Cecil John Rhodes’s bones are in danger of being tossed in the Zambezi, writes Mercedes Sayagues
Few places are as charged with spiritual energy as the Matopos hills in Zimbabwe. Granite boulders twist into contorted sculpture, thorny vegetation is splashed with flowers and 20 000-year-old San paintings adorn caves. This is the place to touch base with the ancestors, forces of nature, God, or whatever you wish to worship.
From time immemorial, spirit mediums have conducted war-making and rain-making ceremonies in its caves. During Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s, commanders sought ancestors’ blessings in Matopos. Today’s cultural guerrillas still do.
Here in south-western Zimbabwe are secret burial sites of kings and spirit mediums; a national park with endangered white rhino; a posh lodge on a kopjie with breathtaking views; and the tomb of Cecil John Rhodes.
For his grave, Rhodes chose the top of a central granite outcrop, known as Marinda-Dzimu Matosi-po, or World’s View Matopos. Here he was buried in 1902.
Just 15km away is the obscure grave of the Ndebele king Mzilikazi, father of King Lobengula – whom Rhodes and his cronies cheated in 1889 into signing away his powers over the Ndebele kingdom. The rest is well-known history: Rhodesia followed, then Zimbabwe.
Today, nearly 100 years after Rhodes’s death, a proposal to remove foreigners’ graves from Marinda- Dzimu is stirring deep emotions in Zimbabwe. Behind the campaign is Sangano Munhumatapa, a strident pressure group.
“Rhodes’s choice was an act of cultural aggression to a holy place and to African religion,” explains Lawrence “Warlord” Chakaredza, the group’s president. “We seek the restoration of revered African sites, starting with the Matopos Mwari shrine.”
He was a bit blunter when he first went to the local press, threatening to throw Rhodes’s bones in the Zambezi if the British didn’t want them.
“If not harnessed, Rhodes’s spirit will haunt and harm the British …,” warns Sangano’s resident spirit medium, Mathisa.
He says Sangano wrote to the British high commissioner in Harare, recommending the commissioner’s involvement in disposing of both bones and spirit. The only reply was that Sangano’s request had been “channelled appropriately”.
Chakaredza (29), a former social sciences student leader expelled from the University of Zimbabwe in 1994 for fomenting student unrest, has metamorphosed into Chief Mhunumatapa III – “a spiritual leader for all Zimbabweans, not a colonial chief with limited geographical jurisdiction”, he explains.
Sangano is a cultural group with a business side, Munhumatapa Empire Ltd. It cuddles up to crusaders for indigenous empowerment, like flamboyant businessman Philip Chiyangwa. The organisation sometimes toes the ruling party line, sometimes operates “like a misguided missile”, says a political columnist.
A skilled media manipulator, with a flair for catchy phrases and wild ideas, Chakaredza gets himself and Sangano in the news frequently.
It may not be what Sangano had in mind, but its proposal has sent tremors along Zimbabwe’s ethnic faultline between the Shona – 75% of the population – and Ndebele, 20%.
In Bulawayo’s business district, many said something along this line: “Why don’t the Shona go un-bury the dead in their provinces? Rhodes is our guest, and we choose who is buried in our land.”
Matopos is in Matabeleland South – the Cinderella among Zimbabwe’s eight provinces. In the ethnic hierarchy, the Ndebele, along with the Tonga of Lake Kariba, are the last to get to the cookie jar. That investment on development has bypassed this part of the country is obvious in its inferior infrastructure, bad roads, bad sanitation, bad everything. But the people who live here have a rich culture, a proud sense of being different – and discriminated against.
The wounds of dissident massacres in the 1980s, when the government sent the Fifth Brigade to torture and kill across Matabeleland, are still fresh. So is President Robert Mugabe’s recent refusal to acknowledge the massacre of at least 10 000 people. Understandably, Ndebele people bristle at the idea of interference from the capital on their sacred place.
“People in Harare are jealous that the Matopos shrine is in Bulawayo,” says taxi driver Prosper Masvosva.
Many in Bulawayo point out that colonial rule is part of Zimbabwe’s identity and Rhodes is part of the cultural landscape.
“History cannot be swept under the carpet, like the massacres in Matabeleland,” says Thulani Timile (25). “Let us accept the misdeeds of the past, learn from them, and build a better future.”
Timile, a Bulawayo clerk, last week popped into The Chronicle, Bulawayo’s daily newspaper, to challenge Chakaredza to a televised debate. “It is not good to let rubbish like this pass because it tends to build up,” he says.
Governor Stephen Nkomo, who in his maiden speech at Parliament 17 years ago first proposed to remove Rhodes from Matopos, spoke against it. “We fought against Rhodes’s evil deeds. We are still demanding our land from the whites. But we will not tolerate people from Harare to disturb our peace,” he was quoted in the press as saying.
Villagers around Matopos were more concerned about losing their livelihoods selling curios to tourists than about the disposition of Rhodes’s bones. Some welcomed the removal of the bones if it meant the national park would cease to exist and they could move in to plant crops and graze their cattle, as they did before it was created.
Among the few approving the proposal was the Vugani Matabezulu cultural society through its chair, traditional healer George Moyo.
But not all healers agree. Moyo’s cousin, Barbara Sibanda, daughter of Lizzie Sikosana, a famous spirit medium, and herself a traditional healer, calls the idea nonsense.
At Makokoba M’kambo market, some n’angas (healers) worry about Rhodes’s evil spirit roaming loose. Sangano’s Mathosi appeases their worries: “We have ways of directing the energy of spirits.”
Some suggest the energy of the living be directed elsewhere.
“The issue is not the bones of Rhodes but our values. Why are we still putting so much value on his grave but not on Lobengula’s or Mzilikazi’s or the many spirit mediums buried in the sacred hills of Matopos?” asks Cont Mhlanga, Bulawayo’s cultural promoter and popular public figure.
“So far, it has been a shallow debate but it is important to discuss these issues,” says Mhlanga. “The only way to bring our politicians down from the clouds where they engage in club politics, like sending soldiers to Congo, is by saying radical things or having radical gestures, like land invasions.”
He points out that Rhodesians built a road to the grave, maintained it and turned it into a tourist landmark. “The whites enhanced history. If the bones were thrown into the Zambezi, that spot would become a monument.”
In many ways, Bulawayo lives off its past, from the 500-year-old impressive stone ruins at Khame to the old steam engines and Rhodes’s personal Pullman coach at the Railway Museum.
But it is largely because economic development has largely bypassed Matabeleland since independence that colonial buildings have not been torn down to build modern offices.
The director of National Museums and Monuments, Dawson Munjeri, warned that any person tampering with Rhodes’s grave would be arrested for vandalism.
How Sangano will carry out its threat to throw Rhodes’s bones into the Zambezi is not clear. Chakaredza said Sagano members will not act in their human form, but the removal of the graves will happen, “even if we have to dynamite the place”.
This weekend, Mhlanga will discuss the issue with local chiefs, spirit mediums, elders and hundreds of ordinary people invited once a month to his Amakhosi Township Square complex in Bulawayo.
“Our weakness is that we don’t value what is African in Matopos,” says Mhlanga. “We should tell the world how to relate to our culture but we lack role models who can take what is valuable in tradition and integrate it in modern ways.”