Episode 6 (Zimbabwe, Part 2 of 4)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

A day or two later, I set out for Great Zimbabwe.  It’s not a heroic journey; you just head south on National Highway No. 4.  That road in 400 miles crosses Kipling’s great grey-green, greasy Limpopo 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.”  

I didn’t have to go that far: Great Zimbabwe is about halfway to the South African border or only 200 miles down the road.

I got started early but promptly got stuck in rush-hour traffic.  This annoyed me at the time but I am grateful now, because I was seeing people with enough money to own  cars and put gas in them.  This surprised me.  Everybody knows, or thinks they know, that Zimbabwe is a basket case.  I’ve heard presidents in the United States use a stronger word.  Yet the day before I left Harare I was similarly surprised by a supermarket more or less like those in South Africa, and I was also surprised by a man who told me forcefully that Robert Mugabe had been an excellent president.  I am grateful now for that traffic jam and also for that supermarket and that conversation, because I need reminding that countries are more complicated than headlines and soundbites.  

Within an hour, I was out of town and crossing an almost level and beautifully verdant plain.  I had the highway almost to myself.  The pavement was in excellent shape and I thought of those old Life magazine advertisements showing a car breezing through the countryside on a road of pristine asphalt.  I don’t drive roads like that as often as I’d like.

Fields that in the bad old days had been planted to tobacco were now in grass, but I saw no livestock.  It isn’t a mystery: the White population of Zimbabwe had collapsed from a peak of three hundred thousand in the 1970s to about thirty thousand.  The old ratio of fifteen Blacks to one White was now about five hundred Blacks to one White.  Nearly all of Zimbabwe’s five thousand White-owned farms had been confiscated and given to supporters of the Mugabe regime who often knew nothing about farming.  

There were no pedestrians or roadside villages, yet in this deserted countryside I passed twenty-pound sacks of potatoes just off the pavement, along with a handwritten sign saying four dollars.  There were so few cars on the road that I figured buyers had to be occasional truck drivers hoping to resell the potatoes.  I saw stacks of firewood piled up for sale, too.  Forget neatly sawn and split logs: this firewood was branches two or three inches thick that had been hacked into two-foot lengths.  I wonder now if somebody was watching to make sure customers paid.  Could it be that customers would pay if they weren’t being watched?         

I stopped at a bypassed bridge, a single lane of concrete built in the 1920s and designed like a low dam with several six-foot-diameter holes punched through it so water could pass.  There were no railings or 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 a much bigger dam, a real dam, a young man would approach and offer necklaces he said he had made.  They could hardly have been simpler: forty coffee beans and forty castor beans strung alternately on a cord.  His English was excellent, and he explained that, like a million other Zimbabweans, he had migrated to South Africa.  He had been caught and deported.  He had then tried and failed to find work in Harare.  

We were standing next to Kyle Dam, which is a concrete-arch dam about 200 feet high and built by 1960 to provide irrigation water for sugarcane plantations about fifty miles downstream.   The young man with the necklaces wasn’t impressed.  Instead, he proudly pointed down the canyon toward what he said 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.  

I bought three necklaces from him for ten dollars.   Don’t you dare tell me I paid too much.  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 usually not thinking of ourselves.

About 100 miles out of Harare I came to Chivhu, a town of about 10,000 people.  The name means “anthill” in Shona, and it’s an odd name because the streets at least in the core are neatly gridded.  Keep it simple.  Keep it cheap.  “Efficiency, my boy.   That’s the ticket.”

I could call this attitude practical, but I’m going to call it Scylla, those rocks that Circe told Ulysses to avoid.  That Scylla was dangerous, but so is the engineering mentality on display in the Chivhu street grid.  It’s a mentality that leads to a future we do not know how to avoid from, yet which with good reason we dread.  At the same time, Scylla does have her good side.  Just think of those piping-hot croissants back in Harare.  

While we’re at it, I’ll call that young man’s faith in the existence of an ancient tunnel Charybdis. Homer’s Charybdis was a deadly whirlpool, which isn’t a bad way to describe the delusions of superstition, but, like Scylla, Charybdis have her good points.  I’ll show you what I mean when we get to Great Zimbabwe. 

Where the highway crosses Chivhu’s old main street, a large and almost empty building carried a sign that read Enkledoorn Garage.  This was Chivhu’s original name, and it comes from the enkledoorn or the single-thorn tree, common in southern Africa. Shell’s golden pecten hung on an arm sticking out from the wall, but 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.   

Half a block down the old main street, I found two churches.  One was Anglican.  The other, much fancier, was Dutch Reformed.  The roof may have been corrugated sheet metal, but the floor plan was cruciform, and the central tower had a weathervane shaped like a rooster, as if to tell the world that Afrikaners aren’t slackers.  The facade had a Dutch gable, too, along with a plaque carrying the Afrikaans version of Exodus 25:8. “Then let them build a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.” 

It hadn’t turned out that way.  The Afrikaners, along with the town’s English-speakers, were gone.  Both churches were locked tight.                           

I imagine Cecil Rhodes coming by in about 1900 and meeting the British South Africa Company’s young man on the spot. He was Henry Cullen Gouldsbury, born in Darjeeling–it’s a small world–and shortly to become an expert on Rhodesia’s customary law. He would also become a captain in the King’s African Rifles and die on the coast of German East Africa at age 35.  I found an obituary saying the cause of death was “fever.”  Malaria is my guess, escalating to blackwater fever.  

Gouldsbury wrote a novel about Enkledoorn but seems not to have liked the place.  The novel is called God’s Outpost, but Enkeldoorn appears as Koodorp and Gouldsbury writes that it is “a gaunt spectre of blighted ambition… forgotten by God and the Government.”  

The main street was now lined for a block with stores shaded by a veranda, but the veranda was made of corrugated sheet metal, supported at the curb by brick columns covered with layers of posters pasted on top of older posters.  Forget ironwork from MacFarlane’s of Glasgow.  

Oddly, the shops had large plate-glass windows unprotected by screens or bars.  I’d think this would be risky, but in the old days the police in southern Africa were scary.  I remember an officer in the old South African Police amusing himself by tormenting a young man like a cat playing with a mouse.  I almost intervened.

The police today may not be so intimidating, but the stores in Chivhu had so little stock that they had little need for screens or bars.  One shop had a girl’s school uniform displayed outside.  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, 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 was no price tag, and there were no other sizes to choose from.  

Education mattered: that was the message I took.  People with next to nothing would slave to help their children get it.  The likely alternatives were alcohol or religion, and though the Anglican and Dutch Reformed churches were closed, there was still plenty of choice, including the Assemblies of God,  Seventh Day Adventists, the Apostolic Faith Mission, the United African Apostolic Church, and Zambia’s End Time Message.

I didn’t visit any of these but did visit the ruins of one church about five miles northeastly of Chivhu.  It had been built by Arthur Shearly Cripps, that Anglican minister who, arriving in Rhodesia in 1902, made a pest of himself by preaching that Africa belonged to the Africans.  Fittingly, he wanted his church to look African, and by 1910 it was finished.   Imagine the builders of St. Peters shrinking the plaza to the size of a classroom, replacing the columns with walls of piled rocks, putting an altar near one end of this enclosure, and then skipping the rest.  No need for Michelangelo.  I’m reminded of a mosque outside Sanaa that consisted and perhaps still consists of a knee-high wall forming a square floored with gravel.  The only deviation was on the north side, where the wall curved to form a niche indicating the direction of Mecca.  That’s all the mosque needed, and Cripps went one better, because his church doesn’t even have straight lines or right angles.  

Cripps died in 1952.  He had never owned a car and had always to Chivhu when he had business there.  Even now, I remember seeing one car on the road to his church.  Otherwise, the only traffic was trucks and vans.  There was a van stop in Chivhu, and it was busy ferrying people out to the ungridded streets at the town’s periphery.  Many people carried bags of corn meal, the country’s staple food.  They had bought it at the town’s SPAR, a South African supermarket chain.  It was a small store, but it devoted an entire aisle to the stuff.  I like corn-meal mush, but I think of children in China who never complain about a steady diet of steamed bread because they do not know there is any other kind of food.