Travels & Tales: The Blog

Posted on

Italy: Exile

“There should be a history of this Italy, a history outside the framework of time, confining that which is changeless and eternal, in other words, a mythology. This Italy has gone its way in darkness and silence, like the earth, a sequence of recurrent seasons and misadventures. Every outside influence has broken over it like a wave, without leaving a trace.”

In 1935, the anti-fascist activist Carlo Levi was arrested by the Mussolini administration in his hometown Turin in Northern Italy and exiled to Lucania, today’s Basilicata -region, the instep of the Italian boot. He spent a year in the two villages Grassano and Aliano among the poverty stricken peasants. After the war, he published his memories in his book, “Christ stopped in Eboli”, which turned into an immediate best seller – and led to social reforms.

Lucania was an impoverished province deep in the South, far from Rome. A barren landscape jagged with ravines and steep gorges, dented by barren peaks, freezing in winter and suffocating in summer, when Malaria was buzzing in the air. A hostile place, so outlandish, it was barely part of Italy, barely part of Europe, and, as Levi was to find out, barely part of this world.  

The vast land lies confined under a heavy, billowing sky. Nature is not an all-embracing source of life here, but a grim, heart-breaking beauty, a moody goddess that demands sacrifice and worship. Packs of wolves and wild boars patrol the valleys, claim their territory in moonlit nights. The villages sit on the hill tops, dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape. Little stone houses huddled together, leaning into the mountain, to hide from the winds: the burning Scirocco that brings the Sahara heat, and the cold storms from the North, that bring the rains. But rains don’t fall in Lucania. They pour down in violent torrents. Until the end of the last century, landslides regularly took with them whatever was in their way – trees, the peasants’ humble stone huts, the little country churches – and left swamps that housed the dreaded mosquitoes.

Levi, then 33 years old, a doctor by training and painter by vocation, was appalled by the living conditions of the peasants. Paralysed by malnutrition, malaria, and various other consuming diseases, they stoically lived on a meagre diet of dark bread with the occasional crushed tomato or a thin slice of sausage. The soil didn’t yield much. The land is fit for olive trees, not wheat, as the peasants were to cultivate, and the goats, the peasants’ only source of revenue, were heavily taxed by the Mussolini regime. Most farmers couldn’t afford their goats anymore and had to kill them. Whether as small-scale farmers or working the fields of the rich landowners in a quasi-feudal system, the peasants barely managed to feed their children. Their life was a struggle, but a struggle they were willing to keep up, for centuries, or rather: since time began.

I was struck by the peasants’ build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips. Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and history has swept over them without effect.

The Lucanians had been living here since 500 BC, working their fields, which they rarely owned. Foreign powers passed through the land on their conquering sprees, the Langobards, the Byzantines, the Saracens, the Swabians, for whom Lucania was only of strategic importance. After the Italian unification in 1961, landownership passed, not to the peasants, but to local aristocracy, or Northern investors, or international companies. But no one ever settled here. They all stayed in their far away palaces in the big cities, and the peasants were left on their own.

Lucanians themselves dreamed of a promised land. Lucania was their homeland, but they wished for another place where they could leave all their hunger and misery behind. They dreamed of America.

When Levi arrived, more men had emigrated to New York than remained in the villages. But many would return after a few years and pick up their previous peasants’ life right where they had left it. Lucanians were, quite literally, inseparable from their land.

Their footprints mark the ancient paths, crossing clearest mountain springs, of which every gurgle transports the voice of the ancestors, a song that sweetens the memories. Hidden in the shadowy shrubs the paths climb uphill to where rusty windmills chew time. Here dreams are made of dust and innocence, and days are uncertain, provisional, and turn to ash in the cry of thunderstorms, in the hurling of landslides, in the growling of earthquakes. Here, where the imaginary is engraved in the sandstone, only the rough fingers of the peasants can decipher what the furious winds have written, her children, in the darkness of Earth.

This is the beginning of Vito Ballava con le Streghe, (Vito danced with the witches), a traditional tale of Lucania. (translated by wanderwarbler from Mimmo Sammartino’s book). It beautifully explains how the peasants’ self-awareness, their identification is entangled, or dependant on their land. Each being is inseparable from the nature that surrounds them: like a leaf to a tree, the peasant belongs to Lucania, like a falcon to the sky. There is no boundary between the world of humans, animals, and spirits. Everything is ensouled. Everything is – not symbolically, but actually – divine.

Like a drop of water in the steady flowing river, the peasant was not individual, but part of a community – a community of peasants, villagers, humans, living beings, of the material world, or the spiritual world. Where everything is connected, acts upon each other, the lines are blurred – between dream and awakening, between yesterday and tomorrow is blurred. Or like Carlo Levi expressed it: They live submerged in a world that rolls independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land can conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature.

Because of this pagan view of the world, Levi called his book: Christ stopped at Eboli. Eboli is the last train station before entering Lucania from the North. Jesus Christ, so the peasants say, never came to Lucania. They meant that in their misery they were forgotten even by God. But it also meant that despite the village chapels scattered all over the land, and numerous catholic festivities, the teachings of the Catholic church had never entered their minds. The peasants didn’t believe in free will, and pursuit of happiness, or some personal holiness. They believed in the eternal rule of an ever repeating cycle of nature, where everything is determined before.

Destiny is already written in stone for everyone, so the peasants say.

Stoically, the Lucanians accepted their fate, a fate that is not compassionate or partisan, nor merciful. A fate needed to be faced in patience and silence.

Of what use are words? None. What can you do? Nothing.

What was strictly separated though, was the world of men from that of women. While the man were working the fields, it was the women who peopled the village during the day.

They seemed to me all alike, with their faces framed by a veil folded several times and falling over their shoulders, pale cotton blouses, wide, dark bell-shaped skirts that went halfway down their legs, and high boots. They stood erect with the stately posture of those accustomed to balancing heavy weights on their heads and their faces had an expression of promitive solemnity.

Of course Lucania was, like the rest of the world, a patriarchal society. Decisions were made my men, and women were married off in their teens, with or without their consent. In the course of their lives women bore dozens, or more, of children, running the risk of maternal death, running the risk of still birth. Children they had to care for on their own, children they often had to bury when they were babies, toddlers, or before they reached their teenage years.

Levi was fascinated by these women, who looked so brittle and old, but were impossibly strong; illiterate and yet so wise. In reality, these women were witches.  

It’s from here, these mountain ridges hammered into the sky, that angels and witches spread their wings, following the falcons, princes of the highest peaks, at the uncertain border between wakefulness and sleep. (from Vito ballava con le streghe)

In the reality of the night, of the world of dreams, women cast themselves from the mountain peaks and fly with the falcons. They dance and sing. They heal and cast spells with magic words. They fabricate love potions to get any lover they want. And they always want lovers.

Men in Lucania had to be alert. Women could smuggle their love potions into the glass of red wine they served at dinner. These love potions were concocted from menstrual blood, impossible to detect in a glass of red wine.

Men had to make sure they were never alone with a woman other than their wife. Love, or sexual attraction, was considered such a powerful natural force no amount of will-power could resist it. A man and a woman together always resulted in love making. And many children. And gnomes.

The gnomes were little airy creature, capricious and frisky, who liked to play tricks on the people, like tickling the feet of those sleeping, pulling sheets off their beds, throwing sand into people’s eyes, making the laundry fall off the line into the dirt. They hid things in the out-of-the way places. They were innocent little sprites. Little rascals. They were the souls of the children who died before they were baptized.

But of course, the world of gnomes, witches and invincible love was just another exile. In a world, where women where kept from material power, had their wings cut by patriarchy and Catholicism, it was this other world of magic and spirituality where they would hold the reins.

Maybe this could be said of Lucania as a whole: Where love and happiness were second to survival, magic was a dream come true.

Against his promises, Carlo Levi never returned to Lucania after his exile had ended. Back to Turin, he picked up his life from before: that of a political and social activist. “Christ Stopped at Eboli” was published 1945 and raised the popular awareness of the plight of the South. Funds of the Marshal Plan were channelled into Southern Italy. The swamps were drained and Malaria eradicated, and land reforms came into effect.

After the war Lucania was renamed Basilicata. It is a quiet place. The people still call themselves Lucanians. At night, the witches are still flying.

Posted on

Naples: Pulcinella

There’s a strange guy hanging out in the streets of Naples. A jokester with a big round belly, dressed in white with a cone-shaped sugar loaf hat. His face half hidden underneath a black, beaked mask, he splurges on Spaghetti and slurps red wine from the bottle. He waggles when he walks, like a nine month-pregnant woman, and when he sings, it’s with a screeching falsetto voice. He’s everywhere, depicted on posters and advertisements, modelled from lava stone or carved from wood by the puppet-makers in the old part of town. He is Pulcinella, the symbol and personification of Naples.

Pulcinella is both a peasant and an urbanite, both a stranger and a local. He’s clever and naïve, mischievous and loyal. Old but immortal, he’s both a woman and a man, both human and bird. In his unbound laughter lies sadness, behind his bird’s mask the unfaltering determination to face the troubles and the hard times. His eyes tell the story of oppression, of marginalisation, and prejudice. 

As ungraspable as Pulcinella is, his life is well documented. In the 1797 book “Entertainment for Children” (Divertimento per Li Ragazzi) the late baroque painters father and son Tiepolo depicted the life of Pulcinella from his birth to beyond his many deaths:

Pulcinella hatched from a giant egg. Legend has is that was an egg incidentally fertilized by the severed testicles cut off a young boy – his father trained the boy as a castrato, a falsetto singer, a wide spread art form in 16th and 17th century-Europe. Pulcinella’s birdlike nativity could well be a baroque version of the ancient Greek creation myth, which goes like this:

In the beginning, when there was nothing but empty darkness, there was but a bird with black wings named Nyx. With the wind, Nyx laid a golden egg and out of it rose Eros, the god of love. One half of the egg shell rose into the air and became the sky, the other one became the Earth. Then Eros made them fall in love.

In the children’s book, Pulcinella was raised both on the countryside and in the city. He liked to play, and he loved to fly: Pulcinella can be seen swinging on a trapeze, and walking the tightrope. He’s playing shuttlecock, or Badminton, which was called volano back then – Italian for flying. An act, by the way, associated with falling in love.

Oh, how Pulcinella loved to play… To play, being free from restrictions and inhibition, an activity completely unproductive, but joyful, improvisational, and imaginative. Play, so psychology teaches us, is the basis of all civilisation, and so is Pulcinella most basically Neapolitan. Ludere is the Latin word for to play – and Pulcinella was playful and ludicrous, just like the city.

No wonder that high-flying Pulcinella fell in love, and married, and had many children. And of course he travelled the world and lived through many adventures. He worked as a barber, a carpenter, a tailor and an artist. He got arrested, imprisoned and pardoned. He fell ill, he died not one but many gruesome deaths and was resurrected.

In the story of Pulcinella it is impossible not to see the parallels with ancient myths as they were told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis – a book so fundamental to Greek and Roman culture – but also with the bible. Pulcinella has in fact been compared to Jesus, most notably by the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot. While likening Pulcinella to Jesus might not go down so well in radically catholic city like Naples, it is however save to say that Pulcinella speaks on a subconscious level, tells of the constant changing and transformation of life, and radiates the fascination and charisma of Jesus Christ.

Without doubt, Pulcinella is older than Naples. Pulcinella gave birth to Naples, he is Naples and everyone who has ever lived here.

While the myth is eternal, the figure Pulcinella is ascribed to a certain Silvio Fiorillo, an actor and playwright, who lived in the 17th century, when Naples suffered under the yoke of the Spanish empire, taxes were exorbitant. Fiorillo created a character with a rebel heart, a defiant servant by the name of Policinella, or Policenello, or Policiniela, or Pulcinello, or Pulcinella – depending on the edition and source. All names share a conspicuous resemblance to the Italian pulcino, chick.

Yet, Fiorillo, didn’t invent Pulicinella. Rather, he condensed many myths and lores of his times into this one secondary character in his book of 1632, La Lucilla Costante. Soon, cheeky Pulcinella became a favourite character of the Commedia dell’ Arte, the travelling theatre companies of baroque Italy.

The Commedia dell’Arte itself stems from ancient times, namely from the Oscan Plays. Oscan was the language of the native people who settled in what is nowadays called Campania and Basilicata, the instep of the Italian boot. Later, under the Greeks and Romans, these plays were called Atellean Commedies or Atellean Farces. These highly improvised plays, intermitted by song and dance, were not performed in amphitheatres, but entertained their audiences on marketplaces or town squares, little farces that dealt with everyday problems. The noise and bustle at these gatherings didn’t allow the spoken word to travel far, so the actors had to rely on body language and wore costumes and masks that accentuated their traits. These masks were well-defined stereotypes, such as the clownish Maccus, the gluttonous Buccus, or hump-backed Dossennus among others –  characters who would later turn into the well-known and popular characters of the Commedia Dell’ Arte.

Probably blending the clown Maccus and the eternally hungry Buccus, Fiorillo dressed his Pulcinella in the loose white clothes that were associated with the people of Acerra, a little town not far from Naples. Acerra was known for frequent floodings and swamps which bestowed on the Acerrans Malaria , and bad odors. The little city had been founded in the early centuries AD by the Nasamoni, descendents of the dark-skinned soldiers from Northern Africa. The venerated black Saints and black Madonne of the region are still vestige of this early black Italian people. But Acerra was also known for its fertile soils and the Acerran produce: fresh fruit and vegetables sold by the Parulani, the grocers, in the big city, in Naples.

Today still, in the Neapolitan dialect, a Parulano is not only a green grocer, but a person who talks and behaves in a rustic manner, in every sense of the word. The phrase Parulano chi fa la Zeza, (Zeza meaning Lucretia, Pulcinella’s girl-friend) describes a very feminine man, and the Fare il Ballo di Parulano tellingly means cross-dressing, a man in woman’s clothes. 

Pulcinella was at the peak of his fame at the end of the 18th century. In her heydays, the city of Naples was the biggest city of the world, the pulsating capital of the Kingdom of Naples, center of art and erudition. Artists, poets, musicians and scholars flocked to the city. The aristocracy indulged in games and gambling, and Pergolesi, the composer of spiritual music, wrote the Pulcinella suite.

But also, Italy was under attack by the French under Napoleon, the Enlightenment a veritable threat to the kingdoms and states on the Italian peninsula. A strategy of defence was needed, a figure of identification, of unification. A nation had to be created, and who better for the job than Pulcinella, who had hatched from an egg like Eros, resurrected like Jesus Christ? Someone who meant everything and embraced everyone.

Italy was unified in 1861, and Naples degraded to an insignificant city at the outskirts of Europe. The South soon became the poor and unloved sibling or the rich, industrial North, where cities like Milan and Turin garnered fame and money in fashion and automobile industry. Southern Italians were dubbed the “Africans of Italy”, and this was not meant as a compliment.

It must not be forgotten, that the original Pulcinella, was in fact in an immigrant, a person of color, shamed and ridiculed for their origins. A character who transcended myths and beliefs, gender and categorization, who turns struggle into game, hobble into dance, ridicule into laughter. A character just like Naples, a city whose pure mentioning evokes chaos, poverty, and gangsterism, a dance at the foot of a furious fire-spitting volcano. A city buried under ashes and resurrected. Old and immortal.

Posted on

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
Posted on

Le Mal D’Afrique |Zimbabwe

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.

Posted on

France: Fortified

The Sun King is alarmed. It’s 1692 and an army of 40,000 Savoyens have just crossed the Vars pass into the rugged region of Dauphiné in the South of the kingdom. They have overrun the Alpine city of Briançon, the city closest to the Italian border, and burned down the city’s splendid catholic Cathedral. Undoubtedly an act of revenge, since the city’s only protestant temple had been ravaged and destroyed only a short time before. Now the Savoyens are threatening to join a major protestant uprising in the central region of France, the Cevennes. Fortunately, early snowfalls are stalling the Savoyans’ campaign, affording the self-proclaimed sun king Louis XIV time to catch breath and order his highly acclaimed chief military engineer, the ingenious Vauban, to travel to the Dauphiné and take matters in hand.

Sebastian Pretre de Vaubun will leave a great heritag in Briançon. Fortifications that outlasted 300 years of warfare, sieges and hostilities. Still nowadays, the city relies on the talent of the ingenious engineer.

In the 17th century, the Dauphiné is one of the monarchy’s most impoverished regions. The winters are freezing and snowy, the summers scorching and bad harvests frequent. The mountainous territory doesn’t allow for development of industry, and transportation is strenuous on the meagre network of roads, the stone bridges that gap the steep valleys or turbulent mountain rivers are dilapitated. Its strategic position between the Italian Houses in the East and Savoy in the North has made the Dauphiné a battle ground of various wars within the past hundred years. Still, the province is heavily taxed both by Paris and the Vatican. As the two sovereigns lead a bitter battle over the Dauphiné’s taxation, the people, plagued by hunger, poverty and epidemics like the Plague, revolt frequently.

By the time Vauban arrived in Briançon,the city was still in ruins, yet he was impressed with the industriousness. Already the locals were up and about after the Savoyan attack. Briançon was, so he noted in his diary, an example of courage and perseverance.

Founded by the Romans in an altitude of 1326m at a strategically important intersection of four valleys, Its Roman name, Brigantium, Place in the Height, was in medieval times, when the settlement was turned into a burgus, changed to Briançon, as it was pronouced in the local language, l’occitan.

Surrounded by pine forests that cradled stone mountain peaks, where lavender sweetened the air and golden eagles patrolled the sky, Briançon was a city of great wealth. As so-called Franko-Burgeois, the people of Briançon were granted certain political freedom and economic privileges, the rights usually reserved to nobles: the right to assemble, the right to elect their representatives, or the freedom of trade. Together with other free-spirited cities in the region, Briançon founded their own republic with special rights and obligations: La République des Escartons, with its leaders, called Dauphins, due to the dolphin in the seal or arms, residing in Briancon. Briançon flourished. By 1345, the city counted four different quarters within the city walls, with a communal oven and market halls, with three fountains, a fire tower, a central canal that ran along the Grande Rue, for the snow melt. There were the palaces of Lombardian bankers, administrative buildings and royal residences. When in 1349, in need of money, Dauphin Humbert II sold his holdings to the King of France, things even improved. Various Catholic orders (the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Ursulines) that settled within its walls and ran schools at their convents, for both boys and girls. Literacy in the population reached for the time incredible 80%. Crafts, arts and trade were booming. Until, of course, Louis XIV ascended the throne and the religious wars broke out.

To finance the enlarged army, the sumptuous court in Versaille, and the growing administration, Louis XIV increased taxation. Since the aristocracy and the nobles, and many bourgeois as well were exempted from paying taxes, it was a burden stemmed the under privileged classes only – like the people of the Dauphiné, from whom the Vatican also claimed their toll.

It was this battle between Louis XIV and Innocent XII over the taxation of the Dauphiné that provoked the attack of the Savoyens and the Calvinistic so called Ligue of Augsburg. To appease the Pope Innocent XII by proving to be an ardent catholic he revoked religious freedom of the Huguenots, the French protestants, which led to violent massacres all over France. The Huguenots emigrated in large numbers to overseas. Others resisted and revolted, others searched for refuge in the less accessible provinces in the outskirts of the empire – like the Dauphine. The tumults between Catholics and Protestants weakened the empire, and the protestant Savoyens attacked.

When Vaubun was sent South, he was already a household name for new and novel techniques of warfare. He had built in the North and West of the French empire his trademark star-shaped fortifications which eliminate blind angels, and were connected by subterranean corridors. His motto of strategic war fare was “More powder, less blood!”, searching to minimize bloodshed and loss of soldiers. An usual approach in a feudal, absolutist empire as was the French monarchy under Louis XIV. A military mastermind, he was of course a rational thinker, a strategist not a passionate hothead, a catholic humanist with a protestant lover.

inside the cathedral

Just as his patron Louis XIV had ordered, Vaubon turned Briançon into a military town. He came up with a system fortifications that connected the surrounding peaks, protecting both the city, and each other. He designed garrisons and also new cathedral. However, he would never see the finalization of his Alpine master work. He died in 1707.

By the end of his life, Vaubun, had turned away from military towards philosophical matters, especially the Enlightenment. He published a treatise, La Dime Royale, in which he advocated for a new fiscal concept of free trade, tax exemptions for the poor and relief programs for those touched by the famines. Not surprisingly, these ideas went down less well with the court.

More than 100 years after his death, Briançon was again under attack. In 1814, after Napoleon had suffered his proverbial Waterloo, the Austrians seized the moment and attacked France. But they were halted at the indestructible doors of Briançon, where, after a three-month siege they were chased away by the Chasseurs Des Alpes, an army of local mercenaries quickly put together for the occasions. They are to this day one of the French Republic’s elite armies.

Briançon was again besieged in 1943 – the Italian fascists also never managed to enter the city. They were chased away not by locals, though, but by an African battalion made up from Moroccan soldiers.

Nowadays, in the 80 years of peace and tranquillity, Briançon still relies on Vauban’s talent. The city was declared “Cité de Vauban” and UNESCO World Heritage in 2008, which turned Briançon in an important tourist destination, and thereby bringing back the wealth and metropolitan flair the city once enjoyed. Granted, many tourists come to ski in the snow rich winters, others to hike and bike in the summer sun when the scent of wild lavender and pine again sweetens the light blue skies. But the old town is bustling – cafés, restaurants are filled with people touring the old fortifications, incredulous how all this was built so long ago into the steep slopes, the rocky gorges, and still stood tall, braving the weather, the frost and the lichens. Stonewalls built in times of bloodshed, hate and destruction are now a shared heritage in a Europe free of borders and wars.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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

Posted on

Zimbabwe: Sundown

Finally, the rains have started to fall. Too little, and too late. Already the stench of death lingers. The sad remains of impalas and baboons lie scattered on the parched earth. Weakened by the heat, they were easy prey to the lions, wild dogs and hyenas. The arid soil is cracked open by the biting sun. For weeks on end, a cruel heatwave kept temperatures soaring to 45 degrees without respite.

Vultures perch on dead trees. The carcasses of elephants and buffaloes, so seemingly unconquerable creatures, line the muddy pools. Pools that once were a reliable source of fresh water and gave their name to Mana Pools Nationalpark in the North of Zimbabwe, Mana meaning four in the local Shona language. But now, with an unprecedented heatwave and draught, these once life-giving pools have turned into sticky death traps for the heavy giants. Life is but a fierce struggle for survival in Zimbabwe.

Last year’s rainy season was short and ineffective. The dams didn’t fill, and even the once majestic Victoria Falls have dried out, leaving the country in desperate need for electricity: The mighty Zambezi- river is at a record low and Kariba Dam, essential for the national electricity supply, fails to produce, leaving those who can’t afford private generators of solar power literally in the dark.

Children suffer from the drought and food shortage the most.

Hunger is a frequent visitor in the history of Zimbabwe – a country used to deal with famines and droughts in the rural areas. But the worst drought in the four decades of Zimbabwe’s existence, cyclone-induced floods and an economic collapse have left Zimbabwe on the verge of its worst-ever famine. Zimbabwe will run out of maize, its staple food, by January.

A marabou stork looks at the almost dried out Long Pool, of Mana Pools National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The current climate crisis has acerbated the problem, as have “poverty and high unemployment, widespread corruption, severe price instabilities and the lack of purchasing power,” said Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the right of food, in an interview with the Guardian. According to the UN report, about 5.5 million rural Zimbabweans and a further 2.2 million in urban centres face food insecurity. The country is now on the brink of starvation.

A white-backed vulture claims a buffalo’s carcass.

As Zimbabwe, once dubbed Africa’s bread basket, has now agreed to buy maize from neighbouring South Africa, so have the national parks ditched their policy of non-intervention and started feeding animals. Over 7000 bales of hay have been delivered to Mana Pools, and water is bumped up from bore holes.

A dying elephant in Mana Pools National Park. Zimbabwe hosts 80,000 elephants, a major part of the world’s elephant population.

Together with South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, Zimbabwe unsuccessfully lobbied the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species for controlled sales of their ivory stocks at a meeting in August. Trade in ivory is banned to deter poaching. Zimparks, who run Mana Pools among others, and  who receive no government funding, says its ivory stockpile is worth $300 million. Money it can use for wildlife conservation.

Elephant calves are now being exported to China: to save them from the drought and ease the situation in the Zimbabwean parks, as well as garner an income for Zimparks. These baby elephants end up in circuses in China, the land of the rising sun. They are just another victim of the global climate crisis.