At home and abroad

Last Tuesday as the afternoon sun lowered, Steve and I stood over the grave of Cecil Rhodes.

This guy, after whom the country of Zimbabwe once was named (Rhodesia), occupies one of the most dramatic final resting places I’ve ever seen.

I knew almost nothing about Rhodes before this trip, but now I can tell you: he was a ruthless, rapacious visionary. The son of an English minister, he was so sickly as a child, his family sent him as a teenager to Africa in the hope it would toughen him up. Once there, Rhodes heard about about the diamond action in Kimberly (in what’s now South Africa), moved there, and raised money (from the Rothchilds) to start buying up mine leases. He wound up essentially cornering the world diamond market and founded the De Beers Company (still a powerhouse in the diamond world.) He also resolved to build a rail line from Cape Town to Cairo through all the British possessions along the way. To do that, he needed to take the land ruled by the Ndebele king (basically today’s Zimbabwe and Zambia) and fill it with Englishmen, who would ride in comfort upon those Rhodesian rails.

Using lies, deception, and the muscle of the English crown, Rhodes succeeded so well that by the 1950s and 60s, white people held all the power in Rhodesia, and they transformed the place into something that warmed many Western hearts. At the same time, resentment among the natives built, and a vicious guerrilla war began in the 1970s. The insurgents triumphed in 1980, when the Brits relinquished their claim on the place, and the modern state of Zimbabwe was born. For most of the time since then, the black Zimbabwean elite, every bit as greedy as Rhodes, has done a pretty dreadful job of ruling. But personally, I can’t fault them any more than I blame Rhodes. He started the mess. I didn’t spit on his grave, but if anyone else had been there and done that, I wouldn’t have objected.

Nonetheless Monday through Wednesday nights, Steve and I stayed in an institution that symbolized the heart of white Rhodesian rule for 127 years, and if I’m honest I have to report: we enjoyed it.

The Club Bulawayo, both a private social club and a hotel, today is still a grand old structure paneled in expanses of dark, very shiny wood.

We were more than comfortable in our large room, spotless and equipped with comfy beds, a nice shower, and decent internet. Food served in the building’s central courtyard was good, and the handful of folks on the staff (all black) were uniformly warm and welcoming. In many ways, however, the Club is as broken as were Rhodes’ dreams of continental mastery. The 300-plus-year-old grandfather clock on the second floor still chimes, but the elevator doesn’t work (so we had to lug our bags up 62 grand steps to reach the second story). The parquet in the lobby gleams, but the corridor outside our door looked shabby.

We saw so few other guests that at times I felt like we had sneaked into and made ourself at home in a museum.

Steve and I devoted one of our two full days in Bulawayo (Zimbabwe’s second largest city) to urban amusements: visiting the national Museum of Natural History, the old railroad museum, the central public library, and more. Like our stay at the Club, these provided more tastes of lost imperial glory.

Rhodes had ordered that the streets of this city be built wide enough so a wagon pulled by 24 oxen could make a U-turn. When the ox teams disappeared, hordes of cars never replaced them, so today you can stroll around the central business district without fear of being mown down.

For our other full day, we had to choose between two excursions outside the city. We could have visited the Khami Ruins built about 600 years ago by people who had abandoned Great Zimbabwe after it collapsed. Steve and I had visited the Great Zimbabwe complex a few days earlier. Considered the greatest archeological site south of the Sahara, it met my (very high) expectations.

But Great Zimbabwe is basically a medieval castle, and the Khami ruins would have been more of the same (only smaller and younger.)

The alternative offered an experience of antiquity orders of magnitude older. So on Tuesday we drove about 30 minutes south of Bulawayo to the Matobo Hills. You could visit Matabo National Park just for the geology (or to see Rhodes’ grave, which lies within it.) Fantastic rock formations dominate the landscape, including gigantic boulders that look like they could crash down at any moment.

For us, however, the big draw was the rock paintings that line the walls of thousands of caves.

We visited two of them. The first was relatively easy to reach, down a shady dirt byway off the rocky main road. A friendly young museum attendant greeted us. His name was Knowledge. (“Yeah, seriously,” he said, aware of the humor in his parents’ choice.) He gave us a thorough, adept tour of the small but excellent museum, which filled us in on the humans who once lived in these rough shelters as long as 40,000 years ago.

Some time around 13,000 years ago, they started decorating their caves with paintings of the world around them. (Actually, even older paintings may exist; the layers underlying the cave floors have not been conclusively excavated.) The little museum contains reproductions of some of the best — far more complex than any cave paintings I’ve ever seen before.

After our tour, Knowledge led us to the Pomongwe cave a bit further down the path. The space is lovely, big enough to have housed a clan of maybe 100 folks, but sadly, the paintings were damaged around 100 years ago, when inept curators tried brightening them up with linseed oil (in preparation for a visit from some British royalty). Still, we could see how extensive and impressive they once must have been.

Knowledge urged us to visit Nswatugi Cave, less accessible but in much better condition. To get to it, we had to drive quite a bit further along dirt roads that were all but deserted. Then we had to find and follow a series of green arrows painted along the path.

Parts of the hike required scrambling up steep rocky inclines lined with brush where black mambas and puff adders lurk; other sections went up stairs and across flats. What we found at the top was worth it all.

A wonderful menagerie parades across this cave’s walls…

The images moved me in a way I find hard to articulate. Thousands of years before the Egyptians began playing in their sands, these simple hunter-gatherers stood in this space, re-creating the world that surrounded them. One thing we’ve learned on this trip is that traditionally, Africans have seen their ancestors as a link with the divine. I’ve never been able to empathize with that. I’m not particularly interested in my own great-great-grandparents and certainly can’t conceive of worshipping them.

But it strikes me now that the San people who lived in and decorated Matoba’s caves are also my ancestors. Now that I’ve seen their art, it’s not that big a stretch to imagine kneeling before them.