South Africa seen through an allegorical lens

Listening to a student telling me about being confronted in his home by a man wielding a butcher’s knife, then locking himself in his room and, with the man stomping about outside his bedroom door, kicking out the burglar proofing to escape (from his own home!), a thought that had occurred to me several times before crossed my mind again.

Our (that is, the peace-loving citizens of South Africa’s) situation in this country reminds me of an episode in Richard Adams’s stirring allegorical tale Watership Down, of a motley band of rabbits escaping from a doomed warren to seek a safer place where they can start a new one. To the best of my memory, this part of the narrative went as follows.

In the course of their search they encounter many dangers which they negotiate resourcefully, thanks to their leader’s ability to draw on and harness the various strengths of the members of the group, and they discover several interesting things about the world.

In one of their adventures they come upon a warren where live the biggest, sleekest, best-fed rabbits they have ever seen. Learning of their flight from the ill-starred warren, the strangers invite Hazel and his band to join their ostensibly prosperous warren. Most of the refugees are delighted to do so, and their pleasure increases when, going out to feed the next morning, they discover abundant “flayrah” — the rabbit word for “king’s food” (lettuce, carrots, cabbage and the like) — outside the warren on the grass. Never have they had it so good.

Despite his concern that his brother, the clairvoyant rabbit Fiver (who had “seen” the disaster at the old warren coming, and warned them in time to escape), is the only one in their group who refuses steadfastly even to go underground, and instead urges them to leave the place at once, Hazel cannot think of any reason why they should decline the strangers’ invitation.

That evening, with Fiver sitting miserably outside, the others experience something they could never imagine in their wildest dreams. In an underground “hall” of sorts, its ceiling supported by tree roots, they witness a rabbit “poet” reciting his latest poem, which exhorts rabbits to accept the fact that imminent death is part and parcel of a rabbit’s life and should be embraced as such.

To the visitors this sounds very strange — isn’t a rabbit’s first and most important task to stay out of the clutches of their death-dealing enemies such as stoats and foxes? And here a rabbit “poet” (a weird concept to them) is trying to persuade them otherwise. Hazel feels an inexplicable feeling nagging at him in the face of this novel idea, but he can’t quite work out what is bothering him.

The next morning when he and Bigwig, the strongest rabbit in their band, are “silflaying” (eating together) from the royal food outside, Hazel shares his concern about Fiver’s reluctance to come into the warren with his friend. He had always respected Fiver’s gift of foretelling the future, but until the unlikely “message” from the rabbit poet that rabbits should embrace their mortality, Hazel thought that Fiver was dead wrong about the place.

Suddenly Bigwig, who was moving around with Hazel as they ate, is jerked off his feet violently and falls heavily to the ground, kicking weakly. Dumbfounded, Hazel sniffs at him, but cannot make out what has caused Bigwig to be pinned down like that. Knowing the cleverest rabbit in their group to be Blackberry (as far as I recall), he sends for him and urges him to find out what force has felled Bigwig.

After examining Bigwig for a while, Blackberry points out a silver wire around the big rabbit’s neck, and traces the wire to a stout peg in the ground. At Blackberry’s insistence, the other rabbits start gnawing at the peg, and before long they have bitten it through. The wire relaxes and after a while a dazed Bigwig is able to sit up.

Then the penny drops: the lettuce and carrots are strewn outside the warren by the farmer from a nearby farm, with the purpose to lull the rabbits into a life of luxury and plenty — a life, that is, which they would not easily give up for the uncertain existence of “wild” rabbits like Hazel and his group.

As a result, they face random death every day, because the flipside of the farmer’s “kindness” of providing seductive amounts of delicious food is the fact that he randomly sets traps for the well-fed, handsome rabbits, bagging one occasionally for its skin and meat. Hence the rabbit poet’s rather incongruous valorisation of death as something that has to be accepted as potentially striking at any time. While rabbits are generally quite aware of this, however, the last thing they do is to accept it with docility; instead, they use all their resourcefulness to keep it at bay. This also explains Hazel’s niggling unease after the poet’s performance. Without further ado, he calls his band together and they leave the place of unpredictably random death.

As I mentioned before, and as may already have become apparent to readers, this episode has allegorical relevance for South Africans. To be sure, the carrots and lettuce on the grass have been steadily diminishing lately, despite all the good signs about our “growing economy” in the years following the advent of democracy in 1994. But carrots and lettuce assume other shapes as well, such as our wonderful climate, the legendary friendliness and hospitality of many South Africans (we have American friends who have visited us here, and still enthuse about the hospitality they received in South Africa), and — I might say “especially” — the natural beauty of the country, which we (my wife and I) know well through regular trips to wilderness areas (we did a mountain ridge walk today, with indescribably beautiful vistas opening up in all directions).

This is probably why so many South Africans feel that they are in a double-bind: one does not want to leave all of this to move to a country where one may feel safe, but also miserable through longing for the landscape and the people of this simultaneously wonderful and terrible place.

The allegorical truth about South Africa, illustrated so well by the story of Hazel and his rabbit band’s visit to the warren of plenty, but also of unexpected death, is simply this: like those well-fed rabbits in the warren, many (though not nearly all) South Africans still experience this country as one where one can live a materially comfortable life, with many business or other kinds of opportunities that one would not easily come across overseas.

But — and this is a big but — this comes at a price similar to the one those sleek, pampered rabbits had to pay: continued uncertainty about an increasing number of things, foremost among them unpredictable, random crime, of course (like the random, unpredictable traps set by the farmer for the rabbits), but increasingly also other insecurities, such as the problems surrounding the electricity supply; clean water; a school education system that seems to be largely dysfunctional by all accounts; an imminent, huge increase in municipal taxes; and last but not least, the prospect of an “expropriation Act” that, for all intents and purposes, will (if it becomes law) pave the way for the possibility of the most arbitrary expropriations of property imaginable (not necessarily only farms, but private homes as well), as long as it may be said to be for the “common good”.

Like those rabbits staying at the jinxed warren, we stay here because we like that which remains of the lettuce and carrots, perhaps repressing the knowledge that random, unpredictable crime — or random, unpredictable legislation — may strike at any moment. Have any of our “poets” advised us that we must learn to embrace the unpredictable possibility of our own deaths? I can’t think of any off-hand, but I do remember a philosophical friend saying to me, years ago, that if one chooses to live in South Africa, one has to change one’s attitude towards death. But, of course, deep down we all hope that we will not be the next victim.