The Rhino's Testimony

Abstract

The Rhino's Testimony Bridget Pitt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Bridget Pitt, author of the novel Eye Brother Horn, reflects on how South Africa's colonial history, and the entanglement of nature conservation with social inequality and violence, means that many efforts to connect with or save nature are embedded in a system of wealth production that is driving its destruction—particularly that of the rhino. [End Page 29] Click for larger view View full resolution Sunrise over the savanna and grass fields in central Kruger National Park in South Africa Every day, at least one rhino is killed for its horn in South Africa. Rhinos in the Kruger National Park have declined by 60 percent in the last decade (savetherhino.org). Often, the horn and half the face are hacked off while the rhino is still alive. It is hard to countenance such cruelty and natural to blame the poachers who shoot them, plus all those linked to the illicit rhino horn trade that feeds the market in East Asia. But a rhino slain for its horn tells a story of violence, greed, and dispossession that ripples far beyond the poacher's bullet and goes back centuries: when I set out to write a novel about rhino-poaching, it became a novel about colonialism. When the British colonizers first arrived in modern-day KwaZulu-Natal early in the nineteenth century, they found what they considered "virgin territory": sprawling coastal and inland forests and lush grasslands teeming with antelope. Vast elephant herds migrated up and down the coast, creating pathways that today are three-lane highways roaring with traffic. Lions, leopards, and rhinos were frequently seen around Durban. The land had in fact been occupied by humans for millennia, first by the San and, later, Nguni tribes moving down from the north. The San were nomadic hunter-gatherers with a light footprint, but the Nguni people, who had been living there for at least four hundred years, cultivated crops and herded cattle, impacting the land in several ways. They burned pastures to improve grazing for their livestock, cleared land for crops, and burned wood for smelting iron and cooking. They hunted animals and harvested wild plants for food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. But their impact was minimal compared to what happened in the years that followed. [End Page 30] By the end of the nineteenth century, the landscape was fundamentally transformed. No elephant, lion, or rhino could be found south of the Pongola River, and the buffalo and antelope herds were decimated. The human landscape was also irrevocably transformed: the power of the Zulu king broken, the chiefs brought into subjugation under British authority. From being self-sufficient farmers, the local people were now forced by the hut tax and loss of land to labor for minimal wages on British-owned farms or in British-owned mines. In 1870 the British in Natal numbered fifteen hundred compared to over fifty thousand Indigenous people. How had a relatively small number of people had such an impact? The simple answer is guns. Guns were used without restraint against the wildlife, and while initial relations with the Indigenous people were based more on cooperation than force, as the colony became more established, guns were used to help subjugate the Indigenous population through force or inducement. When the neighboring sovereign Zulu nation became an obstacle to expansion, the British invaded their kingdom and overcame their armies with its superior firepower. Zululand was carved up for white settlers, and the royal house brought under British rule. But guns were just the tools. The real driver of transformation was the violence that flowed from a hierarchical concept of the world. Human exceptionalism governed colonial attitudes to nature but also to Black people, as they were considered less than human in order to justify slavery and—after abolition—enforced labor, impoverishment, and theft of land. The San Bushmen were so brutally dehumanized that until 1936 it was permissible to hunt them—many people still living today were alive when the last permit was issued in Namibia. As the colony expanded, racist attitudes equating blackness with beastliness became entrenched, disrupting the relationship to wildlife...