Scylla, Meet Charybdis (Zimbabwe 1)

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                                             Scylla, Meet Charybdis (Zimbabwe)

If you must, go ahead and call me a pack rat, but I have a copy of The Official Airline Guide for May, 1999.  It shows that Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, had nonstop flights–I can hardly believe this–to London, Paris, Frankfurt, Vienna, Amsterdam—even, wait for it, Sydney.  Talk about a different world.  

I arrived almost 20 years later.  BA had abandoned the country.  So had Lufthansa, Austrian, KLM, and Qantas. Zimbabwe had one and only one flight out of Africa.  Guess.  OK, I’ll tell you: Emirates to Dubai.    

I came in on a short-haul from Johannesburg.  To my surprise the Robert F. Mugabe Airport—formerly Harare Airport and, earlier still, Salisbury Airport—was immaculate.  There were no long immigration or customs lines, and nobody even hinted at a bribe.  I got a rental car and some cash from an ATM.  The fifteen-minute drive into town was fine, and so was the hotel—an older, two-story place built around a well-kept garden.  The next morning, without my asking, a waiter brought excellent croissants, still hot on the baking sheet.  It was one of those moments to remember The French Revolution.

A few months earlier, Robert Mugabe had been driven from office by a smiling henchman.  People were still hoping that the new man would not live up to his nickname, the Crocodile, and while I was there, people seemed willing to believe that things might get better, not just for a few but to some degree for everyone.

I can imagine a conversation in the hotel garden.  “First, we have to root out corruption and abuses in the security forces.  Then we have to restore and stabilize the currency.  Once we’ve done those things, we can invest in public health and education.  We don’t have any money, but we can get funding from international aid agencies once they recognize our integrity.  With their help we’ll stabilize the power and water supply.  We’ll work on sanitation and roads.  Then private investors will come.  The old cut-and-sew factories are still there, idle in Bulawayo.  They will reopen, but our young people have strong English-language skills.  That fluency will attract call centers and then engineering centers.”

I know: it sounds like an absurd fantasy–you’re going to ask me next about when I think Israel and Hamas will become the best of friends–but a comparable program had actually been executed shortly after 1889.  That’s when the British South Africa Company arrived and established its control over Rhodesia, named in deference to Cecil John Rhodes of South African diamonds fame.  The British South Africa Company remained in charge of Rhodesia until 1923, when the part of Rhodesia south of the Zambezi River became a self-governing crown colony.   I put self-governed in scare quotes, because Southern Rhodesia was “self-governed” by and for Whites.  They were outnumbered fifteen-to-one, primarily by the Shona and Matabele.  Every now and then, the troublesome Anglican minister Arthur Shearly Cripps would speak up from his remote mission station to say that Africa belonged to the Africans, but he was dismissed as a crank.   

A capital city was established in 1890 and named Salisbury after Britain’s prime minister of the day.  As late as 1963 The Columbia Encyclopedia called Salisbury, quote, “one of Africa’s most modern towns.”  It was also one of Africa’s Whitest.  Blacks were not even allowed to live in town unless they occupied servant’s quarters.  Otherwise, they left at night for adjacent Harare.  Here’s the most revealing bit: the census of 1921 counted 5,700 Whites in Salisbury and didn’t bother to count the Blacks in Harare.

One major street in Salisbury was predictably called Rhodes Avenue, in honor of Cecil.  Parallel streets were named for lesser stars of the pantheon: Jameson, Baker, Gordon, Speke.  Buildings along these streets had, and mostly still have, stone facades fitted with the curved and recurved gables characteristic of Cape Dutch architecture.  It’s no mystery: Salisbury’s first settlers came from South Africa, and, like people everywhere, they built what they knew.  I’m reminded of a group of suburban American houses I saw a few years ago in the modest capital of the Federated States of Micronesia.  “Must be housing for the American Embassy staff,” I said to myself.  Score one point. 

Iron verandas began to appear in Salisbury in 1899.  That date is firm because the verandas came from MacFarlane’s, a firm in Glasgow, and they could not have been imported at a reasonable cost until Salisbury was linked to the outside world by rail.  That happened in 1899 with the opening of a line from Beira, a bit shy of 300 miles away, on the coast of Mozambique.  The cost of shipping a ton of freight from London plummeted from forty pounds to two pounds.

An impressive hotel was built by two recent arrivals, the Meikle brothers.  The façade was trimmed with iron from MacFarlane’s, whose foundry was all of fifteen miles from the Meikle brothers’ hometown, Strathaven.  In 1958 a modernist block of a dozen stories replaced the old hotel, but the new hotel was still called Meikles. 

Colonial Salisbury had stylish shops, too, most prominently a Meikles department store.  It also had a cathedral, completed to a design by no less than Herbert Baker, famous from his work in Pretoria and New Delhi.  Still farther north, Dutch-themed bungalows lined wide and quiet residential streets of the kind that estate agencies would describe as “gracious.”  

A wave of British immigrants arrived after World War II and, far from affluent, moved into low-rise apartment buildings with names that spoke either of nostalgia for Britain or pride in Rhodesia: Chiltern Court, for example, or Rhodes Mansions.  That pride survived into the 1970s, when the Rhodesian government built the twenty-story Earl Grey Building to house government offices.  Earl Grey–he was the fourth Earl Grey–had been a chairman of the British South Africa Company.  Later, he became governor-general of Canada, whence the Grey Cup.

A well-grounded fear of Black suffrage persuaded the government in 1965 to declare unilateral independence from Britain.  Fifteen bloody years later, the Whites gave up, and the reign of Robert Mugabe began.  Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.  The Earl Grey Building became the Mukwati Building, named for a martyr in a failed uprising against Earl Grey’s company.   Rhodes Avenue became Herbert Chitepo Avenue, named after another martyr, one who had been Rhodesia’s first Black barrister and who died in a car bomb explosion.  Manica Road, named for the town in Mozambique to which it leads, became Robert Mugabe Road.   Jameson Avenue, named for an acolyte of Rhodes, became Samora Machel Avenue to thank the Mozambican president who had supported Mugabe in his years of struggle.  

Along that street, the city in 1997 got its tallest building, the twenty-eight-story reserve bank tower.  A decade later, that bank would oversee the hyperinflation that would destroy the Zimbabwe dollar, replaced in 2009 by the U.S. dollar.  American currency was still in use in 2018.   I picked up a few dust-impregnated American bills that had passed through so many hands that the paper felt like an old T-shirt.  

I bought a few demonetized hundred-thousand-dollar bills.  They’re nothing to brag about: collectors are after the hundred-trillion-dollar bills.  They all look and feel like Monopoly money.  

That’s about what they were worth in 2008, when a loaf of bread cost ten million of them. The reverse sides of my bills have no words or numbers and are oddly blank except for a picture of Victoria Falls, the country’s most famous natural feature.  I look at the picture and imagine Zimbabwe falling off a cliff.  The collapse was all the more devastating to anyone who recalled the words of the president of Tanzania at the ceremony marking Zimbabwe’s independence.  It may be apocryphal, but Julius Nyerere is said to have said that Robert Mugabe had inherited a jewel. 

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A day or two later, I set out for Great Zimbabwe.  Don’t expect a saga; I just headed 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 hear a bus conductor: “All Aboard for Chivhu, Masvingo, Beitbridge, Polokwane, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Beaufort West, Paarl, and Cape Town.” 

I wasn’t going that far.  My destination was only 200 miles down the road, or halfway to South Africa.  I got going early but got stuck in traffic.  Cars were barely moving, let alone rushing.  Zimbabwe is usually profiled as a study in immiseration, but Harare’s traffic forced me to acknowledge that thousands of people had enough money to buy cars and put gas in them.  Call it a teaching moment.  I’m not defending the 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. The T-shirt reads, “I’m good with the simple version.”

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.  I felt that I was in an old magazine advertisement, the kind where a convertible skims in glorious solitude across 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, and the 1965 ratio of fifteen Blacks to one White was now about five hundred Blacks to one White.   

I can’t see statistics, but I could see the result of the confiscation of nearly all Zimbabwe’s five thousand White-owned farms.  They had been given to supporters of the Mugabe regime, most of whom knew nothing about farming, which is why fields once planted to tobacco, the country’s chief export crop, had reverted to  grass.  I saw no livestock.  Somebody was placing occasional twenty-pound sacks of potatoes just off the pavement, along with handwritten notes 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 another, much bigger dam near Great Zimbabwe, a young man would approach me and offer necklaces he said he had made.  They were very simple: 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 been deported.  He had then gone to 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 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 stopped for a couple of hours at Chivhu, a town of about 10,000 people.  The name means “anthill” in Shona.  I have no idea why, 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 in the Straits of Messina.  Of course that Scylla was dangerous, but so is mine, because it’s our technology-driven society leading to a future that we are building, cannot stop building, yet with good reason dread.  At the same time, my Scylla, our Scylla, has 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. In The Odyssey Charybdis faces Scylla and is a deadly whirlpool, which is one way to describe superstitious delusions, but you know me: things aren’t 100 percent this or 100 percent that, good or bad, right or wrong.  It’s just laziness on our part to insist that they are. Cue the “I’m Good with the Simple Version” T-shirts.  My Charybdis has her good points, too. 

Where the highway crosses Chivhu’s old main street, a large and almost empty building carried a sign that read Enkledoorn Garage.  That 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.  Its cruciform plan seemed extravagant under a roof of corrugated sheet-metal, but the central tower had a weathervane in the shape of a rooster.  How’s that for telling farmers to get to work?  The facade had a Dutch gable over a cornerstone that carried the Afrikaans version of Exodus 25:8. “Then let them build a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.”  Maybe 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.  “Fever,” his obituary said.  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 titled God’s Outpost.  Enkeldoorn appears as Koodorp and is described as, quote, “a gaunt spectre of blighted ambition… forgotten by God and the Government.”  A hundred years later, the town was still bleak.  The main street was lined for a short distance with stores shaded by a veranda, but the veranda was made of corrugated sheet metal supported at the curb by brick columns covered with posters on top of posters.  Forget ironwork from MacFarlane’s.  Oddly, the shops had large plate-glass windows unprotected by screens or bars.  You’d think that would be risky, but in the old days of White dominance the police could be scary even for Whites.  As for Blacks, I remember seeing an officer in the old South African Police amuse himself by tormenting a young man like a cat playing with a mouse.  I almost intervened.

The stores in Chivhu today have so little stock that they don’t need screens or bars.  One store 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 tags and no other sizes to choose from.  

Education mattered: that was the message.  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.  

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Another ninety miles down the highway, I came to Masvingo, a town that since 1980 has tripled to about 100,000 people.  Was this a story of rural push or urban pull?  I’m betting on push.  I say that because I drove around town and saw so little economic activity that I was astonished to pass a few new houses on the outskirts. Teaching moment No. 2: somebody had money.  Well, it wasn’t really a teaching moment.  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 more and I was 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 gates of a thousand Colorado pastures.  Push, and they swing open.  

I ignored the fencing and the gate, which goes to show 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, quote, “used to have a voice.” Unquote.  More than one voice, actually.  The voices belonged to the villagers’ ancestors and, quote, “sounded like people talking to each other.  Also these voices used to talk to visitors that came there.”  Unquote.  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.” Unquote.  The meaning is that the ancestors are not about to be treated as if they are somebody’s property, which is exactly what the fence implies.

Nonsense, you say.  Nonsense, I say.  I can be a jerk about it, too,  and add that the ancestors are sulking, but this brings us back to prehistoric tunnels and the nonsense of Charybdis.  Putting on my “I’m Good With the simple version” T-shirt, I’ll stick with Scylla. 

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’s that powerful and 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, fluent in English, and amazingly gracious when 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 customers to latch onto.  Still, the young men smiled and waved me on.  On my two visits on successive days, I saw only one other foreign visitor and no locals except one class of elementary-school students.  

How the guides made 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, quote, “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.  Score another point.

Three hundred yards in front of me, a granite dome rose two hundred feet.  It was far from perfect.  Chunks of rock had broken off and tumbled downhill.  Trees had taken root, too, and the base of the dome was solidly wrapped in forest. 

Nineteenth century visitors called this hill the Acropolis.  Archaeologists today are allergic to poetic license and call it the Hill Complex.  Dreadful name.  Is it worth visiting?  Some people say that they’ve seen pictures of the place 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 here’s the thing: unless they’re natural features like Yosemite, spectacular things require the labor of hundreds or thousands of wage slaves or real 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 old Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French anarchist who in 1851 wrote that to be governed meant to be–this is a partial quote–”watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded,  and more.  Lots more: Proudhon was just getting his breath.  He ends up with “mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, and dishonoured.”  It’s a fine passage, though arguably a tad intemperate.

Great Zimbabwe is not the product of people whose every move is 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.

You wonder how it is possible for a stone to express freedom.  Well, a path led up to the top of the hill and 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.  

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 faced on both sides with granite blocks roughly the size of a shoebox.  If we were here 700 years ago, we would see 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 better than you might think, because mortar left alone for 700 years weathers into gravel and then into sand and dust that invites plants to root and, in their own sweet time, take apart any wall anyone can make.  

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 holes or pins 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 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 and no French-fry.  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, of course; instead, the stones had been trimmed with an adze, though I have no idea what material the adze was made of. 

I noticed this difference between the entrances, but I didn’t appreciate its significance.  I guess a guide might have told me that the outer tunnel was built 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, for Americans who are 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 we’re back to Scylla and Charybdis.

John Ruskin, an art critic who became a social critic, never got to Africa, but he would have loved the Charydbis  entrance.  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, quote:  

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 lies and corners everywhere.  And once again, I’m not saying that Scylla is all calculation.  Several Masvingo streets have medians planted to Washingtonia palms.  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 Charybdis is more than nonsense about prehistoric tunnels and whispering ancestors.  She is that handcrafted entrance. 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 discusses 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.  

I’m reminded of a physician I know who in retirement began making bowls out of cedar logs.  Great Zimbabwe was made that way.  Can you think of any other city built like that?  I’m scared of the word “unique,” but Great Zimbabwe comes pretty close.  

                                       [break]

From the top of the hill, I looked a few hundred yards over an emerald meadow of tall grass to Great Zimbabwe’s biggest structure.  It’s a roughly circular wall with a circumference of about 800 feet.  It’s been called the Elliptical Temple.  More commonly today it’s called the Great Enclosure.  

You’ll understand why, when I walked over there, I did not go straight inside.  Instead, I circumambulated the wall like a Buddhist might walk around a statue of you-know-who.  That’s because while I can mock Charybdis–even deplore the behaviors she often inspires–she offers something I want but cannot demand.  

The wall around the Great Enclosure is about 30 feet high.  Call it 50 shoeboxes 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 of shoeboxes 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–this was about 1870–the walls were covered with stabilizing blankets of thorns.  At some point–I don’t know when–the thorns were cleared away–which leaves the walls a bit more vulnerable to collapse but spectacularly naked.  

I recall John Muir’s describing the Sierra Nevada as the Range of Light.  I think that if the blocks of the Great Enclosure had been machined to an identical standard size, like a load of synthetic stuff from Home Depot, the wall wouldn’t be beautiful.  I’ll venture that the Great Enclosure wall is beautiful because every stone reveals the freedom of the person who shaped it.  As proof, I point to copies of the Round Tower, the chief relic surviving within the Enclosure.  I saw a copy of the Round Tower at a Masvingo gas station and another at a Masvingo funeral home.  They looked cheap, and it wasn’t because they were undersized.  It was 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, and a third at about 10.  The path from the parking lot leads to the 10 o’clock entrance.  It’s perfectly square, which you know by now means that it’s new.  It was built in the 1990s, and it 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 gracefully rounded.  

The entrance at noon is level, and you can just walk in, but the entrance at two includes eight steps up.  The gap between the walls here is probably four feet, and the steps could be straight, but Great Zimbabwe doesn’t do straight.  The steps bow 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 stones of 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.  This is the upside of Charybdis.  I’m afraid it’s a point in favor of homemade bread, which few of us enjoy.

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.) 

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, and I didn’t think to ask.)  

The tower stands under a high canopy of trees, which means that if you’re outside the enclosure, it’s easy to spot the approximate location of the tower.  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 what the Round Tower was for or what, for that matter, the Great Enclosure was for.

Nobody else knows either, but that hasn’t stopped speculation.  The first White man to see Great Zimbabwe and write about it was a young and ambitious 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 as good as any.   My favorite comes from Cecil Rhodes, who came by in a group.  Local 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.  Well, of course.  David Christiaan de Waal, who travelled with Cecil Rhodes, wrote, quote,  “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 was, he wrote, quote, “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.”  

About the same time, Rider Haggard, without visiting Great Zimbabwe, picked up on the theme and wrote the very popular novel King Solomon’s Mines, which eventually became a movie and then, in 1950,  another movie, this one with Stewart Granger and Deborah Kerr.  I think I saw it as a child, and I vaguely remember being scared, even though the scary bits, with Stewart and Deborah trapped in a cave, were 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.   I don’t think this was a great idea, but 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.  She wrote, quote:

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.  Damned woman.  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 Rhodesia, 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 always did, whether 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 was have been Greek work. Scylla stuff.

If you insist on Occam’s Razor, you’ll explain this craziness by saying that if the Whites of Rhodesia had admitted that Blacks had built Great Zimbabwe, it would have opened the floodgates to the unspeakable possibility that Blacks didn’t need the firm hand of Whites guiding them.

I can see how you’d want to hold the line against such a dangerous idea, and I have no trouble accepting this explanation, but 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 failed to think that I had seen no other such meadow in Zimbabwe.  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 the meadow.  It’s beautiful, but I have a big problem with the golf course.   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 bad old days have been so barbaric that they would make Great Zimbabwe a playground?  Well, I think again of John Muir, this time cursing the City of San Francisco, for building a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley and in this way desecrating Yosemite National Park.  Ulysses was smart enough to steer between Scylla and Charybdis.  The Rhodesians went through life wearing that damned T-shirt.