Problem animals, indigeneity and land: the chacma baboon in South African writing

Abstract

The apparently opposing images found throughout colonial writing of the baboon as trespasser and as original inhabitant – exemplified in the works of Percy Fitzpatrick, WC Scully, C R Prance, Stuart Cloete, Perceval Gibbon, and F W Fitzsimons – are revealed to be mutually implicated in the territorial anxieties of the coloniser. The territorial myth of the late mass Bantu migration is shown to dovetail with a presentation of the chacma as a colonised creature, an image which further supports a view of all men, including the indigenous peoples, as colonisers of nature who preceded European colonisation and set the precedent for it. Against this colonial paradigm is posed the problematic revivification of the image of the baboon as original inhabitant in the “postcolonial” novels of Daphne Rooke, Nadine Gordimer and Justin Cartwright, which uphold historic black claims to land rather than undercut them. The historiographical shifts of the late 1970s – which saw many scholars debunking the late Bantu migration myth – have further inflected a view of the chacma and all South Africa’s indigenes as original inhabitants. Often resuscitating certain colonial paradigms, these writers use the chacma to refract their own historiographical revisionism.