Encounters with Ecologies of the Savannah – Aadaajii laɗɗe

In December 2021, together with a group of friends, I was on the largest island in Senegal. Situated between the Senegal river and its tributary, Doué, it is known by the French name ‘Île à Morphil’, literally meaning ‘Ivory Island’, a reminder that elephants used to live here until the 1960s before they became extinct due to hunting. Today, only the name remains. We had come to see the small eighteenth-century mosques scattered around the island, though we spent more time driving between villages than visiting them. Île à Morphil is a realm of trees and termite mounds, birds and palm rats, strolling goats and rare passersby appearing from behind the trees and disappearing as unexpectedly as they appeared.

At some point, while driving, we stopped next to a giant tree-shaped shrub–termite mound: the trunk is the termite mound and the crown is the tree canopy. It is not possible to say how one is entangled with the other; they constitute a single whole, a world created by the coexistence of at least two living beings. These two are those that are visible, but many more remain inaccessible to the human eye.

During this first encounter with the termite mound, I reached for my camera but the roll ran out after two shots. This is the picture I took:

Philosopher David Abram writes that ‘nonhuman nature can be perceived and experienced with far more intensity and nuance than is generally acknowledged in the West’.11.This is in relation to a discussion of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, his work and theory of perception. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, New York: Vintage, 2017. That first encounter with the termite mound felt like an unexpected meeting that confronted me with the limitations of my visual, subjective experience, taking me to a ‘place’ that modern, urban culture had taught me to unlearn. Over the course of my research, the termite mound has come to offer me a new way of understanding my own subjectivity. At the same time, as a physical, highly situated living form, it has allowed me to contemplate alternative modes of being to those of capitalist extractivism and the ruins it continues to leave in its wake.

Since that first meeting, I have returned regularly to this particular mound and the surrounding area, taking photographs with an analogue camera. The process of analogue photography delays the moment of seeing the image. Once I see it, I am closer to the moment I took the picture, but also elsewhere, in another time. Analogue photography disrupts linear, temporal experience by making past moments visible. The photograph, as light etched on film, reconfigures presence and absence, duration and fugitivity. Brief moments spent in places can be represented by images – photographs – that crystallize those moments forever. Or, the long time we spend in places can be condensed into a single shot taken in fragments of a second. A still image is only a detail of what is felt, sensed and seen. It is inherently incomplete and fragmentary. The mounds are fixed, static formations that change over time, but these changes might not be visible to the camera, even over the course of weeks or months. This peculiarity of termite mounds, their apparent stability and internal dynamism, makes them generative, if perhaps counter-intuitive, subjects for photography.

As journalist Lisa Margonelli writes, ‘to really “see” the termites we have to step out of the rules of being human. Speed up time and you can see that the ground beneath us is moving as many billions of tiny termite feet carry tiny grains of dirt.’22.Lisa Margonelli, Underbug: The Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, London: Oneworld, 2020, p. 250. Standing next to many mounds, I try to feel the presence of millions of termites, of their movements that happen underground and around me.

I return to a quote from W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001):

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.33.W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, New York: Modern Library, 2011, p. 292.

Dénètem Touam Bona writes about marronage as a form of nomadism:

Even when a maroon community remains in the same place for a long time, it remains nomadic, in other words stealthy, because of its capacity to escape the gaze and the grasp of external forces. Cultivating invisibility is a question of life or death when one is faced with far more numerous and much better armed enemies.44.Dénètem Touam Bona, Fugitive, Where Are You Running?, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 21.

Mounds are often enormous structures visible from afar, but termites are never visible, especially under the sun that is deadly for them. They create their own space, preserving invisibility in order to survive. They create spaces of escape from sunlight, heat, predators, other insects and particular enemies – ants, as well as others. When I think of their life practices, my mind turns to those of others that build their lives as a form of escape.55.I am thinking in particular about the character Franz Tunda in Joseph Roth’s novel Flight Without End (1927).

There are numerous examples of writers, artists and researchers exploring alternatives to the pervasive violence of capitalism, through encounters with the more-than-human world: Ursula K. Le Guin via her carrier bag, Tiffany Lethabo King with her shoals, with lichens for Laurie A. Palmer, with lianas for Dénètem Touam Bona,66.See Dénètem Touam Bona, Sagesse des lianes : Cosmopoétique du refuge, Tome 1, Paris: Post-Éditions, 2021. with moss and plants for Robin Wall Kimmerer, and many others. Le Guin speaks of the carrier bag as, variously, a medicine bundle, a ‘vast sack, the belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.’77.Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ [1986], monoskop.org, p. 166. King speaks of shoals as spaces of possibility, of epistemological aperture, of methodological freedom. In The Black Shoals (2019), she refers to the shoal as a geographical formation between water and land, a geologic formation that is neither fully land nor sea. King employs the shoal as a powerful metaphor and methodological tool to explore the complex and often contentious interactions between Black studies and Native studies.88.Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Sketching out a chiaroscuro philosophy of the bodies, social practices and rituals that have historically embodied resistance to racial capitalism, Bona focuses on lianas, on human and nonhuman populations, and on the landscapes and narratives they conjure up in our imaginations. For him, the liana gives rise to subversive architectures, other ways of thinking, creating and fighting together. As a link and metaphorical lever, it also becomes an opportunity to reflect on the possibility of alliances, of a ‘liannaj’ between different experiences of minority and domination.99.See Lecerf Mualpoix and Dénètem Touam Bona, ‘La sagesse des lianes. Entretien avec Denetem Touam Bona’, Théorie, 2 June 2022, contretemps.eu.  For me as well, as I started learning about mounds, termites, the fungi inside, their forms of coexistence and symbiosis, they became a virtual portal, a methodological and visual tool and an epistemological space.

In The Soul of the White Ant (1937), really the classic book on termites, Eugène Marais describes them as a ‘composite animal’ that unites the workers, the soldiers, the queen and the king within the mud structure of the mound as a single body.1010.See Eugène Marais, The Soul of the White Ant, A Distant Mirror, 2017, adistantmirror.com. First published in English in 1937, at which point the word ‘White’ was added to the literal translation of Die Siel van die Mier, its original 1925 title in Afrikaans. Since then, the term ‘superorganism’ has come to be used most often to describe social units of eusocial animals in which division of labour is highly specialized and individuals cannot survive by themselves for extended periods – and scientists consider the termite colony to be one. A superorganism can either be a group of synergistically interactive organisms of the same species or a more diverse group of living things (in this case termites (and all of their castes) and fungi) that function synergistically in a space (the mound) to work towards a collective goal. Termite workers and soldiers are unable to reproduce; soldiers and kings cannot feed themselves, workers and kings generally cannot defend themselves adequately, soldiers and workers cannot fly out of the nest.1111.See, for example, ‘termite’, Britannica, britannica.com. As Margonelli writes:

If the termite mound is a composite animal composed of millions of self-organizing termites, the termite itself is another shell company for a consortium of five hundred species of symbiotic microbes, all cooperating to digest wood for the mutual benefit of the Many.1212.Lisa Margonelli, Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology, London: Oneworld, 2020, p. 84.

The survival of termites is not possible without the fungi they cultivate, so they create and maintain the microclimate necessary for their existence. But, too, the fungi cultivate termites, because they could not survive without the care that termites bring.1313.Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton University Press, 2015. For Marais, the termite mound has a sort of group soul, that of a composite animal, ‘a separate and perfect animal, which lacks only the power of moving from place to place’.1414.Marais, The Soul of the White Ant, p. 62. 

Kimmerer writes about the ‘web of reciprocity’ as a principle of existence where each living being has a particular role to play.1515.Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, London: Penguin, 2021.  The termite mound is a universe of cohabitation, a space of connection between sun, soil, plants and air. It is a complex system of relations, webs of reciprocity among living beings enacting different ways of living together that connect, protect and help, sharing space and nutrients. The mounds’ extraordinary protective architecture has inspired Sahelian mud architecture by humans.

Termites, as a superorganism, reject the idea and practice of individual-ism. Etymologically, ‘individual’ comes from the Latin ‘individuus’, a word composed of the privative prefix ‘in-’ and ‘dividuus’, ‘divided’. It is the lemma corresponding to the Latin translation, first made by Cicero, of the Greek word ‘ἄτομος’, composed of the privative ‘ἀ-’ and the motive ‘τέμνω’, ‘to cut’. Thus, ‘individual’ means ‘indivisible’; in philosophy, along with ‘individuum’, it is used to indicate that each (individual) being has characteristics that make it unique.1616.Treccani Dictionary of Philosophy (2009), treccani.it.  As Bona writes, the individuum is a unit of capitalist rationality. It’s a deliberate confinement of (human) being and its extraction from its environment, surroundings, memories.1717.See Bona, Fugitive, Where Are You Running?, p. 119.      Édouard Glissant distinguishes between a rhizomatic and a single-rooted notion of identity, identifying a Western cultural insistence that identity is unique and exclusive of the other.1818.See Édouard Glissant, ‘Une identité à racine unique et exclusive de l’autre’, Introduction à une poétique du Divers, Paris: Gallimard, p. 23.  Instead, Glissant understands the formation of identity as a result of creolization, as rhizome – a root meeting other roots. He asks: ‘How to be oneself without closing oneself to the other, and how to open oneself to the other without losing oneself?’1919.Ibid.

The lives of termite mounds are statements of dependence between countless organisms and interconnections. The mounds offer a means to think through multiplicity, beyond the conceptual exclusivity of the ‘single-rooted’ individual form. Moreover, they model how to build non-extractive relations: engaging in and with the world as a web of reciprocity, living as part of a superorganism, interacting and interconnecting at all stages of life.

All photographs were taken by Katia Golovko in the departments of Podor, Dagana, Louga and Linguere in Senegal between January 2022 - December 2024.