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The book is socially incisive and clear-eyed, with an all-inclusive pitch that promotes intercultural literacy. It is an important brick towards the ideal of our collective psyche and the evolution towards a higher national conscience.
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Title: Eye brother horn
Author: Bridget Pitt
Publisher: Catalyst Press
ISBN: 9781946395764
One of the most endearing qualities of the book Eye brother horn by Bridget Pitt is its telling of a traditional story, with common narratives of brotherly love, friendship and parental love, that at the same time subtly illuminates tropes of ecology and the impact of colonialism and (foreign) religion, with an added brilliant use of the African worldview through its mythologies, and for an atmospheric background.
This is a story of two brothers, Moses and Daniel (black and white), who grow up together on an African missionary farm in the present-day outskirts of KZN. Through life’s happenings, the black boy, Moses, gradually learns that he is not the “blood child” of the missionary couple. He had always suspected that through subtle actions of favouritism by their father, Reverend Whitaker (village people call him uThika), or uMfundisi. Moses had been secretly delivered by his uncle to the missionaries when the ritual of his drought-stricken native village demanded he be killed because he was a twin. We are not told much of the life of his twin, because the story concentrates only on Moses’s coming of age story. And whether there is real evidence of such practices still common in the area during the mid-nineteenth century is not really the point of the story.
Daniel, in the village, is called inkonyane lika Bhejane, the Rhino’s child, after a miraculous incident of surviving a rhino attack while on his nanny’s back. He grows to be a sensitive boy with proto-ecological consciousness, very much attached to the land, and with mystical connections to the animals, in particular the rhino. It’ll remind those who have read Max Porter’s Lanny of that book. Pitt’s book is mercifully free of animist tendencies, or the anthropomorphism of animals that often passes as mythological wisdom in this now fetishised genre. She’s interested only in the sharing and transmission of energy between living things: sentient, vegetative, inanimate and otherwise.
Moses grows up more and more interested in science, African mythology and stories of life than the Christian religion uMfundisi tries to instil in him. He listens to and gets excited about stories that could easily have been out of Credo Mutwa’s Indaba, my children – creation stories told by their Gogo who lives on the mission. This, of course, inspires outbursts of frustration from uMfundisi with his white saviour mentality, sometimes condescendingly doubting that Moses’s primitive mind will ever benefit from education. He chastises him for being interested in fairy tales, but: “These two worlds live in Moses, side by side.”
Daniel doesn’t fair well either, because each time his father reads him stories from the Bible:
The words are too big to fit into Daniel’s ears – each sentence rumbles at him like a wagon full of stern old men, frowning because he can’t understand what they want …. Daniel wonders who Moses’ people are, and whether he, like Sithungusobendle (from Gogo’s intsomi), will have to slit open the belly of the monster to get them.
Both boys would rather spend their Sundays roaming the green, undulating hills and carving clay cattle on the river bank, like all village boys. Daniel even asks his parents to have their own clan name, like everyone else around, but his mother, Kazi, dissuades him from such silly ideas, telling him:
“English people don’t need these things. Zulu clans need praise songs like izithakazelo to help them remember their ancestors and family histories. But we write our history and don’t need to remember it in a praise song.”
Still, Africa finds its own mystical way into the blood of Daniel, with tragic consequences, as the end section of the book demonstrates. Such parts are so organically portrayed that you suspect an autofictional element from the author, who herself grew up in similar surroundings.
Soon enough, uMfundisi’s cousin, Sir Roland, arrives with intentions of buying a sugarcane farm and paying only for Daniel’s further education in England. He thinks uMfundisi is playing with fire by allowing education for Moses: “If you teach your dog to speak, he’ll soon be barking orders at you.” Sir Roland is a monstrous and irritable character of a greedy capitalist class who will destroy anything and everything for profit. As much as Sir Ronald’s disdain is directed at Moses, to put him in his place, his comeuppance comes through the hand of Daniel, who is just as determined at protecting his brother as Sir Ronald is at humiliating him.
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The strength of Pitt’s writing is her rare ability to repudiate without judgement or condemnation. Her arguments, worn with artistic lightness, go beyond mere politicising.
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The narrative voice of the book often rises to beautiful poetic heights that evoke Alan Paton’s rolling hills prose in Cry the beloved country: “The world has been rubbed out by the mist slowly rising from the valleys.” This book depicts the clash of two worlds in the middle of the nineteenth century, while at the same time giving us a background of our current world in seed. It shows a strand of missed opportunities of how we could have arranged our world in a more humane manner, had we had a modicum of respect for all our cultures, languages and traditions – seeing the melting pot in ways that make for the diverse nation we are now trying to recover. I would also prescribe the book for those still under the allure of the imperial colonial nostalgia – those who don’t really understand its destructive power for native identities; who think colonialism was not just oppressive but creative also, that its hegemony didn’t just attempt to kill native cultures but purified them out of “the dark ages”.
The strength of Pitt’s writing is her rare ability to repudiate without judgement or condemnation. Her arguments, worn with artistic lightness, go beyond mere politicising. They skirt sociological depths and anthropological fringes. The book is socially incisive and clear-eyed, with an all-inclusive pitch that promotes intercultural literacy. It is an important brick towards the ideal of our collective psyche and the evolution towards a higher national conscience.