When faced with
scenes or situations that baffle my ability to express them, I often resort to
the miniature. I focus my camera lens,
Super-Macro engaged, on tiny, maybe abstract patternings, hoping perhaps that something
of the greater truths might somehow be encapsulated there.
I have been
trundling around my (almost) natal town of Mutare, inevitably encountering
fragments of memory scattered over decades – mostly from childhood. My junior and senior schools, which I’ve
never wanted to re-enter – but I glimpse from the road the porch of the
assembly hall where I quite inadvertently sparked my one and only boy-fight. I drive past the houses of then-friends’
families: the Clacks, the de Zoetens, the Grisposes, the Balls. I recall stretches of rain-warm streets and
avenues of silver oaks from cross-country runs.
I pass the service station where I kept a bike that I rode the last few
miles to school; and the dirt road behind the sports club where I skidded in
sand, came off and cracked my elbow – thus disqualifying me from entering a
national drama competition – I was due to play Marlowe’s Faust. “O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!” I pass the Board & Paper Mills, now
defunct and decaying, where a kindly manager once gave me a huge pile of white
card that kept my various projects going for years. Just down the road, the SPCA kennels which my
mother visited every week; and the glass factory in which my father worked unfailingly
every week-day for some 27 years.
There’s the unmarked,
unremarkable army base to which I had to report in the crazy days of 1979, and
outside which I was more recently detained for a day for taking photos of two
ceremonial nineteenth-century cannons, nose down in long grass. Now I see they’ve resurrected the cannons and
mounted them on plinths either side of the gate, so my arrest had some positive
result.
All the time I’m suffering
that dislocation brought on by subtle and not-so-subtle changes: the slab-sided
cathedral looks just the same, but the surrounding streets are a moonscape of
potholes and neglect. Shops still stand
but have changed hands: the gift shop in the arcade has been replaced by
Western Union Money Transfer; the bookshop which for twenty years provided
endless fascination is now a hairdresser; the restaurant at which I worked for
a while serves the same fast food but under a different, equally cheesy
name. What used to be the office of the Umtali Post – in which my first
published poem appeared – is now the Manica
Post, another arm of the government’s propaganda machine. There are old and
new petrol stations, but almost all with unfamiliar company names – Comoil,
Zuva – ousting the well-known multinationals and selling ethanol ‘blend’ at a
high price impervious to global trends.
Walking through the
streets and the supermarkets (now mostly South African: Spar, Pick’n’Pay), I
see scarcely a white face. Contrary to paranoid
ruling party rhetoric, whites are now all but irrelevant – a fraction of a
percent of the population. One sees
gatherings only at the odd club, old-age home, or church – one rural Christian
congregation used to have 64 members, now it has 17. People in public are mild, friendly, and
quietly cautious about the future. I
stop to chat to a young man – Tinashe – who makes a living six days a week on a
suburban street corner, selling eggs, bread, chewing gum, airtime tokens,
crisps and the like from a tiny portable stand and umbrella. He is voluble and forthcoming, with the
sweetest strong-toothed smile, but exudes a frustrated air of entrapment as he explains
his business practice and the pittance he makes. There is no ladder to climb here, almost no
way for anyone but a politically-connected elite to flourish.
Superficially the
place is peaceful, the suburbs reasonably well-kept (only the road surfaces, or
lack of them, attest to the inefficiency and corruption of the city council, which
as I write is being exposed by a government audit). Power supply has been better than at home in
Grahamstown (paradoxically because of an injection from Eskom!); water supply seems
fine despite the drought; Australian flame trees in flower give the town a kind
of flamenco pizzazz. But most major industries
have collapsed; almost all the iconic firms of my childhood, of which we were
indirectly proud, are gone, replaced, if at all, by a welter of informal
trading, cross-border smuggling, hand-to-mouth ingenuity. Hence most of the shanty-like informal
enterprises that were razed by the government’s vicious Operation Murambatsvina
in 2008 have re-established themselves.
That’s what Zimbabweans do: rather than risk more conflict, or gather in
large demonstrations (there are regular small ones, instantly smothered), they
make do, with a kind of casual fortitude: shrug, laugh, cleverly improvise.
What doesn’t change,
except at geological pace, is the topography, these astonishingly beautiful
hills, even now looking improbably lush.
My host takes me up to Inyanga, granite country, mile after vista of outcrops
and streaked batholiths and thrusting kopjes patched with multicoloured
lichens. I can scarcely stop taking
photographs of that strange and wonderful life-form, that will without question
outlast us stupid humans. This is my
refuge, for the moment. The critic
Jonathan Bate rephrased the French philosopher Bachelard: “The more we
miniaturize the place we live in, the better we can dwell in it.” Dwell:
a word with loving and ethical resonance.
I dwell on – dwell among – these hardy splashes and patterns.
We explore the
miombo, or brachystegia woodlands between the hills – so rich and unique an
environment, my host asserts, that it should be defended with as much fervour
as is the rhino. Special birds: Southern
black tits, and White helmet-shrikes, and a favourite of mine – the White-breasted
cuckooshrike, unspectacular two-tone, but so dapper and serene, like
snow-and-gunmetal.
And we climb one
kopje, bearing the remnants of Iron Age stone-built fortifications around its
single access route, the foundations of huts on top, and a single thin iron
arrow-head. We are not far here from
hillsides still etched with mile upon mile of ancient agricultural terracing:
that too is Zimbabwean ingenuity and stubborn fortitude.
The night is
luminous with a full moon, vibrant with crickets and fruit-bats, and an
apparently solitary Wood owl calling, You-too,
you-too, wouldja hook-up? I don’t
want to leave this place and time, knowing I’ll have to, of course: O lente, lente currite, noctis equi –
Slowly, run slowly, horses of night!
***