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

                               Episode 6 

                    (Zimbabwe, Part 2 of 4)

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.  After three hundred and fifty miles that road crosses Kipling’s great grey-green, greasy Limpopo and becomes South Africa’s Route 1.  I imagine the patter of a bus conductor: “All Aboard for Chivhu, Masvingo, Beitbridge, Polokwane, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Beaufort West, Paarl, and Cape Town.”  .  

Great Zimbabwe was only 200 miles down the road or about halfway to the South African border, but I got started early and promptly got stuck in morning traffic.  It was annoying but also instructive.  I mean that Zimbabwe is generally portrayed as a failed state, and although I wouldn’t disagree with that, the traffic forced me to acknowledge that thousands of people had enough money to buy cars and put gas in them.  I’m not defending the Mugabe regime.  I am saying that we like things to be a hundred percent this or a hundred percent that, even though they rarely if ever are. Most people, including me, should have a T-shirt that reads:  “I want the simple version.”  Maybe it should read “simple-minded.”

Within half an hour, I was out of town and had the road almost to myself.  The highway was in excellent shape, two lanes of smooth asphalt with only a sharp, jagged edge to hint at a maintenance shortfall.  It felt like one of those old magazine advertisements in which a new car skims in glorious solitude along a 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.  Put another way, the historic 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, most of whom knew nothing about farming.  Fields that in the bad old days had been planted to tobacco were now in grass.  I saw no livestock.  

Somebody was periodically stacking twenty-pound sacks of potatoes just off the pavement, along with a handwritten note 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 neatly sawn and 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 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 real dam, a young man would approach me 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 or so other Zimbabweans, he had migrated to South Africa.  He had done so illegally, been caught, and deported.  He had then tried Harare but had been unable to find work.  

We were standing next to Kyle Dam, a concrete arch dam about 200 feet high.  It had been completed in 1960 to provide irrigation water for sugarcane plantations about fifty miles downstream.   I thought the dam was impressive, but he didn’t.  Instead, he pointed proudly downstream 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 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 stopped for a couple of hours at Chivhu, a town of about 10,000 people.  The name means “anthill” in Shona, and it’s an odd name because the streets are perfectly gridded.  They’re gridded, of course, because, like Salisbury, the town was laid out by the British South Africa Company.  Keep it simple.  Keep it cheap.  “Efficiency, my boy.   That’s the ticket.”

I could call this attitude practical or rational or, if I put on my cap and gown, Baconian, but I’m going to personify it and call it Scylla, those perilous rocks that Ulysses was told to avoid between Italy and Sicily.  His Scylla was dangerous, but so is mine, because it’s our technology-driven society leading to a future that we cannot stop building, yet which with good reason we dread.  At the same time, my Scylla, our Scylla, does have her good side.  Just think of those piping-hot croissants.  

While we’re at it, let’s call that young man’s faith in the existence of an ancient tunnel Charybdis. Homer’s Charybdis faced Scylla and was a deadly whirlpool, which is not a bad way to describe a superstitious delusion, but you know me: things aren’t 100 percent this or 100 percent that.  It’s just laziness on our part to insist otherwise. Cue the “I’m Good with the Simple Version” T-shirt.  In other words my Charybdis, though I condemn her, has her good points.  We’ll get to them. 

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 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 was simply corrugated sheet metal, but the floor plan was cruciform.  That wasn’t the only departure from rustic simplicity. The central tower had a weathervane shaped like a rooster.  I suppose the message was that slackers wouldn’t build a new Africa.  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.”   I assume that the Afrikaners here a hundred years ago took comfort from those words, but I saw no Whites anywhere in Chivhu, and 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.  His obituary said “fever.”  Malaria is my guess, maybe escalating to blackwater fever.  

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

A hundred years on, the town was still bleak.  The main street was lined for a block with stores shaded by a veranda, but the veranda was made of more corrugated sheet metal, this time 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 no need for screens or bars.  One 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 were no price tag and 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, 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.