It’s been seven years since Cecil’s death. The handsome, black-maned lion was shot right outside his home, Hwange National Park in Western Zimbabwe, by a trophy hunting American tourist. The dentist from Minnesota had paid USD 50,000 for the shooting rights. His action was hence legal under Zimbabwean law, however he had paid his helpers to use an elephant carcass to lure the lion from a protected area into a hunting concession.
Cecil’s agony lasted for well over twelve hours. The circumstances of this death could later be minutely reconstructed as he was collared and named as part of a research programme. Aside from the inhumane aspect of Cecil’s unnecessarily painful death due to the inexpert use of bow and arrow, his killing caused an uproar. The act of a rich American so nonchalantly shooting an African animal strongly echoed the not so long-gone days of colonialism.
It was, however, under colonial administration that Hwange National Park was established, namely in 1928, when present day Zimbabwe was the British colony Southern Rhodesia. Over the years Hwange has grown in the country’s largest national park, comprising of a variety of landscapes from dense teak and mopane forests to white Kalahari sands and golden savannas. It’s raw and diverse African landscape, as the safari marketing slogan goes. Hwange is also one of the best managed parks in the world, running various research, educational and conservancy projects. It is a place for endangered species to thrive.
The idea behind the park, though, was far from idealistic. First and foremost, a national park promised huge revenues from tourism to the colonial government. Wildlife conservancy was the means, a fringe benefit. But it was much more than a collateral damage that the establishment of the national park led to the near extinction of a people that like the lions had roamed the land for millennia; a people that mastered the use of bow and arrow, and who were able to turn themselves into lions: the Tjwao, the bushmen of Zimbabwe.
Sunset over Hangwe
If not physically, then legally, a National Park is a fenced-off area. The aim is not to lock in the wilderness, but to keep the rest of the world out, so the land appears pristine and raw, untouched by human hand: a glimpse of the world as God had created it. However, the land between the Zambezi river in the North, the train tracks to Victoria Falls in the East, and the Kalahari desert in the South-West, is by no means untouched by human hand.
In 1889, Queen Victoria of England authorized the adventurer Cecil Rhodes to economically explore and subsequently administer the lands North of the British Cape Colony. By this time, 35 year-old Cecil was already a diamond magnate, having made his fortune in South Africa. Now he showed great interest in the teak forests, as teak was a sturdy wood needed for the building of fast growing railroad tracks through Africa, as well as in the ivory urgently needed to quench the high demand of upright pianos in the US; Also, the land was rich in coal, another resource the west needed to fire the steam engines of the ongoing industrial revolution promised . He set out immediately.
Kudu in the Mopane forest
First, he tricked the local Madebele – a belligerent Bantu tribe that had settled in this region for generations – into granting them the rights to the natural resources. The naturally illiterate Madebele signed the British contracts, foolishly trusting the oral promises of the Rhodes’ agents. Then, under the pretext of hence broken promises, his rifle-savvy British South Africa Company battled them in the First Madebele War, which resulted in the Africans’ defeat. Subsequently, he consigned the Madebele as workers to build a railroad to connect the teak forests in the South with the coal mines in the North. Rhodes meant business indeed.
By the time of his early death, in 1902, the teak forests were cleared to the extent that they wouldn’t regenerate on their own, and the sandy soil wasn’t fit for agriculture, or husbandry, due to the Tsetse fly. On top, not only were the elephants starkly decimated, but all wildlife had been hunted to near extinction. The British considered hunting a noble sport, and killed predators as vermin, and kudus and giraffes and impalas as trophies. To reserve the remaining game for themselves, and for lack of better use of the sandy and dry soil, they turned the area into a private Game Reserve.
Cave painting in Mapotos NP
The Tjwao bushmen had foraged and hunted in these dry and sandy lands since the beginning of humankind, as archaeological evidence from the Old Stone Age suggests. Their life style, as that of other San (Bushmen) groups all over Southern Africa, was in complete harmony with nature. Their diet consisted primarily of foraged berries and roots, their game hunts were ritualized hunts that lasted for days on end – or longer. Their settlements were temporary, which enabled them to follow migrating game, as well as the rains. This flexibility was a valuable asset in a region so close to the Kalahari desert, a land prone to droughts and climate uncertainty. In their nomadism, they left no traces, no evidence of their presence. aside from carvings and cave paintings. They were invisible, blending into their surrounding.
Most fascinating about the Tjwao and other bushmen cultures though, was their understanding of the relationship between the natural world and themselves. They lived in the truest sense of the word inseparable from nature. All the landscape around them was considered alive, every boulder, every animal once was a human creature, or was inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or those yet to be born. Should the need arise, the Tjwao were also able to turn themselves into animals, into a kudu if they hunted one, or into an ostrich, or a lion.
“My aunt turned herself into a lioness. She sought for us, as she wanted to see whether we were still comfortable where we lived. She, when she had smelt our houses’ scent, she passed in front of us, she roared like a lioness because she wished that we should hear her, that it was she who had come seeking for us.” (from “Stories that float from afar” Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa)
The Tjwao lived outside the confinements of time and their own physical bodies, but immersed into their land, their identities inseparable from the natural world around them.
young lioness – Cecil’s granddaughter
By the turn of the 20th century, when the white settlers and Cecil Rhodes arrived, Tjwao families lived in scattered groups in what is now Hwange National Park. As Rhodes’ administration claimed the land, they relocated the locals to so-called Native Reserves. This was done on the legal basis of the Game and Fish Preservation Act of 1929. The British blamed the Tjwao for “poaching,” and the sudden loss of wildlife, which of course was irrational, given that the Tjwao had lived in these lands for thousands of years without decimating the wild animals, nor the trees. Rather, Cecil Rhodes had a hidden agenda; he considered the natives barbarians and thought that the sooner the Anglo Saxons subjugated the governed the continent, the better for the human race. It was, he said, their obligation. In a letter from 1888 he wrote:
“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.”
Although not the world’s first National Park, Hangwe was hence the first to evict indigenous inhabitants.
In the years to follow the expulsion, during the liberation struggle and after declaration of independence of the state of Zimbabwe, in 1980, the situation for the Tjwao didn’t improve. As a people who didn’t fit in with neither the Bantu societies, let alone the imperialistic Europeans, they were caught in the middle, victims of violence by the hands of the colonial forces as well as, post 1980, by the red berets, the notoriously brutal Zimbabwe Military Police. They were also victims of cultural ghosting. Unrecognized as an indigenous people, in the native reserves, their history and their culture were forgotten. Their homesteads in the Tholotso district south of Hwange National Park is the poorest district of Zimbabwe, their political representation not worth mentioning, their income the lowest in Zimbabwe due to their low literacy rate and lack of higher education.
The Tjwao language, which has no writing, is destined to die out, spoken by only a handful of people of advanced age. The young, who have never been to Hwange National Park, don’t understand it. They mostly speak Ndebele, the prevailing language in the region, and dream of a different future, where their children at least get better education and can find a better life, in Zimbabwe or abroad.
Only the old still dream of returning to their ancestors’ land, where their forefathers lay buried, the land that defined them as a people, and as persons. They still feel the phantom pain from missing the land from which they were once inseparable. To venture into the National Park, even only for foraging for their traditional foods (hunting is out of question within the confines of the park), they need to apply for a license, a bureaucratic obstacle they mostly fail, or are too scared too attempt, or are denied anyway.
Today, the number of Tjwao living in the homesteads surrounding Hwange is estimated to be around 1500 people. There are fewer Tjwao in Africa, than there are lions.
Mopane worm – traditional Tjwao food
Lions are an endangered species, as are wild dogs and cheetahs and giraffes, who all live in large numbers in Hwange National Park. In its wildlife conservation efforts of Hwange National Park is laudable. Situated in a dry region that has no rivers and waterbodies, the park management has since the 1930s installed 103 boreholes, first run by wind wheels, then by diesel generators and presently by solar power, to provide the large mammals with water. Without these artificial waterholes, the many large animals, and with them the lions and other predators, would have long died. This concerns especially the elephants, whose population has exploded since the establishment of the park, from ca. 1,500 elephants in 1920 to ca. 45,000 in 2020.
The sight of many playfully entangled trumps, of happy baby elephants as they splash in the waters against the tangerine African sunset is enlightening to the eyes of the paying visitor – affluent Americans and Europeans. The sparkling reflection of the sunbeams on the solar panels does not diminish their joy. Nor does the presence of rangers managing the waterholes or patrolling for poachers. For these licensed rangers, who are highly skilled in tracking and nature conservation, the National Park is not simply a job, or an income, but their love for wild life is evident – and contagious. Hangwe is not the raw African landscape as the marketing slogan goes; it is land carefully managed and lovingly cared for. As it was before it became a National Park, and before Cecil Rhodes ever set foot on the land that is holy to the Tjwao.
That Tjwao aren’t back to the land that complements them in their identity, that their lives have not been cared for, but falsely sacrificed for the lives of lions and elephants, is incomprehensible; it’s another wrong doing of Cecil Rhodes that should be righted before it’s too late, before their culture has vanished into oblivion.
Unlike his namesake, Cecil the lion was an old man at the time of his death. In the run of his long life he had fathered many new generations. His wives, his daughters and sons, and even his grandchildren are the lions that today hunt in Hangwe National Park and who carry with them the spirits of Africa, of those passed, of those yet to be born.
As a child in Southern Rhodesia, Doris Lessing used to listen to her mother playing Beethoven and Chopin on the piano, and at the same time the drums playing in the compound. She didn’t see any reason why these two kinds of music shouldn’t be played together. “You had to be much older to understand that African drums and Chopin weren’t really a part of the same phenomenon.“
The teenager Lessing, whose family had moved to the British colony benefiting from the Land Appointment Act of 1930, was beguiled by the endless sky, the cascades of the rains, the melodious crescendos of the kingfishers, and the traditional mbira-tunes of the African work gangs on the maize fields, but appalled by the piercing racism, the narrow-mindedness and the strict social confinement of the patriarchal European society. Like her alter ego Martha Quest, the protagonist of her Children of Violence-series, Lessing left Africa, to pursue a life as a writer and free woman in London. Africa remained in the dark, a tragic, mysterious continent under Western yoke.
Tsitsi Dangarmebga’s trilogy Nervous Conditions (1988), The Book Of Not (2006), and This Mournable Body (2018), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, also focuses on the coming of age of teenager girl in what was Southern Rhodesia then, but is Zimbabwe now. The writer, one of a growing number of black Zimbabwean voices is, next to Yvonne Vera, Petina Gappah, Novuyo Tshuma, NoViolet Bulowayo, or Panashe Chigumadze, one of the most prominent writers to shed light on the female African experience in the 20th century. Yet, unlike Dangarembga, who, like Lessing left Africa to study in Europe, and who names the Nobel laureate her literary idol, the trilogy’s protagonist never got the chance to leave.
The girl Tambudzai Sigauke also suffers from the injustice and confinement of tradition and patriarchy, but unlike Martha Quest rarely mentions the unlimited Africa sky, or the beauty of rains and kingfishers. For the Shona teenager from a rural village trying to make her way in or out a colonized country, from the 1950s to the year 2000, when Rhodesia turned Zimbabwe, the oppression is total.
Dangarembga’s trilogy zooms in on the lives of the women under oppression, under patriarchy, and most importantly the unerasable effects of colonialism. For all the gold and diamonds extracted from the sandy African soil, Christianity and Western erudition have been imported, turning post-colonial Africa into a battleground of two clashing cultures.
Property and Real Estate, the bible, self-fulfillment and the one-directionality of progress and growth stand opposed to Hunhu, the Shona equivalent to South African Ubuntu, an ancient spiritual view of the world shared by the Bantu tribes. In this belief system, history is multidirectional as the past, present, and future melt into one state of consciousness and the deceased live on as good or evil spirits. Empathy and respect must be offered to all other human beings, those of the past, the present and the future, since an individual can only exist in relationship to the others: their kinship, their family, their ancestors and off-spring.
If, by the British colonialists the Bantu tribes were regarded subhuman, and therefore property, like animals, it was because of their inseparability from nature and the supernatural, from animals, birds, trees, and spirits. And it was this lack of respect for fellow human beings, which cleared the whites off their humanity in the eyes of the Madebele and Shona.
Uri munhu here? Kuita kwemunhu here? Are you a human? Is this how a human being behaves?
Aiwa, murungu. No, it’s a white person.
It is of course an anodyne and only partially correct representation of Bantu culture as egalitarian or non-belligerent. The 1000-year old predecessors of present day Shonas, Zimbabwe’s biggest tribe, built the mystical Great Zimbabwe, which now stands in ruins near the city of Masvengu, were strictly hierarchical, wasteful and prodigal – traits which are believed to have led to their demise.
The long history of colonialization, which started in 1488 with the arrival of Bartholomeo Dias at the Cape of Good Hope, did not leave the tribal Bantu societies unchanged in their philosophy and view of the world.
Missionaries, most notably Jesuits and Domenicans, gradually displaced traditional teaching and medicine, and the ancient belief systems, and Hunhu, faded. Oppression, violation and traumatization have shaped the Shona, Zimbabwe’s biggest tribe. The struggle for liberation has become part of their national identity.
The spirit of Mbuya Nehanda, a woman who is said to have fought against the Portuguese when they invaded Southern Africa in 1530, has returned again and again in Shona women, who then became spiritual guides in the liberation wars, from the first against Portuguese invaders, to the first Chimurenga of 1890 (the liberation struggle against the British) against the Rhodesians during the second Chimurenga of the 1970s. Currently, Mbuya Nehanda is believed to possess a child in rural Zimbabwe.
The spirit keeps haunting Tambudzai Sigauke in Dangarembga’s trilogy, as the cultural rift doesn’t run between black and white, or oppressor and oppressed, but within those born into post-colonial Africa. The teenager Tambudzai, like Martha Quest a few decades before her, dreams of becoming a heroine, a self-possessed free woman, a European woman. But Tambudzai will remain an African heroine, inseparable from her culture and people, lost in the ubiquity of history.
Tsitsi Dangarembga was born in 1959, into colonial Southern Rhodesia. After spending her early childhood in Britain, where her parents pursued academic degrees, she returned to Rhodesia at the age of six to attend a private English speaking school. Her first language was English, she says, her native Shona the second. Only after hearing a beautiful Shona poem recited at a graduation celebration, did Tsangarembga realize that with Shona tradition being an oral one, not a written, there was a need for African writers and African literature with which she and other African women could identify. The experience was as enlightening as it was painful, she said: to think we’d lost so much of it.
Tambudzai is not Dangarembga’s alter ego, unlike Martha Quest was to Lessing. Rather, Tambudzai’s life story mirrors that of Zimbabwe as a country: Born as a colony, a unilateral declaration of independence from the mother country, a violent struggle into liberation, and a troubled adult existence in a failed state.
The rational, the political and the historical intersect in the personal, Dangarembga recently claimed in an interview with the BBC. In her three books she clearly locates this intersection in a woman’s body, the neuralgic breaking point of a generation, or a country. So much so, that Tambudzai is indistinguishable from Zimbabwe, from the land and history of the Shona people. The trilogy can be read a parable of how the subjugation of nature and of a nation, is the violation of women, of humans, of humanity itself.
Nervous Conditions starts with a shocking declaration, one sentence entirely at odds with anything Hunhu.
I was not sorry when my brother died.
At thirteen, Tambudzai, growing up in a village, has but one wish: getting an education, like her brother. But in traditional societies of the 1960s, only boys are educated and prepared for being the next family patriarch. Lacking other brothers, Tambudzai manages, after some considerable struggle, to take his place at her uncle’s missionary school. This uncle, once an excelling student in Europe himself, values academic merits as highly as family tradition. Gladly Tambudzai trades her calloused soles for patent leather shoes, the Mango tree and lantana shrubs in her family’s homestead for Latin declinations and mathematical equations, and the lazy winding river where she used to skinny dip when she was done with laundry, for the paved road leading up to the Sacred Heart. At this catholic convent Tambudzai, after being the best student at the missionary school, is one of only a handful of African girls chosen to receive a Western education.
I was infatuated when we turned into the school gates. The grounds were majestically spacious. I never did discover how many hectares of land those nuns owned, but to the eye it looked like hundreds. We drove, slowly, because there were humps, up past the tennis courts and the netball, yes, netball courts, to a thicket of conifers that seemed to signify that within this rich kingdom we had left the province of the physical and entered the realm of mental activity, because beyond these trees was a roundabout at the top of which stood the school buildings. The dormitories, bright and shimmering white in the clear summer sun, stretched towards us on one side of the roundabout, the classrooms stretched down on the other. Between them was an archway, supported by ornate plaster pillars in, I was to be told, the Greek style, not the Roman.
The Tambudzai of the first two instalments is an overly ambitious student, eager to grow, and willing to erase any trace of African heritage to transform herself into a vessel for Western erudition. This ambition and focus on career, to trade the past and present for a glorious future, and to make a name for herself stands in opposition to the traditional values of Shona society, where women are named after their firstborn.
Her family’s homestead is not a place of nostalgia to the student Tambudzai, but a dark past, a birth defect. Returning for a brief school holiday, Tambudzai observes:
The only affection anyone could have for that compound had to come out of loyalty. I could not imagine anyone actually wanting to go there, unless, like me, they were going to see their mother. This time the homestead looked worse than usual. And the most disheartening thing was that it did not have to look like that. The thatched roof of the kitchen was falling out in so many places that it would be difficult to find a dry spot inside when it rained. Great holes gaped on the crumbling mud bricked walsl of the tsapi, and the hozi was no more than a reminder of shelter.
As a village girl, Tambudzai is thoroughly African, instilled with the gentle African mind set of Hunhu. She is uncritical of the West since her experiences of injustice stem from her own village. From her family’s point of view, especially her mother’s, her striving for enlightenment, for rationality and science considered internal colonialization, a nervous condition, like Stockholm Syndrome.
Tambudzai’s mother is represented as passive-aggressive, a character suffering from her husband’s emotional absence, a woman falling short to fulfil the traditional chores of a mother: to provide nutrition for the family, which was historically a woman’s domain. The racist husbandry laws of Rhodesia, which attracted white British families like the Lessings, made land cultivation impossible for the natives. While white immigrants were assigned the fertile land, African families were relocated to dry and barren lands that yielded too little. Her daughter Tambudzai’s failure to recognize her as a role model represents a further humiliation.
“The business of motherhood is a heavy burden, she tells her daughter. …When there are sacrifices to be made, you are the one who has to make them. And these things are not easy; you have to start learning them early, from a very early age. The earlier the better so that it is easy later on. Easy! As it it is ever wasy. These days it is worse, the poverty of blackness on one side, the weight of womanhood on the other. Aiwa! What will help you, my child, is to learn to carry your burden with strength.”
The problematic relationship between daughter and mother remains a central point throughout the trilogy.
“In Zimbabwe, we are faced with multiple oppressions. We go back to traditional society and conservative patriarchal society in which women are not really expected to have a voice so that again is working upon women to silence them. And then you come into this postcolonial state where the material circumstances are such that women are heavily burdened in just managing that situation.“
To her mother, Tambudzai has become a Murungu, a white person. But in Rhodesia, she remains an African, a second-class citizen.
The second instalment, The Book Of Not, focuses on Tambudzai’s late teenage years at the convent, and the last decade of Ian Smith’s Rhodesia. The white politician unilaterally declared Rhodesia independent from Great Britain in 1965. The hair-rising structural discrimination of blacks in this internationally shunned state, leads to banalities, such as missing sanitary installations to dispose of hygienic products, posing unconquerable problems to Tambudzai with dramatic outcomes.
The situation was this: I was in two aspects a biologically blasphemous person. This became interestingly clear as I walked, my head low, to the first lesson. My corporeal crime indicted me on two counts. First were the secretions that dripped crimson into the toilet bowl, or, stopped with cotton wool, clogged the school’s waste system. Then there was the other type of gene that made me look different from the majority of pupils. Even if these others ran the risk, as I did, of rendering the waste removal systems dysfunctional, at least they were different in appearance. How was I going to redeem myself, I wondered miserably?
The solution Tambudzai comes up with is simple: Work harder. With radical determination she immerses herself in her studies to make up for her two short-comings: being female and being black. Her idea of Hunhu gets sprinkled with a catholic sense of repentance and Mea Culpa. The thought of revolution doesn’t cross her mind, not as mortars are exploding in the nearby mountains as the liberation struggle gains momentum, not when one of her classmate’s father is being lynched by guerilla fighters, not when her younger sister Netsai, who joined the liberation struggle, steps on a mine and loses a leg.
In the 1970s, the second Chimurenga, the liberation struggle against Rhodesia, was in full swing. It was a decade of violent bloodshed. Revolutionary armies frequently held moraris in the villages, revolutionary night-time gatherings to boost morale and recruit fighters, or terrorize villagers by executing those who they believed to collude with the Rhodesians or a rival revolutionary army.
However, the Shona culture is traditionally non-violent, so much that the colour red, as it is the colour of blood, is shunned. Yet the Book of Not is blood-soaked – arterial blood, menstrual blood. Dangurmebga makes a strong point subtly linking womanhood to victimhood.
Despite all the bloodshed, Zimbabwe’s independence wasn’t gained on the battlefield. In 1980, following British intervention, a treaty was signed in London, granting political majority rule to Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party, whom the British wrongly regarded as the least radical of the revolutionaries, but maintenance of economic power for the white minority of landowners.
The Book of Not begins with the fear and confusion of a violent morari, and ends in the new Zimbabwe, after 1980, in the euphoria of new beginnings, of first independence and hope. The pain simmering in the pages comes from the reader knowing long before Tambudzai that the doors on which she so desperately knocks will never open to her.
The third book, This Mournable Body, short listed for the Booker Prize in 2020, is written in the urgency of Present Tense and the second person PoV. This can be read as an emphasis on the universality of Tambudzai’s story, but also as Tambudzai’s further estrangement from the world and more importantly from herself. If The Book of Not, could be understood as a tale of African female self-erasure, now the “I”, the identity of Tambudzai and Zimbabwe, are lost completely.
Set in the last decade of the 20th century, a sense of doom lingers over the book, over Tambudzai and the country. After a short phase of euphoria, Zimbabwe experienced from 1990 on a steep economic decline. White structural privilege had not disappeared, but Robert Mugabe and his winning ZANU-PF had installed a system of corruption and personal enrichment. Fifteen years of war and genocide against the Ndebel nation, Zimbabwe’s second biggest tribe, had left the country traumatized as the horrors of the past remained present.
“There’s a whole question of what is self,” Dangarembga says, “We had a self that was, and still is to some extent, part of a tribal structure. But this nation self was born in violence, and we haven’t confronted that.”
In the book, Tambudzai is in her late forties and still living in a cheap students’ hostel in Harare. Her world is a brutal social wilderness, devoid of any Hunhu, of solidarity or empathy. Instead, in the first pages unrolls a shocking rape scene of Tambudzai’s young and beautiful roommate Gertrude, in which the protagonist plays a doubtable role.
They throw her onto the ground where she sags with shock. The crowd draws in a preparatory breath. The sight of your beautiful hostel-mate fills you with an emptiness that hurst. You do not shrink back as one mind in your head wishes. Instead you obey the other, push forward. You want to see the shape of pain, to trace out the arteries and veins, to rip out the pattern of its capillaries from the body. The mass of people moves forward. You reach for a stone. Your arm rises in slow motion.
Rape has many layers, many perpetrators. A scarcely clad young woman is lynched by a mob to reinstall a patriarchal system. But as a metaphor for the raping of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo rivers, first by Cecil Rhodes, then by Ian Smith, and finally by Robert Mugabe, the question of personal complicity remains. History books are written by and for victorious men, women are eternally victimized and omitted, their story not told, nor remembered.
Like a wounded animal, Tambudzai roams the quarters of Harare in search for shelter and an income, some dignity. After all these years, she is still trying to make a name for herself. Desperation governs her actions. Haunted by spirits that crawl on her skin like invisible ants, or laugh like hyenas, she is driven into madness.
“The political trajectory in Zimbabwe has been so negative. If you have a negative trajectory the space for people to operate shrinks and everybody is pushed into this very narrow tunnel.” Dangarembga explained in a BBC Hard Talk interview in April 2021. “If the trajectory had been positive there would have been so many possibilities for a character to develop that I could have had many different stories but because everything has shrunk and everyone, one way or the other, is fighting to survive, it meant that was the story that could be told.”
There is, however, one economic branch flourishing in Zimbabwe, providing both jobs and perspectives for the dominantly rural population, as well as for African fauna and flora to recover from a century of exploitation: Ecotourism. National parks and lodges are drawing capital into the country while investing into wildlife conservation and sustainable lifestyle. Yet, as Tambudzai seizes the opportunity and is hired by a Safari agency catering to the European market, another can of worms is opened. Now blond, pink-skinned tourists armed with high tech photo gear and expectations of exotism, are arriving colonial style; management hierarchy goes along racial lines; racial stereotypes and even slum tourism are promoted.
Nonetheless, in the trilogy, we meet other Zimbabwean women, who dealt with history differently. There are those who joined the army, like Tambudzai’s aunts and sisters, those who were lucky enough to escape to Europe, like her cousin Nyasha, and those who stuck to the traditional ways of living, like her mother. Tambudzai is not merely flotsam in the currents and undercurrents of politics and history. Instead, it seems, that it’s her obsession with success, or rather a specific, European kind of success, set against the ancient African values, that keeps Tambudzai fighting upstream.
Again, after long absence, she visits her homestead where she wants to set up accommodation for foreign tourists.
A couple of dogs are asleep in your family’s homestead. Their bloated tongues spill onto the earth. They pant with shallow breaths. Ribs expanding like the hoods of cobras, which gentle motion nevertheless does not disturb the flies that buzz about the animals’ sores. Neither animal barks at the Mazda’s wheels, nor bays to alert a family member. Your vehicle stops under the old mango tree, gnarled and drooping now, that had stood guard over the family members’ arrivals and departures for decades.
“Ewo, Tambu,” she greets you. “You of the years. Isn’t that right, so many years? If this womb agreed, this mouth would say you are one from afar, nothing but a foreigner visiting. Only the womb knows better.”
You swallow your frustration, smile and embrace her again. Patience is both weapon and victory. How much of it have you deployed in your life? Come what may, and soon at that, whether the people here know it or not, you will be queen of the village.
In 2017, after a successful coup in 2017, geriatric dictator Robert Mugabe was finally replaced on the grounds of human rights violations and hyperinflation by Emmerson Mnangaga from the same party, ZANU-PF. However, Mnangaga’s prominent role in the Ndebele genocide is not forgiven, and with climate change, droughts and corruption still adding to the mix of already overwhelming troubles, the country cannot recover. The Corona pandemic has finally dealt the last blow to a brittle economy and a barely existent health system. The toll on women and their bodies again heavy, with hunger, illegal prostitution and AIDS becoming widespread problems.
Zimbabwean society, Dangarembga finds, has long turned away from Hunhu and towards a transactional society, where not solidarity is a person’s main concern, but the question the personal survival, if necessary, on the cost of the next one. It is, in fact, a deeply capitalist society.
With the character of Tambudzai’s cousin Nyasha, Dangarembga has written herself into the book. Like Nyasha, Dangarembga studied in the United Kingdom and at a film school in Berlin, and, having returned to Zimbabwe with a German husband and trilingual children, she now lives as a writer, film maker and political activist.
After an arrest last July for protesting the government, Dangarembga has withdrawn from politics, as did most of Zimbabweans. The dire daily situation which consumes all energies makes it impossible to further invest oneself, as do corrupt political structures. Instead, like cousin Nyasha in the book, Dangarembga relies on the force of creativity, on filmmaking and storytelling to instill power into people and most importantly women by giving them a voice, and most importantly, their narrative.
“The lives of black women are mournable, although society doesn’t mourn,” she says. “We are still trapped in a colonial past. It is important to experience oneself not as a second class citizen – be it as a person of color, a woman, or an older person. The engaging from a perspective of recognition, of oneself, of the other will do that, no matter what country. A people – not angels but not rudimentary souls either.”
Doris Lessing was a fan of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s. In a BBC special from 1993 she praised “Nervous Conditions” to the British public. In an interview with the New York Times, in 1982, the school drop-out Lessing said:
“I’m glad that I was not educated in literature and history and philosophy, which means that I did not have this Euro-centered thing driven into me, which I think is the single biggest hang-up Europe has got.”
Nervous Conditions – ayebia 1988
The Book Of Not – ayebia 2006
This Mournable Body – Gray Wolf Press 2018
Photos were taken during a trip through Zimbabwe 2019
Due to the Corona pandemic I cannot migrate to the South this year. Missing Africa, I dwell in memories.
In the township
Makokoba
There is laughter. The joyful treble of children at play: The girls, skipping with an old elastic rope tied to their waists, are showing off their intricate foot work. The little boys are chasing each other, trying to ride an old cast-off tire, its rubber grey and worn off. White teeth, red lips, little bare feet against the dry orange soil. The children throw you hidden glances and when they see you smile at them, they scream in delight. Their laughter comes as a relief. They don’t hate you. You, who in your Goretex shoes and polarized sunshades, your high-tech camera gripped tightly in your hand, didn’t come from another country, or another continent, but a different world altogether.
Makokoba is a township at the outskirts of the South Zimbabwean town of Bulawayo. A township like so many other townships in Africa, installed by European colonists in need of work force but in fear of Africans. A place to keep the workers close by, to cultivate their fields, clean their clothes and wash their dishes, build their roads and houses and churches, but safely fenced off, separated from their roads and houses and churches. A township to keep the Africans out of sight. To send them back to Africa when night falls.
The main streets of Makokoba are paved, but they are potholed, and blanketed with thick layers of orange dust. A bitter stale taste that with every breath coats the inner of your mouth. A pale orange that clings to the children’s skin and the stray dogs’ shaggy fur, the scattered plastic trash that piles up at every corner, the bare bricks of the one-storied buildings, and the rubber sandals at the callused feet of the people of Makokoba. When you catch their eye, you wave at them: “Salibonani!, you call, which, as your guide told you, means “Hello!” in their language, Ndebele. An old woman – or maybe your age only, yet prematurely hunch-backed and brittle, clad in an apricot-colored head dress waves back at you. Her smile reveals bare toothless gums in a wrinkled face. A young man with bloodshot eyes keeps his gaze at his feet. His gait is unsteady as he passes you by. Still you smile at him. You grip your camera tighter. Not because you fear he might rip it from your hand, but because you feel just as unsteady. You feel out of place. You feel guilty.
The land, fertile and sunbathed, was given to the English immigrants, in exchange for coming to Africa. The land, fertile and sunbathed, was taken from the African tribes that had settled here before. The Ndebele people were relegated to the barren land, far off the water lines, not living from their land anymore, but working for the landlords.
“Salibonani!” A woman in a yellow T-shirt and a skirt of a green leafy pattern wants to show you her garden. She has used discarded tires as beds to plant vegetables. Water is expensive here, you learn, she has to buy it a high price by the barrel, back there, at the manually operated iron cast pump. The rubber tires keep the water from dissipating in the sandy soil. Her plants are thriving: full leaved cabbages reaching for the cloud covered sky. She poses for a photo with a sunny smile.
Makokoba is an enchanting word. Within the century of its existence, the township has gathered fame as a place where African culture has thrived amidst all the poverty and oppression, a place that has brought about music, dance, and literature. A symbol of how a bitter root can bear the sweetest fruit. But still, Makokoba is a poor, disadvantaged African township, where unemployment and poverty lead to gangsterism and alcoholism. A place forever at the margins.
At the market, in the midst of terracotta pottery, bowls and pans neatly aligned, and hand-carved drums, lined up by size and tuning, among iron headed spears and glass pearl-chains and silver bangles, among dried herbs in cardboard boxes with Chinese labels, sits the sage woman. Her face weathered and serious, her eyes piercing. She knows of all the illnesses and their cure, your guide tells you. And you want to buy from her, but you don’t speak the language. You can’t spell the illness. “Salibonani,” you say instead. You smile. But she looks back at you, empty handed. She doesn’t have the cure.
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.
