Voices From the Forest: Celebrating nature and culture in Xhosaland

However disconnected modern people may feel from nature, the cultural legacy of our natural environment continues to leave its mark on us. While the South African landscape has for centuries been moulded and manipulated by humans, the country and its plants and animals have in turn influenced our cultural and spiritual development. Voices from the forest is a fascinating book which explores the journey of celebrating the link between people and nature, the book reveals how plants, animals and landscapes are profoundly reflected in Xhosa language, stories, poetry, religious rituals, healing practices and everyday customs that define Xhosa culture. Over the years cultural and spiritual meaning of nature in South Africa has been poorly recorded and often misunderstood. The current trade of medicinal plants is often destructive and unsustainable with an estimated 27 million South Africans making use of indigenous medicines. This is a serious detriment as natural resources have been a reliant for underprivileged people who gain food, fuel, medicines, and building materials from wild plants. Therefore the addition of information on edible and medicinal plants is of extreme importance. The book is based on 10 years of personal discovery and research by authors Tony Dold and Michelle Cocks, and consists of highly unique photographs that portray that both contemporary rural and urban South Africans still find great cultural and spiritual value in nature. Many books on the subject of natural resource use focus on the negative of how natural resources are being depleted by continued use. While this is indeed a reality, Voices from the Forest gives a fresh positive approach to biodiversity conservation in SA by showing that people’s values for natural resources can be considered positively as a way forward to continued sustainable use. The book explores the role that nature plays in the cultural and spiritual landscapes of the Xhosa people in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and serves as a pointer to sustainable practices in the future. The underlying aim is ultimately sustaining cultural heritage and conserving biodiversity because in our modernising world cultural diversity is threatened by the loss of natural diversity and finding ways of protecting the region’s biodiversity and cultural diversity is of vital importance. As a book which has a social focus, Voices from the Forest is of exceptional value – and it also has a far wider application: what you learn from it, you know must also apply in different ways to countless other peoples whose way of living has been changed and uprooted.