In The New Dispensation (proper name), there is a new regime with regard to Zimbabwe’s charismatic megafauna – under the previous dispensation (improper name), there was the invisible hand of Chinese demand only to determine the value of live or dead wildlife exports. Mnangagwa recently announced that he was banning trade in live elephants. Elephants are a live issue in Zimbabwe, as the linked article notes. There’s an ersatz-abundance of elephant, it seems, in Zimbabwe, leading to ambivalent politics of export and culling that waver between newly-staked arguments for and against hunting. So elephants are on the table, and they were almost splayed across the hood of my car when in the dark night I did not see the elephant standing there until it was well-nigh too late. Although, reader, it was not too late, as I live and breathe. In terms of toppling megafauna, however, I would say that we are all hesitant, suspending judgment of The New Dispensation, which continues minor purges, waffles in its condemnations of the previous dispensation. At the moment, The Last Guy is entitled, still, to a shocking amount of Zimbabwe’s treasury. But, and this is important and telling, during the week of the Coup-Not-Coup, the United States of America took a strong stance toward Zimbabwe. No, not that it supported the rule of law and asked for a peaceful transition of power, although I’m sure there was a press release to that effect. No, it was that the 45th President steamrolled forward on a bill (reversing previous presidents’ policies) to permit the importation of “elephant trophies” to the US from Zimbabwe. This was the same week. A hue and cry was raised (with quite a few hunters rigorously against iit) and it was immediately reversed, which as one official put it, showed how absolutely arbitrary it was. And of course, as with all decisions that the president makes, because he failed to erect any significant barriers or boundaries between himself and his private corporate interests, we must ask: was this just a whim to please his own family? For pictures circulated throughout the run-up, the campaign, and after, that show the President’s two adult sons posing with dead Zimbabwean animals. In one, Trump, Jr., is proudly holding a (n oddly spotless) knife and a tail severed from the elephant slain behind him. (I thought about posting the pictures, but I figured I’d just post this link to the Snopes article that proves their accuracy.) These pictures, in some part, ensured that conservative gun rights groups, fearful of any challenge or change to their capacious reading of the 2nd amendment, trusted Trump when he claimed to want to protect their rights from liberals who were coming for their guns. So the whole picture crystallizes a fairly polarized American politics: a politics of outrage/empathy/”liberal tears” versus a politics of violence/absolute autonomy/rugged individualism. Of course, this is but one way to map the polarizing axes of American politics in 2018; our full reckoning with this era may end up being measured in half-lives. Already, this flare-up, the coincidence of the elephant trophy ban reversal and the ouster of Mugabe, has sunken away in the accelerating cycle of neck-breaking reversals and completely irrational movements. But, in keeping with the overall Trump aesthetic – on display in any photo of his homes, his properties (Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower), etc. – there is a 19th-century nouveau riche, new landed gentry striving that marks their fascination with gold, baroque ornamentation, lacquer, and yes, animal skins and prints (see: any of his casino properties). So, in a way, the junior Trumps’ enthusiasm for slaying African wildlife is perfectly in touch with the American leisured classes, and, as promised, we need look no farther (and, after this, no more) than William Harvey Brown’s morally repugnant narrative of his participation in the settlement of Rhodesia, having joined up after being (self-)deputized to collect animal “specimens” for shipment back to the United States, at least once at the behest of the Smithsonian. But Brown makes it clear in his narrative that the market for slaughtered exotica is a limited one, and there’s a lot of competition. Which renders ironic, then, his very first ‘naturalist’ assignment, wherein he was sent to the Rockies and Plains to collect whatever last specimens he could of the decimated buffalo for museums. This is a particular logic, one that oscillates between the late-19th-century and the present moment: the idea is that if there is a diminishing resource, the only possible logic is to exploit the resource until it is gone, trusting that experimentation and innovation will usher in a new era following. However, if it doesn’t, the system as such doesn’t particularly care about the effects of their terminal market: at the end, the prices will be highest, after all. I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE. –Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood When William Harvey Brown makes his way from Cape Town, across the Cape toward Mafeking, he narrates his first real experiences hunting African game. He’s not good at it! He can’t manage to make relatively easy shots. In point of fact, this is one of the very few actual narrative threads that carries through the narrative. It is a narrative of his becoming more proficient at shooting and killing as he hunts more and more often and as he enrols to fight and kill Africans. It is the narrative of proficiency at murder. He relishes the hunt. Early on, describing the capers of his camp mates in the column he belongs to as it marches upward through the hinterlands of South Africa, he says, “It is remarkable how the instinct for the chase, inherited from our primitive ancestors, is exhibited in small ways. I was one day greatly amused at seeing the entire camp, from officers down to Kafir servants, drop work of every description, and vociferously join in a chase after a harmless hare, which came running through our encampment.” (68) This is an appeal to a sort of evolutionary anthropology – one that argues that there’s a through-line from ancient hunter-gatherer behaviours, and remnant or appendage instincts that still describe our behaviour in modernity. This logic also sidles up to the same colonial racism that insists that there is a continuum of development and evolution, which regrettably, the racists say, explain the lower faculties of those-who-must-be-subjected. Nevertheless, it serves to justify his own relish of chasing and pursuing African animals, with blood always in mind. In fact, for Brown, the Africans’ methods of hunting are also subject to his scorn; they are primitive hunters, scavengers of what he leaves behind in his negligent bloodshed. He works himself into a frenzy of hateful memory when he remembers one particular spoiled hunt. “I made a beautiful stalk,” he marvels, of tssessebe (the “most wary of antelope,” he coos [115]). “...but just as I was about to fire, the entire herd, sentries and all, suddenly stampeded. I was dumbfounded, and quite unable to determine the cause, until happening to turn around, I was startled by perceiving an armed savage not ten steps behind me” (116). Brown’s narrative reads exactly like a potboiler dime-store Western, and similarly carries with it the full weight of American racism. The African, as Brown admits himself, was simply curious as to what the white man was doing, and so followed him. But Brown is derisive that the locals don’t know, to a T, the Western way of hunting. “In his primitive simplicity he had followed bolt upright and close behind me, while I had laboriously crept along the ground, endeavouring to conceal myself from the game. Provoked by small occurrences like this, race antipathies often begin on short notice between the whites and the aboriginal inhabitants.” (116, emphasis added). This statement is appalling, quite literally appalling. It’s the equivalent of saying, “Well, and that’s why you can’t have nice things, like” education or autonomy or self-determination or independence or treatment like a human being, like, because of this one time on a hunting trip. This is the exact logic: because someone different did something to me once that was irritating, I had no choice but to be a racist thereafter. (Curiously, I relayed this to a white Zimbabwean, expressing my shock at the cupidity and stupidity of this foundation for racism, but he relayed the story of his father: liberal white British, came because there were opportunities for white Brits, and within a year, was complaining vociferously about negligible things, essentially accumulating a profound racism on the basis of a number of minor irritations that frustrated his sense of entitlement to foreign ways and ideas.) Brown is also a compulsive, perhaps addicted, human being; his attachment to the chase – to the hunt – to killing – cannot be interrupted at any moment, for any reason. Lest it become “the one that got away.” This is his entitlement. Because he’s out for blood:
The irony here is that the talk of the pursuit of game is a long and old narrative in American culture, and in the early 19th century, at least, it calls to mind the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Accomplished and lyrical novels, they are also responsible for some of the romanticization of the suffering/noble/ethical “savage,” that Last of the Mohicans whose wilderness praxis is attuned to Nature and takes no more than it can carry or eat. Brown isn’t particularly shy about his indiscriminate entitlement to murder. “We journeyed down the right bank, and had not proceeded far when I saw an enormous crocodile stretched out on a sand bank on the opposite side. Its length I estimated at eighteen feet. Although there was no possibility of doing anything with the skin, this was too good an opportunity to miss, so I took careful aim at the animal’s head, and killed it where it lay.” (148, italics added) You know, because it was majestic, it must be slain. And so, in 2014, in advance of the run-up to the current disastrous presidency, Donald Trump, Jr. echoed precisely the smug self-justification of the nineteenth century sporting gentleman when justifying the pictures of him with animal carcasses and “elephant trophies” (an elephant’s tail, as “elephant trophies” feels, every time I type it, to be more and more euphemistic). In a tweet, Donald Trump Jr. replies to a critic of his hunting photos, as such: “@exclamation I can assure you it was not wasteful the villagers were so happy for the meat which they don't often get to eat. Very grateful” Oh, it was no problem that he left an elephant carcass to fester, the “villagers” were grateful. The tweet sounds exactly like his father’s estimation of the state of African-Americans in urban centers, who will be “thanking him” for his advocacy on their behalf, saving them from the American carnage to which they would otherwise be perpetually consigned. Or, as discussed previously, that Nigerians who came to America would never “go back to their huts,” preferring to remain instead in America. It might be precisely this smug faux-benevolence of leaving the meat behind him that is the difference between him and Brown. Brown hates it when the locals, stumbling upon his uncollected dead, instead harvest the meat and body, leaving him without a trophy when he occasions to make it back to the site of the kill. Brown is particularly obsessed with bagging hippopotami, and narrates a number of slogs through rivers and marshes during the day, sniping at them in the water. He also becomes obsessed with tracking and killing a rhinoceros. Even when the animal had been more plentiful – indeed, in the days before sport hunting – I cannot doubt that an encounter with a rhino would have been thrilling – for scale and for potential danger, for rarity (they aren’t particularly human friendly). So obsessed is he that he includes a full letter from a fellow hunter who managed to be more successful. This hunter relays the “record specimen’s” measurements, and proudly reports that the rhino – having been shot more than a dozen times in the account, before being strode by the hunter and shot in the head – was indeed killed (230-231). Brown, like his friend, revels in the sheer enumeration of his kills, the trophies (“a beautiful pair of horns” from one gazelle), the laundry list: “Indeed, it was a glorious six weeks with big game, but the details of all this hunting would only weary the reader. During this time I killed forty-nine head, and the Eyres had been equally successful in their efforts. My specimens enumerated in detail are as follows: one black rhinoceros, six buffaloes, two Burchell’s zebras, eleven elands, three water-bucks, three roan antelopes, two sable antelopes, one tsessebe antelope, one koodoo, six reed-bucks, one bush-buck, one oribe antelope, one lioness, five wild dogs, three wart-hogs, one bush-pig, and one baboon.” (239) The catalogue of the dead is meant to be a tribute to his virility, as opposed to their vitality. The juxtaposition of impotent virility – virility engendered by the practice of exterminating vitality – with vitality itself – is a perverse knot at the center of American masculinity. It is part and parcel of the impetus to enumerate and number the victims of mass shootings; indeed, in the psychology of mass shooters, there is undoubtedly a romance with the enumeration, the trophy, the sheer numbers killed. We are living in an era when the current President tweets condolences about the wrong mass shooting after yet another mass shooting has occurred. We are also living in an era when the President boastfully quantifies the devastation and danger of the latest American hurricane – the most impressive, the most damaging hurricane, the best first responders, the most historic response. I guess I’m just saying there are these uninterrupted thru-lines, that tie together political power and entitlement to violence, of disregarding vitality in favour of virility, of white supremacy and neo-colonial privilege. The Books of Zimbabwe still stocks the Rhodesia Reprint Library, a series of these books of early Rhodesian pioneers, but as the elderly clerk explained, they’re out of print. He claims they are collectibles, although the value of these books (as determined by the market’s crowdsourcing on Abe.com, anyway) is considerably less than the now $40 he is asking me for them. The only books of their series that are still in print – and so less expensive, he explains – are the hunting monographs. Many are 19th-century, some early-20th-century, and almost all bear the words “elephant hunting,” “big game hunting,” “hunter’s diary,” and I’ve picked a few up. Some are more grotesque than others in their descriptions, and the texts are not wholly without merit – tracking for study, observation, tourism isn’t too fundamentally different from tracking for hunting – so these naturalist tracts still serve a purpose. But it also shows the dark side of a culturally polarized politics: there is a swath that admires those who can bring down these huge beasts, who slaver to be able to do it themselves. And on the other hand, there is a swath of the population for whom the charismatic megafauna of Africa are nothing short of majestic, endangered, to be protected at all costs, a vaguely-conceived politics almost wholly affective in its composition. On a completely unrelated note, an update. My new friend Zara informs me that there are precisely 52 Jews left in Bulawayo, down from a historic population of 4,500 in the 1970s. The current population is orthodox, for the most part. One of the previous Fulbright scholars, in fact, was compiling local Jewish histories. Fascinating!
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AuthorFulbright Core Teaching/Research Fellowship to Zimbabwe, 2017-2018. Will teach at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and conduct research on the city's literary history, its cultural infrastructure, and its outlets for creative writing. Archives
February 2018
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