Zimbabwe Revisited

For a transcript, see https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784

For photos, see greatmirror.com

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About a month ago I flew to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city.  Getting there, I had flight connections in Dallas, London, and Johannesburg, and I thought it would be smart to rest a day in Bulawayo before heading out to my destination, but one of my flights got messed up and I was delayed, so I forgot about being tired, rented a car at the airport, and started driving.  The surrounding terrain was unfenced, flat, and empty except for Africa’s seemingly infinite supply of thorn scrub.  I make it sound boring, but after so many hours in airports and airplanes I felt as though I could breathe again.  I think of Josiah Gregg, who left Boston in the 1820s and spent several years on the Santa Fe Trail.  Afterwards, he wrote a successful book about his time there, but the book ends with him saying that he now feels utterly unsuited to urban life.  Or I think of the young John Muir arriving in California and walking to the Sierra Nevada across the carpet of wildflowers that then covered the San Joaquin Valley.   Both men were in a world without barbed wire, that most useful of wretched inventions.  If it could speak, barbed wire would say, “Stop Your Damned Breathing.” 

It’s not as though Zimbabwe doesn’t have barbed wire: the settlers who came in the wake of Cecil Rhodes used spools and spools of the stuff, most of it now thoroughly rusted.  Still, the road leaving the airport was unfenced, and so is most of the country.  This is a major point in Zimbabwe’s favor, and it’s not the only one.  I know, when I say that there are good things about Zimbabwe people think I’m either crazy or joking.  For this, we can blame news coverage, which consistently puts Zimbabwe in the hellhole box.  Once a country gets there, it’s stuck, a lot like college rankings.

In an earlier episode I said that Great Zimbabwe was the grandest of the many ruins that survive from Zimbabwe’s pre-European past.  In that earlier episode I even mentioned one of these other settlements by name.  It was Naletale, or Nanatale, in the 1600s a royal precinct about a hundred miles west of the by-then senescent Great Zimbabwe.  Naletale is still enclosed by a stone wall atop a smooth granite dome that rises several hundred feet above the surrounding plain.  Location, location, location. The wall is mostly about 10 feet high, so don’t expect another mighty Babylon, but near the main entrance the wall is ornamented by layers of stone laid in patterns, including herringbones and checkerboards.  Why it’s trimmed that way is anybody’s guess.

I had come to Zimbabwe because I liked Great Zimbabwe so much that I wanted to see some of its successors.  They have been studied periodically since about 1900, when the acre or so within Naletale’s wall was studied—I mean riddled with trenches— by a British-turned-American archaeologist named David Randall-MacIver.   I respect professional expertise, but Randall-MacIver’s trenches are exactly where he left them.  This means that Naletale within its fine wall is  basically a construction site.  Not that visitors complain.  There are lots of reasons for this, but one is that there are very few visitors.  There are lots of reasons for this, too, but one of them is atrocious roads.  Getting back and forth to Naletale, twice, my poor rented Kia lost its front license plate and one of its skid plates or lower engine covers.  The radiator somehow broke loose, too, and was hanging by its hoses.  Fortunately for me, the car kept going.  I was also lucky that Naletale’s custodian let me wander around by myself.  There’s nothing like a tour guide to distract you from whatever it was you came to see. 

I also wanted to visit a zimbabwe called Dhlo-Dhlo. It’s only 15 road miles from Naletale, but I say “only” as a joke, because nobody can drive those 15 miles in less than an hour, and that’s assuming you show your car no mercy.  Randall-MacIver didn’t have that problem.  He wrote with a straight face that Dhlo-Dhlo was easily reached by a 16-mile walk from the nearest train station.  I’m sure he didn’t mean to be funny, but I smile because British writers from T.E. Lawrence to Peter Fleming to Rory Stewart love to portray arduous journeys as walks in the park.   Randall-MacIver dug trenches at Dhlo-Dhlo, too, though the place had already been wrecked by the Matabele, who after 1800 invaded and took over what is now the western half of Zimbabwe.  

To get to either of these ruins, you go as I did that first day, about sixty miles east of Bulawayo on a good two-lane paved highway.  It’s a toll road.  Two dollars later–that’s U.S. dollars, please–and at a wretched hamlet called Shangani, you bid farewell to asphalt and start testing your dental fillings.  If this seems unwise, you can instead visit a third zimbabwe, the Khami Ruins, which are only a half hour drive west of Bulawayo.  Perhaps because they are relatively easy to reach, with only a few miles of broken asphalt and another mile or two of dirt, the Khami Ruins have been elevated to World Heritage status.  Still, they have almost no visitors.  Well, Zimbabwe has almost no visitors.  We’re back to its reputation, which genuinely perplexes Zimbabweans, who fail to understand why travel agents don’t even bother suggesting vacations in Zimbabwe. 

I admit that the negative coverage isn’t false.  You could even write a confirming story about a tourist sent to Naletale, Dhlo-Dhlo, and the Khami Ruins.  The tourist would return home and say that the custodians at each place asked for ten U.S. cash dollars and were meticulous in handing out printed tickets but had no idea where the money went.  It certainly didn’t seem to be invested in maintaining the ruins or their visitor facilities.

One of the custodians, in a pleasant conversation, told the tourist that he himself was a college graduate and one of the lucky ten of his hundred classmates who had found a job.  Most of his fellows either emigrated, if they could, or stayed at home and did nothing, or loitered on the downtown streets of Bulawayo or of the capital, Harare, or of smaller towns like the intervening Gweru.  It’s true: all these places are crowded with people who aren’t going anywhere.  You can take that both figuratively and literally.  Some of these people try to sell stuff, but most just while away the hours.  Others somehow find themselves loitering at rest stops along the toll road.  These places offer nothing except a pull-out and an overflowing trash barrel, but I usually saw one or two men sitting on the ground.  I have no idea how they got to these places or how they would eventually leave.  

The consensus in 2022 seemed to be that things were no better now than they had been under the Mugabe government, which had been naively and hopefully overthrown in 2018.  As for the three zimbabwes, if someone were to ask me what I think about them, I’d say they were “interesting.”  If someone were to insist that I stop hiding behind that most noncommittal of words, I’d say that I found the zimbabwes discomfiting and discouraging.  

Well, nobody uses the word discomfiting anymore, so let’s take it first.  The Khami Ruins date from the 1500s, a little later than Great Zimbabwe and a little earlier than Naletale and Dhlo-Dhlo.   A few minutes after parking my car in a sort of parking lot–just stop where you like–I found myself at the toe of a very steep hill armored on its far side by a stack of half a dozen stone terraces, each about two meters high.  Wow, I thought.  That’s an exact quote.  I climbed up the rough stairs at one side of the terraces to share the view a king had of the surrounding plains until the Portuguese put an end to the kingdom.  (The Portuguese, by the way, left behind a handsome cross pattee carved into the granite bedrock at the top of another hill fifty yards away.  Why they chose that hill and not the king’s, I have no idea.)

Then I discovered to my disappointment that the terraces that so wowed me were built in the 1990s to replace the rubble of the original terraces.  Well, I know that Rome’s Temple of Vesta collapsed in the 8th century and was reconstructed only in the last century.  I know that something comparable happened to the Parthenon.  I even know that the Ming Tombs outside Beijing—or at least the tomb that tourists visit—have been rebuilt.  

Still, here at the Khami Ruins I felt cheated.  You can say that it makes no difference whether the stones of a wall were placed five hundred years or twenty years ago, so long as they’re placed the right way, but you’re wrong.  The Ming tombs that have been left to fall apart radiate an authority utterly absent from the tomb that has been immaculately restored for tourists.  I can’t explain why this is so, except that the rotting tombs are the real deal, while the reconstructed one isn’t.  I remember the difference on the ground, with the rotting tombs seeming to have intangible threads radiating outwards and linking them to the farthest reaches of China.  I don’t know where feelings like that come from, unless in some sense the threads actually exist.  That sounds weird, but it’s not much weirder than believing, as I do, that monumental art should be left where it was created, not chopped up and carted off to a fine museum in London.  

I still haven’t gotten to the discomfiting bit, but here it is.  The descendants of the people who built Zimbabwe’s zimbabwes are still living in the neighborhood, and they say that these places were intended to disintegrate, along with the bones of the ancestors buried in them.  Now you see the problem: perhaps there’s nothing wrong with rebuilding the Temple of Vesta, but the zimbabwe reconstructions undertaken for the sake of foreigners are desecrations in the eyes of locals.  

And it’s not just the Khami Ruins that have been thoughtlessly restored for the sake of visitors.  Dhlo-Dhlo presents a triple-tiered-terrace fronting what the experts call a platform from which a king or his orator might address a crowd below.  The Dhlo-Dhlo custodian when I came by had been at the site long enough to be proud of having been on the crew that rebuilt the terraces.  Americans have been involved in this work too, at least indirectly, because the American embassy in Harare paid for the reconstruction of the ornamented part of the wall around Naletale.  

The descendants of the people who built these places aren’t happy, but their views don’t matter.  To visit the Khami Ruins, for example, I stayed at Bulawayo’s very nice Holiday Inn.  My room had a balcony overlooking a garden with a palm rustling just outside.  I have no idea who owns the hotel, but I’ll bet that the owners have no patience with anyone opposed to reconstruction. 

My discomfort peaked at a fourth ruin, one just across the South African border at a place called Mapungubwe.  UNESCO, which has put it, too, on the World Heritage list, classifies Mapungubwe as a “cultural landscape.” This is technically accurate, but it’s extremely misleading for anyone who expects to see something.  A sandstone plateau here breaks off in dramatic crags as it drops to the Limpopo River, and among the crags there’s a spectacular mesa, which, with a compulsory guide, you can climb, but up top the guide will point to a sandy spot that he says was once the floor of a vanished building.  He will also point vaguely to a few other spots that he says are graves.  There’s also an excavated midden down at the foot of the mesa.  That’s it.  That’s all you’re going to see. You’re not allowed to wander on your own, and the tours stick to the western edge of the mesa.

Now it’s true that archaeologists since the 1930s have taken lots of stuff from the graves and the midden.  That stuff is now mostly in a museum at the University of Pretoria, and it has been written up in at least two heavy volumes supporting the thesis that Mapungubwe was the first state in subsaharan Africa, earlier even than Great Zimbabwe.  That’s a big deal, but it doesn’t make for a great field trip.  

And here’s the discomfiting bit.  The guide I was with mentioned a young woman, a relative of his, who had graduated from college but not found work.  (Yes, unemployment’s a problem here, too.)  She wanted to come to Mapungubwe to pray for help from her ancestors.  The guide said she’d be allowed to do this, but he added that he doubted that her prayers would work.  I think he was sincere, but I also think that his answer was tailored to his audience, which consisted of me and three generations of one Belgian family.  I pushed a bit and asked whether our presence defiled the place.  The guide shook his head and said no, but I didn’t believe him.  I still don’t.  I think he was mostly just being tactful.  

I said earlier that these places were not only discomfiting but discouraging.  Here’s what I meant.  Great Zimbabwe was built by artists whose every stone was as wild as Africa and whose work was at least in part dedicated to some sacred purpose, now forgotten.  The whole place was fundamentally two large enclosures, wrapped by massive walls with openings that never had doors.  It does seem that the builders wished to create a place where one could feel secure, but not secure in the way I feel secure when I lock and bolt my front door.  I mean secure in the sense of being aware of your existence.  

This is a difficult idea for anyone who grew up in Dwight Eisenhower’s America.  It would be difficult, too, for the general who a few years later took charge at West Point and explained he didn’t have time for cadets looking for the meaning of life.  The general would have had no time for Great Zimbabwe, either, but he would have had no trouble at all with the later zimbabwes.  After all, Dhlo-Dhlo and the Khami Ruins provided a king with a platform from which to address his people.  Think of the British royal family waving from the balcony at Buckingham Palace.  Think of Tian an Men.  Think of the Kremlin.  

These places are inordinately popular with tourists taking selfies, but tourists who think that these are nice places are not really thinking at all.  Years ago I took my younger daughter to Beijing’s imperial palace.  She was about 10, and sitting in one of those immense courtyards, she had the instinctive sense to dislike the place.  She knew intuitively that it was built to make people feel small, to slot them by the hundreds or maybe thousands into a colossal social hierarchy, a kind of machine.  Smart girl, I thought.

So it is with the terraces at the Khami Ruins and Dhlo-Dhlo.  I can't help wondering if the Portuguese had something to do with this tremendous shift from Great Zimbabwe, but the transition itself, taken by itself, could hardly be more discouraging.  Great Zimbabwe teaches something I want to know more than almost anything else, while the later zimbabwes remind me of what I already know too well.  I can even imagine Leona Helmsley standing up there at the top of the terraces and looking down on all the little people.

All this said, I came away from Zimbabwe smiling, and I’m still smiling.  This has nothing to do with zimbabwes or with the country’s dismal economic prospects.  It’s because the people, though trapped in a swamp full of crocodiles, are not Leona’s little people.  If they derived their sense of themselves from their personal wealth or their political clout–if, in other words, their happiness depended on their position in the social hierarchy of the nation–they’d be miserable, but they don’t do that.  They don’t rank themselves by their wealth or their status, and the result is that they are far happier than Leona would think they have any right to be.  

In conversation a few days later with South Africans, I would say hesitantly that I had just been in Zimbabwe and that I thought people there were happier than here in South Africa.  The person I was talking to would unreservedly agree.  This surprised me.  I would say now that Zimbabweans are happier even than Americans, though most Americans would laugh at this idea.  That’s because Americans believe–they would say they _know_–that they are happier than Zimbabweans because they are richer than Zimbabweans.  Welcome to the first and foremost self-evident truth in consumer societies.  

God knows, Zimbabwe isn’t a consumer society.  It’s hard for Americans to imagine any other kind, unless they’re thinking of medieval villages, but I remember getting stopped at a police roadblock near Gweru.  I have no idea what the police were looking for, but the officer in charge was a woman.  She noticed that I was missing my front license plate.  She also noticed that it was sitting on the seat next to me. She said I was lucky.  Then she said, “You can go.”  As she said it, she  flashed a smile so warm and so kind that I stared at her.  

Over the next few days I mentioned this to several people.  They were all astonished when I told them with shame that no police officer in the United States would ever smile so genuinely.  This police officer was smiling as though we were two human beings meeting for an instant.  I still can hardly believe it.

High in the Matopo Hills, an hour south of Bulawayo, I talked about this with an attorney who happened to be visiting from Harare.   He explained that Zimbabweans are raised not by a nuclear family (or by a broken nuclear family) but by a community.  For example, he said children address all their uncles and aunts as mother and father, and each of these people shares equally in parental responsibilities.  
 
 

This, the attorney said, was the opposite of American society, where, instead of being embedded in a large and supportive community, children learn that life is a competition and that they must fight to be the best in a contest whose outcome is ultimately measured by money.  This was a fine way to speed a society along the path of material progress, but it was a terrible way to make human beings happy.  I basically agreed with him.  I said that everyone in America knows that “money can’t buy you happiness,” but they don’t believe it.  They do really believe that someone with two million dollars is or should be happier than somebody with one million dollars.  I was living proof, because although I agreed with what he was saying I had no intention of giving him the deed to my house.  I think now that most Americans only come to question their belief in life as a competition if they get a glimpse of the Grim Reaper, who is an outstandingly good teacher. 

Of course the attorney’s quick lesson in Zimbabwean kinship systems may have been exaggerated or may not be applicable to all of Zimbabwe’s ethnic groups.  Besides, I have my own pet theory about why Zimbabweans are happy.  Every avid gardener knows where I’m going with this.  So does every passionate fisherman.   I mean that the Greeks were onto something with the story of Antaeus.  Even if you’re dead broke, with no prospects for advancement, proximity to the earth imparts strength, makes you secure, provides a footing, and Zimbabweans are much closer to the earth than Americans.  I think of Nirad Chaudhuri, who remembered how good it had felt to walk barefoot in the dusty roads of Kishorganj, his Bengali hometown.  

I know, you’re wondering how the stock market did today.  That’s all right; you can’t help it, but I was thinking about the Antaeus story  the day I went to the Matopos Hills.  I was standing at the top of a granite dome, and I was next to the grave of Cecil Rhodes which was somehow excavated in this solid rock, then covered with an austere, coffin-sized plate of bronze, a quarter inch thick and surrounded by a half-dozen boulders big as elephants.  Amazingly, the plate has none of the defacings one would find in South Africa or the UK.   

Rhodes called this place World View, and the name has stuck.  He may have simply meant that the panoramic view was tremendous, but in his will he stipulated that he wanted to be buried here.  Again, he may simply have wanted to have a permanently good view, but I think he may also have found himself dreaming here about all the things he could do with Africa, and he may have thought it would be fun to be buried here so he could dream of those things forever.

It’s like moving into a new house.  It’s nice, we say, and then we think, "oh, the sofa would go well here, and the breakfront could go over there.”  It’s the same with Rhodes, who of course founded DeBeers, which for a century had a near monopoly in the world’s diamond industry.  The company recently opened the Venetia Mine, which is now its biggest source of diamonds.  Call it a really big sofa.   I imagine Rhodes saying to his company’s directors, “Good show.”  The mine, by the way, is only a few miles from Mapungubwe, and it gets its electrical power from high-tension lines strung on pylons passing by the base of the mesa.  Now there’s a cultural landscape for you. 

I like mines as well as the next guy: the huge pits are a lot more interesting than miles and miles of thorn scrub, but then I see John Muir walking through his wildflowers.  I see David Brower of the Sierra Club fighting to let the Colorado River flow naturally.  Up pops Henry David Thoreau with his "in wildness is the preservation of the world."  I take those odd words to mean very literally that with the disappearance of wildness the world is replaced by an engineered object. 

Lots of people think that the engineered object is a big improvement.  Just listen to a congressman saying that we should open the public lands to multiple-use.  That’s code language for mining the hell out of it.  Africa has idiots, too.  A good early example comes from Kruger National Park, which, for political reasons, was named for Paul Kruger, a Boer leader who thought that the only thing Africa’s wildlife was good for was making biltong, or what Americans call jerky.  

Most comfortably well-off people today, wherever they live and whether they vote liberal or conservative, are not quite that narrow.  They say–we say–that we can have our cake and eat it too, like driving a recreational vehicle to some national park and finding air-conditioned comfort in the wilderness.  I don’t have a recreational vehicle, but I do fly around the world, and some hours later, if I have the opportunity, I turn off the car’s engine so I can enjoy the sight and the sound of giraffes nibbling acacia leaves.  That actually happened between Naletale and Dhlo-Dhlo.

         Mapungubwe, too, has wonderful examples of both having our cake and eating it.  I’m thinking of the Maloutswa Hide, about 30 miles west of the archaeological site.  There’s a securely fenced parking area here.  Animals are excluded by electrified wires not only on top of the fence but on what looks like a cattle guard at the entrance. Then there is a long corridor, opaquely fenced on both sides for perhaps a hundred meters.  The corridor ends at the “hide,” a small building, sturdy, with large openings where there would normally be windows.  

I hadn’t seen anybody since I had entered the park half an hour earlier, and there wasn’t anybody else here at the hide.  I had zero expectations, so imagine my surprise at getting to the hide and seeing 30 elephants, some within five feet of me, others perhaps 50 feet away and bathing in mud pools or trying to get their babies to jump in.  One mother kept approaching the hide, raising her trunk and I am sure smelling a human. It made me slightly nervous.

Can I legitimately call this a wilderness experience?  In addition to the electric fencing, I’m watching elephants attracted to this spot by a  two-inch pipe gushing water next to the hide.  The water comes from a tank in the parking area, and I suppose the tank is filled with water pumped from the nearby Limpopo.  It was fascinating to watch an elephant come up, delicately wrap the tip of its trunk around the mouth of the pipe, suck a gallon or two, then raise its trunk and empty the water into its mouth.  What water the elephants didn’t drink filled the chain of conveniently replenished mud pools.

Perhaps I should scold the South African park service for letting me eat this cake, but if it weren’t for the pipe, the elephants would be down at the river and much harder to see.  I could walk down there to find them, but that could be dangerous.  I know, because I tried this outside the park at a nearby border crossing called Pont Drift.  The border guard there said I was welcome to walk down to the bridge to Botswana, but he warned me that I might have to run for my life, because in the brush fringing the road there was at this moment a solitary elephant.  He wasn’t sure where.  I told him I’d take my chances, but when I started walking someone else called out and told me not to be stupid.  I know I can’t outrun an elephant, and I recall a White hunter in Kenya who failed to come home.  Some days later, there was a knock at the door.  His wife opened it to see someone holding her husband’s bloody shirt with a three-inch-diameter hole in the chest.

It’s pesky, this business of improving nature.  I remember as a boy looking forward to the nightly firefall at Yosemite.  Somebody with a rake shoved embers off the top of Glacier Point to create an orange river that flowed for about half a minute like the valley’s famous waterfalls.  Purists managed to get rid of it, and I haven’t quite forgiven them.  It will be the same with the Maloutswa Hide, if some other purists succeed in turning the water off.

         Mapungubwe offers an even better example of having and eating our cake, because the western boundary of the park is a dead-straight, barbed-wire fence.   I hadn’t quite appreciated how flat the land here was until I saw it smooth as a floor outside the park fence. It had recently been cleared of thorn scrub in preparation for farming, and I could guess what was coming, because a hundred meters or so from the fence I saw the edge of hundreds of acres of orange groves as perfectly engineered as anything in California or Florida.  For technical reasons these oranges weren’t allowed to enter the United States, but they did go to Canada and Europe.  Nearby there were also huge fields of tomatoes and maize, all irrigated with water pumped from the nearby Limpopo.  You can see Rhodes nodding in satisfaction from up there at World View.

I met a farmer unhappy about skyrocketing prices for fertilizer.  He also had nothing good to say about elephants, who laughed at his barbed wire.  He said he even had a video of one angry bull elephant destroying the electric fence he had put up around his tomatoes.  But there you go: despite the farmer’s frustrations, we consumers can have our cake and eat it too.  We don’t have to choose between Henry Thoreau and Cecil Rhodes: we can enjoy both elephants and oranges, provided of course that we don’t blow up the planet or cook ourselves to death.   

I like being able to have my cake and eat it too.  Who wouldn’t?  But there is a snag.  I’m thinking of that police officer again and wondering why the people in my hometown don’t smile like that.  I fear I know the answer.  I’m reminded of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the aviator’s wife, who once went next door to borrow a cup of sugar from her neighbor, who happened to be J.P Morgan.  They had never met, and Morgan  himself opened the door. Lindbergh would later write that this titan of titans struck her as terrifically lonely.   Perhaps she just caught him at an off moment, but how many off moments do you think the great man had?  If Morgan was anything like the titans of our time, or anything like anyone scrambling to be a titan, I think the answer is a lot of them.  And what about his “on” moments?  How many of them do you think he had? I’m betting he had fewer than hat police officer who smiled at me.  I mean, how often do you think J.P. Morgan really smiled?