The Sunday News
Pathisa Nyathi
LAST week I went to the Joshua Mqabuko Nkomo Polytechnic College in Gwanda where I addressed students taking IsiNdebele as a major. Somehow, the presentation wandered, meandered and veered towards Great Zimbabwe in general and the Zimbabwe Bird in particular. I was pleasantly surprised to observe that the song I used in last week’s instalment was well known. “Ngibon’ inyoni yami, elamaqanda two, owesithathu ngunina.”
It was a popular refrain in which the students weighed in. They equally knew the relevance and meaning behind the song. The bird being referred to was, in essence, what had been seen as male sex genitalia: the cylindrical phallus which goes together with two “eggs,” in reference to the two testes. What exists at Great Zimbabwe is one and the same as male genitalia. In a human being, the male element is depicted in isolation without female genitalia in some erotic encounter with the former.
It is not so in the Zimbabwe Bird where the two genitalia are expertly depicted in some sexual encounter where the woman’s legs are easily identifiable.
The “neck” as representative, expressive and symbolic of the man’s penis has sufficiently and exhaustively been dealt with. Its role in the sexual process needs no further elucidation. Its length is uncharacteristic especially if compared with the neck of either a Bateleur Eagle or the Fish Eagle. The male sex organ is not cylindrically uniform throughout. The unattached end carries the glands, the “head” of the penis whose boundary may be viewed as a dentelle. At Great Zimbabwe the part beyond the dentelle was tempered with by German geologist Karl Mauch.
At the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport in Harare the missing component of the phallus was added and does accurately depict the “head” of the male sex organ. Welcome to Zimbabwe!
The somewhat demarcated glands, itself a part of the phallus, presented itself to the artist to temper with, modify and panel beat and, in the process, conceal its real identity. What then emerged was the “head” of the “bird”. Interestingly, what in the Shona context is referred to as the “head” of the penis (we referred it thus as boys attending Mazowe Secondary School in the 1960s) ended up as the “head”, albeit an expertly engineered “bird”, since referred to as the Zimbabwe Bird.
At the point of the glands the sculptor produced an angle so that the end constituted the bird’s “head” with a “beak” and “eyes.” Archaeologist Peter Garlake did observe something suspicious. The bird’s “beak” did not quite look like a bird’s beak.
Commenting on the phallic objects that were retrieved from Great Zimbabwe and other Zimbabwe type stone structures, he wrote, “ . . . nothing like them (the phallic figurines/models) is recorded in Shona ethnography. So their interpretation becomes extremely hazardous (Nyamutswa, 2017).
Garlake had indeed accurately observed there was something amiss. He searched high and low to pin down what he was observing to Shona ethnography. He drew a blank, and yet so important a cultural artefact should find expression within Shona ethnography, if indeed the Shona people were responsible for creating it in the first place. As observed earlier, an important cultural phenomenon finds expression in more than one arts medium. It may exist in a song, a chant, praise poetry, basketry, sculpture among several other artistic genres. Garlake, like others of his time and earlier, never imagined such explicitness in African culture in general and art in particular.
Africans, in their view, never engaged in art that was so explicit nay, vulgar and crude. They created and imagined their own Great Zimbabwe in line with their own understanding and expectations after observing the cultural edifice through their own cultural lenses. Sadly, things simply did not add up. Their response, as expected, was not to pursue questions to their logical conclusion. More importantly, many had built academic careers and empires on a particular interpretation of Great Zimbabwe and had become authorities of a world repute. The “birds” simply laughed at them and resumed their guarded golden silence.
Africans, we have maintained, sought to replicate the heavens on earth. As above, so below. Let thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. This idea has translated into the adoption of a circular design. If the circular design is the basic building block in the universe, we thus expect the same within the African cultural world. The two “eyes” of the engineered head of the Zimbabwe Bird are circular in design Eye balls are described as balls because they are circular in design.
Yet the circular design, without beginning or end, implies eternity that is concretised through within the context of a woman’s womb. There is thus thematic cohesion, the male sex organ and the circular “eyes” both express fertility, continuity, endlessness, eternity and perpetuity.
The Ankh, a symbol painted and found within the Pyramid’s burial chamber, comprises a circular component and a cylindrical component with the two brought together by a short horizontal line. The circular component represents the female part. The womb is circular. The cylindrical rod expresses and symbolises the phallus. The two engage each other in a sexual act, the natural process that brings into fruition ideas of continuity, endlessness, eternity and perpetuity. The two “eyes” are thus not misplaced. Their symbolism is in line with the overall theme expressed and resident in the Zimbabwe Bird. The “beak”, very unlike the bird’s beak is, in reality, a circumcised penis which is erect. Erection is, as expected, an expression of potency and strength. A shy penis will not achieve its intended purpose. Rock art is replete with stylised images of men whose penises are erect. Once again, fertility is underpinned.
Thus from the “neck” to the “head”, the “eyes” and “beak”, all tell the same narrative which pervades the Zimbabwe Bird and the Great Enclosure in general. A look at the artefacts retained within the high security section at the Great Zimbabwe Museum testifies to several soapstone phalli. More of the same phalli are retained at the Groot Schuur Museum in Cape Town where Cecil John Rhodes took possession of Zimbabwe’s precious heritage (Nyamutswa 2017). Sadly, these artefacts have not been availed to the ordinary citizen. Even if they were, he is not likely to decipher the hidden meanings camouflaged within the context of art. Singly and severally, the artefacts fall into place in terms of expressing the pervasive fertility theme resident within the Great Enclosure.
One of the soapstone artefacts or figurines depicts the “neck” fringed by a pair of “wings”. The two components belong and represent the complementary male (the neck) and female (the wings). Their dispositions or relative positions point to the sexual act. Innovative deception has however, concealed what would otherwise have been a display of vulgarity and crudity of the highest order. The treacherous “sexual scape” was successfully concealed and obscured to look innocent as neck and wings of the Zimbabwe Bird.
We are now in a position to turn to the lower part of the Zimbabwe Bird to unpack it by disentangling and disengaging the “Siamese twins” in order to reveal the constituent parts and unravel the hidden meanings and relevance and, most importantly, to see if this lower part of the Zimbabwe Bird is thematically in sync with the top part-the “neck”, “head”, “eyes”, and the “beak”. We shall then get a well deserved ride on the Zimbabwe Bird to fly us up and land on top of the gigantic stone walls in order to identify the representations and expression embedded in the lofty walls. Do these in any way complement the pervasive theme within the Great Enclosure? Let the lithic edifice tell its own story.
