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| Mosel River, Germany, 1979 |
One of the most
stimulating books I’ve read in recent years is historian David Blackbourn’s The Conquest of Nature (2007). This is a startling history of Germany from
the perspective of water management. I didn’t realise, when I was travelling
myself along the Rhine and Mosel rivers, that virtually everything I saw,
including the river banks themselves, were man-made.
What are now
smoothly built-up river-courses, were once often fens and swamplands, which
historically provided both many livelihoods (for eel-harvesters, for example),
and absorbed floodwaters from mountain snow-melts. The draining of the fens under Frederick II
from the 1740s on, Blackbourn argues, set the emerging state of ‘Germany’ on a
particular technological course – river-controls, dam-building, naval power –
which played a major role in what Germany became. The development of a particular,
self-conscious “German identity” was founded to a great extent on how it
treated its waters.
This got me
thinking about water management in our own region, particularly my native
Zimbabwe – and even more particularly about how water management and aesthetics
played into a sense of ‘whiteness’ for that country’s ethnic minority. What role have the big enfolding rivers, the
Limpopo and Zambezi, played in forming a “national consciousness”? What about dams, boreholes and irrigation in
the farming community? Dams and rivers
as venues for quite culture-specific leisure activities? The effect of the region’s unique seasonal
changes, everyone always “waiting for the rain”, to use the title of Charles
Mungoshi’s novel? What are the
relationships between water resources and the spectacles of tourism? How have such attitudes amongst the flexing
number of whites changed between, say, David Livingstone in 1855 and our
post-independence present?
Lots of
questions, and I haven’t read nearly enough to suggest any solid answers. One anthropologist has had a shot at part of
the issue – American David McDermott Hughes, in a short book entitled Whiteness in Zimbabwe (2010). Hughes argues that rural whites attempted to
recreate an English-Romantic kind of landscape, centred on dams, and that this
was part of whites’ attempt to avoid integrating with indigenous peoples. He took as case studies the role of dams in
the Virginia district, near Harare, and the big one – Kariba. From a more urban perspective, Muchaparara
Musemwa’s recent book, Water, History and
Politics in Zimbabwe (2014), shows how water reticulation and control played
a crucial part in the white Rhodesian government’s exercise of political and
racialistic power over Bulawayo’s townships.
Hughes has been
roundly critiqued from a number of perspectives, but he has opened up a
potentially very fruitful line of enquiry: the relationship between landscape
aesthetics and group identities in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe. I have become increasingly wary of branding
“white Rhodesians/Zimbabweans” any one thing.
Despite the song – “For we are
all Rhodesians, And we’ll fight through thick and thin; We’ll keep them north
of the Zambezi [see?], Stop the enemy coming in”, regaled by Ian Smith’s
son-in-law Clem Tholet at the height of the 1970s war – the “white” population
was always quite fluid and internally dissonant in many different ways. Nevertheless, a hard core, which still
exists, came to believe that the “white Rhodesian” was some special kind of
animal, and expressed that belief through various kinds of literature and power
structures. This includes how certain
landscapes were viewed, valorised as beautiful or special in ways unique to
Euro-colonial whiteness, and therefore removed from “black” habitation or
access.
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| Thomas Baines' iconic painting of Victoria Falls |
Among the sundry
unexplored aspects in all this, I find myself wondering about waterfalls. I guess waterfalls are attractive to people
of all cultures, though they may be viewed and utilised in culturally nuanced
ways. There’s the biggie, of course –
Victoria Falls, still known by the name of the Dead White Queen. Between the ambiguous “discovery” by
Livingstone and the blandness of today’s tourist brochures lurk many other
illuminating treatments. One is The Diary of Henry Stabb (1875), written well before
Rhodes’ invasion of 1890:
To
convey any just idea of these falls is hopeless ...Suddenly & without a
moment’s warning, right athwart the entire bed of this hitherto peaceful river
occurs a mighty rift, the walls of which on either side go sheer down for
nearly 400 feet, forming a frightful chasm into which the waters of the river
disappear. The original bed of the river
on both sides of this huge rent remains as it used to be before the earth
yawned & this vast fissure appeared; the bed has been simply rent asunder,
but on the far side now grow trees & grass & ferns where formerly the
river flowed. Into this chasm, nearly
1900 yds. in length, the entire river rolls with a deafening roar; imagine more
than a mile of water suddenly precipitated over a sharp ledge into a black
& yawning gulf.
Stabb was no
great writer, and his geology quite wrong, but what’s interesting is his
attempt to measure objectively as well as to convey the “awful” subjective frisson
of the Romantic sublime. But this is not
purely European, either: Stabb noted that his local gunbearer, “being a very
fine fellow, showed yesterday by his frequent exclamations that, savage though
he is, he is capable of thoroughly appreciating the beauties that surrounded us.”
If this is a
glimpse into an early “white” aesthetic, in the post-colonial era the poet
Harold Farmer, then resident in Zimbabwe, figures (I think) the receding of
white power as an imaginary receding of the Zambezi river itself, a
sub-continental drying-up. The last
stanza of his poem “Victoria Falls” reads:
The
Falls have shrivelled; cracks in the clay,
paper
boats in puddles, mock battles between
unruly
sailors and the predictable course
of
a trickle, crocodile snaps of twigs
and
the restless indentation of children
in
foliage, the massive ropes and chains shrunk
to
spindles, great slabs of crested sound
dwindled
to an insolent dripping.
White supremacy,
Farmer seems to be intimating, was always a fragile and delusory thing.
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| Pungwe Falls |
On the other
side of the country, at about the same time, N H Brettell was writing about the
smaller, but still spectacular falls of the Inyanga highlands: Pungwe, Gairezi,
Nyama. “It seems odd,” he wrote in his
lovely memoir, Side-Gate and Stile (1981),
that there is not much music written about waterfalls:
But
nothing that I know has all the noises of this cataract, the steady bass of the
underlying roar, the fluting of the spray scattered by the up-draught into a
score of variations, the cymbal clap of ripple on rock, the sudden thunder like
the muffled thump of timpani, of loose stones rolled in the bed of the swirling
torrent, strings and woodwind competing for the contrapuntal voices of the
cloven stream: the whole orchestra ...
Only someone
thoroughly versed in Western orchestration could write like that. In the poem “New Year”, Brettell observes how
a weir had been thrown across the “petulant stream” and how “James the water
clerk” came to take his flow readings – a hint at the technologies of control,
management and governance of water:
But
you can only tame a mountain river
For
a few yards. After an olive sliding,
Sleek
as an eel-skin, over the basalt shelf,
Flexing
of shoulder muscles for the eager wrestle,
Against
the random barriers of the gorge
It
leaps, splits, foams, and overcomes
The
haphazard fashion of the broken bed ...
Between
the green pool and the cataract,
I
wait with Janus, chameleon, the swivel-eyed:
Before,
the savage catclaws of the rapids,
Behind,
the sullen measurable flow.
The aesthetic of
white belonging, Brettell implies, is also split, between controlling
‘civilisation’ and the liberating lure of wilderness.
My mother Jill Wylie
also wrote (in Call: Life with a Basenji)
about some falls in the same region, the Inodzi, with similar
personification. Though in the middle
of a dangerously slippery search for a lost dog, she took time to appreciate
the perilous aesthetics of the place:
The
river strolls along a gorge flanked by gums and wattles, tumbles over a little
weir and basks in a wide, shallow pool.
For a moment it fools around among natural steps and crevices, not
looking where it’s going. The burnished
iron and copper slopes down, so smooth, so innocent – come into my parlour –
one could be forgiven for stepping too close.
But it takes the heels from under the river and flings it, confused and
out of control, down the slick gorge.
Sometimes it hits rocky projections
which toss it into white manes, white and brown and silver in the sun. For a moment it tries to catch its breath
against a sand-bank but is whipped onwards to sheer down into a deep, glass-sided
pool. ...
Which is where
she found the dog, dead. The way the
description reflects what must have been the dog’s own inner experience of
falling, without making it at all obvious, is I think quite remarkable.
And there must
be much more of such intriguing writing about the place of water in our
lives...
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| Sue Ross-Jarvis' original illustration for Jill Wylie's Call. |
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