucania was, like the rest of the world, a patriarchal society. Decisions were made my men, and women were married off in their teens, with or without their consent. In the course of their lives women bore dozens, or more, of children, running the risk of maternal death, running the risk of still birth. Children they had to care for on their own, children they often had to bury when they were babies, toddlers, or before they reached their teenage years.
Levi was fascinated by these women, who looked so brittle and old, but were impossibly strong; illiterate and yet so wise. In reality, these women were witches.
It’s from here, these mountain ridges hammered into the sky, that angels and witches spread their wings, following the falcons, princes of the highest peaks, at the uncertain border between wakefulness and sleep. (from Vito ballava con le streghe)
In the reality of the night, of the world of dreams, women cast themselves from the mountain peaks and fly with the falcons. They dance and sing. They heal and cast spells with magic words. They fabricate love potions to get any lover they want. And they always want lovers.
Men in Lucania had to be alert. Women could smuggle their love potions into the glass of red wine they served at dinner. These love potions were concocted from menstrual blood, impossible to detect in a glass of red wine.
Men had to make sure they were never alone with a woman other than their wife. Love, or sexual attraction, was considered such a powerful natural force no amount of will-power could resist it. A man and a woman together always resulted in love making. And many children. And gnomes.
The gnomes were little airy creature, capricious and frisky, who liked to play tricks on the people, like tickling the feet of those sleeping, pulling sheets off their beds, throwing sand into people’s eyes, making the laundry fall off the line into the dirt. They hid things in the out-of-the way places. They were innocent little sprites. Little rascals. They were the souls of the children who died before they were baptized.
But of course, the world of gnomes, witches and invincible love was just another exile. In a world, where women where kept from material power, had their wings cut by patriarchy and Catholicism, it was this other world of magic and spirituality where they would hold the reins.
Maybe this could be said of Lucania as a whole: Where love and happiness were second to survival, magic was a dream come true.
Against his promises, Carlo Levi never returned to Lucania after his exile had ended. Back to Turin, he picked up his life from before: that of a political and social activist. “Christ Stopped at Eboli” was published 1945 and raised the popular awareness of the plight of the South. Funds of the Marshal Plan were channelled into Southern Italy. The swamps were drained and Malaria eradicated, and land reforms came into effect.
After the war Lucania was renamed Basilicata. It is a quiet place. The people still call themselves Lucanians. At night, the witches are still flying.
