"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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“Children at Station 16”exposes the divide between nature and humankind
and implies that there is no human ecological interconnection with nature. Humanity is
shown to be very much apart from the rest of nature and to be divided from itself in this
poem. The implicit moral of the poem is that compassion is the first step towards
ecological health. If humankind cannot take care of her children then there is no hope of a
wider nurturance of and respect for the rest of the living world.
The next poem in A Littoral Zone also examines human alienation from “nearperfect
creation”. In “Eland About Station 17” (44), Livingstone imagines a time of
harmony between man and nature so vividly that he “dreamed into eland” (final line) or
transports himself into the San culture. The eland is a symbolic animal of exceptional
potency in Bushman belief and is connected with the state of trance. The eland is the
most frequently depicted animal in their paintings and appears in four important rituals:
first-kill, girls’ puberty, marriage and shaman trance (Lewis-Williams 120). 36
Livingstone finds an unrecorded or undiscovered San cave where the rock
paintings transport him back in time. The art speaks to him in this “hub / of silence”
(lines 3-4), where the cave is likened to a sacred place. The eland becomes a ‘mystic’
symbol which represents a time when the animals and the “sunfolk” (line 39) or San, the
hunted and the hunter, were at one with one another, knew how to live symbiotically with
and on the Earth. He mourns the passing of this time. The final stanza is a lament on the
present day plight of the San people, who have been robbed both of their homeland and
of their life-sustaining symbol, the Eland. Livingstone expresses his helplessness in an
address to the San: “the least / I can do is to keep this cave hid for you” (lines 45-6).
Livingstone says he cannot forgive “my race”, the colonial South Africans who
have dislocated the San people, have changed their status from the hunters to the
“hunted” (line 42). Paul Garner says the victimisation of the San people began when they
came into contact with cattle-owning people:
The Bushmen over much of Southern Africa suffered greatly from interaction
with cattle owning groups because they preyed on the cattle, having no concept of
animal ownership in their culture, and they were hunted to extinction about 100
years ago by both white and black colonists. (1)
36 Lewis-Williams adds: “No wonder that the southern Bushmen believed the eland to be /Kaggen’s (The
Mantis’s) favourite animal… The eland was also the Mantis’s first creation and he loved it dearly” (120).