TOURIST IN AFRICA

(5) The Rhodesias

Saturday night in Ndola—Salisbury— Utntali- Zimbabwe.

p.

THE civilised route to Southern Rhodesia is from Beira in Portuguese East Africa. That is the way Cecil Rhodes came when he visited and scolded the disgruntled body of pioneers who had toiled up from the south. He coveted Beira, which he saw as the natural opening to the new territories, and tried to piCk a ,quarrel with the Portuguese. Lord Salisbury refused to go to war on his behalf. Beira remains Portuguese and air- conditioned sleepers now carry the wise travel- lers out of the hot coast to the frontier near Unnali. But, alas, I have never travelled on this route. I have come by train from Elizabelhville and by air from London. Now I was committed to a very uncomfortable little vehicle. Had I wished, I could have gone straight through to Salisbury, but this would have caused me to arrive at a later hour than was convenient for toY hosts, who live some forty miles out. Accordingly 1 arranged to spend the night at Ndola, in Northern Rhodesia, near the Belgian frontier. As soon as it was impossible to write legibly we were presented with the usual sheaf of official forms to fill. Could they not have been Provided during our hour-long vigil in the but which at least provided chairs and a table? I say 'the usual official forms,' but one was unique in my experience. In order to spend one night in transit at Ndola I was required, among other things, to inform the Federal authorities of the names, ages, sexes, dates and places of birth of children not accompanying me (six in mY ., case, whose birthdays I can never remember; they remind me in good time) and date and place of marriage. What European languages could I write? The oddest demand was to State 'sex of Wife.' No question was asked about 'sex of hus- band.' A note explained : 'All information asked- for is necessary either to comply with the law or for statistical purpole.' An argumentative man might, I suppose, have refused information which did not comply with the law. I filled it all in obediently in a hand- writing, shaken by the machine, which must, I fear, be causing overwork to the statisticians at Ndola. 'That fellow who stayed here on March 14— what do you make the name of the eldest son who didn't accompany him — Might be Audubon?' 'Or Anderson.' 40,1- 'Pass it to the Department of Epigraphy at Lusaka.'

'Or Salisbury.'

'They will pass it on to Salisbury.' At least we've got his birthday.' `Yes, that's the great thing.' But the Immigration Office have no business to let him through leaving an ambiguity of this kind.' Not enough men for the job.' 'We ought to increase the establishment.'

'We will.'

Looking at the form again (I kept a copy as a souvenir) I see I was too conscientious. Visitors for periods of less than sixty days need not answer Questions 13 to 18. So I need not have affirmed pretensions to write English. Rhodesians have good reason to be suspicious of English journalists, but it is, surely, naïve to suppose that it takes sixty days to compose an article traducing them. Nor need I have stated that I was free from infectious or communicable diseases. That seems odder still, for it is one of the few sane questions. No country welcomes the plague-stricken. In fifty-nine days an active carrier should be able to broadcast his diseases liberally.

Here fully displayed are the arts of modern government for which, it is popularly believed, the native races are not yet far enough advanced. For the last hour of the flight there was no cloud and we could see a huge expanse of apparently quite empty country; lake, swamp, bush, no sign of a road or village. The apparent emptiness of Africa seems to belie the popular claims to land-hunger, but no doubt there are good reasons for it which the tourist does not understand.

The sun set and we came in by darkness.

The agent of the statisticians was civil enough. A room had been booked for me in the town. There was a bus to take me there. 1 was the only transit-passenger. Ndola is south-east of Mbeya, on the railway line which joins the Congo to Cape Town. I passed through it many years ago in a train. We arrived at 7.15 by my watch; 6.15 by local time. The town has grown beyond recognition and is growing fast. spreading itself in the man- ner of modern Africa, where land is cheap and everybody worth the planners' consideration has a motor-car, along broad boulevards in a litter of concrete. The hotel alone, one storeyed, stucco- faced, soon no doubt to be demolished and re- built, is a relic of pioneer days. The builders had plainly some faint memories of the column and architrave. Everything else in sight was 'con- temporary.' It was a hot airless evening heavy with the fumes of metallurgy. The real copper belt where white artisans, it is said, live the life of an American country club and honoured guests are luxuriously feasted, lies at some distance. Ndola, like every part of the continent, is in transition. It is already purely a white man's town. On this Saturday evening there were fewer Africans in the streets than would be seen in London. Most of the white men seemed to be drunk. I left my bags in a sad little, stuffy bedroom, lit by a single faintly glowing bulb, and I wandered out. Attracted by a neon sign which read: 'TAVERN, OLD ENGLISH ATMOSPHERE,' I descended concrete steps to a basement bar, softly lit and pervaded by 'background music.' The barman was white and wore his hair in the Teddy-boy style. A white lady, whom I took to be a tart, sat before him. She had an odd look of Mrs. Stitch. Four or five youngish Rho- desians were drinking with her. The old English atmosphere was provided by ,chairs and tables made to look rather like beer barrels. The bar of the hotel, to which I adjourned, was more congenial. I had no appetite, for dinner and asked for some sandwiches. When they were brought, a frightfully drunk man came and devoured most of them. He was, he told me, a philosopher who had lost his soul. `He's a nice enough fellow,' said the barman, 'except on Saturday nights.' While he ate my sandwiches he uttered a great deal of vaguely familiar English verse. I think he was just stringing together as many odd lines of Shakespeare and Macaulay and Wordsworth and Kipling as had remained in his mind from some not very remote period of schooling; improvising a little, in part poetic, part Biblical style, on the subject of his own evident unpopu- larity.

A much less drunk man came to protect me. 'You mustn't, mind him. He's a bloody nuisance.' This new friend was stout and affable. I should have taken him for a military man had he not

assured me he had served in the Navy and the Air Force. He later confirmed my first specula- tion by claiming to have been in the Black Watch. He also said he was Irish.

The philosopher then said: 'Don't believe him, he's not Scotch. He only says he is because he went to Fettes.'

Suddenly, apropos of nothing, the barman said: 'D'you happen' to know Ed Stanley of Alderley?' By what mannerism or turn of phrase had I betrayed this arcane knowledge? Perhaps it was the barman's habitual gambit to all visiting Englishmen.

'Sheffield to me,' I replied.

'I am a great friend of his lordship,' said the barman. He then recited the names of some dozen noblemen of his acquaintance. I could join him in one or two cases. This did not endear me to the philosopher, who had formed a low view of aristocracy without, he was at pains to assure me, indulging any respect for democracy.

My stout champion said wistfully: 'I left all that sort of thing behind when I came out here.'

The barman, however, was so pleased that he fetched the manageress to see me.

'A friend of Lord Stanley of Alderley's.'

`Sheffield's. You know him? He has been here?'

'No, I am afraid I've never heard of him. I hope you'll be comfortable here. What room have they given you?' I told her. 'Oh, dear, that won't do, will it? I'll have your things moved.' So when, very early, I escaped from my com- panions, I found myself quartered in a fine suite —sitting-room, bedroom, bright lights, flowing water—where I lay very contented while the sounds of a Ndola Saturday night waxed and raged about me until, before dawn, I slipped out to the aerodrome bus in the now silent street.

March 15. The aeroplane from Ndola was rather more comfortable than the machine that brought me from Mbeya and the portholes afforded glimpses of a less desolate terrain than the swamps of Northern Rhodesia. About half- way through the flight we crossed the border of Southern Rhodesia. As we approached Salisbury we might have been over Surrey. Distance gives a trimness, which I knew from previous experi- ence is largely illusory, to the great commercial suburb which has flooded over Matabeleland and Mashonaland.

The friends I was coming to visit are named John and Daphne. Neither was at the aerodrome to meet me nor at the office in the city. A tele- phone call, made through an instrument of novel design, which concealed its dial under its base, disclosed that I was not expected until next week. But with imperturbable good will Daphne said she would come for me at once.

I had an hour to wait.

Salisbury is changing dizzily. The air-line headquarters where I stood was brand-new since last year. Next to it Males Hotel, which on my last visit had some architectural affinities with the hotel at Ndola, had sprung up into a slightly smaller version of the Rockefeller Centre in New York. Behind it a tower, slightly lower than the Empire State Building, crowned by a sphere (luminous and opalescent in the hours of darkness) has arisen to accommodate an insur- ance company. On this Sunday morning the broad streets were empty. The trees were just shedding their flowers. The air was fresh, the sun brilliant and pleasantly warm. At length Daphne arrived and bore me off to Mazoe near which she and her huge family have been settled for ten years.

John's fortunes are typical of the new Rhodesia. He returned to England from the Army in 1945 eager to work and develop. his ancestral estates, found himself frustrated by official regulations, impetuously bought an agri- cultural property, unseen, forty miles out of Salisbury, and removed there with his wife, chil- dren and family portraits and much of his live- stock. The estate is very large by English stan- dards, but of moderate, viable size for Africa. There was no Labour Government there to vex him, no elaborate regulations or oppressive taxa- tion; but Africa imposes its own discourage- ments. The farm does not pay its way. He is now a prosperous businessman driving daily to an office in the city as though to London from Sunningdale, preserving a strong link with his former way of life through his racing stable. He is a director of a bank and several commercial enterprises. His main activity is to manufacture paper bags out of imported materials. His sons go to school in Salisbury and speak in a different accent from their parents, the girls to convents in Umtali and South Africa. They go for seaside holidays to Durban. None of them have any sentimental yearnings for their homeland.

The house is a long bungalow stretching across the hillside, roofed with iron, walled with con- crete, making no claim to architectural character. A short distance away is the 'native compound,' the village of round huts from which sounds of revelry can often be heard long into the night. All John's labour, house boys and farm boys alike, come from Nyasaland. He has built them a school and employs an African teacher and an English chaplain. Many have become Christians. The house is always thronged but never, apparently, full. My hostess serenely welcomes all corners, friends from England, neighbours, business associates of her husband, relations; but children predominate. Th'e veranda, here called a `stoep,' is their playground. African nurses are not employed much in Rhoddia. There is no nursery. There is a schoolroom imposingly fur- nished with desks, blackboard and terrestial globe, but it never contains its children for more than a few minutes at a time. Tricycle-riding round the stoep is the favourite pastime.

It is not a restful house by any ordinary stan- dard, but Daphne's personality mysteriously imposes a kind of overriding peace above the turmoil.

March 16. Though I have taken advantage of every comfort Africa affords, 1 am travel-worn. I have covered a lot of ground one way and an- other and am glad of a day's inactivity—it can- not be called repose. The teeming life of the house, as in a back street of Naples, rages round me from dawn to dusk, but I remain in my chair, subject to interrogation and the performances of conjuring, dancing and exhibitions of strength, but for one day at least immovable.

March 17. We set out in a party of four— Daphne, her chaplain and a kind young manu- facturer of paper bags--to drive to the Eastern Highlands.

Some 160 miles of railway and good road lead from Salisbury to Umtali. This, as I have noted. is the route by which the wise traveller enters the country. The Eastern Highlands march with the Portuguese frontier. They comprise some of the finest natural scenery in Africa, wooded mountains, waterfalls, keen air, an area of special fascination to the ornithologist and entomologist: to the archaeologist also, for here are the finely built stone terraces and unexplained dens of Inyanga. An undated civilisation once flourished here and today there are for the tourist, to my knowledge, two admirable hotels and, by repute, more.

One, where we lunched—by far the best hotel meal since Malindi—is in the main street of Umtali, the capital and centre of this happy land, a spacious garden-city round which many rich immigrants have built themselves villas and laid out gardens.

The object of our visit was to sec Daphne's daughter, Jill, who is at school in a brand-new convent which American nuns, who profess a devotion (unfamiliar to me) to 'the Sacred Heart of Mary,' have built in the outskirts of the town —a sumptuous place with a bathroom to every two girls. It was a little depressing to find Ameri- .• can pseudo-anatomical charts illustrating the ill effects of wine on the human body; also to find textbooks of local history composed for use in the Union of South Africa. A more modern note was struck by the appearance of Charm' in the time-table of the curriculum. This, on investigation, proved to be the new name for Deportment. And very engaging the, deportment of the girls was as they skidded past us in the corridors with little genuflections.

We drove on higher into the mountains, past a riding-school and the gates of many handsome Properties, through a landscape of stupendous beauty to another excellent hotel named Leopard Rock.

I have said that the Eastern Highlands are the Proper approach to Rhodesia. In fact the holiday- maker need go no farther. A booklet issued by the office of tourist development sets out the attractions of the district with a moderation Which contrasts pleasantly with the language usually employed in such publications. It is admitted that there is neither snow nor sea, but there is everything else in Umtali golf, bowls, lawn tennis, riding, a camping site (with bath- rooms), a theatre, cinemas. a Rotary Club, a Round Table, Lodges of English and Scottish Freemasons, and a Catholic Bishop; at Inyanga Cecil Rhodes's estate is now a National Park, with a trout-hatchery, a lake for bathing (no bilharzia in the mountain waters) and boating, a camp of log cabins in the Tyrolean style; in the Vumba hills there are pretty Samango monkeys; everywhere there are waterfalls—ferns and great trees_ _well, there is no need to transcribe the Whole official encomium; enough to say that it is true. Charabancs have not yet appeared to despoil the place. It is what the natural beauty &Pots of Europe must have been sixty years ago.

1 should have liked to linger and go farther. I hope to return. Perhaps the development of this district may provide the elderly and well-to-do with a more dignified resort than the beaches where they now exhibit themselves. The craze for sunburn has lasted long enough. On the Riviera the survivors and imitators otehe ele- gant young neurotics of Scott Fitzgerald's Tender '. the Night have grown into those greasy hulks of flesh which are now being hemmed in and Invaded by the proletariat. If fashion is to be true to its metier it must seek seclusion. Where better than here?

March 18. A long day's drive; back to Umtali first, then seventy-six miles due south through the hills, dropping at midday into the hot valley of the Sabi, turning west over Birchenough Bridge for some 100 miles of bush and grass country to Zimbabwe which we reached just before sunset.

I had been here before from Fort Victoria and had fairly thoroughly surveyed these famous ruins—the most remarkable in Africa south of Egypt. Daphne and the others were on their first visit. There was not time that evening to do more than appreciate the general aspect. The rest of the party returned at dawn next day.

There was once a great stone city here of which two main groups of building survive in impressive form. Their aspect has been too often photographed and described to need a detailed account here. Their origin remains a mystery and the ground of acrimonious dispute. They are unique in their size and state of preservation, but there are other 'Zimbabwes'—a word indif- ferently translated as a 'court' or 'a stone build- ing.' This is correctly called the Great Zimbabwe.

When the first white man came here in 1868 the elliptical enclosure popularly known as the Temple was deserted and densely overgrown. The hilltop called the Acropolis was used by a neighbouring tribe as a cattle kraal and remained in their use for nearly thirty years longer. In the early days of the Charter Company a concession was given to an 'Ancient Ruins Company' formed with a capital of £25,000 to prospect for gold in all the archaeological sites between the Limpopo and the Zambesi. It lasted until 1903. No record survives of its depredations. Doubtless numerous artifacts were unearthed and melted down. The damage done by the excavations is now deeply deplored and recent administrations have been at pains to mitigate it.

At Great Zimbabwe the bush has been cleared. It is admirably kept (part of it, indeed, laid out as a golf links); fallen stones have been replaced, paths and, where necessary, steps laid down. The aspect is of Devon parkland, strewn everywhere with natural boulders, outcrops of rock and lines of masonry.

The Acropolis is a steep little hill some 350 feet high, approached originally only through two narrow clefts in the granite. The custodians have laid out a gentler path, interspersed with seats, for the benefit of elderly visitors. The sum- mit is a mass of fortifications and partitions built among the natural boulders and rock face. It was once, presumably, a place of refuge; also of industry. Gold was smelted here although no gold diggings have been found near it. Many objects of archeological value were probably found here by the white pioneers, most of which were destroyed. Of what remains some are in the museum at Bulawayo but much was taken to Cape Town in the days when it seemed likely that that city would be the capital of a great British com.nonwealth country.

The Temp* stands more than a quarter of a mile distant. It is a great oval of massive and highly skilfully laid drystone wall surmounted for 265 feet pf its length with an ornamental coping of a double strip of chevron pattern. The entrances have been rebuilt, not as they were. Now they are gaps open to the top with rounded sides suggesting Cotswold buttresses. Originally there were doorways each with a beam, and above the beam continuous wall. The outer wall is 116 feet thick 'at the bottom. The guide-book does not specify its height; more than twenty feet I should guess. The effect must have been for- bidding. As it stands many who are susceptible —Daphne among them—to such impressions find the place eerie. It is certainly enigmatic. For a large part of the circumference there is an inner wall as high as the outer, leaving between them a narrow sunless lane which leads to a solid conical tower which, of course, has been dubbed 'phallic.' 1 am sceptical of these modish attributions. Are the objects displayed on some of the new electric railway stations of outer London 'phallic'? Do they attract a cult? The only explicitly phallic symbol of recent construction which I know, is Wiegland's obelisk in the suburbs of Oslo. There is no mistaking the inspiration of that erection. But it lacks worshippers Inside the walls the ground shows signs of division; what was roofed, what was open, what was a ceremonial court, what a cattle byre, are all conjectural. The appellation 'temple' and the deep shadows have stirred the imagination to thoughts of bloody and obscene ritual, but in fact there is no reason for supposing that this was ever a place of worship. I defy the most ingenious film director to reconstruct it, and people it at all plausibly with priests and priestesses. A visitor from Mars to the Catholic Cathedral in Salis- bury, Rhodesia, would recognise that he was in a building made by the same kind of people (living in a debased age) and for the same pur- pose as in Salisbury. England. But 'the Temple' at Zimbabwe leaves the visitor from Europe without any comparison. It is an example of what so often moved G. K. Chesterton to revul- sion. It is the Wrong Shape. Something utterly alien.

Nor do there seem to be any native traditions of sanctity. The latest excavators think it was built fairly recently by Bantus.

There is a choice of hotels within easy reach of the ruins. We chose badly. I noted in my diary: 'kept by fiend,' which meant that we were back in the grip of one of those affable British manageresses of whom I have already warned the reader. l will not, from respect for the law of libel, identify the place, nor, from respect for my readers' patience. expatiate on our sufferings.

1Thr:.:1 19. We escaped early and joined the road that runs from Beit Bridge through Fort Victoria to Salisbury.

Serima Mission lies off the main road in the native reserve behind a large European estate named Chatsworth. Here again it was my com- panions' first visit. I had been there a year ago and was eager to show them what seemed to me one of the most remarkable enterprises in tile country; also to see what progress had been made in the year and to meet the architect, Fr. Groeber, who had been away when I was last there. Serima does not advertise itself or welcome idle sight- seers. It exists for its own people. None of its products are sent out for sale or for exhibition. As far as I know no photographs have ever been published. There are no signposts to direct the traveller along the sandy tracks which run through the flat, sparsely grown country.

It is in the diocese of Gwelo, entrusted to the Swiss Bethlehem Fathers. In 1948 Fr. Groeber was sent by his bishop to found and design the Mission. The available funds were, and are, piti- fully inadequate. Everything was lacking except space and zeal. The staff at present consists of one other priest, a lay brother skilled in building, and six Mary Ward nuns. They have .a school of 170 Mashona boarders and, nearing completion, the large and remarkable church which we had come to see.

It is this that one first notices as one emerges from the bush, and at first sight it affords no pleasure to an eye such as mine which is dull to contemporary taste. Geometrical, economical, constructed of concrete and corrugated iron, it rises from the centre of its bleak site like the hangar of a deserted airfield.

Seen on the drawing-board Serima is a logical and symmetrical plan. Axial roads converge on the church from the surrounding blocks of dor- mitories, schoolrooms, workshops, refectory, ,and dispensary. But at present these roads are scarcely visible tracks and bare feet have traced other straggling paths across the campus. The 'blocks' are at -present represented by low sheds. One day it will be laid out and the intervening areas planted and the architect's conception will be manifested to the layman. At present one needs a keen imagination to appreciate the plan.

Fr. Groeber works and sleeps in a single cell opening on the little entrance hall of the main building. His bookshelves are filled with books of ascetic theology and modern art in English, German and French. He is an elderly, serene man. When I said I might be writing something about the place, his welcome became slightly clouded, but he did not forbid me to do so and as he began showing me how he worked, he brightened. In youth he studied architecture in ,Switzerland and on the day after taking his degree went straight to the seminary, volunteered for the African mission and thought it unlikely he would ever be called to exercise his art. In tht last twenty years he has built not only for his own order but for the Jesuits, whose seminary for native priests near Salisbury is from his designs. But Serima is his particular creation. It is here that he has founded the little school of art which is one of the most exhilarating places in Africa.

-During the last weeks I had taken every chance a searching bazaars and pedlars' wares for examples of African sculpture. The best, as I have said, were at Kilwa and the work of tribes in Portuguese territory, but they, though skilfully cut, were hopelessly lacking in vision and inven- tion. The same archetypes of animal and human form were repeated again and again. I have seen photographs of figures by natives of the Congo and Uganda which might get exhibited in Lon- don and Paris; individual enough but plainly the work of men who had been shown European sculpture. The savage African art of the eigh- teenth and early nineteenth centuries, which de- lighted the European and American connoisseurs of the Twenties, seems as dead as the civilised art of Europe.

There is a mission at Cyrene with wall paint- ings by native artists which I have not visited. From photographs it seems that they were shown conventional European pictures and encouraged to translate them into local idiom, rather as the Mexican Indians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were set to work on models of the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque—with agree- ably picturesque results, certainly, but without planting a living art, capable of free growth. And the Mexican Indians had a long tradition of many ingenious crafts. The Mashona, among whom Fr. Groeber works, have never had an artist, nor any craft except the weaving by the women of grass mats in very simple patterns. Fr. Groeber has been at pains to keep all Euro- pean models away from his pupils. He has none of the illusions of the recent past, that every man is a natural artist, but in the boys passing through his hands he has found a few—as many perhaps as would be found passing through an English public school—who have the genuine esthetic impulse. At present he has two master-carvers in their mid-twenties and a dozen apprentices in their teens. The sort of carving they produce is symbolic and didactic, like that of the European Middle Ages; entirely novel and entirely African.

Every boy on arrival from his village is told to draw an account of his jqurney. Many are capable of nothing; some produce pictures not much different from the nursery scrawlings of European children some years their juniors. Those with discernible talent are then taught to control the pencil, the chalk, the pen, the brush; they make abstract symmetrical patterns, they draw 'match-stick' hieroglyphics of figures in- action. Perhaps all this is a commonplace of 'progressive' education. I don't know. It was quite new to me. Nothing of the kind happened in the drawing classes of my own youth, which began with copying lithographs of rural scenery and advanced to 'freehand' renderings of still life.• Clay modelling is the next stage. The boy's first task is always to make a mask which will 'frighten his little brother.' It is explained to him that it is far easier to make ugly things than beautiful; that, implicitly, the paintings of Mr. Francis Bacon are a rudimentary accomplish- ment which the Mashona boy must outgrow. The highest achievement is to make something lov- able, an image of angel or saint, of Our Lady or Our Lord, before which it is easy to pray. Before this stage is approached the use of the chisel is taught and the composition of ornaments that express a moral lesson or a theological tenet. Art is the catechism and prayer in visible form. There is no suggestion of self-expression or of aesthetic emotion; nor of acquiring a marketable skill or titillating national pride at doing as well as the white man.

What will happen when Fr. Groeber is no longer there to direct them? They are very much younger than he. Their technical skill will remain ripe for well-intentioned exploitation by collec- tors and museums. How long can their vision remain uncontaminated by Europe and America? Those eager apprentices I saw today will find that there are larger rewards awaiting them for inferior work. With very little labour they can imitate 'expressionist' of 'abstract' models. Some- thing of the kind, I gather, is happening in parts of the Belgian Congo. In less than a full lifetime one has seen so many promising enterprises come to nothing—for example Walt Disney's cartoon films. It would be absurd presumption to sug- gest that a tradition has been founded at Serima. But to say that is not to belittle the present achievement. It is the fault of the modern eye to be forever goggling ahead, of the modern mind to concern itself only with 'influences' and 'movements,' instead of accepting with gratitude the tangible gifts of the past and present. The artist has no concern with the future. Fr. Groeber's achievement has been to' make Africans do what none but Africans could have done and what no Africans in this huge region• ever did before; to leave a church where they and their descendants can worship, which their descendents will cherish with the pride and awe with which we in Europe survey the edifices of our Middle Ages.

The smiling nuns pressed us to stay for lun- cheon, but my party had business in Salisbury. Soon we were back on the straight, empty main road. We paused briefly at the restaurant of a little mining town, then on again over the plain, and reached the farm where I was staying before dark.