Pursuing Giraffe

Anne Innis Dagg

Description

In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to study wild animals in Africa (before Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey); her memoir captures her youthful enthusiasm for her journey, as well as her näiveté about the complex social and political issues in Africa.

Once in the field, she recorded the complexities of giraffe social relationships but also learned about human relationships in the context of apartheid in South Africa and colonialism in Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Kenya. Hospitality and friendship were readily extended to her as a white woman, but she was shocked by the racism of the colonial whites in Africa. Reflecting the twenty-three-year-old author’s response to an “exotic” world far removed from the Toronto where she grew up, the book records her visits to Zanzibar and Victoria Falls and her climb of Mount Kilimanjaro. Pursuing Giraffe is a fascinating account that has much to say about the status of women in the mid-twentieth century. The book’s foreword by South African novelist Mark Behr (author of The Smell of Apples and Embrace) provides further context for and insights into Dagg’s narrative.

Sujets

• Life writing

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 04 août 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554586622
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Pursuing Giraffe
A 1950s Adventure
Pursuing Giraffe
A 1950s Adventure
ANNE INNIS DAGG
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data
Dagg, Anne Innis, 1933-
Pursuing giraffe: a 1950s adventure / Anne Innis Dagg.
(Life writing series)
ISBN-13: 978-0-88920-463-8
ISBN-10: 0-88920-463-2
1. Dagg, Anne Innis, 1933- -Travel-Africa. 2. Giraffe-Behavior-Africa. 3. Africa-Description and travel. 4. Zoologists-Canada-Biography. I. Title. II. Series.
QL 31. D 34 A 3 2006 590 .92 C 2005-907541-4
2006 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlu.press.wlu.ca
Cover design by P.J. Woodland. Cover photograph courtesy of Anne Dagg. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Dedicated to the Memory of
Alexander Matthew
Griff Ewer
Jakes Ewer
who made my year with the giraffe not only possible
but profitable and indeed, a virtual paradise.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Setting Off
2 Adapting to Africa
3 Rhodes University
4 Driving to Giraffeland
5 First Days at Fleur de Lys
6 Settling in at Fleur de Lys
7 October
8 November
9 December
10 Dar es Salaam
11 Zanzibar
12 Up Kilimanjaro
13 To Study East African Giraffe?
14 Heading South
15 Mbeya to Umtali
16 Zimbabwe and Victoria Falls
17 Back at Fleur de Lys
18 Leaving the Giraffe
19 Return to England
Epilogue
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Selected Readings
Glossary
FOREWORD
Anne Innis Dagg has written a brave and moving account of her time as a young white woman travelling and doing research in Southern and East Africa.
Mid-1950s Canada had not yet produced the personal or professional liberties feminist movements of the sixties and seventies would begin securing for women in North America. In a time when very few, if any, white woman scientists had engaged with Africa, Dagg s courage and determination forged the space for her to follow a childhood dream of studying giraffe in their African habitat. In doing so, she helped pave the way for later women to produce other work of enormous importance to science and conservation on that continent.
The two decades following Dagg s time in Africa would produce irrevocable changes in North American and African race politics. At the same time as the civil rights movement and demands for the rights of native peoples gained momentum in the Western hemisphere, Africa was rapidly loosening the grip of five hundred years of European invasion and occupation. Only eight years after her visit there, black people in East Africa won their political independence from Britain. In contrast to what was happening in East Africa, the time that Dagg spent in South Africa was the period in which the white government there was entrenching a vast range of racist legislation that would come to be known as apartheid. Dagg s experiences and observations as an outsider in South Africa offer provocative witness to the terrible ease and disturbing normalcy with which brutal political and racial systems are perpetuated by very ordinary people.
The young Anne Innis Dagg is a scientist. Academic. Woman. A little in love. Against the odds, she raises the money for her research and the journey. She goes in humility, and with little of the stridency that characterizes so many of the narratives of those who went before or even after her. She goes on her own by ship. She is drawn to the oldest continent s landscapes, people, and animals. She will buy a car of her own. She will drive at night alone, only guessing at her own whereabouts. She will climb Kilimanjaro and be awed by the spectacle of the Victoria Falls. She will study giraffe in the wild and will end up grappling with what it means to be white in Africa. And so she will begin to confront her own discriminations, biases, and blind spots. She will celebrate democracy that will come-she knows-albeit almost four decades after she first went ashore in South Africa. At heart, the story is certainly about what she observes, studies, films, and chronicles in 1956 and 1957, details and understandings that had never before been documented about her subject: the beloved giraffe of Africa. But this book is also about one person s intellectual imagination, spirit of adventure, and daring: where she has long dreamed of going, where others either say she shouldn t or cannot go, and where some work against her going, she goes.
-Mark Behr
PREFACE
As I was growing up in Toronto, my life s ambition was to go to Africa and study the giraffe there. In 1956, when I was twenty-three years old, my dream came true. This book is based on an extensive journal I kept during this adventure, the high point of my life, and on long, excited, twice-weekly letters I wrote home to Canada. It focuses first, of course, on giraffe, which I observed mainly on a twenty-thousand-acre ranch in South Africa near Kruger National Park, but also in Tanganyika, Kenya, and Southern Rhodesia. As a result, in part, of this work, I was able later to publish scientific papers not only on the behaviour of giraffe but also on their subspeciation, distribution, food preferences, gaits, and sexual differences in their skulls ( Appendix 1 ).
This memoir also has two lesser areas of focus: the culture of racism and colonialism extant in the countries I visited at that time, and my own na vet as a young woman educated at a private girls school in Toronto.
The racism of most white people in the Africa of that day astonished me; I was unaware of such discrimination because I grew up in Toronto in the 1930s and 1940s, where there were few blacks or recent non-European immigrants, while aboriginal peoples lived largely out of sight on native reserves or in the North. Virtually everyone I knew was white. It did not occur to me that colonization in Africa was mirrored in the treatment of Indians and Inuit (then thought of as Eskimos) in Canada who, at that time, did not even have the vote. Nor did I realize that most Canadians were white because the country had a restrictive immigration policy. Canadians (unjustifiably) felt superior to Americans who, in the 1950s, were in the throes of trying to solve the problems of deeply entrenched racial discrimination.
Idealistic people such as myself were unable to comprehend the racism prevalent in Africa. How could it be that some people were denied schooling because of the colour of their skin? And then were derided because of their lack of education? I also had to face the reality that people who were often openly racist could also be incredibly kind to me-that racist people could be judged in most contexts as nice people. Yet some of their comments about Africans were so gross and incredible that I copied them down verbatim in a notebook, which I have reproduced in this book.
When I was in Africa in 1956-57, it would not be long before political winds of change would begin to sweep over this continent as the colonies I visited became independent nations. Unlike these countries, South Africa, although a member of the British Commonwealth, was completely self-governing at the time and in the process of implementing the horrendous practice of apartheid, meaning separateness. Under apartheid, which lasted until 1994, the government restricted non-Europeans to grossly inadequate schooling, inferior jobs, and substandard living space in slum areas, crowded reserves, locations, or homelands.
Conversely, apartheid and colonialism had benefits for me, personally, which made my trip possible in ways it would not be today. Because whites were completely in control of the countries I visited, I was able as a lone white woman to travel everywhere in safety. Had I visited Africa five or ten years later, when, at least in the colonies, Africans were rising up in revolt against white domination, this would have been highly dangerous or impossible. Indeed, it says much for the Africans whom I met that even in the mid-1950s, when they routinely were treated badly by Europeans, they still were kind and friendly to a visiting Canadian woman such as myself.
Because I was white, I had an immediate entr e into the dominant class everywhere I went. I was always allotted good seats in a theatre and offered the best travel arrangements. Because I was a visitor to Africa, acquaintances were usually anxious to make me feel at home and like their country. The hospitality of the whites was amazing, and reflected in part the free time they had to perfect such kindness, given that the manual work involved in preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning, and laundry was all done unobtrusively by African servants. The time and attention that my short-term hosts, Professors Jakes and Griff Ewer at Rhodes University in South Africa, gave