The Green Okapi

I need to write you down before you escape from me into oblivion. Your fantastical colours and your casual backwards glance as you gently walk off down an emerging street from the jungle never to be seen again. The very fact that I ever witness your existence is only made possible by the very fact that that you are about to disappear for ever. My very being in an emerging urban humanscape that was your home is what consigns you to oblivion. Your out of placeness, otherworldly beauty and fusion of naive trust and human familiarity condemn you.

You are a fantastical beast that can only be of a dream; vivid parrot green hind-quarters with white fleck stripe zebra stockings pulled up neatly round your ankles. A crimson torso seamlessly slides from the green as russet shoulders ponderously swing your careful feet. A dark blue head sways round just one time to look me in the eye, there is no blame, no malice, an almost Buddhist serenity in that unknowable gaze. With that, a flick of the ear, and you turn and lope away.

This vivid description is part of a seamless dream I had after reading “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe. A concise, beautiful novel that is as powerful as it is important. It speaks of a world and a time that I know very little of, and yet poignantly brings to my attention a collision of worlds. I do not mean to speak of any demeaning ‘noble savage’ gibberish, there are human frailties amongst the society under duress in the novel as in any other. Human societies interact and change constantly, both internally and externally, with a fluid complexity that is surely staggering.

What is so sad in this tale, to me, is not just the personal dramas of the individuals involved but the particularly tragic nature of this inter-societal interaction. The combination of arrogance and paternalistic pseudo-benevolence of the colonisers is as heart breaking as it is nauseating. How can they think so little of another group of human beings so as to have the delusional self-assuredness and disturbing certainty of the correctness of their actions that leads them to unravel whole societies?

There are of course a variety of answers to such questions and those being subjected to exploitation don’t exactly just sit there passively and accept their fate! An interplay of personal human interactions is taking place in such a context with a complex interplay of prior social obligations, differing cultural attitudes and wider socio-economic forces at play.

My dream then led me from this visage of a semi-mythic wild nature to an emerging ‘modernising’, or at the very least, rapidly changing landscape; forests being felled, railways set forth into ‘mysterious’ forests and great beasts transported as curios to be gawked at by curious creeps in distant lands..

I found myself on a train, a buzz was in the air, beer was available from the train bar at astonishingly low prices, a sensation of excitement and new possibilities permeated everything. A new land of endless bounty and riches lay out forever on a leafy green horizon.

Such colonial myths of course hide the fact that such places were only ‘new’ to incomers and were not virgin wildernesses. They were, and are, full of people who are often viewed in the same way as the green okapi. Like the beast, they, ‘the noble savages’, are supposed to conveniently lope away nobly into the mist of oblivion, according to the colonial narrative.

Places are not destroyed by change, in the sense that some sort of primeval nature is being lost by the arrival of ‘civilisation’. Such myths conveniently omit the history, agency and rights of the people living in such places. The ‘large-scale socio-economic forces’ I refer to are of course those of colonialism; which at its base was the attempted mass theft of resources and exploitation of human beings from another part of the world. 

I must shamefully admit that I had not heard of Chinua Achebe until he passed away recently, and on cue I assume his book sales rose and I found myself in possession of a copy of his highly lauded work. I am, as I should state, white, middle-class and from the UK – one of the societies that so hideously exploited others around the world for self-aggrandisement.

The economic and social forces that led to the tragedy that is ‘Things Fall Apart’ are still very much at work. No such situation is of course one-dimensional or simple but I have never come across a work that better illustrates the tragic effect of these forces and can only hope that any increased reading of Achebe’s work after his passing can engage more people in those societies with a legacy of exploiting to dismantle these destructive forces as best as possible, irrespective as to if there ever was a green okapi.