Save us from the rhinos
Is there any greater villain nowadays than a rhino poacher? Perhaps a rhino poacher moonlighting as a contract rapist in small towns in Limpopo?
How can one but feel revulsion for a person who stalks an endangered species just for the monetary return on fairly useless parts of its anatomy? Even if the rhino hype often looks like greenwashing – allowing many people to pretend they care about the environment – this is one cause that is justified left, right and centre.
But we forget that not so long ago the tables were turned, sometimes literally. The rhino filled man with universal fear and loathing. Especially in chic places such as Paris, where in the 1950s the play Rhinoceros was performed for the first time. It’s about people in a village turning into rhinos and demolishing furniture all over the place. This clearly was a reference to the tide of totalitarian herd movements such as communism and fascism.
The British empire had adopted rhinos as bumbling, naive creatures who suffer from bread-crumb irritation – explaining their loose skins – as per Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories. Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist play set matters right, depicting rhinos as dangerous throwbacks from Jurassic times that will stomp you to death out of pure ignorance.
That is closer to the truth about beasts in Africa, anyway. This is the continent where animals are not cute and aspiring to be man’s furry toys, but monsters out to devour your flesh and then crack your bones to lick up some marrow. OK, so rhinos are vegetarians, but how sure can you be?
In my previous job, we had a correspondent from Malawi who was not bad at reporting on local events, except when he earnestly wrote about supernatural creatures terrorising the country’s rural areas. Queries about their veracity invariably elicited the response that he could cite several witnesses whom he would trust with his life.
I once spent a night in Maputaland, during which I was awakened by the saddest and most beautiful singing I had heard in a while – by the man who was on duty tending the village fires meant to keep hippos out of the maize fields and vegetable gardens.
Until electrical times, nature was the enemy everywhere, to be battled to the death and subjected to man’s will if he was to survive. Waves and earthquakes demolishing nuclear reactors underscore the point to us modernised sorts, but in the African or Asian bush just dealing with the animals in the surrounds of one’s home still requires lots of nerve and fatalism.
Granted, some monsters are fabricated, but elephants charging through villages, hyenas and lions dragging off children and stampeding buffalo are real enough to warrant serious consideration on a daily basis. Popular historians such as John Reader and Jared Diamond regard these as key factors in explaining Africa’s technological underdevelopment.
If we want to save marginal species such as the rhino, this has to be taken into account. The poor Mozambican peasants from whom poachers’ scouts are mostly recruited still confront nature every day, especially the force driving it, called hunger and want. Using animal parts to gain mental strength is part of the preparation for this constant war, and so clients who use them in a similar fashion in faraway places are much more in sync with their world view than any green organisation close by.
Displays of fury and calls for collective action by ministers at press conferences broadcasting into homes where the nearest rhino is likely to be a keyring-holder fits better with the fears expressed in Rhinoceros the play. It’s really an attempt at mass incitement against and constant surveillance of suspected poachers. Muffin-loving mollycoddlers might be turned into vigilantes hunting innocent zombie-haters (Hollywood’s version of the play).
So what’s the solution? Nobody should kill the rhino, and the rhino should not kill anybody, not even the white ou. Ceasefires and peace talks are called for here, followed by reconstruction and development plans.
A case for the African Union’s Peace and Security Council? Let’s rather not go there. Before you know it, Nato will be bombing the Kruger National Park.