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Naples: The Siren, the Queen and the Poetess

PARTHENOPE

Legend has it, that the South Italian city of Naples, built so precariously close to the furious volcano Vesuvio, stands where once the dead body of the Siren Parthenope had been washed ashore. Lovesick, the sweet-voiced maiden had drowned herself in the waves. In Naples, not even the Sirenes are immortal.

MARIA CAROLINA

The teenage princess was appalled. At the court of Vienna, Maria Carolina, second youngest daughter of the empress of Austria, had been educated in contemporary erudition. She spoke five languages. She knew how to dance, to fence, to ride and act with confidence. But now her mother Maria Theresia, the matriarch who led both her empire and her family with an iron fist, wed her off to Ferdinand, King of Naples.

Everybody knew that King Ferdinand of Naples was an illiterate fool. The only language he mastered was Neapolitan, the language of the street. He was dubbed the Re Lazzarone, the king of the mob. On top he was ugly. He had no manners. He liked to kill fenced animals and call it hunting. He grabbed his concubines by their private parts. He shat where he ate.

Maria Carolina begged her mother to let her stay in Vienna. She cried. She screamed. She held on to her favorite sister, Maria Antonia. In vain. The empress was adamant. Off she sent her daughter to the Mediterranean Sea.

Sailboat in the Gulf of Naples

King Ferdinand had ascended the thrown at the age of eight, and the decision to keep him uneducated was a political one. His father, King Carlos of Spain, didn’t want him to be a strong leader, but rather a compliant place holder. The state business was run behind closed doors by a council reporting to the Spanish court – a council that dutifully taxed Italian lands to finance the Spanish wars. An innocuous sixteen-year old virgin from Vienna was deemed the perfect queen for this kingdom at the outskirts of Europe.

Cobble Stoned Street

The immediate consumption of her marriage upon her arrival in Naples was probably the most painful, but not the only shock Maria Carolina had to endure. The Southern sun was scorching and the Royal Spanish etiquette as stiffling and serious as the cobble-stoned city was noisy and chaotic. On top, Maria Carolina discovered that the kingdom was rundown, held in a tight grip by organized crime, by a corrupt clergy and a decadent aristocracy. The treasury was nearly depleted. The military was at the brink of collapse. Diseases ravaged through the filthy streets and the poor were starving. To her husband their misery was entertainment. In front of the Royal Palace he had a scaffolding erected, decorated with live animals and food, the so called Albero della Cugagna. From his window he rejoiced at the sight of the poor fighting each other to the blood, often killing each other over a pig, a hen or a loaf of bread. The young Queen was appalled. But not disheartened, she was after all a trained queen.

Discounted Baby Jesus

Maria Carolina dutifully bore heirs to the king (18 in the 20 years to come), the first son Francesco opening her the doors to the council. She taught her husband to read and write. She established charitable institutions for the impoverished. She championed the arts. She planned workers’ residencies. Soon, Maria Carolina took over the reins of the kingdom and proved herself a capable politician and a strong-willed leader.

Ferdinand, Maria Carolina in the midst of their children

ELEONORA

At sixteen, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel spoke five languages plus Latin and Old Greek. The extra-ordinarily intelligent young women, a daughter of Portuguese immigrants, had published poetry that afforded her the position of head librarian to the Queen of Napples, Maria Carolina, and opened her the doors to freemason societies and the intellectual circles of Naples: the highly acclaimed Accademia dei Filateli and the Arcadia.  

Throughout history, Naples had been a center of education and art. The famous Opera house Teatro San Carlo had opened its doors in 1735 (and never closed them again). Artists like Caravaggio and Bernini, musicians like Pergolesi and Scarlatti had found a home in the bustling cobble-stoned streets. In the 13th century already, a university had been founded, and scientists and scholars taught at numerous Academias. Now, in the late 18th century, the intellectuals of Naples reflected on the writings of Voltaire. Eleonora, who corresponded with various intellectuals, was inflamed by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and Voltaire by her. “The nightingale of beautiful Italy” he called her.

Eleonora had escaped a brutal husband, whose domestic violence also resulted in the death of her infant son Francesco. Now she searched to end the outrageous inequality in the kingdom of Naples. Eleonora engaged in social reformatory projects to improve the living conditions of the lazzaroni, the lower class.

The lazzaroni themselves however, were strongly opposed to these new ideas of equality and fraternity. They were profoundly catholic and superstitious. To science they preferred the miracles in their sparkling golden churches. To reformatory ideas they preferred the gruesome Albero dell Cuccagna. They adored their King, who lived unrestrained by political correctness or etiquette. The lazzari were in fact royalists.

In her Royal Palace, which had underground tunnels to various places in the city, Queen Maria Carolina secretly approved and even collaborated with the intellectuals of the Academia, she too was with the freemasons. She too wanted reforms. But then the unspeakable happened.

In Paris, the Jacobins had put her sister Maria Antonia, now called Marie Antoinette, on the guillotine. Maria Carolina was heartbroken over her sister’s death, whom she had never seen again after she left Vienna. She vowed to revenge her death. But Paris was far away, and so the Academia became her enemy.

Eleonora was thrown into jail and Maria Carolina turned into an ardent counter-revolutionary. She, who had favoured the arts and the freemasons before, now turned Naples into a police state, mobilized the army, set up a tight spy system. On the verge of paranoia, she employed food testers and slept in a different royal apartment each night. Then things got worse.

In 1798, on his conquering spree, Napoleon Bonaparte himself appeared in the gulf of Naples and it was thanks to Maria Carolina’s long relations with England, that the legendary Admiral Horatio Nelson came to her rescue. The liaison between the captain, his young lover Lady Hamilton and the Queen led to racy rumours – where the Admiral and the Queen lovers? Or the Queen and the young beautiful Lady Hamilton? Or were the three engaged in a ménage à trois? – These rumors were of course set into the world by the French, who, reckoning that it was Maria Carolina who ran the kingdom, and not her husband, tried to ruin her popularity with the people. True or not, the badmouthing failed. If anything, the people were entertained by the royal scandals.

Inside Teatro San Carlo

Eventually though, Admiral Nelson had other wars to tend to. He and Lady Hamilton left Naples, and without her protectors Maria Carolina, had to flee Naples. Too strong was the hate between the French and the Austrian Queen of Naples, to great the fear of the guillotine. The Royal couple escaped through one of their secret underground tunnels to the harbor and boarded a ship to Sicily. Whatever was left in the treasury, they took with them.

The King and Queen had deserted their people, but still the lazzaroni stood with them. The mob had assembled in front of the Royal Palace, demanding arms to fight the French themselves. But there were no arms for them, and so their hate against the Jacobins and the Enlightenment was their only weapon in the uneven battle against the French army. The bloody street fights left the lazzaroni dead by the thousands, and it took the French two days to declare victory.

Appalled and frightened by the bloodshed around her, Eleonora and the Academia had sought refuge in the Castel San Elmo, on top of the hill overlooking Naples. Now that the battle was over and the French successful, they announced the end of the monarchy and on January 21, 1799 they declared the Repubblica Parthenopea, a Republic modelled after the French République, named after the luckless Siren.

Castel San Elmo, seen from the Palazzo Reale, the Royal Palace

Eleonora believed in education. She was convinced that with some help, the lazzaroni, who had impressed her in their faith and determination, could achieve a higher cultural level. In the Monitore Napolitano, the Republican newspaper she published on her own, she appealed to the courage of all: Because freedom cannot be loved in half… and cannot produce its effects until everyone is free. She searched for conciliation between the Republicans and the Royalists. Their catholicism, their rituals, believes and even their superstition should not be ignored, she wrote. In vain. She disapproved of the radicalism of their French Sister Republic, who was now demanding taxes from her Italian sister Republic, very much like the Spanish had done before. Already Eleonora had second thoughts about the Revolution and the Repubblica Partenopea. But soon her mind was changed again.

After the Lazzaroni’s defeat, it was the farmers of the surrounding lands that took to arms, or rather took their axes and hoes marched into the city. Their rage and violence was unparalleled, their monikers telling of their brutality: Fra Diavolo (Brother Devil), Sciabolone (Big Sword) and Panzanera (Black Belly) ravaged through the streets. Centuries of oppression erupted in ire like lava flowing from Vesuvius. “Viva Maria!” they screamed as they pillaged through Southern Italy. It was in fact the church, in the person of Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo, set as vice roy by Ferdinand before he fled, who had managed to bundle the farmers’ hate against the Republicans. Again, fearing for her life, Eleonora withdrew to Castel San Elmo, imploring her French brothers and sisters for help. In vain.

In the dilapidated Royal Palace in Sicily, Maria Carolina learned the news of Cardinale Ruffo’s victory. Yet she was consternated. Why had the Cardinale promised safe conduct to the Republicans when her sister’s death on the guillotine had not yet been revenged? Consumed by hate and rage, she again called on her friends, Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton.

Admiral Nelson did a good job. Accompanied by his sweet wife he entered the port of Naples just as Eleonora and the other revolutionaries were waiting to board a ship that would bring them safely to Toulon, as Cardinale Ruffo had promised. Instead, Nelson had them all arrested. Eleonora was condemned to death, and the intellectual scene of the city wiped out.

Details of Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, Museo Real di Capodimonte

Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel asked to be decapitated, a wish that was not fulfilled. One of 120 revolutionaries condemned to death in the aftermath of the Rebubblica Perthenopea, she was hanged on Market Square on August 20. The lazzaroni were waiting under the scaffolding, ready to peep under her skirt, as not even her most basic wish to tie her legs together with a belt was granted.  

“Long Live Carolina, Death to the Jacobina!” They chanted.

Six years later, in 1806, Maria Carolina had to flee Naples again. Napoleon had defeated the Austrians and crowned himself king of Italy. She travelled to Vienna, where she had to learn that in an effort to appease the French, her own grand daughter Maria Luisa was wed to no one else but Napoleon Bonaparte. Maria Carolina died in Vienna, in 1814, at the age of 64.

Legend has it, that as she stepped on the scaffolding, Eleonora Fonseca Pimentel quoted Virgil, the Roman Roman poet from Naples.

Perhaps one day this will be worth remembering

Detail of Caravaggio’s Seven Acts of Mercy, Chiesa Maria del Misericordia
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Austria: MOUNTAIN HIGH

High up, where clouds get caught at granite peaks and marmots whistle with the wind, where winters are brutally long and blinding, and summers dangerously close to the sun, there, in the dizzying heights of the Austrian Alps, grows a mythical flower: the flaming pink Alpine Rose.

Together with the better known Enzian and Edelweiss, the Alpine Rose is one of the three iconic flowers of the High Alps – a token of love and proof of bravery when plucked and delivered to a lover waiting down in the village.

The sturdy scrub-like plant exclusively grows between the tree-line and the rocky peak. It’s evergreen and therefore needs the thick protective layer of snow to withstand the freezing temperatures of winter. It flowers for the short period of Alpine summer only, from late June to beginning of August. But when its petals sparkle in the mountain sun like crimson dew, the Alpine Rose is mesmerizing.

Its folkloristic name in the German speaking Eastern Alps is “Almrausch”, which can be translated to: intoxicated by the Alps – an expression that equals the flower to the effect of alcohol or love. In other words: a mountain high. Like drunks or lovers, climbers charmed by the Alpine Rose lose their minds, their heads, and ultimately their lives. Village boys and tourists alike.

In 1871, an especially tragic incident was reported in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:  Beautiful 19 year-old Luisa Büchlerer fell to her death while plucking Alpine Roses: “She didn’t heed the warnings of the guides”, the paper stated, “nor the calls of strangers, as they implored her not to venture farther, but she moved on, closer to the steep decline, for it’s here that the most beautiful flowers are glowing.”

The Großglockner, Austria’s highest peak at 3800m, seen from behind an Alpine Rose scrub

Its deadly habitat is not the Alpine Rose’s only danger. Rhododendron hirsutum and rhododenron ferrugineum – so the scientific names of the two species found in the Eastern Alps – are considered poisonous. Acetylandromedol found in petals, leaves and stem causes nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, and leads to death as swiftly as a fall from a mountain peak.

Honey from Alpine Roses, on the contrary, is not toxic at all, but a sweet delicatessen. In summer beekeepers relocate their hives to the high alps, knowing that their bees are just as crazy for the blooming Alpine Roses. The honeybees ignore other Alpine flowers to feast on the pink blossoms. Although not wild like its favorite flower, the local Carniolan honeybee is known to be just as resilient in rough climate, but gentle towards the beekeeper.

Aside from lovedrunk boys, hapless tourists and greedy bees, most wanderers shy away from plucking the Alpine Rose. In the old days, the flower was believed to attract thunder and lightning – another deadly trap in high mountains. Not only was it advised to stay away from the pink blossoms, but by no means to bring them home, for the lightning will follow the flowers.

This belief has since been proven untrue – and wanderers are indeed welcome to pluck a few flowers to decorate their homes. Contrary to common belief is not under protection like the Edelweiss or the Enzian. Although differently regulated on a local basis, only its commercial use and trade are forbidden. There are in fact plenty of Alpine Roses in the Alps nowadays. For economic reasons, agriculture in high altitude has dramatically decreased in the past century, and so many alpine pastures have grown wild again and the habitat of Alpine roses again expanded.

As it turns out, the mythical Alpine Rose is neither scarce, nor attracting lightning or thunder, nor especially toxic. Despite being a member of the Rhododendron family – science has long discovered that the Alpine Roses aren’t posionous at all. But why are all these myths so widespread and persistent?

One reason surely lies in the ongoing romanticizing of the Alps. Once, the high mountain riff was inaccessible, a strange and horrid barrier divorcing North from South, and each crossing regarded an act of heroism. Only in the 19th century, with the modernization and industrial growth were the Alps regarded a place for spiritual retreat and recreation, a last enclave of pristine, divine nature in a fast secular world.

You see, I want a lot.

Maybe I want it all:

the darkness of each endless fall,

the shimmering light of each assent.

So many are alive who don’t seem to care.

Casual, easy, they move in the world

as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces

of those who know they thirst.

You cherish those

who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it’s not too late

to open your depths by plunging into them

and drink in the life

that reveals itself quietly there.

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about the Alps in his Book of Hours published in 1905. The Austrian poet found God in the high mountains. Before, in 1779 already, the German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe had found himself in the Alps, as he wrote in his Spirit Song Over the Waters

Down from the lofty rocky wall

Streams the bright flood

Then spreadeth gently in cloudy billows

O’er the smooth rock

Romanticism one way or the other, the Alps are in fact under threat – and it’s only owed to the sturdy resilient nature of its fauna and flora that the fatal effects of climate change are not evident there. Apart from the appalling results of more than 50 years of skiing industry that play a part in the destruction of the pristine Alpine ecosystem.

The Alps die in silence, and neither idealistic poetry nor meditative hiking will save them from climate change. Temperatures have risen by almost 2C within the last 100 years. Glaciers are melting away and permafrost soils of high altitude are thawing.

As for the Alpine creatures, the flowers and the marmots, they have silently moved upwards within the past decades.  But for the Alpine Rose to climb any further up, the mountains aren’t high enough.

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Zimbabwe: A White War and a Black Madonna

“This world is a good place. We should all be happy,” the Italian bricklayer Michele said to the Captain. Then he painted a black Madonna inside the catholic chapel, much to the Captain’s disdain.

Michele was a WWII internee in a camp in the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, and the Captain his supervisor. They are fictive characters in Doris Lessing’s short story, “The Black Madonna”. The chapel, however, is real. It’s still standing, 5km outside of the Zimbabwean city Masvingo, a lesser known tourist attraction reminding of an almost forgotten chapter of African history.

In 1939, when Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia readily joined the war. It was a surprising move. The country, named after the British explorer Cecil Rhodes, had only been established 15 years before, in 1923. Two years later, in 1925, British citizen Doris Taylor, aged 6, and her parents moved to Southern Rhodesia to farm maize. The family settled in the middle of the African planes that stretched endlessly under the perfect blue sky. Land was abundant for the British immigrants, thanks to a land-settlement programme, which had been launched by the government to attract European settlers. Doris’ mother adhered to an Edwardian life-style – participating in a society of which her daughter would later write in the Black Madonna, a ….minority whose leisure is guaranteed by the hardworking majority. Southern Rhodesia’s ruling white class counted 67.000 – a dwindling number against the black African population, who counted more than one million. 

Entering a costly war and deploying troops sounds like a foolish idea, given that troops were almost exclusively whites. Blacks were – not surprisingly – barred from carrying weapons. But, there had been a secret, long-prepared plan…

Southern Rhodesia offered Britain assistance by taking over thousands of “internees”, refugees or citizens of enemy countries that the kingdom had singled out as potential alien enemies. These were Germans, Austrians, Italians, Polish – not prisoners of war, but civilians deemed fascists of varying degrees who had to be separated from society.

The plan was to increase the white population.

The captain had visited Germany under Hitler and though it was not the time to say so, he had found it very satisfactory.

The war was a huge success for Southern Rhodesia. Since the British had to pay for the accommodation of the internees, they thereby financed the infrastructure necessary to set up the camps: Railways and roads. But the war also led to tremendous economic growth. Southern Rhodesia became the second largest gold producer in the world, exported chrome and asbestos and other strategically interesting minerals worldwide, supplied neighbouring countries with coal and starving Europe with dehydrated vegetables. With the large scale exploitation of the country’s natural resources, money came rolling in. Private enterprises set up shop in the capital of Salisbury. White people!

By then Doris was a high school drop-out working as a telephone operator in Salisbury, married to a civil service named Frank Wisdom. But the city and the party-going, fun-loving society were no match for the young intellectual.

We were all bored to extinction by dances, fancy-dress balls, fairs, lotteries, and other charitable entertainment.

Doris gave birth to two children. But even this experience fell flat for her. Motherhood was no satisfaction for Doris. Nor was the colonial life style.

Needless to say that the war was no success for the black population – not only for those who had been sent to the battlefields (there was one black regiment serving under white officers), and those ten thousands who were conscripted to work on white-owned farms and in the mines. The economic boost had led to an increasing demand for labor. Cheap labor. Unpaid labor.

Since the foundation of Southern Rhodesia, the government had relied on a system of assigned labor quotas for each district. Native commissioners – government officials in charge of the black population –  called on local chiefs to provide laborers from their kraals. Forced laborers, barely remunerated.

Black Africans themselves had been prevented from farming by the same land settlement programmes white settlers benefited from. African communities had been evicted from their land and re-settled in “reserved areas”, which were mostly arid strips of land with no access to water, and too overcrowded to provide for all, and so-called Native Purchase Areas, completely unsuitable for agricultural use.  Railways and roads only ran through white farming lands – the strategically planned roads and railways that led to the internee camps.

Southern Rhodesia hosted a total of 12.000 internees on five different sites. One of these camps was close to Fort Victoria, a military town. Built in the 1930ies, it came to use in 1942, strictly adhering to the plan. The camp hosted 1500 Italians, of whose suspected skills in farming, mechanics and other crafts the government tried to benefit. Some Italians were even to be deployed as soldiers with the Rhodesian African Rifles, the only black regiment – however the plan was not executed due to lack of training and motivation on part of the Italians.

Michele’s talents were discovered, when a church was built in the camp, and Michele decorated its interior. It soon became a show-place, that little tin-roofed church in the prisoners’ camp, with its white-washed walls covered all over with frescoes depicting swarthy peasants gathering grapes for the vintage, beautiful Italian girls dancing, plump dark-eyed children… Culture loving ladies who had bribed the guards to be taken inside the camp would say: “Poor thing, how homesick he must be.”

Life in the camp was characterized by boredom, deprivation of sexual pleasures, and poor living conditions. Escape attempts were frequent, 31 successful.

inside the chapel. these are not mosaics, but paintings

In 1943, Doris left her husband and the two children, and moved to London to pursue a writing career.  The same year, in October, Mussolini surrendered, and the interned enemies were to be released.

Some thousand stayed where they were, in the camps, where they were fed and housed at last. Others went as farm laborers, though not many, for while the farmers were as always short of labour, they did not know how to handle farm labourers who were white men. Such a phenomenon had never happened in Zambesia before.

When finally the war ended, in 1945, the Italians were able to go home. Or rather, they were repatriated. However, many returned to Southern Rhodesia, possible fascists, possible enemies of the state, turned friends.

In 1980, after a long and bloody struggle for independence, the country shook off apartheid and became Zimbabwe. In London, the divorcee and acclaimed writer Doris Lessing invested herself in the anti-apartheid struggle. In 2007, she won the Nobel Prize for literature. In her acceptance speech, she addressed the global inequality of opportunity and stressed the importance of fiction writers in this respect. She said: “It is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed.”

Just in front of the Captain was a picture of a black girl. She was young and plump. She wore a patterned blue dress and her shoulders came soft and bare out of it. On her back was a baby slung in a band of red stuff. Her face was turned towards the Captain and she was smiling.

“That’s Nadya,” said the Captain. “Nadya…” He groaned loudly He looked at the black child and shut his eyes. He opened them, and mother and child were still there. Michele was very carefully drawing thin yellow circles around the head of the girl and her child.

“Good God,” said the Captain. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t have a black Madonna.”

“She was a peasant. Black peasant Madonna for black country.”

By the way, there is no black Madonna inside the chapel.

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Zimbabwe: Walls

There once was an empire of opulent wealth and luxury. Gold was abundant. Houses were dressed in gold foil, and people in finest silk that came all the way from China, died blue with Indian Indigo. Women strutted down the clay paved lanes clad in nothing but sparkling jewels and glass pearls. Walls were erected from stones carried from near and far so that those who had didn’t have to mingle with those who had not.

A thousand years later, little remains of this ancient grandezza. A few pearls found scattered by the Aloe excelsa trees, and broken pieces of terracotta buried in the dry African soil. Yet the walls are still standing. Battered by time and weather – and rusty, it seems. But the orange veil is lichen, tiny creeping flowers with petals like delicate lace, which in the run of centuries, have silently embraced the stones. No one, but those lichen, remembers what happened behind these walls. And they don’t tell.

The ancient walls hold spiritual meaning, though, for the modern local people who live here nowadays, the Shona. The site is now a UNESCO world Heritage Site, its Shona name not only lent its name to this site, but to the entire country, and bestowed a unifying identity to the nation: Dzimbabwe, House of Stone.

So little was known, so forgotten was this mysterious place and those who lived in these stone settlements that fabulous speculation flourished. The European and American explorers and adventurers, the colonizers who came across the walls couldn’t believe that a black African tribe was capable of constructing such a monument that rivals Notre Dame Cathedral, or St. Peter’s Church. The Phoenicians must have built those walls! Or the Arabs! The German explorer Karl Mauch, who was first to report of the ruins of Zimbabwe to western media in 1871, claimed it was Ophir, the biblical city of King Solomon. Some explorers went as far as reconstructing the walls to better fit their Euro-centric, Christian view of the world.

What evidence-based science has found out in the meantime, though, is no less fascinating. Based on recent findings – the walls, golden artefacts, iron weapons – and sociological cultural research, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe are the remains of a grand settlement of the ancestors of today’s Shona people.

The empire lasted for a few hundred years, counting at its heydays a population of 18.000 – the biggest city in sub-Saharan Africa of its time. It was a trading center entertaining connections with places as far as China, mining gold, raising cattle and cultivating the land, a land that –according to research – at the time was fertile enough to not only sustain the city with grains and wild fruit, but even provide for medicinal needs. But why then did the empire fade into oblivion?

What’s most striking about Great Zimbabwe is its strict social order. There were two groups that lived strictly segregated. The elite – the king, his senior administrators, military men and spiritual leaders and the royal family – lived in the above mentioned luxury. The other group were the ordinary people, the craftsmen, and the administrators. The farmers, who cultivated the land, and miners who dug up the gold, did not even live within the stone settlement. Why did this second, much larger group sustain the decadence of the first group? Why did they even build those impressively high walls under the scorching African sun – in a time and society that knew no slavery? Why did – as research suggests – those who built the very walls that separated them from the wealth and abundance – do so voluntarily?

Visiting Great Zimbabwe requires some basic fitness level. The ascent to the king’s quarters on top of the hill is steep and slippery. Exhausted from the climb, one cannot fail to be overwhelmed by the stone formation on top. Wind and weather have carved the shape of an Eagle’s head into stone. A shape that has also been recreated in smaller stone statues that were found placed on various places within the site. The eagle, that is now featured on Zimbabwe’s flag, and five other birds, or rather birds with human attributes, bird men. These statue had been robbed by fortune hunters, but were returned and can now be viewed in the little museum at the site.

Birds were symbols of deities in this old culture. Did the king, who lived high up in the sky, and whom the rest of the population never got to see, and his entourage make the rest of the society believe they were of divine descent? Of direct descent of the Fish Eagle, maybe, or the Batteleur Eagle? And did they build the walls so that people wouldn’t find out, that they were just mortal ordinary beings after all? Was there even a king, or just the illusion of one that subjected the people?

The Fish Eagle is the original Totem of the Shona people. In their culture, a totem is an emblem – mostly an animal or a tree – of a family or dynasty. Today, there are 25 different totems in the Shona people, but the Eagle is their national bird, represented on the Zimbabwean flag.  

In the run of its existence, stone masonry improved in Great Zimbabwe. Different kind of walls are found on the site, with different decorations. The Chevron pattern as seen below is now regarded a typical Zimbabwean style, frequently used in modern design.

Great Zimbabwe is not the only stone ruin found in Southern Africa. But it is the biggest of these sites. No one knows, why these elitist, materialist systems, that were so unlike the localized chiefdoms that can be found in surrounding Africa, ceased to exist.

Climate change is one explanation, there was in fact a small ice age. Depletion of soil another, Great Zimbabwe was densely populated and restraint none of its virtues. Maybe unleashed consumption doesn’t go down well with history. Maybe injustice.

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Zimbabwe: Matriarchs

A matriarch is a leader. A general. A decision maker. A caring mother. A matriarch guides her family from the moment of its formation to the moment of her death. A matriarch will die for her children.

The pattern on the fur are unique, like a fingerprint.

Painted Wolves live in a strict hierarchical system that can safely be called altruistic. In the den, they huddle together to sleep, and when they wake, before leaving for their risky daily business, hunting big game in the wilderness of Africa, they perform long and joyful rituals. Dances that show their mutual love and devotion. Who knows who will return in the end of the day?

Fights within the pack are rare. Instead, the pack members take good care of each other, feeding incapacitated members, and licking each other’s wounds. 

Their leader is the alpha female, the matriarch. When she dies, the pack will dissolve. She and her alpha male are the only ones to breed. Their pups will be looked after by the whole pack. At first the little ones will be fed regurgitated meat when the adult animals return from the hunt, but as soon as the pups are old enough, they will join the hunting party. The youngsters don’t contribute to the hunt yet, they are here to learn, but they will be the first to eat, guarded by the adult animals.

Painted Wolves are formidable hunters. Their success rate lies at 90%, a number that by far exceeds that of other apex predators, like lions, leopards or hyenas, and is undoubtedly owed to their perfect organization.

A typical hunt starts with the pack spreading out to cover more ground and give each member enough space to manoeuvre. Once prey is detected, the pack is called and together they spread panic in the heard to separate them. The ensuing chase will be both long distance – with pack members performing flanking movement to cut off any escape routes, or driving herds towards rivers and waters, deadly traps. And it will be high speed. The prey will tire, but not the painted wolves: Comparable to a cycling team, pack members at the head of the chase will pull back once they’re exhausted and other members will take their place, taking the weakened prey down.

Until the present day, there is no incidence recorded of painted wolves ever attacking humans. In fact, for thousands of years Africans and painted wolves lived side by side. Oldest testimony thereof is a palette from ancient Egypt, than 5000 years old, that depicts the big-eared creatures while dancing. It was only when the Europeans arrived on the continent that things went dire for the Painted wolves.

When the Dutch first encountered painted wolves, they thought that they were hyenas – which was wrong. They were soon corrected by the British naturalist Joshua Brookes, who recognized them as canids, and named them: Lycaon Pictus, which is a creative mixture of Latin and Greek, meaning something like: a painted wolf-like thing. What the Romans themselves made of painted dogs, is not known. But they surely held wolves in high esteem, especially when it came to motherhood… With this hybrid name however, Joshua Brookes was closer to the truth. Painted Dogs are neither dogs nor wolves, but their own species.

Romulus and Remus nursed by a wolf

By 1900, painted wolves lived all across the African continent, an estimated 500.000 of them, roaming the savannas, the semi-deserts, bushlands and forests. They lived at the sea shores and even on top of the Kilimanjaro. Then the European settlers started to establish their European ideas of agriculture in their colonies. Painted Wolves, or Wild Dogs, or Painted Dogs, or whatever name they gave them, to the settlers were a vermin. A pest. Their threat to live stock radically overstated.

Rhodesia (nowadays Zimbabwe), which considered painted wolfs “problem animals” until 1975, paid a reward of five shillings for each wild dog destroyed. Their excellent organization was of no help to the painted wolves when it came to shotguns. Government records state that in the 1950ies alone, 3,679 Wild Dogs were killed for reward. That’s more than half the number of Painted Wolves living today: 5000-6000.

Men have decimated the number of Painted Wolves by 99% within a century, making them an endangered species, their number lower than that of elephants (500.000), giraffes (70.000), rhinos (25.000) and lions (20.000).

Habitat loss continues to be the greatest threat for the painted wolves, predators that need large spaces. Their future is looking bleak. The tragic fate of these loving, joyful creatures has been largely ignored by the world.

Until David Attenborough’s BBC series Dynasties hit the screens. In the fourth episode he tells the story of Tait, matriarch of a pack living in Zimbabwe’s Mana Pools Nationalpark. Her bravery has not only touched the hearts of a world-wide audience, but turned Mana Pools into a prime eco-tourist attraction. Tourists that bring desperately needed money into the country, and therefore might ensure the survival of the painted wolves.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06mvrr0

Recommendation: Painted Wolves by Nick Dyer is not only a beautiful and informative book, shot in the Mana Pools National Park, but its revenue will go into the conservation of Wild Dogs.

https://www.hphpublishing.co.za/products/painted-wolves

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Zimbabwe: Get Up!

Ko-ko-ko. His cane knocks along the deserted streets, against wooden doors and window panes. Curfew has passed and he makes sure that the workers aren’t drinking, but sleeping, and most importantly, that they have no women visitors in their quarters, here in Makokoba. That’s how the township at the outskirts of the big city Bulaway got its name, from the local Ndebele word ukukhohoba for stick, and the rhythm it produced in the hands of Mr. Fallon, the District Native Commissioner. Ko-ko-ko Makokoba.

It was the beginning of the 20th century and Bulawayo in the South of the newly founded colony South Rhodesia, was growing fast. Less than 20 years before, Cecil Rhodes and his British South African Company had wrangled the land out of the hands of the Matebele and the city had an insatiable demand for workers. There was a railroad to be built, and a dam to supply water to this arid land, and mines dug, buildings constructed: a post office, a library, churches and schools. And grass cut, and trees planted: blue blooming Jacarandas that would shoot their roots deep into the sandy soil. And so, with every street, with every house built, in the run of only a few decades, Makokoba, the workers’ suburb in the segregated country, grew into a bustling, vibrant township, a melting pot of different languages, heritages and cultural beliefs.

A community garden. Vegetables are raised in old tyres. Water is scarce and expensive - the water is not being supplied to the suburb, where people need to buy drinking water, like electricity.
*A community garden. Vegetables are raised in old tyres. Water is scarce and expensive – the water is not being supplied to the suburb, where people need to buy drinking water, like electricity. *

In the big city, Bulawayo, the black workers had no rights. Banned from the pavements even, they faded like shadows, once the job was done, disappeared with night fall. But in Makokoba, there was rhythm. Ko-ko-ko.

In Makokoba, junk turns into music: An empty rusted metal drum. A battered, one-stringed can of Olivine cooking oil, hollow reeds that leave their biting white sap on lips. Feet feel free. To be alive is a consolation.

*Herbal medicine. A sage woman waits for clients with ailments.*

They called their music Khwela. Khwela, which means Climb on! Get Up! in the Ndebele language. Like: Get up, enjoy the life, join us in song and dance in the shebeens, where home brewed beer is served, but it also means Climb On! Like: Climb on the police van, when they came raiding the township. Join us in the hardship!

*The Jacaranda trees are omnipresent. They were planted here about 150 years only, a beautifully blooming tree that can make do with little water, growing its roots deep into the soil.*

Khwela meant accepting the hardship and allowing for joy, both, in solidarity, wrote Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera in her beautiful book Butterfly Burning: One can always be swallowed by a song.

Culture thrived in Makokoba. A culture of music that couldn’t be suppressed. The mother of Zimbabwean music Dorothy Masuka as well as celebrated musicians like the Cool Crooners or Augustine Musarurwa, who composed the global hit Sikokiyana, were children of Makokoba.

A culture of football and acclaimed players.

Of theatres, of spoken and written words.

At Emkambo, the market, goods were traded with ideas and news. Unions were formed and political resistance probed.

It was a culture of resistance, of insurgence. It was a counterculture, literally: a culture of alcoholism, too, and of gangsterism and violence. A brutal fight for survival. The struggle for independence knew its beginning here, in Makokoba, ko-ko-ko.

* Lewis Ndlevo guides tourists through the suburb. His passion for Makokoba is contagious. *

Today, almost 40 years since the birth of Zimbabwe, since independence in 1980, Makokoba is still a place riddled by poverty and crime. Worse, twenty years of mismanagement and corruption have left the people poorer than before.

Yet the spirit of Makokoba lives on, at least in the exuberant laughs of the children, charming despite the litter piling, and in the glittering eyes of people like Lewis Ndlovu, the founder of the Drums of Peace, who also runs the Thabiso Youth Centre.

Ndlovu finds art a way out of poverty, of the idleness and depression of unemployment. He hopes to turn his Youth Center into a cultural hub that attracts tourists and reminds people of the history of Makokoba. That it’s part of the country’s arts heritage, and ultimately, its future. Get up, children of Makokoba!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp-orzKx8o4

Sikokiyana – or Skokiaan – was the illegally brewed and consumed alcohol in the shebeens of Makokoba.

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Vienna: Beyond Redemption

Last Friday, the streets of Vienna were thronged with children. Children chanting. Children forsaking meat, cars, planes and even school. Children demanding action in fighting climate change. It was, in relation to population, one of the biggest turn-outs of the Fridays For Future-movement worldwide. And yet, despite the looming climate catastrophe, the children remain unheard. Is all hope is lost?

500 years ago already, the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch wondered whether humankind, immoral and sinful, was beyond redemption. Catering to the illiterate medieval society, he depicted the horrors of the punishments of the mortal sins in hitherto unmatched creativity, in horrific perversion and brutality: A toad in a nun’s habit frying the gluttonous sinners nicely chopped up in a pan. Naked sinners of lust impaled on a bare tree, one guilty of wrath getting his head blown off by a grenade fired from a bizarre engine of war.

Hell.

The Last Judgement Triptych, from which the above mentioned scenes are taken, is one of the world’s outstanding masterpieces in late medieval art and the uncontested high light of the Paintings Gallery of the Academy for Fine arts in Vienna. (Where a hundred years ago, Egon Schiele studied, to name but its most famous student.) One of Bosch’s most important oeuvres, the Last Judgment Triptychon disappeared after its creation around 1500 in the Netherlands, but re-surfaced in a Habsburg collection in the 17th century. The notoriously catholic Austrian Habsburg dynasty was one of Bosch’s major commissioners.

The Last Judgement Triptychon is currently at display at Theatermuseum Wien, as the Paintings Gallery is undergoing complete renovation until 2020

Bosch was a religious man, a devotee to the Virgin Mary deeply anchored in the catholic doctrine. He designed his paintings after the altar pieces of the catholic churches: three connected tables that could be read like a story, from left to right. The Last Judgement starts with the expulsion from Paradise on the left wing, then on the center piece, zooms in on torments of the sinners, where cyborgs, demons and other hybrid monsters have their way with the sorry souls, and ends, on the right wing, in burning hell.

Detail on the left panel: Evil looms in paradise. And it’s pretty sexy.

Among art lovers, Hieronymus Bosch is considered a masterful painter of landscapes. On the Triptychon the meadows and trees on the left panel are rendered in impeccable beauty, teeming with colorful birds. But the charming fields turn into barren land, wastelands and dumps on the center piece, and into burning fields on the right panel. The bright cerulean skies of Paradise turn black in the smoke pillars rising from hell’s fires: This is the destruction of nature, literally, by the hands of humanity. The Last Judgement Triptychon remains topical to the present day. A medieval Sunday for Future.

The Paintings Gallery invites artists to “correspond” with Bosch. Ali Banisadr, an Iranian painter living in New York, suffers from or enjoys synaesthysia. While painting, he hears internal sounds. His dynamic brushwork, which oscillates between figuration and abstract expressionism, reflect a chaotic world, an explosion reminiscent of Bosch.

However, Bosch, who sported a tonsure, defined the root of all evil not in corporate greed, but in the moral failing of the individual. Lust makes all men untrustworthy  was a popular proverb around 1500. Accordingly, it was any sex that didn’t serve the purpose of procreation that caused of human downfall. (Like a thornbush out of your ass, keep an arrow in your head, to save one in your heart, was another popular saying of time, which must have given Bosch some ideas.) But then world was more spiritual back then, and art more allegorical than it is nowadays. What seems like insane perversion in the 20th century, must have made complete sense in the 15th.

On an even sourer note Bosch didn’t stop at scapegoating beautiful women and homosexual men. Jews (wearers of the obligatory yellow badges in medieval Europe), Africans and Muslims alike were responsible for humanity’s demise. Another radical catholic point of view that sadly finds its adherents to this day: in the rising extreme right movements of the 21st century.  

Four Trees by Egon Schiele, from 1917. Like Bosch, Schiele is not known for his landscapes, even though he painted them masterly. The Four Trees, on permanent exhibition in Vienna’s Belvedere Castle, is rumored to have been coerced from a Jewish family during the Third Reich in Vienna.

But what is the morality of the Last Judgement? A novelty in his time, Bosch did not call on Jesus and Mary for redemption. Rather, he had the holy family watching passively from the center panel as the world went to shambles. Each and every one has to make an effort, the Triptychon tells us, to not stray from the right path, on the journey of life. Evil looms everywhere.

It was the rich, the nobility and the aristocracy, whom Bosch accuses of sanctimony, guilty of the seven mortal sins, in his paintings. Another novelty in his days: wealth and high social standing would not safe anyone from hell. And so Bosch, despite his radical pessimism, despite his fatal thinking and hopelessness, opened the doors to the new world order of the Renaissance, the age of science and enlightenment.

Fridays for Future at Heldenplatz, Vienna, in front of the Imperial Castle.

While at the general election that took place two days after the huge climate strike, the majority of Austrians still voted for right wing and neoliberal parties that favor industries over environmental protection, the Green party was pushed into parliament as the strongest Green party in the world. Not all hope is lost.

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Sarajevo, Mon Amour

Yesterday, the star-studded 25th edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival ended and with it a week of joyful partying for the entire city. And what a party it was! While director Alejandro González Iñárritu, actors Isabelle Huppert or Gael Garcia Bernal, to name just a few, strutted down the red carpet in front of the National Theatre, local youth volunteered as ushers, and the rest of the town joined international movie-goers not only in the movietheatres, but at parties and clubbings that boosted Balkan popmusic through the city center until the wee hours.

The Heart of Sarajevo at the Bazar in the Ottoman quarter of town

The “Heart of Sarajevo”, the festival’s logo, a delicate heart shape designed by French fashion designer Agnès B., could be found at every street corner: dangling from the street lights in the elegant Habsburgian part of the town, from the shops at the bazar in the Ottoman part of the town, and even illuminated at the bus stops in the concrete jungle of the realsocialist Tito era.

street café packed during the Festival

Little reminded of the beginnings of the Sarajevo Film Festival 25 years ago: Admission to any one of the 37 films shown from October 25 to November 5 1995 was one cigarette. Portable generators provided power to the projectors. Directors Alfonso Cuaron and Leos Carax made their way over the surrounding mountains in armored cars. Film canisters were lugged through a tunnel dug beneath the airport. Sarajevo was under siege.

Sarajevo, hitherto a symbol of religious tolerance and joie de vivre, was besieged by the Serbian army for four years, from 1992 till December 1995. Snipers zooming in on city dwellers while asleep in their beds, while preparing dinner in their kitchens; shrapnel killing children on the playground or on their way to school; land mines blowing up men, women searching for fire wood, in need of food or medication. The Balkan War, an ethnic conflict which led to the Bosnian genocide and the break-up of the Yugoslav Republic, resulted in the death of at least 130,000 people.

Crossing from the Ottoman quarter to the Habsburgian part of town.

The Sarajevo festival was launched in 1995 as an act of defiance, Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s founder remembered in an interview with “The Wrap” on the occasion of the festival’s 20th anniversary in 2014:

Sarajevsko Beer at the Sarajevsko Brewery. During the siege, the brewery was the only source of fresh water in the city. The people queued up with plastic canisters, risking their lives. The Serbian army had snipers set up on the mountain tops surrounding the city.

“For the first six months of the war, to survive physically was the main goal,” he said. “After six months, we started to think about how to survive mentally, and film was the way. During the war, there was no communication. You never knew who left the city, who stayed, who was killed. Coming together to see movies became the main cultural event in Sarajevo.”

Diary entry from during the Siege, at a War Exhibition in Sarajevo

The first screenings where held at a basement, then relocated to a Jewish Synagogue. 15,000 people – an utterly unexpected and overwhelming number – showed up to watch the films in war torn Sarajevo. The second festival, in 1996, ended on the same day the Dayton Agreement ended the Balkan War, and Purivatra started thinking about turning the screenings into a real festival. The rest is history.

Mountainous Sarajevo

The Sarajevo festival grew into the most prominent film festival of South-East Europe, attracting more than 100,000 people annually on all programs and screening hundreds of films from 60 countries. This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded the Sarajevo Film Festival the status of the Academy Award qualifying film festival in the Short Film category.

The Sarajevo Rose at the markethall in central Sarajevo. The Serbian Army bombarded the so called Markale twice, in 1994 and 1995, killing 111 and wounding 219 people queuing up to buy groceries.

The scars of war are still visible in the city. The “Sarajevo roses” indicate where bombs killed more than three people in the streets; facades still pock marked with bullet holes; buildings damaged and never rebuilt; and of course the memories of the people of Sarajevo.

at Ferhadija Mosque in Sarajevo

But the scars are fading. And with the festival the spirits are rising and at least for ten days a year Sarajevo becomes once again the symbol of tolerance and joie de vivre it has always been.

One of the winning films of the 2019 Festival. The festival focuses on the South-Eastern Europe, this film of Georgia tells the story of a gay love in a patriarchal society
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The Lion King

25 years after “The Lion King” hit theatres as one of the world’s most successful films, Disney will release its remake on July 19th. While the 1994 original won multiple awards for its creative animation work, the 2019 remake relied on photorealistic CGI technique – computer generated Images – a technique so realisitically precise, it could fool the movie goers into believing they’re watching an Attenborough documentary, if it weren’t for the unrealistic plot.

That and its anthropomorphism will surely turn the remake into an even bigger success at the box offices. For lions have fascinated humans as long as they remember.

A lion king in the Okavango Delta. It is said that Botswana owns the strongest anti-poaching units. They shoot first, then ask questions.

Spotting a lion, or a lioness, in the wild is a both intimidating as awe inspiring experience: the demeanor of a queen, a king, the innate grace that stems both from superior in strength as well as the unconditional solidarity to the pride. No wonder humans have idolized them.

The oldest known object of figurative art is in fact a figurine of a human’s body with a lioness’s head. The so called Löwenmensch, German for Lion Human, was carved out of mammoth tusk about 40,000 years ago. Discovered in Germany in 1939, only a couple of days before the outbreak of WWII, the Löwenmensch is proof of the presence of lions all over Europe.

In ancient Rome, gladiators had to fight Barbery Lions, lions from the land of the Berbers in Northern Africa. They were in fact damnatii at bestias – condemned to Death, their prosecution entertainment for the lower class.

Neither cave lions, which roamed central Europe in prehistoric times, nor the smaller South European Lion, Panthera Leo which the Romans still enountered when they ruled the continent, had humans on their menu – unless of course they were made sparring partners to unlucky gladiators at the colosseum. Rather, lions and humans have always been competitors on the hunt.

A competition, humans won. The Panthera Leo Europea has long gone extinct. And for the African Lion, the Panthera Leo Leo, the outlook is just as bad.

The Selous Game Reserve offers sufficient space and prey to apex predators

25 years since Disney’s “The Lion King” ran as one of the highest grossing films of all times, lions have halved in number to less than 25.000 – there are fewer lions than rhinos worldwide. Only six countries are home to more than 1000 lions respectively. All of them are in Southern or Eastern Africa, most notably Tanzania, which with its Selous Game Reserve and Ruaha National Park – still offers sufficient space and prey for large predators to thrive.

A young male in the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania

Lions have suffered a dramatic loss of habitat through fragmentation due to agriculture and livestock replacing their natural prey, fueling the conflict between carnivores – humans and lions in this case. Many lions are simply killed in retaliation, or because they are perceived a threat to human livelihood. Poaching, badly managed trophy hunting and bush meat hunting – due to poverty in rural Africa – have done the rest to put lions on the list of endangered species.

A lion cub in the Selous Game Reserve in Southern Tanzania. It’s future is unsure.

25 years after Disney’s “The Lion King” hit the theatres as one of the best selling shows ever, the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, put lions on the list of endangered species.

But real, wild lions however are important in this world and to individual countries. As apex predators they keep ecosystems in balance, they increase the touristic attractiveness as a country for ecotourism. But most importantly, they have as any other living being on this planet has an unconditional right to live.

A lioness also in the Selous Game Reserve in Southern Tanzania

25 years since the first Lion King, the Walt Disney Corporation has asked fans to donate to their Lion Recovery Fund, as well as donating $1.58 million to various lion protection projects since August 2018 themselves. A number dwarfed the $814.7 million adjusted life time grossing of the first Lion King.

A bachelor in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. This young male was actually wearing a colar. Scientific research is fundamental in saving the lion population by tracking their ways and preventing conflict between the big cats and local cattle farmers.

Here are some links of lion conservation projects for you to donate:  

The Ruaha Carnivore Conservation Fund:

ABOUT RCP
Remembering Lions
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Austria: La Ronde

It’s this time of the year again: The bee-eaters, those agile, gregarious birds, have returned from South Africa and set up shop at Lake Neusiedl. By means of their sharp bills they dig their burrows up to two meters into the vertical sand stone, completely ignoring the burrows they had carved out the previous year. It’s in their nature to build a new home each June.

It’s not in their nature to find new partner, though. Bee-eaters mate for life. Their romantic fidelity has inspired poets and biologists alike. Albeit, their sex lives aren’t as straight forward as it may seem. Both husband and wife like to engage in extra-marital affairs to further their own offspring’s chances of survival, turning the colony into a stage for a veritable Ronde à la Schnitzler.

Courtship follows an elaborate protocol. The groom presents the bride with a present – a bee or a dragonfly or even a butterfly, the avian equivalent to a bouquet of roses. After a little cuddling, the female will assume a receptive posture, after which the consummation of marriage will take place. Then both will joyfully take to the skies. Love is in the air!

However, monogamy is often limited to “social monogamy” – the shared raising of the hatchlings. Copulation often happens in the hidden, sometimes it’s forced, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all.

A couple usually enlists other birds as babysitters, most preferably their own children. If the latter however wish to start their own family, the old couple will go to extraordinary lengths to prevent them from mating. The daughter in turn will sneak out in the wee hours of the day to find herself a secret lover.

In general, as recent studies have shown, a lot of extra-marital sex in the world of birds is in fact instigated by females. Married males will not shy away from a little tete-a-tete, especially if they don’t have to take care of the hatchlings later. On a darker note: bachelors who haven’t managed to impress a female will resort to drastic measures to get their DNA spread: coercion and rape.

Comes September, the bee eaters will head South again. Many more of them.

The Austrian doctor and novelist Arthur Schnitzler published his novel “La Ronde” (Der Reigen) in 1879, causing a scandal for its frank description of sexuality. Or rather: it caused a riot. Not surprisingly, the book was banned. Then became a best seller. The Fifty Shades of Grey of its time. Passion is more colorful at Lake Neusiedl.