Harare, Chivhu, Masvingo, and Great Zimbabwe.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For photos, see greatmirror.com
Harare, Chivhu, Masvingo, and Great Zimbabwe.
For a transcript, see
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784
For photos, see greatmirror.com
It’s hard to believe, but in 1999 Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, had nonstop flights to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, Amsterdam—even Sydney. Twenty years later, BA, Lufthansa, Austrian, KLM, Qantas had all abandoned the country, and Zimbabwe’s one surviving flight out of Africa was on Emirates, to Dubai.
To my surprise, the Robert F. Mugabe Airport—formerly Harare Airport and, earlier still, Salisbury Airport—was immaculate. There were no long immigration or customs lines, and nobody even hinted at a bribe. I got a rental car and some cash from an ATM. The fifteen-minute drive into town was fine, and so was the hotel—an older, two-story place with a beautiful and well-kept garden. The next morning, without my asking, a waiter brought excellent croissants, still hot on the baking sheet. I was surprised, took a couple, and couldn’t help thinking of the French Revolution.
A few months earlier, Robert Mugabe had been driven from office by a smiling henchman. People were still hoping that the new man would not live up to his nickname, the Crocodile, and while I was there, people seemed willing to believe that things might get better, not just for an elite but to some degree for everyone.
I can imagine a conversation in the hotel garden. “First, we have to root out corruption and abuses in the security forces. Then we have to restore and stabilize the currency. Once we’ve done those things, we can invest in public health and education. We don’t have any money, but we can get funding from international aid agencies once they recognize our integrity. With their help we’ll stabilize the power and water supply. We’ll work on sanitation and roads. Then private investors will come. The old cut-and-sew factories are still there, idle in Bulawayo. They will reopen, but our young people have strong English-language skills. That fluency will attract call centers and then engineering centers.”
Farfetched? Sure, but a comparable program had actually been executed back in the days of the British South Africa Company, which arrived in 1889 and proclaimed a new country, Southern Rhodesia. The company remained in charge until 1923, when, without a name change, Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing crown colony. That phrase has rarely been more misleading, because Southern Rhodesia was self-governed by and for Whites, who were outnumbered fifteen-to-one by Blacks, primarily the Shona and Matabele. Every now and then, somebody like the stubborn Anglican minister Arthur Shearly Cripps would speak up from his remote mission station to say that Africa belonged to the Africans, but such complaints were swatted away. Cripps himself aged in place, dying blind at eighty-two and cared for in his later years by the people to whom he had devoted his life. His church is now a generally deserted shrine but also the annual site of a commemorative festival.
Southern Rhodesia’s capital was named for Lord Salisbury, a long-serving British prime minister, and as late as 1963 The Columbia Encyclopedia called it “one of Africa’s most modern towns.” Salisbury certainly was one of Africa’s Whitest towns, because with the exception of domestic servants, allowed to sleep in quarters behind the houses where they worked, Blacks who worked in Salisbury left every night for an adjoining town called Harari. Something of the relationship between Whites and Blacks in Southern Rhodesia may be inferred from the census of 1921, which counted 5,700 Whites in Salisbury and didn’t bother to count the Blacks in Harari.
One major street in Salisbury was called Rhodes Avenue of course. after Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the British South Africa Company. Parallel streets included Jameson, Baker, Gordon, and Speke—names mostly forgotten now but recalling men who once were iconic figures in Africa’s White pantheon. Buildings along these same streets were of stone fitted with the curved and recurved gables characteristic of Cape Dutch architecture. It’s no mystery: Salisbury’s first settlers came from South Africa, and, like people everywhere, they built what they knew.
Iron verandas began to appear in 1899. That date is firm because the verandas came from MacFarlane’s, a firm in Glasgow, and they could not have been imported at a reasonable cost until Salisbury was linked to the outside world by rail. That happened in 1899 with the opening of a line from Beira, on the coast of Mozambique. The cost of shipping one ton of freight from London to Salisbury plummeted from forty pounds to two, and within a few years a rail network had been laid across Southern Rhodesia and into South Africa. The network hub is still at Bulawayo, whose rail station is a graveyard of heavy steam locomotives rusting in the strong sunshine.
The best hotel in Salisbury was Meikles, owned by two Scots. The façade was trimmed with iron from MacFarlane’s, whose foundry was all of fifteen miles from the Meikles brothers’ hometown, Strathaven. In 1958 a modernist block of a dozen stories replaced the old hotel, but the new hotel was still called Meikles. By 2018, the hotel was suffering from deferred maintenance, but soon after the fall of Robert Mugabe an investor from Dubai came along, bought the property, and announced plans to renovate and reflag it, perhaps as a Hyatt.
Colonial Salisbury had stylish shops, too, most prominently a Meikles department store. (When I first saw it, in about 2010, its shelves were almost bare. By 2018 it had changed names, and by 2020 it had closed.) Two blocks north of the Meikles hotel, the Cathedral of St Mary and All Saints was completed to a design by no less than Herbert Baker, famous from his work in Pretoria and New Delhi. Still farther north, Dutch-themed bungalows lined wide and quiet residential streets.
With a wave of British immigrants arriving after World War II, low-rise apartment buildings appeared. Despite modernist forms, their names like Chiltern Court and Rhodes Mansions spoke either of nostalgia for Britain or of pride in the Rhodesian accomplishment. That pride survived into the 1970s, when the Rhodesian government built the twenty-story Earl Grey Building to house government offices. Earl Grey had been a chairman of the British South Africa Company. Later, he became governor-general of Canada.
Fear of Black suffrage induced the government of Southern Rhodesia in 1965 to declare unilateral independence from the British Empire. Rhodesia was born, a pariah state that fought to maintain its privilege. Fifteen bloody years later, the Whites gave up, and the reign of Robert Mugabe began. The Earl Grey Building was renamed the Mukwati Building, after a martyr in a failed uprising against Earl Grey’s company. Rhodes Avenue became Herbert Chitepo Avenue, named for Rhodesia’s first black barrister, and Manica Road, named for the town in Mozambique to which it leads, became Robert Mugabe Road. Jameson Avenue, named for an acolyte of Rhodes, became Samora Machel Avenue to thank the Mozambican president who had supported Mugabe in his years of struggle. Along that street, the city in 1997 got its tallest building, the twenty-eight-story reserve bank tower. A decade later, that bank would oversee the hyperinflation that would destroy the Zimbabwe dollar, replaced in 2009 with the U.S. dollar.
American currency was still in use in 2018. I picked up a few dust-impregnated American bills that had passed through so many hands that the paper felt like an old T-shirt. Like many other visitors, I bought a few demonetized hundred-thousand-dollar Zimbabwe bills. They’re nothing to brag about: collectors are after the hundred-trillion-dollar bills. They all look and feel like Monopoly money. That’s about what Zim dollars were worth in 2008, when a loaf of bread cost ten million. The reverse sides of my bills have no words or numbers and are blank except for a picture of Victoria Falls, the country’s most famous natural feature and shared with Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia. I look at the picture and imagine Zimbabwe falling off a cliff. The collapse was all the more devastating to anyone who recalled the words of the president of Tanzania at the ceremony marking Zimbabwe’s independence. Julius Nyerere had said—or is at least said to have said—that Robert Mugabe had inherited a jewel.
I set out the next morning for Great Zimbabwe, about two hundred miles south of Harare. The route was simple: I just had to follow National Highway No. 4, which three hundred and fifty miles out of Harare crosses the Limpopo River and becomes South Africa’s Route 1. I imagine a bus conductor singing: “All Aboard for Chivhu, Masvingo, Beitbridge, Polokwane, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Beaufort West, Paarl, and Cape Town.”
It was the morning rush, and for the first few miles I was caught in traffic, irritating for me but proof that somebody had money to buy cars and fuel. Within half an hour, the traffic thinned. The highway itself was in excellent shape, two lanes of smooth asphalt with only a sharp, jagged edge to hint at a maintenance shortfall, but I soon had the road almost to myself, like one of those old magazine advertisements where a convertible skims along an otherwise deserted carpet of pristine asphalt.
The white population of Zimbabwe had collapsed from a peak of three hundred thousand in the 1970s to about thirty thousand, and the 1965 ratio of fifteen Blacks to one White was now about five hundred to one. Nearly all the country’s five thousand White-owned farms had been confiscated and given to supporters of the Mugabe regime. Most of the new owners knew nothing about farming, and cropland had reverted to grass. I saw no farmsteads or villages, but somebody was placing occasional twenty-pound sacks of potatoes just off the pavement, along with handwritten notes saying four dollars. There were so few cars that I figured the buyers had to be occasional truck drivers hoping to resell the potatoes somewhere up or down the line. Similarly, stacks of firewood were piled up here and there. Forget split logs: this firewood was branches two or three inches thick that had been hacked into two-foot lengths.
I stopped at a bypassed bridge, a single lane of concrete built in the 1920s and designed like a low dam with six-foot-diameter holes punched through it for water to pass. There were no railings or even curbs to keep motorists from driving into the drink. It would have been an adventure to cross when overtopped by floodwater. I imagine a driver stopping and saying to his nervous passengers, “It’s only a few inches deep; we’ll be OK.”
A few days later, at another dam, a young man would hurry over to offer necklaces he said he had made. He, or someone, had drilled holes through perhaps forty coffee beans and forty castor beans, then strung them alternately on a cord. His English was excellent, and he explained that, like a million or so other Zimbabweans, he had migrated to South Africa. He had done so illegally and been caught and deported. He had then gone to Harare but been unable to find work. I bought three necklaces from him for ten dollars. So, call me a chump. Another young man saw the transaction and hurried over with identical necklaces. I kept declining to buy them, but his price kept dropping, and when he was on the verge of tears I bought three more. We speak of people born with silver spoons in their mouths, but we’re not usually thinking of ourselves.
About ninety miles from Harare, I stopped at Chivhu. The name means “anthill” in Shona, but the street grid was too perfectly rectilinear to deserve that name. It’s rectilinear because the town was established in 1897 by the British South Africa Company, and that company did have time to bother with town planning. Instead, it copied the simple, seemingly efficient gridiron layout that the Romans had spread across their empire almost two thousand years earlier and which today is on display from Kansas to Argentina and from Burma to Australia. Chivhu’s old name, Enkledoorn, seems to have come from a large specimen of the enkledoorn or single thorn, a tree common in southern Africa and known to botanists as Vachellia robusta.
Where the highway crosses the town’s old main street, a large and almost empty building carried a sign that read Enkledoorn Garage. Shell’s golden pecten hung on another arm sticking out from the wall. The gas pumps were gone, along with the repair business. On the other side of the highway, the Enkeldoorn Hotel was defunct except for one wing operating as Vic’s Tavern. A few feet away, Zimpost was still collecting mail from a red pillar box made by McDowall Steven of Glasgow. That company had gone out of business in 1909.
Down the old main street half a block, I found two churches, both locked tight. One was Anglican. The other was a Dutch Reformed church. Its cruciform plan seemed extravagant under the church’s corrugated sheet-metal roof. The central tower had a weathervane in the shape of a rooster, and the facade had a Dutch gable over a cornerstone that carried the Afrikaans version of Exodus 25:8. “Then let them build a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.” There were no Whites left in town, at least none that I saw.
I imagine Rhodes coming by in about 1900 and meeting the Company’s man on the spot, Henry Cullen Gouldsbury. Gouldsbury was then in his twenties and destined to become an expert on Rhodesia’s customary law—and, as a captain in the King’s African Rifles, to die in German East Africa at the age of 35. Gouldsbury seems not to have liked Enkledoorn. He wrote a novel, God’s Outpost, in which the town appears under the name Koodorp and is described as “a gaunt spectre of blighted ambition… forgotten by God and the Government.”
A hundred years later, the main street was lined for a block with solid but very plain stores. Some had verandas, but they were simply sheets of corrugated metal supported at the curb by brick columns covered with posters plastered on top of older posters. There was no ironwork from MacFarlane’s. The shops had large plate-glass windows unprotected by screens or gates. Perhaps that was because they had little to protect. One shop had a girl’s school uniform on display. There was no mannequin—just a hanger on a hook—but the skirt, dress shirt, and necktie had been neatly put together with the necktie knotted, the collar turned down, the plackets buttoned, and the skirt pinned to the hem of the shirt. Everything hung limply, as you would expect from clothes that had been washed fifty times. There were no price tags and no other sizes to choose from. Education mattered: that was the message. People with next to nothing would slave to help their children get it.
A nearby bus stop was crowded with people waiting for kombis, the minivans that would take them to the many villages that are extensions of Chivhu but are separated from it by a mile or two. For the children in these villages, education provided the surest path to a life in Harare or, better still, in another country. The alternative was poverty, perhaps alleviated by alcohol or religion. On that score, Chivhu offered the Assemblies of God, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Apostolic Faith Mission, the United African Apostolic Church, Zambia’s End Time Message, and more. Back near the stoplight, shoppers crowded into the town’s two small supermarkets, Spar and Pick N Pay. Both are based in South Africa, and both were stuffed with staples, especially corn meal for the porridge called sadza. Bags of it took up as much shelf space as chips and soft drinks in an American supermarket.
Another ninety miles down the highway, I stopped at Fort Victoria, now Masvingo. The name simply means “fort” in Shona. The highway here comes to a T-junction and turns right. To the left, the road is National Highway No. 9, leading to Mozambique but also to the Masvingo Airport. In s 1999 that airport had scheduled flights to Harare and Bulawayo. Now the sign pointing to the airport was rusting so badly that I didn’t even have to visit the airport to see how it was doing.
I turned right onto a highway that was absurdly wide. Washingtonia palms were lined up on a median. There was very little traffic on the road, but there were three lanes heading south and three lanes heading north, and there was room left over for parking at the margins. Angle parking. The palms, which are native to Mexico, naturally acquire ruffs or beards of dead fronds that, if left untrimmed, reach almost to the ground. The palms here hadn’t been trimmed in a long time, and they were a fire hazard, tolerated perhaps because a fire in the median would do so little damage. This spacious avenue had once been Allan Wilson Street. His name, like so many others from the bad old days, is fading from memory, but in 1893 Wilson and nearly all the men of his Shangani Patrol were slaughtered by an enormously greater force of Matabele. There’s an elaborate monument to Wilson and his men next to the grandly simple grave of Cecil Rhodes in the Matopos Hills south of Bulawayo.
Fort Victoria had a railroad, too. It came in 1915 but proved to be only the end of a branch line. The station’s painted wooden signs were in pristine condition when I saw them. One read “chief clerk” and another read “goods: parcels and tickets,” but the last passenger train had pulled out in 1950. That must have been a blow to the town’s White population, but Fort Victoria was still on a main road, and the Whites had worked too hard to consider quitting just because they had lost passenger-rail service. Theodore Bent, an archaeologist who visited Fort Victoria in 1891, gives some idea of how tough the early days had been. “Nearly everybody was down with fever when we got there… and the melancholy aspect of affairs was enhanced by the hundred and fifty saddles placed in rows within the fort, which had once belonged to the hundred and fifty horses brought up by the pioneers, all of which had died of horse sickness.”
One corner at the T-junction had an abandoned one-story shop slowly decaying under a heavily rusted sheet-metal roof. Across the street, however, a line of concrete buildings from the 1950s housed Edgar’s, a South African department store, as well as Old Mutual, a South African insurance company. Some of the buildings in the group had brise soleils, concrete sunscreens stylish in the 1950s and perhaps still so.
A block west, an old sign in front of the customs and excise building had been painted over with a new sign that read “Department of Immigration.” The name seemed absurd—who immigrates to Zimbabwe?—but what caught my eye was a coat of arms with a pair of kudus holding up a shield. At the bottom, it read “Unity Freedom Work.” I assumed the heraldry was left over from Rhodesian times, but I later learned that it had been adopted in 1982, which means it must have passed muster with Robert Mugabe, who was both an anglophile and a martinet. As I was taking a photo, a burly sixty-something gentleman came up and asked aggressively what I was doing. I explained that I was surprised by the motto. I said I assumed that it was colonial and that I would have expected it to have been removed. I asked if he found its survival puzzling. He said no in a tone suggesting that an argument was brewing. He then told me about visiting the United States and about being arrested for taking a picture of the White House. I said that this was impossible, but he didn’t yield. For some reason, he decided I wasn’t worth an expanded dispute and walked away.
A bit farther along the former Allan Wilson Street, I stopped at the civic center, another vestige of the 1950s. It included a theater with faded posters in the lobby for live productions of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” and “Come Blow Your Horn.” Across the street, there was a Meikles department store, its stock severely depleted. An adjoining Meikles supermarket had closed for good, leaving shoppers to choose between Pick n Pay or SPAR. A mile farther on, the Masvingo Polytechnic College had a fine campus, opened in 1988 but now deserted. Claiming that college administrators had stolen their scholarship money, the students had gone on strike. The government responded by transferring the principal to a college in another town, but the students stayed on strike.
Part 2. Great Zimbabwe
Two miles beyond Masvingo, I turned left from Highway No. 4 onto a secondary road built to an even higher standard. The road I was on now was as good as anything in Norway, which I take to be the ne plus ultra of highway engineering, and it led in fifteen miles to my destination. The name Great Zimbabwe derives from dzimba, “house” in Shona, and the country in fact has many ancient zimbabwes, all in ruins. Great Zimbabwe is simply the largest of them, but it’s impressive enough to have been placed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1986, one year before Uluru. Ironically, there is no stone house at the site. Great Zimbabwe is instead a place of walls and a single stone tower. As a spectacle, Great Zimbabwe offers no competition to Giza or Angkor but for my money it’s more wonderful than either of them.
Scholars believe that Great Zimbabwe was the successor to Mapungubwe, a mesa about one hundred fifty miles to the southwest and just across the Limpopo River. Literally “the hill of the jackals,” Mapungubwe was only discovered by Whites in the 1930s. Local Blacks knew of the place, of course, but considered it taboo and would not even look at it. Archaeologists had no such fear and have been able to find enough material to conclude that Mapungubwe was the first complex, or class-based society in Southern Africa. Established about 1220, Magungubwe didn’t last long, Within a century, its residents left for parts unknown. Some of them may have made it to the site of Great Zimbabwe, which arose at about that time. Even if they didn’t, the people living at the site of Great Zimbabwe knew about Mapungubwe and adopted parts of its culture.
With an estimated population approaching twenty thousand, Great Zimbabwe thrived for two centuries on shallow-mined gold shipped east almost three hundred miles to Arab traders at Sofala, then a port near present-day Beira. (The site of Safala has since subsided under the Indian Ocean, but the name lives on in Sofala Province, which includes Beira.) Although never completely abandoned, Great Zimbabwe declined after 1500 with the rise of richer mining centers, chiefly Khami, near Bulawayo.
Arab coins and Chinese pottery found at Great Zimbabwe confirm some of these facts, but there is no written account of Great Zimbabwe in its heyday. The earliest recorded mention is in Da Asia, written about 1550, when Great Zimbabwe was in serious decline. The author was João de Barros, a man of deeds as well as words. Unfortunately, he did not visit Great Zimbabwe. Instead, he talked to traders on the coast. They told him of
a square fortress, masonry within and without, built of stones of marvelous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them…. [As] these edifices are very similar to some which are found in the land of Prester John, at a place called Acasumo [Aksum], which was a municipal city of the queen of Sheba, which Ptolemy calls Axuma, it would seem that the prince who was lord of that state also owned these mines....
Great Zimbabwe in fact has no square fortress, and its stones are light enough for a single person to lift and carry. The biggest mistake de Barros makes, however—and one that proved to be extraordinarily tenacious—was that White men had built it.
The first European to see and write about Great Zimbabwe repeated that mistake. He was Karl Mauch, and in his diary for 1871 he writes that local natives told him of “ruins which could never have been built by blacks.” Mauch believed he had found Ophir, a source of King Solomon’s gold, but thorns defeated his attempt to explore the site. Fifteen years later, Rider Haggard repeated the White-men-built-it story in his popular novel, King Solomon’s Mines, which he wrote fifteen years before actually seeing Great Zimbabwe. Cecil Rhodes came by, too, and David Christiaan de Waal, who travelled with Rhodes. De Waal wrote that “a man who has travelled in that country and sat on the walls of the Simbabe temple cannot fail to be convinced that the Mashonaland gold mines are the same from which King Solomon got his gold….” De Waal was “thoroughly convinced that the ruins in and around Simbabe are a proof to demonstration of the existence in earlier days of thousands, yea tens of thousands, of white men there.”
A couple of years later, Theodore Bent, the same man who had commented on the rows of saddles without horses in Fort Victoria, wrote in disgust that “the names of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were on everybody’s lips,” yet even he suspected a Phoenician connection, and a century later the government of Rhodesia, determined to bolster its claim of racial superiority, remained adamant in perpetuating the error. Peter Garlake, the Rhodesian Inspector of Monuments from 1964 to 1970, grew so frustrated by the government’s intransigence that he quit in disgust and moved to Nigeria.
The amazing thing is that anyone who has seen Great Zimbabwe would even suspect, let alone insist, that it was built by Whites. When Europeans from South Africa settled in Rhodesia, after all, they laid out gridded streets and built shops and homes that looked like what they knew. That’s what settlers always do, so far as their means allow, which is why White men, if they had built Great Zimbabwe, would have built something that looked like Jerusalem or Lebanon’s Byblos or Yemen’s Ma’rib. If White men had built Great Zimbabwe, it would at least have been built to a measured plan and with stone blocks or clay bricks of a standard size.
There’s nothing like that at Great Zimbabwe, where masons worked intuitively, hammering blocks of stone to shape and fit as they wished. I think here of John Ruskin and the second volume of his The Stones of Venice, published in the early 1850s. Ruskin was in his early thirties, but he had made a name for himself as a critic defending the now-celebrated but then-controversial landscape paintings of William Turner. Ruskin had not yet become a full-throated social critic, but the seed of that shift is visible in The Stones of Venice, particularly in the chapter called “The Nature of Gothic.” In that chapter, Ruskin says something as pertinent to Great Zimbabwe as it is to the Doge’s Palace:
The degree in which the workman is degraded may be thus known at a glance by observing whether the several parts of the buildings are similar or not; and if, as in Greek work, all the capitals are alike, and all the moulding unvaried, then the degradation is complete…. [In] Gothic work, there is perpetual change both in design and execution, [and] the workman must have been altogether set free.
I hesitate over that word altogether because Ruskin must mean that the workers are set free in their work, not in the totality of their lives. A parallel case exists with the megalithic or polygonal walls of the Inca, where the shape of each stone is so inventive that entire walls can seem alive. (The best-known example is probably the Inca foundation of the building in Cuzco now called the Archbishop’s House.) The Inca masons probably had less freedom—social freedom—than the Broken Hill miners who fell off ladders and died in rock falls, but the visitor to Cusco sees only the environmental freedom the Inca masons had in their work.
So, too, at Great Zimbabwe. Visitors who enjoy a high degree of social freedom themselves come to Zimbabwe and, without knowing anything about the society that built the place or the restrictions it put upon its people, can still feel the environmental freedom of the men who built the place. For me, it was worth the cost of the trip. I recall the words of David Douglas Duncan discussing a photograph he had taken of a Moroccan potter sitting calmly with his hands on a pot he was shaping: “If Rembrandt were only here today to paint what I see, Old Moha would live forever.” Duncan undersells his photograph.
I paid the entrance fee and walked past several young guides. They were friendly, fluent in English, and gracious when I told them I wanted to wander around by myself. Instead of dogging my heels, as they would in some other countries I could name, they smiled and waved me on, even though there were no other customers in sight. In fact, on my two visits on successive days, I saw only one other foreign visitor. I stayed at a hotel a couple of miles away, and it had no other guests. How the guides made enough money to get by I don’t know, but the absence of visitors was a blessing. So was the fact that nothing came of a proposal by a government ministry in the 1980s for a ring road around the site and for trolleys whisking visitors around the ruins. A UNESCO advisor ridiculed the plan as “an extremely expensive way of spoiling one of Zimbabwe’s most beautiful assets…,” but it wasn’t his words that killed the plan. What killed it was the absence of visitors to whisk.
Three hundred yards in front of me, a granite dome rose two hundred feet. Its summit was ragged, with chunks of rock lost to weathering. Trees had taken root at many spots, and the base of the dome was wrapped in forest. Karl Mauch called this dome a “mighty fortress.” Later visitors have called it the Acropolis. Archaeologists today, allergic to poetic license, call it the Hill Complex.
There’s an old path up to the top. Unpaved, the path is rough enough that you can easily trip if you don’t watch your footing, and it’s generally wide enough for only one person. Near the top, you can stretch out your arms and touch, both to the right and left, boulders bigger than elephants. Lower on the hill the path is bordered by walls about six feet high and four feet thick. These walls are built with a rubble core faced on both sides with granite blocks about the size of a shoebox. Using a hammer of diabase the masons trimmed each granite block to taste. The result is that the blocks are wedged together tightly but have irregular gaps between them. They have never been mortared, which has helped the walls survive, because mortar eventually decomposes to form a medium in which plants grow and pry stones apart.
At the top of the hill, the path meets two concentric walls about fifteen feet high and ten feet thick. Far from circular, they are more like necklaces draped carelessly on a table. Each wall has a tunnel-like opening, but there’s no evidence that the openings ever had doors or gates. The first or outer-wall opening has precisely square corners, and the lintel at the entrance is a single block exactly cut to fit. The workmanship is highly skilled. The second or inner-wall opening has no rectangular lintel. It has no square corners, either. Instead, the walls on either side curve gently into a ten-foot-long tunnel. Perhaps the radius of curvature is about six feet, about as tight a curve as you can make with granite blocks the size of shoe boxes. The roof of this second passage is supported not by square-cut beams but by diabase cylinders perhaps four feet long, eight inches thick, and dark as old iron.
I failed to see what now seems obvious: only the inner entrance is original. The outer one was built under the direction of St. Claire or “Weary” Wallace, a British South Africa Company policeman who was caretaker at Great Zimbabwe all the way from 1911 to 1948. His entrance is the work of a skilled mason, but comparing it to the inner entrance is like comparing a cell phone to a baby, which is to say that there is no comparison. That inner entrance is as arresting, as natural, as Uluru. John Ruskin, who never got farther from England than Sicily, would have loved it.
There’s not much else to see atop the Hill Complex. For this, we can at least in part thank Richard Nicklin Hall, “Weary” Wallace’s predecessor. A journalist, Hall became Great Zimbabwe’s first European caretaker. It was 1900, and Hall was a true believer. He wrote, “The evidences presented at Zimbabwe of an intrusion of foreign influence having taken place in some most remote times were and are as clear as the African sun at noonday.” To prove his point, Hall set about digging. An Egyptologist of the time, David Randall-MacIver, blasted Hall’s work as “worse than anything I have ever seen.” Peter Garlake, the archaeologist who quit Rhodesia in disgust in 1970, wrote that within the area inside the summit walls Hall had removed “at least three to five feet, and in places up to twelve feet, of stratified archaeological deposits. His justification for this, in his grotesquely inapposite words, ‘recent and timely preservation work,’ was that he was only removing ‘the filth and decadence of the kaffir occupation.’”
The most interesting thing remaining within the perimeter of the walls is the natural granite dome itself, topped by boulders on a summit with a fine view. From that summit, you can see a roughly circular wall about two thousand feet to the south. Early visitors called it the Elliptical Temple, but investigators since 1958 have referred to it as the Great Enclosure. I can’t be the only visitor who, rather than entering this place, chose first to walk around it.
I didn’t know why I did this, but I think now I was approaching the idea that people can create things that are absolutely natural, provided that their technology is as intuitive as a cat’s whiskers. David Douglas Duncan’s potter did this. So did the craftsman (or possibly the craftswoman) who made a Western Sudanese drum I have, a baobab log with cattle hide stretched tightly across the top and bottom. Great Zimbabwe is unusual only because instead of being a pot or a drum it’s a city. Every other city I know of is full of intangible strangers, not merely the strangers of our day but precisely measured gridded streets and precisely measured buildings of precisely measured bricks and blocks. Standardized measurements are in fact a diagnostic test of civilization, of Lewis Mumford’s megamachine, all the way back to the millions of identical bricks happily mined by British railway engineers in India who didn’t realize that they were building their new line from Hyderabad to Lahore with bricks baked four thousand years ago for Harappa, a city in the Indus Valley.
There are several openings in the Great Enclosure’s wall, at least one where the wall has collapsed in rubble, another where a modern entrance has been built, and a third where—small miracle—the original entrance survives, at least partially intact. It is a now-unroofed gap about four feet wide between thick walls terminating in semicircular curves like the inner entrance on the hilltop. The interior of the Great Enclosure is elevated a few feet, and the wall is thick enough that it contains room for eight steps. The treads are not straight: Great Zimbabwe doesn’t do straight. Instead, the treads bow inward from wall to wall. Again, there are no hinges to suggest doors that have been lost. Did this entrance mark the transition from secular to sacred space? It’s tempting to read it that way, like the moonstones of Anuradhapura, in northern Sri Lanka.
There’s about an acre of ground within the Great Enclosure, and most of it has been dug up by amateur or professional shovels. The most striking object visible from the top of the stairs today is a wall to the left. This second wall, parallel to the outer wall but a bit lower, creates a path about four feet wide and perhaps forty feet long. Since nobody knows why the Great Enclosure was built, it follows that nobody knows the purpose of this so-called parallel passage. You can walk through it like a happy heathen, sure that nobody alive today will be shocked at what seven centuries ago might have been sacrilege.
Great Zimbabwe’s best-known feature, the Round Tower, stands at the other end of the passage and under a canopy of trees. Cased or armored in shoebox-sized blocks, the Round Tower is about twenty feet top to bottom and half that in diameter. The diameter slightly increases with height, then tapers gently. Karl Mauch in 1871 believed that the tower was a grave. Cecil Rhodes was “much interested in the Phallus or Phalli, the Phoenician god….” David Randall-MacIver thought it was a flag, a sign of a ruler’s residence. Richard Nicklin Hall, the target of Randall-MacIver’s wrath, may have come closer than anyone else when he reported that in 1904 local villagers sacrificed cattle at the tower. Confident that this was a later barbarism irrelevant to the tower’s original purpose, Hall didn’t ask why the cattle were being sacrificed.
There’s nothing up top, and there’s no interior room or void. In 1930 Gertrude Caton-Thompson, an English archaeologist, decided to make sure there wasn’t anything underneath the tower, so she hired a mining engineer to help her tunnel underneath it. “The sum total of this laborious work was four objects of no dating value…. Our toil also contributed nothing to the Tower’s significance.” Caton-Thompson suggested very tentatively that the tower might have been a local copy of a minaret that somebody had seen on the coast, but the point she made most insistently was that Great Zimbabwe was indigenous:
It is inconceivable to me now I have studied the ruins how a theory of Semitic or civilized origin could ever have been foisted on an uncritical world. Every detail in the haphazard building, every detail in the plan, every detail in the contents apart from imports, appears to me to be typical African Bantu.”
Experts at the time, including some in South Africa as well as Southern Rhodesia, angrily rejected her conclusion. They would probably reject it still if Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia and if Nelson Mandela was still locked up.
Whatever significance the trees near the tower may have had is forgotten, but their branches reach over the Great Enclosure’s wall. People outside the wall at this point can also tell that they are close to the Round Tower because the outside of this stretch of the wall, unlike any other wall at Great Zimbabwe, has a band of chevrons built into it near the top. Other zimbabwes have been found with the same pattern, perhaps most strikingly at the Naletale Ruins, a hundred miles northwest of Great Zimbabwe and built several centuries later. But why decorate just one stretch of the Great Enclosure’s wall? Perhaps it was one mason’s obeisance. Perhaps it was one mason’s obeisance masquerading as artistic whim.
The Round Tower appears on the defunct Zimbabwe dollar, and business owners around the country often put a version of it on their premises. I saw one such imitation at a Masvingo gas station and another at a Masvingo funeral home. Such copies look cheap, I think because they’re made of standard, measured blocks without a hint of improvisation. It may also be absurd to celebrate an object whose meaning is forgotten. Still, Great Zimbabwe has suffered greater insults. One of them is the emerald-green meadow between the Hill Complex and the Great Enclosure. It didn’t occur to me that I had seen no other such meadows in Zimbabwe. Then I realized that, until Rhodesia became insecure in the 1970s, the meadow had been a golf course. Abandoned, the grass continued to grow, irrigated with water from a creek ponded about a mile to the east. The meadow is beautiful, but, like the chain up Uluru, it is a reminder that within living memory Great Zimbabwe was the playground of White barbarians.
I also didn’t think about what the people who live close to Great Zimbabwe think about it today. The subject came up indirectly, when I noticed that instead of a grand entrance to the nation’s premier historical attraction, there’s only a tubular steel gate that might have led to a Colorado pasture. It was tied to an ordinary T-bar-and-barbed-wire fence that wrapped the entire site. It seems trivial, as though nobody gave the fence much thought. Then I read The Silence of Great Zimbabwe, a book by an anthropologist named Joost Fontein. He writes that nearby villagers told him that Great Zimbabwe “used to have a voice.” More than one voice, in fact. The voices belonged to the villagers’ own ancestors and “sounded like people talking to each other. Also these voices used to talk to visitors that came there.” The voices stopped when the fence was built. The ancestors refused to be treated as somebody’s property. The villagers told Fontein, “The ancestors are not fools.”
I don’t know how Fontein responded to these comments, but I would have felt awkward. That’s how I felt about five miles east of Great Zimbabwe, where I went to see Kyle Dam, which was completed in 1960 to provide irrigation water for sugarcane plantations about fifty miles downstream. A young man who had no interest in the dam, which was a concrete arch two hundred feet high, told me proudly that just out of sight downstream there was an ancient tunnel leading to Great Zimbabwe. Such a tunnel would have been over six miles long. In the spirit of friendly skepticism, I asked him to show me the opening. He waved vaguely.
Now I know that there are Zimbabwean archaeologists who have written that the ruins scattered across Zimbabwe are connected by spiritual tunnels, and I can understand this if I think how I may feel close to somebody who is a thousand miles away. But I don’t think the young man meant it that way. I think he may heard somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who had spoken of spiritual tunnels, and along the way the spiritual tunnels had become hard-rock tangible passages. He believed they existed because, as the sculptor Canova said, we see with our ears.
So what was I to say? I don’t believe such tunnels exist anymore than I believe in the existence of ancestral voices. So call me narrow-minded. Call me hostile to the ways of other cultures, but if I believe in such things I’m also ready to believe in sorcery, witchcraft, and all the other barbarities that litter the pre-scientific world. Junking them, or most of them, has been arguably the greatest achievement of the last five centuries, but laughing at the young man would only have fortified his belief that foreigners are arrogant. Perhaps he’s right: I refuse to approve of human sacrifice, no matter how ancient the practice is or how central it is to the beliefs of a culture.
But my silence was not just tact, because this young man was at least remotely connected to the builders of Great Zimbabwe, and I know that they had something I’ve lost. That’s why I walked around the Great Enclosure before entering it. That’s why I wouldn’t play golf in the meadow, even if the course was freshly mown and even if I played golf, which I don’t. I kept quiet because I know that my talents or gifts are atrophying.
I think of a certain doctor’s waiting room a few years ago. A wall-mounted television refused to leave me alone. The doctor eventually saw me and cordially asked how I was doing. Instead of a customary and trivial response, I let him see that I was annoyed. I didn’t quite ask him if he thought his patients were so stupid that they wanted to hear nationally prominent hosts chat up nationally prominent celebrities in front of a nationally curated audience. But he got the idea and with some heat said it was absurd that a television should irritate me. Then he put on his medical hat and told me that getting angry wasn’t good for me.
Coincidentally or not, his television these days is set to a less obnoxious channel, and I practice waiting calmly. I’m not very good at it. I imagine pretending I’m an automobile engine purring in neutral while my car is stopped at a light. Just watch the signal. Wait for it to turn. Everything will be fine. This works for half a minute, then Great Zimbabwe comes to mind, or Uluru, or even my own front porch, overlooking rampant Japanese maples and dogwoods and a few evergreens, precious in winter. The image varies but not the underlying thought, which is that I should be somewhere I belong.