Daily Maverick
Dailymaverick logo

Maverick Life

Maverick Life

The Rhinoceros and the Rain — the animal that does not sweat

The Rhinoceros and the Rain — the animal that does not sweat
Eben Venter
By Eben Venter
21 Nov 2024
Facebook
0
What does the landscape and climate for creative writing and freedom of expression look like in five different African countries today?

What are some of the issues that affect writers? This year, PEN Afrikaans is participating in the Right to Write project together with four other PEN centres, at the invitation of PEN International. 

The aim of this Unesco-funded project is to promote public dialogue on issues affecting writers in five African countries (Malawi, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe).

As part of this project, PEN Afrikaans asked five Afrikaans writers to reflect on pertinent topics. This is the third in a series of five articles. Here, Eben Venter writes about the crisis of climate change, the concurrent annihilation of Earth’s species, and the role of the writer.

***


The black rhinoceros slowly rises from her resting place until all four feet stand firm on sandy soil. She grunts displeasingly about the heat, the air stifling, her feet loosen puffs of fine sand. Behind her the spekboom rushes under bees at work in clusters of shy pink. The flowers came earlier in the dry, the plants eager to seed, pushing back against the heat. The rhino mother knows she should get to the water hole for a decent mud wallow, her skin itchy, there is no other way to cool down as she doesn’t sweat. There is a sense that she can expect dark, deep-wet mud, or nothing.1

I used this voice to write about the rhinoceros in my most recent novel, Decima, a blend of fiction and non-fiction. I wanted to set the rhinoceros and her life free from the narrator; asking the reader to suspend disbelief for the time it takes to be with my novel, to be with the rhino, to be the rhino, so to speak. The rhinoceros communicates with her family, the crash of rhinos, she remembers her pre-history, the rhinoceros feels the threat of the coming of the full moon. I named her Decima. 

There’s nothing new about naming an animal. In the Sixties the youthful Jane Goodall spent months near the chimpanzees of the Gombe forest, Tanzania. If only one of the group would approach her, she hoped. It did not happen, the chimps kept their distance from her. Meanwhile, the funding for her expedition was running out. Then, one day, she noticed how a young chimp extracted ants from their holes in an antheap. A suitable blade of grass was selected, stripped of its leaves, and skilfully inserted into the little holes, only to be extracted covered in plump ants. The observation was a breakthrough. Here is an animal that makes use of an instrument to gather food. From that day onwards Jane Goodall named the particular chimp David Greybeard. The ethologists at the time denied the use of instruments by an animal, or simply did not know about it yet, and, significantly, also baulked at the anthropomorphic inclination to give an animal a name.

David Greybeard did eventually knuckle-walk up to Jane Goodall, but what had happened on that day was that she registered the acute sentience of the chimpanzee. The chimpanzee would become her field of study for the next 50 years – we now know that we share 96% of our human genes with them – and Goodall would get to know these sentient beings so well that she’d eventually remark: “Well, I didn’t like all of them. There were those who were kind and forthcoming, and others were gruff and nasty.” 

Back to the rhinoceros. There was a time when millions of rhinoceros roamed central to southern Africa; now, worldwide, a mere 27,000 remain. The highly threatened black rhinoceros of the Eastern Cape, central to my research for Decima, constitute the beauty of the spekboom veld. As they graze and meander, nibbling on a jacket plum or plucking at a tuft of grass, these megaherbivores contribute to the conservation of the veld. And with the wind and the thunder in September, and with the bees and the ever-vocal birds, especially the red-beaked oxpeckers which clear rhino skin of ticks, they all add to the soundscape present in the Eastern Cape bushveld.  

Theodore Roosevelt, former president of America who later became a big game hunter, belittled both the black and the white rhinoceros as the dumbest things that walk the Earth. The tag attached to the rhinoceros by Roosevelt and his son Kermit who literally slaughtered hundreds of giant herbivores, did not stick. On the contrary, the image of the rhinoceros has been respectfully restored by rangers, researchers and wildlife photographers. We now suspect, as we do with other mammals, that the rhinoceros has a sense of the history of itself and its crash, that they bear knowledge of good veld and “danger veld”, the latter as the poachers’ moon rises, that rhinos know how to read the communal dung midden: who left its mark, who trundled on, and that they probably have an inbuilt equivalent of a GPS to tell where likely mud pools are.  

The crash of rhinoceros bears a history of survival, but even if white and black rhinos can be safeguarded from poaching (it seems impossible) and loss of habitat (a complex situation), a new threat looms: climate change. Ecohydrology expert, Professor Timothy Randhir of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, concludes that there is zero possibility of the rhinoceros surviving if their climatic domain reaches a certain extreme degree of heat; the megaherbivore is not able to sweat, as mentioned before, and the animal is dependent on shady trees and particularly cool mud pools for wallowing. 

*


I live and write in a town of almost 50,000 people on the northeasterly tip of the Australian continent. In February 2022 all aspects of the perfect storm were present in Lismore. After weeks of heavy rain only roofs and chimneys were visible and the rescued, cradling babies and pets, were taken to safety in tinnies, that is small, tin boats, across the highest bridges, as in storm water peaking way above the very top of every bridge. In the mid-1900s Scottish loggers occupied the Big Scrub, so called after the giant red cedars and the almost impenetrable bush. At the time, the local people, the Bundjalung, warned the settlers: listen people, this is a floodplain, you can’t build a town here. To which the freckled, hardheaded colonisers apparently replied: Oh, come on, what do you know?  

Our own house, a Queenslander with shutters, wooden verandas and high ceilings, a safe 11.5m above ground level, flooded with toxic, muddy water up to just under the very ceilings. I lost my entire library, from the orange-spine Penguins of student days to my beloved first edition of the Sixties Afrikaans novel, Sewe Dae by die Silbersteins by Etienne Leroux. And all my precious notebooks started during army days in Rundu on the banks of the Kavango river and my iMac desktop with my rhinoceros text in progress. All drenched and covered in stinking flood mud. 

Although I was indifferent about safe-keeping my documents in iCloud, I did save a considerable volume of my rhino research, titled rinokeros, on a USB stick. (Rinokeros is derived from the Greek word for nose-horn.) Once my study and my old South African Railways desk were salvaged by power hose and many, many rags dipped in white vinegar and clove oil against mould, I resumed my rhino book on my new iMac. 

March 2024 clocked in as the 10th-consecutive-warmest month on Earth, according to the records. Do not think only of floods like the mega-flood in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, or of runaway bush fires and cyclones. Think too of food and water scarcity, interruption of food chains, conflict and war, fascism and the destruction of the diversity of species. Regarding mammal extinction, Australia, as a world leader, stands utterly guilty.

What is the role of the writer during these troubled times? 


Literary critic James Wood talks about serious noticing, that is, the directed attention of all the writer’s senses in order to save whatever can still be saved, “to save life from itself”. In my novel I let the rhinoceros Decima speak, not to be tricky or senseless, rather to steer the reader to deep awareness: here we have a creature that wants to roam about and sound freely in bush and veld. A living being that, like Goodall’s David Greybeard, can make decisions, can understand as they stand or sit. To quote Woods again: “... perhaps we can bring back life, or extend life, here on Earth, by doing the same: by applying what Walter Benjamin once called the natural prayer of the soul: attentiveness.”

The writer wants to fully focus the reader on the branch of a thorn tree on which perches a bokmakierie calling out with yellow throat; hleetok, leetokk. And on the rhinoceros with its rounded ears sharply listening, and on her nostrils sweetly filled with early morning air. Other than Wood who talks about the transfiguration or reshaping of the subject by the fantastical and attentive writing by the writer, I did not attempt to transform the rhinoceros. The book Decima is not a parable of a rhinoceros. The rhino stands for herself. She is herself. And the writer now invites the reader to participate in biophilia, a term coined by EO Wilson, to express the deep-seated human desire to connect with the natural world, “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life”. Us as individuals and collectively humans, should attend not to the madness of wars and the manufacturing of weapons, but to the most urgent issue of our time: the prevention of the full-scale crisis of climate change and the concurrent annihilation of Earth’s species. DM

The article was originally written and published in Afrikaans. It is available here.

Categories:

Tags: