“There's a Meat Down There”

“There’s a Meat Down There” An Essay on English and the Environment in Africa ELSIE CLOETE ABSTRACT Interrogating the potency of English as a pedagogical eco-language could oblige one to recognize this language as a potentially contaminant meaning system where deep, verna- cular knowledge about the environment, wild life and natural vegetation within the non- metropolitan areas of the African continent in general and South Africa specifically is being lost or side-lined. The basis of this article discusses student responses to a four- hundred-year-old engraving as well as their response to notions of terms such as ‘wilder- ness’ and ‘the bush’. In the majority of cases, indigenous vernaculars and knowledge were being sublimated to English as the more superficial conveyor of meaning systems about the environment. Introduction N 1595,CORNELIS DE HOUTMAN SET SAIL from the Netherlands to Indonesia in order to establish the Dutch spice trade. On his way there, I the ships anchored in Table Bay at the Cape of Good Hope. It was neces- sary: crew members had come down with scurvy during the Atlantic section of the voyage and the expedition had also run out of rations and water. Once on land, the sailors encountered members of the local Khoi with their herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. The Khoi were not unacquainted with Europeans, as the Portuguese were regular visitors on their way to Malacca and ships nearly always dropped anchor in order to re-provision before crossing the Indian Ocean or the Atlantic on their return leg. While De Houtman’s voyage to the Far East was a diplomatic and mercan- tile disaster, from a symbolic point of view the voyage was considered a break- through because it set the scene for the 1606 establishment of one of the most successful monopoly cartels the world has ever known – the Dutch East India Company (VOC). In 1652, the VOC established a full-time outpost at what 22 E LSIE CLOETE was soon to become known as Cape Town, and this effectively led to the de- cline and eventual extermination of the Khoi in the southern and western Cape. No artist accompanied Cornelis De Houtman on his voyage to the Cape, but the De Bry Company, a family of accomplished engravers, published sets of engravings which illustrated some aspects of De Houtman’s voyage to Banten and Madura. The De Brys were utterly reliant on descriptions by travellers not only of the native populations but also of the kinds of animals and plants observed in far off places.1 A particular engraving, illustrating an (imaginary) encounter between members of De Houtman’s crew and soldiers with the natives at the Cape, depicts members of the company handing out bowls of intestines and meat from an animal to the Khoi. The animal has been skinned and disembowelled. To the right, a soldier stands at ease with his halberd pointing skyward. A company 1 The De Bry Company’s engravings are printed in a collection entitled Petits Voyages (Frankfurt, 1598–1613). My thanks to Peter Duncan, Curator of Early Collec- tions at the William Cullen Africana Library at the University of the Witwatersrand, for providing a scan of the De Bry engraving and giving permission for its reproduc- tion in this article..

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