When Nature Turns
By Patrick Makondo
Since the trees and undergrowth disappeared, the art of taking a shit is a tedious affair in our village. The layout of the land is generally flat, bereft of anthills and suchlike .One has to walk a while, observing the village mud huts get smaller and smaller, and then, just when you start to get into the business of choosing a suitable spot to squat, another village, manned by loud boisterous kids and curious dogs, suddenly looms in front of you and you have to hastily divert with your load.
There is also the issue of cleaning up after the deed. Green soft grass is non-existent. The unrelenting sun has long combusted it. Dry stunted shrubs remain, brittle to the touch, no good for any delicate behind. So as you walk, your eyes are peeled for smooth well rounded pebbles, several will do. They are sizzling hot and you spit on them to coax them down to body temperature.
It never used to be like this, my uncle Denis keeps reminding me, observing me pick a pebble.
This whole area was dense forest. Dense, He emphasizes by waving his hands. Every tree grew here.
He goes on to name the fruity ones, counting them off with long bony fingers.
Ndlulamithi, mondzo, xanatsi, nsisimbani… every tree you can think of. A perfect jungle. That whitish small patch of sand east of our villages was once a lake, a huge one with big crocodiles and hippos. We fished there with nets and bamboo traps, every type of fish you can think of.
He flings a disgusted look in my direction, now- not even a tree stump to shit behind.
We are on the customary morning walk, more aptly named the breakfast run by my uncle, canvassing villagers for his upcoming environmental awareness rally at the weekend.
Breakfast run, precisely because during this time of the day, we are the obliging recipients of sugarless porridge, tasteless tea, boiled tasteless tubers and last night's left-overs from the many homes we visit.
He points in the general direction of the Kruger National park.
“There was no clear boundary between the park and our land. This was one solid jungle for miles and miles.”
We are not really that close to the park though.
The lake he refers to used to be a natural land feature between us and the Park. I came into the world when it was a somewhat respected river, surging to flood status in the rainy season and slowing and thinning to a trickle in the dry months.
The bareness of our land appeared to have pulled the park closer, such that on a clear morning, when the sun was not too overwhelming, you could just make out what appeared to be a dark impenetrable wall in the distance, the thick canopy of trees and undergrowth that marked the park's beginning. In fact sometimes when the wind blows strong from that direction, it drenches us momentarily in an aroma of wild animals and thriving humus.
‘So who is to blame for this? I ask.
These are recycled conversations. The question has been asked before, many times. It is the villagers' way of taking the drudgery out of the chore at hand, making it more pliable, of taking our minds off distances, off the hot sun.
Yet it never fails to trigger him.
Environmental awareness is like a religion to him. I watch as the Holy Ghost of environmental awareness settles on him like a dove. I am a lost soul in need of saving. He needs to deliver a powerful sermon that will make me drop everything and go running with him to plant trees. I am more fascinated with his passion and delivery, the vocal javelins levelled at me do not land.
A former animal slayer, the stories of my Uncle's early hunting life are legendary. They were told from the times when we still had trees to light fires with, full stomachs to nurse and are still told in the thin shades of our crumbling huts when we have nothing to do.
How he snatched meat from a pride of feeding lions. How he stared down and shouted off a raging bull elephant. How he lowered himself into dark burrows, legs gleaming with sap, luring constrictors to slaughter. A village legend.
These days however he never boasts about a hunt, is never belligerent about his escapades, and cannot be drawn into a fanatical rant about the thrills of hunting. He is now measured i suppose by the larger calling of green conservatism, preferring instead to deflect and dwell in detail on the often overlooked intelligence or other unknown spirituality of the animals he once hunted.
There was the legend of the spiteful bovid that almost trampled him to death. Uncle was supposed to find him tired and spent when he went to check the traps the next day and finish him with a well-placed bullet to the skull.
But the rugged buffalo fought with the massive steel entrapment and won, leaving ample bits of himself in its unforgiving steel jaws. Of course the buffalo had been hunted before .He had fought off lions, tigers, pumas, crocodiles, flies and droughts.
He had fought off other bulls.
Those fights build him. They made him who he was. He expected it, even welcomed it, it was his destiny, his nature.
But this-he tried several times to wreck the trap by trampling on it with his good legs after defeating it-this was savage, vile, cruel, unnatural, extremely evil trickery that has no place in the natural order of things.
The freedom fighter within him was awakened and he did not limp away to freedom. No. He chose to face his soon-to-be butcher. He was going to lay down his life for the sake of future generations of bovids like him.
Uncle swears the spiteful bovid re-arranged the trap around its mangled leg then proceeded to look and sound as close to death as a bull can while still on its feet.
The story, he stresses, was there in the spoor when he returned to that hallowed site later, written in blood, meat and spittle.
The beast waited several hours, not eating, not licking its wounds, just waiting, waiting and loathing, waiting and foaming on the mouth. When it finally smelled him, its huge head sagged to the ground, blood shot eyes shifted, pretending not to see him as he crept closer. And when he was close enough to start to make out some finer details- just when his hunting brain started to say wait, something does not look right, the spiteful bovid suddenly came to life and charged.
We take them for granted, he always laments in conclusion to this tale, because we hunt and eat them. Traps and guns are not sustainable. They are aware of the bigger picture. We are not.
While the sun is still bearable we visit more homes. We canvas. We invite.
His message to fellow villagers is impassioned, explicit:
We breed like rats. We have overrun the habitat. We ate the adult fish, the baby fish and the fish eggs. We did not throw anything back into the water as we were supposed to.
Do not think I am thick or naive about the situation around me, far from it. The disruption to normal rural life, especially in the past decade or so is stark and humbling:
Village dogs shedding their domestication and innocence, now trotting by us in packs; digging up shallow graves; consuming the fresh meat of our deceased.
They will soon hunt us, People in the village say hauntingly, they will isolate the weak and young amongst us and eat them. What with this hunger?
Our Goats climb walls, vertical walls, they march up our huts and eat the thatching.
Our chickens flew away with the birds.
But what of it, has Mother Nature not seen this before. In fact is nature itself not a countdown to the next disaster everywhere? Is this-the dying and rebirth-not its native element? Have this planet not weathered floods and earthquakes? Had it not shrugged of collisions with huge space rocks? Did dinosaurs not roam here once, assured of the nature of things?
In a dream i was shown that there is no shred of truth in the statement: You cannot destroy nature without destroying yourself. A higher being stressed: you cannot destroy nature.
It ends there. You are tiny and pointless after this point. Your folly is believing you somehow matter in the bigger scheme of things and that, skews your view of everything in general.
The planet is a living breathing organism, I was told, wholly concerned with its own self propagation and regeneration. I was then shown a honey bee, busily buzzing from one flower to the next, doing its business of pollinating. Look closely, the higher being said, unlocking some hidden intelligence in my brain. And i realized with a sudden wokeness that the bee was not itself.
It was a zombie.
Its every move, beat of a wing, twitch and thought was at the behest of a parasitic fungi lodged securely in its brain. To the uninitiated it looks like a symbiotic compact but it’s not. The bee will soon commit suicide when the fungi crash lands it on a safe spot, flips the final switch and eat its way out to freedom.
The fungi is one of the tools in the planet's toolbox, the higher being explained, and what happens to a bee also happens in turn to an ant, a rat, a cat, a dog, a human or an elephant. There are no special cases. None.
It was glaringly obvious to me then that those who led humanity to catastrophe, those who were attached to particular causes, those who caused wars, those who were religious and those who were not, were doing nature's bidding.
They were zombies.
That spark of intelligence that led to gun powder, to oil exploration, to aerosol spray cans and refrigerants, was a nudge from the planet itself, ensuring its own decay and rebirth, casually making available the ways and means. Hard to glean but it is all pre-determined beforehand, worked out to the tee, just like its orbit and distance from its nourishing star. And if you actually follow it, dig deep, use your inner eye, you can see the decay and rebirth laid out before you like a conveyer belt-the next drought, the next pandemic, the anticipated earthquake, the fault lines, the rumbling volcano, and there in the distance, approaching slowly but approaching still, mass extinction.
Villages like ours start, hum, then decay. It is the law. We won’t be the last and we definitely are not the first to be desertified.
But Uncle fails to grasp us pebbles on a slope, zombified like everything else, tumbling to our inevitable pre-determined end. He believes nature and Climate desolation can be forestalled, even stopped by a conceited effort of restoration. He believes the slope can be levelled by planting a tree, by not squashing a bug, reclaiming plastic in the water. He speaks up for bio diversity, for Food chains, balanced ecosystems.
Unlike me, he believes it is his fight, he is yet to dream of course.
He wants to roll out the fading national park out over our village like someone unfurling a rug, drape it over our eroded earth, and bury with it our shit and urine.
He tells the people in the next village and the next, we can bring back our rains, our trees and animals, we can start loving our snakes and black cats and owls, come to me and learn how.
Uncle's morning run affords me an opportunity to have some breakfast. Everyone here needs to get by without nature’s input. Tending the fields and herding cattle has been replaced by one charity event or another.
Not all who attend Pastor Ben's sermon at the Sunday Baptist church are truly devout. People imagine aloud if lions will still be lions if they will eat grass and play with human babies in the Promised Land, they wonder while they wait for a plate of hot potatoes served during a break in church services. A bit of God on a stomach full of potatoes goes a long way.
At the missionary hospital, not everyone is sick, here you can abandon your kids, set them up for adoption of course, sign them off to parents in lands that can still sustain. There are also drugs and pills here that can stop one from stressing a lot, even give one a wholesome high.
Uncle has mahewu for his classes. It is a fermented, maize based non-alcoholic beverage mixed with water. It is donated to him by the Green-Africa group, the international conservation group that converted him, cleansed and set him firmly on a path of reclamation.
It is past mid-morning, the heat is already proving to be quite a challenge for the politician. He is sweating profusely and hyperventilating, a fish out of water. An assistant brings in another umbrella to create more shade.
We watch him with practised restraint as the sun drains the juices and the very life out of him.
He promises roads, seeds and fertiliser –the usual, trying to hurry through his prepared speech before he fades.
We miss nothing. Calm collected village awareness. Komodo dragons bidding their time.
One villager remarks on the strengths and durability of this party’s campaign T-shirts. She has washed it several times and it did not fall apart. Her eyes are fixated on the small truck behind the politician.
We have worked out that the hand-outs are in there.
Another villager ventures with information on the next rally.
Every villager makes a mental note.
The Politician succumbs to the heat and is bundled off into a nearby car. We surge forward as one. The truck doors are thrown open. Bundles of colourful t shirts are flung out. Hands grop, clash. Children scream. Men yell. Several women ululate wildly.
The turnout is good. Uncle is elated.
Villagers came out early, eager to reclaim the lost environment, eager to quench their thirst, most bring their own cups for mahewu.
The banter is light among villagers as they crowd around the baobab stump were Uncle is preparing to deliver his lecture. They are all agreed, this is not sustainable. If the former huntsman had a solution there was no better time than now to hear it. They are keen.
Suddenly a commotion. Barking dogs. Rapidly approaching feet. Yelling, shouting, screaming children. A hush falls upon all us. Everyone strains eyes and neck, inquiring.
And with a terrible suddenness the sickening realisation hits us all.
Our own dogs were now hunting our offspring.
Our guts cringe. The cacophony is coming closer. This chase is definitely coming our way. Spines curl. Breathing stops. Men reach hastily for sticks, stones, anything to throw. Women shuffle closer to men. My uncle from his elevated vantage point on the stump is bent double, reading information from a fast approaching cloud of dust.
Then the commotion is upon us and past in a heartbeat.
I note many things in this instant. Wide Panicked eyes. Flared nostrils. Stink of animal dung, fear, distress. A mother Kudu and its young in a desperate flight for their lives. Village Dogs, in their dozens, gaining on them.
I hear my uncle utter an oath or a prayer, something profound like Holy Mary mother of God. When i look at him it is like i am discovering him for the first time, and indeed i am. I am in time to catch him transitioning, from a man awash with wonder and disbelief, to a man in his element, encumbered by climate change or environmentalism, or awareness flyers, unusually keen and nimble.
Then he whirls on one foot, drops everything and rockets into a nearby hut. He emerges a few seconds later naked expect for a loin cloth, in his right hand a well-used, old Springfield rifle.
The villagers start and gasp. Some point, gaping.
There is a moment of stunned silence, awkwardness, realisation, a moment of taking in. The hunter before us, poised, a man with ways and means. Then a pin appears to drop and we take off like mad after our dogs.
*