Decima
Eben Venter
Penguin Random House South Africa
ISBN: 9781415209998
Eben Venter’s novel, Decima, defies expectations. At first glance, its English version cover image is a striking collage of a mechanical rhino. This immediately suggests a multilayered novel with different tropes and themes. Mercifully, my fears of it being an eco-grief novel were unrealised. It transcends the usual didacticism of environmentalist novels by weaving urgent themes into a tapestry of ecology, self-discovery, historical reckoning, traditional lore storytelling and a deeper investigation of our broken relationship with nature. It is about the human condition as much as it is about the natural environment.
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It transcends the usual didacticism of environmentalist novels by weaving urgent themes into a tapestry of ecology, self-discovery, historical reckoning, traditional lore storytelling and a deeper investigation of our broken relationship with nature. It is about the human condition as much as it is about the natural environment.
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Venter complicates the usual ecological arguments by bringing into the discussion the views of poachers, trophy hunters and game rangers in a non-judgemental way. Not only that, the narrative unfolds through a chorus of perspectives: a female rhino guarding her calves, impoverished communities teetering on the edge of poaching’s temptations, and distant markets fuelled by superstition and the greed of late capitalism. This polyphonic approach avoids moral grandstanding and, instead, invites the reader to inhabit conflicting viewpoints. The author’s even-handedness is striking; poachers are not caricatured as two-dimensional characters and mere villains, but are depicted as products of systemic inequality. And consumers of rhino horn are portrayed with cultural nuance and with desperate research for their own point of view. Though this empathy occasionally tests reader patience, it underscores the novel’s core question: how did humanity’s evolutionary trajectory veer so catastrophically from ecological symbiosis into rapacious greed?
What elevates Decima beyond the trappings of an eco-grief gospel is its visceral intimacy with the topic. Somehow, the reader feels that Venter has lived it, beyond his clearly comprehensive research. He understands first-hand, not just abstractly, the crises of the tangible lives he is narrating, both humans and animals. The rhino’s struggle for survival mirrors the human characters’ battles against poverty and historical ghosts. By humanising all sides, the novel forces uncomfortable introspection upon the reader: “Are we, in our relentless consumption, any less ‘barbaric’ than Roosevelt, whose 1909 Kenyan safari butchered rhinos for sport?” Venter’s indictment of colonial violence (from Belgian King Leopold’s atrocities to the pope’s menagerie of exploited creatures) draws sharp parallels to modern exploitation, challenging readers, especially white ones, to confront their inherited complicity in all of this. It is too easy to see the black poachers as barbaric, seeking a quick buck. But where did this start? And how do we mitigate it if we don’t tackle the productive land issue they are excluded from? These are neglected questions the novel tackles.
The protagonist’s journey – part investigative thriller, part existential quest – grapples with the moral place of “whiteness” in postcolonial Africa. In that sense, Venter is part of your typical white male writing in South Africa, navigating land disputes and ancestral guilt: “We’re taxed with our past.” His protagonist also wrestles with familial duty and what he calls the “accidents of civilisation” he wishes to leave behind, without cloying self-flagellation. He probes how historical wounds fester in contemporary ecological and social fractures.
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I was pleased to hear that the South African Academy of Science and Arts had awarded it the 2025 Herzog Prize for Prose. This is the most prestigious prize in the Afrikaans literary world. Decima is a timely book for our era that deserves such accolades. What I like most about it, is the telling of our urgent stories through the lenses of not just people, but animals also.
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I was pleased to hear that the South African Academy of Science and Arts had awarded it the 2025 Herzog Prize for Prose. This is the most prestigious prize in the Afrikaans literary world. Decima is a timely book for our era that deserves such accolades. What I like most about it, is the telling of our urgent stories through the lenses of not just people, but animals also. This forces us to get inside the minds of not just the people, but the animals we are poor stewards of. And the guilt of further excluding the dispossessed, the living old and frail (his mother) on the pile of wreckage created by our past and capitalist way of life. But its major topic is about the politics of nature – who stewards it, and how, for future generations. After reading about the tragic colonial mischief of the likes of the Belgian King Leopold from the Royal Museum for Central Africa, our protagonist cannot help wanting to “free himself from the accidents of civilisations”. Is this a viable option?
Even the popes don’t escape condemnation, in the person of Pope Leo X receiving a rhinoceros that was caught in the Himalayas and kept as a toy to entertain the elite and the rich. Then there is the annoying racist behaviour of Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit during the Kenyan safari visit: being carried on black people’s backs (the image is in the Smithsonian Institute) and shooting “nine white and eleven black rhinos”. What really exposes him and his son for being barbaric is the description of Kermit’s kill, sealing their fate as being hunter-killers rather than naturalists: “A couple of hundred yards away she fell, rose again, staggered, fell again and died. … The calf, which was old enough to shift for itself, refused to leave the body, although Kermit and Grogan pelted it with sticks and clods. Finally, a shot through the flesh of the buttocks sent it off in a frantic state” (135).
The comprehensive research for the book is dished out with an artistic ladle. Our protagonist’s perambulations and the risks he takes to get to the bottom of the poachers’ underworld are another eye-opening part of the book. It also digs into African lore, and uses vernacular Xhosa and traditional understanding in an appropriate manner (I was ready to grind the axe with my red pen).
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Decima is a triumph of moral and aesthetic ambition. By entwining a species’s extinction with personal and national identity, Venter crafts a story that is simultaneously urgent and timeless. Its greatest achievement lies in making readers feel the weight of ecological collapse not as abstract data, but as the sum of countless individual tragedies, human and animal alike.
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Decima is a triumph of moral and aesthetic ambition. By entwining a species’s extinction with personal and national identity, Venter crafts a story that is simultaneously urgent and timeless. Its greatest achievement lies in making readers feel the weight of ecological collapse not as abstract data, but as the sum of countless individual tragedies, human and animal alike. For those willing to sit with discomfort, this novel is a masterclass in how literature can bear witness without sermonising. A necessary, haunting read for our age of unravelling.
Lees ook:
Persverklaring: Aankondiging van die Suid-Afrikaanse Akademiepryse vir 2025
Persverklaring: Kortlyste vir kykNET-Rapport-boekpryse vir 2024 bekend
The post Decima by Eben Venter, a review first appeared on LitNet.
The post <i>Decima</i> by Eben Venter, a review appeared first on LitNet.