This whole white male/baboon matter has been shockingly one-sided. It’s one thing to sit, bathed in academic reverie in some university, composing long self-pitying tirades about the behavioural equivalences between certain cabals among Homo sapiens europeanus, and Papio ursinus in general. It’s quite another to take the trouble to canvass the opinions of the latter side of the equation. Quite obviously, University of KwaZulu-Natal vice-chancellor Professor Malegapuru Makgoba certainly didn’t before he wrote his article. Neither did anyone in the media.
I decided to do just that and set out to see an old baboon acquaintance who lives alongside the lovely Wit Els River, running off Mitchell’s Pass near Ceres. His name is Gladstone and he’s an elder in the De Jager troop. I make haste to say that there’s no blood relationship behind the troop’s name; it’s just that the troop used to live on Jasper de Jager’s farm on the other side of the Skurweberge and had to move when Jasper started putting out cage-traps to catch baboons. He’d then sell these poor creatures to medical schools all over the world so that surgery students would have something vaguely humanlike on which to practise. Gladstone’s uncle, Jolyon, had undergone his fifth coronary bypass operation in six months when the troop decided to pack it in and move.
I first met Gladstone a few years ago when I was flyfishing upstream of Boulder Pool. I sent a message to Gladstone, asking him to come downriver a bit. We greeted each other late last Thursday afternoon at Bum-Slide Pool.
”You’re looking well,” I said, after we’d got through the obligatory backslappings, though I could see some grey creeping into his auburn hair. ”What’s your take on this whole hooha about some white human males being like baboons?”
”If you don’t mind my saying so, I think it’s a load of horseshit,” replied Gladstone. ”It’s not that the average baboon minds being likened to human males of any colour. As a species, we’ve long since risen above those sorts of cheap jibes. What I resent is that this Makgoba fellow seems to think he’s got the copyright on victimology. That’s far more serious.”
”Aren’t you being a bit harsh?” I rejoined. ”Professor Makgoba’s in a position to know just what it’s like to suffer hostile discrimination.”
”And you think we baboons don’t?” said Gladstone, a wry smile crossing his lips. ”While the good professor whinges very touchingly about the horrors that have followed the colonisation of ‘his’ continent, he seems to forget that his own people colonised our part of Africa long before white humans made their appearance. Baboons were here long before all of you.”
”But surely colonisation doesn’t automatically spell victimisation,” I ventured.
”Not always,” he admitted. ”Since before even humans arrived, baboons have been discriminated against by a decidedly minority simian group, the accursed chimpanzees. We baboons can’t stand chimpanzees. It’s their pretensions, those smug little pink faces as they ponce around passing themselves off as intellectually superior to all the other primates. Hand in hand with humans, chimpanzees are even worse. It’s sickening.”
”I must say we see quite a lot of them on Discovery and Animal Planet,” I mused.
”Exactly. They’ve nearly taken over on television wildlife programmes. If it isn’t chimpanzees, it’s sharks or crocodiles.”
”Or Secrets of the Pyramids,” I added wittily.
As we sat talking in the gentle dusk, the great smooth Wit Els rocks were giving off their stored heat and light. ”’Give a chimpanzee an inch and he’ll take an ell’, is what my mother used to say to me,” Gladstone went on. ”Last week in your own paper there was a super column about baboons. But it was illustrated with a picture of a chimpanzee. How’s that for successful spindoctoring?”
”So you think Professor Makgoba was overreacting when he said that the behavioural paradigms of some white males remind him of baboons?” I asked.
”It should be the other way around. Try picking the pellets out of your arse when you’ve strayed by mistake into some human’s apple orchard. As my mother also used to say: ‘baboon born of baboon, hath but a short time to live and it is filled with birdshot.”’
”So what you’re saying is that the professor is making a bit too much of it.”
”History is replete with its victims,” said Gladstone, flipping a pebble into the water. ”I speak as one of evolution’s most celebrated casualties. Feeling terribly sorry for yourself and then blaming it all on someone else is very habit-forming. And it gets you nowhere in the end.”
”Unless you’re blaming chimpanzees?” I murmured.
”There are exceptions to every generalisation.” He tossed the next pebble a little further. ”I would tell that Makgoba chappie to cool it on the subject of victimisation. It’s terribly old hat. Whenever I hear one of our troop bitching away about how badly he’s being treated, I tend to wonder what’s really behind all the distress. It’s often just some fleas.”