By the rivers of ZHOU, the word of the Shona people
for elephant, the ramparts of Chilojo have for centuries gazed down at the
great Gonarezhou wilderness in the southeastern corner of Zimbabwe. The meeting
place of the Runde and Save rivers, it has ever since slaving days, been the
free-fire zone of elephant poachers. It has also witnessed the decimation of
lofty ironwood trees I an attempt to hold the tsetse fly at bay, the culling of
buffalo to protect man’s cattle, gun running, slavery and ivory wars. Every
adventurer of the lowveld – Shangaan, Swahili, Portuguese, English and
Rhodesian – has had a crack at Gonarezhou.
If you follow the Limpopo River west from Gonarezhou
to a point where the Shashi River joins it, then head north, you will soon come
to the Matobo hills. Visionary imperialist Cecil John Rhodes chose this sublime
eyrie as his burial place. Surrounded by massive natural cannonballs, it
overlooks a land that seems to have been pulverized by giant blows into a
thousand tumbled hills. Great spaces washed by the rain and wind and sun.
In the summer rains, if Mwari God is bountiful,
water courses down these massive granite whalebacks in a hundred glistening
streams like the white stripes of kudu as it pauses among dripping msasa trees.
Seventy per cent of Zimbabwe’s 13 million people still live and work as small
farmers and herdsmen, and for nearly a thousand years they have also mastered
the art of shaving off or fire cracking the surfaces of dwalas to produce
building blocks. This was how the Great Zimbabwe’s huge stone structures were
made and the same process has allowed modern day artists in the country to
carve exquisite mythological sculptures, recognized as among the most
sophisticated in the world.
No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything
witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes;
but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their
flight.
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