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Had lunch with a pair of Classicists, teachers at one of the universities here in South Africa. They were lovely people, doing their best to inspire their students, and conversation was genteel and thoughtful, as it usually is among people who truly feel themselves to be teachers first and foremost. But wanting a bit more, I pushed a bit: what did they think of the recent controversy at the University of Cape Town, where a large campaign was mounted to get rid of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, which as an image of one of the founders – the person who gave the land “for the establishment of national university,” no less – had a prominent place on the campus. A group of students had repeatedly protested at the statue, proclaiming “Rhodes Must Go.” The university acceded and removed the statue.

One of our interlocutors was clearly upset about it – and like all things in South Africa, this was ultimately about race – “Look. I don’t have any problems with saying that values have changed, and we don’t completely approve of everything Rhodes did and we would today make statues of different people. But you don’t go around destroying history. I say, go ahead, put up new statues. But don’t go around tearing things down. It makes it seem like you have nothing of your own to put up beside what is already there.” He spoke with the heat of someone who felt the incident as symbolic of a larger issue with contemporary South Africa.

In America we are having a similar controversy, about the Confederate Flag being flown in state buildings in the South. A flag is more clearly a symbol of a cause, while a statue of a man often has the greater moral ambiguity which lies always in our humanity. But I have thought, in my dislike of the Slave Power known as the Confederacy (I side with Grant’s dictum, that theirs was “the worst cause for which men ever fought”), that it would be good to clear away all the monuments as well, which honor nothing so much as men’s desire to live by the sweat of other men’s brows, even to the point of buying and shackling and whipping and raping and selling men and women and children.

Everyone recognizes that there is a spectrum of honorability, and at some point along the spectrum the statue should come down. Few people argue for statues of Hitler in Berlin, despite the fact that he is without doubt the most important figure in twentieth-century German history. On the other end of the spectrum, Napoleon spilled much blood, but his monuments all stand and his image would cause no controversy in polite circles. Where does Rhodes fit in this spectrum?

One of the comments I have heard more than once is that “the ANC was a revolutionary organization. Revolutionaries don’t make very good governors and policymakers” – indicating that it is time for South Africa’s one-party system to be voted out. It does intrigue me that in the newspapers and on the radio I hear about “the spirit of ’76,” which here refers to the student protests in 1976 which resulted in the death of Steven Biko and others, and greatly increased the international isolation of the apartheid state. This was almost forty years ago, and the ANC has held monopolistic power for more than twenty years since. It is like the Communist Party continually propagandizing for revolutions long past while the shelves slowly empty. Campaigning to remove statues strikes me as similar: creating a show of revolution while the real tasks, which could make people’s lives better, are left undone.

A picture of me at the place where J.R.R. Tolkien was born. Just to establish nerd credentials for all time. It did amaze us that this is not a tourist spot at all, that there is no J.R.R. Tolkien Museum in the town where he was born, or anything similar. If he had been born in the U.S. we felt the town he was born in would have long ago converted his name into tourist dollars. Nemo propheta acceptus est in sua patria.

It was very surprising to us that Tolkien could have been born anywhere but in England. And yet – somehow it makes sense, given his racial cosmology, that Tolkien was born in South Africa. I have written about the racial overtones of Lord of the Rings before; I think for Tolkien it is all summed up in the one word, fair, which means good, just, beautiful, equitable, desirable, and light-skinned.

June 26th.

We made it to Graaff-Reinett, a pretty little town in the Karoo. We are staying at a lovely bed and breakfast, where we were greeted with a glass of sherry and shown to our big four-poster bed. I’m in the tub now. As usual the place is empty, though it’s Friday night and we were told school holidays begin today, and accommodation would be harder to find. We get the impression that no one in the country is travelling.

Our host is quite an interesting man, with an accent utterly different from other South African accents we have heard: he is from Durban. He says “ellyfont” for elephant. He owned a sugar-farm in Natal, before retiring and moving into the Bed-and-Breakfast business.

June 26th.

Well, we came to Addo for the Elephants, and we got them: they are everywhere here. Our guide pulled up right next to an elephant feeding beside the road, and we just sat there watching him, only fifteen feet away.  He continued grazing undisturbed by our presence; I don’t know if I’ll ever forget the fluttery crunch of the foliage as he brought it to his mouth, one proboscis-full at a time. Petrus Gillius, in his Descriptio Nova Elephanti (1614), says of elephants:

In itinere promuscidem gerit porrectam ad terram usque, et nisi paululum eam incurvaret, reptantem humi traheret aut pedibus calcaret: ipsam huc illuc circumfert, semper inquirens aliquid quod edat, nunquam otiosam habet, nunc folia stringit, nunc herbas decerpit, quas ut fruticosas esse percipit, earum cacumine proboscide corripit, pede autem radicitus evellit, eo pedis impetu utens, quo agricola ligonis extirpat frutices: nunc a vicinis quippiam exposcit, et cum haec desunt, petras volvit aut terram proicit.

As he walks he keeps his trunk pointed at the ground, and if he did not slightly curl it, it would drag in the dust or get caught underfoot; he moves it to and fro, looking always for something to eat, never letting it be idle: now he strips off leaves, now he plucks up plants, and if he sees any to be the size of shrubs, he grabs them with his proboscis while pulling them up from the roots with his foot; using the force of his foot the way a farmer rips up shrubs with a a spade; now he begs for something from his neighbors, and when all these are lacking, he turns over stones or tosses the ground.

We did not see all these behaviors, but that the elephant appears to be constantly engaged in the act of feeding we were able to see for ourselves, and our guide confirmed it. “What does an elephant do all day?” he asked us rhetorically. “Eat,” he responded. They were so intent on the task that they did not bother with us very much: it was all they could do to pass enough vegetable matter through their bodies to maintain their massive frames.

We saw males stalking through the savannah, all alone, which is their mode: the females and young we also saw, in herds. Our guide put us right in the pathway of one such herd and cut the engine, and slowly the elephants approached, then swarmed around our truck, and continued on the other side. Every herd had numerous young of all ages, and it seems the elephants are doing well here; there are now more than five hundred in the park.

Our guide said that elephants can cause tremendous problems, but most of the major problems, at least here in South Africa, seem to be in the past. Tourists don’t feed the elephants as much as they used to, and of course they can’t hunt them in the parks either, and so the elephants now neither harass nor attack nor flee people. For centuries wild elephants have been the enemies of man, as it is almost impossible to practice agriculture in areas with large concentrations of them. They supposedly especially enjoy oranges – destroying the orchards as much as they enjoy the fruits. Farmers killed them whenever they could, and even game reserves did not want them until finally someone came up with a cost-effective elephant-proof fence, here at Addo. Now an entire generation of elephants has been confined to the reserve, away from farms and hunters, and the result is harmony between man and elephant, each on his own land.

Of course there is something slightly sad about knowing that in the end the great animals of South Africa live inside fences: apparently only the leopard, of the great animals, still wanders the mountains and lives truly free.

But to come here and see these elephants graze these hills which are all their own – to see them serenely strip entire trees of their leaves, to watch them nurse their young and see the adolescents butt heads and tangle trunks, to live with lions and hippos and crocodiles and yet flourish and multiply – it is the peaceable kingdom made manifest.

My mother said I needed to come to Africa and see this before it was all gone: throughout much of Africa the big animals are giving way to development: wherever people want to grow food, or keep their children safe, they tend to drive away or kill the large, dangerous animals. But here in South Africa the situation is quite different. These fenced parks and preserves are becoming more common, not less, and more land is being conserved yearly: the big animals are big tourist business, and they are supporting a fairly complex economy: the national parks require rangers, scientists, guards, hospitality staff, restaurant staff, and guides; private game reserves also employ butchers, taxidermists, chefs, and the like. And South Africa appears to be having tremendous success restoring functional ecosystems: Addo and Pilanesberg, both of which were restoration projects, now support large, healthy, reproducing populations of both predators and prey. The diversity of the hoofed animals is mind-boggling: we cannot even learn to identify them all, these springboks and impala and hartebeest and wildebeest and kudu and eland and gazelles and antelopes and reeboks and ruisboks and everything else: they are all roughly deerlike, with a bewildering variety of horns; and there are of course the rhinos and hippos and zebras and giraffes and so much else. None of them are here in vast herds, the way they seem to live in the Serengheti; whether this is due to the choice of the restorers (emphasizing diversity?) or is the result of the different, more temperate climate here I do not know.  But there are so many large animals here, and of such diversity, it seems to be succeeding well. And the area was, not long ago, all just farms: you can still see the vegetative shifts, in large square blocks, which mark the old fields. It’s an amazing success story for habitat restoration.

They have fenced off a large area within the park too, to keep elephants out, as they are studying the effect large numbers of elephants have on the vegetation. Elephants don’t seem to have any natural predators – lions can get young ones only when they are left alone, which is not normal – and their numbers continue to grow here. In the afternoon almost every hill seemed to have a little herd of them, and from a distance it looked like the boulders were slowly changing places on the hilltops, shaking the trees as they passed.

June 26th.

We are now awaiting our “game drive,” as it is called, when a safari guide will take us out into the veld animalia ad videnda; we spent the morning doing a game drive of our own, as the South African national parks allow people to go out into the wild themselves. Our resolution to have a proper guide was strengthened considerably after our own efforts: we soon came upon a herd of elephants crossing the road, but we were quite uncertain how to deal with the situation. How close could we actually get? How dangerous were they? They are huge animals, towering over our car. Ever since we rented our car – a tiny little thing called a Chevy “Spark,” the cheapest and tiniest thing available – Catherine has been afraid that it would make a tempting target for an elephant. “The car’s pretty little,” she said when we were first looking at it. I thought she might be worried it wouldn’t be great in the event of an accident or something like that. But then she revealed her real worry: “The elephants are going to stomp us!” It’s been a refrain the whole trip. Now here we were, trying to proceed on a road which was blocked by elephants. Catherine wanted to inch closer, but then we held back – “Uuuuuhhhhh the elephants are going to stomp us!” I treated them as I have treated buffalo in the past, keeping a hundred feet between us and them.

But then on our return to camp – the road being blocked, we had to go back – we saw a huge elephant behind a bush right by the side of the road. There were other cars nearby, and the elephant paid them no mind at all. So maybe we can get closer. But I’d rather we not be the ones who get stomped.