Tuesday
We reach the Imfolozi Wilderness at lunchtime. David has been travelling for three days, from California; Christopher only about 30 minutes, from a nearby village. We are a mixture of ages, language, heritage. Four from Cape Town, one from the US; Sicelo’s son, Hawu, is joining us, and we have sponsored two additional trailists from local communities. Together with our two guides, Sicelo and Sipho, we are a group of ten.
      We climb out of the mini van, and say goodbye to our cellphones, watches and wallets. Sicelo invites us to ‘blow off the dust of the city, and embrace the clean dirt of the wilderness’.  Compared to what the young men are carrying, my pack is light. Yet I need help to get it onto my back, and lugging it for five days seems an impossibility. But my body slowly adjusts to its weight.
       We walk through an mthombothi forest, the dry leaves crackling under foot beneath a winter sun low in a milky sky. As we clear the forest, I see the line of the iMfolozi River ahead. Before me is a broad grassy sweep, dotted with impala, and a stand of stately spreading umkhiwane trees. The shadows of several white backed vultures sweep over the grass.  I watch the birds circling the trees before they fly down to roost in the branches for the night.
      I stand watching them, bathed in the golden light of late afternoon, Despite the my heavy pack, I feel the sensation of some burden falling away, some elation taking its place. I take a deep breath, smelling grass, dust, wild basil.
       This is the wilderness. And I am here.

       We walk alongside the river, following its course, and enter a wooded grove along a path that winds up to a series of broad, granite shelves overlooking the river. ‘This is our home for tonight’, Sicelo says. I see my companions eyeing the bare rock dubiously, and remember my own disbelief on my first trail,  when we stopped, 'in the middle of nowhere', and learnt that this was where we would eat and sleep. But I know now how quickly we humans can colonise a space and make it home.  
        On the opposite side of the river are a lone white rhino and three buffalo. The rhino drifts away, but the buffalo seem undeterred by our presence. They stand or lie, watching us with mild curiosity, as we are watching them.
          We each claim our small section of rock, spread out bedrolls and sleeping bags, chop onions with a pen knives, scoop water for cooking from the river below us in canvas buckets. Soon the mthombothi firewood we’d gathered on our walk is crackling, sending a fragrant curl of smoke into the evening air. Talk is simple, mostly about the practical tasks before us. Already this divergent group is united in common purpose.
           Just after midnight, I do my first night watch. It's a spooky time at first, alone in the dark, with a chorus of unfamiliar sounds. The three-quarter moon has risen and is flooding the landscape with its otherworldly light. I busy myself with small routines, feeding the low fire, conducting a regular patrol of the camp and sweeping the torch over surrounding bush and across the river.  Many things are stirring and rustling, but gradually I relax, soothed by the lapping of the water, and the calmness of the buffalo still sleeping on the bank.  When I figure that an hour or more has passed, as far as I can tell from how many fingers Scorpio has a travelled above the horizon, I wake up the next watch, and crawl gratefully into my humble bed. A heavy dew has settled on my sleeping bag, which makes for chilly feet, but I drift off on a raft of insect calls and the distant barks of rutting impala, under a canopy of moonlit clouds and revolving constellations.

Wednesday
I wake early to a dawn bathed in milky softness. The world slowly reveals itself as the light brightens, but all is muted by cloud. A small crocodile can be seen down river, resting on a sand bar. Across the river, our buffalo  have shifted, but still lie quietly.

     As with all the mornings, we have a slow start, allowing the sun to dry out the sleeping bags before we set off. This is not a march with schedules and destinations, but a five day meditative meander through wild spaces.
    We shoulder our packs, which feel more manageable although our supper hardly lightened their load. We walk over the crest of the hill above us, through aromatic wild camphor trees, and wild basil. Small white flowers are scattered on our path. We reach a midden, the dung bed of a white rhino where it defecates and marks its territory. Although this is not the season to see the dung beetles  pushing dung balls, their presence can be detected by the movement in the layers of dung. Sicelo pauses to discuss the ecology of the midden, how it gives life to so many creatures: The dung beetles, the white tailed mongooses that feed on them, the jackals and birds of prey that feed on the mongoose. The scat of the mongoose, packed tight with the exoskeletons of the beetles,  tells us that they were foraging there that morning. Sicelo reflects on the generosity of nature in giving life, so different from humans who just take and take from nature, who leave waste that cannot be used and only serves to poison the rivers, air and land.

       As we walk on, I think about the cycle of life, imagine life flowing from the rhino, through the dung beetles, the mongooses, the jackals, a continuous river of death and rebirth in different forms, the circularity and ongoingness of it.
          All along our path, the golden orb spiders are busy at work, stretching huge webs across the gaps between trees. We stop for lunch under Mthombothi trees, dozing as the restless night catches up, then head down through a grassy seep following the path of the shaggy Nyala ahead of us. Another white rhino stands on the bank as we head to sleeping spot for the night. Our camp is also on the river, but set back in a wooded clearing, so the water is not visible from the ‘kitchen’.  We settle in, and enjoy a swim in the river, relishing the cool water on our sweaty bodies as the afternoon turns to evening.

Thursday
My night watch is quiet, save for the splashing of a buffalo crossing the river a few meters downstream. It’s the last watch of the night, and I have the privilege of watching the dawn come in: the unfolding of light, the shift from night sounds to day sounds, the surge of my spirits as the birds celebrate another dawn. When the others are awake, I go to the rock overlooking the water. I think of my daughter, who was supposed to with me but could not come as she was still recovering from Covid. I offer her the quality of light on the river, the susurrations of the reeds silhouetted against the shifting pewter coloured water, the swallows meeting their reflections as they skim the surface on their journeys to and from their nests under the overhang of the rock. I try to release myself into the joy of seeing them, to block out questions of why they have not migrated so late into winter, what this might suggest about the confusion of climate and seasons.
      Today brings the release of walking without packs, as we will be camping in the same spot. We head off, pausing for a “check in” on the rocks. Everyone shares what the trail is bringing to them. Many speak of the stress and uncertainty of living through the pandemic, of what a healing release it is to step into the wilderness. I am glad we could offer this opportunity to people who would not usually be able to afford it, and am grateful for the privilege of walking with people from different communities, and gaining new perspectives on life. The sharing helps me to see that I need to lay down my disappointment that my daughter could not come, lay down all intentions and expectations of the trail, and open myself to its gifts.
      We walk over green hills, pausing to contemplate a family of zebra. They contemplate us back, intermingled curiosity and caution expressed in their alert and twitching ears. Orb spiders spin golden webs in the surrounding trees,  hornbills and orange bee eaters fly above us, and we catch the iridescent flash of a lilac breasted roller.

We cross the river and strip off for a frolic in the water, as silly and playful as a pack of puppies. We walk up a steep koppie, and munch our cheese sandwiches with a commanding view of the silver river, flanked by golden sand, snaking between the hills. We listen to a story that Sicelo tells us about a small river nearby that was called ‘soup river’ after a battle with Shaka’s troops let to such bloodshed the river resembled a bloody soup. Hard to imagine in this still afternoon.
     We see two buffalo entering the river from opposite sides, to stand, head to tail in the middle. A lone elephant can be seen beyond them, and, in the far distance across the valley, five giraffes, ghostly and pale in a wedge of sunlight between the hills, like phantoms of another age.
      The walk back grows long in the warm afternoon, and the mthombothi branch I am carrying begins to weigh on my arm. I try to focus on the comfort it will bring that evening. Back at camp, darkness comes quickly, as we prepare a simple meal of pasta and tuna. I talk to Hawu about his aspirations for the future, the difficulties of getting into university.
      My night is not disturbed by night watch, as everyone is taking a little longer, and as the last person on the list I’ve been spared. But my self inflatable mat self-deflates,  reminding me of of bones I never knew I had as they meet the hard earth; my sleeping bag is damp, and some fiercely itchy pepper tick bites erupt on my legs.  At last the morning drifts in on the river mist, with a rousing twitter of weavers in the reeds, and all night discomforts are forgotten.

Friday
The sun soon burns off the river mist and dries our damp sleeping bags. We head off, once again with full packs, although lighter after three days of eating. We cross the river which is running  high for this time of year, up to my waist. On the opposite bank, we lay down our packs to put on our shoes. A large scorpion scuttles out of Dave’s pack - the worst kind, with small pincers and a big tail. No doubt it had crawled in during the night, and he had unwittingly carted it across the river. As the first scorpion seeks shelter in the sand, another scuttles out.
      We walk for some time along a wooded ridge, pausing to admire a rubbing post. The tree stump has been polished smooth by a parade of animals wearing it down over the years. Birds hover about, waiting for the ticks that the bigger animals will leave on the post.
       As we wind down to the river, a buffalo crosses  before us, then stands on the opposite slope, watching us uneasily. Sicelo goes ahead and greets it, saying, ‘Uxoliswa mfowethu’… excuse us, my brother, we come in peace. He draws on his kinship ties with the animal - the first Mbatha got his name from the full buffalo pelt that he used to wear.
      The buffalo lets us pass, and we continue up the slope. We sit in the welcome shade of some mthombothi trees for our daily cheese sandwiches. I close my eyes and drift into dreams, to be woken by Sicelo’s sharply whispered ‘Wake up’ – a white rhino bull has wandered out of a nearby thicket and is standing, watching us, from about ten metres away.
    Without speaking we scramble to our feet and retreat to a safer distance, but I still scan the surrounding trees to mark out which one I’ll duck behind should the rhino charge. We and the rhino stand watching each other for some time. I am awed by its power and beauty, moved by its poignant vulnerability to the poacher’s gun. There is such a different engagement in watching a rhino when you are on foot and defenceless, when it is aware of your presence. When you are in a vehicle, it has no awareness of you as another living creature.

When the rhino moves away we go back to our lunch spot to gather our things, and walk on. Emma says she wishes she could see an elephant. Sicelo says he won’t track animals, as that is predatory. If you want to see one, he says, invite one to make itself present to you. A few minutes later we do see a young male elephant, about thirty metres away.  Lovely to contemplate, but it forces us to take a long detour as the elephant is between us and the river. Sicelo knows that young male elephants tend to move in groups, that there will be others out of sight,  and that they are less predictable and more aggressive than breeding herds.  
      We climb a slope and take a long walk through thorn trees, carrying heavy branches for firewood, fighting the heat and aching muscles. Along the way, Peter hears a black rhino snorting nearby, but it does not confront us. When we reach our intended camp, Sicelo decides that it is not suitable as the grass has grown, restricting visibility of surrounding areas and increasing the risk of snakes and ticks. We cross the river to reach our old camp upstream. Buffalos and elephants on the opposite bank dictate that we walk in the river along a sandbank where it is a bit shallower. After a few hundred metres of wading, we reach our camp - just in time to see a crocodile slip into the deep water near the bank and swim downstream past us. We cross past where the crocodile was, sinking thigh deep into mud as we attempt to climb out of the river. With the help of a nearby tree and each other, we manage to get everyone out, all wearing thick mud ‘trousers’.
        We reach our familiar rock at last, the place where we spent the first night, and now it really does feel like home. Soon the fire is lit, tea is brewing, and Sicelo is reflecting on his experiences as a wilderness guide. We all feel that heady elation that comes from skirting danger. But I am less rattled by the experience of dodging big animals and walking in a river with crocodiles than some of the others because experience has taught me to trust Sicelo’s instincts completely.
      I do an early night watch, around midnight. At first the stars are vivid in the black sky, but the rising moon dims their light. It reveals a skein of mist lying on the far bank, spreading Umkhiwane trees rising from it like islands on silver seas. I hear the ‘sawing’ call of a leopard, and the warning bark of a baboon, frogs and insects, a scops owl, the eerie whoop of a hyena on the far bank. Silver-lined pale clouds stipple the dark sky, the river gleams in the moonlight. I am reluctant to yield my watch to the next person, but know that we have a long day ahead of us and need to sleep.

Saturday
At breakfast we are entertained by a mocking cliff chat, hopping near the fire, and eyeing us quizzically as it pauses to show off its bright orange underbelly and wedge-shaped tail. Its more reserved mate lurks in the branches nearby. Too soon we are packing up for the last time. We pause on the way out to consider a wild bee hive in an umkhiwane tree near the river. We carry on to the stand of umkhiwane’s where we first saw the vultures, which are now beginning to leave their roosts as the thermals warm up. We watch them circling up and away, moving soundlessly through the blue sky

We sit in a circle, and share what the trail has meant to us, our concerns about returning to ‘civilisation’.  Sicelo dubs this the ‘trail of hope’ – with the shocking toll on rhinos taken by poaching, he had been fearful that we might not see any, and was encouraged by those that we did see. I take a photo of each person. Everyone looks so at peace, so centred in themselves.
      All too soon, we are back in the human world: three hours in the van, then negotiating  the shockingly bright loud cluttered environment of the airport. For days we have seen nothing but water, sky, trees, a few animals. When I close my eyes on the aeroplane, I still see the patterns of the trees behind my lids. I’d been seeing that every night, as if they were imprinted on my eyeballs. The patterns soon fade, but I know I will carry the memory of that place, of being there in such a quiet way, without ownership or agenda, wanting only to live for a fleeting time in harmonious connection with other creatures and earth. How different things might be if humans could pursue that connection, rather than destroying everything for the comfort and greed of a small minority.
      As the plane takes off, I look at the lights retreating below us, and think of the golden orb spiders, patiently reminding us that we are all connected. That any tear in the web of life weakens the web and threatens us all.

First published in the Daily Maverick 

TWO  weeks ago, while chopping onions for her family’s supper in her Ophondweni home, 63-year-old Fikile Ntshangase was gunned down by unknown assailants. 
   A motive for her murder was not hard to find. As deputy chairperson of the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation (Mcejo), Ntshangase was a leading figure in community efforts to fight the expansion of the Somkhele coal mine. 
    When she was killed, she became yet another martyr in the increasingly ruthless global fight to force rural communities to allow mining on their doorsteps. Ntshangase’s death has been widely publicised, provoking widespread protest and dismay. So far there have been no arrests. 
Let us hope that progress is made more swiftly than in the case of Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Rhadebe, an activist from the Xolobeni area on the Wild Coast, who was resisting titanium mining in his community. 
He was shot dead in March 2016. Family members alleged that SAPS sabotaged the investigation by refusing to interview witnesses or collect evidence. Four years on, no progress has been made, and other Xolobeni activists face constant threats of violence.
    Ntshangase’s death highlights again the environmental and social costs of coal mines, which I wrote about in a story published in Daily Maverick one year ago. 
There is much complexity in this story, but the underlying narrative remains stark and sharply relevant at a time when environmental and social injustice threaten our very survival. 
In response to Ntshangase’s death, the CEO of the Tendele Coal Mining, Jan du Preez, claimed that the mine has brought great benefits to the area, including 1,600 jobs, contracts, programmes to assist with studying and learnerships, creches and so on. 
    Among these benefits, according to Tendele’s community manager, Nathi Kunene, is training in basic agricultural principles. It is somewhat ironic to be teaching people how to farm while degrading the lands on which they do it.
    It’s mind-boggling how much we pay. It’s close to blackmail.
   According to Du Preez, the mine faces closure if new areas cannot be excavated. And, if the mine closes, “40,000 people will lose either a job, a contract or a training opportunity”.
Du Preez claimed that the payouts to directly affected families in the Ophondweni and Emalahleni villages areas were, in some cases, 10 times more than the market value of their home; that the average payout was R750,000.
    The company’s own records show that not all families were offered R750,000. According to documents seen by Mail & Guardian reporters, many could be offered much less, the lowest amount being only R10,870.  
However, on the face of it, it may seem a generous offer, and for people living on the margins on hardscrabble traditional farms, R750,000 may be very tempting. 
    But that number becomes less compelling when you consider what is at stake. Tendele calculates the payout by evaluating the structures on the land – but not the land itself. 
This is because, although most families have been living there for generations, none of them own the land. It is held by the Ingonyama Trust, supposedly for the benefit of the community. 
     The question of why the people who live on the land don’t own it takes us down the rabbit hole of land ownership in this country, with its tangled burrows of dispossession, of the trickery and coercion whereby colonialists wrestled the land from those who were living on it; of deals made to grant the Ingonyama Trust control over millions of acres; of deals still being made to enable mining companies to gouge out and render non-arable and uninhabitable many of those acres, and of who has and who will really benefit from those deals.
    It is in the context of this troubled history that Du Preez’s allegations of “blackmail” should be considered.
In a world governed by property rights, compensation for the structures alone may be legal, but can it be regarded as fair? And if so, is the market value a remotely relevant instrument? 
How do you assess the value, for example, of a traditional hut (indlu yangenhla) built and rebuilt over centuries, where for generations a family has sustained contact with their ancestors, performed rituals that give meaning and purpose to their lives, found comfort from misfortune and celebrated joy… Is it really only worth the price of the mud, sticks and grass that constitute its housing?
    When the people are relocated from their homes for the mine, they lose far more than the structures on the land for which they are compensated. 
    Their real wealth is in the land beneath their feet. And when they lose that, they lose the right to live on the land of their forefathers, they lose ancestral connections, they lose the springs that flow even in times of drought, the sweet summer grass, the trees which sheltered their goats from summer storms, the ground where their umbilical cords are buried, the view of the rolling hills that framed their childhoods, clean air and fertile soil.
    Even assuming that R750,000, (or whatever they receive) is adequate compensation for this loss, the only people who receive a payout at all are those so-called “directly affected communities” who have to actually vacate their homes and lands for the mine. 
But the mines are surrounded by thousands of homesteads whose residents are not offered compensation as they are not classed as “directly affected”.
These are some of the ways in which the people who get no compensation are “not directly affected” (drawn from the articles cited, and interviews I have conducted with people in the area):

•       The walls of their homes crack and sometimes collapse because of the constant blasting, which also affects their mental health, as do the glaring spotlights. Work shifts run day and night and through the weekends;
•       The air is filled with coal dust, leading to headaches, lung disease, asthma and other respiratory illnesses;
•       Water scarcity: residents report that springs have been blocked by the mine; in the drought of 2016, according to Attorney Kirsten Youens, the mine sank boreholes into the dry river bed of the Imfolozi, without obtaining authorisation – thereby depleting critical groundwater sources;
•       Pollution of water sources: open-cast mines contaminate groundwater and pollute surface water through the processing of ore;
•       Their animals grow sick. The intestines of cows, which used to be a delicacy reserved for older men, are inedible because they are black with coal dust;
•       Animals have to be tethered to stop them wandering onto the huge dumps of fragmented rock, and falling and breaking limbs; and
•       The rainwater which many homesteads capture from their roofs and store in tanks has become unusable, as it is full of black grit – depriving households of a critical water source.

I don’t know what representatives of Tendele told the community when they first came with the mine proposals some 15 years ago. I have been told by those who were there that many promises were made, but not many written down or signed. 
I doubt the mine agents told communities about all the effects described above. I doubt Tendele told them that all the blessings that flow from the mine – the jobs and learnerships and so forth – would come to an end when the coal ran out in a decade, and the only way to secure them further was to agree to another huge portion of earth being hauled out. 
More removals, more noise, more coal dust, less water, more sick animals. 
And when that ran out, another mine would be needed… and another, and another… until perhaps all the 220km² for which Tendele has mining rights has been turned from fertile grazing lands into a toxic gravel pit hollowed out for its anthracite. Whatever was promised at the first meetings – when Tendele came to the community with the latest expansion plans in 2018 – people were a little wiser.  
Many had not received the promised blessings and knew all too well the consequences of living next to a coal mine. Mcejo was formed and the community resolved to launch a court application to ensure that the existing mine complied with environmental regulations, and that further expansion was stopped. 
But by then powerful interests in the community were heavily invested in the mine. Traditional leaders, politicians and local businessmen all had connections with lucrative contracts – and it is likely that most of these people lived far enough from the mine not to experience its negative impacts. 
Our resolve is based on honouring a strong woman; an anchor of our community.
As is the way of these things, those who benefit most from mining tend to be those whose daily lives are least impacted. I doubt that Du Preez and other managers are woken at night by blasting, or have to drink water contaminated by coal grit.
And so, pressure was put on the activists, with increasing menace. 
In April this year, there were two drive-by shootings, targeting Sabelo Dladla and Tholakele Mthetwa. Other Mcejo members faced repeated death threats and were told of a hit list in circulation. 
Then, in October, Mam’Ntshangase paid the ultimate price.
The mine created 1,600 jobs. But in the process it has destroyed many livelihoods. Situated on the border of the Hluhluwe/iMfolozi Game Reserve, this area has rich tourist potential which could have been enhanced with investment in creative community-led projects, but the growing excavations  for the mine are rapidly destroying this possibility. 
This, and the damage caused to the land, has made the community more dependent on these jobs. Now, to sustain those 1,600 jobs, the mine needs to obliterate many more homes and livelihoods, leaving a great swathe of destroyed land which is unlikely to recover any time soon – if ever.
Which begs the question: just who is blackmailing who?
While the mine is seriously compromising or destroying the livelihoods of many on its borders, these impacts are overshadowed by the even bigger threat of catastrophic climate change. 
Not only are these communities suffering from the process of extracting the coal, but they are also beginning to suffer seriously from the consequences of burning it, as drought and floods induced by climate change ravage their area and many others beyond.  
And by destroying topsoil and grasslands, the mine is turning land that functions as a carbon sink into a top carbon emitter.
Du Preez expressed regret at Ntshangase’s death, but suggested that violence was inevitable as the mine was being “held to ransom” by 19 of the 145 families in two designated mining areas who had refused offers of compensation to relocate. Du Preez’s suggestion that it is the resistance of anti-mining activists that is causing violence and tension in the community is disingenuous.  
This resistance would not be “causing violence” in the community if there was no mine to resist. But this mine is spoken of by its proponents as an inevitability, and has been presented to residents as such. 
The question asked of them is not, do you want this mine? but this mine is coming whether you want it or not – how much are you willing to sacrifice to try to stop it?
Perhaps in years gone by, coal mining could have been justified as a necessary evil. Now, with growing evidence of the devastation caused by extracting and burning fossil fuels, and with the rapidly growing capacity for renewables such as wind and solar to provide our country with safe, cheap and clean energy, coal mining is becoming increasingly indefensible.
In 2019 I interviewed Sabelo Dladla, the son of a dedicated anti-mining activist who took up the struggle against Tendele after his father’s death. In April 2020, armed men stormed Sabelo’s homestead and raked it with gunfire. He had to go into hiding and subsequently withdrew his name as the leading applicant in the case against Tendele. 
I don’t know what finally made him withdraw, but I do know that not only had he faced bullets himself, he’d grown up watching his family live in terror of these attacks when they were directed at his father.
Bullying and intimidating communities into accepting the coal mine is not the same as getting community assent. No one should have to choose between staying alive and defending their right to raise a family on ancestral land in a safe, clean, unpolluted environment. 
These communities are not blackmailing the mining companies. They are protecting our fragile earth from yet more destruction, and they should be saluted as the heroes they are. 
But far from coming to their support, the South African government continues to promote fossil fuels, grant mining rights without consulting those affected, promote the interests of mining companies over communities and drag their feet on investigating threats and acts of violence.
In the words of Medical Nziba, “This won’t stop us from continuing with our struggle to fight against mining on our land. 
“Our resolve is based on honouring a strong woman; an anchor of our community.” 
Brave words indeed. 
Let’s hope that in this instance at least, their struggle will be rewarded and justice will be found for Mam’Ntshangase. DM
Bridget Pitt is a South African author with a keen interest in environmental and social justice issues. She has published poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and three novels in South Africa, Canada and the United Kingdom. Her work has been short-listed for the Commonwealth book prize; Wole Soyinka African Literature Award and Commonwealth Short Story Award, and was runner-up in the Short Sharp Stories competition.

A billion animal lives; twenty-seven human lives; countless human and animal homes. This is the latest toll of the 2020 Australian bushfires, widely acknowledged as a manifestation of our climate crisis. The country burns, while their Prime Minister Scott Morrison brings lumps of coal to parliament and mocks those who fear it….
 
When I was five years old, my father went to Australia on a business trip. He was gone forever, it seemed, but he returned at last – perhaps after a week or two. My sister and I hovered about as he unpacked his suitcase, not wanting to make it too obvious (or so we imagined) that we were waiting to see what he’d brought for us. Then I saw a patch of fur, and my heart leapt as I imagined it to be a kitten, or puppy, or guinea pig, it didn’t matter. As long as it was alive.
 
He took it out and said, this is for you.
 
I looked at the curious creature in his hands.  It was square of body, with soft rubber claws on its four corners, small round ears, and a large  black rubber nose,  oval-shaped with long nostrils. Two small bright eyes winked at me.
 
What is it? I asked
 
It’s a koala bear, he said.
 
It was a toy, of course, and not animate. But in the way of loved things it soon came to life. I can still feel it, the soft fur, the tufted ears, the firm coolness of the nose against my neck
 
I called it Koala. It didn’t need another name. Koala was exotic enough. Each night he lay on my pillow beside me, his glassy eyes gazing out, and whispered secrets about his life in the blue gum forests of Australia. His potency lay in this: He had not left Australia to be my bear. He was not some toy my father bought at an airport store. He was a real live bear living a the mysterious faraway land, who had sent his doppelganger, this square fur creature with the rubber oval nose, to be his proxy in my life.  I never doubted that my Koala was still living his life with his koala family, for he conveyed the richness of this life through the stories he whispered into my ears every night. How lucky I was that he’d sent his symbolic self into my father’s suitcase, that he’d chosen me to share his stories, that I could stroke his soft fur and press his square body against me, when the night was dark and lonely or haunted by fearful dreams.
 
Once I had a dog called Angus, a black and white spaniel who grew into a fox terrier, whom no one really loved but me. He was my constant companion. When my mother’s  dog (a real spaniel) had puppies, Angus was desperate to love them, but the mother wouldn’t let him near. On going to bed one night I could not find Koala. And there he was in Angus’s basket, adopted as Angus’ puppy, sodden from being licked and licked.  I knew why my dog had chosen him from all the soft toys. Because Koala was different.  Koala was alive.
 
In time, Koala grew bald patches on his fur. Being a toy from the early 60’s, he (like the kangaroo my father gave my sister) was constructed from a real kangaroo pelt  rather than faux fur, although I only figured this out much later. Creepy, perhaps, but it gave him authenticity. In time, a family dog (not Angus) nibbled off his claws, another chewed his ears.  But Koala continued to be my faithful dream companion well into my teens.
 
My memories of my childhood koala came back to me vividly today, when I was reading about the bushfires in Australia. I have been watching this disaster unfold with horror, rage and despair; just as I have watched the withering of my own country from drought, the devastation of lives in nearby Mozambique from floods, the fires in the Congo basin and the Amazon, and all the other unravelling of the fabric of the world. In recent weeks my eyes have skated over the appalling images of kangaroos fleeing the inferno, of a small joey trapped by a fence and mummified by fire, of people shell shocked and despairing watching their lives implode. 
 
Today I watched a video of a woman rescuing a koala bear burnt by the flames. I watched it first in silence, and then I replayed it with the sound on.
 
I will never forget the sound it made. I sat there in my lounge, sobbing. Not just tears, but heaving, snotty paroxysms of grief. Because somehow, in that singular, inchoate wail, in that lament of sorrow and pain and fear, the koala expressed the sorrow, pain and fear of all the koalas, of all the humans, of all the kangaroos and birds and insects and ants and snakes and lizards and wombats. Of all who have lost homes, who have lost children, siblings, life-partners, parents; who have faced the terror of a traumatised planet turning against itself. 
 
It was as if that inconceivable agony had run past me, and flicked me with its tail. As if that tiny keening koala framed on my phone was the envoy for all its fellow koalas and all the dwellers of the fire forests. Just as my koala had been an envoy for the vibrant living Australian forest of my imagination. But what a different narrative each koala told.
 
The koala was rescued from a burning tree. He was taken to an animal hospital, which named him Lewis. After assessing and treating his injuries, they made the heartbreaking decision to euthanize him.
 
My childhood koala was meaningful for me because of the living koalas it represented. It offered me a connection to life, to other life forms, to other, non-human lives in a forest on the other side of the world. It reassured me that we were not alone, but shared our earth home with a huge diverse family. And I knew, as I lay listening to Koala’s night time tales, that my life was enriched by these other lives, that they rendered it more significant, more mysterious and complex. Koala was different from the wooden dodo on my mother’s dresser. Because that dodo did not connect to life, it connected to the absence of life, to lives snuffed out by extinction. It held a sadness where my Koala held joy.
 
But Lewis the crying Koala could not hold the joy of a thriving creature in his natural home. That joy, that home was gone. He could hold only the pain of a species not yet dead but dying. Of innumerable lives shattered by the immense, cascading, and entirely preventable tragedy of Anthropogenic Climate Change.
 
Koala’s have been declared ‘functionally extinct’ by the Australian Koala Foundation – their numbers too low and habitat too destroyed to be able to recover. Can we imagine a world where the only elephants-giraffes-lions-rhinos-koalas-kangaroos are the toys of children? Can we imagine a world where even the children are gone, the toys no longer signifying life or love but just lumps of plastic or wool spinning on a lifeless planet? That world is coming, and every day that not enough is done to address the climate crisis, that world moves towards us faster.
 
The connection offered by my childhood Koala was my birthright. That connection is the birthright of all humans, of all living creatures, of all of us sharing this infinitely complex, infinitely beautiful miracle of life. That birthright is being stolen to prop up the profit of one hundred companies, to enrich a handful of billionaires who already have more than they could spend in a lifetime, to placate lily-livered or narcissistic politicians and executives with no vision beyond their own obsession with power, to fool those still gullible enough to be fooled. No wonder that fleeting apprehension of that pain left me sobbing and gasping for breath.
 
My childhood Koala has gone now, lost in one of the multiple moves between my childhood home and my present one. And Lewis has gone, free at last of pain. But his  cry will never leave me. It has pierced my heart, and stitched itself to my flesh. The only way I can live with it is to do join the millions of others in fighting for earth; to turn my grief into action and do everything I can with every day I have to stop the coal-driven ecocide and genocide, and help to birth a kinder, less destructive way to be human.
 
To paraphrase from a well known movie, we can choose life or fossil fuels. How is that even a debate?
 
Listen to Lewis. Choose life. 


To watch the video of Lewis, if you can bear it, go to 
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/1/5/1907319/-Compassion-Abounds-Australian-Grandma-Jumps-Out-Of-Car-To-Save-A-Suffering-Koala-As-Fire-Rages?detail=emaildkre

https://inhabitat.com/koalas-declared-functionally-extinct/
​

Ancestors. A ticklish business. Kennedy has no problem with his. They are all small dogs with delusions of grandeur, I imagine, although someone in the very early days of the family tree was a Mexican fox. A number of ankles have doubtless fallen prey to his line, but their destructive impact on a global scale is quite minimal. Alas, the same cannot be said of mine.
 
My British forebearer, William Pitt, first set foot on South African soil in 1826, with his wife and seven year old son, Thomas. William was born in Gloucester in 1777. I don’t know what impelled him to get on to a boat and subject himself to three weeks of scurvy and sea sickness, but he became a cobbler in Grahamstown, now renamed Makana, while his son grew up to be a diamond prospector in Kimberley.
 

I know little about William, but I was raised with the notion that the British were a fundamentally decent lot; that while the Boers believed in slavery, the British treated their servants with a firm kindliness and brought all sorts of advantages to the local populace, such as railways, monocrops and afternoon tea, which was a fair bargain for the land they acquired. After all, I was told, the locals did not know how to farm their land properly and ran it into the ground. (My father would point to soil erosion around over-crowded reservations as proof of some genetically transferred poor land management skills, never stopping to consider that perhaps it was more to do with the fact that 80 % of the population was crammed onto 13% of the land.)
 
When I became a hot-headed young radical (my father’s words) in the 1980’s,  I discovered  that the British, historically, were not that decent after all; that colonialists stole land and enslaved people; that the exploitative relationships of colonialism persisted into modern times, perpetuating global inequality and keeping Africa in poverty. I went from believing them to all be fundamentally good, to damning them all as fundamentally bad. William himself might not have run a bayonet through any local tribesmen, but he supplied the shoes of those who did. And, unlike their amaZulu and amaXhosa counterparts, British soldiers would  certainly not have been able to conquer anyone as efficiently had they been barefoot.
 
Age has graced me with a more nuanced view. I have come to realise that perhaps the most frightening aspect of history is that monstrous systems are upheld not only by monsters but by kindly people, who are either frightened, ignorant or deluded about the system they are helping to sustain. That kind, generous, funny likeable people may equally and almost simultaneously be callous, greedy and self-serving.
 
This understanding has been greatly expanded with the research undertaken for my current work in progress. The novel is set in KwaZulu-Natal in the second half of the 19th century, and moves from a mission station, to the sugar cane fields, to the hunting fields of the Black Imfolozi. I have read a number of personal diaries, journals and letters. I have made several friends among these long-dead humans. But, as much as I have been moved by their courage, fortitude, and wry English self-deprecation, I have been appalled by their unquestioning assumption of their right to live on and appropriate the land; by their unquestioning belief in their superiority over  anyone who speaks a different language, wears different clothes and has a different colour skin.
 
Researching and writing this book has been a fascinating and often unnerving journey for me. I wrote it to understand better the roots of our current ills – social inequality; white supremacy; massive environmental destruction and wide spread extinction. It has certainly provided a profound insight into all of these things. In the coming months, I will share more of what I have learnt. In the meantime, I shall endure the angry ghosts of my forefathers, as they follow me about, pointing out that all the privileges I enjoy flow precisely from my great great great great grandfather protecting the feet of the British Infantry; my great great great grandfather digging diamonds from the soil of a land that was not his; and all the wealth extraction and exploitation practiced by their descendants. An uncomfortable truth I must live with, but the least I can to is unpack, shake out, and minutely examine the grain of that privilege and its origins. ​

Kennedy's ancestors are certainly less morally compromised than mine. But he  doesn't care  how ill-gotten my privilege might be, as long as it supplies him with supper and a warm bed every night.

Others who were there were with me in high school, and as I attempted to project an airy erudition I suddenly recalled giving English Orals to a room full of underwhelmed and derisive teenagers. Fortunately, they are all now lovely and gracious women who were kind enough to come and listen without heckling.
   My high school English teacher was there, who knew me as an unformulated fourteen year old who spent her lessons surreptitiously eating Fritos and writing poetry on very small scrolls which I kept in a world sharpener in my pencil case. Also my Gym teacher, now in her eighties, who spent 12 years patiently trying to remedy my total failure on the sports field.
    In Cape Town, there were people who’d marched with me when I was a social activist sporting a Free Mandela button with stern opinions on What is to be Done; others who’d got to know me over the heads of our squalling infants in pushchairs; and more recent connections forged in the trenches defending a local wetland from developers.

__ I was very touched that all these people should feel moved to come to support my book launch, and it also felt quite fitting. After all, it is these myriad connections which have enabled my stories to grow. For while one tries to avoid stealing people’s lives too blatantly, there can be now doubt that the raw material of a writer is forged in these relationships.
I recall little of what was actually said at these events, but fortunately Liesl Jobson was at the Cape Town launch, and has written a great account on the BooksLive website, as well as supplying these fabulous pics. The extracts which I read aloud can be downloaded here.
So thanks to all who made this possible, especially to Ryno Posthumus and Fourie Botha of PenguinRandom House, Kate Rogan at LoveBooks and Mervyn Sloman and The Book Lounge team, and all those who came and smiled at me kindly and bought books. The novel is launched, and all that remains to be said is bless this book and all who sail in her.

Incredible Journey Teaser: Q&A with one of this year’s runners-up, Bridget Pitt

Posted By twodogs On July 28, 2015 @ 8:59 am In South Africa | Comments Disabled

Bridget Pitt is a 2015 Short.Sharp.Stories Judges’ Choice Runner-Up for her story “The Infant Odysseus”. Pitt is a Zimbabwe-born South African writer. Her first published writing appeared in the anti-apartheid newspaper Grassroots, and she has since written educational material for NGOs, school textbooks, poetry and fiction.

As your first time being a part of the Short.Sharp.Stories project how does it feel to be a prizewinner?

It’s firstly wonderful to be part of the Incredible Journey collection, and to feel part of this community of writers. And, of course, it is very gratifying to get the recognition of being a prize winner, although (as I remind myself on the many occasions I don’t win) the real satisfaction lies in writing as well as I can, and in touching others.

What does this year’s topic, ‘incredible journey’, mean to you?

It’s a very evocative topic, which resonated with me as soon as I’d read it. I think what is so powerful about it is that it captures a sense of process, that as living beings we are in a constant state of change – which can be disturbing, as we like to hold onto things, but is also liberating.

Speaking of constant state of change, is that why you chose a baby as the focus for your incredible journey story?

I felt that the baby’s journey, and the internal journeys that it sparked in the other characters who engaged with it, held a lot of powerful metaphors about us as individuals and as a society. Meeting a baby can be an invitation to relate to another human in a very authentic way – babies don’t judge us; we are not afraid to engage with them in case they take advantage, or think we’re stupid, or misunderstand our motives. They connect us with a time before we were formed – or damaged – by life. But they also connect us with our vulnerability as children, and as adults, which can be quite threatening. This baby also interested me because it was at once both vulnerable and resilient, like feelings of tenderness, or love, or hope.

Your story has a very distinct moment in it when your main character is appalled by her husband’s reaction so drastically different from her own. Have you had a moment like that, living in South Africa, when you’ve realised someone close to you has a completely different opinion?

I have often experienced this, and it is always disconcerting, especially when these responses are from someone I hold dear, or whom I’d assumed shared my views. The South African reality is highly contested, and can feel very personal if someone feels threatened or overwhelmed by the violence and injustice of it, so I suppose it is not surprising that we respond to it very differently.

In addition to the husband and wife having different reactions to the baby both women have a powerful yet different response to the baby – can you comment on this?

The women both have enormously complex relationships with the baby. The mother’s tenderness for the baby is evident, but equally evident are the burdens she carries of poverty and forced migration which make it almost impossible for her to care for her child. For Georgia, the baby is a portal both to her suppressed grief about her own lost child, and to a disturbingly intimate insight into the hardships faced by millions of mothers across the world. At some level, their respective reactions are quite primitive: a meeting between a mother and a barren woman longing for a child. The starkness of this encounter momentarily illuminates the strands of personal and social history that weave their relationship to the child and each other, simultaneously bringing them together and ripping them apart.

As someone who has written many different formats, from textbooks to poetry, which one do you find the most rewarding to write?

My first love is novels, but I like any writing. A successful poem is a wonderful thing, and not quite as arduous as a novel. Textbooks are very much on other people’s terms, but I enjoy finding ways to be creative within those strict parameters.

Describe your fiction writing process. Is it disciplined and 9-5pm or do you need to be in the mood?

I try to spend at least four hours on writing something every day, or at least working on writing-related stuff such as research or making submissions. Once I am fully into a novel, story or poem, I get a bit obsessive and have to drag myself away from it. Then I can go for twelve hours a day.

It sounds like you truly love what you do. Do you have any short story writing tip you can share?

This is hard, because when I read the great short story writers I feel like a total amateur. I think the challenge is to encapsulate something quite monumental and complex into a small moment, but I can’t really say how you do that. I can say “make every word count”, but of course that should as equally apply to a 400 page novel!

Do you believe you have a role in promoting South Africans’ interest in reading?

Hopefully all writers promote reading by writing stuff that is attractive to read. I do think we need to cultivate a reading culture, though, which is why I enjoy working on school-based material and material for children. I like finding texts and activities to make kids feel that reading can bring some inspiration and relevant narrative to their lives.

What can we expect from you next?

I have a novel [Notes From The Lost Property Department] coming out in September this year, which explores brain injury, mountains, secrecy, and the thorny challenge of forgiving your parents. I am also working on another novel, which delves into the issue of rhino hunting/poaching in the past, present and future, which I hope to finish by the end of next year.

Interview by Liz Sarant

Incredible Journey
AUTHORS: Edited by Joanne Hichens
RRP: R190
ISBN/EAN: 9781928230182
EXTENT: 256pp
RELEASE DATE: July 2015

ABOUT THE BOOK:Incredible Journey is the third of the annual SHORT.SHARP.STORIES anthologies. Following the crime-thrillers of Bloody Satisfied (2013) and erotic tales of Adults Only (2014), the focus in 2015 is on a journey, be it political, personal or emotional.
  The incredible journeys of this year’s title vary from road trips to mind trips, and are by turns inspirational, intriguing and entertaining. Those that have made this year’s shortlist have two things in common: 1) as in previous collections, they capture uniquely South African voices, and 2) they move the reader.
  The judges of this year’s competition are Henrietta Rose-Innes, Ken Barris and Makhosazana Xaba, with a foreword to the collection by Sindiwe Magona. To read more or to order the book go to http://www.burnetmedia.co.za.

Recently I had the great pleasure of reading Let’s tell this story Properly, an anthology of stories entered into the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This collection provides a chorus of voices from throughout the Commonwealth, and I feel extremely privileged that my own story, Next Full Moon we will Release Juno, represents one of these.

The story that gives the anthology its title is by Ugandan writer Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, a sharply observed narrative on the death of a man with a secret from his wife. The protagonist’s ruthless honesty about herself and her relationship with her recently deceased husband  provides a wonderful insight into the community of the Ugandan diaspora, as well as a commentary on marriage, fidelity, and widowhood that is universal to all societies.

The other stories feature a humming bird, a smoking grandmother, a devil on a church outing, a mother lost to America, a Haitian cowboy, a woman married to a ghost, a mummified cat, an elusive giant squid, and (my own) a stuffed Kudu. They take us from Singapore in the 1920’s to pre-war Germany and modern day Jamaica. The narratives are satirical, tragic, compassionate and humorous, but all are wonderfully expressed and compelling to read.   Taken together, they form a remarkable portrait of the world we live in, with all its pathos, absurdity and delight.

Next Full Moon We’ll Release Juno
by Bridget Pitt

Long before we released Clarence on the Plains of Camdeboo, it was well known in Oupoort that Jonah was soft in the head.
       It was also well known that anyone who had a problem with that could sort it out with me. Jonah sometimes made me want to run up the koppie behind the Ouport and scream so loud that all the boulders would roll down the hill and bury the whole damn town. But he was my cousin and I had to keep him safe. 
        Jonah was always different. Ouma Saartjie said it was because he was born just as the blood-red midsummer Karoo moon was rising on one side of Oupoort, while the angry orange sun dipped below the ragged-toothed mountains on the other side.
        Auntie Jenna said we shouldn’t question God’s creations.
        If he hadn’t been different, I might have been jealous of him. Not only did he snatch my place as the youngest cousin, but, as our relatives never tired of remarking, he also ‘looked like an angel’. Oh, how those aunties would babble on about his green eyes, his curly hair bronzed with gold, his ‘tawny’ skin... Any kid who ‘looked white’ was admired (and also despised) in our neighbourhood, although Jonah didn’t look white so much as like a whole new breed of human, whereas I was just your standard issue Karoo laaitie.
        But when the aunties tried to cuddle him, Jonah would go rigid and silent, as if listening for instructions from a distant planet on how to manage a life-threatening situation. And they would put him down, puzzled and a little afraid. When I saw that, I understood that Jonah needed someone to stand between him and the world. It seemed that he’d rather be squeezed by a python than hugged by an auntie, and I soon learnt to put myself in the path of relatives bearing down on him.
        Keeping him safe at school was a trickier business. On Jonah’s first day, Willie Kleinhans knocked him down in the playground and sat on top of him, pummelling him into the red earth like a secretary bird stomping on a snake. Jonah just lay there staring out at some dark star, and when I dived in and persuaded Willie to beat me up instead, he picked himself up and wandered off as if the whole thing had nothing to do with him. Every other day I had to punch someone for calling him spastic chicken brain or fish puke (which some genius coined after a Sunday school lesson about Jonah and the whale). Jonah never seemed to care about the insults, and never thanked me for defending him, but he was family. What else could I do? ...

So there is this place where I walk my dogs. I call it the Bosky Dell, but its official name is the Kirstenbosch Arboretum. It’s a sad place because once there were families living there whose homes were demolished under the Group Areas Act’. Now it has beautiful, lush growth as if the sorrow of its past has fertilised the ground. In spring it is carpeted with snowdrops and Arum lilies. In summer the grass grows high and hums with cicadas, and my dogs bound through it in a shower of golden grass seeds. 
    A river runs through it, clear water fresh from the mountain rushing over pale stones. At one point this stream forms a deeper pool, in a shaded, quiet moment beneath contemplative trees. The pool is fed by a small waterfall; gnarled and woody roots garland the water, fish and tadpoles flicker through the still depths, beneath the dart of dragon flies.
    Visiting this was once the highlight of my walk. It felt like a portal into wild, untouched spaces in distant forests, a reverent place that could bring me back into connection with myself and the earth. A place where I could feel the humility and serenity that comes from knowing you are just one small part of a very big dance.
    Until the day I came to find a word spray painted in dayglo orange on one of the trees. And the word was “God”.
    Any word would have been a destructive act of vandalism, but I think I would have preferred “Chantal loves Wayne”, or “DOG”, which was what Kennedy thought it was, as he read it from the bottom of the tree. (How thoughtful, he said. A tree especially for dogs, and he proceeded to honour it, as dogs do.) Because far from bringing God into the place, it just crushed its inherent spirituality and shoved God right out.
    I don’t pretend to know about God. I don’t subscribe to any formal religion. I’m with the Buddhists in thinking that a God conceived by humans is inevitably diminished by the limits of our imagination. Far from humans being created in God’s image, it seems to me that humans have cast God in their image, and all too often come up with a small-minded vengeful God, a mean jealous God with a fragile ego. A God who is offended by homosexuality, for instance. Seriously? You think that a being who created a universe of which the world is one miniscule particle in an unbounded vortex of stars and galaxies, who spawned billions of life forms, who has watched humans evolve to find ever new ways of destroying the life, is going to be offended by two men wanting to love each other?
    I think God would be a lot more annoyed by someone defacing a tree. A lot of work went into that tree. Millions of years of evolution, to get it from a single celled amoeba into a multicellular brachiate and intricately functioning organism.
    The Dayglo GOD got me thinking about the phrase “taking God’s name in vain”. There’s a lot of that going on these days. And I don’t mean yelling “Jesus Christ” when you stub your toe. I mean perpetrating acts of cruelty, or abuse, or greed and claiming that you are acting for God. Like kidnapping school girls, gunning down cartoonists*, launching air strikes, or attacking women who choose to abort a pregnancy; Like denying children knowledge of evolution, or robbing people of their homeland and their birthright. Pretty much an endless list, going back way into the dark ages - as long as there has been a formal religion there have been those bandying God’s name about to justify any old thing, from burning women accused of witchcraft to systematically stealing from peasants.
    There are enlightened pro-religious thinkers who decry this abuse of God’s name, who claim that it is an aberration, the exception rather than the rule. But when the abuse is so widespread, you have to question whether it is not intrinsic to organised religion. In particular to those religions whose doctrine dictates that God loves only those who subscribe to a particular belief. There is no theistic religion in which believers have not used God’s name to justify atrocities – Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus all have blood on their hands.  This calls to mind the quote by Deepak Chopra: “God gave humans the truth, and the devil came and he said, 'Let's give it a name and call it religion’”.
    It is nice to imagine old Beezlebub skipping through the Bosky Dell with a can of orange dayglo paint and defacing the tree, but I have no doubt that the devil was invented by priests to rule their subjects with fear, and to absolve themselves of responsibility. As in “The devil made me do it.” It wasn’t the devil but humans who distorted the truth with religion, and infused it with all their self-serving barbarous narratives of righteous warfare and chosen races.
    So, speaking as one balanced on that rickety fence between vague agnosticism and stern atheism, I’d like to appeal to all the theists out there to start treating God’s name with a lot more respect. Don’t wave it around to endow acts of barbarism with glory. Don’t shine it in people’s eyes to blind them to atrocities, or to turn lost young men into killing and raping machines. Don’t use it to perpetuate fear and ignorance. And please don’t use it to deface any more trees.

* NOTE: While I condemn the attacks on the French Cartoonists, I am wary of the simplification of this issue and the glorification of Charlie Hebdo. The following articles provide nuanced commentary on this:

The false debate between freedom of expression and religious extremism By Monia MazighUnmournable Bodies By Teju Cole 
Charlie Hebdo Is Heroic and Racist We should embrace and condemn it. By Jordan Weissmann