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5 w The Python and the Crying Tree Commentaries on the Nature of Colonial and Environmental Power Exploring in detail the negotiated cultural meaning of particular landscapes in the early colonial Transkei is often difficult. Oral sources provide crucial insights into local perspectives on the cultural significance of various forest resources and the history of state resource interventions, yet their representations of local residents’ worldviews a century ago are understandably colored by the distance of time and more recent life experiences. Colonial sources, of course, also contain pitfalls of silence and bias, and colonial observers in the turn-of-the-century Transkei seldom commented at length, or knowledgeably, about Africans’ cultural perspectives on their particular environments . Most likely people in different locales strove to minimize official and missionary intrusions into their cultural practices and ritual life by keeping certain environmental interests secret from outsiders.1 However, there are exceptional cases when colonial accounts and oral sources converge, and even collide, to provide instructive clues for interpreting how people understood specific resources and environmental sites and the meaning of colonial interventions into these culturally potent landscapes. This chapter draws from the narratives of certain elders from the Gqogqora area of the Tsolo District in order to read beyond the limits of colonial knowledge, as embedded in archival sources, and to see how colonialism itself was the subject of Africans’ commentaries on their transforming landscapes in the emerging colonial order. One of the most renowned forest resources in KwaMatiwane, in both popular memory and written records, is one particular forest—one particular tree, in fact—in the mountain forests of the Gqogqora area. When colonial foresters began surveying the area in the late nineteenth century, they immediately 145 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. encountered popular stories among local Mfengu residents of violent forests, disappearing people, and “unaccountable” wild animals. Officials quickly dismissed these narratives, but they were also keen to represent them as examples of Africans’ irrationality and superstition and thus as evidence of the necessity of colonial environmental takeover. Yet, contrary to their representation in colonial discourse, such stories cannot be reduced to inconsequential rumor or mere assessments of local flora and fauna. As multiple sources reveal, such accounts in fact expressed the significance of specific forest resources and animal symbols in the practices of ritual divination and healing which were most closely associated with the well-being and protection of local communities. These stories not only served to restrict popular access to forest areas and species “reserved” for ritual specialists, but further reflected Africans’ complex perspectives on the meaning of local environmental control in the region and the impact of colonial efforts to undermine it. Understanding the deeper significance of such environments can thus help us see how local people critically commented on the changes they experienced in their social, spiritual, and biophysical landscapes in the early colonial period. colonial forestry and the “enchantment” of local landscapes Colonial observers first encountered and negotiated the ritualized landscapes and the symbolic stories surrounding them in the Gqogqora area in the 1880s. As noted in chapter 1, colonial environmental control did not really expand in the Tsolo District until after the political tumult of the early 1880s stabilized. CMK Walter Stanford’s new system of forest regulation in East Griqualand in the mid-1880s, the establishment of the Transkeian Conservancy in 1888, and the basing of a newly appointed conservator, Henkel, in Umtata, increasingly turned official attention toward the rich forests of the neighboring Tsolo District . In fact, in his earliest official inspections of local forest conditions, Henkel singled out the Tsolo mountain forests and their supply of such species as yellowwoods as “the most valuable and extensive” in the territory, initiating a campaign to strictly “preserve” these timber resources for local and regional European exploitation.2 At the same time that Henkel and other officials expanded their surveying of local forests for commercially desirable species in these years, they also commented upon their encounters with Africans’ quite different perspectives on the particular forest sites being “protected.” H. C. Schunke, for instance, compiling a geographical survey of the Transkei in 1885, noted that people in the 146 w Chapter 5 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press...

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