No 82 - Cyclone Idai hits Chimanimani

Tempe van der Ruit and her husband Doug, residents of Chimanimani, were swept up in the chaos of Cyclone Idai. Here is her vivid and affecting account:

All photos courtesy Doug and Tempe van der Ruit

Our poor beloved Chimanimani really got hammered by Cyclone Idai.  It was hard to comprehend how a night of heavy rain could have had such a devastating effect.  The mountain behind our house, called Green Mount, got the brunt of the storm.  In three days we had over 750 mms of rain but the damage was done between eight p.m and midnight on Friday the 16th of March.  We were anxious about the heavy rain, thunder, lightning and wind but the worst thing was the ominous low roar. Doug looked outside with a torch and said the sound was water - sheets of it, flowing all around the house.  Every stairway a waterfall.  He was wrong.  The sound was water and mud and rocks moving.

In the morning all seemed well bar a few trees down in the garden – or so we thought.  But it was not long before we discovered that in fact Chimanimani had been flooded, not only with water but with mud and rocks from huge landslides. Green Mount is etched with red scars on every side.  We were just incredibly lucky.  Our house is high enough to be safe, but every valley had changed into a sea of huge rocks and mud and water.  Any house built close to the valleys was broken or gone, including Heaven Lodge, just down the hill from us (half of it was washed away). Our other neighbour up the valley from us, Joshua Sacco's turquoise house was full of mud with a tree in the sitting room window and a waterfall meters from the house.

Down the road - which we could not use because it was washed away - the poor people of the high density suburb Ngangu had suffered more.  Many many houses had washed away.  And it happened so suddenly in the middle of the night that many were lost and dead, many others were injured.  I cannot imagine how terrifying the night must have been for
them.  I imagine the terrible roar and then add the sound of people screaming.  Folk floundering around in the mud and rain trying to find children and each other.  Others trying to take injured people to the hospital or to the Catholic Church. 

We had no electricity.  Wires were strewn all over the village.  We could not get to visit each other at first as in every place where the roads crossed even a culvert, they were washed away and covered in rocks. Doug's famous video of the road and the golf course strewn with rock went viral.  "Golf course gone!" The phones would not work except at our house as we have a generator and a satellite dish.  The only one working in the village so in no time our house became the centre of communications for everyone.

Doug called Bob Henson in Harare; he owns a little helicopter.  The rain continued till Monday when at last Bob arrived in the helicopter and he took Doug to see the district.  More and more bad news came in. Huge floods all the way to Mozambique.  Whole villages washed away at Ndakopa where the Nyahodi River meets the Rusitu.  And terrible damage to all the roads into and out of Chimanimani.  We felt utterly bleak. Shane Kidd opened up his sawmill, helping the people of Ngangu with money to feed the homeless and wood for coffins.  The council managed to open a road between the hospital and the graveyard so that the fifty-odd dead could be buried. It was a strange and terrible funeral.  Just streams and streams of people coming and going and tractors going back and forth bringing coffins. At the same time people were digging and more than one coffin went into each hole.  More died in the south, washed into Mozambique, buried in mud, and many will never be found. 

Doug and Bob did what they could bringing in doctors and medicines and evacuating patients but on Wednesday Bob had to go.  Luckily after that more, bigger helicopters arrived.  The support from everyone in Zimbabwe and from South Africa was unbelievable.  Especially generous was Strive Masiwa of Econet.  Doug is a Gideon and it seemed God had prepared him for just such an event.  He knows the names and whereabouts of every single school and clinic in the district and this information was invaluable as he and a group of fantastic volunteers set up a command centre in Mutare to coordinate rescue operations.  Doug loves flying in helicopters but it was an extremely stressful, adrenaline-filled ten days and when he came back he was ready to collapse.  There were also frustrations when operations had to stop for the president to visit.  He needed five helicopters for his entourage. And various generals, colonels etc had to be flown by helicopter into the "field" and often all they wanted to do was to take selfies on their phones of them next to the helicopter in whichever disaster-stricken place they were.

Meanwhile our house continued to be full of people, locals at first, but after a road was opened from Chipinge into Chimanimani, we began to have all sorts of visitors.  Journalists and 4x4 drivers and helicopter pilots. We met many wonderful people but looking after everyone with no electricity became exhausting.  And then the droves of aid organisations arrived in the village, too.  They are still here.  The village is full of tents and big white Toyotas with aerials and about ten different aid organisations displaying their logos on the doors.  The homeless ( hundreds of them) are still living in schools, and the hotel and the club.  They are refusing to move into the tents because they say that the last time the government moved people into tents they never gave them new places to build.  The relocation of all these people is a huge problem.  They don't want to leave Chimanimani but with all the landslides there is no place suitable to relocate them to.

The roads are being repaired slowly.  But all the work we have seen so far has been temporary repairs.  We can even drive down Skyline now which seems miraculous as Doug showed me a picture he took from the helicopter  and Skyline looked like a cliff with a waterfall from top to bottom; where the road was half way down the cliff there was not a sign.  But they (the Chinese?) cut into the cliff and there is a road, though it has tight corners and is not suitable for big lorries. So our sawmilling future looks bleak – besides the fact that the sawmill still has no electricity.  And when it rains the Skyline road is muddy and slippery, not for the faint-hearted.

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Amy Durkin contributes this harrowing account:

Our friend Daniel came by yesterday morning with his terrible story of Cyclone Idai

He was with his children in the village the week end before the deluge. His 5 year-old son Ian had asked him repeatedly: “Please father can I come home with you ….” And Daniel had replied that only one more week of school remained and he must stay.

On leaving his kids on Monday morning he was oppressed by a terrible feeling of foreboding… Ian only agreed to stay if he was given a loaf of white bread! Dan set off only to find that he could go no further than the clinic. There he sat in a trance till midday.  He berated himself and set off home. At home the confused feeling of doom continued to dog him: he couldn’t do any work, just yearned for his children.

             On Thursday morning his wife Mai Yolanda set off to the village with Rob, their 3 year-old son. Normally Rob stayed home with Dan but this time he wanted to visit his siblings in the village.  Mai was going to the village to attend parents’ day on the Friday 15 March. Thursday afternoon it started to rain with heavy winds. The winds continued through the night, taking off our goat house roof. On Friday the wind dropped and the rain came down with unprecedented force. Michael only realised the missing roof mid-morning. Poor goats were huddled in the corner drenched! Fortunately the thatched part of the house remained and he could chase them into shelter.

By Friday morning Dan was overwhelmed by this feeling of foreboding.  He struggled up the hill in the driving rain – there being no signal at his house – to phone Mai to tell her to get the kids and come home now! But he could not get through; he tried without success several times during that fateful Friday. Nine o’clock Friday night: Mai opened the door to find out what the strange noise was. To her amazement cars were floating by. Her last thought was; But there is no road in front of the house! Then a torrent of mud and water poured through the open door, pinning her to the wall and washing the three sleeping children out into the wild night. She was screaming for help when three men looking for their mother came to the rescue. While they were struggling to free her there was a terrible rumble as huge boulders loosened from the mountain started to crash down. They tried to run away. Only one man survived. Yolanda managed to cling to a banana tree till neighbours with a torch saved her and took her to the clinic. All that was seen of Carlos was a hand sticking out of the mud. He was plucked out by a man thinking he had found his son.

         The nightmare of that night is difficult to imagine: the wild pouring rain…the darkness…the screaming….the fear as yet another mud slide followed the rocks.

Little Rob was washed in through someone’s window. A woman strapped him to her back as they prepared to flee their crumbling home. By the time they made it to safety the towel and little Rob were gone.

On Saturday morning Dan heard rumours that 2 of his children were missing. He set off to find out what was going on. The rain had eased to a light drizzle by lunch time so Michael let the goats out to graze. Poor animals had had no food since Thursday 12pm. Then Dan came by on his way down to the village and told Michael of the disaster in the village. Dan went to the clinic where Yolanda lay motionless wrapped in a blanket. But she could talk but not move: she had injuries to spine, neck and pelvis. Carlos lay with eyes closed, his injuries unknown. How long can you lie submerged in mud and survive? Dan and a couple of friends set out to find little Rob’s body. Sniffer dogs had identified possible sites near the ruins of his house. The first excavation revealed a broken sewerage pipe, the second a cage with six broilers, two shivering but still alive, and the third dig uncovered a dead dog. Rob’s body was never found. Ian, who had pleaded to go home just that Monday, was found 10km away, quite dead.

The image of Daniel’s kind, gentle face deeply furrowed with much suffering keeps going round and round in my mind. His ready smile replaced by a puzzled frown! I just need to share his story to try and find some peace. Daniel is one of the few people I trust and respect. A man of integrity and kindness. Never one to ask for favours even if life deals him hard blows. Go in peace my friend!

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Now we see there are more terrible storms - poor Natal flooded and cyclone Kenneth heading for the north of Mozambique.  God help us. Poor earth.

*****

No 81 - Two cultures? Science in South Africa's poetry

Science, we are regularly assured, is based on rationalism, repeatable experiment, hard fact, and mathematical certainties – rising loftily above mythical beliefs, cultural biases and individual vagaries. Poetry, on the other hand, is supposedly about our inner worlds – unrepeatable experience, individual emotions, and the unpredictable imagination. Science seems so crisp and defined, whereas no one I know has come up with a decent definition of poetry; it’s something you just learn to recognise when it strikes the ear, rather like the “unparaphrasable meaningfulness of music” (the phrase is critic George Steiner’s from The Poetry of Thought).

Almost all discussions I’ve seen start with this alleged dichotomy, these silos of human thought, or the “two cultures”, as CP Snow famously termed the division. And almost all the discussions I’ve seen – mostly launched by poets, to be sure – go on to assert that this is just not the case. The argument might go like this: not only is “science” a social construct like any other human thought-system, it is, like poetry, founded in fundamental ways on metaphor. They are both languages of understanding. And if one goes beyond the simplicities of Newton’s objective laws of motion, into the subatomic realms of quarks, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and Schrödinger’s Cat, a realm in which the presence of the observer is inseparable from the experiment, one is back in the dizzy whirl of the individual and the immeasurable.  So why should poetry and science not be speaking to each other, cross-fertilising? – and perhaps they always have done, actually.  Here’s the poet  Alison Hawthorne Deming on the subject:

[T]he view from either side of the disciplinary divide seems to be that poetry and science are fundamentally opposed, if not hostile to one another.  Scientists are seekers of fact; poets revellers in sensation.  Scientists seek a clear, verifiable and elegant theory; contemporary poets, as critic Helen Vendler recently put it, create objects that are less and less like well wrought urns, and more and more like the misty collisions and diffusions that take place in a cloud chamber.  The popular view demonizes us both, perhaps because we serve neither the god of profit-making nor the god of usefulness.  Scientists are the cold-hearted dissectors of all that is beautiful; poets the lunatic heirs to pagan forces.  We are made to embody the mythic split in western civilization between the head and the heart.  But none of this divided thinking rings true to my experience as a poet.

Ruth Padel is another American poet who has written on the topic; indeed, as the granddaughter of one of Charles Darwin’s granddaughters, she has published a whole poetic life of her famous evolutionary predecessor. In this, she is echoing Charles’s own father, Erasmus Darwin, who wrote a lengthy treatise on the science of his time in resounding heroic couplets.  The early nineteenth-century Romantic poets were fascinated by the scientific discoveries of their own day; and many scientists and naturalist-travellers, including those to Southern Africa, felt it was de rigueur to enliven their accounts with snatches of quoted verse and Classical allusion. The divide, it would seem, has become stricter, along with more intense specialisation in the academy. Yet, as the anthology A Quark for Mister Mark (edited by Maurice Riordan and Jon Turney, 2000) shows, poets have continuously written about science and its theories, which sometimes can seem as outlandish as any dreamscape, and to use science as metaphor in wild ways. There is, as South African poet and literary mentor, the late Lionel Abrahams, titled his last volume, a “chaos theory of the heart”.

Abrahams is just one of any number of South African poets who have found in scientific discovery rich imagery for topics not strictly scientific. Cosmological, botanical, zoological, medical, geological, chemical terminologies, aesthetics and ideas work their way into poems in obvious and subtle ways. Just as John Donne, back in the seventeenth century, got poetically excited by the new cosmological theories of Galileo and Kepler, so do modern poets in the age of moon walks, the Hubble telescope, the discovery of black holes and dark matter, which are as mysteriously untouchable as any poetic implication.

No doubt many scientists appreciate poetry – and some even write it. Pre-eminent among such South Africans is Douglas Livingstone, a professional microbiologist whose last volume of poems, A Littoral Zone (1996), is structured around the various measuring stations he established to monitor pollution levels along the South Coast. As one might expect, the imagery of cells, molecules and chemical reactions feature strongly.  Don Maclennan always reminded us as students that poetry as poetry comes not from raw emotions, or the ether, or scientific knowledge, but out of other poetry. Livingstone wittily demonstrates this in one of his poems by ‘Giovanni Jacopo’, a sort of comic alter ego he invented. In “Giovanni Jacopo Meditates (on the Passionate Bacteriologist to his Love)”, he rips off a famous seventeenth-century poem by Andrew Marvell – which was so gloopy and romantic it had almost immediately been satirised by Walter Ralegh. In Livingstone’s self-mocking version, the speaker invites his lover up to his laboratory, promising not Edenic gardens and unrealistic happiness, but

Bacilli with a sunset Hue

Will form a little Chain for you,

& Cocci on a Culture-plate

Will make your heart gyrate

You’ll see fresh Eggs infected by

The virus from a bloodshot Eye.

For your Delight, my Lover Doll,

I’ll flourish Spleens in Alcohol.

In more serious vein, Livingstone uses the microscopic to reflect the essentially destructive side of human nature. In “A Natural History of the Negatio Bacillus”, he mimics the terminology of a medical handbook – definition, epidemiology, aetiology, diagnosis, prophylaxis – to map a kind of mythic evolution of the human-as-disease, obliquely critiquing pride, aggression, and intellectual separation from a sense of wholeness with the earth. We are, Livingstone repeatedly recalls, ineluctably part of the material world – especially at the molecular level, where interchanges between our ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are happening continuously. Not least after death: in “Cells at Station 11”, the poet-speaker, taking his ocean-water samples, wonders if cells from a “blackened corpse” tumbling beyond the surf line have found their way into his test-tube. At that level, we have always been, in common, infiltrated by

Billion-year invaders

– the silent mitochondria –

[which] propel our mobile tower, shared cells

sparking, colonised by vandals:

a fifth column of DNA ...

We might “claim autonomy”, but the independent “self” is something of an illusion; Livingstone returns to that phrase “shared cells” to assert, basically, that to kill your brother is to hurt yourself. For all the science (he draws explicitly on Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock), it is almost religious.

In the same way, Livingstone, caring deeply about the health of the planet and distressed at humanity’s accelerating capacity to poison it, sees that the earth is us: it is like a “bright blue cell”, uniquely hanging in space, and our relationship with it boils down, bluntly, to a choice: “symbiosis or death”.

Many other poets work with scientific material, language and disciplines. Scientists themselves can be subjects.  Charles Darwin, whose evolutionary theories are foundational to all the natural sciences, inevitably appears. Basil du Toit, in his poem “Darwinism” (in Older Women, 1996), wonders how he is to survive in Darwinism’s tough world of unrelenting competitiveness and “searing wispy airs” – “you who are so inhospitable to love”. Loveless and irreligious Darwinism might be but, as du Toit notes in “Eye & Ocean”, it has also helped alert us to nature’s complex bounties:

the Darwin-rich deeps

supporting genus after genus

ocean hierarchies:

whales, jellyfish, plankton

rejuvenating the blue organ.

Gus Ferguson, in my view our finest comic poet, explores the evolutionary migration of once-upon-a-time land mammals ‘back’ to the sea to become whales, in his lightly ironic but affecting poem, “Poetry at the Whale Well”. (As it happens, a transitional, 42 million year-old “hoofed whale” skeleton has just been unearthed in Peru.)

Another, related popular discipline, then, is palaeontology. South Africa is so rich in fossil remains, from the most ancient ammonites through the dinosaurs of the Karoo to the early hominid skeletons of Gauteng’s ‘Cradle of Humankind’, that many poets have had a go at fossils. Ruth Miller, for example, riffs off Broom’s discoveries in “Sterkfontein”, though her concern is less on the science than on the remains’ implication that we all, as it were, descend into the cave of death; we will all be blown to “the kingdom of shared graves”. In a quirky essay, “The Hippo and the Moth”, Miller shows her familiarity with several sciences, including zoology, relativity and the physics of light, although, as she says, “the moth must remain a symbol at all costs”: that is the heart of poetry.

Brian Warner, a bit like a Livingstone-Ferguson cross, produced a volume of witty rhyming poems (Dinosaur’s End, 1996) satirising scientific discoveries, especially of the ancient dinosaurs and the fossil remains of early hominids. Among the lighter squibs is his clerihew on the discoverer of ‘Taung Man’:

Raymond Arthur Dart

Gave anthropologists a start

When out of nowhere he sprung

And stuck out his Taung.

Don Maclennan, who shared with me an amateur interest in science, wrote repeatedly of his particular fascination with Stone Age tools, the flakes and cores we could find lying all over the Eastern Cape, even in Grahamstown’s gardens –  “handaxes that obtrude/ to challenge who we are/ after a million years of progress” (from Reading the Signs, 2005). Also in Grahamstown, Chris Mann is particularly assiduous in exploring zoological and galactic subjects, and marrying them with a sacralising reverence for life and its ecological interdependencies.

All the above is only to scratch the surface of a potentially vast subject – a book for someone to write. Certainly, as Riordan and Turney say in their introduction to A Quark for Mister Mark, poets, whatever they are up to, are not ‘doing science’, their references to science “often oblique, glancing, wry, or sardonic, or it is so much a part of a way of seeing that the reader, and even the writer, may not be conscious of its presence.”  That’s crucial: science has come to dominate and structure so much modern thinking that a poem may be surreptitiously ‘scientific’ even where no technical terms are used. Douglas Livingstone once asserted that “science is man’s search for truth, that art is man’s interpretation of it”. However, in a 1985 interview with Michael Chapman (in Green in Black-and-White Times), he blurred the distinction. He noted that the science philosopher Kuhn saw science as creative, that a scientific philosophy’s “new way of looking at things can alter our perception of reality – a kind of poet’s way”. The final lesson for him, whether through science or poetry, was “how to feel variously, how to admit ambiguity, how to understand the equal attraction of opposing truths, or to know when to mistrust ‘truth’ altogether.”

A mantra for our own times.

*****

No 80 - Studying Zimbabwe: Some recent work

It is with unutterable distress that we watch Zimbabwe descending into another cycle of repression combined with economic shortages, militarisation of daily life with arbitrary persecution of the poorest, and yet another play at launching a local currency backed by, as far as one can tell, nothing at all but an unpronounceable acronym.

Events move so fast it’s hard to keep up. It’s equally impossible to keep up with the academic work being churned out, even though by its very nature such research tends to lag behind current developments. At the same time, the slow-brew of academic production fruitfully clarifies longer-term trends, sometimes offers unconventional approaches to old issues, and gets to grips with case studies which reveal complexities ignored or oversimplified by popular media. By its very nature, too, academic study tends towards the dense and ponderous, is sometimes over-burdened with fashionable and indigestible theory, and mostly languishes all but unread in university libraries or specialised journals.  It is seldom absorbed by the people who need it most – policy-makers, politicians who are allergic to complexity, and financial power-houses. 

I can’t even begin to be comprehensive, but I think it’s worth advertising some of the serious work going on. Most inaccessible to the general public are the numerous theses and dissertations produced at universities. A goodly number of Zimbabwean postgrad students gravitate to Eastern Cape universities: NMMU, Fort Hare, and Rhodes, where Kirk Helliker anchors the Zimbabwe Studies Unit. Helliker himself, followed by some of his students, has worked mostly on the role of NGOs, which have often had a contentious relationship with the ZANU-PF government. A number of studies, unsurprisingly, focus on the Fast-Track Land Reform process: case studies, such as Loveness Chakora on women in Goromonzi, Manase Chiweshe on Mazowe, and Esther Chigumira  on Kadoma, provide much-needed nuance to a field often stereotyped as either grand success or chaos. Other studies tackle the Murambatsvina ‘cleansings’ of 2008, the relationship between mysticism and Mugabe’s rule, the rural elderly, climate change adaptation, forest management, social accountability in Bulawayo, and the situation of ethnic minorities such as the San and the Tonga. Journalism departments have also produced any number of studies of various media’s treatment of subjects such as witchcraft and HIV.

And that’s just a smattering from my corner of the academic subcontinent.

Then there’s the work being produced within Zimbabwe, including from the slew of smaller universities established over the last fifteen years or so. Despite Zimbabwe’s economic woes, local publishers (albeit often with overseas funding) have managed to produce, in book form, several collections of articles. These can tend to be a little doctrinaire, driven by ‘developmental’ agendas, lingering on anti-colonial rhetorics and reticent about critiquing the government of the day. What prolific scholar Maurice Vambe identified, in his contribution to a ground-breaking volume, Versions of Zimbabwe (ed. Mponde and Primorac, 2005), as a “poverty of theory” in literary study, might also apply to much of this body of work. It all has a bit of a hothouse feel about it, a coterie of local academics collaborating with and reviewing each other, not always attuned to latest theory elsewhere. As is usual with such collections, quality can be uneven, but some of it is very good, eloquent and challenging.

“Multi-disciplinary” perspectives seem especially in vogue, as are very long titles: Dialoguing Land and Indigenisation in Zimbabwe and Other Developing Countries (ed Z Makwavarara et al, 2015); Indigenous Knowledge and Technology in African and Diasporan Communities: Multi-disciplinary perspectives (ed.E Chiwome et al, 2000); and Culture and Development: Perspectives from the South (eds Chiwome and Gambahaya, 1998). As these titles indicate, a great deal of energy is expended on confronting and undermining ‘Western’ and ‘neo-colonial’ views. This can get a bit wearisome, as can the repetitive discourse of what I think of as the ‘bureaucratisation of the sociological’. Scholars’ use of this machinery, ploughing a similar furrow over two or more decades, is paradoxical and fraught, often hanging off the coattails of Western-generated theory even as African-centred perspectives are validly and fascinatingly offered. This is partly the result of new local scholars learning the field and yet to attain innovative independence; interesting, however, is the difference in feel from many of the essays in Versions of Zimbabwe: that volume sported such established luminaries as Preben Kaarsholm, Terence Ranger and Ranka Primorac, but bears the hallmarks of a cool intellectualism redolent of the Western academy. Local writers are nothing if not passionately engaged.

            

Being a literary dude, I am especially interested to see the number of essays devoted to literature in Zimbabwe’s vernaculars, as in the collection Zimbabwean Literature in African Languages: Crossing language boundaries (eds Chiwome and Mguni, 2012), which builds on the pioneering work of Alec Pongweni, Robert Muponde and Maurice Vambe. It makes for a fascinating parallel to well-worn studies of internationally-known fictions and memoirs by English-language writers, from Chenjerai Hove to Yvonne Vera, from Doris Lessing to Alexandra Fuller.  The latter group have now been exhaustively unpacked by Anthony Chennells, Ashleigh Harris and Ruth Eppel, to name just a few Zimbabwean scholars in this field – another little hothouse specialisation.

Gender has also emerged as a scholarly preoccupation, as in the collection African Womanhood in Zimbabwean Literature (eds Mguni at al). This concentrates not only on validating literature in Shona and Ndebele primarily, but also asserts various Africanist perspectives in opposition to Western models of feminism which are adjudged (as did Vandana Shiva in relation to Asia) inappropriate to African realities. This agenda is prominent also in the ponderously titled Rediscoursing African Womanhood in the Search for Sustainable Renaissance (eds Muwati at al, 2012), even as it is stimulated, and a bit over-determined, by the African-American inventor of “Africana womanism” Clenora Hudson-Weems, who supplies a foreword.  Here is evident a strong conservatism – meaning an avid defence of ‘traditional’ Shona dual-gender mores as distinct from ‘white’ Western feminism. Entirely absent is any discussion of one of the fiercest gender-struggles elsewhere: the definition, role and rights of homosexual, transgender and other ‘fluid’ identities. Such were anathema to Mugabe and still, it appears, to considerable swathes of African opinion.

These are just those few collections I’ve chanced upon. By their nature they are unlikely to be encountered by the general public; more accessible and available perhaps are monograph (single-author, book-length) studies. Among these, the land problem, especially in its post-2000 Fast Track manifestation, looms understandably large. A ‘first wave’ of studies ranged from the brilliant – such as Donald Moore’s Suffering for Territory (2005), through Ian Scoones et al’s somewhat doctrinaire and economy-orientated Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: Myths and realities (2010), to the subsequently roundly-criticised Zimbabwe Takes Back its Land by Joseph Hanlon and others (2013) – too closely aligned to ZANU-PF for the comfort of some scholars. Other provocative studies have explored dimensions of so-called whiteness – such as David Hughes’ Whiteness in Zimbabwe (2009) and William Wolmer’s Lowveld farmer-focused From Wilderness Vision to Farm Invasions (2007) – or on ZANU-PF politics, as with Stuart Doran’s monumental  Power, Glory, Kingdom (2016).

But I want to just glance at three recently published monographs which take the study of Zimbabwe in more unusual directions. 

Like Wolmer, Andrew Hartnack examines the white farmer community, but from a hitherto neglected angle – the role of farmers’ wives and their sundry ‘charitable’ and outreach activities. His Ordered Estates (2016) is slightly cheekily subtitled Welfare, power and maternalism on Zimbabwe’s (once white) highveld. Before 1980, many farmers’ wives oversaw farm-based clinics, schools, craft workshops, women’s clubs and orphanages, partly as a way of generating loyalty amongst workers, but also as a means of surveillance, behavioural inculcation, and control. The early twentieth century’s settler regime of overt violence was gradually supplanted by ’soft’ forms of power, legislative and economic, which helped extend and reinforce an avowed paternalistic ‘civilising mission’, at times strongly church-based.  After independence, and even more so after the dispossessions of the early 2000s, these welfare efforts were often invoked to justify the white farmers’ continued presence on the land. There are both continuities and ruptures in this shift, and Hartnack unpacks with exceptional subtlety the interactions of farmers and workers, of government structures with NGOs, of colonial-style patriarchy with land-use and women's domestic routines, with all their "awkward articulations" and contradictions.

My second example is Joost Fontein’s Remaking Mutirikwi: landscape, water and belonging in southern Zimbabwe (2015). This study overlaps to a degree with Scoones’, also being based in the Masvingo region, but Fontein is more interested in the complex interactions between the many players involved in and affected by the building of Kyle Dam (Mutirikwi). Fontein shows – again contrary to those who characterise the land-reform process simplistically as successful, chaotic, or top-down – how complex negotiations were between various traditional authorities, rainmakers and chiefs whom even ZANU-PF could not afford to ignore, war veterans and dispossessed people pursuing contradictory agendas, largely white leisure organisations, National Parks rangers still implementing colonial-style conservation ethics, commercial farmers and agricultural extension officers. For my taste, Fontein is rather too fond of injecting flights of theoretical jargon – which begin to sound more and more circular as he repeats them. (This also characterised his earlier book The Silence of Great Zimbabwe (2006).) Remaking Mutirikwi is also oddly structured – why is the earliest event, the establishment of the dam at Kyle itself, only covered in Chapter Six? But the detail, the product of years of immersion in the communities around the dam, multiple interviews and archival research, is fascinating – a lot of it unfortunately reduced to footnotes, but gritty and illuminating nonetheless.

As Fontein’s book is centred on water control – damming, irrigation, leisure-fishing – so too is my third book of interest, Muchaparara Musemwa’s Water, History and Politics in Zimbabwe: Bulawayo’s struggles with the environment 1894-2008 (2014). This, like Hartnack’s book, is the ultimate fruit of PhD research (Hartnack was at UCT, Musemwa at Missouri); and like Hartnack, he is good at placing his study in the frame of wider theories and approaches without becoming pretentious or obscure.  Musemwa intimately documents how water, its provision and control, played a crucial role in the establishment of Bulawayo. In an already arid region, the centrality of water seems blindingly obvious – but so much so it has been generally overlooked. As world-wide water issues gain prominence, however, this neglect is changing.  Musemwa reveals the often antithetical strategies of the British South Africa Company, the early municipality, national government and residents, over how to bring water to a n expanding urban population. Whatever one’s opinion of that ‘cash-box bandit’, as Bulawayo poet John Eppel called Cecil John Rhodes, Rhodes’ plans for the city were pretty enlightened. But they did not extend to the burgeoning black township of Makakoba, which was established and maintained for cheap labour, distanced but interdependent. The colonial authorities paid ad hoc attention to its layout and conditions, never taking full responsibility but also sporadically concerned to ameliorate health hazards and political unrest. The differentiation in water provision between the two poles of the urban area is the main thread in Musemwa’s story, which he brings up to date with ZANU-PF’s studied neglect of Matabeleland, not least in the funding of water resources.

It’s impossible to do justice to the richness and fascination of all these works in so short a space, but they all deserve to be read. May fruitful inferences be drawn from them, especially by the people who can influence our fraught futures.

*****

No.79 - Makhanda Unravelled 4: Roja adrift

“Roja!”

            The dog spun round at the sound of his name. The others in the pack took a moment to turn on him and nip his flanks.

            “Oy!” the man shouted, coming, running and stumbling over the piles of trash, waving. The dogs scattered and then returned to their business, mauling some scrap in amongst the debris.

            “Oh, Jesus,” the man cried, “what is that? Is that a dead baby?”

            The dog turned and turned, confused.

            “Roja, Roja,” the man said, “Come, you know me, it’s Jessie.” The voice was friendly, it was familiar to a degree; the dog pricked his ears and sniffed warily, the man’s scent barely discernible from the reek of smoke that billowed around them. The man knelt and called again, and Roja moved forward. “Come boy, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you at home? Where’s Rebecca?”

            The dog’s ears worked, trying to parse urgency from friendliness in the voice.

            “Let’s look at you, oh Lord, you’ve been bitten, haven’t you? What a mess you’re in.”  Roja winced as the man took the burned pads of a forepaw in his hand.  “Come on, let’s get you home, I can’t imagine how you got into this hellhole.” The man shucked his backpack and took out a length of thin rope. “At least you still have your collar, there we are, come with me now.”  From the pack a thin yowl rose. “No, that’s my kitten, not edible.”  He tugged on the rope. “Let’s go now.”

            But there were other shapes emerging through the acrid drifting smoke, lean and threatening. Feeling tied down and vulnerable, the dog was torn between plunging away and pushing up against Jessie’s leg for support.

            “Ay, mlungu!” a voice rasped out.

            “Molweni, injani,” Jessie replied evenly.  The figures circled, like dogs themselves, hungry-looking, ragged as the dumpsite they seemed to have been born out of.

            “What you want here? This is our place,” the lead youth said.

            “I just came to see what all the smoke was about. Amazing, even after all that rain, things dry out and  these fires start up again.”

            “We want that fat dog,” the youth said.

            Jessie laughed shortly.  “What, to eat? No chance, this dog belongs to someone else.  You can have one of those ones.”  He had unslung his long stick from his shoulders and waved it at the pack, which was itself wary of these two-legged strangers, lunging in opportunistically to snatch at the bundle they had been ravaging.

            The youths shifted warily from side to side, foot to foot.

            “We want your gun,” the leader said, though less certainly than before. Roja sensed Jessie’s unease and whined.

            “Sorry, no can do.” Jessie started backing away up the slope of the dumpsite; the youths spread a little and made threatening gestures, though the dog could sense that they were afraid, too.

            “You want one of those dogs?” Jessie said his voice cracking a little. Roja dragged at the rope, and Jessie tugged, “C’mon, boy, it’s okay.  I shoot one for you,” he called out.

            The youths shrugged and stared, non-committal. Jessie and Roja lurched and stumbled backwards up the slope towards the top edge of the dump. Jessie was coughing in the pungent smoke, Roja felt his eyes smarting, his tongue desperately dry.

            “You go, mlungu!” the lead youth yelled, “This is our place!”

            “You can have it,” Jessie yelled back. They reached the dump’s edge, negotiated a half-fallen fence of barbed wire snaggle-toothed with streamers of rotting plastic, then they could cross a strip of old bush and break out onto a road.

            “Whew, that was a bit unnerving, hey,” said Jessie. Roja sensed the relief and even a promise of safety, and limped more readily alongside the hurrying man.  “Shame, boy, your feet are sore, hey? It’s not far to get home, though, you can do it. Hell’s teeth, what a dump, literally! I haven’t been there for years, I can’t believe those fires have got going again, probably one of those idiots lit a cooking fire or something. I tell you, if we don’t die of thirst or get blown away by a cyclone, we’ll choke ourselves to death on plastic, hey boy?”

            Roja pricked his ears momentarily, felt how the man was gabbling away his fear, as walking along the road became a little easier, and breathing slowed. Jessie glanced behind, no one seemed to be following, except long flurries of smoke. He pulled up and dropped the pack. “Here, boy, I’ve got some water, you want some water? Course you do.” From a bottle he poured water into the cupped palm of his hand; Roja slabbered it up.  From the pack the cat was mewling, and Jessie extracted it, so small it almost disappeared in his hand.  He dabbed water into its pink mouth.

            “Roja, this is Siberia, the tiger who came in from the cold.  Not that it’s been that cold, global warming and all that.” Jessie showed Roja the kitten, which flare and hissed and took a swipe at Roja’s curious nose with a fistful of tiny claws. Roja jerked back, almost lifted a lip.  “No, Roja, she’s not for lunch.  Be friends, okay!  Come on, let’s go, maybe Rebecca will spare some of your biscuits for Siberia, if she has any.”  He stuffed the kitten back in the pack, and coaxed Roja back into walking.

            The wind shifted and swathes of thicker smoke descended on them, and Jessie tried to hurry a little more.

            “Come on, we can take a shortcut through these old factory grounds,” he said. They twisted through a gap in a fence, skirted some buildings grey with abandonment, though suddenly a voice hailed them. “Oops, a guard, imagine that,” Jessie muttered, and he called out, bright with friendliness, “It’s okay, we’re just cutting through to Hill 60, sorry, no problem!”

            They hurried on, ducked under another fence, crossed another strip of thin and ragged bush. “Yuss, this bush is sad, hey,” Jessie said. “First it shrivels in the drought, then its roots get washed away by the storms. Nothing even for the birds left. Thought I might shoot you a hare or something, Roj, but nothing left here, hey.”

            They emerged onto a street that Roja recognised now, he had walked here before, and he began to whine and pull on the rope, sniffing for familiar sign.

            “Ah, now you know where you are, hey boy! Almost there, easy now.”

            The houses, most evidently empty, were gloomy and ethereal behind the blanket of blue smoke that drifted and stung the nostrils.  Round a corner they spotted a bulky figure hurrying away, a smaller figure alongside. Jessie said, “Hey, isn’t that – ?” He called out, “Ai, Sis’! Sisi Mpum’!” But the woman just sped up, only the child dragging at her hand looked back, seeing them, or seeing the dog, and screamed, and Roja too squirmed and bristled and growled. Then the two turned the corner and vanished.

            “Wow, that was weird, is there a history between you guys? I don’t like the feel of this, Roj, I don’t like it at all. They were friendly enough last time we met, why are they running off like that? Shit, I  hope nothing’s happened.”

            Roja detected the rising anxiety in the man and looked up and whimpered.

            “Well, on we go, nearly there, one more street down. I think. Why the devil would anyone go off with all the street signs, anyway, huh?”

            As they turned another corner at the beginning of Roja’s street, and the dog began to strain and cough on the rope, a vehicle approached, lurching through potholes, its headlights strangely orange and wavering in the blue-grey smoke.

            “Ah, a cop car,” said Jessie, “that’s all right.”

            The bakkie drew alongside, and a brawny brown arm crooked out of the driver’s window.

            “Well, well,” said the policeman, “Mister Man with the Gun again! Johannes, yes?”

            “Jessie, actually, hi.”

            “Everything all right, Mister Gun?”

            “Ah, no, I’m not sure, actually. I just found this dog on the rubbish dumps, it belongs to Mrs Cochrane, it’s weird, and someone, this woman who normally stays with her, or has been for a week or two anyway, I’m sure I saw heading off, but she wouldn’t stop.”

            The cop frowned. “You mean Sis’ Mpumelelo? I also saw her, you’re right, she didn’t want to stop and chat, that’s for sure.”

            “I was just going to Rebecca – Mrs Cochrane’s house. D’you wanna come and check it out with me, it’s weird.”

            “Sure.” They eased along the road together.

            “How’s it going with you guys?” Jessie asked.

            “Hm, hmpf!  What a mess, ay. At least since the rain stopped this week we’re getting some more supplies through, it’s taken the heat out of things a little bit.  But people are stressed, ay, they get het up over nothing, take it out on the foreigners, or on their wives and I don’t know what.  And yesterday it was people poaching giraffe for nyama, can you believe it? Giraffe! Here we are, isn’t it?”

            They stopped at Rebecca’s sliding gate. It was securely chained and locked, from the outside. Roja scratched at the bottom of the gatepost and whined. Through the haze of blue smoke they bobbed and peered.  The car was still parked in the driveway. And half hidden behind the front wheels they could see the hem of a dress, a shoe, the paleness of a fallen ankle.

            “Oh, Jesus,” said Jessie. “That’s Rebecca.  Rebecca!” He rattled the gate. The foot did not move. “Rebecca!”

            Roja sat back on his heels and raised his nose and began to howl.

*****

No 78 - A short meditation on Long Walls

"The fate of walls" (c) Dan Wylie, 2019

After I aired my little cartoon about Trump and The Wall a couple of weeks ago (below), a friend challenged me to provide a solution – “O wise one”, he added, with (I suspect) a touch of sarcasm. Ha ha. I make no claim to wisdom, O challenging one, let alone solutions, but – as is my wont – I am led to do a little pondering and research into Long Walls.

Donald Trump – whose own German immigrant grandfather  would surely have been mortified to have been turned back by a wall of real steel and human hostility – recently proclaimed that “they had walls in the Middle Ages – and they worked!”

There are, of course, walls and walls and walls. Walls have, to state the obvious, protected us from wildlife, violent weather, and predatory humans, ever since we graduated from caves and humpies of hide or sticks. They’ve grown bigger and more sophisticated, tangible vectors of pride and fear, in unison with developing technology. One profound effect has been, it seems to me, to cut us off increasingly from the natural world as well as from one another. I am fascinated by the modern trend towards refined sky-piercing spikes of glass – the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, ‘the Shard’ in London – buildings which seem to want to transcend their own ‘wall-ness’, to be both transparent and impenetrable, flaunting their sterilised, pointy pointlessness, fatal to birds and humility alike.  A long (or high) way from the functionality of domestic comfort or protection in war.

Trump was right that there were massive defensive walls in mediaeval Europe (he was presumably thinking only of Europe), but they were very different to what he envisages for the Mexico-US border. Mediaeval Europe was divided largely into tiny principalities, city-states in a more or less constant state of bickering. Walls were built around these city centres, coming periodically under siege from an unfriendly neighbour, or an army sent by some overarching power such as the Holy Roman Empire, or the Papacy. Those broader blocs were only here and there roughly aligned with a self-identifying ethnicity – more EU-like. Of course these conflicts produced refugees, though distances and time was experienced very differently: when Dante was sent into exile from Florence by just such a city-state squabble, he fled scarcely a couple of days’ good walk away. But the problems those walls were designed to overcome were a world away from those of contemporary North America.

Trump was also right to claim that those walls ‘worked’, though they did so only in very limited ways, and for very short periods. Walls had the predictable effect of stimulating more sophisticated technology for breaching them: bigger siege machines, ultimately artillery, beginning with the “Horrible Bombard” that finally broke through the walls of Constantinople in 1453. Or cunning deceptions – think of the walls of Troy and the Trojan Horse. People would always search for ways of escaping or infiltrating walls: climbing over them, tunnelling under them (as in Israel today), or ballooning across them (as with the Berlin Wall). City walls could also have the problematic effect of becoming involuntary prisons, trapping the defenders in their own pit of starvation and disease. In the longer term, deeper societal currents simply made them redundant: they could not contain growing populations, and the formation of larger ethnic or nationalistic ‘states’ – France, Germany, etc – made the ‘city-state’ itself irrelevant. New technologies, networks, even moralities transcended the mediaeval version of the laager: I’ve walked around the walls that mark the limits of mediaeval York, now lost in the urban vastness, crisscrossed by cars, trains and aeroplanes, reduced to the merely picturesque.

Shorter walls are certainly effective in limited ways. The Israelis claim that their 400-km wall along the West Bank border has been effective in curbing suicide bombers, though this seems a narrow if understandable reason for the wall’s massive expense. It doesn’t prevent attacks by means of rockets, kites, seaborne boats, or knifings by Palestinians already living in Israel. This case also exemplifies another by-product of such walls: it intensifies “Othering” – the demeaning and stereotyping of the Outsiders.  Unlike the bluff but friendly neighbours, mutually repairing the wall between them in Robert Frost’s famous poem, “Building a Wall”, government-sponsored walls usually work only to the benefit of one side. The wall becomes as much a seam of invigorated conflict as a comforting divide, and muzzles or defers any collaborative efforts to address the underlying issues.

But what of Long Walls, the thousand kilometre-type monsters of the kind Trump envisages, ranging from coast to coast, over hill and dale? Such are fewer in number historically, though according to David Frye in his recent book, Walls: A history of civilisation in blood and brick, some 70 nations around the world today have built a variety of long-distance border barriers. The key word there is “nation”: these “hard borders” are, unlike most predecessors, associated with the notion of “national sovereignty”, often itself aligned with some or other form of ethnic purity or avowed cohesion. As any student of history will know, such purity is a myth – though no less a psychological force in the world for that. In practice, most of those barriers remain more or less porous – like that between South Africa and Zimbabwe, which some 2 million Zimbabweans have found to be no barrier at all.

This is true of the ancient walls, too. The most famous example, the Great Wall of China, built up and added to over many centuries, ostensibly to keep out nomadic raiders (Mongol or Hsiung-nu “barbarians”), was as much an imperial/nationalist pride-project, along with Ch’in canal and palace projects. It was constructed at appalling cost in human life, and, to judge by the minimal role accorded to it by Harry Gelber in his history of China, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils, it did little to fulfil its original function. Indeed, it became as much a conduit for trade and cultural exchange as anything. Again, the modernisation of the globe has reduced it to decaying ruin in most parts, a romanticised tourist-trap in what’s left. Such walls, in the long run, cost too much to keep up: the $5 billon demanded by Trump for his wall would be only the beginning of endless and disproportionate maintenance costs.

Digging Hadrian's Wall, 1984

The same can be said of the less well-known, 5th-century  “Red Snake” wall of Gorgan, stretching 120 miles east from the Caspian Sea. Hadrian’s Wall, the 80-mile Roman wall across northern England, was also touted by some Roman writers as being responsible for a period of peace in the Roman Empire. However, modern historians – including the archaeologist I briefly “dug” with in the 1980s – argue that the Wall was only very temporarily effective, too low and poorly manned to really keep people out. In any event, many “barbarians” were already inside the imperial bounds: that’s in the very nature of empires, and the city of Rome was already irreversibly cosmopolitan. Indeed, Rome was arguably at its best when it welcomed “others” as resources rather than enemies. And it was still overrun by the Visigoths, walls or no walls.

There seems little reason to doubt that a physical US-Mexico border wall won’t eventually suffer the same fate, whatever short-term satisfaction it might bring some people. It’s unlikely to add much to the already intense network of surveillance (heat-sensitive cameras, drones, motion detectors, dog and helicopter and vehicle patrols, detention centres, and sometimes deliberately cruel and discriminatory legislation) that has already cut actual immigration to a trickle. These modern migrants may not all be angels, but they are not Visigoths or Huns; they are not Al Qaeda or Boko Haram. Nor are they drug-lords: the wall will do nothing to curb the import of drugs so long as Americans keep taking them. The only real solution for these people’s plight is renewed collaborative efforts to elevate the well-being and functionality of the states they come from.

As in the case of Rome, the 'enemy' is already within the gates. White Americans largely seem to forget that those southern border areas were first occupied by Spanish invaders who (in tandem with the eradication of native Americans and the imposition of imported black slave-colonies) were evicted south of the Rio Grande by Anglo-Saxon/imperial force or strong-armed ‘land-purchase’. Despite that, the more recent flourishing of southern states has least in part been built on the labour of Hispanic immigrants; and the rate of criminality among such immigrants – as every government and independent source (barring Trump) attests – is markedly lower than that among American-born inhabitants.  Recall that not a single American has died at the hands of an “immigrant terrorist” since the Twin Towers attack in 2001, whereas a mass shooting (defined as 4 or more shot at one time) by a locally-born American has happened virtually every day in 2018 alone.

"Ozymandias: or, Desert Hubris" (c) Dan Wylie, 2019

So, to answer my Challenging Friend, it’s very, very complex, and I don’t know what “the solution” is, if there is a single one.  We should not be distracted by Trump’s simplistic obsession with The Wall from the real-world complexity of the US response to immigration. In any event, a solution is hardly going to emerge when the problems are inaccurately diagnosed from the get-go, and when those who ought to be treated in the first instance with compassion are met instead with misdirected hostility. “The Wall” seems to me an embodiment of all that is ugly and unfruitful in human relations, doomed to expensive failure. In the best scenario, it will be doomed by the angels of our better nature.

*****