It took a man from Zimbabwe to shame America over Cecil the Lion hysteria

The New York Times has published a remarkable piece by Goodwell Nzou, originally from Zimbabwe, to give us yuppies some cultural perspective on the circle of life.

MY mind was absorbed by the biochemistry of gene editing when the text messages and Facebook posts distracted me.

So sorry about Cecil.

Did Cecil live near your place in Zimbabwe?

Cecil who? I wondered. When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.

My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?

 I’m reminded of the German film director of Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog, regarding our culture’s one-dimensional view of Nature:

And when you look at how I depict nature – wild nature for example in Grizzly Man, it’s quite evident that it’s a completely anti-Romantic view. Timothy Treadwell who was protecting bears and who was killed and eaten by a grizzly bear together with his girlfriend, he has this kind of watered down Romanticism … that’s what I’m completely against. I would stop the course of the film even and in my comment I would have an ongoing argument with Treadwell: “Here I differ from Treadwell.” I do not see wild nature as something benign and beautiful and the bears fluffy like little pets. No, they are dangerous and aggressive and nature itself looks rather chaotic and hostile. You look at the universe – it’s very, very hostile out there.

Goodwell goes on in his New York Times article to clarify,

Don’t misunderstand me: For Zimbabweans, wild animals have near-mystical significance. We belong to clans, and each clan claims an animal totem as its mythological ancestor. Mine is Nzou, elephant, and by tradition, I can’t eat elephant meat; it would be akin to eating a relative’s flesh. But our respect for these animals has never kept us from hunting them or allowing them to be hunted…The American tendency to romanticize animals that have been given actual names and to jump onto a hashtag train has turned an ordinary situation…into what seems to my Zimbabwean eyes an absurdist circus…

Read the full piece here.

As you can imagine, the comments over at the NYT are as shrill and self-righteous as ever. Here’s a sample. Someone sitting at Starbucks calling themselves “SP,” writes,

One of the treasures Africa has is its wildlife. That wildlife is what draws tourists. By getting more tourists (not hunters), money will flow into these villages. What is good for the animals is good for the people.

I am outraged over the killing of Cecil , I am also sitting here looking at a pictures of African children who were the beneficiaries of surgeries paid for by me, an American, through Smile Train. I am also interested in how you went from a small village in Africa, to an institution of higher learning in the US. Did you receive any financial assistance in your 5 years studying in the US? Perhaps, it was Americans who helped pay for your education or at least built the institution you studied at[?]

Wow.