It’s midsummer in Zimbabwe, and the trees should be fully in leaf, the maize crops in the roadside farmlands at least waist high and beginning to tassle. But it looks like the middle of the winter dry season: many trees almost bare, the grasses on the verges grazed to stubble by ribby cattle and donkeys, the patchy fields naked and red. Almost no water in the many river courses I cross as I drive from one side of the country to the other.
Yet what is it about
this Zimbabwean countryside, that so affects and invigorates me? After the almost suffocating dullness of
Botswana, its banal flattened architectures matching the low expansiveness of
its terrain, this is so different. Immediately
after the border-post at Plumtree, hills heave up; the brachystegia woodlands
breathe greenness, even now; there are clusters of rock, many-hued, each individually
fascinating. This, at various scales
from miniature balancing conglomerates through the great domelands of Ngundu
Halt and Nyika to the long limber ranges of Chimanimani and Bvumba, is what
Zimbabwe is for me: tree-covered hill-slopes,
from loosely rolling to dramatically steep, overlooking the variegated
farmlands and ochre-coloured homesteads, punctuated with bouldery domes of
friendly rock.
I’ve always felt rather
at a loss as to how to explain the literal lurch of the heart, a flummoxed tightening
in the chest, on spotting the contours of a particular kopje. It’s the way it catches late afternoon sun,
or the contrast of textures of mopane bark and rusty granite, or how
leaf-shadow falls across a lichen-coated curve, or an irresistible mystery in
the dark bend of a transverse crack. I’ve
read a fair bit of landscape aesthetic theory, and nowhere have I found this
emotional effect really adequately described. It’s
not just familiarity from childhood, as a prospect wholly new to me can have
the impact. It’s not just the effect of
landscape art, though I’ve studied and practiced some of that, too, and know
about Burke’s theories of the Romantic sublime – but some of the scenes I
thrill to are two metres high. It’s
sometimes, but not always, a matter of pattern or shape, since often the
distribution of effects seems entirely random.
It’s partly, perhaps, the way my mother taught me to observe and
enthuse, since many people I know don’t respond in quite the same way.
And all of the
above.
Stop trying to
explain! I trundle in my pick-up along
the spanking new Chinese-built road between Plumtree and Bulawayo, exulting in
this or that view, shocked at the dryness of fields between their collapsing
fences of mingled thornbush and wire, dodging donkeys and ruminative cows and
multiple police road-blocks. After
Bulawayo – passing the Mater Dei Hospital, scene of my birth – I turn southwards
briefly, recalling a mantra of my younger journeys: Turn left at Balla
Balla. It’s Mbalambala now, of course:
opposite the army training camp languish several acres of stacked metal railway
sleepers and rails, whether abandoned to economic downturn or awaiting prospective
use, is impossible to say.
I turn left for the
east, my ultimate destination. A policeman
in dark blue denims signals for a lift.
Policemen are always interesting to talk to, and this one is no
exception. He has been in the ZRP for 17
years, he tells me, mostly because it’s one of the few jobs available these
days, though even then inadequately paid.
Like most working men, he has many family members dependent on him; he
didn’t get his bonus last year, and the buying power of his salary has nearly
halved since 2008. “I don’t want to say
I blame the government,” he says, “because
I am the government, I work for the
government. But I don’t want to say I
work for the government, I work parallel to the government” – and he
illustrates his ambivalence with big gestures.
Like everyone else, he hopes for some sort of change – more jobs, more
industry, more investment – though quite how that is to come about he can’t
specify. “Here I am, getting lifts – but I should be having my own car!” he
almost shouts. We discuss the Chinese
presence; he dislikes them intensely, they are exploitative, and “they have no love,” he says. And of course we discuss
the drought, and the parlous state of the dam nearby that supplies Bulawayo
city; and he insists with some vehemence that one must distinguish clearly
between weather and climate, the short-term and the
long-term. “We must just pray,” he
concludes.
I drop him off at
the Filabusi turnoff – he commutes some 80 km almost daily – and immediately
pick up a lanky Rastafarian-looking man, his dreads tucked away in a yellow
woollen turban, his ivory fingernails grown long, his skin tawny as an Ethiopian’s. He
commutes a similar distance between Filabusi and Zvishavane – he calls it by
its colonial version, Shabani; perhaps he thinks my whiteness won’t accommodate
the buzzing Shona sibilants. He is
eloquent and affable and curious; he turns out to be a driving instructor, and
we discuss the odd fact that in these straitened times two minor industries
seem to flourish: hairdressing and driving schools. We discuss fuel consumption rates and his
desire to move to Namibia, since it is becoming intolerable here. The political future is deeply uncertain,
to say the least. He notes a truck
turning out ahead of us, loaded with rough pale ore from a mining claim, going
to a Chinese-owned mill to be crushed for its gold. We discuss the depressed state of Zvishavane
due to the closing of the asbestos mine.
We discuss the drought, of course, and he informs me that in nearby
Chivu people are already slaughtering livestock and selling it off at rip-off
prices to the abbatoirs, since they will soon be too thin to sell at all; but
what prospect then of restoring the herds?
“We can only pray to the Most High One,” he concludes. “He is punishing the nation.”
I decide to refrain
from engaging this sweet man in discussion of why God’s punishment seems to
descend disproportionately on the meek, the weak, and the impoverished.
East of Masvingo
that impoverishment is stark. There are
simply no crops: stubble, here and there ploughed in again, as if hoping for
another season to begin. The farms taken
over by war vets look abandoned; even the Zionist Church lands, fronting their
massive green-roofed temple, which are usually the best-advanced and organised on
this stretch of road, are bare.
Livestock is thin, both in body and distribution: where South Africa’s
road-kill often includes wild animals, and Botswana’s is almost exclusively
donkeys and dogs, here there is none at all.
Traffic is sparse, and generally comfortingly (sometimes infuriatingly)
sedate in pace. There thunder past,
however, quite a few burnished new buses – ZUPCO and other new companies –
alongside the rattletraps, little better than modified flour-tins, that I once
used when I was a rural teacher.
At a favourite
baobab near Birchenough Bridge I stop for coffee. Spaces between the lovely rocks are crammed
with discarded drink-cans. I’ve noticed –
especially with the bush and grasses so thinned by drought – not a single
kilometre of this journey is unmarred by a greater or lesser density of litter:
long streams of broken glass glittering in the sun, plastic bags and cans and KFC
packaging and bog-roll. This despite the
President’s call a while ago to clean the country up, and recently some
litter-bugs being prosecuted, named and shamed.
Yet just thirty metres from the verge, again and again you’ll see a neat
cluster of huts and byres, all ochre mud and uneven wood fences, the surrounds swept
down to the raw dust, but clean as dust can be, not a scrap of trash to be seen
there. If only that ethic extended to
modern motorists and their careless civilised junk.
Turning north from
Birchenough Bridge and the worst stretch of broken-up road surface on all the
journey, I am on the home run – 123 km to Mutare. Here you pass, as elsewhere, the Zim
equivalent of the American strips: rows of shop-fronts set back from the road,
most of similar architecture, with verandas tacked on to the flat shopfronts,
leaving enough space above their roofs for the business name: Big Pees Enterprises and Muchadza General Dealer and TV and Butchery Investments Ltd. Some are derelict, others flash with garish
new lime-green or deep purple paintwork; rather like traditional huts, perhaps,
buildings are established, deteriorate, and are abandoned, rather than being continuously
maintained, and new ones spring up alongside.
So there is this kind of continuous archaeology of enterprise, an air of
decay simultaneous with hope and vigour.
Rutted communal forecourts
are gently busy with battered cars and loose goats and donkey-carts and minibus
taxis colourfully emblazoned: King Shaddy
or The Hardworkers or Roasted Wire or Psalms 23. In the shade of great mango or acacia trees,
knots of seated people: small-time vendors of tomatoes and mangoes and baobab
pods – unusually, no roasted maize-on-the-cob, a staple the drought has
rendered unavailable – their fruit arranged in little heaps of such symmetry,
perhaps inadvertent artistry, that is touching.
It’s midday and clusters of tiny school-kids are prancing home,
irrepressible as the goat-kids alongside them, all gangly and cute in crisp
uniforms too big for them and wholly unsupervised – a freedom and insouciance
that has been largely leached from Western societies.
Nyanyadzi is one
such ‘strip’ I recall convoying through during the war in the late 1970s; and I
can safely say that, whatever the hardships of the present moment, it’s a
hundred times better than it was then, when there was virtually no life here at
all, when the derelict buildings were not just abandoned, but blackened by
fires and pock-marked with terror. And
here is Wengezi Junction, where I used to turn off to the school I taught at
for a time. Ugly memories; fond
memories.
At last, north of
the beautiful blue granite dome of Rowa, not far from the notorious Chiadza
diamond fields, truly familiar batholiths and ridges are coming into view beyond
the curving road, and I both settle and buzz in my nerve-ends with my impending
arrival at what was once home. Despite
whole decades of absence, in some sense it remains so.
Great read Danny! More to follow of your trip I guess? Peter
ReplyDeleteYou took me right back to the heart of Zimbabwe. Thank you
ReplyDeletethat was from Yvonne Ripley
Delete