Episode 7 (Zimbabwe, Part 3 of 4)

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

Transcript

                                 Episode 7 

                    (Zimbabwe, Part 3 of 4)

Another ninety miles down the highway, I came to Masvingo, a town that since 1980 has tripled to about 100,000 people.  Is this a story of urban attraction or rural push?  I’m betting on push, because I drove around town and saw very little economic activity.  The biggest surprise was a few new and very nice houses on the outskirts. Call it another of those teaching moments, like the traffic jam in Harare: somebody had money here, too.  Well, it wasn’t really a teaching moment.  Somebody always has money.  Call it a refresher course.   

Then, two miles past Masvingo, I turned left onto a secondary road built to an even higher standard than the national highway.  Fifteen miles on this branch and I arrived at Great Zimbabwe.  From the entrance, I couldn’t see anything except trees, grass, and a barbed-wire fence strung on T-bars.  Sorry, I forgot: there was also an entrance gate of tubular steel, like the simple gates of a thousand Colorado pastures.   

I drove in and ignored the fencing and the gate, which shows how easy it is to not have a clue.  What clue, you ask, and the answer is in a book called The Silence of Great Zimbabwe.  The title is not a throwaway.  The author, an anthropologist named Joost Fontein, writes that villagers told him that Great Zimbabwe “used to have a voice.” More than one voice, actually.  The voices belonged to the villagers’ 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.   Hence the title The Silence of Great Zimbabwe, but why did the voices stop?  Fontein quotes a villager again:  “The ancestors are not fools.”  The meaning is that the ancestors are not about to be treated as if they are somebody’s property, which is what the fence implies.

Nonsense, you say.  Nonsense, I say.  I can be a jerk, too, and say that the ancestors are sulking, but even if I’m polite we’re still back to the Charybdis of prehistoric tunnels.  If I decide to wear my “simple version” T-shirt, I’ll stick with Scylla.  She has her lethal failings, but she’s rational. 

Of course I didn’t say any of this to the young man with necklaces, and I bet that Fontein didn’t say it to the villagers talking about their yakkety-yak ancestors.  We’ve learned to keep quiet, at least while we’re chatting with people who are–what is that powerfully dismissive word?--superstitious.  

The gate was open and led to an empty parking lot.  Several young men were sitting around, waiting for a visitor who wanted a guide.  They were friendly and fluent in English.  I told them I wanted to look around by myself.  You might think they’d dog my heels or insist on accompanying me.  I can think of other countries where that would definitely happen, and it’s not as though there were other visitors.   On my two visits on successive days, I saw only one other visitor plus a class of elementary-school students.  Still, the young men smiled and waved me on.

How they got enough money to get by I don’t know, but having the place to myself was a blessing.  So was the failure in the 1980s of a government proposal to have trolleys whisking visitors around the ruins.  A UNESCO advisor called that proposal “an extremely expensive way of spoiling one of Zimbabwe’s most beautiful assets….,”  but I doubt that his words killed the proposal.  What killed it was the lack of visitors to whisk. 

Three hundred yards in front of me, a granite dome rose two hundred feet.  Chunks of rock had broken off, tumbled down, and left the summit missing a few teeth.  Trees had taken root, too, and the base of the dome was solidly wrapped in forest. 

Early White visitors–the first came about 1870–called this hill the Acropolis.  Archaeologists today are professionally allergic to poetic license and call it the Hill Complex.  There’s something irresistibly attractive about that word.

Some people say that they’ve seen pictures of Great Zimbabwe and wonder what all the fuss is about. I think I understand what they mean, because there’s no spectacle here, nothing like the Eiffel Tower or the Pyramids of Giza.  But spectacular objects, unless they’re natural like Uluru or Yosemite, require the organized labor of hundreds or even thousands of workers, whether chattel slaves or wage slaves.   That’s as true today as it was 5,000 years ago.   

Great Zimbabwe, on the other hand, is the work of a society that was barely civilized.  Depending on your definition, it may not have been civilized at all.  I don’t mean this as a criticism.  I’m thinking of that old French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.  In 1851 he wore out three quills on a sentence declaring that to be governed, which is to say to be part of a civilization, meant–and this is only part of his sentence–to be ”watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded….”  He’s not done, and he ends up with “mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, and dishonoured.”  It’s a fine passage, though a tad intemperate.

Great Zimbabwe is not the product of people whose every move was governed.  I’m not saying that the people who built Great Zimbabwe were a hundred percent free–you know by now that I don’t believe in a hundred percent anything–but every stone at Great Zimbabwe expresses the freedom enjoyed by the people who built the place.  Say hello to Charybdis’s good side.

A path led up to the top of the hill. It was bordered on both sides by walls about six feet high and four feet thick.  I could reach out and touch both walls at the same time.  

That doesn’t sound like freedom, but the walls were built a bit like the walls you sometimes see around pastures in Scotland or New Zealand.  Nothing precise; nothing engineered.  Instead, a core of rubble was faced on both sides with granite blocks roughly the size of a shoebox.  If we had been here 700 years ago, we would have seen masons swinging their one and only tool, a hammer made of diabase.  That’s the British name.  In the U.S. it’s called dolerite.  Either way, it’s harder than granite.  

The shoeboxes fit together tightly but not precisely, and they’ve never been mortared.  That’s good, because mortar left alone for 700 years weathers into gravel and then into sand that invites plants in their own sweet time to dismantle whatever wall they’ve rooted in.  

Near the top of the hill, the path threaded between boulders bigger than elephants.  No walls here, but then I came to two concentric walls around the summit.  Same construction technique, but these walls were 15 feet high and ten feet thick.  I say concentric, but they weren’t circular.  They were irregular, like necklaces tossed on a table.  No surveyors here, no transits or theodolites.

Each wall had a tunnel-like opening, but there were no pine or holes or anything suggesting hinges.  The two entrances had that much in common–no doors, now or ever–but otherwise they came from different planets.  To stick with my Homeric metaphor, one was Scylla and the other was Charybdis.

I mean that the outer entrance had precisely square corners and a lintel made of a single, long, thin, precisely cut rectangular granite block.  Imagine a four-foot-long French-fried potato.  The second or inner-wall entrance had no corners.  Instead, the walls on either side of the entrance curved gently into the tunnel.  Perhaps the radius of curvature was 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 was supported by cylinders of dolerite, the rock used for hammers.  The cylinders were about four feet long, approximately eight inches thick, and dark as old iron.   They weren’t perfectly cylindrical.  Instead, they had been trimmed with an adze, though I have no idea what material the adze was made of. 

I noticed the difference between these two entrances, but I didn’t realize that the outer tunnel was built–amazing I didn’t figure this out–under the direction of St. Claire Wallace,  a British South Africa Company policeman.  His nickname was “Weary” Wallace, which makes sense if I tell you that he was stationed here from 1911 to 1948.  That’s 37 years, if you’re done with mental arithmetic.  

Wallace’s entrance is the work of a skilled mason, which I respect, but comparing it to the inner entrance is like comparing a cell phone to a baby.  That’s a brutal comparison, but Wallace’s wall belongs to Scylla.

John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic who became a social critic, never got to Africa, but he would have loved Great Zimbabwe’s Charydbis.  Think of the second volume of his The Stones of Venice, published in the early 1850s.  In the chapter called “The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin says this:  

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.            

Ruskin in Britain was surrounded, as we generally are in the United States, by Greek work.  By Scylla.  Just think of Masvingo, the town near Great Zimbabwe.  Masvingo means fort, and the town is called that because in the old days it was Fort Victoria. It has gridded streets, angle parking, and buildings whose facades are all squared-up to face the sidewalks.  Measurements galore, straight lines and corners everywhere.  

Again, I’m not saying that Scylla is all bad.  Several Masvingo streets have medians planted to Washingtonia palms.  They’re very nice, just like those croissant back in Harare.  Masvingo once had a live theater, too.  I know this, because I saw dusty old posters advertising a production of “The Odd Couple” and “Come Blow Your Horn.”  Scylla’s not all same-day deliveries from Amazon.

But then, let’s be fair: Charybdis is more than nonsense about prehistoric tunnels and whispering ancestors.  Think of David Douglas Duncan, a photographer who after World War II worked for LIFE magazine. In Yankee Nomad, a memoir published in 1966, he discussed his photograph of a Moroccan potter sitting calmly at his wheel.  The man ignores the camera and with his head slightly tilted contemplates the wet clay turning in his hands.  Duncan writes, “If Rembrandt were only here today to paint what I see, Old Moha would live forever.”  It’s a beautiful photograph, and it belongs to the same world as that inner entrance at Great Zimbabwe.

I’m reminded of a physician I know who in retirement began making bowls out of cedar logs.   He’d probably like Great Zimbabwe.

A couple of weeks ago I spent a couple of hours with a student I last saw more than 50 years ago.  He was retired now, bald, gray, and nursing a new hip, but he had enjoyed a career as a wildlife biologist.  Retired, he was working voluntarily to secure conservation easements on the island where he lived, but what amazed me was his house.  Apart from the bathroom on one side, it was all one room, perhaps 30 feet square.  The roof was flat but slightly inclined and rising to the kitchen side.  The interior was lit by a central skylight, but the only other straight line I saw was the stovepipe, because the roof rested on debarked logs resting on bigger logs supported by two immense and debarked tree trunks.  The house had thick wooden doors that must have weighed over a hundred pounds each.  They were rounded at the top and worthy of inspection, but they were upstaged on the low side of the house by a window framed by a single piece of driftwood like a droopy eyelid.  I teased him about his computer and internet connection, but as a woman once said to me in a Transylvanian village, “you can’t live without the internet today.”  Scylla had intruded into his Charybdis.