No.84 - A valley in Zimbabwe, 2001: what's changed?

This account of one of my many visits to Zimbabwe, which I recently rediscovered, was published in the East Cape Weekend on August 18 2001, under the headline "Stoic, friendly people survive amid the chaos".  So what has really changed under Mnangagwa's government, 18 years later?

The valley sweeps down from high forested mountain-sides to a flat but narrow floor which leaks into Mozambique. It carries all the scars and memories of its history. Ancient burial-caves keep respectful Shona peoples warily out of the forests; there are leached-out lime-pits and gold workings. There are steeply twisting roads, power-lines, barbed fences, coffee and nut plantations. Along the border rakes the still visible scar of the minefield, relic of the Rhodesian war, the “second Chimurenga”. Twenty years on, mines still explode occasionally, some poor baboon dies. Human smugglers have long since carved clear paths across the fields.

Across the border is the site of one of the dust-ups between the first British invaders and the Portuguese in the 1890s. Local black people were simply overridden in those wars. Now they – or the Mugabe government – are out to “get their own back” – a “third Chimurenga”, some have called the latest land-grab.

It is mid-2001. I walk down the valley road familiar from many visits. Geography dictates that this is a tight-knit community, though really a multinational one: there’s a Swede, and a Jamaican, whites of British and Afrikaans descent, Shona landowners from both sides of the all-but-irrelevant border, an Ndebele lawyer. There are farm workers, a doctor, crafts-people, retired folk, a couple of store-keepers, a hotelier. Their properties are small or steeply inaccessible. It’s not in the front-line of the violence racking Zimbabwe’s big commercial farms. But it’s still under siege, a fragile haven threatened in many less obvious ways – a microcosm, in fact, of the way the majority of Zimbabweans are living right now.

As I walk down the road, ragged Mozambicans greet me in hesitant Portuguese. One reeks of fish, dried and humped up from the coast, to be swapped for mealie-meal. Another is loaded with clothing: in the flea-markets you can buy, very cheaply, heavy duvet jackets, inappropriately supplied by Canadian relief organisations to Mozambican refugees; they end up worn by rich Zimbabwean students at South African universities. On the red clay banks of the road, old election slogans are carved and still visible, all Zanu-PF. The opposition MDC have confined themselves to spray-painting on the backs of road-signs. The region voted solidly MDC a year ago: some blame this for the fuel shortage, the government deliberately starving opposition strongholds.

I notice, bizarrely, that the cats’-eyes on this mist-bedevilled road have all been dug up. The story emerges that it’s not the eyes the thieves are after, but the aluminium mountings. They’re melted down – for coffin handles.

“Aids,” says K (names and details have been changed to protect identities). “It’s taken sixteen of my workers in the last year.” K runs a small factory on the border. Because it’s a lucrative little export business he has been able to wangle enough fuel to run his trucks – just. But you can see the strain in his florid, intense face.

“It’s getting harder and harder. No forex. Bad fuel situation. Producers can’t get their stuff to me. No spares, theft from the factory on the rise. I had to fire my building foreman for smuggling my cement across the border. That’s where the real building is happening. But these people are desperate. Never mind the whites, most of us can get out if we have to. But my workers can’t. Prices are rocketing. I pay twice the minimum wage, but I’ve had to stop subsidizing their kids’ schooling, so many just aren’t going any more. It’s a disaster for their generation. Mugabe doesn’t see what he’s doing. If he wants us to go back to the 17^th Century, he should get out of his f…ing Rolls Royce and his f…ing Armani suits and go back to the 17^th century himself.”

“Mugabe knows exactly what he’s doing,” asserts D, a retired Scot who keeps himself and a couple of workers alive by supplying vegetables to the valley hotel. “He’s bloody clever the way he keeps himself in power. He knows how to manipulate his people – with this”, he says raising a fat Scots fist.

D is leaving in two weeks’ time, going back to Scotland. He’s one of those tough engineers who’ve been through the gamut of African states of independence: Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, finally Zimbabwe. But he’s had enough. The hotel is cutting back, tourism has crashed.

“I can’t make ends meet. Before, I could still earn more than I can on British pension. Not now. And I had this,” he sweeps his hand across the vista of forested mountainside. “Fantastic climate, fine people, never had trouble with my workers in 22 years. Even now they don’t agree with Mugabe’s nonsense. Mugabe knows it; he’s deliberately unleashed anarchy. He’ll declare a State of Emergency and rule by decree.  And he wants us whiteys out. You, too.” He points meaningfully, sadly, at my chest.

Mugabe has more than succeeded: From 180 000 whites in 1981 the white population is down to about 50 000 now – about one half of one percent of Zimbabwe’s total.

* 

F fulminates: “We’re such a tiny minority, it’s ridiculous. Mugabe can’t even begin to seriously believe we’re a threat to him. It’s not about us at all. He’s scared he’s going to get the chop because of what he did in Matabeleland. He checks out [ex-Yugoslavian leader Slobodan] Milosevic and so on, and thinks, I’m going to die in the saddle, or else.”

F is particularly incensed because he’s a third-generation Zimbabwean, albeit white. He’s almost a caricature, comb in sock, bush hat, an attitude towards blacks that hasn’t changed since the ‘60s: “We always knew they’d bugger it up. But I can’t go anywhere else. This is my country. I’ve given it all I’ve got.”

In fact, he is going elsewhere – he’s moving his small irrigation firm to Mozambique, where he’s welcomed with open arms. Too many farmers have stopped ordering equipment -  but just across the border it’s full steam ahead. I suggest to him it’s a little premature to bail out, even now.

“It’s an insurance policy, okay. And why not? There’s no paperwork, there’s petrol for Africa, the roads are better, people are planting. But I’m telling you, there’s a hundred families already over there, waiting to come back the moment Bob’s gone. Lots of people here are saying it can’t get any worse. But look at Angola, Uganda, look at Mozams ten years ago. It can get a helluva lot worse.”

*

V puts her head in her hands. She’s maybe 50, but still looks like a hippie. Her long hair trails in the coffee she’s served herself in her coffee-shop on the valley road.

“I can last maybe another year,” she says. “Then I’m broke. You’re my first visitor in a week. It takes one murder in the international press, and we small fry are sunk.” 

She’s a one-time political science major who now also runs a small pottery, employing a dozen women. She can’t sell much locally, but finds ways of getting stuff overseas, squirreling away smidgens of forex.

“Even two years ago I wouldn’t have thought of operating this way. But Mugabe is making criminals of all of us. And just to think, back in the ‘70s when I was a student in London, I helped raise funds for Zanu-PF. I got arrested in Trafalgar Square for baring my boobs in an anti-Smith demonstration! You can understand it in a way. Now whites feel exactly the way the Africans felt for so long – no help to be expected from the police, the courts; that desperate helplessness. What the whites were doing back then was evil, but what Mugabe is doing now is also evil. Funny how Smith and Mugabe both believe in a British-led international conspiracy against them. Like they’re twins. You know, I think Mugabe’s mind is the most colonized mind in the country. He can only think in terms of racial binaries – and that’s a form of thinking that colonialism invented.”

*

M owns a meagre 30-hectare farm. “The bank owns me!” he laughs, “but Mugabe doesn’t realise that if he sinks agriculture, he sinks the banks.”

You can’t imagine anywhere less suitable for the resettlement project. Twenty of his 30 hectares are forest and rock rising at 45^o. But M’s property has been designated by the government for compulsory acquisition; three times he’s fought it, been de-listed. Next list, he’s back on. In September 2000 a bunch of people moved on to a strip of land, partly on his property, partly on the next, all previously cleared grazing land.

“That’s old Z’s place; he’s an African and he got designated, too! It’s chaos. And are they war vets? Landless peasants? No, they’re the army. They got a tractor from the Districts Development Fund (paid for by taxpayers). Men in uniform – with jobs already – were ordered to dig. One of them came up to the house, and said ‘teach us to grow flowers’.” I said, “First, you buy seedlings, and shadecloth, and the drip irrigation system. To buy that, first you go to the bank and borrow Z$500 000 (R55 500)”. That’s the last I heard of that”, he chuckles. “But there they are, ploughing up my doorstep, practically. They’ll get one crop of mealies, maybe two, then they’ll have to go somewhere else. What a waste!”

He gestures at an area of land on the opposite slope. “Look at that – unutilized, riddled with wattle and gums. It desperately needs clearing. But do they take that? No, they want the cleared land. Lazy sh…” he mutters darkly then muses, “It’s funny, they’re all gung-ho to get rid of us foreign people, but they don’t give a stuff about the foreign trees. But it’s the trees that will do the most damage in the long run.”

Humour isn’t dead. There’s a story about a pantomime they wanted to stage: “No Whites and the Seven War-Vets.”

Back on the road, I meet a soldier. He’s young, unarmed, and a little tipsy. He greets me effusively.

”I saw some other soldiers working the lands there,” I tell him.

He grins, “Yah! Those are our lands, we have taken back the land.”

“Do you stay there now?”

“Ah no, I stay in town, at the barracks.”

“Are you a war veteran?”

He straightens up. “Yah!”

“How old are you?”

He thinks. “Twenty.”

“So you were born in 1980, the same year as Independence?”

“1981,” he corrects me sternly.

“Ah, same as me,” I joke; he points at my greying hairs and laughs uproariously.

At the little farm store, I find some youngsters playing soccer with a bundle of plastic bags tied together. Apart from the game, and the backdrop of msasa trees, I could be in Harlem: the baseball caps, the dreads, the numbered T-shirts and ‘Harvard’ sweater, even the rapper-jive walk and gestures of the hands. What has happened to their Shona-ness? I think. Mugabe can fulminate all he likes about great Western conspiracies, but it’s these subtler trends that will long outlast his brief regime.

*

At first I think I am at the wrong house, or perhaps the Swede has been bought out by this elegant, articulate and attentive Shona man who rises from a deskful of papers. But no, he is the house-keeper; the Swede is in Sweden. And what about the upcoming Presidential elections?

“Mugabe will not lose,” he says mournfully. “He has the police, the army. Even the judiciary now.

The opposition are not together, they are naïve. So how can he lose? It’s terrible, what is happening. People are beginning to starve. So eventually he will lose. It will come round again, behind him, like a jackal, chup!” And he laughs hugely. These people laugh so much. Then he frowns and adds, “I don’t think he understands morality.”

I ask him why he isn’t doing something more in line with his intellect, teaching or something. “Oh no, I am happy with the quiet life; I just get on with things, I think a lot. But maybe this is the problem with us Shona people; we have to be pushed very hard before we get angry. But we can get angry. As the white people discovered.”

And he gives me a straight, amused look. “Meanwhile, we just try to live with what we have.” There are amazing smells coming from the kitchen. I look at my watch. “I won’t delay your lunch.”

“Oh,” he waves self-effacingly. “I’m just trying out a Thai vegetarian recipe. Will you join me?”

******

No.83 - New poem: "Election Day, 2019"

Election Day, 2019

After three decades of lowering mist, a bright day

of sunlight through pine-needles, and steam off rotting fungi.

The geese are voting one way, the guineafowl another.

Left-wing drongos, dark on the wires, taunt the tabby electorate

with their forked tails, their obsidian eyes and promises.

No one believes them any more, or trusts the clouds.

The dogs bark, but the vervets’ rhetoric baffles them.

The bees have compiled their poll, but no one knows

how this day might end for them.

What does the wind think, tainted with the smoke

of loitering desires? Or the sea, tasting saltier to itself

than at any time in its leviathan memory?

Or the noonday sun, burning its hole through the sky?

Or the river, its bounty irrevocably mingled with toxins

and blood? Or the leaves left behind on the floor

of the broken forest, like the remnants of slaves?

Or the doubloons of light on the shadowed lane,

the pointless riches of overthrown kings?

A nameless man is sweeping dead leaves round

and around the parking circle; his toothless

broom splinted with someone else’s rough idea.

Curtained windows and erythrinas observe indifferently.

The night is falling, echoing with uncertainty.

The stars are counting themselves up, the heavens

impassive but for the comets inserting themselves

in the slots in the galaxies. All said and done, the sky

looks much the same. Leaves go on falling through the wind.

******

(c) Dan Wylie

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.

------------------------------

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!

----------------------------------

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.

*****