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The United Nations: From National to Global Park

An young elephant dies in Zimbabwe during the drought of 2019

When the UN Convention on Biological Diversity ended last week, a pledge was made: By 2030, thirty percent of the world’s water and land shall be turned into protected areas. This comes as a final attempt to stop the alarming loss of species worldwide (30% to 50% of known species are estimated to go extinct in the next few decades), and thereby save the one species that’s dearest to our hearts: the human species.

A lonely Eurasian kingfisher. Last of his kind Austria.

The idea of setting aside parts of the world to let them regenerate from human influence goes back to the late American biologist E.O. Wilson, who, in his book Half Earth demanded fifty percent of the world to be turned into protected areas in order for our ecosystem and us to survive. Thirty percent appears a realistic interim goal – given that currently a rough 17% are already under protection. This downsized goal plus the highly alluring image of having a third of our planet restored into pure, pristine nature, in other words a Garden Eden as our front yard, should find acclaim from all sides. Yet, it doesn’t. Most surprisingly, the Thirty by Thirty-goal was met with resistance from the representatives of indigenous people.

Why doesn’t the idea of doubling the amount national parks worldwide appeal to those whose lives seem most immersed in nature? To understand their sceptisim, the discussion of environmental protection cannot be led in bio-geographical terms only, but conservation must be addressed against the background of imperialism and racial discrimination. Maybe it’s time to tackle the most fundamental questions: why in order to save our own habitat it needs to be protected from us, and who we, the human species, really are.

Dubbed by the New York Times “the most important global meeting you haven’t heard of”, the Convention on Biodiversity didn’t get much media coverage, unlike its sister, the UN climate convention which drew an international Who Is Who to Glasgow this year. Yet, in impact and urgency the loss of biodiversity equals the climate catastrophe. A functioning ecosystem is crucial to meeting the single goal defined at the climate convention this year: a maximum global warming of 1.5C of pre-industrial levels.

Danube swamps in Austria are under threat due to excessive floor sealing.

Nature is an intricate network of interacting species living in complex habitats. In this recicprocal system called biodiversity, everything is equally important, a field hamster weighs in as much as a bison or a ladybird. The eleven bird species that got declared irreversibly extinct in 2021 alone – among them the beautiful ivory-billed woodbecker and the spectacular Hawaiin Kauai O’o – are eleven more dropped stitches in a once tight fabric called our eco-system.

No species and no individual can survive on its own: Tiny birds morph into giant celestial creatures, little fish clean humpback whales, and savanna plants rely on elephants and migrating mammals to spread their seeds, and cherry trees on bees. Collaboration between species is as crucial to our ecosystem as competition –even in the most competitive field of all: mating, as ornithologist Richard O. Prum in his new interpretation of Darwin’s teachings proved.

Wild Carneolean honey-bees are endangered, as is the Alpine rose, growing exclusively in highest altitudes.

We might not be aware of it, staring at the screens of our phones in our air-conditioned apartment, but we are still embedded in a network of living creatures. Forgotten, that until as few as fifty years ago it was field hamsters that held mice in check, and wolves the grazing deer. Forgotten the birds of Venice whose morning songs inspired Antonio Vivaldi to his Four Seasons, and a falling apple Newton’s law of gravity. Forgotten that it was birds who emboldened Leonardo to engeneer the first flying machines, and bats taught us echolocation, and termites how to ventilate multi-story buildings.

After 10,000 years of agriculture, and almost 250 years since the industrial revolution and industrialized farming, our technoligized lives still depend on the lives of honey bees and other insects, who pollinate 87% of the worlds’ plants. We still rely on elephants to keep planting the trees that store our CO2, and on trees to prevent the soil from eroding and the wind from growing into a hurricane, and the evening tide into a tsunami.

The physical and emotional distance from our own beginnings in the African savannah, this rift we have created between what we call nature and culture, has made it nearly impossible to raise awareness to the extent and urgency of the impending disaster. Species conservation is still regarded a first world problem, a thesis for ornithologists, a post-doc research-grant maybe, and not a question of survival. Because it’s hard to imagine our immense ecosystem collapsing because of the loss of a tiny creature like a honey bee, while we are flying to Mars.

A glimpse of eternity. Snails evolved 350 million years ago. Their shells are endlessly fascinating, spirally coiled and chiral.

For two weeks, representatives of governments, NGOs, and ethnic tribes convened in Geneva, tackling in specialized assemblies each of the main contributors to the loss of biodiversity: agriculture and food systems, climate change, invasive species, pollution, and unsustainable production and consumption. They came up with twenty-one different targets to be rediscussed in China, when they will meet again this year. The one catchy concept of 30 by 30 was concocted in 2020 already at that year’s Convention, but since none of the targets set in 2020 have since been reached, the pledge simply was repeated. However, things were moved a step farther this time by addressing the question of where these protected areas are to be established.

Since loss of biodiversity is, like anything else, not equally distributed on this planet, a Map of Life was designed to pinpoint the most promising regions: those who still offer the greatest abundance of species, like the rainforests of the Amazonas and the Congo basin, or the mopane forests of Namibia. Little surprisingly, Tokyo, New York, or London were not on the map. In short, for the lives of bankers to remain unchanged, the world’s indigenous people should give up their hunting grounds, most likely their settlements; for sure their culture, life styles, their livelihoods. Not again.

Fishermen at the Kilombero River in Tanzania, their mokoro carved from a local sausage tree.

In his seminal book “Ecology and Equity” (1991) the Indian writer and historian Ramachandra Guha called indigenous tribes who live in rural subsistence-communities the eco-system people. Submerged in their environment they are the planet’s top conservationists. While they make up only 5% of the world population, or 476 million people, they share their homes with 80% of the species (according to IPBES) 

“Europe has long lost their wildlife, has founded its wealth on exploitation,“ an indigenous representative in Geneva was quoted. “What alternatives do they offer us, if we cannot continue living from our lands?” 

History has taught indigenous tribes to be apprehensive of National Parks. Before Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first National Park, was established in 1872 it had been home to various Native American tribes for more than 10,000 years. They had hunted, fished, and gathered plants in what to European settlers appeared untouched nature. When the German colonialists turned the Etosha-pan in nowadays Namibia into a game reserve in 1907, they expelled the native Hai//om people. To this day the Hai//om live at the outskirts of Etosha National Park in impoverished townships, having to pay admission fee to enter the park.

Wattled Cranes in Botswana, near extinct.

The Concept of the National Park rests on the romantic ideal of nature as untouched by civilization. Whenever colonialists entered unchartered land, they took the absence of fields or permanent structures as a sign of desolation, failing to recognize the sustainable life style of the native people. A nomadic lifestyle like that of the Khoisan in Southern Africa, or the Native American tribes was an unimaginable impossibility. What was perceived as natural or untouched was in fact vernacular landscape: sites filled with meaning, memories and spirituality for the locals. Indigenous culture was overlooked. This first form of ghosting – the silencing, blocking out, the active un-imagining of a group, a tribe, a minority – is what historically predates expulsions when ever land was usurped: to build dams, train tracks, industrial plants, or, if nature was deemed sufficiently beautiful, National Parks.

In the late 19thcentury two kinds of reserves simultaneously came into existence: Game reserves were established to protect wildlife for the use (hunting) or pleasure of a single privileged group, and Native Reserves to push indigenous people out of the way, and out of sight. Private or company-owned wildlife or nature reserves were often turned into National Parks in the late 19th and early 20th century, at a time of rising international nationalism and nation building. The romantic Zeitgeist of the time, instilled with the writings of Goethe or Thoreau, bestowed qualities on nature which should reflect the nation: pure and God-given, resilient, strong and graceful, as Jane Carruthers highlighted in her history of the Kruger National Park:

National parks fulfil an important cultural function in that they are the tangible embodiment of those elements of the natural environment which citizens consider worthy of state protection. … Thus a national park is not merely a physical entity, a geographical area, or a suite of ecosystems and species, but a mirror of society and a vigorous symbol.

Nationalpark Hohe Tauern in Austria. Sublime nature as representation of an idealized nation. The high Alpes are among the most threatened ecosystems on the planet due to climate change.

The history of the world’s second oldest national Park, the Kruger in South Africa, serves as a prime example of how the establishment of a national park often disguised imperialistic, economic, and racist goals.

Kruger Nationalpark, in the Northeastern corner of nowadays South Africa, is situated in a region inhabited by the nomadic Khoisan since the Stone Age, and by sedentary Bantu tribes since the Iron Age. When the European settlers, the Vortrekkers, and the British colonialists arrived in the 19th century, the area was abundant with wildlife. Due to the novel use of firearms, the Vortrekker’s growing need of meat, and the British lust for hunting, animals were killed to near extinction.

Blue Roller, once abundant, is now extinct in Western Europe. It’s Eastern European cousin migrates to South Africa and back each year.

Game reserves were hence established by the administration to protect and manage the remaining herds of antilopes. Contrary to the Vortrekkers, the British didn’t hunt for sustenance. Rather, hunting was regarded a noble, elistist sport, and sport hunting as the only morally acceptable form of killing wildlife. It was in this vein that predators like lions, hyenas, wild dogs, or leopards were destroyed as vermin. Their killing was even rewarded by local administration. As predators, they were competitors to the British sportsmen.

The African residents were either evicted from the game reserve to Native reserves, or made to pay rent. Officially, this happened to protect the wildlife from sustenance hunters – the Africans and the poor Afrikaaners. In reality, their impact on the reduction of wildlife was minor. Rather, they were deprived from their livelihoods as the diamond mines and agricultural plants of the emerging nation were in dire need of cheap workforce.

Persona non grata – animalium non gratum. After excessive hunting, the once abundant painted wolf or wild dog is now a threatened species. Less than 5,000 Painted Wolves are left worldwide.

When, in 1926, shortly after the foundation of the Afrikaaner Union of South Africa, the Kruger National Park was established by merging two private game reserves, it was in a spirit of nascent Afrikaaner nationalism. The National park was a tool to promote and romanticize the Vortrekker heritage: the land as it was when the Vortrekker arrived, and the dangers they had to overcome, voracious lions and ferocious buffaloes. With the creation of a national myth, the white population of South Africa was to be glued into a nation, one valiant, heroic people which the wildlife represented. While the rest of the country was industrialized, filled with dumps from the diamond miles, and flattened for endless fruit plants, inside the electrified fences that surrounded the Kruger, a Garden Eden was preserved. Pristine nature as God had created was to serve the spiritual regeneration of paying visitors. The Africans were fenced out, made into Un-inhabitants of South Africa.

The Waldrapp, extinct from overhunting in the 18th century, was bred at the Vienna Zoo and reintroduced into its Alpine habitat.

From an indigenous point of view, national parks, in South Africa and elsewhere, were not established to conserve, but to destroy: their livelihood, their tradition, their culture. Naturally, and politically, we have come a long way. The days of apartheid and racial segregation are long gone, and National Parks have indeed become refuges for conservation and protection, for scientific research and reintroduction programs. As tourism hot spots they employ well trained rangers, thereby offering perspective, job opportunities and ensuing wealth to the surrounding communities. Yet, inside the African National Parks, the old imperialist ideas have often survived. Game Lodges cater to affluent tourists from Europe or the US, conjuring up the once glorious past with colonial style tents and candlelight dinners under the Milky Way, and solemn African waiters that discreetly withdraw into the night. The African townships dwellers never get to see a rhinoceros, a lion, or an elephant. Their habitat is the overcrowded cities.

Children playing in downtown Johannesburg, 2015

Ramachandra Guha, who minced the term eco-system people, also had a name for us, the Westerners: omnivores. We are the wealthy consumers who overstrain the planet. Insatiably, we eat everything. In lack of competitors, we have thrown the ecosystem off balance. Like an unstoppable comet, we are causing the planet’s 6th extinction.

It is not humanity, human kind, from whom the nature needs to be protected, fenced off in National Parks, but the omnivores: Jeff Bezos and wanna-be Jeff Bezos of this planet. We urgently need the ecosystem people to protect us, and our planet.

In this sense it is important to redefine the concept of a nationalpark as a region protected from human exploitation, but not devoid of humans. A space to live in, not an entertainment park for the wealthy. If thirty or fifty percent of the world are turned into protected areas, they must be returned to the eco-system people for them to hunt and fish, to fertilize the soil with controlled fires, to grow their traditional vegetables, to thank and venerate their Earth Gods and spirits. And thereby, hopefully, they will teach us, or refresh our memories of how to live enmeshed in a network of collaborating species, how not to exploit but to give and take, to become the ecosystem people we once were. Then no part of the world will need to be protected, but the planet will be our habitat again. A place for all of us, fellow species and ethnicities.

The Okavango Delta, the world’s largest wetlands is under threat from oil drilling by the Canadian ReckonAfrica
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Namibia/Botswana: The Age of Loneliness

Humanity arose from the African savannas. As frequent lightning struck and set the grasslands in flames, homo erectus, a split-off from the ape lineage, learned how to control fire. The easily digestible calories from cooked meat were a tremendous advantage over competing species, like the chimpanzees and bonobos. Homo erectus started walking on their hind legs, which freed their front legs to carry weapons, and bounty, and their off-spring on the run. With their brain size enlarged, around 200,000 years ago, homo erectus evolved into homo sapiens. Into humans. Us. a lucky accident of primate evolution.

Like other large mammals of the savanna, the apes, wild dogs, elephants, and lions, early humans lived in highly organized societies marked by collaboration and division of labour. But at night, only the humans sat around the fire, and talked, and told each other stories. We know all this, because there are still some around who live very much like the first humans in Southern Africa: the /Xam, the Ju/’hoansi, the !Ko, the Nharo, the Heixom, the G/wi and other nomadic tribes more commonly known as San, or Bushmen. Hunters and gatherers who once travelled long distances, they are now confined to a small territory in the Kalahari desert of Namibia and Botswana, struggling to hold on to their ancient lifestyle, in tightly knit communities without chiefs or religious leaders, with a view of the world where everything is possessed by divine spirit. The San are what we once were, in the Garden Of Eden, before the Fall.

Northern Namibia

But of course, the savanna with its fierce competition among predators, with bushfires and torrential rains, never was a biblical garden Eden. And of course the San didn’t live in constant enchantment by the sprites of nature. Rather, they have been living in a state of respectfulness – granting animals the same rights as themselves, valuing nature as much as their culture; outsmarting predators and prey, knowledgeable of roots and grasses, savants of the changing skies. Quite unsentimentally, theirs was, or is, a lifestyle perfectly adapted to their environment, to the circumstance and age that age that brought about us humans: the Holocene, the Age of Mammals, which followed the Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs. If ever there was a Garden of Eden, it was not a place, but a manner of living.

Obviously, we don’t live in this Garden of Eden anymore, but on a planet transformed by human activity, in a new age called Anthropocene. Why were we expelled from our garden Eden? Was it the original sin, as the bible says, or was it rather the combination of swift technological progress with the worst of human nature, as biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson said?

Grassland with Aloe Vera

Edward O. Wilson, regarded the greatest biologist and one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, has in his lifetime witnessed the so called sixth extinction, the alarming rate of extinction of species in the past fifty years. Half of the Earth’s living creatures, from animals and insects, are estimated to have been lost since 1971.

Biodiversity as a whole forms a shield protecting each of the species that together compose it, ourselves included. What will happen if, in addition to the species already extinguished by human activity, say, 10 percent of those remaining are taken away? Or 50 percent? Or 90 percent? As more and more species vanish or drop to near extinction, the rate of extinction of the survivors accelerates…. As extinction mounts, biodiversity reaches a dipping point at which the ecosystem collapses, Wilson wrote in 2016

Humanity as a species is perfectly adapted to excel in the Holocene, the biosphere and biodiversity of the past 200,000 years. In the Anthropocene, though, we find ourselves as vulnerable and helpless as we would have been in the Mesozoic period: an evolutionary cul-de-sac, easy to prey to a T.Rex called rising sea levels, or draughts and deluges, shortness of food, and water, and oxygen.

Endangered species: There are less than 6000 wild dogs living in the wild.

Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground, so the bible said. Consequently, there are very few places on this world left intact, free from human impact. Farmland and pastures displace natural forests and habitats. Oceans are void of fish, as air pollution blankets the planet, plastic swamps the waters, and debris lies scattered in the remotest places. It’s become an impossibility even to find a place free from human noise, or free from light pollution. Climate collapse, a direct consequence of extraction and burning of petroleum and carbon, has irreversibly altered temperature and weather patterns.“We thrash about, appallingly led, with no particular goal other than economic growth and unfettered consumption,” Wilson writes.

Of all the mammals on Earth, 96% are livestock and humans, only 4% are wild mammals. Farmed poultry makes up 70% of all birds on the planet, with just 30% being wild. The recently-updated Red List issued by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature classified 19,625 of the currently recognized 59,508 species as threatened.

“It’s only in the past fifty years or so that children have been brought up to think chickens come from the supermarket and Nature is a TV show. As with so many things, what we don’t know may kill us, and what we seem not to know right now is that without a functioning biosphere (clean air, clean water, clean earth, a variety of plant and animal life) we will starve, shrivel, and choke to death.” Wilson said in a talk with poet Robert Haas.

Edward O. Wilson fears we have already entered the next age, for which he has already coined a name: the Eremocine, the Age of Loneliness; a single species left in the world, having lost touch with nature.

elephant in the Okavango Delta

There are still a few intact places – not untouched, but habitats free from obvious signs of human activity. These places, such as remote forests in South America, the Congo Basin, or New Guinea make up less than five percent of the Earth’s land mass. In his book “Half Earth”, Wilson demands that half of the planet is restituted to nature as wildlands, for our own sake: to regenerate the biodiversity and biosphere we humans need to survive.

Only a major shift in reasoning, with greater commitment given to the rest of life, can meet this greatest challenge of the century. Wildlands are our birthplace. Our civilizations were built from them. Our food and most of our dwellings and vehicles were derived from them. Our gods lived in their midst. Nature in the wildlands is the birthright of everyone on Earth. The millions of species we have allowed to survive there, but continue to threaten, are our phylogenetic kin. Their long-term history is our long-term history. Despite all our pretensions and fantasies, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world.  

Okavango Delta

About 50,000 years ago, an earthquake caused the Okavango River in Southern Africa to crack up and spill into the Kalahari Desert. Thus, in the middle of one of the planet’s driest and loneliest regions, a lush fresh water oasis was created: The Okavango Delta, situated in nowadays Northern Botswana, is one of the world’s largest and last pristine ecosystems. The Delta is home to the Ba’Yei, descendants of the San, who have inhabited the Delta for centuries without impacting its ecological integrity, and to many endangered species according to IUCN, such as giraffes, Ground Hornbills, Wild Dogs, Rhinceros, Lions, to name but a few, and the world’s largest population of elephants. In 2013, the Okavango Delta was declared one of the Seven National Wonders of Africa, in the following years, 2014, UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognizing its “outstanding value to humanity.” It is in fact so naturally beautiful, it’s been dubbed the Garden Of Eden.

In January 2021, the Canadian oil and gas exploration company Reconnaissance Energy Africa started drilling inside a protected wildlife area in northeastern Namibia. ReconAfrica, has acquired exploration licenses valid until January 2023, which cover more than 21,000 square kilometers near the Okavango River. Although the Okavango Delta does not lie within the leased area, it will likely be affected. Pollution from oil and gas drilling – despite ReconAfrica’s contradicting claims – is inevitable, as experience has proven. Once the Okavango River is contaminated, pollution will accumulate in the Okavango Delta, as it has no outlet to the sea.

The drillings come on top of other threats. After years of scant rainfalls, and with commercial water use by farms in Namibia and Angola increasing, water has become scarce, and the Okavango’s water levels have fallen to an all-time low.

kingfisher caught a fish in the Okavango

As any pollution to the Okavango River would directly impact the ecosystem of the Okavango Delta, it would affect not only the Ba’Yei. The delta is the main source of water for the region. The livelihood of the San people of the entire Kalahari is under threat. Another paradise lost.

The world ends twice, Wilson wrote in “Half Earth”, Humanity started with fire, with social gatherings around the campfire 200,000 years ago, with stories told and re-told. And it will end in deadly loneliness – with a second, a final expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Welcome to the Misanthropocene.

“We should forever bear in mind that the beautiful world our species inherited took the biosphere 3.8 billion years to build. The intricacy of its species we know only in part, and the way they work together to create a sustainable balance we have only recently begun to grasp. Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world. Our own ultimate future depends upon that understanding. We have come a very long way through the barbaric period in which we still live, and now I believe we’ve learned enough to adopt a transcendental moral precept concerning the rest of life. It is simple and easy to say: Do no further harm to the biosphere.”

Edward O. Wilson passed away on December 26th 2021 at the age of 92. You can join the call for a moratorium of ReconAfrica’s drillings here

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5-YEAR RECAP

Tanzania, 2018

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.

In Matera, 2021

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Italy: And God Created the Bicycle

Up a steep mountain road from the picturesque lakeside-town Bellagio, where a forest-covered hill reaches far into the crystal blue waters of Lake Como, there stands against a backdrop of high Alps a little church. Inside, there are no pews. Instead, there are old bicycles attached to the walls, with nametags like “Fausto Coppi,” “Gino Bartali,” or “Alfonsina Strada”. Underneath, the walls are covered with the yellowed portraits of men looking sternly into the camera: Italians, who, like martyrs, have lost their lives in (or off) the saddle.

Madonna del Ghisallo is not simply another church in Italy’s most cosmopolitan tourism hotspot. For centuries celebrities from the Shelley’s to the Clooney’s and even the Pope have set up summer residence at Lake Como in Northern Italy’s Lombardy. The little church, erected in 1623 in dedication to the Virgin Mary del Ghisallo, patron Saint of all travellers, really is a pilgrimage site for the disciples of Il Ciclismo. Cycling is a highly political and religious matter in the Italy’s history, where the fate of riders and races have mirrored that of the nation.

The bicycle was one of the most revolutionary inventions of the 19th century. When mass production of the “anti-horse” picked up in the 1890s, providing mobility and freedom to the poor, it had greatest impact on Italy’s economic and democratic development.

By the turn of the century, the young Italian state (the peninsula was only unified in 1861) suffered from political instability and economic inequality. Italian was rarely spoken in Italy as local dialects prevailed, a sense of identity still lacking. Opposing political currents like socialism, liberalism, anarchism and nationalism competed, often resulting in violent clashes. While industrialization drove the North towards democracy and wealth, the South remained stuck in feudalism and poverty. Bike – and tyre-making factories like Fiat, Bianchi and Pirelli were driving the economy in the North, but in the agricultural South, where there were hardly any roads, the bike found no footing. In the former Kingdom of Naples and Sicily the slow, obstinate donkeys remained the peasants’ means of transport, while the the bikes gave sped up the workers’ movement.

As the bicycle industry provided both the jobs and the means to commute, working was soon linked with owning a bike: to work was to pedal. The socialists were first to recognize the opportunities the bicycle offered when it came to organizing protests, strikes, unions, and blocking off strike-breakers. Soon, the “red cycling” movement was born. Brands like Carlo Marx-tyres catered specifically to the Italian “Comrades and Cyclists”, and low-priced Avanti!-bikes, that came with red Avanti!-shirts, were produced for workers on a large scale.

The bicycle not only became a symbol for the political left, but for women’s emancipation, and for social, individual freedom – and therefore was swiftly condemned by the conservative establishment, who framed it as catalyst for delinquency – bikes providing fast escape from police – and moral decay – the idea of women in saddles being too evocative. For a while, bikes had to carry license plates, and riding bikes after sunset was outlawed. The Vatican forbade their clergymen the use of bikes altogether.

Lake Como

On the other hand, cycling as a sport gained momentum. After the first Tour de France in 1903 a veritable cyclemania had taken hold of France, the Benelux, England, and even the United States. Italy, too, searched to establish its own national bike race and in 1905 the Italian sports daily “La Gazetta dello Sport” organized the first Giro di Lombardia/Tour of Lombardy. To this day, this race remains one of the world’s hardest and most prestigious one-day races.

Dubbed for its date in October, Il Mondiale di Autonno, or: The Race of the Falling Leaves, it challenges the riders not only by the irregularity of its course, from the foggy plains of the river Po to vertiginous Alps at the border to Switzerland, but also by its cold, rainy, in some years even wintery, weather conditions. Whoever, after having criss-crossed the waveless plain of Lombardy, bounded by the vaporous air, islanded by cities fair, in the words of Percy Bysshe Shelley, could still pedal up the steep Ghisallo was blessed by the pastor of Madonna del Ghisallo in person – and cheered by the masses that throng the road on this day.

Opposite the church Madonna del Ghisallo, where the view of the mountain panorama is best, there is a monument. Two riders, one on his bike with an arm outstretched in a winner’s pose , the other devastated, on the floor by his bike, having presumably crashed. Cycling is not for the faint of heart, and it was even less so in the beginning of competitive riding. In the run of a century many tales were written on the road leading up to Madonna del Ghisallo: dramas, epics, and even comedies.

In the long canon of male cyclists that raced up the Ghisallo one name stands out: Alfonsina Strada. She was the only woman having successfully competed in men’s races, from the Giro di Lombardia, which she signed up for when the race was still open to anyone, to the Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, where Tsar Alexander presented her with a medal.

Alfonsina Morini was born the ca. tenth child into an impoverished family in a sleepy village in central Italy, in 1891, when women on bikes were sneered upon, and girls discouraged to even leave the house by themselves. Yet, the stout, boyish girl rode her brothers’ bikes anyway, outracing the other boys in her village, dreaming of a career as a cyclist. When she met the aptly named Luigi Strada (strada meaning road in Italian) a fellow biking enthusiast who supported her unladylike cycling ambitions, she married him and moved to Milan, a cosmopolitan city and a much more liberal place than her catholic village.

Alfonsina rode the Tour of the Falling Leaves in 1917 and 1918, when World War I, which cost Italy a dead toll of 600.000, was raging throughout Europe. But even then, under food- and gasoline rationing, and despite the horrors of the near-by frontline war, the North Italians were craving for the drama on the mountain.

Signora Strada, who “unashamedly showed off her muscular legs,” as a local reporter wrote, and had her hair cut short “bébé-style,” like Coco Chanel would later wear it, finished last in 1917, having crashed (the current ruling was that crashed riders were to receive no assistance), and she finished third to last in 1918.

During WWI Italy had made good use of the cycling-craze. Cycling volunteers were called into the army for transportation of supplies, and twelve cycling battalions were deployed in the conflict. These war-time cyclists made for good heroic epics, which the starving and battered state of Italy desperately needed.

After the war, bike races came in useful: the rivalry, the suffering on the ascent, the crashes on the descent, the pain and the blood of the riders were to become the glue to bind the Italian people into one nation. The Ghisallo was the perfect stage.

Alfredo Binda was from a humble background: a Lombardian family too poor to feed all their fourteen children. As a teenager, Binda emigrated to Nice to work as a plasterer. There, the poor emigrant took up the bike, and, by training hard with this uncle, he became the best rider of his time.

But Binda’s fame didn’t solely rely on his winning – in fact he won so easily, he rendered races boring and was finally paid for not competing. Binda made his name by winning with unmatched elegance and ease. He was a dandy, always dressed to the nines, a lady’s man who attracted a largely female public to the races; an eccentric who smoked, ate large quantities of eggs, infused his water with coffee or wine during races, and even had enough breath to play the trumpet after winning the Giro di Lombardia in 1927. The year before, in 1926, when the Giro di Lombardia was held on a chilling and rainy day, he won by twenty-seven minutes to the runner up. By the time the last riders were crossing the finish line, Binda, having long ago collected his prize and showered, was already on his train home. Some riders claimed that the thirty-four eggs Binda had eaten during the race should have accounted for doping. But that word had not been coined yet.

But the heroic image of the cyclist – a strong mind in a muscular, healthy body – also fit in too well with the ideals of the budding fascism. Soon cyclism was usurped by the right-wing nationalists under Mussolini, who had established himself as dictator in 1925. And, fascism found followers among the riders. Alfredo Binda was one of them.

Because of his allegiance with the fascists, and because of his dominance of the cycling world, Binda was nicknamed “il dictatore.” Until, at last, a rival came along, who would challenge and ultimately beat Binda.  

Learco Guerra was born into poverty, too, and just as disciplined and head strong. Yet, unlike the flamboyant self-made man Binda, the learned bricklayer Guerra was a down-to-earth socialist. In his native city Mantua in central Italy, a socialist hotbed at this time, he campaigned actively for the dominant socialist party, and he was involved or witnessed the violent clashes between socialists and fascists. When the first world war broke out, Guerra signed up as part of the cycling battalions, and, upon return from the frontline, he took up professional cycling.

The competition between the elegant “dictatore” and the socialist superman Guerra, who was nicknamed “il locomotive” for his brutish endurance but lack of strategy, divided Italian cycling aficionados into “Bindarini” and “Guerrini,” but united the country. Even in the South, where cycling was still notoriously unpopular they inspired inspired the poor and underprivileged – especially Guerra – as the anti-fascist writer Carlo Levi remembered in his memoirs.

Mussolini, who didn’t care much about cycling himself but recognized its myth-building power, saw in Guerra’s 1934 victory over Binda a symbol for the superiority of the Italian man, and hence claimed Guerra for the fascist movement. It is commonly understood by historians that Guerra was merely exploited by the fascists – but following this bizarre twist of events, Guerra was suddenly the fascist poster boy, and the more refined Binda won fans among the oppositionists. Italian politics have always been complicated.

In 1938, Binda and Guerra became eclipsed by another rider. Gino Bartali, a devout catholic from poor background, nicknamed Gino Il Pio, Gino the Pious, won not only the Giro of Lombardia, but more importantly the Tour de France. Mussolini, sensing an opportunity to prove the world that Italians, too, belonged to the master race, asked Bartali to dedicate his victory to him. The cyclist refused. Rather, Bartali became a partigiano. As part of a catholic network he helped Jews to flee from Nazi rule in Northern Italy by couriering forfeited documents in the frame and handlebar of his bike.

Throughout WWII, as roads were damaged and petrol lacking, the Italian partisans relied on the bike for transport and communication. Often it was women who, like Bartali, rode their bikes at highest personal risk on behalf of the resistenza, the anti-fascist movement. The Germans, who occupied Northern Italy in 1943, saw bikes as a subversive danger: ‘every cyclist . . . a rebel ready to shoot’.

In 1945, when post-war Italy was still in rubble and ashes, and most Italians had to go hungry and homeless, the Giro di Lombardia resumed. (1943 and 1944 being the only years the race had not taken place). Now, in the newly built Republic of Italy – the monarchy had been abolished by plebiscite – former partisans rode shoulder to shoulder with former fascists, catholics and communists. In a peloton of cyclists, who only months before, would have shot at each other, the drama on the Ghisallo was heightened to the maximum.

Among post war Italy’s strongest riders were Fiorenzo Magni, who had fought with the fascists (and was briefly banned from racing in the Giro for this matter), and the communist Vito Ortelli, Gino Bartali, the arch-conservative catholic partisano, and Il Campionossimo, the bon vivant Fausto Coppi, who won the Giro di Lombardia five times.

During the war, Coppi had been deployed to Northern Africa, where he had become Prisoner Of War by the British. But the record-setting champion of all champions went down in history not only for his victories, but for his scandalous extra-marital love affair with Guilia Ochini. He was banned from cycling for two months for that matter. Even the pope implored Coppi to return to his wife – unsuccessfully.

His love affair with Giulia Ochini cost Coppi the victory of the 1956 edition of the Giro di Lombardia. His main competitor, Magni, had crashed, and, in his own words, wouldn’t have had the strength to continue had not Ochini passed him by in a support car and sneered at him: “Coppi is best!” Magni got so enraged that he jumped back up on his bike and beat Coppi at the finish line. 

Yet, it’s Coppi’s bust that stands at the church Madonna di Ghisallo, with an inscription below:

‘God created the bicycle for men to use as an instrument of effort and exaltation on the hard road of life.’

Like most riders of this time, Coppi was born into a modest background and the bike was not merely a means of transport, of exercise or competition, but a means of pedalling out of misery. And maybe it’s the trials of cycling, the suffering and endurance of life in poverty that cycling represents, that the bicycle has become the pride of the underprivileged, the proletarians as well as the pesants.

In 1948 the church’s pastor, Don Ermelindo Vigano, had the idea to dedicate the church to the cyclists, and make the Madonna the patron saint of all cyclists worldwide. Pope Pius XII, who also remained notoriously neutral during WWII, kindled in his palace in Rome a flame, which was then carried by car and bicycle to the church, making it the most iconic place in cycling.

As a pilgrimage site, the church soon proved too small, and a giant museum was built by its side. The modern building holds cycling memorabilia that make the hearts of cycle aficionados beat faster, and dedicates the entire basement to the an exhibition about Fiorenzi Magni without mentioning his role in fascist Italy. Either the Madonna of Ghisallo has absolved him in, considering his deeds as a rider only, or he has atoned for his sins on the steep ascent of the Ghisallo.

80 years of peace and the economic stability granted by the European Union has also freed cyclism from its political undercurrent. If cycling has become troubled and political again, it is undoubtedly a self inflicted damage through doping. A fact that might have something to do with the race routes becoming ever more longer, steeper and demanding.

In 1960, an addition had been made to the Giro di Lombardia: an ascent so steep it is called a muro – a wall – in cycling lingo: the Muro di Sormano. At a length of less than 2kms, the road overlooking the city of Como ascends at an average of 15%, but peaks at hellish 25%. The incredibly steep slope is highly controversial, having led to many crashes and many riders have to get off the bike and push.

From 1974, when cycling was again dominated by an overly powerful rider, the Belgian Eddie Merckx, nicknamed the Cannibal, stems a funny anectode that might or might not be true. At the Giro di Lombardia, Merckx was challenged by his compatriot Order de Vlaeminck. De Vlaeminck had escaped early in the race, but later decided not to go for a solo ride. He hid behind a bush and waited for Merckx to pass, then rode up to him, asked him, whom Merckx was actually chasing, then sped off and won the race ahead of Merckx.

This Saturday, October 9th, the 114th edition of the race from Como to Bergamo, passing by the Madonna di Ghisallo, but not the Muro di Sormano, will be held again. The riders will face six climbs, completing a total elevation of 4500 meters during the race.

Even though cycling has changed so much in the slightly more than hundred years of its existence, many things have remained the same. Those who have chosen cycling as a hobby, let alone those who pursue it as a career, know that it is, despite all the gossip and politics involved, a lonely sport. No matter the quality of frame and tyres, no matter the steepness of the road, or the sting of the headwind,  it is a humbling, meditative exercise, that strips the rider to the core. Once out of breath, once the legs have tired, there is nothing left but will, or, in other words, faith.

In the museum at the Ghisallo there is a quote by Albert Einstein. Life, he said, is like a bicycle. One needs to keep pedalling not to lose balance. And in the church, suspended from the wrought iron gate before the altar, there is the cyclist’s prayer:

O Madre del Signore Gesù, we beg you to help and protect our cyclist activities. We ask you to make the bike a vehicle of brotherhood and friendship, that can elevate us ever closer to God.

Amen.

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Italy: A View of Paradise

At last, after a long losing streak, the tables are turning. For three years of soaring unemployment, of closed shopfronts, deserted beaches, and soup kitchens, the future looked bleak. Now the golden sun sparkles on the turquoise waters of Lake Lugano again, the trees don’t shiver, but sway dreamily in the early summer’s breeze. Once again everything seems possible. Once again, the people of Campione d’Italia are gambling for high stakes.

Campione d’Italia is a little Italian town located at Swiss Lake Lugano. With stunning mountain views and clear waters, cypresses and palm trees, and dolce fa niente, the Italian enclave is indeed a piece of Italy in the middle of Switzerland. The name goes back to medieval landlord, Campione, who left his estates to a monastery in Milan. A Papal State that remained Italian when the Helvetic Protestants took their oath, Campione was for decades spoilt for success.

The rise of Campione started in 1917, during WWI, when with the sole purpose of spying on foreign diplomats, a gambling licence was granted to Campione to open a casino. After the war, the Casino di Campione was closed again, and the town fell back into provincial slumber, but in the 1930s, Mussolini, recognizing its strategic importance in the middle of neutral Switzerland, not only added “d’Italia” to the former name “Campione” in an imperialistic gesture, but he reopened the Casino. Tax-exempted, all profits were to go to “Campione d’Italia”.

The Casino soon became a hot spot of international intelligence. The US Office of Strategic Services – the precursor of the CIA – opened an office there, and, with diplomats of all sides rubbing shoulders at Roulette and Black Jack, the little town saw a fair share of secret service intrigue and 007. After the war, when Italy lay shattered in ruins and ashes, Campione d’Italia kept prospering.

The Casino provided jobs to a quarter of the 2000 locals, and a steady inflow of foreign currency. With the roulette’s wheel turning until 6am, nightlife was vibrant, with concerts and music festivals all year round. Restaurants, hotels, gyms, and boat clubs and upscale boutiques were flourishing as international High Society and VIP’s promenaded along the lido, the lakefront.

Campione had the best of both worlds. With Italian verve, it outshone luxurious, but staid Lugano on the other side of the lake. Cappuccino was ordered in Italian, but paid in with Swiss Franken. Telephone numbers were Swiss, as were car plates, and insurance policies. From rubbish collection to schools, municipal services were reliably provided by Switzerland, and paid for by the Casino. With gambling prohibited across the border, fortune smiled on Campione. Money kept rolling in and Champagne bottles kept popping, real estate prices soared.

But the rich didn’t flock to Campione simply for the fun.  With a moderate income tax, no inheritance tax at all, nor gift tax or VAT Campione d’Italia was a tax haven.

Then Campione started pushing its luck.

In 2007, Casino was rebuilt. At the cost of more than 100 million Euro, Swiss star architect Mario Botta designed a block-shaped 36,000 square metre colossus that offered 56 tables and 1,000 slot machines to 3,100 gamblers at a time. Sitting at the lakefront, the ochre monster dwarfs the old town up the steep slope behind it. Instead of Italian charm or Swiss understatement, the Casino di Campione d’Italia oozes Sowjet megalomania.

The redesigning came at a bad time. The same year, new Italian laws allowed for gambling machines in bars and café, stealing Campione its unique selling point. Then Switzerland unexpectedly permitted gambling and soon three casinos opened near-by, one of them in elegant Lugano on the other side of the lake. Then, unforeseen online gambling became a thing. And really no one in Campione had thought about the possibility of the Swiss Franken gaining in strength against the Euro. Relying on Swiss services, Campione started amassing enormous debts.

So the unlucky streak began. When the Casino failed to come up with the maintenance costs of its high-priced municipality, one after the other, the city offices, the nursery schools closed down. The mayor resigned, and clerks were left waiting for months for their pay checks in offices they had no fuel to heat.

When finally, in 2018, the Casino declared bankruptcy and closed for good, the boutiques first lowered their prices, then the scrollbars. The gyms shut their doors, then the bars. Then the restaurants closed, and the soup kitchens opened.

But then things got worse. In 2000, after long legal battles, Campione was forced to join the European Union, an unwanted “Brexit al contrario.” Italy finally revoked Campione’s old tax exemptions. From one day to the other, people of Campione had to report to Como in Lombardy, crossing EU borders to get new car plates, telephone numbers, even to collect their amazon parcels, which were now delivered by Italian postal services. They realized with horror that no one in Campione had a tobacco license. For each package of cigarettes, they had to cross borders into Switzerland now.

Just when it looked as if couldn’t get any worse for Campione, the Corona virus spread over Europe, holding Lombardy in a tight grip. Cross border traffic between Switzerland and Italy came to a halt, bus service was suspended. The only way to get to Como was now to walk to the Italian border, and to quarantine.

Rien ne va plus.

“S-O-S. Campione is dead.” A banner the local Lion’s club had mounted on the lido read. People now had to rely on meagre Italian unemployment cheques, others went without pay. Debts to Switzerland counted 175 Million Franks. Neighbouring Swiss communities helped their suddenly impoverished neighbours with warm food and clothes. But while some felt desperate, it was a moment of catharsis to others.

“If you eat too much caviar, you will get sick,” the starred chef Baptiste Fournier said in an interview with the BBC. He saw a new beginning, a chance to re-organize the economic system, become independent from a single employer, or from another country. There is, after all, much more to Campione d’Italia than Baccara and Black Jack.

There are palm trees softly rocking in the breeze, there is the sweet scent of the ancient cypress trees in the ear. Red kites are whistling as they cross the cerulean sky, and flocks of black-headed gulls come sailing in to rest on the calm, turquoise waters. A group of old men are playing cards by the lake front. One of them, turned away from the group, is singing the old Italian song Volare, flying, in the delicate falsetto of old age. He looks across the lake, to Paradiso, Lugano’s cosmopolitan lakefront, the elegant lido against a backdrop of high mountains.

Then, luck turned.

This June, a court in Milan approved a refinance plan. By the end of the year the Casino is scheduled to reopen, people are re-employed, restaurants re-opened. The sun shines on Campione again, and again Campione d’Italia is counting on Fortuna. The ball is rolling.

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AUSTRIA: COSSACK LULLABY

Slumber sweet, my fairest baby,

Slumber calmly, sleep-

Peaceful moonbeams light thy chamber

In thy cradle creep;

I will tell to thee a story,

Pure as dewdrop glow,

Close those two beloved eyelids-

Lullaby, By-low!

In June 1945, in the outskirts of Lienz, a sleepy town in the Austrian Alps, British soldiers found an abandoned new-born in the shrubs. Certain of her mother being dead, drowned in the near-by river Drau, they handed the baby girl to a local family where she would grow up a “wolf’s child.” A cossack brat. The off-spring of the wild Cossacks.

WWII had ended less than a month ago, on May 8th. The British had arrived in Eastern Tyrol as a victorious army, the Cossacks only days before them. 25.000 Cossack men, women, and children had crossed the stormy and snow-covered Plöckenpass from Italy.  It was a hazardous crossing, for they had travelled in their traditional Russian one-horse carts, which were suitable for the vast fields of the Eastern steppes, but not for the steep Alpine roads. The Cossacks had brought along all their possessions, their instruments and incomprehensible songs and wild dances, their jewelry and copper kettles, and a sheer uncountable number of horses, cattle and camels. The Eastern Tyroleans, in their inaccessible valleys had so far been spared from the horrors of war. Now, outnumbered by the strangers, they were in awe and fear.

Austro-Italian border, the Dolomites in the back

But the Cossacks hadn’t come as invaders but to meet up here with the British. Before setting out on this hazardous mountain crossing, in Tolmezzo, Italy, they had struck a deal, that the British army would take them as prisoners of war. The British, in God’s name, should take them, and not the Sowjets, who were advancing from the East, and who would execute them for treason, or the Italian partisans in the South, who had sworn revenge for what had happened in the war. Alas, it was the British who would fail the Cossacks in what would later be remembered as the tragedy at the Drau.

Valley of the Drau

Grievous times will sure befall thee,

Danger, slaughterous fire-

Thou shalt on a charger gallop

Cubring at desire;

And a saddle girth all silken

Sadly will I sew,

Slumber now my wide-eyed darling,

Lullaby, By-low!

The Cossack graveyard of Peggetz sits nestled in a tranquil residential neighbourhood in the outskirts of present day Lienz. Those who visit usually stumble here by chance and find themselves alone with the orthodox tombstones and Cyrillic inscriptions. The lush panorama of the serene Alps, the arias of the blackbirds and the soft gurgling of the river Drau belie the drama of the past. The inscriptions, translated into German “Unbekannte Kosaken” are all the same: “Unknown Cossacks”, and bear the same date, June 1st, 1945.  Those buried here aren’t soldiers, a white print out at the gate informs, but at least three hundred women, children, and civilians, who had committed suicide when it became clear that the British were not keeping their promise, but handing them over to the Sowjets, where certain death in Stalin’s gulags awaited them.

Stemming from the wild fields, the vast uninhabited steppes of what is now Russia and Ukraine, the Cossacks were originally – some 1000 years ago – a loose community of freemen: anyone could join them, peasants fleeing the oppressive feudal systems of Poland or Russia, Jews or Christians alike. In the run of the centuries, their originally liberal culture was moulded by their role as eternal outcasts: By fending off frequent Tartar attacks, they gained their adroitness on the horse back and their military organisation. By standing up against Polish catholic oppression, they became fervent orthodox Christians. Organized in Hetmanats, democratic entities, the Cossacks soon started expanding their territories engaging in countless battles with the Ottomans, venturing far into the East, into Siberia and beyond.

Their military strength and ruthlessness soon became notorious. The great powers from the Russian tsars to the Austrian Habsburgers, and even the Vatican relied on Cossack merceneray armies. It is safe to say, that the Cossacks fought in every European war – they defeated the Ottomans when they besieged the Habsburger capital of Vienna in 1683, Napolean when he tried to invade Russia, the Prussians spoke in horror of the Cossack winters of the 19th century.

When I see thee, my own being,

As a Cossack true,

Must I only convoy gice thee-

“Mother dear, adieu!”

Nightly in the empty chamber

Blinding tears will flow,

Sleep my angel, sweetes dear one,

Lullaby, By-low!

The Cossack’s present day representation as national emblems of patriarchal, autocratic and nationalistic societies of Ukraine and Russia stands in a stark contrast and perversion of the Cossacks’ tolerant, democratic origins, and their role as oppressed minority in these very same countries. In fact, the Cossacks were outcasts, tolerated at most but never integrated in Poland and Russia. But the Nazi-chapter and British betrayal of the Cossacks may play an important part in this interpretation of Cossack identity. There is, however, another side of the story. Shalom Aleichem, the Jewish writer of the Tsarian Russia, called the Cossacks the protectors of the Jews. “When we hear the word Cossacks, we grow a new skin. We feel safe, and fear noone,” he wrote in his short story “Wedding without music”, in which the Cossacks prevent a Jewish Pogrom.

It was especially the Russian tsars who used the Cossacks for their political goals. In exchange for tax exemption and personal freedom, the Cossacks served the tsar as soldiers and police force, often exerting cruelty against political opponents and dissidents. There were however, both in Poland, Russia, and the protectorates poor Cossack peasants, who instead of fighting for foreign powers remained free and – oppressed. Accordingly, in the October revolution of 1918, the Cossacks were the first to fight the Bolsheviks – searching to keep their privilege – and the first to join the Red army.

In the USSR, the Cossacks were an oppressed minority because of their involvement in the October revolution. As aresult, when Nazi Germany pushed Eastwards, they offered Hitler support. Reluctant at first, Hitler installed Cossack battalions from 1942 on, as did the Sowjets. Doubtful that the Cossacks would fight and kill other Russians, the Germans deployed the 1st Don Cossack Battalion in the West Balkans to fight the Tito Partisans.

Thy return I’ll wait lamenting

As the days go by,

Ardent for thee praying, fearing

In the cards to spy.

I shall fancy thou wilt suffer

As a stranger grow

Sleep while yet thou nought regrettest,

Lullaby, by-low!

The fighting in the Balkans was abhorrent. The Don Cossack Regiment committed war crimes like mass rapes and executions, decimating the number of Tito partisans by the ten-thousands. Yet, with the Allied forces gaining upper hand in the war, the Cossacks had to withdraw. In another historic absurdity, the Germans now promised them a state of their own, in the Northern Italian region Friaul, right across the border from the Austrian Eastern Tyrol.

Dispossessing local Italian farmers, they established Kosakia in the steep Italian dolomites. Cossack families moved in from the East. Believing to move in for good, the Cossacks set up infrastructure, like hospitals, schools and orthodox churches, making the little town Tolmezzo their new capital. If they weren’t before, the dispossessions turned the local Italians into partisans who fought the Cossacks. 

I will send a holy image

Gainst the foe with thee,

To it kneeling, dearest being,

Pray with piety!

Think of me in bloody battle,

Dearest child of woe,

Slumber soft within thy cradle,

Lullaby, by-low!

When defeat became inevitable in April 1945, the Cossacks packed their carts and fled to Eastern Tyrol, which was under British control. There, they set up camp in Lienz and waited to be taken to Great Britain as promised. Lacking a common language and mores, they had little contact with the local population. Some traded food, others medical help. But all in all, the Tyroleans remained sceptical of their uninvited guests.

In the meantime however, the British, fearing for their own prisoners on Sowjet territory, decided during the conference of Jalta, to hand the Cossacks over so as not to anger Stalin. When the news of their impending deportation East not West hit the camp, mass panic broke out.

In an act of passive resistance, the Cossacks held mass when the British arrived. The soldiers found them immersed in praying and singing. Some children from Lienz witnessed what happened next:

“We saw, how the British soldiers rounded up the Cossacks. And at the near-by rail road tracks, we saw the wagons waiting, and then only we heard the screaming and shouting and praying and when we looked closer, we saw that they had locked their arms, forming a tight circle around their pope who held up high a cross. And then we saw, how they pulled them up on the wagons. They were covered in blood.”

The British shot and beat those who resisted. Some Cossacks shot back, but most committed suicide, by shooting their children and themselves, by throwing themselves and their children into the waves of the Drau. Some escaped into the woods, where they were later found hanging from the trees. A few hundred lucky ones escaped to the snow covered high mountains.

At the end of the Day, June 1st, there were no Cossacks left in Lienz.

A handful of wolf-children grew up in the villages of Eastern Tyrol, strangers from the wild fields they had never seen, lacking the words to tell the story, unable to hear their mothers’ lullabies.     

CRADLE SONG OF A COSSACK MOTHER  by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, translated by Martha Bianchi Dickinson.

Bell of peace at the Austro-Italian Border

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Book Review: Woman Africa – Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Triptych of Zimbabwe

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

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Matera: From Jesus To James Bond

how the movie industry changed a South Italian city

A vast landscape. Raptors circling over a barren hill. An ancient town, tossed like a crown of thorns on a bare scalp. Zoom in. Beige-colored lime stone houses stand cuddled together. Staircases and walls melt into a maze, where windows gaze like hollow eyes. Close Up. A narrow street snakes uphill, and with the roaring sound of horsepower a silver Martin speeds uphill, chased by a motorcycle and a helicopter. The silver bullet skids as it makes a right onto the town square and comes to an abrupt halt in front of the cameras. “Cut!”

The South Italian cave-city Matera serves as a breathtaking setting for one of the most expensive movie productions in history, No Time To Die, the impatiently awaited 25th installment of the James Bond series. Slap bang in the middle of Italy’s notoriously poor and crime-stricken Basilicata region, the city once known for abhorrent squalor has benefitted tremendously from the movie industry.

In the past fifty years, fifty-four major films have been shot in the Sassi. These 10,000-year old cave dwellings, which make Matera the oldest permanently inhabited city in the world, have added drama to major Hollywood blockbusters such as Wonder Woman (2017), Ben Hur (2016), and, most importantly, a myriad of biblical films. At least eight times did Jesus Christ die and rise again in Matera.

The shooting of 007 caused chaos in the lively city center. In a high speed chase, one of the five Aston Martins was turned to scrap metal. The parade of celebrities attracted wannabe-paparazzi: French starlet Léa Seydoux, who returned as love interest, and veteran secret service agent Daniel Craig stayed at the Palazzo Gattini Luxury Hotel at Piazza Duomo, a 5-star hotel opposite of the 13th century Basilica Santa Maria della Bruna, overlooking the old town. But Materans don’t mind the traffic jams.

The accommodation and catering of the crew of four hundred was a boost for local businesses. Then Mayor Raffaele di Ruggiero spoke of €12 million to flow into Matera’s economy – a number surpassing the Gibson effect, the €10 million profit Mel Gibson’s blockbuster “The Passion of Christ” afforded Matera in 2004.

“The first time I saw her, I lost my mind, because she was simply perfect,” the catholic Australian Gibson said of the ancient city in a press statement. Gibson’s account of Jesus’ final hours was a gory tale. When Jesus (played by Jim Cazeviel) collapsed on a steep staircase in the Sassi, barrels of fake blood were poured down the ancient cobbles. 600 extras in leather sandals stood in as the angry mob as Cazeviel was picturesquely crucified on the Belvedere of Murgia Timone, a hill overlooking Matera.

Passion of Christ turned into one of the highest grossing movies of all time. For Matera, the blessing lay in the controversy the film’s violence and alleged antisemitic undercurrent caused. The town was catapulted into the headlines worldwide, and onto the travel maps. Tourists, who traditionally stuck to the sundrenched beaches of Southern Italy, started venturing inland. Travel agencies organized Passion Tours that catered to American tourists wishing to step into the savior’s footprints.

The artistic value of Passion of the Christ remains open for discussion, but tourism has sky-rocketed in Matera since. The Sassi are refurbished into AirBnBs, into boutique hotels and restaurants. For visitors strolling along the cobble stones the sight of white-teethed Roman soldiers slurping cappuccino in one of the many cave-cafés is not uncommon.

In the movies, Matera has rarely been featured as itself. Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, scouting for a location for his 1964 film Gospel According to Saint Matthew, was the first to find in the Sassi his perfect Jerusalem of the year zero. The city had no electricity, no paved roads. Families of ten lived in the cold damp caves, sleeping next to their pigs and goats. Malnutrition and Malaria, landslides and floods, and a long history of brutal feudalism made life in the Sassi short and miserable.

To Pasolini, the suffering of the Materans equaled that of the chosen people. He hired locals as amateur actors, letting his camera linger on their faces: Close-ups of creased skin, parched by an unforgiving sun, of cracked lips revealing gaps and crooked teeth. The film has become an inseparable part of Matera’s history, and a badge of honor for many. Pasolini’s Jesus, the Spaniard Enrique Irazoqui, who sadly passed away in September 2020, was declared honorary citizen of Matera.

Since then, Materans have a long tradition of amateur acting. Rosario Gagliardi, a government clerk, played a disciple in Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ, and minor parts in Omen 666 and The Nativity Story. The now 59year-old, who sports flirtatious blue eyes and a fashionable three-day stubble on his cheeks, is proud of his part-time movie career.

For others, working on the set presented a welcome, if temporary, income. Antonietta Scazzariello, who played in six films, said in an interview for the Guardian in 2004. “There’s no work. So it’s a good thing people like making films here. At least I can earn a bit of cash that way”.

For Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ, 20,000 Materans auditioned. The 600 who got the job, were paid 60-90 Euros a day for performing under physically and psychologically taxing circumstances, braving wind and weather naked and barefoot, dying multiple times on the cross.

But things have changed since. By granting tax credits, the city government has attracted many major productions to Matera, each of them raising the local GDP. Materans now enjoy higher education and a higher income than the rest of the Basilicata region. Italian grips, electricians, carpenters, costume designers, makeup artists, and dressmakers find work in the Sassi.

Yet, not everyone is a fan. “Until a few years ago, the movie industry was very important for Matera,” explains travel-guide Antonio Rubero, who works for Sassiemurgia, a Materan travel agencia offering walking and historical tours.

“The first films kickstarted the renaissance of the Sassi, which led to their recognition as UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. But lately fame threatens to distort the city, with restaurants and hotels taking over.” Rubero fears Matera lost in commercialization. The 49year old Materan loves movies but is grateful for a new regulation that limits the number of film shoots in town. “The problem is that the Sassi are fragile.”

Rather than a movie set, the original Neolithic cave-dwellings of Matera were a model in resourcefulness and eco-sustainability. The ancient people who chiseled the caves into the stone had a complex system of collecting rain water in giant underground cisterns to irrigate their hanging gardens. They were a tightknit community that shared common sewers and ovens.

Rubero agrees with the “lentezza” movement, which abdicates mass tourism for the sake of quality and preservation. Matera being nominated European Capital of Culture in 2019 has helped to direct tourism along less destructive lines. Many caves now host artists’ workshops and IT-start ups, there is even a music conservatory, which fills the Sassi with harmony and rhythm.

In the shadows of James Bond another film with a decidedly smaller budget was shot. Swiss director Milo Rau had set out to remake the Passion of Christ once again. But bubbling, touristy Matera was nothing like old Jerusalem, Rau says. Rather he found his Jesus on the close-by agricultural fields where thousands of undocumented African immigrants work as tomato-pickers. Together with Cameroonian human rights activist Yvan Sagnet he came up with a completely new version of Jesus’ last twelve hours. The documentary-style drama features a first black Jesus – Yvan Sagnet himself – and black African disciples. The Materans were enlisted, too, as whip swinging Roman soldiers.

The 2020 “Passion of Christ” can be streamed online, but the 2020 James Bond still has not hit theatres. Due to the Corona pandemic the release was rescheduled various times and is now announced for October 2021 (Europe) and November 2021 (US). It will most likely be a success at the box office. Bond movies do traditionally well in times of crisis.

For Matera the outlook is bleak. Tourism in Italy has decreased by up to 90%, Italian economic growth is down to zero.

“My last tour was three months ago!” Rubero says. “There are no tourists from Japan and the USA. The situation is very hard.”

Now all hope is set on James Bond.

No time to die is not part of the original series by Ian Fleming, and is Daniel Craig’s last outing as 007, which begs the question: Will James Bond survive his trip to Matera? Snippets of videos locals have uploaded on social media show Daniel Craig with blood on his face on the very spot where Jesus had collapsed so many times before. Bond probably won’t get crucified, but he’ll surely save the world, and Matera, again.

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Italy: Exile

“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.

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Naples: Pulcinella

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 il Ballo 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.