Episode 8 (Zimbabwe, Part 4 of 4)

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

Transcript

                                 Episode 8 

                        (Zimbabwe, Part 4 of 4)

From the top of the hill at Great Zimbabwe, I looked south a few hundred yards over an emerald meadow toward Great Zimbabwe’s biggest structure.  It’s a roughly circular wall with a circumference of about 800 feet.  It used to be called the Elliptical Temple.  Today it’s called the Great Enclosure, which isn’t much of an improvement.  

I walked over but did not go straight inside.  Instead, I circumambulated the thing the way Buddhists circle  statues of you-know-who.  I did it because while I can condemn Charybdis, she also offers what I want.  

The wall around the Great Enclosure is about 30 feet high.  Call it a wall of shoeboxes stacked 50 high.  I should add that the people who put the wall together did cheat a bit, because in addition to hammers they used plumb bobs to keep the rows level.  

Despite the collapse of one section, the wall has held together very well, partly because of the lack of mortar and partly because when Europeans first saw Great Zimbabwe the walls were covered with stabilizing blankets of thorns.  At some point–I don’t know when–the thorns were cleared away, leaving the walls newly vulnerable to collapse but also shining as brightly as John Muir’s Range of Light.  

The wall wouldn’t be beautiful if the blocks had been machined to an identical standard.  Exhibit A is the copies I saw of the Round Tower, the chief relic surviving within the Enclosure.  I saw one of these copies at a Masvingo gas station and another at a Masvingo funeral home.  They looked cheap because they were made of standard blocks without a hint of improvisation.  They were as dead as the walls of a Victorian prison.  

If you think of the Great Enclosure wall as a clock face, there’s an entrance just after noon, another at two o’clock, and a third at about 10.  The path from the parking lot leads to the 10 o’clock entrance.  It’s perfectly square. Again, I failed to realize what this meant.  I thought the entrance looked fine, but fine isn’t the same as beautiful, and eventually I learned that this entrance was built in the 1990s and replaced an earlier modern entrance that had collapsed.

The old entrances are the ones near noon and two.  They have no corners and no hinges.  They also have no roofs.  They are merely gaps in the wall, though the ends of the walls are rounded like whales stood upright.  

The entrance at noon is level, and you can just walk in, but the entrance at two includes eight steps up.  There’s a four-foot gap between the walls, and the steps could be simple straight steps connecting the two walls, but Great Zimbabwe doesn’t do straight.  Each step curves inward, with a little more curvature with each riser.  Each riser is also a tread, one shoebox up from the last and each step merging neatly at its ends into the walls. 

I think of a Western Sudanese drum I have, a baobab log with cattle hide stretched tightly across both the top and bottom. No calculations, just your eye and your hand.  Here it is again, the beauty of Charybdis.  It’s a point in favor of homemade bread kneaded without a machine.

The interior of the enclosure has been well and truly dug up by people looking for treasure.  (They’ve been disappointed to find nothing more than bits of Chinese pottery and a few coins that got to Great Zimbabwe through the port of Sofala, near modern Beira.  In exchange, Great Zimbabwe offered gold. When the gold petered out about 1500, so did Great Zimbabwe.) 

Across this jumbly surface, the most striking object visible from the top of the stairs is a wall just to the left.  It’s parallel to the outer wall but not so tall, and it creates a path about four feet wide and perhaps forty feet long leading to the Round Tower.  

Don’t expect Trajan’s Column or Delhi’s Qutb Minar.  The Round Tower is a  measly 20 feet high, 18 feet in diameter, and cased all round with shoeboxes.   (Don’t ask me where they were quarried.  I don’t know.)  

The tower stands under a high canopy of trees, which means that if you’re outside the enclosure, it’s easy to spot the tower’s approximate location.  You can also do it by walking around the wall and looking for a spot at about five o’clock where the top few rows of shoeboxes are replaced by two rows of chevrons.  I have no idea why they’re there, but then I have no idea why the Round Tower was built or, for that matter, why the Great Enclosure was built.

Nobody else knows either, but that hasn’t stopped speculation.  The first White man to see Great Zimbabwe and write about it was an ambitious young German explorer, Karl Mauch, who arrived at Great Zimbabwe in 1871, cursed the thorns, and wrote that the Round Tower was a tombstone.   Fair enough.   The first  archaeologist to work at the site, David Randall-MacIver, came about 30 years later and thought the tower was a flag marking a ruler’s residence.  That’s fair enough, too.   My favorite interpretation comes from Cecil Rhodes, who came by in a group.  Nearby villagers were told that the White men were interested in seeing the phallus.  I blush.

Whatever the Round Tower was for, until the 1930s there seems to have been unanimous agreement that Great Zimbabwe had been built by White men.  David Christiaan de Waal, who travelled with Rhodes, 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, who in real life was mayor of Cape Town, was, he wrote, “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.”  

Without bothering to visit, Rider Haggard picked up the theme and wrote the very popular novel King Solomon’s Mines, which eventually became a movie.  In 1950, it became  another movie, this one with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr.  I vaguely remember it scaring me, even though the scary bit, with Granger and Kerr trapped in a cave, was filmed in New Mexico.  

In 1930 Gertrude Caton-Thompson, an English archaeologist, decided to make sure there wasn’t anything underneath the Round Tower, so she hired a mining engineer to help her tunnel underneath it.   The tower survived, and Caton-Thompson wrote, quote, “The sum total of this laborious work was four objects of no dating value….  Our toil also contributed nothing to the Tower’s significance.”  

The point she made most insistently was that Great Zimbabwe was not the work of White men.  As she wrote,

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.

No dice.   The government of Southern Rhodesia refused to accept this conclusion.  Peter Garlake, Southern Rhodesia’s Inspector of Monuments, grew so frustrated by the government’s intransigence that in 1970 he quit and moved to Nigeria.  I suspect that if Whites still ruled Southern Africa the governments there would still be hewing to the Whites Built It line.  

It’s crazy.  When Europeans from South Africa settled in Salisbury, after all, they laid out gridded streets and built shops and homes that looked like what they knew.  They built Scylla stuff.  That’s what White settlers did in Africa or the Americas or Australia.  If White men had built Great Zimbabwe, it would have looked like Jerusalem or Lebanon’s Byblos or Yemen’s Ma’rib.  It would at least have been built to a measured plan and with stone blocks or clay bricks of a standard size.  It would have been Greek work. Scylla stuff.

But if it’s crazy, it’s also strategically logical, because if the Whites of Rhodesia had admitted that Blacks had built Great Zimbabwe, Blacks would get the idea that they could manage perfectly well by themselves, without the firm hand of Whites.  I can see how Rhodesians would have moved heaven and earth to hold the line against such a dangerous idea.

At the same time, I think there’s something else going on.  Remember the emerald-green meadow between the Hill Complex and the Great Enclosure?  When I first saw it, I thought it was beautiful, but it never occurred to me that I had seen no other such meadow anywhere else on the drive from Harare.  Then I found out that, until life in Rhodesia became dangerous in the 1970s, the meadow had been–wait for it–a golf course.  When the golf course was abandoned at the height of the civil war, the grass continued to grow, irrigated with water from a creek ponded about a mile to the east.  

Now I have no problem with a beautiful meadow, but I have a big problem with building a golf course in the middle of the most impressive archaeological monument in Sub-Saharan Africa.   I wouldn’t play golf here even if the course was freshly mown–and even if I played golf, which I don’t.  But how could the Whites in the days of Rhodesia been so barbaric that they would choose to make Great Zimbabwe a playground?  It’s not a unique situation.  Think again of John Muir, this time cursing the City of San Francisco for desecrating Yosemite by building a dam in the nearby Hetch Hetchy Valley.   These people weren’t stupid in any normal sense of the word, yet they were stuck in that old keep-it-simple T-shirt.  Ulysses steered between Scylla and Charybdis.  The Rhodesians didn’t.  The builders of Hetch Hetchy didn’t.  I wish I could say that today we are at least as clever as Ulysses.