It is impossible for
most of the world's population to imagine what it is like, let
alone experience, to contact the really wild. It is also difficult
to find anyone who actually described it from personal
experience. Such is a literary gem from a Welshman who
made contact with the African highlands in late colonial
times. In his book Black Laughter, Llewelyn Powys
describes how his brother at that time was managing an agricultural
farm in the highlands leading to Laikipia. He lived in a small
stone house which had been built by an Indian mason. The veranda in
front overlooked two hundred acres of ploughed land, which grew
peas, potatoes, flax and barley. This diminutive farm was enclosed
on one side by the rough scrub country of the ordinary veldt, and
on the other by a forest which stretched away at the foot of a tall
escarpment as far as eye could see. It was a surprise to come
suddenly upon this oasis of cultivation in the midst of a country
which still remained virginal.
Towards evening,
when the mists of the light rains drove across the peas and
potatoes, or hung about the brown cone-shaped flax-stacks, the
prospect would take upon itself a strangely familiar appearance;
but coincident with such reassuring impressions would come others,
impressions curiously disturbing. One had but to step out of the
little garden of geraniums, which his brother had arranged and
planted round the house, to find oneself in the actual
jungle, in dark, overgrown places which for thousands
of years had remained undisturbed. It was this abrupt juxtaposition
of the tamed with the untamed, at one's very doorstep, so to speak,
which affected the nerves with an ever- present feeling of
insecurity. He felt that even their handful of black servants were
permitted a foothold here on sufferance only -that in a moment of
time, for a mere whim, these stately, wicked, bearded
cedar-trees might conspire with their long-clawed
parasitical creepers to obliterate one's handiwork and reassert
their ancient domination. He was conscious of this feeling every
single hour of his stay on that upland farm, and came to realize
what it was to live in a place where nature was in the
ascendancy.
He would sit in a
shaded corner of the veranda watching the humming-birds flitting
about the petals of the coloured flowers which in all directions
expanded so passionately in the hard tropical sunlight, and then he
would suddenly become aware that I was being looked at, that from
behind the trellis, or from behind the bloom of a mammoth
nasturtium, a haggard and very old chameleon was peering at him
intelligently, cynically.
At night it would be
even worse. Then, when the flat Equatorial moon would blandly
illuminate this unregenerate section of the
earth's surface, the soul of Africa would become articulate. Hyenas
would moan as they slunk along the darkened banks of the forest
streams nosing for death with heavy obtuse jowls. Leopards would
cause the pale trunks of the forest trees to echo and re-echo with
the sound of their calling. Jackals in an ecstasy of crafty
expectation would go yelping across the open veldt. From every
festooned branch of the forest the hyraxes would cry and croon to
one another, while from tiny crevices in the bark of each piece of
ancient timber the African crickets would grow strangely vocal.
Often at night when they went out to draw water from the rain-tank
at the back of the house they could hardly hear each other speak so
audible had the great continent become.
It is perhaps a
truism that when wild nature is everywhere, no human societies have
shown much interest in an altruistic protection of it.
Pragmatic reasons such as the perpetuation of a food supply or the
maintenance of animals for hunting may have been widespread, but
the disinterested preservation of wild plants, animals and
ecosystems was rare. It has been said that in the European Middle
Ages very blade of grass was grazed with reverence, but
that did not prevent the Europeans from making over much of their
continent at that time, and they were not alone in the
world.
In the agricultural
phase of world history there has been a considerable loss of
species during the transformation of wildland ecosystems to other
types of terrain, whether the results be agricultural land, peat
diggings, or a multitude of other land uses. The extension of
Polynesians and Europeans into hitherto inaccessible regions of the
world made possible extinction of plants and animals on remote
islands: the dodo is a famous example. For a balance we should note
that some biota inevitably benefited from the human-organized
transformations of the agricultural era: malaria would be an
example since more deforestation meant more silty deltas with
stagnant pools. Rats and fleas doubtless did well out of urban
growth, and the common fox in Europe found the increased quantity
of woodland edge abutting farmland highly congenial just as more
recently the same species has taken well to city life.
Overall, however,
many species have suffered a diminished range even if not total
extinction and in most places this was found acceptable; in the
'development' of Europe from say ad 1000-1800, nobody was very
concerned to conserve wild pigs, the European bison and the wolf,
in the way we now urge upon the states of east and central Africa,
for example: is this progress or a double standard?
