The slightly mad journey
described here occurred in 1991; the account may have been printed in an obscure
Harare broadsheet, the Northern News, maybe in early 1992, but I have no record of that, so venture to resuscitate it here.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF
MAPONDERA
The early white settlers called him a murderer and a nuisance
and a mercenary and a cannibal. Later, black liberation fighters would hail him
as a kind of proto-nationalist hero and protector of the poor. In his 1893
novel, Solomon Mutswairo called him “the last and greatest fighter of his
country against Cecil Rhodes’ squatters”.
Even as new, often contradictory evidence comes to light,
Mapondera remains controversial. But his career in Zimbabwe’s north-eastern
districts, from the 1840s to 1904, is astonishingly well-documented. His tracks are pretty clear.
In his footsteps, very crudely, my friend David and I
decided to follow – on bicycles. It was altogether the wrong season to cycle
anywhere, over Christmas: very hot, very wet. We also had to do it too quickly,
either for comfort or to locate and visit Mapondera’s old haunts with any real
precision.
But we did it anyway.
We began where Mapondera ended, both literally and
symbolically: Harare. Here he was finally imprisoned and died; and here also
his name is enshrined on the facade of the High Court building on Samora Machel
Avenue. When he was captured and brought here, so the legend goes, his broken
chimurenga spirit possessed him for one last time and he flew about the heads
of his terrified captors, before floundering back to earth and final
humiliation.
But David and I set out rather in search of the living
countryside, the present setting of a once very real, violent and chequered
life.
***
 |
| [All photos courtesy D G Roux] |
DAY ONE
Clear day, soft morning light through Harare’s northern
suburbs, early joggers on the Mazowe road. The flat tarmac, cleaving rich red
farmland and the research stations, makes for relaxed progress, long shadows
mimicking us as we pedal. We stop once near Maryvale to watch a heron hunting
through a vlei, take a slug of water in the warming day, and press on down the
winding exhilaration of the Golden Stairs. Mazowe Dam on the right, firefinches
along the road by the Rowing Club, wagtails in the gorge beneath the high wall.
None of the famous oranges at the store: off season.
There has long been citrus at Mazowe: Frederick
Courtney Selous wrote of finding lemons here in the 1870s, left maybe by
Portuguese wanderers a century before. Though the village originally served
goldmines – the map is littered with the crossed picks of mine-sites – citrus took
over after the early 1900s when Robert McIlwaine and others started up the
Mazoe Syndicate, and built the first citrus factory in 1930.
Mazowe village skulks off the main road among the trees.
Beneath huge jacarandas is the moss-greened monument to Blakiston and
Routledge, the two youngsters elevated, in the manner of all nascent political powers,
to heroic status for little more than getting themselves rather futilely killed
in the 1897 Chimurenga. This countryside is full of such mementoes of that
rebellion. We divert a short way along the old Fort Road to the hilltop site of
Fort Mazoe, from which operations were initially coordinated against Mbuya
Nehanda and Kaguvi. Nothing here now except the remnant of a ditch, a thatched
shelter for a display of historical accounts and glassed-in photographs;
settlers with their pinned-up hats and bandoliers and walrus moustaches;
Nehanda and Kaguvi before their execution, a sad, haunted-looking pair whose
spirits hovered for seventy years to inspire the second, more successful
Chimurenga.
On the way back to the village the rear wheel of Dave’s
mountain-bike seizes. We strip it down to find the inside of the bearing
housing shredded into flakes. Nothing for it but for him to hitch back to
Harare for a replacement. Cursing cheap Taiwanese junk, we pile his gear onto
my racing bike (dubbed Mercury, after the god of travellers), and push to the
hotel, and he sets off, armed with his wheel. I start to read Newman’s Birds from cover to cover, doze, watch
the people who ebb and flow from the veranda: rough-handed agriculturalists, government
officials, a lonely farmer who nurses a beer for two hours without removing his
baseball cap, a horde of sweaty brittle Danes from a Zambian aid project.
Seven and a half hours later, Dave returns, Isak’s Cycles
having generously given him preferential treatment. We retrace our tracks to
pitch our Little Red Tent at the rowing club, the rowers’ chant and oar-clank
drifting over the water until dark.
We’ve covered the terrific distance of 40 kilometres.
***
 |
| My primary source for this historical sections. |
Just north of Mazowe,
to the south of Chiweshe communal land and in the lee of Nyota Mountain, is the
country of Negomo: Mapondera’s original homeland. Negomo’s chiefly name still
adorns our map: his people came there, as the stories tell it, around the late
18th century from the semi-mythical territory of Guruuswa (“upriver”), and claimed descent from the great
Changamire. Maybe links still existed with the north in the 1830s, as Mapondera
said he was born on the Zambezi River.
It was a turbulent
time then of internecine strife, foreign invaders. Alternate trade and conflict
were carried on with the Portuguese – vazungu
– along the Zambezi, particularly in gold (gold panning is still today
devastating large sections of the lower Mazowe river, alongside Umfurudzi). One
Magumu is said to have won the present Negomo lands; after the death of Magumu’s
adventurous successor Chiwodza, credited with killing a magician in Dande, the
Negomo dynasty split and the chieftainship erratically circulated between
brothers. One of Chiwodza’s sons strangled another, a third committed suicide.
When Mapondera was born, Chiwodza’s grandson, the “quiet man” Dandera, held
sway – but little power that was, at a time when Zwangendaba’s Ngoni madzviti were foraging disruptively
northwards on their way from Natal to Malawi.
Dendara was succeeded
by Gorejana, maybe Mapondera’s father (even Mapondera’s grandchildren debate
this) and a renowned settler of disputes. Mapondera seems to have inherited
some of this ability, though it’s arguable whether he didn’t provoke more
conflicts than he solved. Little is known of his childhood, but certainly he
distinguished himself in resisting Ndebele raiders who scattered through this
area in the 1860s, and in sundry Shona civil wars over land, stolen grain, a
robbed woman. Either in conquest or arbitration, Mapondera won himself some 25
wives over the years.
In 1884, Mapondera
met his first white man, a Montagu Kerr, who was following in the tracks of
Selous. Three years later, the great white hunter himself met the Shona chief.
Selous extracted (or they concocted together) a fraudulent concession,
apparently designed to forestall the encroachments of equally mercenary
Portuguese “warlords”, who were making a concerted effort to take over Zimbabwe’s
central plateau even as they squabbled among themselves. By 1891, whites were making more serious
incursions from the south into the Mazowe valley; clashes occurred over labour
and tax; missionaries arrived in Nyota; in 1892 a white trader was murdered.
The build-up in tension was steady until the outbreak of widespread rebellion
in 1896.
But by then Mapondera
had gone, heading north-west – as we did.
***
DAY TWO
For the second time we cross through the gap in the Iron Mask range, past Concession’s ranked grain silos, turning off towards Mvurwi.
The day heats up rapidly. Mapondera’s Nyota (Thirst) mountain faint in the
east. The turnoff to the Howard Institute, the Salvation Army school and
successor to the first mission in Chiweshe, which in 1891 included maybe
Zimbabwe’s first black missionary. Acres of citrus trees, tiny oranges peeping.
We both suffer in the heat, welcome the stop to watch a
Longcrested eagle on a telephone pole, its self-assured stance, that fierce
crest of black feathers, white windows on its wings as it flies. Dave labours
particularly: he’s carrying more gear on his sturdy mountain-bike, suffers more
road-friction from its fat tyres, more wind-resistance from his upright
posture. He drinks vast quantities of water, and I rib him about it; I find
that when on the move more than a mouthful makes my stomach turn and legs go
leaden.
We stop at a store for cool drinks, craving ice and sugar.
Reggae music blasts numbingly from scratchy speakers. People stare; boys
convulse in laughter. We are a sight:
Dave in sandals, straw hat, multicoloured shorts, intellectual’s glasses, long
muscular arms gripping those spacious handlebars; me in boots and binos,
Indiana Jones hat, purple panniers. All the way we suffer from this intense
self-consciousness.
Mvurwi’s granite koppies sail into view, ghostly overturned
galleons, well before lunch. We collapse on grass on the curving main street,
chat to a South African couple and their Zimbabwean daughter: “You’re going to
Gooroovy? Why the hell would anyone want to go to Gooroovy?” We’ll die in the Valley, we’re told. But we’ll
head for Guruve anyway, as soon as we’ve got over feeling like the “heap of
pieces” the name Mvurwi means. Once called Dawsons, the village became Umvukwes
in 1935.
We drop in on an acquaintance; his kind, bluff landlady
entertains, allows us to shower in humid pre-storm heat. Clean, we launch into
a skyscape of riotous, steely storm-cloud, dark sheaves of approaching rain
thundering through Gertrude Page country: this 1930s novelist’s grave at Omeath
is just a few kilometres south as we turn towards Guruve.
A cool, magnificent tailwind lifts us over the Great Dyke at
Mupingi Pass: a protected area and the northernmost crossing of the 530-kilometre
serpentinite mass, the world’s longest, 2,500 million years old. If there are
any of the Dyke’s 20 endemic plant species along this route, we don’t notice,
the storm-wind hurtling us down the Pass’s exhilarating loops, making nearly 30
kilometres an hour. We stop momentarily for more wanter, race on in the dusk
through the bleak flatlands of Guruve communal lands, scattering stones and
chickens, finally turning aside to pitch the Little Red Tent near the
headwaters of the Dande River.
***
A mere 20 kilometres
downstream of us, in late 1894, Mapondera came to rest with 50 followers, on
the rugged edge of the Zambezi escarpment.
Why did he flee his
homeland at Nyota, where he had lived for nearly 50 years? Probably many
reasons. There was drought in 1893-4; a lot of people had to move. There was
the conflict with the new white raiders (they could hardly be called a
government yet), especially after the killing of the trader Henry Austin and
the arrest of his killer, Rwanga. The notorious Native Commissioner Kenny was
stretching his tax-collecting tentacles into the Mazowe valleys.
But Mapondera had
avoided friction with the whites himself: he just raided his neighbours. As one
described it: “About 3 days ago Mapondera’s men came to my kraal. Mapondera was
there himself with a great many of his men. They said they had come for cattle from
us. We had no cattle of theirs. They came and took all our cattle – about 14
cattle – and killed a boy and a girl. The boy was stabbed by an assegai and the
girl was a little girl they caught hold of her and dashed her against a piece
of wood. ... They took away my wife and her two children. My wife and my
children.”
So it was probably
Mapondera’s neighbours who pushed him out, despite his prominent position. Here on the Dande’s steep hills, he was
beyond the reach of British, Portuguese and vengeful Shona alike. This northern
curve of the Dyke, the Horseshoe, had always been a place of refuge for Nagomo’s
people; it was here that Chiwodze had killed his magician and returned to
power.
Mapondera would never
return to power in Nyota. He was left alone until 1900; the 1896-7 chimurenga
entirely passed him by. But in April 1900 he fatally drew attention to himself
by raiding in his old home ground, too close to Mazowe to be ignored, and again
in June by attacking, for no known reason, one Mavuri. One of Mapondera’s own
daughters tried to warn Mavuri, but too late: Mapondera shot him through the
thighs, and both the traitorous daughter and the wounded Mavuri prudently fled
to the white camp at Chinhoyi’s.
The result, of
course, was a punitive patrol. Twenty whites under Gilson set out on what would
be called “The Chastisement of Mapondera”. However, Mapondera ambushed them
just west of where Dave and I were camped, and they were scattered, with one
man killed. So, equally inevitably, a bigger force was despatched. A hundred
and eighty men attacked Mapondera’s base on 5 July; four of Mapondera’s men
were killed. More importantly, his crops and villages were destroyed, his
family and followers dispersed.
Mapondera had to move
his people again.
***
DAY THREE
The peaks of the Horseshoe – smoky, sheer-sided Mavurwe among
them – close in on Dave and I as we negotiate the dirt farm roads. This is
where Dave’s mountain bike scores over my bony, frail 10-speed.
We skirt Guruve township – some stores still bear the
pre-independence name, Sipolilo – thus unfortunately missing the famous
Tengenenge sculpture workshop. The Tengenenge river flows from the Dyke to the
Dande, the source of the gleaming serpentine they coax those world-renowned
sculptures from.
We tether our bikes near the tobacco barns of Penrose Farm,
asking permission to walk to Tingwa Raphia Palm Reserve, one of two small
designated preserves in an area known generally as the Palm Block. A hot
4-kilometre tramp across the northernmost curve of the Horseshoe’s great
question-mark, through maize fields and uapaca woodland, chittering woodhoopoes
and Amethyst starlings, unidentifiable raptors screaming on the high thermals.
Somewhere to the east, a mountain beckons with its name: Incognito.
The raphia palms (Raphia
farinefera), the last insular remnants of a once popular tribe, cluster
along the narrow head of the Mavare stream as it flows through vlei north-west
into Mavuradonha: towering, creaking fronds fanning from layered bases – the longest
leaves in the plant kingdom, up to 18 metres tall. Returning, we find ancient
rock paintings in the lee of an outcrop: magical flaking renditions of
energetic hunters, waterbuck, giraffe – some, strangely, upside-down (dead?) –
maybe 10,000 years old.
Press on, tough farm roads, alternately sandy and rocky;
onto a short stretch of tar north of Guruve, then dirt again. Horrible, this
bit: recently graded, with a treacherous sheath of loose stones; Mercury slides
and rattles and fishtails, and I dread the blowout that doesn’t come.
Almost last light: Bakasa Business Centre, perched on the
lip of the Zambezi escarpment: RMS trucks and buses grinding up from the valley, music,
lemonades (all we can buy in a time of shortages), beer-cradling youngsters on
holiday crowding us with friendly questions: Are you on a race? Who is
sponsoring you? Who are you raising money for? They can’t believe it is just
for fun (is it?), have heard only vaguely of Mapondera.
Valleys fall away on every side; habitation everywhere. In
my halting Shona I ask to pitch Little Red Tent on a flat spot near some huts.
Little girls gather with badzas to clear the stones for us, awestruck by the “piccanini
kaya”, sleeping-bags (“Brunkets!”), sadza being cooked on a meths stove. And I
sleep out, pasted with repellent, listening to the bushbabies cawing in the
donga, the sky weighted and bouyed at once with its wheeling stars.
***
Mapondera needed to
plant a new season’s crops, rebuild villages before the rains. He was caught
between British and Portuguese tribute-collectors. In the Dande there was talk
of further rebellion against the new white overlords, with rumours that many of
the whites had left to fight a big war against the vabunhu, the Boers, far to the south.
Mapondera was less
keen to fight than to find security, food, the means to hold his diminished people
together. It was an desperate move to go into the Zambezi Valley, with its
tsetse fly, its heat, its poor Kalahari sands. But in July 1900 another white
patrol caught up with him; he escaped, and dropped, somewhere in the vicinity
of Bakasa, over the escarpment to a point on the Musengezi River.
He returned once to
Dande to recover some of his belongings, and shot in the leg a youth who turned
obstinate. It was his last appearance in that traditional haven.
***
DAY FOUR
Like Mapondera, we drop precipitately from Bakasa to the
valley floor, 600 metres down treacherously loose hairpins. Dave positively
enjoys it on that muscular bike of his; I nurse complaining Mercury over the
rocks and avalanching pebbles; more than once the machine despairs and throws
its wheels in the air and sends me leaping.
That liberating floodplain comes intermittently into view
round the wooded corners, blurring into mysterious, unreachable blues towards
Kanyemba and Cabora Bassa, where Portuguese gangsters once traded and slaved
and lived the violent, polygamous lives of minor potentates.
Shoulders aching and paintwork scratched, we arrive at the
Fly Gate (extra wide, to admit exceptionally large flies?), a store without
drinks, mangoes on pole-and-thatch stalls. We head west along the foot of the
escarpment, trying to make as much distance as possible before the heat hits us.
We stop for tea beneath a thorn tree, not far from Mutota’s Ruins, a schist
oval structure, possibly connected with the Mwenemutapa imperial complex,
pottery dating it to around the 15th-17th centuries (this is book-learning: we
don’t actually find the ruin ourselves, far too much effort in the growing
heat).
After crossing the Musengezi, not far upstream from where
Mapondera settled, we find a steel-and-concrete blessing: a roadside borehole.
A laughing man pumps the long handle while we duck and writhe in its pulsing
stream, the nearest we’ve had to a wash since Mvurwi. Finally, dripping and
sapped, but having made some decent progress on well-kept gravel, we reach Muzarabani
shops and irrigation scheme. No electricity, no ice’n’sugar. We buy biscuits
and exorbitantly expensive oranges, crash for a few hours under a pair of
corpulent baobabs, refreshing ourselves in the irrigation sprinklers. A snazzily-dressed young lady in scarlet
shoes and straw boater comes across to chat, wrinkling her face in utter
amazement: “From Harare! And back again? My God, you must know how much I hate cycling!”
Mid-afternoon: back up the escarpment, thankful for the
tarmac of the Alfa Trail. Push, ride; push, ride. It’s exhausting, dispiriting
to see the road loop back and forth above us. Dave, tractor-treads and Mister
Tuffies anti-thorn strip inside his tyres notwithstanding, picks up a slow
puncture, keeps stopping to pump, grows irritable and despondent. (I’ve been there, buddy.) Elephant dung on the
road; no elephants. At last, after three hours of backbreaking climbing, we
arrive at the campsite at Mavuradonha, absolutely empty. Even the manager’s
away. Up goes the LRT; down go the weary heads.
I wonder if we’re the only crazy coots ever to have cycled
down and up the Zambezi Escarpment, by two different routes, on the same summer
day.
***
Mapondera, like us,
was not long on the Musengezi – a few months. He was too close to the
Portuguese warlord Fonseca for a start, and by October 1900 he had moved bodily
eastwards, 150 kilometres onto the lower Ruya – well inside Mozambique and just
north of that sharp north-eastern corner of Zimbabwe enticingly called Baobab
Beacon – but there Dave and I can’t follow.
It was a pretty
horrendous place to live. Mapondera put down new crops in the local
transhumance style, but the soils were poor, rains inadequate. Between
plantings, raiding was endemic. Mapondera was implicated in some raids,
including the killing of a white trader in late 1900, but many of the tales
were probably spread by Mapondera’s slanderous rivals. But every man had a gun;
Portuguese slaving threatened every woman; British raiders, claiming suddenly
to rule the whole area and demanding tax, erratically came, were resisted, and
went away again.
Mapondera sandwiched
himself between two tough local chiefs, Chiuti and Chioko, who, along with
Chimanda and Pfungwe on the upper Mazowe, continued to offer spirited
resistance to the incursions of Native Commissioners Taberer and Kenny, who had
set up an advance base at Pfura (Mount Darwin).
For his part, Mapondera’s
own experiences rankled. He had more or less consistently avoided conflict with
the whites; those few he had met personally, he had treated hospitably. They in
return had repeatedly attacked him under some misguided judiciary impulse which
compelled them to control affairs which had never had anything to do with them.
As a result, Mapondera had been reduced to shiftlessness and virtual
destitution.
But he was by no
means finished yet.
 |
| Our route, going clockwise. |
***
DAY FIVE
We relax at the Mavuradonha campsite for the morning. I
wander about, watching birds, a pair of Wahlberg’s eagles harassing baboons on
the hill. David repairs his puncture; our steeds are groomed and fed, their
wheels relaxed in the air.
After lunch we leave into a forbidding prospect of storm.
After yesterday I have no energy for the initial hill, barely appreciate the
cold witch-brooms of rain that sweep the Tingwa and Musengezi valleys to the
west, vagrant patches of sun on the Mulingura Hills. Almost invisible beyond,
the eastern slopes of the Horseshoe. We turn east towards Mount Darwin,
afternoon sun burning our shoulders. Magnificent downslope into the farmlands,
exhilaration reluctant to brake, youths shouting hoarsely from the banks,
whether encouraging or abusive is impossible to say.
Slow climb again; I feel drained, irritated that Dave isn’t
hanging back for me. We stop at one store in search of that self-renewing grail
of Ice’n’Sugar; about thirty people are already there, an unlit stuffy cavern, another
thirty curious children crush in behind us: the dark crowding and sudden lack
of air overwhelm us and we flee, buying nothing. Another store along the road
offers celebratory music, friendly poring over our maps by sundry young men,
cold LemonTwists. Darkness overtakes us thirty kilometres short of Mount
Darwin; the LRT goes up on tussocky burnt grass against a swarming
termite-mound, rain-clouds threatening again, scotching fantasies of a friendly
farmhouse: “What, camp? No. no, come in, have a drink, have a bath, roast
chicken, a nice bed!”
Ho ho. We wriggle and toss in the confines of the hot tent,
tussocks nudging our spines, ants running over our feet; we’re trying to find a
miracle in the fact that we haven’t been rained on once yet.
***
By Februrary 1901,
the disgruntled Mapondera was ready for a major assault on the white outpost at
Mount Darwin – the only such deliberate attack of his career. For weeks
messengers had shuttled back and forth across the north-west region, gathering
soldiers and carriers. Chiutsi joined in, as did groups from Pfungwe, Chitange,
Makuni, Chipara; Manyozi and Chimbangu from further west, from Mkote and
Nyombwe to the south. Some never joined
at all: Chioko had already aligned himself with Kenny; others deserted when the
crunch came; others still arrived too late. On Mapondera’s line of march, only
Chimanda, 70 kilometres east of Darwin, failed to supply some sort of support.
In the end, he had maybe 600 men with him.
On 15 February, a
hundred of Mapondera’s men attacked Chimanda’s villages. Though beaten off,
possibly because the powder for their muzzle-loaders got wet in the rain, they
forced Chimanda to flee, and later captured him. Mapondera then secured his
flanks on the flooded Mazowe and Ruya rivers with incoming recruits, and camped
with his full force for several days on the small stream of the Matitima, only
40 kilometres away from Kenny’s base at Darwin.
The delay was fatal.
On the night of 1
March, a force of eight whites and a hundred African supporters moved out of
Darwin. They swung too far north initially, only realising their mistake when
they bumped into some recruits hurrying south to join Mapondera on the Matitima.
Turning south, the white column quite accidentally surprised Mapondera from
behind. Foolishly, they split in two: one half was taken in the flank by
Mapondera’s men, who committed themselves in full faith in Mapondera’s nyambe medicine-tail, by which he had
promised to turn enemy bullets to water.
The fighting was
fierce, and the white force was saved from annihilation only by the timely
arrival of its other half. Among other casualties, Chiutsi was shot in the
stomach, and died later. Like two boys daunted by each other’s ferocity, both forces
then backed off the field.
Mapondera had failed
in his apparent objective of killing Kenny and driving the whites from the
Mount Darwin area, and had lost the necessary momentum to continue. His
supporters, who had anyway joined for a muddle of motives – territory, loot,
vengeance, loyalty, taxation – scattered back to their homes. Mapondera
regrouped at Chimanda’s, badly mauled, losing a son drowned in the Mazowe on
the way.
For all the effort,
he had left himself even worse off than before.
***
DAY SIX
Christmas Day. It was both hot and wet in the night. Light
drizzle in the morning. Not far to Mount Darwin, originally named Pfura
(rhinoceros), and renamed after the evolutionary theorist by F C Selous. We
roll into its main street, enormously wide, as if still to take in turning
ox-trains, a gravelled straight with spaced, high-fronted shops, looped with
electricity wires, verandas, for all the world like a Wild West town, with
cycles for horses.
The atmosphere here is really strange. Everywhere else we’ve
felt either warmed by people’s spontaneous greetings, or uncomfortable under
uncomprehending and shameless stares, or claustrophobic in tightly gathered curious
crowds. But here we merit only the casual glance, the polite nod. People just
go about their business as if they have itinerant cyclists coming through every day of
the week. It’s at once liberating and prickly.
It’s Dave’s turn to feel ennervated. Leaving him and all my
gear in Darwin, I attempt a 40-kilometre sprint to Mapondera’s battlefield at
Matitima, out on the Rushinga road. A tailwind helps, a faint rain refreshes,
and I revel, I have to admit, in the solitude. Dave and I are close friends –
but still I feel something special in travelling alone.
Through Chesa small-scale farming area (formerly Purchase
Area, the white government’s tool in synthesising a compliant black rural
middle class), the plots becoming more sparsely worked the further I get from
Darwin, giving way to more woodland. Orange-throated longclaws startle and drop
into the grass, bolt-upright and alert like mongooses.
A few kilometres short of Matitima rain and wind strengthen.
I get to a rise where I think I’m overlooking the battle area through grey
walls of rain and time; rolling woodland, wink of a tiny dam through the
msasas, Ndorohwe Hill up ahead, the rising ground of Umfurudzi Safari Area not
far to the south. This then is where Mapondera’s career climaxed, though not
quite ended. Impossible to discern more detail now; I turn back, tiring rapidly
in a strong headwind, until a truck stops and I accept a ride, cold in the
rain, to rejoin Dave.
For much of the afternoon we shelter on a veranda.
Children peep round corners and shrink back when we wave at them. A young
unemployed man, beer-bottle clutched firmly by the throat, shuttles back and
forth from the hotel: “This government is rubbish! The people are
suffering. The prices go up! We should
have white people in the government. They know how to organise.” It’s hard to
tell how drunk or genuine he is.
At last, we detect, with some effort, a slight slackening in
the rain. Let’s go for it. We mount our rearing stallions and hit the road
south. The rain falls harder. And harder. The headwind all but halts us in
our tracks. We battle on in raincoats (psychological value only) through
drenched passes, putting away our specs as worse than useless, hoping for that
mythical farmhouse, fretting about the gathering darkness. Soaked by rain from above and wheel-spray
from beneath, we finally cross Huck’s Drift and hole up on the veranda of a
store. Drunken youths roar with laughter from a bus-shelter; Dave makes the
fateful and inevitable discovery that even Karrimor panniers aren’t watertight
in an African thunderstorm. We cook in
the dark. But we’re more dry than wet; we welcome even this unyielding concrete
and the company of two men who stay on all through the lightning-riven night,
guarding their store against Christmas-Day thieves.
***
Those thieves, I
surmise, are the modern equivalent of Mapondera’s raiders. Having reaped little
or no food that season, Mapondera reverted after Matitima to his customary
habits of avoiding conflict with the whites and plundering his Shona
neighbours. But the whites weren’t going
to let him go so easily. Apart from his depredations on other Shona, Mapondera
was endangering their gold trade between Mazowe and Tete in Mozambique, and
beginning to skirmish with the nearest Portuguese trader, Martini.
On 25 June 1901 Mapondera
was ambushed at a beer-party by a force of over a hundred British, but with his
usual cunning escaped. He raided northwards, while his son Gotora, in alliance
with other local chiefs, marauded south beyond the Nyadiri river and plundered a
white gold-panners’ camp. They gained little, since only the poorest of whites
would venture so far north, but it was more than enough to provoke the despatch
of another white force in January 1902, this one consisting of over 400 men,
including some 280 carriers. Mapondera’s men sniped at the force for nine days
running, but could do nothing to prevent the year’s new crops from being entirely
destroyed.
That spelt final
disaster. Some of Mapondera’s people surrendered to Taberer. The despairing Mapondera
himself made a humiliating move he would not have contemplated just a month
before – he gave himself into the hands of the Portuguese at Cachomba on the
Zambezi.
There, Mapondera was
permitted to plant a new crop, but the Portuguese weren’t going to give it to
him for nothing. They were just then renewing their efforts to infiltrate the
plateau region, and in 1902 hired Mapondera to lead a long-distance raid on Makombe
of Barwe, a hundred kilometres due east of where Dave and I slept on Christmas
night. The incursion was beaten off; either Mapondera was captured by Makombe,
or he escaped and went underground, for nothing was heard of him for another
eight months.
When he resurfaces in
the records in mid 1903, he is running south again. In Nyota, old Negomo had
died; his people were offering considerable passive resistance to the whites; the
Negomo succession was wide open. For the last time, we cross Mapondera’s tracks
as he finally returns to his original homeland.
***
DAY SEVEN
Turning south to follow Mapondera home, we find Boxing Day
cool, faintly drizzly in patches, with a steady tailwind. Dave seems to have
found his cycling legs: where heading north he had generally lagged, now it’s
all I can do to keep up with the beggar. We hurtle through Madziwa communal
land, over the beautiful turns of the Shashi Pass, across the muddy flood of
the Mazowe river, making excellent time despite the steady climb of 500 metres
from Darwin to Bindura. We stop for lunch in this extensive mining town
(originally named Kimberley Reefs after the 1901 goldmine, now host to Trojan,
Zimbabwe’s largest nickel producer). For the first time in a decade, I have
this absurd craving for cheese and bully-beef on white bread, washed down with
cold milk.
Replete, and having had a conversation with a Shona farmer
about the situation in Romania (of which we’ve heard nothing for a week), we
press on in alternate sun and shade, the hills of Mapondera’s Nyota
reappearing, ice-blue and glittering with their granite tips, on our right.
And our journey ends, as unexpectedly, though with a rather
more satisfying kind of ignominy, as Mapondera’s, in Mazowe.
Here, we cruise up to the hotel, intending to trough out in
Ice, Sugar, and Chips, and to camp again before tackling the Golden Stairs in
the morning. But we meet an acquaintance of mine. He has a Land-Rover. An empty
Land-Rover. Going to Harare. We throw up our hands. After the last 500
kilometres, what’s another 40? Pride dissolves in the prospect of hot showers,
spongy chairs, clean beds with real sheets.
As we motor that final stretch, I think of Mapondera’s end.
He had not come back to Nyota to vie for the chieftainship,
nor to join the resistance against the whites. Instead, he passed through to
Mazowe itself and gave himself up to the subordinate of his long-standing foe
Taberer, M D Fynn.
Over this road, pretty much, he would have been carried to
his final abode, Salisbury Jail. He was photographed after his surrender:
shackled, enormously gaunt, worn, still faintly defiant with the flat glaucoma’d
eyes photographs gave people in those days. He was tried but, strangely,
insufficient evidence could be accumulated to execute him. Instead, he was
given seven years’ imprisonment. At his age, the judge noted, it was tantamount
to a life sentence. Still, Mapondera danced as sentence was pronounced.
He lived for barely a year after that. The circumstances
were strange. The prison record says he was putting on weight. His family
asserts that he died on hunger strike, saying, “Though I may serve that
sentence and go out of gaol, what am I going to do, the chieftainship has gone,
the country has gone.”
