"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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In the third stanza he sees the profusion of rock paintings: "The stone sides are
crammed: blazed / with swarms of symbiotic man" (lines 19-20). Livingstone does not
use the words ‘rock paintings’, perhaps to obviate preconceptions. The word “blazed” has
connotations of a reddish colour, illumination, passion and excitement, and conveys both
power and a life force. Before he describes the paintings in the final two lines of the
stanza, he concentrates on what they convey: the ecological activities of “symbiotic man
about / the business of getting on with the earth” (lines 20-1). The phrase “man about the
business” echoes the “eland about” of the title. Symbiotic man is concerned with living
his life, of survival, but he does it with respect for the Earth, knows how to ‘get on with’
or live alongside nature. In this way he is like the Eland, for he knows his place in the
ecosystem. His interjection “– my fathers, such candour –“ is an exclamation of praise
and wonder at their innocence and freedom from bias and an implicit lament at a lost
connection with his evolutionary and spiritual forefathers.
The word “swarms” to describe the San refers to great numbers and connects
them – through association – with the industry and social structure of ants and bees.
Some of the men are “mantid-cowled” (line 23), taking on the shape of the preying
mantis. In San folklore the Mantis is shown as a kind of trickster, sometimes as a
bumbling fool, yet possessed of supernatural powers (Biesele in Tobias 169). The mantis
is called /Kaggen or, as Livingstone spells it in the following stanza, Xagen. The single
dolphin and “one wondrous elephant” are noticeable for the break they make in the
pattern of “swarms of symbiotic man” and represent animals of the sea and land, thus
extending the metaphoric connection of the San with other forms of life.
The next stanza opens by personifying Africa and, through an extended metaphor
of the functioning (and non-functioning) of a living body, powerfully communicates the
now lost symbiosis of the previous stanza. This is given in one line, presented as one
sentence: “Such infarcts rue the heart-shaped continent.”. Africa's physical shape and
psychic relevance is communicated in "heart-shaped". The heart image signifies the
driving force or machine of life as well as (curiously) the idea that nature is
compassionate and caring, because it has heart and "rues" the loss of the San way of life.
The "infarcts" refer to this through the image of dead or dying tissue which has been cut
off from the blood supply. The use of "heart-shaped" may also to refer to Africa as the
cradle of the human race which first evolved (or was shaped) there. The continent's