Husbandry, Agriculture and Ecocide

Abstract

This article reads Bessie Head's novel When Rain Clouds Gather within the georgic mode, particularly as it relates to agriculture as an ecologically disruptive force. Although the narrative's engagement with georgic concerns, notably husbandry, is informed by an ecological imperative dominated by outside Western influences, it is also increasingly tempered by an emerging postcolonial questioning of the changes wrought. This leads to the figuration of an African-centred, eco-systemic perspective. These features characterise the text as a postcolonial georgic.

Keywords:

• georgic
• agriculture
• postcolonial literature
• development
• ecocriticism
• environmental criticism
• Bessie Head

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Notes

Byron Caminero-Santangelo and Garth Myers, for example, regret the absence of analysis on Head's work in their collection (2011: 13).

A sampling of this considerable body of research includes the studies by Elaine Campbell (1985), Maureen Fielding (2003), James M. Garrett (1999), Sophia Obiajulu Ogwude (1998). See also Desiree Lewis (2007).

Jonathan Highfield incorporates some ecocritical discussion in his article, for example regarding the introduction of the plough (2010: 106–7).

She attended an Anglican mission school, where she read widely (Eilersen, 1996: 20, 25–6).

Agro-environmental scientists commonly understand agriculture to be environmentally disruptive. See, for example, John Warren, Clare Lawson and Ken Belcher (2008: 1, 23–5) and Stephen R. Gliessman (2007: 3–17).

Critics concur that the pastoral and the georgic overlap as modes and that a text may exhibit characteristics from both.

Head was keenly aware of the threats drought poses, having arrived in Botswana during one that lasted 10 years (Eilersen, 1996: 67).

In Virgil's Georgics the goddess of agriculture brings the knowledge (Virgil, 2005: 8).

As Head's biographer discovered, so important did Head find the agro-ecological content of her novel that she had an ‘agricultural officer check … everything she wrote’ (Eilersen, 1996: 100).

To Head's credit, she was painfully aware that she was an outsider and later made it her priority to explore local history, including that of the agricultural project in which she was involved in Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (1981). In this book, she also acknowledges some of the project's shortfalls.

A prominent concept in classical and early English modern georgic texts, husbandry is formulated as a demand (the need for ‘good husbandry’) in Western development rhetoric of the later twentieth century.

The problematic issues that Gilbert's experiments raise in light of later science and the effects of livestock development projects in Africa are out of the scope of this essay.

For an overview of this theoretical critique see Huggan and Tiffin (2010: 27–35).