Margaret Fuller’s Birthday and a Chimpanzee

An early morning on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in South Africa still smells of woodsmoke and Impepho trodden underfoot in the wild landscape. Impepho (Helichrysum spp.) is one of the most revered plants in Southern Africa, the holiest of the Daisy family. I can smell it now from where I’m working. I’m busy with research on Margaret Fuller, born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, America, on 23 May 1810. Ten years later, in 1820, my own ancestors would arrive in the Eastern Cape.

I’m writing furiously against a deadline from the borrowed safety of my friend’s deck, far from my own desk and bookshelves. I hope they and my animals are safe during my absence. They are jittery from a fortnight of fear and high alert, as much as I am, and we all desperately need sleep.

It’s freezing, gloriously harsh; the air smells of Winter in the way only the Eastern Cape can. I find myself working with a view over the same stubborn soil where men like Dr Edward Roberts once hauled the very first printing press into frontier country long before South Africa imagined itself literary.

Right here is where Jeremiah Goldswain, an almost entirely self-taught farmer and former sawyer, scratched out his extraordinary phonetic journals in rough Midlands English, preserving the sound of ordinary working people who were never meant to become history at all.

Bathurst still wears a strange feeling of unfinished settlement. Picturesque, sleepy, but quiet isn’t always peace. Often it is merely tension waiting for a shape. The old frontier mentality lingers here in peculiar ways: territory, performance, dominance. You still see flashes of it in modern South Africa’s endless theatre of masculine intimidation, the chest-beating rituals of frightened men mistaking aggression for authority. Like chimpanzees crashing through underbrush to convince the troop they are kings of a shrinking forest. I. am sitting here today because a man I don’t know wants to shoot me. Plenty of that sort of story in old Jeremiah’s journals too. That’s h-History for you: nothing’s new.

Margaret Fuller would have recognised the performance immediately.

“I accept the universe,” Margaret Fuller’s statement was never passive. She accepted the world in order to confront it honestly, not to excuse its cruelties. She understood that civilisation often disguises brute power in respectable tailoring. The vocabulary changes; the domination rarely does. She spent her life arguing against the notion that power naturally belongs to the loudest voice, the hardest fist, the most socially protected sex. Born into a century that expected women to remain ornamental, obedient, and grateful, Fuller insisted instead upon women’s intellectual and spiritual sovereignty. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader,” she wrote.

That feels especially poignant here today among the ghosts of printing presses, journals, sermons, schoolbooks, petitions, and all the fragile paper trails by which human beings attempt to outwit oblivion.

And yet literacy alone does not civilise us.

South Africa remains trapped inside a pandemic of gender violence so relentless that statistics themselves begin to fail morally. Women alter routes, routines, clothing, tone of voice, and entire lives in negotiation with male volatility. Communities whisper warnings about certain houses, certain men, certain tempers.

Sometimes even writing itself must become migratory: a laptop packed quietly into a bag; a temporary desk assembled. Keep Calm and Carry On.

Fuller knew something about carrying on, regardless of volatile intimidation. “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow,” she wrote. Growth, however, is rarely gentle. It often begins in discomfort, in exile, in recognising that old social contracts no longer protect the vulnerable but merely preserve the powerful.

I feel close to the great Margaret Fuller today, and grateful. Sitting here displaced from my own workspace, away from my safe domestic haven, and writing against time on land dense with colonial memory, I find myself wondering why we aren’t being better ancestors.

Why can’t we learn how to stop inheriting the oldest violences of all?

Further Reading & References

• Woman in the Nineteenth Century — Margaret Fuller (1845)
• The Margaret Fuller Society — https://margaretfullersociety.org/
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Margaret Fuller — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Fuller
• The Good Ancestor — Roman Krznaric (2020)
• The 1820 Settlers Association — https://www.1820settlers.com/
• British South Africa — George McCall Theal (1897)
• South African Government: Gender-Based Violence and Femicide Response Fund — https://www.gov.za/issues/gender-based-violence-and-femicide
• UN Women South Africa — https://africa.unwomen.org/en/where-we-are/eastern-and-southern-africa/south-africa

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