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.
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.
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.
There’s a strange guy hanging out in the streets of Naples. A jokester with a big round belly, dressed in white with a cone-shaped sugar loaf hat. His face half hidden underneath a black, beaked mask, he splurges on Spaghetti and slurps red wine from the bottle. He waggles when he walks, like a nine month-pregnant woman, and when he sings, it’s with a screeching falsetto voice. He’s everywhere, depicted on posters and advertisements, modelled from lava stone or carved from wood by the puppet-makers in the old part of town. He is Pulcinella, the symbol and personification of Naples.
Pulcinella is both a peasant and an urbanite, both a stranger and a local. He’s clever and naïve, mischievous and loyal. Old but immortal, he’s both a woman and a man, both human and bird. In his unbound laughter lies sadness, behind his bird’s mask the unfaltering determination to face the troubles and the hard times. His eyes tell the story of oppression, of marginalisation, and prejudice.
As ungraspable as Pulcinella is, his life is well documented. In the 1797 book “Entertainment for Children” (Divertimento per Li Ragazzi) the late baroque painters father and son Tiepolo depicted the life of Pulcinella from his birth to beyond his many deaths:
Pulcinella hatched from a giant egg. Legend has is that was an egg incidentally fertilized by the severed testicles cut off a young boy – his father trained the boy as a castrato, a falsetto singer, a wide spread art form in 16th and 17th century-Europe. Pulcinella’s birdlike nativity could well be a baroque version of the ancient Greek creation myth, which goes like this:
In the beginning, when there was nothing but empty darkness, there was but a bird with black wings named Nyx. With the wind, Nyx laid a golden egg and out of it rose Eros, the god of love. One half of the egg shell rose into the air and became the sky, the other one became the Earth. Then Eros made them fall in love.
In the children’s book, Pulcinella was raised both on the countryside and in the city. He liked to play, and he loved to fly: Pulcinella can be seen swinging on a trapeze, and walking the tightrope. He’s playing shuttlecock, or Badminton, which was called volano back then – Italian for flying. An act, by the way, associated with falling in love.
Oh, how Pulcinella loved to play… To play, being free from restrictions and inhibition, an activity completely unproductive, but joyful, improvisational, and imaginative. Play, so psychology teaches us, is the basis of all civilisation, and so is Pulcinella most basically Neapolitan. Ludere is the Latin word for to play – and Pulcinella was playful and ludicrous, just like the city.
No wonder that high-flying Pulcinella fell in love, and married, and had many children. And of course he travelled the world and lived through many adventures. He worked as a barber, a carpenter, a tailor and an artist. He got arrested, imprisoned and pardoned. He fell ill, he died not one but many gruesome deaths and was resurrected.
In the story of Pulcinella it is impossible not to see the parallels with ancient myths as they were told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis – a book so fundamental to Greek and Roman culture – but also with the bible. Pulcinella has in fact been compared to Jesus, most notably by the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot. While likening Pulcinella to Jesus might not go down so well in radically catholic city like Naples, it is however save to say that Pulcinella speaks on a subconscious level, tells of the constant changing and transformation of life, and radiates the fascination and charisma of Jesus Christ.
Without doubt, Pulcinella is older than Naples. Pulcinella gave birth to Naples, he is Naples and everyone who has ever lived here.
While the myth is eternal, the figure Pulcinella is ascribed to a certain Silvio Fiorillo, an actor and playwright, who lived in the 17th century, when Naples suffered under the yoke of the Spanish empire, taxes were exorbitant. Fiorillo created a character with a rebel heart, a defiant servant by the name of Policinella, or Policenello, or Policiniela, or Pulcinello, or Pulcinella – depending on the edition and source. All names share a conspicuous resemblance to the Italian pulcino, chick.
Yet, Fiorillo, didn’t invent Pulicinella. Rather, he condensed many myths and lores of his times into this one secondary character in his book of 1632, La Lucilla Costante. Soon, cheeky Pulcinella became a favourite character of the Commedia dell’ Arte, the travelling theatre companies of baroque Italy.
The Commedia dell’Arte itself stems from ancient times, namely from the Oscan Plays. Oscan was the language of the native people who settled in what is nowadays called Campania and Basilicata, the instep of the Italian boot. Later, under the Greeks and Romans, these plays were called Atellean Commedies or Atellean Farces. These highly improvised plays, intermitted by song and dance, were not performed in amphitheatres, but entertained their audiences on marketplaces or town squares, little farces that dealt with everyday problems. The noise and bustle at these gatherings didn’t allow the spoken word to travel far, so the actors had to rely on body language and wore costumes and masks that accentuated their traits. These masks were well-defined stereotypes, such as the clownish Maccus, the gluttonous Buccus, or hump-backed Dossennus among others – characters who would later turn into the well-known and popular characters of the Commedia Dell’ Arte.
Probably blending the clown Maccus and the eternally hungry Buccus, Fiorillo dressed his Pulcinella in the loose white clothes that were associated with the people of Acerra, a little town not far from Naples. Acerra was known for frequent floodings and swamps which bestowed on the Acerrans Malaria , and bad odors. The little city had been founded in the early centuries AD by the Nasamoni, descendents of the dark-skinned soldiers from Northern Africa. The venerated black Saints and black Madonne of the region are still vestige of this early black Italian people. But Acerra was also known for its fertile soils and the Acerran produce: fresh fruit and vegetables sold by the Parulani, the grocers, in the big city, in Naples.
Today still, in the Neapolitan dialect, a Parulano is not only a green grocer, but a person who talks and behaves in a rustic manner, in every sense of the word. The phrase Parulano chi fa la Zeza, (Zeza meaning Lucretia, Pulcinella’s girl-friend) describes a very feminine man, and the Fare ilBallo di Parulano tellingly means cross-dressing, a man in woman’s clothes.
Pulcinella was at the peak of his fame at the end of the 18th century. In her heydays, the city of Naples was the biggest city of the world, the pulsating capital of the Kingdom of Naples, center of art and erudition. Artists, poets, musicians and scholars flocked to the city. The aristocracy indulged in games and gambling, and Pergolesi, the composer of spiritual music, wrote the Pulcinella suite.
But also, Italy was under attack by the French under Napoleon, the Enlightenment a veritable threat to the kingdoms and states on the Italian peninsula. A strategy of defence was needed, a figure of identification, of unification. A nation had to be created, and who better for the job than Pulcinella, who had hatched from an egg like Eros, resurrected like Jesus Christ? Someone who meant everything and embraced everyone.
Italy was unified in 1861, and Naples degraded to an insignificant city at the outskirts of Europe. The South soon became the poor and unloved sibling or the rich, industrial North, where cities like Milan and Turin garnered fame and money in fashion and automobile industry. Southern Italians were dubbed the “Africans of Italy”, and this was not meant as a compliment.
It must not be forgotten, that the original Pulcinella, was in fact in an immigrant, a person of color, shamed and ridiculed for their origins. A character who transcended myths and beliefs, gender and categorization, who turns struggle into game, hobble into dance, ridicule into laughter. A character just like Naples, a city whose pure mentioning evokes chaos, poverty, and gangsterism, a dance at the foot of a furious fire-spitting volcano. A city buried under ashes and resurrected. Old and immortal.
Legend has it, that the South Italian city of Naples, built so precariously close to the furious volcano Vesuvio, stands where once the dead body of the Siren Parthenope had been washed ashore. Lovesick, the sweet-voiced maiden had drowned herself in the waves. In Naples, not even the Sirenes are immortal.
MARIA CAROLINA
The teenage princess was appalled. At the court of Vienna, Maria Carolina, second youngest daughter of the empress of Austria, had been educated in contemporary erudition. She spoke five languages. She knew how to dance, to fence, to ride and act with confidence. But now her mother Maria Theresia, the matriarch who led both her empire and her family with an iron fist, wed her off to Ferdinand, King of Naples.
Everybody knew that King Ferdinand of Naples was an illiterate fool. The only language he mastered was Neapolitan, the language of the street. He was dubbed the Re Lazzarone, the king of the mob. On top he was ugly. He had no manners. He liked to kill fenced animals and call it hunting. He grabbed his concubines by their private parts. He shat where he ate.
Maria Carolina begged her mother to let her stay in Vienna. She cried. She screamed. She held on to her favorite sister, Maria Antonia. In vain. The empress was adamant. Off she sent her daughter to the Mediterranean Sea.
Sailboat in the Gulf of Naples
King Ferdinand had ascended the thrown at the age of eight, and the decision to keep him uneducated was a political one. His father, King Carlos of Spain, didn’t want him to be a strong leader, but rather a compliant place holder. The state business was run behind closed doors by a council reporting to the Spanish court – a council that dutifully taxed Italian lands to finance the Spanish wars. An innocuous sixteen-year old virgin from Vienna was deemed the perfect queen for this kingdom at the outskirts of Europe.
Cobble Stoned Street
The immediate consumption of her marriage upon her arrival in Naples was probably the most painful, but not the only shock Maria Carolina had to endure. The Southern sun was scorching and the Royal Spanish etiquette as stiffling and serious as the cobble-stoned city was noisy and chaotic. On top, Maria Carolina discovered that the kingdom was rundown, held in a tight grip by organized crime, by a corrupt clergy and a decadent aristocracy. The treasury was nearly depleted. The military was at the brink of collapse. Diseases ravaged through the filthy streets and the poor were starving. To her husband their misery was entertainment. In front of the Royal Palace he had a scaffolding erected, decorated with live animals and food, the so called Albero della Cugagna. From his window he rejoiced at the sight of the poor fighting each other to the blood, often killing each other over a pig, a hen or a loaf of bread. The young Queen was appalled. But not disheartened, she was after all a trained queen.
Discounted Baby Jesus
Maria Carolina dutifully bore heirs to the king (18 in the 20 years to come), the first son Francesco opening her the doors to the council. She taught her husband to read and write. She established charitable institutions for the impoverished. She championed the arts. She planned workers’ residencies. Soon, Maria Carolina took over the reins of the kingdom and proved herself a capable politician and a strong-willed leader.
Ferdinand, Maria Carolina in the midst of their children
ELEONORA
At sixteen, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel spoke five languages plus Latin and Old Greek. The extra-ordinarily intelligent young women, a daughter of Portuguese immigrants, had published poetry that afforded her the position of head librarian to the Queen of Napples, Maria Carolina, and opened her the doors to freemason societies and the intellectual circles of Naples: the highly acclaimed Accademia dei Filateli and the Arcadia.
Throughout history, Naples had been a center of education and art. The famous Opera house Teatro San Carlo had opened its doors in 1735 (and never closed them again). Artists like Caravaggio and Bernini, musicians like Pergolesi and Scarlatti had found a home in the bustling cobble-stoned streets. In the 13th century already, a university had been founded, and scientists and scholars taught at numerous Academias. Now, in the late 18th century, the intellectuals of Naples reflected on the writings of Voltaire. Eleonora, who corresponded with various intellectuals, was inflamed by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and Voltaire by her. “The nightingale of beautiful Italy” he called her.
Eleonora had escaped a brutal husband, whose domestic violence also resulted in the death of her infant son Francesco. Now she searched to end the outrageous inequality in the kingdom of Naples. Eleonora engaged in social reformatory projects to improve the living conditions of the lazzaroni, the lower class.
The lazzaroni themselves however, were strongly opposed to these new ideas of equality and fraternity. They were profoundly catholic and superstitious. To science they preferred the miracles in their sparkling golden churches. To reformatory ideas they preferred the gruesome Albero dell Cuccagna.They adored their King, who lived unrestrained by political correctness or etiquette. The lazzari were in fact royalists.
In her Royal Palace, which had underground tunnels to various places in the city, Queen Maria Carolina secretly approved and even collaborated with the intellectuals of the Academia, she too was with the freemasons. She too wanted reforms. But then the unspeakable happened.
In Paris, the Jacobins had put her sister Maria Antonia, now called Marie Antoinette, on the guillotine. Maria Carolina was heartbroken over her sister’s death, whom she had never seen again after she left Vienna. She vowed to revenge her death. But Paris was far away, and so the Academia became her enemy.
Eleonora was thrown into jail and Maria Carolina turned into an ardent counter-revolutionary. She, who had favoured the arts and the freemasons before, now turned Naples into a police state, mobilized the army, set up a tight spy system. On the verge of paranoia, she employed food testers and slept in a different royal apartment each night. Then things got worse.
In 1798, on his conquering spree, Napoleon Bonaparte himself appeared in the gulf of Naples and it was thanks to Maria Carolina’s long relations with England, that the legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson came to her rescue. The liaison between the captain, his young lover Lady Hamilton and the Queen led to racy rumours – where the Admiral and the Queen lovers? Or the Queen and the young beautiful Lady Hamilton? Or were the three engaged in a ménage à trois? – These rumors were of course set into the world by the French, who, reckoning that it was Maria Carolina who ran the kingdom, and not her husband, tried to ruin her popularity with the people. True or not, the badmouthing failed. If anything, the people were entertained by the royal scandals.
Inside Teatro San Carlo
Eventually though, Admiral Nelson had other wars to tend to. He and Lady Hamilton left Naples, and without her protectors Maria Carolina, had to flee Naples. Too strong was the hate between the French and the Austrian Queen of Naples, to great the fear of the guillotine. The Royal couple escaped through one of their secret underground tunnels to the harbor and boarded a ship to Sicily. Whatever was left in the treasury, they took with them.
The King and Queen had deserted their people, but still the lazzaroni stood with them. The mob had assembled in front of the Royal Palace, demanding arms to fight the French themselves. But there were no arms for them, and so their hate against the Jacobins and the Enlightenment was their only weapon in the uneven battle against the French army. The bloody street fights left the lazzaroni dead by the thousands, and it took the French two days to declare victory.
Appalled and frightened by the bloodshed around her, Eleonora and the Academia had sought refuge in the Castel San Elmo, on top of the hill overlooking Naples. Now that the battle was over and the French successful, they announced the end of the monarchy and on January 21, 1799 they declared the Repubblica Parthenopea, a Republic modelled after the French République, named after the luckless Siren.
Castel San Elmo, seen from the Palazzo Reale, the Royal Palace
Eleonora believed in education. She was convinced that with some help, the lazzaroni, who had impressed her in their faith and determination, could achieve a higher cultural level. In the Monitore Napolitano, the Republican newspaper she published on her own, she appealed to the courage of all: Because freedom cannot be loved in half… and cannot produce its effects until everyone is free. She searched for conciliation between the Republicans and the Royalists. Their catholicism, their rituals, believes and even their superstition should not be ignored, she wrote. In vain. She disapproved of the radicalism of their French Sister Republic, who was now demanding taxes from her Italian sister Republic, very much like the Spanish had done before. Already Eleonora had second thoughts about the Revolution and the Repubblica Partenopea. But soon her mind was changed again.
After the Lazzaroni’s defeat, it was the farmers of the surrounding lands that took to arms, or rather took their axes and hoes marched into the city. Their rage and violence was unparalleled, their monikers telling of their brutality: Fra Diavolo (Brother Devil), Sciabolone (Big Sword) and Panzanera (Black Belly) ravaged through the streets. Centuries of oppression erupted in ire like lava flowing from Vesuvius. “Viva Maria!” they screamed as they pillaged through Southern Italy. It was in fact the church, in the person of Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, set as vice roy by Ferdinand before he fled, who had managed to bundle the farmers’ hate against the Republicans. Again, fearing for her life, Eleonora withdrew to Castel San Elmo, imploring her French brothers and sisters for help. In vain.
In the dilapidated Royal Palace in Sicily, Maria Carolina learned the news of Cardinale Ruffo’s victory. Yet she was consternated. Why had the Cardinale promised safe conduct to the Republicans when her sister’s death on the guillotine had not yet been revenged? Consumed by hate and rage, she again called on her friends, Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton.
Admiral Nelson did a good job. Accompanied by his sweet wife he entered the port of Naples just as Eleonora and the other revolutionaries were waiting to board a ship that would bring them safely to Toulon, as Cardinale Ruffo had promised. Instead, Nelson had them all arrested. Eleonora was condemned to death, and the intellectual scene of the city wiped out.
Details of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, Museo Real di Capodimonte
Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel asked to be decapitated, a wish that was not fulfilled. One of 120 revolutionaries condemned to death in the aftermath of the Rebubblica Perthenopea, she was hanged on Market Square on August 20. The lazzaroni were waiting under the scaffolding, ready to peep under her skirt, as not even her most basic wish to tie her legs together with a belt was granted.
“Long Live Carolina, Death to the Jacobina!” They chanted.
Six years later, in 1806, Maria Carolina had to flee Naples again. Napoleon had defeated the Austrians and crowned himself king of Italy. She travelled to Vienna, where she had to learn that in an effort to appease the French, her own grand daughter Maria Luisa was wed to no one else but Napoleon Bonaparte. Maria Carolina died in Vienna, in 1814, at the age of 64.
Legend has it, that as she stepped on the scaffolding, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel quoted Virgil, the Roman Roman poet from Naples.
Perhaps one day this will be worth remembering
Detail of Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy, Chiesa Maria del Misericordia
Due to the Corona pandemic I cannot migrate to the South this year. Missing Africa, I dwell in memories.
In the township
Makokoba
There is laughter. The joyful treble of children at play: The girls, skipping with an old elastic rope tied to their waists, are showing off their intricate foot work. The little boys are chasing each other, trying to ride an old cast-off tire, its rubber grey and worn off. White teeth, red lips, little bare feet against the dry orange soil. The children throw you hidden glances and when they see you smile at them, they scream in delight. Their laughter comes as a relief. They don’t hate you. You, who in your Goretex shoes and polarized sunshades, your high-tech camera gripped tightly in your hand, didn’t come from another country, or another continent, but a different world altogether.
Makokoba is a township at the outskirts of the South Zimbabwean town of Bulawayo. A township like so many other townships in Africa, installed by European colonists in need of work force but in fear of Africans. A place to keep the workers close by, to cultivate their fields, clean their clothes and wash their dishes, build their roads and houses and churches, but safely fenced off, separated from their roads and houses and churches. A township to keep the Africans out of sight. To send them back to Africa when night falls.
The main streets of Makokoba are paved, but they are potholed, and blanketed with thick layers of orange dust. A bitter stale taste that with every breath coats the inner of your mouth. A pale orange that clings to the children’s skin and the stray dogs’ shaggy fur, the scattered plastic trash that piles up at every corner, the bare bricks of the one-storied buildings, and the rubber sandals at the callused feet of the people of Makokoba. When you catch their eye, you wave at them: “Salibonani!, you call, which, as your guide told you, means “Hello!” in their language, Ndebele. An old woman – or maybe your age only, yet prematurely hunch-backed and brittle, clad in an apricot-colored head dress waves back at you. Her smile reveals bare toothless gums in a wrinkled face. A young man with bloodshot eyes keeps his gaze at his feet. His gait is unsteady as he passes you by. Still you smile at him. You grip your camera tighter. Not because you fear he might rip it from your hand, but because you feel just as unsteady. You feel out of place. You feel guilty.
The land, fertile and sunbathed, was given to the English immigrants, in exchange for coming to Africa. The land, fertile and sunbathed, was taken from the African tribes that had settled here before. The Ndebele people were relegated to the barren land, far off the water lines, not living from their land anymore, but working for the landlords.
“Salibonani!” A woman in a yellow T-shirt and a skirt of a green leafy pattern wants to show you her garden. She has used discarded tires as beds to plant vegetables. Water is expensive here, you learn, she has to buy it a high price by the barrel, back there, at the manually operated iron cast pump. The rubber tires keep the water from dissipating in the sandy soil. Her plants are thriving: full leaved cabbages reaching for the cloud covered sky. She poses for a photo with a sunny smile.
Makokoba is an enchanting word. Within the century of its existence, the township has gathered fame as a place where African culture has thrived amidst all the poverty and oppression, a place that has brought about music, dance, and literature. A symbol of how a bitter root can bear the sweetest fruit. But still, Makokoba is a poor, disadvantaged African township, where unemployment and poverty lead to gangsterism and alcoholism. A place forever at the margins.
At the market, in the midst of terracotta pottery, bowls and pans neatly aligned, and hand-carved drums, lined up by size and tuning, among iron headed spears and glass pearl-chains and silver bangles, among dried herbs in cardboard boxes with Chinese labels, sits the sage woman. Her face weathered and serious, her eyes piercing. She knows of all the illnesses and their cure, your guide tells you. And you want to buy from her, but you don’t speak the language. You can’t spell the illness. “Salibonani,” you say instead. You smile. But she looks back at you, empty handed. She doesn’t have the cure.
The Sun King is alarmed. It’s 1692 and an army of 40,000 Savoyens have just crossed the Vars pass into the rugged region of Dauphiné in the South of the kingdom. They have overrun the Alpine city of Briançon, the city closest to the Italian border, and burned down the city’s splendid catholic Cathedral. Undoubtedly an act of revenge, since the city’s only protestant temple had been ravaged and destroyed only a short time before. Now the Savoyens are threatening to join a major protestant uprising in the central region of France, the Cevennes. Fortunately, early snowfalls are stalling the Savoyans’ campaign, affording the self-proclaimed sun king Louis XIV time to catch breath and order his highly acclaimed chief military engineer, the ingenious Vauban, to travel to the Dauphiné and take matters in hand.
Sebastian Pretre de Vaubun will leave a great heritag in Briançon. Fortifications that outlasted 300 years of warfare, sieges and hostilities. Still nowadays, the city relies on the talent of the ingenious engineer.
In the 17th century, the Dauphiné is one of the monarchy’s most impoverished regions. The winters are freezing and snowy, the summers scorching and bad harvests frequent. The mountainous territory doesn’t allow for development of industry, and transportation is strenuous on the meagre network of roads, the stone bridges that gap the steep valleys or turbulent mountain rivers are dilapitated. Its strategic position between the Italian Houses in the East and Savoy in the North has made the Dauphiné a battle ground of various wars within the past hundred years. Still, the province is heavily taxed both by Paris and the Vatican. As the two sovereigns lead a bitter battle over the Dauphiné’s taxation, the people, plagued by hunger, poverty and epidemics like the Plague, revolt frequently.
By the time Vauban arrived in Briançon,the city was still in ruins, yet he was impressed with the industriousness. Already the locals were up and about after the Savoyan attack. Briançon was, so he noted in his diary, an example of courage and perseverance.
Founded by the Romans in an altitude of 1326m at a strategically important intersection of four valleys, Its Roman name, Brigantium, Place in the Height, was in medieval times, when the settlement was turned into a burgus, changed to Briançon, as it was pronouced in the local language, l’occitan.
Surrounded by pine forests that cradled stone mountain peaks, where lavender sweetened the air and golden eagles patrolled the sky, Briançon was a city of great wealth. As so-called Franko-Burgeois, the people of Briançon were granted certain political freedom and economic privileges, the rights usually reserved to nobles: the right to assemble, the right to elect their representatives, or the freedom of trade. Together with other free-spirited cities in the region, Briançon founded their own republic with special rights and obligations: La République des Escartons, with its leaders, called Dauphins, due to the dolphin in the seal or arms, residing in Briancon. Briançon flourished. By 1345, the city counted four different quarters within the city walls, with a communal oven and market halls, with three fountains, a fire tower, a central canal that ran along the Grande Rue, for the snow melt. There were the palaces of Lombardian bankers, administrative buildings and royal residences. When in 1349, in need of money, Dauphin Humbert II sold his holdings to the King of France, things even improved. Various Catholic orders (the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Ursulines) that settled within its walls and ran schools at their convents, for both boys and girls. Literacy in the population reached for the time incredible 80%. Crafts, arts and trade were booming. Until, of course, Louis XIV ascended the throne and the religious wars broke out.
To finance the enlarged army, the sumptuous court in Versaille, and the growing administration, Louis XIV increased taxation. Since the aristocracy and the nobles, and many bourgeois as well were exempted from paying taxes, it was a burden stemmed the under privileged classes only – like the people of the Dauphiné, from whom the Vatican also claimed their toll.
It was this battle between Louis XIV and Innocent XII over the taxation of the Dauphiné that provoked the attack of the Savoyens and the Calvinistic so called Ligue of Augsburg. To appease the Pope Innocent XII by proving to be an ardent catholic he revoked religious freedom of the Huguenots, the French protestants, which led to violent massacres all over France. The Huguenots emigrated in large numbers to overseas. Others resisted and revolted, others searched for refuge in the less accessible provinces in the outskirts of the empire – like the Dauphine. The tumults between Catholics and Protestants weakened the empire, and the protestant Savoyens attacked.
When Vaubun was sent South, he was already a household name for new and novel techniques of warfare. He had built in the North and West of the French empire his trademark star-shaped fortifications which eliminate blind angels, and were connected by subterranean corridors. His motto of strategic war fare was “More powder, less blood!”, searching to minimize bloodshed and loss of soldiers. An usual approach in a feudal, absolutist empire as was the French monarchy under Louis XIV. A military mastermind, he was of course a rational thinker, a strategist not a passionate hothead, a catholic humanist with a protestant lover.
inside the cathedral
Just as his patron Louis XIV had ordered, Vaubon turned Briançon into a military town. He came up with a system fortifications that connected the surrounding peaks, protecting both the city, and each other. He designed garrisons and also new cathedral. However, he would never see the finalization of his Alpine master work. He died in 1707.
By the end of his life, Vaubun, had turned away from military towards philosophical matters, especially the Enlightenment. He published a treatise, La Dime Royale, in which he advocated for a new fiscal concept of free trade, tax exemptions for the poor and relief programs for those touched by the famines. Not surprisingly, these ideas went down less well with the court.
More than 100 years after his death, Briançon was again under attack. In 1814, after Napoleon had suffered his proverbial Waterloo, the Austrians seized the moment and attacked France. But they were halted at the indestructible doors of Briançon, where, after a three-month siege they were chased away by the Chasseurs Des Alpes, an army of local mercenaries quickly put together for the occasions. They are to this day one of the French Republic’s elite armies.
Briançon was again besieged in 1943 – the Italian fascists also never managed to enter the city. They were chased away not by locals, though, but by an African battalion made up from Moroccan soldiers.
Nowadays, in the 80 years of peace and tranquillity, Briançon still relies on Vauban’s talent. The city was declared “Cité de Vauban” and UNESCO World Heritage in 2008, which turned Briançon in an important tourist destination, and thereby bringing back the wealth and metropolitan flair the city once enjoyed. Granted, many tourists come to ski in the snow rich winters, others to hike and bike in the summer sun when the scent of wild lavender and pine again sweetens the light blue skies. But the old town is bustling – cafés, restaurants are filled with people touring the old fortifications, incredulous how all this was built so long ago into the steep slopes, the rocky gorges, and still stood tall, braving the weather, the frost and the lichens. Stonewalls built in times of bloodshed, hate and destruction are now a shared heritage in a Europe free of borders and wars.
A matriarch is a leader. A general. A decision maker. A
caring mother. A matriarch guides her family from the moment of its formation
to the moment of her death. A matriarch will die for her children.
The pattern on the fur are unique, like a fingerprint.
Painted Wolves live in a strict hierarchical system that can safely be called altruistic. In the den, they huddle together to sleep, and when they wake, before leaving for their risky daily business, hunting big game in the wilderness of Africa, they perform long and joyful rituals. Dances that show their mutual love and devotion. Who knows who will return in the end of the day?
Fights within the pack are rare. Instead, the pack members
take good care of each other, feeding incapacitated members, and licking each
other’s wounds.
Their leader is the alpha female, the matriarch. When she dies, the pack will dissolve. She and her alpha male are the only ones to breed. Their pups will be looked after by the whole pack. At first the little ones will be fed regurgitated meat when the adult animals return from the hunt, but as soon as the pups are old enough, they will join the hunting party. The youngsters don’t contribute to the hunt yet, they are here to learn, but they will be the first to eat, guarded by the adult animals.
Painted Wolves are formidable hunters. Their success rate lies at 90%, a number that by far exceeds that of other apex predators, like lions, leopards or hyenas, and is undoubtedly owed to their perfect organization.
A typical hunt starts with the pack spreading out to cover
more ground and give each member enough space to manoeuvre. Once prey is
detected, the pack is called and together they spread panic in the heard to
separate them. The ensuing chase will be both long distance – with pack members
performing flanking movement to cut off any escape routes, or driving herds
towards rivers and waters, deadly traps. And it will be high speed. The prey
will tire, but not the painted wolves: Comparable to a cycling team, pack
members at the head of the chase will pull back once they’re exhausted and other
members will take their place, taking the weakened prey down.
Until the present day, there is no incidence recorded of painted wolves ever attacking humans. In fact, for thousands of years Africans and painted wolves lived side by side. Oldest testimony thereof is a palette from ancient Egypt, than 5000 years old, that depicts the big-eared creatures while dancing. It was only when the Europeans arrived on the continent that things went dire for the Painted wolves.
When the Dutch first encountered painted wolves, they thought that they were hyenas – which was wrong. They were soon corrected by the British naturalist Joshua Brookes, who recognized them as canids, and named them: Lycaon Pictus, which is a creative mixture of Latin and Greek, meaning something like: a painted wolf-like thing. What the Romans themselves made of painted dogs, is not known. But they surely held wolves in high esteem, especially when it came to motherhood… With this hybrid name however, Joshua Brookes was closer to the truth. Painted Dogs are neither dogs nor wolves, but their own species.
Romulus and Remus nursed by a wolf
By 1900, painted wolves lived all across the African continent, an estimated 500.000 of them, roaming the savannas, the semi-deserts, bushlands and forests. They lived at the sea shores and even on top of the Kilimanjaro. Then the European settlers started to establish their European ideas of agriculture in their colonies. Painted Wolves, or Wild Dogs, or Painted Dogs, or whatever name they gave them, to the settlers were a vermin. A pest. Their threat to live stock radically overstated.
Rhodesia (nowadays Zimbabwe), which considered painted wolfs “problem animals” until 1975, paid a reward of five shillings for each wild dog destroyed. Their excellent organization was of no help to the painted wolves when it came to shotguns. Government records state that in the 1950ies alone, 3,679 Wild Dogs were killed for reward. That’s more than half the number of Painted Wolves living today: 5000-6000.
Men have decimated the number of Painted Wolves by 99% within a century, making them an endangered species, their number lower than that of elephants (500.000), giraffes (70.000), rhinos (25.000) and lions (20.000).
Habitat loss continues to be the greatest threat for the painted wolves, predators that need large spaces. Their future is looking bleak. The tragic fate of these loving, joyful creatures has been largely ignored by the world.
Until David Attenborough’s BBC series Dynasties hit the screens. In the fourth episode he tells the story of Tait, matriarch of a pack living in Zimbabwe’s Mana Pools Nationalpark. Her bravery has not only touched the hearts of a world-wide audience, but turned Mana Pools into a prime eco-tourist attraction. Tourists that bring desperately needed money into the country, and therefore might ensure the survival of the painted wolves.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06mvrr0
Recommendation: Painted Wolves by Nick Dyer is not only a beautiful and informative book, shot in the Mana Pools National Park, but its revenue will go into the conservation of Wild Dogs.
