The relationships between human and other animal species will forever be contested; a contest for space, nutrition, power, freedom. In South Africa the proximity of wildlife to human settlements is greater than anywhere in Europe, where many millennia of human domination has left the landscape bereft and empty of the larger mammals. But the accommodation between animals and humans remains uneasy – and as a result of the growing competition the relationships and co-operation between animals and members of their own species is also contested. Zorro the hippomotamus escaped from a ‘reserve’ near Cape Town to escape bullying and attacks from his father. Perhaps his father felt it was time for the adolescent to leave home, but there’s nowhere far enough away to go in a game park. Zorro somehow managed to escape and found a more peaceful home in one of the City’s sewage farm, where he gives the impression of bliss. He reigns supreme in a kingdom of shit devoid of all other hippos. But he will have to be re-homed eventually into one of the proliferating number of game parks, all in search of a hippo.
Amongst the lizards, too, things have got difficult. One of the more colourful chameleon lizards has developed a transvestite strain. These are adolescent males (again!) who don the colouring of the females of the species in the hope of avoiding attacks and evictions by the dominant males. This strategy seems to be working and the transvestite lizards are scoring with the females before the typically stupid males realise what’s going on. As a result, the selfish genetic adaptation that allowed them to take on female colouring seems for the moment to be prospering.
But, as far as humans are concerned, our most complex mythical and practical relationships are with big cats and with the higher primates. Baboons are notoriously territorial and aggressive apes and continue to resist human invasion of their territory long after the roads and houses have been built and the people have moved in. They keep a watchful gaze from a distance and mount guerrilla attacks when they can, both in defence of their territory, causing as much mayhem as possible, but also in search of relatively easily accessible food. As well as urinating and defecating on beds and cushions, where presumably the human scent is strongest, they also steal fruit, vegetable and most other edibles. An avocado from a salad bowl is a good deal less effort, after all, than climbing all those trees. And we humans are inadequate protectors of our abundant food supplies. Unlike the transvestite lizards, this is a learnt adaptation and undoubtedly a functional one. Many groups of birds and animals are losing their fear of humans – squirrels and pigeons in North London for example.
So, once battle with the baboons is joined, fear must be deployed. Many baboons that live near humans bear the scars. A troop living in Pringle Bay near Cape Town had broken fingers, tails, hands and legs. Many other injuries had been terminal. Some injuries have been gained in fights with other baboons, motivated either by sexual competition or by an attempt to upset the established hierarchy, the former being a particularly irritating example of the latter from the point of view of the alpha male. Others have been attacked by humans, hit with stones from catapults, shot at and run over by cars, not always accidentally. Some have been attacked by man’s most faithful friends, dogs. They survive despite their disabilities, by compensating in other physical ways and by sticking with the pack.
But one human couple in Pringle Bay have come to some kind of accommodation with the baboons. Kate Jagoe-Davis is an artist who is also a paraplegic and a continuous wheelchair user. The baboons are much less aggressive to her, in part because they are less aggressive towards women: apparently they find the smell of testosterone particularly annoying. But the baboons have gone further and made friends with her, playing with her bangles, sitting on her knee and even grooming her hair. One young mother even brings her newborn to show her. They remain wary of her partner, Brian, meanwhile. He occasionally has to adopt an assertive male stance, either standing his ground in stand offs with the baboon bosses or seeing them off the premises with shows of aggression. This bizarre accommodation leads to confusion all round and even this benign human couple trying to come to terms with their baboon neighbours will more likely than not come unstuck. It will end in tears, because the baboons will eventually call Brian’s bluff. A show of aggression will not be enough.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Animals in Amsterdam
At the FOAM photographic gallery in Amsterdam, in a lovely canalside town house, there were two exhibitions, one by an African photographer, Malick Sidibe, and the other with an African subject , The Hyena and Other Men, by Pieter Hugo. The photographs in the Malick Sidibe exhibition were mostly taken in his studio in Bamako, Mali in the 1970s. They are devoid of the all too familiar stereotypes of Africa. Instead, sharply dressed, mostly young people went to his studio to have a photo taken, which conveyed their strength of pride about themselves, as if they were setting off for a night on the town, perhaps with romantic conquest in mind. Many of the outfits give them a kind of gangster quality, complete with mirror sunglasses. Not gangsta in the contemporary sense, but gangster in the sense of 1930s Chicago: dapper men in sharply cut suits; feminine, glamorous women.
Malick Sidibe also specialised in wedding photography and these photographs convey all the joys of crowds and community, of spontaneity, celebration and hospitality that one might struggle to find in Europe nowadays. Finding celebration and crowds might be particularly difficult in Amsterdam, where all is cool, distant, elegant and now conservative. How different to the 1970s when Amsterdam was colour, youth and freedom, whilst London was grey, old, broke and broken.
The other exhibition by Pieter Hugo could not be more of a contrast. Instead of the small studio portraits, the huge photographs are of men with hyenas, dogs and monkeys on chains. These men are a group of travelling musicians and performers in Nigeria whom the photographer has got to know. But the subjects do not seek to reveal intimacy or vulnerability. Instead they want to convey strength, control and, above all, mastery over the hyenas, muzzled and on the end of a thick chain. These animals are forcibly controlled, not tamed – and God knows how they were made to suffer in order to contain their fear and aggression. Aggression must have been beaten out of them.
The men are exotically dressed in beads and animal skins, whilst some of the animals are dressed up in human clothes: two monkeys are wearing football shirts and they stare at the camera in a defiant, knowing way. So somehow the so-called hyena men have tried to pull off a kind of anthropomorphic role reversal. The men are posing with their legs apart and their chest out, as if they are wild, dominant animals. The animals are supposedly becalmed and deferential. But the pose is obviously fake. The viewer senses immediately not that these men are powerful, but that they are powerless, poor and desperate. The animals, however, still suggest their barely contained wildness. The human trick has failed. We are not the masters of wild animals. We only convey an illusion of brutal power, seeking more than anything to convince ourselves, whilst those over which we claim power know that our power is conditional and temporary. One day the fight will come and the fight will be to the death.
Human anthropocentric delusion is a subject which John Gray addresses in Amsterdam. He tells the story of a vegan cat. A friend of his told him that he had trained, cajoled and tricked his cat into being a vegan and therefore to eschew meat and other animal products. The animal had apparently thrived on this unusual diet. Even a cursory acquaintance with cats confirms that there is no cat in the world that does not eat meat and fish. But then one of John’s questions hit the bullseye. Was the cat kept indoors, he asked his friend. No, came the reply, the cat was free to come and go as it pleased. The owner apparently believed that the cat maintained its vegan habits whilst out on the town alone.
The cat, one suspects, may have had a friend like Yvonne who feeds Herman the cat from next door, to the point where he is now overweight; some might even say obese. His owners think he has a poor appetite. They may even think he is a vegan.
Malick Sidibe also specialised in wedding photography and these photographs convey all the joys of crowds and community, of spontaneity, celebration and hospitality that one might struggle to find in Europe nowadays. Finding celebration and crowds might be particularly difficult in Amsterdam, where all is cool, distant, elegant and now conservative. How different to the 1970s when Amsterdam was colour, youth and freedom, whilst London was grey, old, broke and broken.
The other exhibition by Pieter Hugo could not be more of a contrast. Instead of the small studio portraits, the huge photographs are of men with hyenas, dogs and monkeys on chains. These men are a group of travelling musicians and performers in Nigeria whom the photographer has got to know. But the subjects do not seek to reveal intimacy or vulnerability. Instead they want to convey strength, control and, above all, mastery over the hyenas, muzzled and on the end of a thick chain. These animals are forcibly controlled, not tamed – and God knows how they were made to suffer in order to contain their fear and aggression. Aggression must have been beaten out of them.
The men are exotically dressed in beads and animal skins, whilst some of the animals are dressed up in human clothes: two monkeys are wearing football shirts and they stare at the camera in a defiant, knowing way. So somehow the so-called hyena men have tried to pull off a kind of anthropomorphic role reversal. The men are posing with their legs apart and their chest out, as if they are wild, dominant animals. The animals are supposedly becalmed and deferential. But the pose is obviously fake. The viewer senses immediately not that these men are powerful, but that they are powerless, poor and desperate. The animals, however, still suggest their barely contained wildness. The human trick has failed. We are not the masters of wild animals. We only convey an illusion of brutal power, seeking more than anything to convince ourselves, whilst those over which we claim power know that our power is conditional and temporary. One day the fight will come and the fight will be to the death.
Human anthropocentric delusion is a subject which John Gray addresses in Amsterdam. He tells the story of a vegan cat. A friend of his told him that he had trained, cajoled and tricked his cat into being a vegan and therefore to eschew meat and other animal products. The animal had apparently thrived on this unusual diet. Even a cursory acquaintance with cats confirms that there is no cat in the world that does not eat meat and fish. But then one of John’s questions hit the bullseye. Was the cat kept indoors, he asked his friend. No, came the reply, the cat was free to come and go as it pleased. The owner apparently believed that the cat maintained its vegan habits whilst out on the town alone.
The cat, one suspects, may have had a friend like Yvonne who feeds Herman the cat from next door, to the point where he is now overweight; some might even say obese. His owners think he has a poor appetite. They may even think he is a vegan.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets/ for a few photographs of Amsterdam
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Lighthouses at Dartington
Peter Maxwell Davies, one of Britain’s greatest living composers, was once the Director of the Dartington International Summer School. After a long absence of more than 25 years, this year he returned. He gave master classes in composing and the musicians present played many of his pieces in the Great Hall, which, notwithstanding its name, high windows and vaulted ceiling, is a surprisingly intimate place to listen to music. If you sit in the front row, you can almost touch the musician.
Maxwell Davies' music is not simple or romantic; harmony and melody are hard to get hold of and there is no soothing flow in which to get lost. Instead the music is abstract, mathematical and sometimes atonal. His music, some might say, is ‘difficult’. His explanations of his music, which precursed each piece played at Dartington, are, on the other hand, not difficult at all. They are simple, clear and almost always point to Orkney, a place, at least in his descriptions, which is so profoundly connected to the sea that the relentless sea makes sure the place never changes.
From his front window on Orkney Maxwell Davies can, he told us, see four lighthouses. That seemed an amazing fact in itself. Imagine living in a place so surrounded by and exposed to the sea and its dangers that four lighthouses are needed to protect boats from going to close to the rocks. The light from each lighthouse has a different pulse, as every lighthouse everywhere in the world does, making their lights instantly recognisable to the knowledgeable seaman. And so each instrument in his string quartet represented the pulse of one of these four lighthouses. One day he had imagined he had seen a mirage, a kind of vision: a fifth lighthouse had appeared in the bay outside his house, but this one was upside down, with its pulsing light at sea level. And that impossibility was at the heart of this piece of music.
At the climax, the music is shocking, convulsive and loud, like the vision of the upside down lighthouse. Having heard that explanation the music became straightforward, logical, easy to follow, evocative of a place the listener had never been, but now felt some intimate understanding of. Above all, the music seemed to suggest that lighthouses might appear for a moment upside down in the sea. Everything’s possible in music.
Maxwell Davies' music is not simple or romantic; harmony and melody are hard to get hold of and there is no soothing flow in which to get lost. Instead the music is abstract, mathematical and sometimes atonal. His music, some might say, is ‘difficult’. His explanations of his music, which precursed each piece played at Dartington, are, on the other hand, not difficult at all. They are simple, clear and almost always point to Orkney, a place, at least in his descriptions, which is so profoundly connected to the sea that the relentless sea makes sure the place never changes.
From his front window on Orkney Maxwell Davies can, he told us, see four lighthouses. That seemed an amazing fact in itself. Imagine living in a place so surrounded by and exposed to the sea and its dangers that four lighthouses are needed to protect boats from going to close to the rocks. The light from each lighthouse has a different pulse, as every lighthouse everywhere in the world does, making their lights instantly recognisable to the knowledgeable seaman. And so each instrument in his string quartet represented the pulse of one of these four lighthouses. One day he had imagined he had seen a mirage, a kind of vision: a fifth lighthouse had appeared in the bay outside his house, but this one was upside down, with its pulsing light at sea level. And that impossibility was at the heart of this piece of music.
At the climax, the music is shocking, convulsive and loud, like the vision of the upside down lighthouse. Having heard that explanation the music became straightforward, logical, easy to follow, evocative of a place the listener had never been, but now felt some intimate understanding of. Above all, the music seemed to suggest that lighthouses might appear for a moment upside down in the sea. Everything’s possible in music.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Man eating sharks in Recife
Recife has been a port since colonial times, but, as everywhere, a deep water port was needed to cope with modern container traffic. This was built some way from the city and the old port., with its rundown streets, customs house and red light district. Unfortunately the new port was built in the feeding grounds of the local sharks. So they moved down the coast to the golden, palm fringed beach right in the heart of the city, Boa Viagem. Now right outside the biggest hotels, the streaming traffic and under the bright arc lights illuminating the beach, the sharks hang around just beyond a low reef not far out from the beach. At high tide they can get over the reef and there are one or two breaks in the reef which hungry baby sharks can get through. The only food available is bathing human beings so every now and again they attack one of those with a view to eating them. But human beings are not tasty, so they generally just spit the flesh out and move on, still hungry. A lorry driver, desperate for a pee, went into the sea and relieved himself. That was a bad mistake. The smell attracted the sharks and one of them took a big bite out of his leg. So the moral of the tale is don't pee in the sea if there are sharks about.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Friday, December 05, 2008
Fishing for miracles in Bogota
Ingrid Betancourt was held hostage for many years by FARC guerrillas in the impenetrable lowland jungles in the east of Colombia. She was held in a distant jungle camp along with three Americans and seven Colombian soldiers. Hostage-taking has been one of the most effective tactics of the guerrillas in Colombia, not just FARC but also other paramilitary and Maoist groups. Taking hostages has dual benefits. Considerable sums are raised in ransom money, some paid, as it were, below the counter by worried, wealthy families. The second benefit is sowing fear and anxiety in the civilian community going about their day-to-day business. Some of the kidnapped were ordinary people, chosen by the upmarket brand of their car, whom the guerrillas hoped came from prosperous and privileged families and may therefore command larger ransoms. The market, so ubiquitous, even has it place in the world of hostage-taking. This semi-random approach to the choice of civilian hostages came to be known by the darkly ironic name of ‘miracle fishing’.
Even though FARC activities have been much curbed and their leader is dead, many other paramilitaries group are still active. Some say that the price that the wildly popular but aggressive President Uribe has paid for putting an end to negotiations with FARC and seeking to defeat them militarily is that other paramilitary groups operate with impunity and sometimes with covert official support. The main losers are the peasants, turfed from their land by intimidation. Two thousand people are still believed to be being held as hostages, 700 of them by FARC. The latest estimates are that about 30 hostages are soldiers in the Colombian army and two politicians remain in captivity. FARC maybe in retreat and the security situation much improved, but the war is not yet won and the consequences of lawlessness, crime and corruption will be a long time in the eradication.
As the world now knows, Betancourt and the other hostages with whom she was being held were rescued in a James Bond-like mission. Undercover Colombian army officers, operating on intelligence acquired over many years with foreign help, found the guerrillas’ hideout in the jungle. The guards at the camp were persuaded that the army officers were in fact also guerrillas under orders from headquarters to move the hostages to an even more remote camp close to the Venezuelan border. One of the hostages, Lieutenant Malagon, had been keen not to submit to the Stockholm syndrome, in which captives start to identify with their captors (most famously, Patty Hearst). So he took every opportunity to assert his true identity. On seeing the fake guerrillas arriving in the helicopter, believing them to be real guerrillas, he said “I am Lieutenant Malagon of the glorious Colombian army”. So convinced were the guerrilla captors that the men who had arrived by helicopter were their own kind that two of them went into the helicopter with the hostages. Once the helicopter was airborne the rescuing soldiers abandoned their cover and revealed their true identity. It was their turn to say that they were soldiers of the glorious Colombian army. At this point Ingrid Betancourt, who unsurprisingly had been depressed for a long time, burst into tears.
When the soldiers had been taken hostage they spoke no English. They had been taught English in the long tedious hours of captivity by the three American hostages and in return had taught them Spanish. Since being released the soldiers have gone through all the ‘detoxification’ procedures with psychologists and the army, particularly with a view to curing any lingering traces of the Stockholm syndrome. They are now to be re-commissioned. The legal advisor for kidnapped soldiers to the army suggested to them that they may like to continue their English studies in the rather more congenial but less dramatic setting of the British Council in Bogota. So yesterday, on a stormy afternoon in the upmarket Northern part of the Bogota, in the bright, glassy offices of the British Council, three officers were sitting at separate desks (presumably to avoid plagiarism; standards must be maintained!) taking their assessment test to check their current level of English alongside teenage students. On the surface the scene could not have been more humdrum. But the youngsters recognised these three soldiers as former hostages because they had been extensively on television. Lieutenant Malagon has been nominated for Colombian personality of the year, along with Olympic medallists, sports celebrities and President Uribe. Whilst doing their own tests, the teenagers cast a furtive glance at the soldiers and raised a small smile, comparing the routine business of sitting English language tests at the British Council with the outrageous extremes of being held hostage in the jungle and being taught English by your fellow hostages.
I shook hands with Lieutenant Malagon and wondered at the extraordinary miracle that had been fished from teaching English.
Even though FARC activities have been much curbed and their leader is dead, many other paramilitaries group are still active. Some say that the price that the wildly popular but aggressive President Uribe has paid for putting an end to negotiations with FARC and seeking to defeat them militarily is that other paramilitary groups operate with impunity and sometimes with covert official support. The main losers are the peasants, turfed from their land by intimidation. Two thousand people are still believed to be being held as hostages, 700 of them by FARC. The latest estimates are that about 30 hostages are soldiers in the Colombian army and two politicians remain in captivity. FARC maybe in retreat and the security situation much improved, but the war is not yet won and the consequences of lawlessness, crime and corruption will be a long time in the eradication.
As the world now knows, Betancourt and the other hostages with whom she was being held were rescued in a James Bond-like mission. Undercover Colombian army officers, operating on intelligence acquired over many years with foreign help, found the guerrillas’ hideout in the jungle. The guards at the camp were persuaded that the army officers were in fact also guerrillas under orders from headquarters to move the hostages to an even more remote camp close to the Venezuelan border. One of the hostages, Lieutenant Malagon, had been keen not to submit to the Stockholm syndrome, in which captives start to identify with their captors (most famously, Patty Hearst). So he took every opportunity to assert his true identity. On seeing the fake guerrillas arriving in the helicopter, believing them to be real guerrillas, he said “I am Lieutenant Malagon of the glorious Colombian army”. So convinced were the guerrilla captors that the men who had arrived by helicopter were their own kind that two of them went into the helicopter with the hostages. Once the helicopter was airborne the rescuing soldiers abandoned their cover and revealed their true identity. It was their turn to say that they were soldiers of the glorious Colombian army. At this point Ingrid Betancourt, who unsurprisingly had been depressed for a long time, burst into tears.
When the soldiers had been taken hostage they spoke no English. They had been taught English in the long tedious hours of captivity by the three American hostages and in return had taught them Spanish. Since being released the soldiers have gone through all the ‘detoxification’ procedures with psychologists and the army, particularly with a view to curing any lingering traces of the Stockholm syndrome. They are now to be re-commissioned. The legal advisor for kidnapped soldiers to the army suggested to them that they may like to continue their English studies in the rather more congenial but less dramatic setting of the British Council in Bogota. So yesterday, on a stormy afternoon in the upmarket Northern part of the Bogota, in the bright, glassy offices of the British Council, three officers were sitting at separate desks (presumably to avoid plagiarism; standards must be maintained!) taking their assessment test to check their current level of English alongside teenage students. On the surface the scene could not have been more humdrum. But the youngsters recognised these three soldiers as former hostages because they had been extensively on television. Lieutenant Malagon has been nominated for Colombian personality of the year, along with Olympic medallists, sports celebrities and President Uribe. Whilst doing their own tests, the teenagers cast a furtive glance at the soldiers and raised a small smile, comparing the routine business of sitting English language tests at the British Council with the outrageous extremes of being held hostage in the jungle and being taught English by your fellow hostages.
I shook hands with Lieutenant Malagon and wondered at the extraordinary miracle that had been fished from teaching English.
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