Homebru Nature

“Let us, then, set off together on a series of journeys around South Africa with an old kitbag full of books instead of maps to guide us. Let us follow meandering paths through the landscapes of literature, and celebrate how local authors, characters and readers are shaped and inspired by place …” In this gripping travelogue, Justin Fox goes on a one-of-a-kind journey. Marrying his love for travel and writing, he sets off to explore the places ofhis favourite books. From the mountainous eastern Karoo of Olive Schreiner to the big game lowveld of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, from Deneys Reitz’s wide-open Cape interior to the bushveld of Eugène Marais’s Waterberg, Fox reveals the majestic power of place. Through the savannah of Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico, the dusty plains of JM Coetzee’sMoordenaars Karoo, the forests of Dalene Matthee’s Garden Route, the subtropical hamlets of Zakes Mda’s Wild Coast, and finally the sandstone crags of Stephen Watson’s Cederberg, he brings to life the settings we’ve only seen through characters’ eyes. Place is a moving love letter to South Africa, merging literature and landscape, and taking the reader on a breath-taking journey – into the heart of South Africa’s spectacular landscape and the inner-worlds of its most celebrated authors.

Read more less

There is an African proverb: ‘Until the lion has a historian of his own, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.’ This book is an acceptance of that challenge, to write a brand new kind of history, where the author becomes the the lion’s historian. As a species, we are not alone. But for too long our history has been written as though we are. This book insists on a retelling of our more-than-human past, a retelling of a shifting series of significant inter-species relationships – from the odd and quirky connections to those that triggered major changes in history itself. Sandra Swart has scoured the archives to find both the real animal stories and the stories we have told about them for millennia. The animals in this book – elephants, hippos, okapi, lions, jackals, cows, sheep, horses, white ants, quagga, Nazi-bred Heck cattle, police dogs and baboons – are chosen strategically to highlight different facets of our shared past. With this animal-centric lens, decades of research are brought together in a stunning book that take animals seriously. To do this, Swart embraces the natural sciences (biology, ethology, conservation biology, palaeontology) and the social sciences, oral history, indigenous knowledge as well as archival history. This is a book with fangs! It tears through conventional stories to ask: if we are not alone and given our current global crises of mass extinctions, are we prepared to move beyond the convention that ‘history’ is only the story of our own species? Can we, instead, consider a more-than-human past? In our current cataclysmic biodiversity crisis, we humans need to find new ways to live with and relate to other beings. The possibility of our shared future pivots on a reckoning with our shared pasts. This ground-breaking book shows what human–animal history can do, not only to understand our place in the world better but to make our world – however slightly – a better place.

Read more less