The Sunday News
Phathisa Nyathi
TODAY we steer our spaceship towards Great Zimbabwe. We are taking back with us some important lessons, in particular the heavenly theme, gleaned from the cosmos/universe. The one theme that we identified and we are taking with us as an important component of our luggage relates to eternity, endlessness, immortality and continuity.
After decades scrutinising African culture, this is one pervasive theme that is identifiable in many rituals, ceremonies and cultural practices in general. It is preoccupation with attainment of continuity or endlessness that underpins African dances or performances generally, including their architecture and sculpture. As we shall see later, the last two are well represented and expressed at Great Zimbabwe. Performances that were contemporaneous with the heyday of Great Zimbabwe may no longer be in existence today.
Before beginning our descent, it may be prudent to peer through the spaceship and see what begins to emerge as we get closer to the ground. A bird’s eye view of the monument reveals dark blobs or dots and black circular lines. At this height, we cannot differentiate between objects at different altitudes.
It is as if all aerial images are at the same level. One important observation pertains to bold lines that run parallel at some places. Curiosity certainly takes the better of me. Why are some thick lines parallel? Is there some significance attached to that? Why is this phenomenon restricted to some and not all parts of the cultural edifice? When we fail to offer interpretation, that does not mean the builders did not know what they were doing. It is us who do not know. What are the little dark blobs that I see? What are their heights, if any? Do these represent and express the heavenly theme? We shall allow the story to be told, not by us, but by the art that is represented and expressed in the colossal monument. Our conviction is that art expresses more accurately and more objectively that we do.
We have a tendency of clogging stories from the past with our own ideas, prejudices and perceptions and in the process distort history.
As we get closer and closer to the ground, two physical features begin to take shape. It is a river that runs near the monument. We also see a nest of hills where we saw dark blobs and thick black lines. So, after all, the cultural edifice that we are interested in was built on the hills and a bit of it on the ground. There is a river nearby. For now, the names of these physical environmental features are not important. We are keen to get into the minds of the builders of the cultural monument. We have been arguing that it is the mind that creates while hands translate mental creations into physical objects.
Hands build, mould, carve, paint, engrave and sculpt, inter alia and, in the process, translate mental images into physical or material reality that can be shared with other minds. Our argument is that a scrutiny of cultural features, including the built environment, translates to taking a journey into the mind that created that particular cultural landscape. Great Zimbabwe is a product of hands which got instructions from minds. We shall argue that the minds were African.
In the meantime, we shall try to decipher the messages relating to the physical landscape. It could not have been accidental to locate the cultural edifice where it was located. We thus need to start there rather than rushing to seek explanations and interpretations pertaining to what minds, in collaboration with ecology, ordered. Ecology and cosmology work hand in glove to produce a cultural landscape. Ideas fly high above ground level and ecology grounds them to take into cognisance practical realities. If stones were not available, the walls would not have been built out of them. Technology operates within the confines and possibilities of ecological dictates. For a better understanding of the choice of location, we may need to borrow experiences from Egypt where the pharaohs built the well known pyramids.
Fortunately, there is no controversy regarding the purpose of building the grandiose lithic edifices. They were tombs of the pharaohs and other leading royals in Egypt. What is important here is appreciation of underpinning beliefs and cosmologies. For the Egyptians of the time, just like our Bantu ancestors, life did not end at death. Rather, death was part of the cycle of life. Death marked some important transition from ephemeral earthly life to eternal life in the spiritual realm. There would come a time when life on that plane entered the physical earthly realm, thus continuing the cycle of life. Out of death emerges life. Death is an aspect of life and has no existence outside of life.
Where there are no stones and one wishes to have his/her remains interred in stone, stones must surely be brought from elsewhere to the desert where there are no stones. That is what the pharaohs, with access to labour and technology, did. Out of stone, burial chambers were created and provided with pyramid writing, meant to guide the departing soul into the final destination, sometimes perceived as some star in the cosmos. The idea of eternal life was expressed in several ways, one being the use of stone with its solidity, hence pyramids still stand to this day. Interestingly, there was the drawing of the ankh, comprising a circle (female) and a rod (male/phallus). The ankh thus symbolised eternity as graphically expressed through sexual reproduction.
The Bantu in Africa had the same ideas and went on to express them the Egyptian way. We have to appreciate it that they could have made flat graves. They did not. Instead, they created a mini mountain or mound out of earth. Interestingly, among the Ndebele people stones, known as intaba, were collected by women folk. Collected stones were then placed on the earth.
That it was women, rather than men, who collected these stones which were carried in one hand, was not accidental. Eternity and endlessness are more of female phenomena than male ones, in African terms. It is all to do with the question of who contributes more to sexual reproduction which guarantees eternity and endlessness of the human species. It is, without doubt, women folk who play a bigger role in the natural process of ensuring the endlessness of the human species and Africa recognised that. Even in more recent times powerful African leaders had their remains interred in rock caves. King Mzilikazi kaMatshobana was a case in point and, after Cecil John Rhodes had seen his grave, he envied and copied the idea and willed that he too be buried in a rock at Malindandzimu in the Matobo Hills. It was the same with the Makoni chiefs whose bodies were embalmed through use of slow heat fires made in the caves.
Instead of building it on flat ground, the cultural edifice known today as Great Zimbabwe was built on hills. What we then need is to find out are African perceptions regarding both rock or stone and the hills that are made from them. “Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.” As young boys at the Salvation Army’s Mazowe Secondary School, we used to sing a song with that line. I wonder whether we appreciated the significance of rock then. Rock is for Ages indeed. It carries the idea of eternity, fertility, continuity, immortality and endlessness. By the way, where was Jesus Christ’s grave hewn? Was the Christian Church building at Lalibela in Ethiopia not hewn out of rock? We would know quite a lot pertaining to the African past only if we cared to interrogate the African mind, instead of dismissing every creation of it as primitive and/or superstitious.
