Writing the Ancestral River. Jacklyn Cock
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rivers, or canoeing or walking through the riverine forest, involves encounters with wild nature. One can hear the lap of the tide, and perhaps the bark of a bushbuck or the coughing sound of a baboon. Birdsong is constant and might include the sweet notes of the Black-headed Oriole, or the harsh alarm call of the Knysna Loerie, flying away with its scarlet underwings flashing, or even the soft hooting of the shy Narina Trogon. There are kingfishers and rare waterbirds like the African Finfoot and the Green-backed Heron. These birds are our access to nature, to the wild and the pristine. I have watched Cape Clawless Otters at play in a gold dawn light. These are very intimate and privileged experiences of wild nature. They give us the space (both psychic and geographical) to think about our place in the world and our relations with the wild creatures with whom we share it. They can remind us of our place in nature, of our ecological interdependence, even of our dependence on the trees which release the oxygen that allow us to live. They can provide us with a sense of joy, ‘an intense happiness’.21 Olive Schreiner wrote of ‘that strange impersonal peace that comes into our hearts when we contemplate nature’.22 It can also involve focusing and simplifying our lives. Henry David Thoreau believed: ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the World’.23 For him, walking (‘sauntering’ he called it) was the best way of connecting with nature. In a spirit of pilgrimage, I visited Walden Pond in Massachusetts where Thoreau lived, but today, filled with crowds and cars, Walden is a very different place.
Just as Walden Pond represented the world for Thoreau, the Kowie River embodies much of what I care about. So writing this book has involved three kinds of journeys: firstly, intellectual in the research process, which has involved many conversations and interviews with very different people as well as solitary hours in archives and reading rooms trying to trace the history of the area and understand its earliest inhabitants – the Khoikhoi, Dutch, Xhosa and British. Secondly, it has involved many physical journeys down the river, from its rising near Grahamstown to its Indian Ocean mouth, often retracing well-loved bays and places. Both these journeys of exploration have been fun. But the book has also involved an emotional journey, which has raised some unsettling questions about my own ancestry.
One of the British 1820 settlers was my great-great-grandfather. In my family he was always referred to as the Honourable William Cock, the name spoken in deferential tones, as if the title signalled more than membership of a discredited colonial institution, the Legislative Council, whose members were appointed by the governor of the Cape Colony. In these family conversations he was invariably described as an entrepreneur, and his efforts to turn the Kowie River into a productive harbour were always framed as a heroic confrontation with the forces of nature. It was therefore deeply shocking for me to read of him in recent historians’ accounts as a member of a settler elite who promoted the violent dispossession of the land and livelihoods of the indigenous population. Was William Cock a warmonger and profiteer, ‘the army butcher’ as the historian Timothy Keegan describes him? Was he one of the ‘strangers to honour’, as Noël Mostert terms the 1820 settler elite, or a brave pioneer and entrepreneur? The developer of the Port Alfred marina told me, ‘William Cock is the father of the marina. We could not have done it without him.’ This book will show that there are similarities in the two main assaults on the integrity of the Kowie River: the nineteenth-century harbour and the modern marina. Both are linked to a process of racialised dispossession originating in the violence of settler colonialism.
Obviously I found it painful to consider my revered great-great-grandfather as part of an imperialist settler elite driven by narrow commercial interests at best, a warmonger and profiteer at worst. But this was not the only unsettling discovery about my own family during the course of researching this book. I used to love working in the heavy, comfortable silence of museums and reading rooms. But the sense of peaceful engagement with the past was shattered in a particularly uncomfortable discovery one day. Going through old papers in the reading room of the Albany Museum in Grahamstown, I came across a letter which contained a reference to my mother, for whose intellect and integrity I had great respect. The writer stated, ‘I have come to the conclusion that Mrs Pauline Cock is a very unreliable source of settler history. What she doesn’t know she simply invents.’ Part of what she ‘invented’ was a consoling narrative held by many descendants of the 1820 settlers who still live in the Kowie area, one that tends to idolise the courage and enterprise of the settlers and praise the extension of the benefits of British civilisation to the benighted Xhosa.
Rivers can connect us not only to nature, from which many urban people are alienated, but also to questions of justice. Understanding that we are all part of nature in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe means recognising both our ecological and social interdependence and our shared vulnerability. Furthermore, rivers can connect us to our past and show how it is inscribed in the present. Researching the Kowie River has involved revisiting my own ancestors and confronting the inter-generational privilege which forms part of their legacy. This has meant confronting many prejudices, myths and distortions, which this book describes.
My story of the Kowie River acknowledges how the ravages of the past continue to flow through the present. It is a story that incorporates both social and environmental injustice: the silting and pollution of a river and the violent conquest of the indigenous Xhosa whose descendants continue to live in poverty and material deprivation.
But around the world people are increasingly reconnecting with nature and justice through rivers. Unlike other bodies of water, such as dams, oceans and lakes, rivers have a destination and we can learn from the strength and certainty with which they travel. I believe this learning is valuable because acknowledging the past, and the inter-generational, racialised privileges, damages and denials it established and perpetuates, is necessary for any shared future.
2The Kowie River
The Kowie is an ancient river; it flows through land where dinosaurs once roamed and where cycads still grow. At one time this land was covered by the sea with marine deposits fifty million years old. It is a wild, tidal river, dynamic, forever changing and diverse. This diversity lies not only in the different types of country through which it flows, but also in the changing seasons, the differences between wet and dry years, between high and low tides, and the rich variety of the forms of life it sustains. The Kowie River has not received scholarly attention from historians, nor has its beauty been acknowledged by poets or writers, except for one noteworthy exception. In his poem ‘The Rivers’ (1982), Chris Mann celebrates this diversity:
The rivers of the Eastern Cape are full of hidden life:
quiet cob, greenyblackcrab,
turtle and tadpole flimmer and flee;
The rivers of the Eastern Cape are walked by recent ghosts:
waterbuck, lithebuck leopard doe;
The rivers of the Eastern Cape run with holy waters:
ochred priest and prophet refract
the shimmershades in pools.1
The term ‘holy waters’ refers to the enduring and sacred importance of the Kowie River to many Xhosa people today.
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One of my most magical river moments was at dawn one morning in 2005 as I was crouching in the lush vegetation lining the beautiful deep green pool that marks the confluence of the Kowie and Lushington rivers. A friend and I were waiting to see the otters whose holt I had discovered in this particular pool. After sitting motionless for a long time, we saw the whiskered head of an otter break the surface and then turn, swimming on her back with a crab in her front paws, followed by three otter cubs. My friend and I didn’t move or speak, but after a while the golden silence was broken by the sound of rhythmic chanting and the beat of a drum. Five figures, all clothed in white, their faces painted with white clay and their heads covered in white cloth turbans, suddenly appeared. They were led by a diviner in a white robe and red turban carrying a flywhisk in one hand and a spear in the other. We watched in fascination as they removed their shoes and chanted to the rhythm of a cowhide drum, calling in sonorous tones on ‘the People of the River’, the source of the created world. The experience felt like the ‘shining adventure’ which the conservationist Aldo Leopold described while canoeing through