The Soapbox | Where South Africans Speak Out

BY T. SLABBERT

I would like to address this to the flat footed fool who recently shot a baboon in Hermanus (although I doubt whether the person is literate enough to read and if indeed so, whether the guilty party will be able to understand what I have to say).

For years the image of the baboon or monkey or any other primate has been used as symbol or metaphor to represent ‘the savage’ from a white colonialist’s perspective. A rather ironic comparison as it is now general knowledge that Homo sapiens is indeed nothing but an ape with a meagre difference of around 3% that separates human DNA from that of primates like the chimpanzee. Historically and during colonisation, the human ‘other’ was deprived of land and forced to live on the fringes of white society despite being the indigenous inhabitants of the land. Some of these ‘others’ (!Xam) were even hunted and shot for financial gain or for sport.

Since our newfound democracy, this treatment and regard of the human ‘other’ has transformed (so they say?). Yet, it seems to me that the same disrespectful and inhuman treatment of living beings persists in the approaches towards our other brothers, the other indigenous inhabitants of this land – the baboon. It seems that Eugene Marais’ prediction that humans might “outwit evolution to such an extent that mankind – as an extreme example – could conceivably develop into a race of hairless, blue idiots” (cited in Rousseau 2000: 36) has indeed come true. The murderer from Hermanus, who is undoubtedly hiding somewhere in his constructed homestead behind his fire stick, could perhaps ask someone to bring him a copy of Marais’ The Soul of the Ape to page through while in self-inflicted exile.

Allow me to include an additional passage written by another educated and informed South African. J.M. Coetzee, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature writes in The Lives of Animals:

In the olden days the voice of man, raised in reason, was confronted by the roar of the lion, the bellow of the bull. Man went to war with the lion and the bull, and after many generations won that war definitively. Today these creatures have no more power. Animals have only their silence left with which to confront us. Generation after generation, heroically, our captives refuse to speak to us. All save … the great apes.

Yet because the great apes, or some of them, seem to us to be on the point of giving up their silence, we hear human voices raised arguing that the great apes should be incorporated into a greater family of the Hominoidea, as creatures who share with man the faculty of reason. And being human, or humanoid, these voiced go on, the great apes should then be accorded human rights, or humanoid rights. What rights in particular? At least those right that we accord mentally defective specimens of the species Homo sapiens: the right to life, the right not to be subjected to pain or harm, the right to equal protections before the law (2000: 30-31).

To the killer: hide, man, hide – the law of life is coming to get you.

T. Slabbert lives in Betty’s Bay.