On March 3 the Cape Argus published a piece on Bukshi, an 18-year-old Arabian horse that lived in Faure and had to be killed because a group of teenagers had brutally tortured him. A few years earlier a group of Johannesburg adolescents were reported to have bought, trapped and tortured a mouse before setting it alight.
Cruelty towards animals seems to be systematic and wide-ranging and includes the process of how animal flesh reaches the dinner tables of meat eaters. In her 2005 book, Animal Rights in South Africa, Michelle Pickover documented how animal welfare laws and policies in many ways reinforce cruelty.
But instead of discussing the laws in place (or not in place) to protect animals, I want to highlight how cruelty towards other animals is ignored, dismissed and even defended by social justice practitioners and feminist intellectuals and activists — sometimes in the name of an undefined African culture.
The anthropocentric view that holds the lives and interests of humans to be central to the universe and maintains that human beings are superior to all other living creatures underpins a dominant belief system protected by religious, animal welfare and poverty discourses — as well as intellectual discourses broadly, including feminist talk in South Africa.
This echoes a racialised solipsism in which it is assumed that “white” South Africans, for instance, can interpret and understand reality only from their experiences as “white” subjects. Feminist ideologies fight to eradicate hierarchies that maintain who has power over whom in the name of race, gender, sexuality, geographical location and class; but their own “species-ist” prejudice often ensures that other animals are unseen and invisible.
Some women’s rights activists, feminists and other social justice intellectuals sit at dinner tables fervently articulating their positions against patriarchy and colonialism, or perhaps in favour of organic consumption, while they praise or critique the bird wings and lamb chops they’re guzzling.
They speak intelligently about complexities of power and succinctly about problems with fixed notions of culture. Their arguments about difference and “otherness” in race, gender and sexual politics are well thought-out and sophisticated. The disease with a vegetarian (or vegan) subject at the dinner table is often expressed through defensiveness — just as the disease of homophobes in the presence of a gay or lesbian subject is conveyed.
And if you push for a counter-argument, the idea of animal-eating as essentially and culturally African is at times invoked.
There is a disjuncture here between the ability to see similarities among different kinds of power in human relationships — say white, male or heterosexual privilege — and the blindness concerning human power over other animals. It is about seeing, on the one hand, power and privilege over another living being, while simultaneously choosing not to see power and privilege over a living being that is not in human form.
This has some similarities to sociologist Bob Torres’s argument about moral schizophrenia in his 2007 book Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. He talks about how human beings can simultaneously love a non-human animal as a pet and consume other animals as food.
The torture of Bukshi and the abuse and murder of the unnamed mouse, both apparently as entertainment for teenagers, is no different from the global systematic torture and murder of other animals each day for food, for leather, for beauty and for masculine hunting trophies. As long as mainstream and alternative social justice discourses ignore other animals as sentient beings who have a right to live free of human interference, their torture and murder are rendered invisible and acceptable.
We have no right then to be shocked or disgusted when teenagers act brutally towards a horse, cat, cow, dog or mouse. As long as feminist discourses in South Africa — one of the primary alternative voices to mainstream ideologies — understand power and privilege only as they relate to the interests of subjugated human animals, and dismiss the multiple ways in which human power over other animals is exercised, feminism in our country will lack self-reflexivity and remain directly complicit in utilising power for its own ends.
Dr Nadia Sanger is a feminist vegetarian living and working in South Africa. She writes in her own capacity