Where do all the chameleons go? & the expansion of Earth & allied topics

The child is father of the man.  I remember, aged about eight, being called into the garden to look at the big bush in the front garden – I wish I knew its name.  I couldn’t see what the fuss was about until I noticed that it was alive with dozens of tiny camouflaged newborn chameleons.  The servants were petrified of them, for the beautiful creatures star in an African myth about the origin of death.  For a like reason, I too fretted: where, I asked, would all the baby chameleons go?  I wasn’t told then, but most would die, and soon.

At about the same time I started worrying that the land would run out.  Bulawayo was expanding and each month another plot or two, for white immigrants, would be carved out of the bush.  I was reassured that there would always be more land, so it was a rude shock a few years later to find out that the planet was not literally expanding to need.  (Also misunderstood was my parents’ reassurance that Africans were happy with their dispensation and did not – as I would see it now – chase the same wasteful consumerist goals we did.)

Step on five or six years and I was reading Biggles, Foreign Legionnaire by WE Johns.  My heroes are flying over the Iraq-Syria border and Biggles is pontificating:

“... There was a time when this district must have been fertile.  If there was water there would be vegetation.  Like so much of the Middle East it dried up and died when the water fizzled out.  This is what men can do to a country.  They’re doing the same thing now, in more countries than one.”

“Men?”

“Cut down the forests and there’s no cool ground to bring down the rain.  But that’s not our worry now....” 

There was a more immediate threat: von Stalhein and the alarming War Syndicate.  But I had been alerted!

Next I was working in the National Archives of Rhodesia and geographers from the University were scouring reports and photographs for indications of the encroachment of the desert on farmland near Plumtree.  There was plentiful evidence!  The only question was, who did the more damage, the blacks overstocking the tribal trust lands (due to modern medicine their population now doubling every 23 years) or the whites with their machinery and pesticides?  The government did strive, with some success, to educate both sets of farmers.  And meanwhile I read how in the 19th century hunters such as Selous, Hartley, Finaughty and Johannes Cornelius van Rooyen, to name a few, had killed tens of thousands of elephants, denuding the highveld, before the BSA Company reined in the slaughter.

I emigrated to Australia and grasped the impact on the environment of introduced species.  I emigrated to England and the first thing I saw was a tractor ploughing up and over a hill in chalky Wiltshire (after wrenching out hedgerows).  I went on holiday and learned what the Romans did to Sicily.  A TV historian expounded on the Dust Bowl that had driven my great uncle out of America.

The evidence is all about us.  We are destructive animals.  Why did I demur when my old friend Phil said the world would be better off without us and that trees are superior to humans? 

My country right or wrong

It astonished me, when the Southern Rhodesian government under Ian Smith declared UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) in 1965, that the large minority – possibly even majority – of those voters (overwhelmingly white) who had not been in favour of the perilous move immediately switched to supporting it wholeheartedly.  Bar a few mutterings.  Though exactly a year later I witnessed a clandestine act of defiance ­–a white teacher raising a black flag in the dead of the night at Goromonzi High School. 

My father was firmly against UDI and continued to support the ten per cent of Europeans who campaigned for a “multiracial” settlement (to use the terminology of the times) but, like most of us, he felt he had no option but to buckle down and make the administration and the economy work – indeed, he played an important part in managing the sanctions-busting “grey ladies”, the unmarked road tankers that kept the oil flowing.  And the ninety per cent that continued to vote for “good old Smithy” apparently believed, because they felt they were in the right, that he could carry off their coup against the whole weight of world opinion.  Since when was being in the right, whatever that may be, a passport to success?  By the end of the war, of course, the doubts were more often and everywhere acknowledged. 

Ian Smith was profoundly misguided and totally out of his depth but he was a good enough man at heart.  The loathsome politicians were the ones who were consciously playing a little post-colonial game, like PK van der Byl and Lord Graham – seeing how far they could get away with a naughty little adventure – and they, unlike me, had ready boltholes to flee to and money outside the country.

Now all this has nothing to do with love for country.  A third generation “settler”, I loved Rhodesia and shared this love with recent (postwar) settlers, intransigent racists and brave farmers.  And shared it with the Ndebele (who had “settled” there, too, albeit fifty-odd years earlier than my grandfather) and the Shona, also comparatively recent immigrants.  (The only folk with real cause to feel they had an exclusive claim on the country were the Bushmen – as we called them – and they were long since driven away.) 

Nor have my remarks got anything to do with the efficiency with which Rhodesia was governed.  Do not confuse the issue with economics.  Or with the injustices of modern Zimbabwe. 

When you vote and if you want to change the way a country is governed a few tangible facts and figures become useful.  Which is pertinent to us in Britain now.  You will find them in short supply.  Meanwhile, if you realise that your country is being destroyed there is no requirement to plunge about crazily proclaiming that now “we” have made a decision – whether through a decree by the Cabinet or in a referendum – we should support it blindly.  “My country right or wrong” is an idiotic code.