Alex Dodd:LANDMARKS
In February 1996 I was woken up in Dublin by the sort of phone call everyone dreads getting. “Take a deep breath. I’ve got some terrible news. Anne is dead.” One of my closest and most inspiring friends had been killed in a head-on collision. Anne’s last words to me had been: “Come home.”
I remember scrambling for change at a bar in Schipol airport where you could pay for your whiskey in any one of 10 currencies. I remember seeing Table Mountain through the window of the aeroplane. The funeral in a small church in Cape Town didn’t help much. At sunset I drove up Signal Hill with a group of friends to look out over the sea.
That was the first time I came across the kramat, a humble square white building with a green dome that sits quietly on the crest of the hill as if it was always there. Up to the left Lions Head was silhouetted against a dazzling sun and far beneath us lay an immensity of blue sea. At the door beneath the moon and crescent were the words: “The Dargan is for praying and glorifying Allah the almighty.”
Having walked through the little iron gate and removed my shoes, as requested in a hand- painted sign on the wall, I remember entering the building and encountering silence and a kind of peace I had not felt for days.
The light entering the shrine was softened by coloured glass and in the centre of the room was a tomb covered in bright satin cloth. There lay Sheikh Muhammed Hassan Ghabi Shah al Qadri, a man I never knew. What I did know was that somehow this was a building that could house my pain.
Perhaps it had something to do with the sense of detachment you feel up there. Something about height – about being released for a while from the goings-on of the mortal world below.
But since then I’ve wondered why that particular place? Why not the pretty church where the funeral was held? Why a Muslim shrine? Was that some kind of cultural appropriation on my behalf, like finding freedom in music with lyrics in a foreign tongue? Or do some buildings have a structure that is inherently peaceful, intrinsically welcoming? Are some forms more capable of accommodating a greater diversity of human impulses?
Since then I have learned that the kramats, the holy shrines of Islam, mark the graves of great Muslim spiritual leaders who died in the Cape. There are more than 20 kramats in the Peninsula area, with at least another three in outlying districts of Faure, Caledon, Rawsonville and Bain’s Kloof.
Cape Town is surrounded by a “holy circle” of kramats stretching from Robben Island to the kramat of Sheikh Yusuf in Faure and offering divine protection to the city, the fulfilment of a 250-year-old prophecy.
The history of these shrines stretches way back to 17th century when the Dutch East India Company invaded places like India, Ceylon and Java. Local communities resisted the tyranny but their leaders were banished to the faraway Cape. People of Malay, Indian, Javanese, Bengalese and Arabian origins were also sold into slavery during this time and, together with the exiled sultans, started the first Muslim communities in the Cape.
But Islam was practised in secret for fear of harsh recriminations by the Dutch. To have faith in Allah in the Cape of the 17th century was a constant, rigorous struggle. There were no institutions then, no mosques, no kramats … the slaves used to run from one farm to the next, teaching people about the Qu’ran. People used to pray at home or outside in quarries.
It was only later that the kramats were built to enshrine the tombs of Islamic princes, noblemen and wise men who’d lead the struggle for religious freedom in the Cape.
The issues of religious and cultural freedom in the Nineties are a far cry from those of the 17th century and yet when, on my recent flight to Cape Town, I find myself having flash thoughts of Pagad bombings and making snap resolutions to consciously avoid American theme bars. I am reminded that this war began a long time ago.
Lately I’ve noticed a disturbing tendency to, almost subconsciously, blame all Muslims in the Cape for the recent spate of bombings. This is not even a vague temptation to me, but sadly, I’m still not convinced that I’ve escaped the deeper influences of a Western culture that paints Islam as some kind of strange, dark force. So how do we unlearn this rubbish? Perhaps through shared experience and lots of questions.
I take mine to Vincent Kolbe. Kolbe is not Muslim, but he is a man who has Cape Town in his blood. If doctorates were issued from the university of the streets, Kolbe would be an emeritus professor. This man’s knowledge is nothing short of encylopaedic, only it’s much more fun hanging out with Kolbe than with an encyclopaedia. Encylopaedias don’t tell jokes and encylopaedias don’t know the skinner behind the facts.
For many years Kolbe worked in the library at the District Six Museum and became a conduit, a fountain of grassroots knowledge for students and activists of the Western Cape.
“Some people say it’s superstition,” says Kolbe. “But the Japanese go to shrines, the Christians go to shrines, lots of people go to shrines and invoke God and the forces of good to fight evil. That evil could be very tangible. It could be the government. It could be your neighbour …”
To Kolbe and film-maker Shariff Cullis, another passionate Capetonian with whom I reconnect in Kolbe’s front room, there is nothing exotic or intriguing about the kramats. Having grown up immersed in Muslim culture, they’re as much a part of the landscape as Table Mountain.
“People go to different kramats for different things. If you’ve got marriage problems you go to a certain kramat. If you’ve got legal problems you go to another kramat. Each one has a local significance. If you’re in trouble, you say a certain ghadir or prayer at the kramat and that prayer helps you.”
Kolbe tells me that Sheikh Yusuf’s shrine at Faure is the “St Peters of kramats”. Cullis recalls how, as a kid, he’d go there on camping trips. “Every Easter weekend, people go camp there. It turned into something of a jol. People would go and swim in the river and all that. But that’s where people have been camping for decades. It’s a custom – an affirmation of faith and belief and a sense of unity within the community,” he says.
“In the olden days they went with wagons – with horse and cart,” says Kolbe. “The tradition of going to kramats is very old. People used to sing songs on the way there: `Hier gaan die padjie na die kramat toe …'” At this point he leaps up with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old and begins playing a catchy tune on the piano and Cullis can’t resist humming along.
“On the anniversary of 300 years of Islam in the Cape there were over 300 000 people at Faure. You had to walk for half an hour to get from your car to the kramat,” says Cullis. “There used to be a lot of trees there. That area was very underdeveloped. Now its got Khayelitsha right next to it and Mitchells Plain, and Strand is moving in from the other side. Now there are vitually no trees there.”
Only one white person I spoke to in Cape Town knew what a kramat was and he told me that, as a child walking on the mountain, he used to believe that giants were buried there.
It’s scary that in a town like Cape Town that’s how separate our realities can be. But then I suppose this place is still fractured and scarred by the state’s destruction of one of the country’s most vibrant, culturally mixed areas, District Six.
Perhaps it’s this vacuum that the Cape Times’ recent “One City Many Cultures” campaign is intended to address. But, with its five distinct cultural categories (Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Xhosa), it’s hardly going a long way to accepting and embracing cultural flux and contradiction.
I am drawn back to that kramat on Signal Hill and the way it made me feel on that day three years ago. I ask Kolbe if he knows anything about that particular kramat. “Kramats have a history of resistance,” he tells me, stressing that many of the holy men buried around Cape Town were political prisoners of the Dutch.
“All religions have their collaborationists and their resisters. Imam Abdullah Harun, who was killed by security police while in detention in the Sixties, came from that long tradition of Sheikh Yusuf who resisted domination,” he tells me. “Harun was a radical idealist. There was a strong connection between the black consciousness movement and the Islamic movement of the time. Both sought to find an African interpretation of the United States’s black power movement. Harun’s resistance coincided with the anti-apartheid movement, the post- Sharpeville student movement, the black consciousness movement, Steve Biko … Globally Muhammad Ali was a big icon in the Sixties, Malcolm X … People were mobilising against injustice …
“When Imam Harun was killed in detention another religious activist from the Anglican church, Basil Wrankmore, went up to that shrine on the mountain to fast in protest of the imam’s death. That’s the kind of significance of the shrines, of our common humanity, the political dimension.”
I return to the kramat on Signal Hill at dusk. After spending some time in the incense-scented interior, I return to the side of the hill where my friends and I sat on that tragic day three years ago.
The clouds are out and today there is no visible line between the sky and the sea. Just one immense stretch of space. You cannot see where the sky ends and where the sea begins. Substance ceases to be classified. I am thinking of Wrankmore’s act. About how it could somehow have been inspired by the spirit of Sheikh Mohamed Hassen Ghaibie Shah al Qadri, a follower of Sheikh Yusuf, buried here on Signal Hill.
In these days of separate identity politics and fundamentalism, Wrankmore’s non-partisan spirit is divine inspiration to me.
Darwin created us all … and the idle shall inherit the earth
Tim Radford asks if natural selection is the key to life, the universe, and everything
Slapstick is no laughing matter: that involuntary response to a pratfall tells us something about where we come from and how we got here. The sound called laughter developed as a kin signal, according to Professor VS Ramachandran. It is a way of alerting those who share your genes that the comic tumble you have just witnessed is a false alarm. Your clan members need not waste precious energy rushing to the aid of the fallen, discomfited to find himself suddenly horizontal.
“Laughter is nature’s it’s-okay signal,” he told a conference in California last month. “It’s a false alarm signal, just as a baby’s cry is an alarm signal.” So a sense of the comic is a valuable evolutionary adaptation, honed by nature to enhance chances of survival. Why not? Pain and fear are part of the inborn, inherited survival kit. Those rare individuals with no sense of pain are usually dead before 30. Fear is an advantageous trick that helps keep you alive.
So far, so obvious: Charles Darwin’s great explanation for life on earth is now a standard alibi for human phenomena. A tendency to obesity? Ice Age hunter-gatherers who could store fat easily would be much more likely to survive in the lean seasons of a glacial planet. Diabetes and heart disease? None of us were meant to stay fat for long. Sexual desire? Sex is a terrific way of spreading genes around.
But the operation of natural selection upon random mutation – Darwin hardly used the word “evolution” in The Origin of Species in 1859 – has become an answer to almost everything.
Altruism? Self-sacrifice? A sense of duty? How useful to a community it would be if one man was prepared to give his life for the people, providing they were his people. Care for the weak or helpless? Such things are reciprocal: the community benefits. If other primates care for each other – and a group of rhesus monkeys in Wisconsin has been observed caring tenderly for a monkey with Down’s syndrome – then why should there be anything special about humans being humane?
Diplomacy and negotiation? Chimpanzees resolve conflicts that way: how else would humans, their nearest relatives, conduct their affairs? The arguments go on. Abstract art? The hand-eye co-ordination necessary to etch like Rembrandt or paint rocks like a cave man is an evolutionary benefit, a by- product of the skill needed to fashion perfectly balanced throwing spears. But it could explain a taste for Picasso’s Cubism, according to Ramachandran, a neuroscientist from San Diego. The capacity to abstract lines from a world in which there are no sharp, defining lines, and use them to recreate imagery in the mind, exists in rats and gulls, too.
One great animal behaviour expert discovered more than four decades ago that seagull chicks anxious to be fed would peck, not just at the mother gull’s beak, but at a brown stick with a yellow dot at one end, or even a stick with three yellow stripes. What the chick saw, says Ramachandran, was a super- stimulus, a caricature in what he called “beak space”. If there were an art gallery in the seagull world, this super-beak would qualify as a great work of art, a Picasso.
Some Darwinians take things further: God is part of the package. A belief system is a powerful part of the human armament – how else do you explain hope? This religious sense exists because of the brain, and the brain is evolution’s gift, but there is more. God, says the old hymn, be in my head and in my understanding, and that is exactly where some neuroscientists think they have found Him, in the limbic system, a “God module” where transcendent experiences happen. Sufferers from grand mal (temporal lobe epilepsy) often report profound spiritual experiences; some are convinced that they have heard the voice of God.
The neuroscientists are cautious about this: as Ramachandran observes, God works in mysterious ways, why shouldn’t He choose the limbic system to reveal Himself? But others take matters much further.
The American philosopher Daniel Dennett recently called Darwin’s hypothesis “the single best idea anyone has ever had”. He saw it as a universal acid, eating through every traditional concept, leaving a revolutionised world view: it transformed psychology, politics, ethics and religion.
It could certainly transform cosmology: a Pennsylvania physicist, Professor Lee Smolin, recently proposed that maybe Darwin rules okay across whole universes. If this universe, the one we are in now, popped into existence, what from? Some other universe? Perhaps universes pop out of each other all the time, each with its own mutations of physical laws? Perhaps the successful ones survive long enough to reproduce themselves by means of black holes, with intelligent life as a by-product along the way? What is that, if not natural selection operating on random mutation, Darwinism as alpha and omega?
You could call it creation science, if the phrase hadn’t been bagged already by a very different group. Darwin proposed the origins of life in a warm pond full of primeval organic chemicals. The latest consensus sees life fashioning itself from hot brines in some submarine volcanic vent. All flesh is indeed grass, which is in turn recycled clay, but the mystery has always been what, or who, triggered this great chain of being?
Churchmen used to argue that self-creating life was as likely as a monkey randomly batting typewriter keys and typing out the Bible without a mistake. But think of monkeys and typewriters Darwin’s way, says Professor Cesare Emiliani of Miami. It might take a monkey an eternity to type the six million characters of the Bible by chance, but suppose natural selection were a rubber that erased each mistyped letter – or each unsatisfactory mutation – immediately? Assume 13 mistakes for each successful letter, and at the rate of a keystroke per second, you could have the whole of Holy Writ in 13 times six million seconds, or two-and-a-half years.
A British bishop once caused a storm in the Church of England by stating what now seems the obvious: God was not a funny old man with a beard. He said that before the full implications of the new revolution in biology – begun by Crick and Watson’s explanation of the genetic code in 1953 – had sunk in. Now the faith once placed in God is laid at the feet of a funny old man with a beard who walked round his garden in the village of Down, in Kent, 150 years ago.
Natural selection isn’t just a proposition that might explain how stripes would favour tigers in the jungle, or big antlers benefit a stag. It is something scientists can see happening when they throw antibiotics at a bacterium, or drugs at a virus, or weedkiller at grasses: they can pinpoint the genetic mutations that give one strain an advantage, and dismiss another to oblivion.
The new Darwinism sometimes sounds like a religion. People believe in it: they make an act of faith. Darwinism is naturally a “broad church” and within it are sects, schisms and heresies. People who talk about it slip into the language of religion, refer to some scientists as “high priests” and those who follow them as acolytes. Edward O Wilson, the Harvard biologist brought up as a Southern Baptist, tackled this in his recent book Consilience.
“Could Holy Writ be just the first literate attempt to explain the universe and make ourselves significant within it?” he asked. “Perhaps science is a continuation on new and better-tested ground to attain the same end. If so, then in that sense science is religion liberated and at large.” That explains why words like “zealot” get thrown at Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist, who over two decades ago stirred up the Darwinian community with his book The Selfish Gene, and has been exploring the argument since.
Steven Pinker, a professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology who produced the blockbuster How the Mind Works, says it makes him groan when newspapers call him the “pop messiah” of evolutionary psychology. He also doesn’t like being called a Darwinian “fundamentalist” by the scientist and writer Stephen Jay Gould. It’s an epithet designed to make people you might disagree with look like dogmatic fanatics.
Some might argue that Mozart’s music is objectively beautiful, rather than beautiful because humans find it so. He’s not so sure about that: he’s of the Ramachandran persuasion. He doesn’t see Darwinism in every nook and cranny of creation: explaining the evolution of the brain and the body is quite tough enough. It requires painstaking, step- at-a-time argument, rather than leaps of faith, though he admits to some sympathy with the parallel.
“I rather think that all scientists are excited about their work,” he says, “perhaps even involving similar emotional circuitry activated in preachers and prophets: but if so, it’s a distraction – the only thing that should count is whether the theory explains the facts.”
Dawkins claims to have a blind spot for paintings. His latest work is much more concerned with provoking people into understanding the beauty and poetry of science. He doesn’t think the question of whether Darwinism explains the universe as well as life is very interesting. “It’s all of a piece with the general sort of challenge: how do you explain X, using Darwinism, where X is – fill it in – almost any human habit. It could be art, it could be philosophy, it could be mathematics.”
He sees human brains as being designed by evolution long ago to survive in the African savannah and through the Ice Ages. “What we do with them now is only very indirectly interpretable.” Humans, he once pointed out, have a great hunger for explanation, which may be why religion is such a universal phenomenon. Most religions offered a cosmology and a biology, a theory of life, a theory of origins.
In that sense, Darwinism was not religion: instead, religion was science – bad science. Dawkins once famously described religion as a virus that infected the collective brain: ever since, he says, radio, television and newspaper interviewers have needled him, trying to get him to lash out at the church again. “I’m like a pit bull terrier, being released into the ring, as a spectator sport, to attack religious people,” he says philosophically. “I’ve done it once or twice.”
The work ethic is an evolutionary adaptation from our farming ancestry that has outgrown its usefulness, writes Colin Tudge
Ours has been an era of hard work – busy, busy, busy. With toil comes success and virtue too, for “The devil finds work for idle hands.” But we should see the work ethic for what it is – an adaptation to life in quite different times that for us is an anachronism and a dangerous one at that.
For, as Charles Darwin first pointed out, our behaviour and the attitudes that underpin it are, to a large extent, evolved: they have been shaped by natural selection, helping us and our ancestors to survive and reproduce.
But evolution can catch us out; organs and behaviours that evolved in one era may be out of place in another, yet persist like a hangover. Our insatiable proclivity for hard work was favoured by natural selection when our ancestors first learned to farm. Only with farming – and then only with primitive farming – was hard graft truly apt. The world has moved on.
It used to be thought that agriculture was invented at a stroke, 10 000 years ago, in what is traditionally known as the “Neolithic Revolution”. But it seems likely that for many thousands of years before the Neolithic Revolution our ancestors were not just hunter-gatherers but “proto-farmers”, not just culling their environment but managing it; not much, but enough to make a significant difference to their survival.
There are many ways in which this might have happened. In the 1970s, John Yellen of America’s National Science Foundation found that the Hottentots of South-West Africa would raise goats for a few years and then go back to hunting. Husbandry was just their fall-back position when game was hard to come by.
Clive Gamble of Southampton University suggests that our own Cro-Magnon ancestors displaced the Neanderthals in Europe around 30 000 years ago not by direct combat, but simply by exploiting the environment more adroitly. Those Late Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) people of the tundra and steppe surely manoeuvred the great herds of mammoths and horses just as their descendants in North America marshalled and dragooned the bison.
Surely, too, they protected favoured coppices and herbs; and there is no clear distinction between crop protection and cultivation.
Around 40 000 years ago, marking the start of the Upper Palaeolithic period, our ancestors seemed to shift into a higher gear, making more varied tools, and beginning to create what deserves to rank as art. This, I suggest, is when proto-farming was truly beginning to make an impact; raising the status of Homo sapiens and compromising everything else, from the mammoths and wild horses to Homo neanderthalensis.
People who combined hunting and gathering with proto-farming surely enjoyed the best of all worlds. We tend to think that hunting and gathering is harsh and that farming must be an improvement.
But when hunter-gatherers had the world to themselves, and could take their pick in the rich fertile valleys that are now under the plough, life was often easy. Some wild places even today – like the Serengeti in Tanzania or the everglades in Florida – show how astonishingly rich a wild environment may be.
Even in recent years, the aborigines on Australia’s Cape York culled the passing flocks of birds and picked off the shellfish at will. The hunter-gatherer’s diet is immensely varied: modern gatherers commonly know and make use of scores of different plants, and a host of animals.
What’s more, human beings have the wit to hunt in closely organised teams. Hunting- gathering is uncertain: floods, droughts, erratic migrations of prey, collapse of favoured coppices through disease or over- exploitation. Proto-farming, then, is the constant amelioration. The animals are guided, to some extent, to where the people want them to be, the favoured animals are protected and dispersed.
In some places, life could be so good that people had plenty of leisure. The archaeological record of Europe suggests that 40 000 years ago – the time known as Late Palaeolithic – people began to make better tools in greater variety.
The first cave paintings in Spain and France date from this time – not the scratchings that anyone might do, but beautiful, refined representations of bison, mammoths, deer – all the creatures they depended on and increasingly manoeuvred. These paintings alone reveal a society that was confident, settled, and with enough spare capacity to support specialists and intellectuals. Life, for human beings, has surely never been better. Such a vision feels good: it is what our psyches are geared to.
So why turn to full-time agriculture? Recent studies suggest that our ancestors did not take easily to agriculture and indeed, very sensibly, resisted. Bones from the first full-time farming peoples show signs of malnutrition and infections that did not seem to trouble their hunter-gatherer ancestors. The newly cultivated diet was too monotonous and probably too sparse.
Farming was harsh, too, particularly arable, or crop, farming. It proved far more testing than the hunting-gathering life. There was no “eureka” moment; no pastoral Shangri-La waiting to be discovered. The real question is why people took to it at all. But proto- farming with hunting-gathering was too successful. It contained the seeds of its own downfall. It did indeed increase the amount of food that could be coaxed from the environment, but as food increased, so did the human population. As numbers rose, so it became more and more necessary to farm. Farming was thus a vicious spiral.
At intervals too, here and there, the ever- rising spiral was given an extra kick. Notably, around 10 000 years ago, the last Ice Age ended. In the Middle East, people had long been hunting and managing deer and gazelles on the balmy, fertile coastal plain between Arabia and Iran, with a little horticulture on the side. This, literally, was paradise: the story of Eden is, very plausibly, a distant folk memory of those idyllic times. But as the ice on the northern continents melted and the water flowed away, so the sea began to rise – 200m in all – and this Eden became the Persian Gulf.
The people, their population already swollen in the good times, shifted inland to the uplands. There, to their great fortune, they found big-seeded grasses – wild wheat and barley – and compliant creatures that were social, not too agile, and could be easily herded – sheep, goats and asses. This upland, Middle Eastern flora and fauna set the pattern of western agriculture: its direct descendants are now the subject of European Union grants. And with farming came the work ethic. For a hunter, too much zeal is self- defeating. Natural selection favours idleness and so it would in our own hunting ancestors.
There is modern, indirect evidence for this. In the 1960s Richard Lee of the University of Toronto found that Kung Bushmen in the Kalahari hunted for about only six hours a week. The rest of the time they sat beneath the acacia trees and told stories.
Surely our own Upper Palaeolithic ancestors did exactly the same. Storytelling is our mode of thought: all conscious understanding is narrative. For a hunter, much of the time, sitting around is by far the best thing to do. But the logistics of agriculture are quite different. Its whole point is to increase the amount of food that the environment will yield. The more you farm, the more you get. Farming, in short, favours industry. As hunters became farmers they also changed from wool-gathering storytellers to go-get-’em workaholics.
Graft was the new adaptation, appropriate to the agricultural age. God makes the point in Genesis, as he banishes Adam and Eve from Eden’s easy pickings: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground!” This, in a nutshell, was the reality of the Neolithic Revolution.
Given time, natural selection tends to favour animals (including people) who enjoy doing the things they need to do. But sometimes, natural selection does not have time to adjust our minds. Then the psyche remains out of sync with life’s demands. Our Neolithic ancestors surely hated their new way of life – the Old Testament makes this very clear – but they had to get on with it nonetheless. Those who did not learn to live with unhappiness, died. We are the children of the Neolithic Revolution, and have been sweating ever since.
The boom must end soon. Almost all of the world’s most fertile land is already cultivated. The task that our Neolithic ancestors began is almost complete. Besides, the hard work can now be done by machines. The frenetic industriousness of the Old Testament arablists is no longer appropriate yet we retain their Neolithic mentality: channelled, now, into a thousand industries whose output is mostly trivial.
It is surely time to take breath. Each of us knows personally that it would pay to take things easier. The Earth certainly needs a rest from our labours: at least we should give the fish a chance to breed, and allow the trees to grow. More broadly, though, we should perceive the historical evolutionary roots of our own behaviour, and acknowledge our mood and attitudes not as values or as sins but as adaptations, which as times change may become inappropriate. Hard work for hard work’s sake is in that redundant category.
Most creatures in the history of the world have become extinct. Most of them did so because they persisted with behaviour that had evolved in different times and no longer served their purpose. Inveterate workers that we are, however, we have already made work out of idleness. Leisure is a boom industry. Play has become competitive sport and that, too, is big business. We need to relearn, as our hunting ancestors did, what it is to be alive without expending energy. For us in our time, tranquility is the appropriate adaptation.
Colin Tudge is a research fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of the London School of Economics. His latest book is Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers