Voices from the forest : celebrating nature and culture in Xhosaland / Tony Dold & Michelle Cocks.
Michelle Cocks and Tony Dold have spent many years documenting the role that nature plays in the cultural and spiritual landscapes of the Xhosa people in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Voices from the forest presents, for the first time, this poorly understood theme in the context of sustaining cultural heritage and conserving biodiversity in South Africa..
The book is not only a record of knowledge about Xhosa people and their use of plants, but serves as a pointer to sustainable practices in the future. 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.
Voices from the forest includes a wealth of information on Eastern Cape plants and animals, Xhosa culture and the environment, which is not recorded as comprehensively, accessibly and authoritatively anywhere else. It is a unique and vital record of information. It also gives moving insights into the Xhosa people's hold on their culture, their sense of place and of their history. As a focussed social record, it is exceptionally valuable - 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.
Tony Dold is a plant taxonomist and ethnobotanist and is the curator of the Selmar Schonland Herbarium at the Albany Museum in Grahamstown. Michelle Cocks is a research officer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University.
A husband and wife team, Tony and Michelle both grew up in rural Transkei. They are passionate about the link between different cultures and the environment, and for the past 20 years have documented and photographed indigenous plant use in the Eastern Cape. They believe their shared passion has birthed a new vision for the conservation of biological and cultural diversity and together they facilitate a schools education programme called " Inkcubeko nendalo - Bio-cultural Diversity Education Programme". Source : Voices from the forest : celebrating nature and culture in Xhosaland /Tony Dold & Michelle Cocks.
