I’ve made it clear that I don’t have any respect at this point in my life for most forms of identity politics, which I think is a broader and more potent term than “political correctness”. Occasionally, however, I’m reminded of some of the valid things people were trying to accomplish initially in that manner, and of the more modest ways we could support some of those objectives.
What made me think of this subject in the past week was my own reaction when I climbed a high trail near Ithala Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. The first reaction was the simple one that most of us have when we’re high up in a beautiful place and have a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside: wow.
Then something else kicked in and I thought to myself, “This is the landscape that humanity evolved in. This is the primal landscape that created us.”
And then I thought, no, you shouldn’t think that, that’s not right. Why should that occur to me? Well, first off, because of course isn’t actually quite right: the savannah of southern Africa might not be the primary site of hominid evolution, that’s eastern Africa. But there were hominids here very early, and the landscape in savannah areas of southern Africa is broadly similar to eastern Africa.
More importantly, it was the part of my mind that is trained in the history of this region saying that, cautioning myself to not think of this landscape of lying outside of history, as being primeval or primitive. There’s a lot tied up in that thought. Most wilderness landscapes in the world today are misperceived by many of their most devotees as lacking in human presence, as being what the world looks like before and outside of humanity. That’s just not so. The wilderness of the American West is a human-produced landscape, not just recently, but before European settlement. So too the view from Ithala.
The hills I was looking out over were hills that shaped the 18th Century formation of Shaka’s Zulu state and the various movements of peoples that resulted from it, what historians have come to know as the mfecane. Before that, other histories of movement and state-building, of defining peoples and ways of life. And they were also a landscape affected by later waves of European settlement and by apartheid. I was looking out at history as well as prehistory.
You can make that point in a simple way, as a way of imparting knowledge. Why, then, is there that little censor in my mind, that little sense of guilt at the thought of homo habilis creeping across the hills? Because it’s not entirely a innocent thought. The landscapes that get automatically envisioned as historical, as full of the knowable actions and experiences of recent humanity, are often the landscapes of the West. What we think about what we see before we really think isn’t just incidental: it’s a structured response with a history in its own right.
But it’s silly that reflecting about this should make me, or anyone else, feel guilty, or that it should lead us to push away a true and valid experience or sensation of place or person. That’s where some scholarly responses lost their way, when they started to slide into trying to inhibit what people already know about the world rather trying to complicate and enrich what we know. You can learn to see many things at once, after all.