The Abundant Herd

Inkomo eyezindlu or "beast which has the houses" is a descriptive Zulu term for an Nguni cow with the hide markings like the one in the photograph below. The small, black round circles on a white coat represent the circular huts dotting the Zulu countryside.

Like the Zulu, the Xhosa people have wonderfully descriptive terms for animals in their herds depending on the colour and patterns on a hide and/or shape of horns. These terms often allude to aspects of nature. For example, a black animal with white head is likened to the African Fish Eagle (very similar to the North American Bald Eagle with its' conspicuous white head) and called uNkwazi (Fish Eagle in Zulu).

The naming of the cattle by the Zulu and Xhosa herders doesn't follow any strict scientific protocol. Rather the poetic names emerge because of a daily association between a herder with his cattle and the surrounding countryside, expressing patterns of similarity between an animals hide and what he observes around him.

The abundant herd of Nguni cattle at Gqunube Green could well offer residents endless opportunities to once again reconnect with nature in the daily round of living, the disconnect perhaps being partly to blame for humanity's abuse of creation. By simply learning to associate the patterns on a hide with other aspects of nature on Gqunube Green, perhaps we too will learn to regularly give expression to the beauty which surrounds us and be spurred to find ways of caring for it.

The Gqunube Green Nguni herd arrived about eight years ago. They are the ecovillages' first residents and began to play their role in creation care immediately. Holistic Grazing Management has allowed us to use them as a land management tool so implementing the pattern of sustainable agriculture. They have helped to preserve the grasslands firstly by tramping the moribund grass down and allowing fresh grass that was being shaded out to grow. Secondly, by browsing young acacia and Port Jackson saplings they have slowed bush encroachment, particularly of alien invaders. Their contribution goes well beyond supplying meat as they improve the water and mineral cycles of the ecosystem processes through their dunging and hoof action and enhance the solar energy flow of the property.

Exercising my own poetic imagination, Inkomo eyezindlu or "beast which has the houses," the old matriarch of the Nguni herd, has perhaps been a walking testimony for those of us about to build our homes on the very grasslands she and the herd has been grazing for these past eight years. As our homes move from her hide onto the land, will we, like the resident herd, strive to give to the land and the emerging community as much as we take?

While I prepare to wing my way back home tomorrow to join other future residents of Gqunube Green for a weekend of celebration and planning, I can only hope that we will. The future of the abundant herd depends on it. And this small, resiliently fragile world over which I will be flying needs places like Gqunube Green, "enacted parables of creation care," to help light the path to that "still better way."