Isilwane: The animal – Ubuntu, ukama and environmental justice

Kurzfassung/Abstract

Although South Africa has one of the most liberal Constitutions in the world, and a progressive Bill of Rights (and is Africa’s flagship in this regard), it does not go so far as to protect, let alone extend rights to individual animals – despite vociferous campaigning for the inclusion of animal rights during the negotiating process for South Africa’s Constitution by animal rights groups. The South African legal system continues to be characterized by a resolutely anthropocentric approach. Is this anthropocentrism a hangover from the colonialist and apartheid years – in other words, a characteristic of occidental exploitation and expansionism, as the following quote from Zimbabwean novelist Chenjerai Hove seems to suggest?: "We have neither catalogued nature nor pinned it down and preserved it in formaldehyde. We see it differently and speak to and about it differently." Or is it already implicit, or indeed explicitly contained, in traditional African world-views and perceptions? Hove is arguably correct about one thing. Practices like large-scale dissection, vivisection and, generally, all scientific experimentation involving non-human animals appear to have been pioneered and exported all over the globe by monetarily inclined ‘westerners’. The same goes for factory farming and the mass slaughter of food animals, and the hunting and killing for profit and/or fun of large numbers of wild animals (with modern aberrations like ‘canned hunts’). Of course, this subjugationist and expansionist mindset and drive claimed countless human victims, too – which may explain the accusations made by or on behalf of indigenous people, Africans, Native Americans and Australian aboriginal people, accusations like Hove’s. But is Hove correct when he claims, "We see [nature] differently and speak to and about it differently"? The investigation of the grounds for this claim takes up the major part of the present chapter.