“Do you know the butcherbird?”Footnote 1 So asks Madonele, a shepherd in Alex La Guma’s last novel, Time of the Butcherbird. The question, a riddle from African oral culture, tests one’s knowledge about the behavior of local South African animals. As a character responds correctly that the bird can detect sorcerers, the answer reveals an animist worldview that gives the animal a spiritual and social meaning. Bird riddles and other animist codings of animals also present puzzling questions for animal studies and postcolonial zoocriticism: Do such socially, spiritually coded animals have the potential to provide ways of thinking more ethically about human relationships with animals, or do they take away from aims like critiquing human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism? Does the human meaning given to animals obscure or enhance the ability to “see” animals, their materiality and phenomenology? And what potential might animist animals have toward liberatory politics for humans and nonhumans? Two novels that take animist birds for their titles, one a bird riddle and the other a bird myth, prompted this article that examines “new” materialist and “animist materialist” ways of writing, reading, and relating to animals. In the context of this discussion of materialist scholarship, Madonele’s question—Do you know the Butcherbird?—also poses a question and challenge to new materialist scholars to cite and acknowledge the teachings of the “old” or traditional materialisms like the animist code.
In their introduction to the special issue on animist materialism in the Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry,Footnote 2 Rosemary Jolly and Alexander Fyfe provide an overview of the materialist or ontological turn in academic scholarship, focusing primarily on the question of animism, which they define as “noncartesian modes of thought.”Footnote * They critique certain Western approaches to new materialism for the way such scholarship neglects to cite or fails to engage with traditional or “old” materialisms that have long maintained a materialist understanding of the embodied and environmentally embedded self, refusing the nature/culture binary that “new” and posthumanist materialisms aim to correct. Jolly and Fyfe argue that new materialist scholarship that cites only European materialist theories fails to credit the knowledge and work of indigenous materialisms, often eliding questions of race and continuing in a colonial legacy that might risk a reinstatement of the humanist subject that new materialisms seek to transform. As Zoe Todd puts it, “In order for the Ontological Turn, post-humanism, cosmopolitics to live up to their potential, they must heed the teachings of North American Indigenous scholars … [and] of Indigenous and racialised scholars from all around the globe.”Footnote 3 This article joins their critical assessment of new materialisms in questioning new materialist approaches to animals that similarly neglect the insights of traditional materials, specifically here the codings of animals in animist materialist African literature.
A main postcolonial critique offered by Jolly and Fyfe of new materialist work like Jane Bennet’s is the “assumed universality”Footnote 4 of approach: an assumption that all cultures need to move away from a Cartesian view of matter. They recount how scholars such as Mel Chen and Alison Ravenscroft question this “universality” by considering matter from other subject positions and from aboriginal and indigenous thought where, for Ravenscroft, nature has never been viewed “through the ‘thingification’ of the colonial gaze.”Footnote 5 Jolly and Fyfe provide a series of critical reflections on the ethics of doing research about animist cultures and literatures for postcolonial scholars, considering the promise that animist and other “old” materialisms might provide for analyses of global capitalism. Among their recommendations for postcolonial scholars, they argue that animist materialisms should be taken seriously to challenge the assumptions of sovereignty in settler colonialisms. In line with these critiques and recommendations, this article argues that southern African animist realist fiction provincializes and critiques Cartesian views of matter and animals with the animist code, demonstrating the potential of “animist materialism” for animal studies.
Jolly and Fyfe recognize Rosi Braidotti as a key figure of “new materialism” and cite her critical view of the Anthropocene. Yet, her vitalist materialist writing about animals might be said to overlook literary traditions such as the “animist materialism” that Harry Garuba finds in African material culture.Footnote 6 Braidotti’s vitalist project, “nomad ethics,” and bio-egalitarianism offer a robust critique of globalized capitalist violence; however, her materialist strategies for reading and relating to animals ignore the modes of relating to animals that have long been the provenance of animist materialist cultures. Through readings of animals and the material world in two Southern African novels, I argue for a plurality of animal literary treatments in both the animal and animist codes against Braidotti’s dismissal of metaphorical treatments of animals.
The present article begins with a discussion of the differing approaches to metaphor and meaning taken by vitalist materialist and animist materialist philosophers, starting with the origins of the vitalist position against metaphors in animal studies. Vitalist materialists’ anti-metaphorical stance in relating to animals offers one way to deal with the problems of instrumentalizing and othering animals for human meaning and of dehumanizing others in racist uses of animal metaphors. However, animist materialism offers other ways to address animals and racist oppression, while maintaining metaphors and meaning. After critiquing Braidotti’s dismissal of animal metaphor, I consider the merits of Garuba’s “animist materialism” for doing postcolonial animal studies.
Finally, this article offers a reading of animals and the animist code in two Southern African novels, Alex La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird (1979) and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000), to demonstrate the limits of the new materialist approach and promise of the animist coding of animals in postcolonial literatures. New materialist strategies of reading animals not only fail to acknowledge animist thought but unnecessarily dismiss the animist code’s spiritualized, metaphorical, and signifying animals, and its concomitant potential for agency and resistance to colonial and humanist oppression. The valorization of the animist code and animals in both novels also challenges the necropolitical management and risking of communities in rejecting the human/nature divide and anti-animism that underpins colonial biopolitics. The novels bear out how characters find agency to resist domination and violence through coding animals and new social relations according to traditional notions of sorcery and mythology through the accommodative quality of the animist code.
Garuba’s theorization of animism offers a way of thinking differently about literary animals than the materialist ways of reading and writing common in animal studies. However, like many other new materialisms that fail to cite animist knowledge, “animal studies and literary animal studies seem reluctant to acknowledge … that human awareness of the lives with whom human lives are enmeshed lie in the echoes of indigenous tribal shamanism, animism and totemism,”Footnote 7 as Marion Copeland observes. Through reading La Guma and Couto’s novels, this article acknowledges their animist coding of literary animals as valuable for thinking a postcolonial animal ethics. Garuba’s theorization of the animist code describes a blending of metaphor, spirit, and material—and a shifting back and forth across these registers via its accommodationism that challenges binaries like the metaphor/material that underpins vitalist anti-metaphorical stances. Although Garuba’s work doesn’t focus on animals, his insight into the literary strategies of animist materialist culture challenge the “neoliteral” relation to animals that Braidotti calls for.Footnote 8
Metaphor in the Animal and Animist Codes: Reading African Animals
The negative views of nonhuman animals in Western cultures have contributed to their ill treatment in privileging an exclusive definition of the human, as in Descartes’ writings. Many animal studies scholars assess literature and art for their potential to check human exceptionalism by recognizing animals’ abilities and phenomenologies. In his work on animal art, Steve Baker discusses how many Disney films use animals in a way that “denies” them or includes them only in service of human narratives. Baker argues that “the cultural denial of the animal is maintained by means of a rather effective two-pronged attack: it comes from common sense … on the one hand, and from theory (psychoanalysis, historical sociology, and a good deal more besides) on the other… .”Footnote 9 Such animal art and cultural views of animals deny them in the same way that Freud tends to interpret peoples’ fascination with animals as representative of oedipal desires.
In his reading of a child’s dreams and fascination with African animals, Freud famously interprets a child’s interest in giraffes as a manifestation of his Oedipus complex, where the animals are stand-ins or metaphors for the mother and father. As Ian Buchannan puts it:
When Little Hans reports a dream about two giraffes in his bedroom … Freud and his pupil are united in the view that the big giraffe is the father, … and the squished giraffe is his mother… . There is nothing about the giraffes themselves that is significant, save their (flatteringly) long necks… . One could easily substitute flamingos or any other long-necked creature, and the interpretation would be the same.Footnote 10
In Freud’s reading, the boy’s dream or fascination is not about animals: they are mere carriers of meaning or representatives of humans and get moved to the background of the story, if not removed from the story altogether. In response to such uses of animals as mere vehicles for human meaning, vitalist philosophers reread the animals and affection for animals back into the scene.
Deleuze and Guattari and Rosi Braidotti adopt an anti-oedipal stance as they view Freud’s definition of oedipal desire as wrong-headed and oppressive. Against Freud’s argument that desire stems from the relationship with parents and is defined as a negative feeling of lack, they define desire as more positive, diverse, and transformative. As their work analyzes how negative modes of desire and identity get taken up in capitalism and dominant, hierarchical systems, they create concepts as alternatives that might point to “lines of flight” from violent and oppressive ways of thinking, desiring, relating, and being that pertain to the oedipal family. Their concept “becoming animal” revisits Freud’s reading of children’s dreams and thoughts about animals, arguing for a more literal interpretation without metaphors. The affective encounter between the child and giraffes has the potential, they suggest, to liberate him from oedipal desires and transform his identity.Footnote 11 Although they bring the animal back into focus, Deleuze and Guattari do not necessarily draw attention to the plight of animals or emphasize what’s at stake for the animal in this encounter, an aspect of “becoming animal” sometimes criticized by animal studies scholars as not animal-centric enough. “Becoming animal” avows the animal (unlike the Freudian denial) but does so in pursuit of the way that such affective experiences with animals might transform the subjectivity of the human away from the dominant notion of a stable sense of self.
Rosi Braidotti’s work on animals, especially “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others” in the “Theories and Methodologies: Animal Studies” section of PMLA (2009), takes “becoming animal” more directly to the question of animals than Deleuze and Guattari, extending their rejection of Freudian hermeneutics. In her critique of oedipal and Cartesian culture’s failure to recognize the ethical standing of animals, Braidotti dismisses animal metaphors altogether as a cultural practice or mode of relation that contributes to the backgrounding of animals: “Animals are not … metaphors: they partake rather in an ethology of forces.”Footnote 12 This anti-metaphorical stance offers a valid and urgent critique for Western humanist animal art and relationships that deny the animal; yet, not all metaphors are the same.Footnote 13 Her universal dismissal of metaphorical relations and literary treatments of animals ignores the diverse literary traditions of animist materialist cultures. The rejection of metaphor and signification when it comes to animals is surprising given Braidotti’s recognition of traditional spirituality and knowledge elsewhere. Although she describes her earlier work as secular, she seems to recognize the problems with a secular approach in The Posthuman: “To be simply secular would be complicitous with neocolonial Western supremacist positions.”Footnote 14 Further, in Transpositions, she critiques how biopiracy leads to the “devalorization of local knowledge systems and world-views… . [T]hese practices also devalue indigenous forms of knowledge, cultural and legal systems. Eurocentric models of scientific rationality and technological development damage human diversity.”Footnote 15 Yet, if the problem is with certain Western readings of animals, and in some cases African animals like giraffes, rather than adopting a universalist stance against such metaphorical readings, Animal Studies scholars might acknowledge and consider the potential of traditional materialisms of African and other indigenous cultures. To do otherwise risks, as Ravenscroft points out, a “reiteration of terra nullius”Footnote 16 that denies traditional and animist knowledge. The vitalist critique of animal metaphors ignores this other literary relation to animals that has the potential to both raise the ethical status of animals and provide lines of flight—literal and signifying flights in the bird novels considered here—from oppressive conditions: potentials consistent with vitalist aims.
Like Ravenscroft’s point that many cultures don’t need posthumanist interventions,Footnote 17 not all cultures are in need of Braidotti’s proscriptions against animal metaphors and animal meaning. Jolly and Fyfe cite Ravenscroft’s critique of Western “new” materialisms: “Not all humans require Barad’s or Shaviro’s correctives … because it is only the West’s concept of the subject that has fallen into such crisis: Aboriginal and Indigenous traditions have never conceived of nature through the ‘thingification’ of the colonial gaze.”Footnote 18 Cajetan Iheka’s concept of the “aesthetics of proximity”Footnote 19 in African literature’s portrayal of the human and nonhuman also makes clear that the “hyperseparation” and “backgrounding” (Plumwood) or denial of animals is not a universal problem. Instead, Western Cartesian cultures’ elevation of the human over the animal and practices of using animals as mere stand-ins for human meaning might benefit from a stoppage of metaphorical relations.
Deleuze and Guattari develop their approach against human meaning from their reading of the flattening of metaphor in analyzing Kafka’s literary bestiary: “Kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification.”Footnote 20 Throughout their analysis of Kafka, animals are looked to for ways of escaping violent and oppressive relations on various “lines of flight” from dominant understandings of the subject and dominant uses of language. Noting his Jewish identity and writing in the lesser regarded Prague German, they suggest Kafka positions animal languages or sounds as an “outside” of oppressive human languages—a kind of asignifying language that might be free from the violence of human meanings. Unlike animist mythologizing and adding meaning to animals, “Kafka’s animals never refer to a mythology or to archetypes but correspond solely to … zones of liberated intensities where contents free themselves … from the signifier that formalized them… . In the becoming-ape, it is a coughing that ‘sound[s] dangerous but mean[s] nothing.’”Footnote 21 The sounds of animals are a challenge to common sense, questioning its universality and assumptions; Deleuze and Guattari praise Kafka’s writing “non-sense”Footnote 22 that privileges materiality and affectivity over signification. Their analysis of Kafka’s asignifying animals is valuable for a liberatory politics; however, Kafka’s disregard for metaphor doesn’t necessarily render other metaphorical, signifying approaches to animals invalid.Footnote 23 The animist code offers another potential “outside” of European humanist signification and common sense (that which Baker holds responsible for denying animals). Animism, too, was regarded by colonists as a kind of nonsense;Footnote 24 therefore, it also has the potential to challenge violence and oppression.Footnote 25 The point here, however, is to go beyond simply gesturing to this “outside” of colonial humanism and common sense: to acknowledge the teachings of and think with African and other indigenous or traditional materialist theorists and novelists.
Drawing likely from Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on stripping literary animals of human meaning, Deleuzean philosopher Rosi Braidotti calls for the outright end of animal metaphors:
The main point, however, is for us to move on, beyond the empire of the sign, toward a neoliteral relation to animals, anomalies, and inorganic others. The old metaphoric dimension has been overridden by a new mode of relation. Animals are no longer the signifying system that props up humans’ self-projections and moral aspirations… . They have, rather, started to be approached literally, as entities framed by code systems of their own.Footnote 26
This stance approaches a way to de-anthropomorphize animals and recognize their agency—that humans are not the only ones coding the world. Yet, while this “new” materialist theory of relating to animals recognizes the animal code, it needlessly dismisses the “old” metaphorical relation and thereby the animist code. Braidotti’s essay begins with a critique of the European subject but tends toward the universal—“humans have long used animals … to mark boundaries”Footnote 27—prior to announcing the end of metaphors in the “Against Metaphors” section. The universalizing language of Braidotti’s vitalist manifesto neglects the possibility that animist materialism’s metaphors do not necessarily “other” animals.
As Potawatomi scholar and activist Kyle White makes clear, some traditional cultures code environmental knowledge into signification: “Indigenous knowledges range from how ecological information is encoded in words and grammars of Indigenous languages, to protocols of mentorship of elders and youth, to kin-based and spiritual relationships with animals and plants.”Footnote 28 The signification and spiritualization of animals in indigenous thought that Whyte observes reflects an intimate knowledge of animals rather than a use of animals as mere props for human meaning. To do away with all human meaning added to animals would mean the loss of the rich ecological knowledge encoded in indigenous languages. As the animist worldview refuses the human/nature dualism of Western humanism, animist-materialist metaphorical and signifying practices avoid the problem of “backgrounding”Footnote 29 animals and the environment that Australian ecofeminist Val Plumwood identifies as resultant from anthropocentrism.
Plumwood’s theorization of a “materialist spirituality of place” approaches the problems of Cartesian backgrounding of matter through her learning from Australian aboriginal traditions and other indigenous materialisms, in line with Todd and Ravenscroft’s call for non-indigenous materialists to heed the teachings of indigenous and traditional materialists.Footnote 30 For example, she acknowledges the potential of Chief Seattle’s materialism: “Chief Seattle too may be seen as critiquing a radical separation between the land of the living and that of the dead, corresponding to a dualism of spirit and matter, reason and nature, presupposed in Christian-rationalist [spirituality that …] displays in extreme form the unhappy, earth-denying outcome of the vices of hyperbolized autonomy, denial and backgrounding of the elements that support our lives.”Footnote 31 Citing indigenous materialisms, Plumwood values their ability to critique humanism toward an environmental ethics, contrasting with Braidotti’s largely Deleuzean, Spinozan, and Irigarayan approach. Similarly, the present article approaches the question of the ethical positions of humans and animals through Garuba’s work on the animist code of African material culture.
Garuba’s Animist Materialism
Harry Garuba explains that animist materialism involves the “re-enchantment of the world” where material objects are coded with social and spiritual meaning as opposed to the Cartesian view of matter as blank, mere background to human thinking and action. For Garuba, the pluralism of animism makes it a source agency for animist cultures when new technologies, gods, ideas, and so on are introduced because they can be incorporated into the animist worldview. New social relations and drastic changes brought with colonial modernity can be coded and understood according to an animist worldview, giving its practitioners a kind of agency and grounding in traditional culture, rather than humanist modernity and its “new” ideas dominating animism. Garuba describes this “re-enchantment as:
A process whereby “magical elements of thought” are not displaced but, on the contrary, continually assimilate new developments in science, technology, and the organization of the world within a basically “magical” worldview. Rather than “disenchantment,” a persistent re-enchantment thus occurs, and the rational and scientific are appropriated and transformed into the mystical and magical.Footnote 32
For example, he explains how the electric authority in Nigeria associates itself with Sango, the god of lightning, and how in the coding of this modern electric technology, Sango is credited with its discovery.Footnote 33 Such retraditionalizations offer people a kind of agency as it provides a way to “prepossess”Footnote 34 the future as new or outside objects, technologies, and so on become encoded and, as Soyinka suggests, added to the “social armoury” of the people.Footnote 35
Garuba observes how in this spiritualization or retraditionalization of the world and of Western technologies “objects … acquire a social and spiritual meaning within the culture far in excess of their natural properties and their use value.”Footnote 36 The “excess” meaning that material objects and things obtain in animist materialism is the kind of added meaning to animals that Braidotti argues against as she calls instead for a relation to animals that is only literal or against metaphor. Garuba suggests that the continued prevalence of animist materialism challenges the temporal privileging of Western modernity (and the reduction or eradication of animism) as an aspirational goal of African societies. Rather than “develop” according to secular rationalism as a way to “progress” African nations toward a more Westernized way of life, the persistence of animist materialism offers different possible futures as the traditional worldview can accommodate new phenomena, presenting lines of flight from colonial, humanist organizations of society.
In contrast to the antimetaphor of vitalism, a main facet of animist realist literatures is “the “locking” of spirit within matter or the merger of the material and the metaphorical.”Footnote 37 Animist realist literatures code animals as metaphors, myths, and spirits while maintaining their materiality, undoing a metaphor/matter binary. After citing Hornborg’s point that the Western view of matter as meaningless is a rather new idea, Garuba expresses his approval of recent scholarly interest in animism in environmental studies and anthropology: “A result of this work has been the suggestion that the boundary between Nature and Society, between the world of objects and that of subjects, between the material world and that of agency and symbolic meanings, is less certain than the modernist project had decreed it to be.”Footnote 38 For a literary example of the animist upending of a matter/meaning binary, he reads a scene from Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which a character’s heart is metaphorized as a sealed tobacco tin: the tin stores painful memories to keep the trauma of racism and slavery in America sealed away.Footnote 39 Garuba explains how the animist metaphor operates as the tin’s material qualities are strikingly pronounced later as it begins to rust and, finally, bursts open. The tin as the vehicle of the metaphor is not simply used and backgrounded in the novel; instead its materiality is later foregrounded as the literary treatment shifts across and blends linguistic and materialist registers, enabled by what Quayson describes as the “polysemy” of magical realism.Footnote 40 Garuba’s essay recounts the common use of the animist code by traditional and modern elites, but he closes the essay gesturing to the need for further acknowledgment of the potential of animism for the oppressed: “An animistic understanding of the world applied to the practice of everyday life has often provided avenues of agency for the dispossessed in colonial and postcolonial Africa.”Footnote 41 Garuba thus theorizes an animist code that, not unlike the animal code for vitalists, offers a potential for resisting or transforming oppressive conditions.
The reenchanting of the world with animist social, spiritual, and mythological meaning does not mean that animist cultures are timeless or unchanging, nor does it position animist coding as an attempt to restore a precolonial past. As Ato Quayson puts it, “Garuba goes on to explain this [retraditionalization] not as a sign of resistant primitivism, but as the attempt to appropriate the tools of traditionalism and modernity for explicitly strategic purposes.”Footnote 42 In Time of the Butcherbird and The Last Flight of the Flamingo, dispossessed characters tap this agency of the animist by strategically drawing from both “modern” and traditional worldviews, coding animals and new social relations via animist enchantment.
Animist Materialism and Biopolitics
If not already apparent, recognizing the value of traditional knowledge and animist materialism has important implications for biopolitics given the history of colonizers’ racist identifications of animist thought as a marker of inhumanity. At the most basic level, asserting animists’ humanity and recognizing animism’s cultural value challenges colonial biopolitics that dehumanized and denigrated animists as “natural” people. The biopolitical implications here are yet another reason that “new” materialisms need to acknowledge the teachings of traditional cultures as Todd and others suggest if they are to truly critique the violences of Cartesian humanism. In her work on biopolitics, Braidotti seeks to leverage the agency of that which Cartesian thought has pejoratively labeled as nonhuman, what she describes as zoe, against the thanatopolitical workings of late capitalism and state violence: “The structural link between women, ‘native other’ and animals has a dense and complex unity … The structural link between women and zoë is also a matter of sharing a second-class status, as shown by the relative marginalization of animal life (zoe) in relation to discursive life (bios).”Footnote 43 Braidotti’s affirmative biopolitics promotes joy and “transversal” connections among those marked as nonhuman, including “native others,” against the negative affect and violent logic that excludes them from bios, rendering them disposable. Yet, rather than dismiss metaphorical and signifying animals that are part of the animist code, materialist scholars and biopolitical theorists might recognize the agency of animism for the way that postcolonial writers and traditional materialists continue to enlist them against necropolitics.
Colonial racist thought marked animists as less than human, as Achille Mbembe argues via Arendt, primarily because of their closeness or “proximity” to nature. The animist refusal to take a position of human mastery over nature was marked as a pejorative difference from humanist rationalism. As Mbembe explains, this violent colonial logic:
Stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the native… . savage life is just another form of animal life … In fact, according to Arendt, what makes the savages different from other human beings is … the fear that they behave like a part of nature, that they treat nature as their undisputed master … The savages are, as it were, “natural” human beings who lack the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, “so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.”Footnote 44
It’s clear that animism, with its refusal of a nature/culture binary, is a target of this colonial bestialization of natives.Footnote 45 Deborah Bird Rose, anthropologist of Australian aboriginal culture and scholar of environmental humanities, further explains the colonial dehumanization of animists: “As a secular thinker and materialist, [nineteenth-century anthropologist Edward] Tylor argued that primitives failed to understand the absolute differences between humans and all others. According to [Graham] Harvey, Tylor asserted that ‘animists have no sense of the absolute physical distinction between man and beast’ or between humanity and plants, or even ‘objects.’ … he equates recognition of hyperseparated boundaries with civilization, and thus he uses hyperseparation ideology to denigrate and dismiss Indigenous knowledge.”Footnote 46 To deride metaphor and the practice of adding meaning to animals, hallmarks of the animist code, then risks continuing in a colonial legacy of discrediting animist cultures and traditional knowledges. Where Braidotti’s approach seeks to restore the ethical standing of animals against human exceptionalism, animist materialist literature challenges colonial logic’s attempt to mark native animals and humans as beneath the status of ethical consideration.
La Guma and Couto dramatize the racist dismissal of animist thought as outsiders and humanist characters in their novels dehumanize and laugh at natives and their traditional spiritualities. However, their novels create worlds where animist gods and spirits—and animist-coded animals—assert their agency, thwarting the plans to instrumentalize and displace native people, flora, and fauna. What colonial logic dismisses as nonsense, a sign of inhumanity, and mere background bites back forcefully in these novels in acts of shared human and nonhuman resistance, affirming animist understandings of the environment. Southern African writers adopt the traditional mythical and metaphorical strategies of animist materialism to counteract the necropolitical disposal of native humans and animals. Performing the animist code, they validate animism’s understanding of nature as an affirmative biopower for the inhabitants of their fictive worlds.
Animist Materialism in Time of the Butcherbird
Set in a mining town during Apartheid, La Guma’s Time of the Butcherbird dramatizes an Afrikaan community’s attempt to remove people from their land amid a drought. As the conflict develops, La Guma positions native South Africans’ spirituality at the heart of the political action as they defend their connection to the land as sacred because their ancestors are buried there. The current leader, Chief Hlangeni, has given in to the removal plan, accepting settler authority and domination as inevitable rather than recognizing the agency of the animist code. However, his sister Mma-Tau (known as a she-lion) usurps her brother’s leadership role, drawing strength, in part, from the power of the ancestors as she invokes the spirit of the warrior ancestors in her blood. Mma-Tau’s leadership and spirituality accommodate “new” feminisms as she challenges her brother’s traditional male leadership, an aspect of the animist code that Wole Soyinka defines as the “philosophical accommodation” of animism: “Experiences which, until the event, lie outside the tribe’s cognition are absorbed through the god’s agency, are converted into yet another piece of social armoury in its struggle for existence.”Footnote 47 Mma-Tau also espouses Marxist sentiments, notes her schooling at a mission and develops her politics in the city, thereby accommodating “modern” ideas in her animist worldview.
While many critics read the novel in terms of La Guma’s socialist politics, Jabulani Mkhize astutely observes that his last novel differs from earlier socialist works,Footnote 48 here because it combines animism and socialist aims. The novel emphasizes the role that animism plays in the community’s resistance, and therefore La Guma, who incidentally was exiled in Cuba, bears out Soyinka’s insight into the revolutionary agency of animist thought as perhaps a greater source of resistance than Marxist thought: “As the Roman Catholic props of the Batista regime in Cuba discovered when it was too late, they should have been worried less about Karl Marx than about Ogun, the re-discovered deity of revolution.”Footnote 49 Some critics find fault, however, with Butcherbird’s emphasis on the environment of the Karoo, preferring the direct socialist writing about La Guma’s firsthand knowledge of the coloured community and Cape Town. David Maughan Brown criticizes the description of birds in the novel’s closing lines as devoid of the socialist pathos he finds powerful in previous novels: “In the Fog of the Seasons’ End also carries a good deal more conviction in the hope it posits for the future: as symbols of hope, children standing in the sunlight watching soldiers go to war ‘in the name of a suffering people’ (180) are more moving … than Time of the Butcherbird’s ‘flight of birds swoop[ing] overhead towards a waterhole.’Footnote 50 The final image of the birds is not at odds with socialism, however, as animism accommodates and allows for ostensibly contradictory positions—a point Garuba makes in his analysis of Niyi Osundare’s poetry.Footnote 51 La Guma’s emphasis on the birds in the closing lines is not a mystical escape from politics, but instead an animist coding of the animals who are part of an oppressed community. Because the birds are thought to be able to detect sorcery and can rid the community of evil, the ending emphasizes how animist characters find agency in coding the intrusions of settler colonialism as a traditional battle between good and evil sorcery. The passage offers a concern for the birds’ survival as their flight toward water amid a drought also signals a future for the community, gesturing to the promise of animism as a sustaining force against settler colonialism and other environmental crises.
The narrator of Time of the Butcherbird notes that, despite their largely Calvinist nationalism and doctrinaire spirituality, some Afrikaners believe in the powers of indigenous spirituality, including Tant’ Philipa, who “when it came to the special powers of black witch-doctors, medicine men, diviners, she cast race prejudice aside,”Footnote 52 going to witch-doctors for help with illnesses. Despite Tanta Philipa’s respect for animist beliefs, other Afrikaans characters ignore the spiritual agency of the animist code. Within this broader community-based resistance to the prospect of removal emerges a more personal grievance as Shilling Muerile seeks vengeance for his brother’s murder. Afrikaans farmers Opperman and Hannes Muelen kill Schilling’s brother Utimi when punishing the brothers for stealing liquor and drunkenly letting sheep out of a pen (when trying to get the sheep to dance with them) on the night of an Afrikaner wedding. The farmers dehumanize the brothers as “baboons”Footnote 53 in a racist metaphor. Roughly bound to the fence with electrical wire that cuts off blood flow, cuts flesh, and damages bone, the brothers suffer through a chilly night that leaves Utimi dead. Opperman’s killing of Utimi and later transgression of deliberately walking to the holy Kloof or ravine ignores Philipa’s advice, riddled as it is with racist epithets, that he respect Black people and animist agency: “Don’t underestimate the powers of a kaffir … They got ways we don’t know of. Especially don’t do a black no harm. Remember, even dead he will get even.”Footnote 54 Philipa’s comments nonetheless acknowledge a power in animist spirituality that might check the hubris and humanist mastery underpinning the Apartheid-era displacement. Ultimately, La Guma’s novel validates this spiritual agency through a human, spiritual, and animal vengeance that serves as a cosmic punishment for Opperman’s violence and transgressions.
Animist Animals: “Avenging Rhingals” and the Riddle of the Butcherbird
Among the warnings that Tanta gives Opperman about witchcraft is natives’ knowledge of snakes: “A kaffir knows snakes.” Earlier in the novel, the narrator describes diviners petting snakes as a metaphor for Schilling’s thirst for revenge: “Hatred sat behind the bleak eyes … hatred was a friend to be given shelter, nurtured and petted as the old-time diviners petted the avenging rhingals.”Footnote 55 The snake is used as part of a metaphor to describe hatred, yet it is not simply Othered, backgrounded, or instrumentalized for human meaning. The snake’s materiality appears forcefully later in the novel, rather like Garuba’s example of Morrison’s tobacco tin, as it asserts its agency by attacking the intruder on the sacred land. The association of diviners with poisonous snakes makes the vehicle of the metaphor a human–animal relation, offering a spiritualized understanding of snakes as agents of ancestors. The novel does not romanticize animists as animal lovers, however, as part of Schilling’s revenge involves his killing of an Afrikaner’s dogFootnote 56—a killing of a surveillance and hunting animal that the novel positions in line with the native killing of settler animals during anticolonial raids.
In contrast to Mma-Tau’s people’s otherwise positive view of animals, the dominee of the Afrikaans church offers a denigration of snakes in a misogynist, racist, and Cartesian sermon. While offering a Christian rationale for the drought as being caused by sins of the community including the “sin” of miscegenation, women’s lack of purity, and improper displays of the body, he cites as an example how “there was … a performance by a woman—can she be called a woman?—dancing near-naked with a snake, the symbol of evil.”Footnote 57 As Plumwood makes clear, not all spiritualities are the same given some “have been deeply damaging and antipathetic to the earth and its systems of life. For examples, we can consider certain traditional forms of spirituality that are hostile to the body, to other species, to the earth, or to women, or that foster racial or religious hatred …”Footnote 58 The devaluing of racialized and gendered Others, of animals, and the body in the Christian sermon informs the Afrikaans characters’ violence to native characters and the earth. Mma-Tau’s peoples’ spiritualizations and positive valuations of matter and animals resists the Christian pejorative symbolism of animals and Afrikaners’ racist animal metaphors.
Adopting a colonial view of animism, Opperman attempts to verify his view of indigenous spirituality as nonsense by walking on the sacred kloof. After thinking “so much for the ghost of the black chief,” Opperman walks on when “he heard the dangerous hissing as the common and venom-laden old rhingals … struck swiftly at his bare leg.”Footnote 59 Read at a literal level, the snake asserts its agency in perhaps responding to a threat, killing Opperman; however, this fails to account for the spiritual coding of snakes as pets of diviners. The snake’s attack on Opperman engages them in a shared spiritual postcolonial resistance against the violent intrusions of Afrikaner settler colonialism. The rhingals, as a metaphorical, spiritual, and material animal works in concert with Mma-Tau’s people to thwart the Afrikaner plans for displacing the community and instrumentalizing the land as they throw stones to fend off the trucks arriving to remove them.
Similarly, the “butcherbird” of the novel’s title is not treated solely in a literal sense. Madonele brings up the bird in testing Schilling’s knowledge of local riddles, situating the bird in human meaning. He replies, “Yes, I know the butcherbird. That he is a hunter and smeller-out of sorcerers, because he impales insects.”Footnote 60 The bird as detective of sorcery provides it a local cultural meaning, one that is connected later to Mma-Tau as she invokes this language of smelling: “I have this nose for smelling out things.”Footnote 61 Although Mma-Tau’s associations with animals as a “she-lion” might appear to align with Braidotti’s vitalism—“I am a she-wolf”Footnote 62—, the emphasis on the cultural meaning of the bird in the folk riddle emphasizes the differences between Braidotti’s vitalism and animist materialism as the bird is coded with human meaning. Cecil Abrahams explains that the butcherbird “preys on these parasites [ticks that feed on livestock] and in performing this noble task it is considered by rural dwellers as a bird of good omen that cleanses nature of negative influences.”Footnote 63 In recognizing the animal’s ecological function, the animist code accounts for the striking behavior of the butcherbird—the way it impales parasites and protects livestock—and spiritualizes it to enlist the bird in the cause against the parasitical threat of settler colonialism.
In Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in Xhosa, A. C. Jordan further explains how riddles serve as entertainments in exercising wit and knowledge in oral culture and cites the butcherbird riddle as a prime example: “The essence of the bird riddle is to display one’s knowledge of the ways and habits and/or colour-markings of the birds.”Footnote 64 Unlike Cartesian metaphorical uses of animals, the riddle emphasizes the bird and tests the “proposer’s” local avian knowledge. La Guma explains his rationale in selecting the butcherbird:
The title of the novel comes from African folklore. One of the riddles from the oral tradition indicates that the butcherbird represents something which not only cleanses the cattle but also cleanses the society. It does away with the wizards, the sorcerers, and the people who have a negative effect on the society. What I’m trying to say is that conscious resistance of the people heralds the time when the butcherbird will cleanse South Africa of racism, oppression and so on.Footnote 65
La Guma’s explanation of the title invokes animist materialism, specifically an animist animal, as a source of agency and revolution. Mma-Tau’s butcherbird-like ability to smell out sorcery confirms her as a revolutionary leader fighting displacement enabled by the agency of the coded social meaning of the animal. Not only do “literal” animals themselves resist such colonial violence,Footnote 66 but La Guma makes clear that spiritualized and metaphorized material animals also provide oppressed characters with agency to challenge colonial violence. Knowledge and coding of the land, local flora, and fauna inform characters’ defense of their sovereignty as a challenge to settler displacements.
The Animist Code in The Last Flight of the Flamingo
Like Time of the Butcherbird, Couto’s novel portrays animist-encoded animals as collaborating in resistance to colonial violence; however, the novel further emphasizes the accommodation of the animist code as a character rewrites a myth of the flamingo, revising the traditional understanding of the bird. Set after the Mozambican civil war, The Last Flight of the Flamingo portrays a community called Tizangara led, at the behest of the national government, by corrupt officials from distant parts of the country who commandeer state services and funds. Akin to La Guma’s novel, characters note how the organization of society is like colonialism: a state of affairs that upsets the ancestors as the people don’t even own the land anymore. Now, as in colonial times, outsiders have arrived under the guise of helping or civilizing the people. This time UN soldiers from around the world are investigating deaths of people exploding. Taking on the conventions of detective fiction, the narrator serves as a translator between the neocolonial administrators and the UN investigators, explaining the various theories behind the explosions. The novel’s animist materialism enables an agency for characters to negotiate environmental hazards: land riddled with land mines left over from the civil war and environmental terrorism in the plan to blow up a dam and flood their lands. Because “there was now as much injustice as in colonial times,”Footnote 67 characters look to animist spirituality and animals for agency with which to resist such inequality.
Like his later Confessions of the Lioness,Footnote 68 Couto’s Last Flight includes an outsider’s viewpoint, one not versed in local sorcery and animism, in the Italian character named Massimo, who must report to the international community the cause of the deaths. As characters attempt to explain their animist views and Massimo experiences some magical occurrences himself, he struggles with his duty to “make sense” of what he’s seen and heard. The explosions of the UN workers are particularly bizarre as in the first instance wherein no trace of the worker exists beyond a dismembered penis and a UN hat (explosions later credited to a witchdoctor, Zeca). David Huddart describes the outsider detective as a consistent device in Couto’s novels, arguing that Couto writes in a “Mozambican context, in which a new post–civil war world seems likely to consign both the pre-war reality and the Mozambican environment to oblivion. His fiction explores various ways in which that oblivion can be resisted, and how demands for a transparent accessibility to the global market can be met with a certain postcolonial opaqueness.”Footnote 69 The opacity of animist beliefs resists the attempt by Western outsiders to make Mozambique into an object of Western knowledge, one that can be more easily mastered and controlled if brought into transparency. Affirming the animist worldview and tapping its agency serves as a human-animal resistance to neocolonial exploitation in Last Flight.
Necropolitics in Last Flight
In dehumanizing its community members, the Tizangaran government deliberately risks their lives in replanting land mines for their personal profit. Characters learn that the administration received funds from the government to clear the land mines; however, the leaders develop a strategy to keep federal money flowing by digging up and replanting the landmines to ensure a constant problem and source of wealth they can pilfer. This instrumentalization of the land suggests their denial of the animist code as they neglect the narrator’s point that “the land is a being.”Footnote 70 As he critiques the greed of the politicians, the narrator points out how their capitalist secularism could have disastrous effects on the town beyond the explosions, risking a drought like in La Guma’s novel: “If the chiefs, during this new time, respected the harmony between the earth and the spirits, then good rains would fall and men would harvest general happiness.”Footnote 71 The administration’s denial of animist belief points to the lingering effects of colonialism, something Wendy Woodward observes in her analysis of the novel: “Couto has Sulplício critique how their desires have been framed within colonial prejudice—which first regarded indigenous people as uncivilized/savage, and now as mechanistically lacking.”Footnote 72 Sulplício and his son’s privileging of African spirituality suggests a resistance to Western supremacy as they use their animist beliefs to counteract the violence and devastation wrought by Western-style capitalism and government.
The racist biopolitics exercised by the town’s administration marks local people as disposable to the administrator’s land mine scheme: “A few deaths here and there were convenient, to give the plan more credibility. But they were nameless people, in the interior of an African country that could hardly sustain its name in the world. Who would worry about that?” By contrast, the UN workers lives are determined to be valuable and their deaths by explosion become cause for concern: “The death of the blue helmets … attracted inappropriate attention.”Footnote 73 In response to the unwanted attention, the administrator plans to blow up the dam, further risking the community, to flood the land and cover his tracks. The passage describes a necropolitical mode of governance as the administration regards the people as closer to an animal life that they can kill or risk with impunity. The narrator relates, for example, that the administrator’s wife “looked at me as if I didn’t even warrant the status of a human being.”Footnote 74
In an early scene of Last Flight, as the administrator attempts to perform authoritatively in front of arriving UN investigators by controlling an animal, he accidently voices an animist understanding of the animal. He asks, “Who’s this goat?” and his secretary corrects him “Whose.” Fixing his grammatical error, he asks, “Yes, whose is that piece of shit?”Footnote 75 The slippage suggests an initial animist understanding of the animal as the first pronoun recognizes the goat as a person (or potentially an ancestor or spirit) rather than an object of human ownership and derision. The rejection of an animist coding of the animal bears out Kyle Whyte’s point about the loss of environmental knowledge resultant from colonialism: “Through each of these practices of colonialism, Indigenous peoples witnessed the away-migration of their nonhuman relatives… . Away-migration also occurs in a ‘psycho-cultural’ sense, as Wildcat calls it, when people lose customs, protocols, skill-sets, and identities … related to particular plants, animals, insects, and ecosystems.”Footnote 76 Couto and La Guma portray characters defending their communities and environmental knowledges from colonial disenfranchisement, whereas the town administrator’s efforts to move away from the animist worldview informs his risking their lives and culture. As the goat is hit by the approaching UN vehicles and bleats in pain throughout the scene, the suffering animal body reveals the inadequacy of the outside “help” and the violence with which the administrator asserts his authority. The narrator refuses the administrator’s order to “Go and kill that son-of-a-bitch of a goat,”Footnote 77 and, although this may be a way to end its suffering, it indicates his rejection of the speciesism and necropolitical logic of the administration. As the narrator, his father, and other elders plan to stop the administrator’s explosion of the dam, the novel’s animist realism becomes even more spectacular as ancestors save the town by making the country disappear into another world, sinking it into the earth. Last Flight offers an animist animal as the primary figure of its resistance to neocolonialism as the narrator’s mother rewrites a traditional masculinist tale of the flamingo via the accommodationism of the animist code.
A Failed Hunt and the Invented Tale of the Flamingo
The narrator’s refusal to kill appears to be an inherited trait from his father. His dad, Sulplício, embraces traditional ways as he scoffs at the administrator, contacts the ancestors, is “learning bird language,”Footnote 78 and so on. Sulplício tells the narrator a story toward the end of the novel about a failed flamingo hunt that caused him anxiety about his masculinity. Expected to kill a flamingo with his brother and father as a rite of passage into manhood, Sulplício refuses: “My father ran up and ordered: Kufa mbalama! It was the order to kill the bird. In my brother’s hands, the stick completed its task and the creature breathed its last. That blow settled in my soul. The bird was dying inside me. Worse, however, was still to come. At night, I was obliged to eat the meat. My father thought I wasn’t hard enough, not ready enough to kill. So I had to eat its remains. In order to be a man. I refused.”Footnote 79 His internalization of the bird dying suggests an empathy but also perhaps a magical transfer of the experience of violence and suffering to himself. Sulplício’s refusal to kill the animal or eat it also resists his participation in patriarchal masculinity.
The traditional hunt as part of a rite of passage for men makes clear the dangers of romanticizing all traditional cultures and practices as environmentally friendly, something Laura Wright critiques.Footnote 80 Yet, Sulplício refuses, and the revised flamingo myth further demonstrates the animist code’s nondoctrinaire nature. His concern for the flamingo highlights its ethical status and his refusal to violently extract meaning from its body to confirm his male identity. The polysemy of the animist code enables the flamingo to be rewritten as a myth. Later, Sulplício explains that he felt humiliated and excluded from manhood until he met the narrator’s mother, who “inverted the story of the flamingo.”Footnote 81 La Guma and Couto both adopt a rather ecofeminist approach because their women characters are leaders and authors associated with the animal agency pivotal in their communities’ resistance to colonialism. Earlier, the narrator recounts the myth of the flamingo that his mother tells when she visits him as a spirit: the flamingo takes a “last flight” across the boundary between night and day where he would “forget that he could fly, turn his back on the art of landing on the earth’s surface.” This place with “no shade nor map”Footnote 82 is home to the gods, who make the country disappear at the novel’s end. The myth ends with the bird flying on, creating the first sunset and night. Positioning the flamingo as a manipulator of temporality, the invented tale rewrites the masculine meaning of the bird and reflects the animist code’s agency for “prepossessing the future” in the face of Western modernity and globalization. The bird myth “destabilizes the hierarchy of science over magic and the secularist narrative of modernity by reabsorbing historical time into the matrices of myth and magic.”Footnote 83 The myth also frustrates the secular account expected of the UN investigator by the international community, as he recognizes the transformation of the canoe and materialization of the mythologized bird.
After stopping the attempted dam explosion, the narrator, Sulplício, and Massimo sit aside the edge of the country that the gods have just submerged into another world. The narrator explains that “each country would remain suspended, awaiting a favourable time.”Footnote 84 Then, as Sulplício enters a canoe that hovers over the abyss, riding to the other world, the canoe appears to transform into a flamingo: “It seemed to me less like a boat, more like a bird. A flamingo flying off into the beyond.”Footnote 85 The transformation of canoe into flamingo suggests the materialization of the flamingo myth, as rather like La Guma’s butcherbird, it becomes a spiritual and material agent, bringing about a time when the country will be cleansed of neocolonial violence. Like the opening scene of the administrator stuttering over the goat, the scene includes another corrected speech as Massimo suggests they “—Wait for another boat—and after another pause, he corrected himself:—wait for another flight of the flamingo. There’s bound to be another one.”Footnote 86 In contrast to the administrator’s denigration of the goat and rejection of the animist code, Massimo’s correction critiques views of animism as nonsense, validating the animist animal and recognizing the community’s own agency to resist neocolonialism.
The journey of this extended literary treatment of the flamingo begins with a literal bird in the hunt, to killing the bird as a sign of masculinity, to the narrator’s mother mythologizing the bird, and ultimately to the transformation of the physical/magical canoe into a flamingo flying over the abyss of the otherworld of the gods. The excess meaning imported to materiality and portrayal of humans and indigenous animals resisting colonial violence manifests the potential of the animist code. The titular birds of both novels are conceived as manipulators of time or as agents who will radically change the current state of affairs to bring about different futures for the human and nonhuman members of their communities. Not only do animal phenomenologies, materialities, and affects have the potential for resisting oppression and necropolitical violence; so too, the spiritualized, mythologized, and metaphorized material animals of the animist code offer modes of resistance and agency against settler and neocolonial violence toward more just futures.
