At Goedgedacht: A Story of Olives

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Notes

¹ The early 1990s were, in retrospect, a pivotal moment with regard to the emergence into public prominence of a globally situated view of environmental degradation, its relation to uncontrolled development, and the urgent need for change. The influential report of the Brundtland World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future, first published in 1987, was followed in 1992 by the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio. Alongside such global initiatives, a range of South-based critiques of Northern-style developmentalism identified eco-political priorities in the context of more regional struggles. In South Africa, this transitional period between apartheid and the new dispensation saw the appearance, particularly among non-governmental organizations, of a new kind of environmentalism, which sought to prioritize both ecological sustainability and social justice.

² First used in 1974 by Ray Dasmann, “biosphere people” indicates a form of human social organization which draws on the entire biosphere for its resources, as distinct from “ecosystem people” whose consumption is more regionally specific. See his discussion of this in Called by the Wild (152f.).

³ Quoted in Ruiters, 121. Writing about ecosocial organizations, Harvey has noted that while oppositional social movements may be very efficient at organizing “in place” they tend to be relatively disempowered when it comes to organizing across space: “In clinging to place bound identity, such oppositional movements become a part of the very fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed on,” so that while they may be excellent bases for political action, “they cannot bear the burden of radical historical change alone” (quoted in Ruiters, 121).

⁴ Nixon, “Environmentalism,” 236, 238. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin make a related point in a discussion of green postcolonialism with regard to the emphasis on situated experience: “The advantage of this view is that it foregrounds alternative, often ‘non-Western’ epistemologies that are still routinely ignored in Western metropolitan literary and cultural criticism; the disadvantage is that situatedness can end up being mistaken for regionalism, thereby reifying the cultural distinctiveness of the author, or the critic, or the text” (“Green Postcolonialism,” 9).

⁵ These terms refer to Gerald Berthoud's account of the transition from “the market as place” to the contemporary globalized market as universal phenomenon (75–6). For further representation of Imhoff Farm, see the website: www.imhofffarm.co.za.

⁶ Ingold, Perception, 16.

⁷ There are, of course, numerous examples of ways of writing that do this very effectively, and Rob Nixon's essay (which I think does in fact rather overstate the case for rhetorical effect) has provoked some valuable analysis of precisely this question. See, for example Rachel Azima's discussion of the representation of place in Jamaica Kincaid's My Garden (Book).

⁸ Ingold, Perception, 87.

⁹ On 26 September 1704, Robbertsz was granted a piece of land then called Weltevreden, probably as a “loan farm.” This was a portion later incorporated into the farm that came to be called Goedgedacht. The document that records this transaction (apparently a copy of the original) includes a drawing of the plot, showing a cottage near the stream (Old Stellenbosch Freehold I: 493–4).

¹⁰ As Ingold shows, an ecological view of history must question the simple dualism of this way of seeing (Perception, 87).

¹¹ In this regard, Penn's Forgotten Frontier is the definitive study of the subject.

¹² Ibid., 153–4.

¹³ As Penn puts it, “Fear permeates [this…] passage, just as it permeated Cape society—even though the ‘real wild people of Africa’ were several hours away from Tulbagh” (ibid., 154).

¹⁴ As regards the transfer of “ownership” of the land, Loedolff appears to be the first owner of the larger farm of Goedgedacht, designated as such in 1824. While the document that records this bears the stamp of a confident, conquering Britain in the authoritative signature of Governor Lord Charles Henry Somerset, under Nationalist rule in the late twentieth century, the apartheid state's imprint on sales of the farm is recorded in terms of its own brand of power. From 1961 to 1985, the four successive owners of Goedgedacht are all listed with reference to the governing racist ideology: “blanke groep.”

¹⁵ David Morris, in an e-mail, 30 March 2009.

¹⁶ Unless otherwise indicated, comments from Annie and Peter Templeton are from conversations during May–July 2009. For a more detailed representation of the projects associated with Goedgedacht than I can offer in the discussion that follows, please see www.goedgedacht.org.za. The photographs by Chris Spies in the Photo Gallery are particularly evocative.

¹⁷ Cornell interview, 5.

¹⁸ As Ingold has put it, an ancient tree may be said to “play its part in the domestication of humans rather than having been domesticated by them” (Perception, 86).

¹⁹ These questions refer to recent research into the network of species and habitats involved in the presence of a particular animal—the beaver—in the place now called Manhattan. Asking “What a Beaver Needs” and “What Needs a Beaver,” scientists have mapped a detailed Muir web (after the naturalist John Muir) of such connections. For a simplified chart of these relations, see Hendriquez, “Making Connections”: 134–5.

²⁰ While Kasteelberg is particularly prominent in the archeological literature for its traces of pastoralism in the last two thousand years, Johnathan Kaplan, an archeologist from Riebeeck Kasteel, tells me that he has picked up Middle Stone Age tools on the Kasteelberg above Goedgedacht.

²¹ This refers again to the work of Tim Ingold (see, for example, Perception, 20), in conversation with the Buddhist concepts of sunyata (usually translated as emptiness) and pratityasamutpada (or dependent arising). As the third-century Madhyamaka Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna put it: “Things derive their being and nature by mutual dependence, and are nothing in themselves.” In this context, olives are empty of essence, yet full of all the world.

²² This is the 90 percent by 2030 project, a countrywide initiative to cut carbon emissions by 90 percent by the year 2030. Ninety percent is the figure proposed in George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning.

²³ I am very grateful to all the people who helped to bring this essay together. After Annie and Peter Templeton, whose conversations about Goedgedacht were so warm and informative, I would like to thank Michael Cope, David Morris, and the anonymous Safundi reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. Chris Murphy was invaluable when I was tracking documents relating to the early colonial occupancy of the farm, and Carohn Cornell, Ingrid de Kok, Johnathan Kaplan, Duncan Miller, and Nigel Penn responded helpfully to my questions. Sky Cope spent a patient morning in the National Archives, and Eugene Vinnicombe found what I was looking for at the Deeds Office. Finally, thank you to David Morris for directing me toward the work of Tim Ingold, whose essays in The Perception of the Environment have been instructive and evocative for the sense of place I try to articulate here.