14
Pots, tunnels, and mountains
Myth, memory, and landscape at Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe
Introduction
Archaeology interprets the past through materials, but people use all their senses to understand the pasts and the environments. Narratives are one way they try to understand the layers of their landscapes. They are memory tools that communities use to understand their environment and shape their present and futures. Recovering these memories in narratives and utilising them to enhance archaeological interpretations of place has, however, been difficult in archaeology and its related disciplines. However, listening to community narratives and analysing them through narrative inquiry has many benefits for the discipline. Narrative inquiry creates collaboration between the researcher and the people that he or she is researching. It thus makes people, and not artefact, central to archaeological inquiry (Clandinin & Rosiek 2007). Memory, restructured as myth, contains insights into how people think about their environments. This information can be used to define research agendas beyond the limits of archaeological boundaries and also force archaeologists to think of every place as a part of a wider landscape and not just a ‘site.’
Narratives are also used to question the dominant ideologies which seem to focus on materiality in telling national stories at the expense of local narratives. This chapter examines the cultural landscape around Great Zimbabwe using community narrative to understand perceptions of heritage and landscape among the communities that created it. I argue that myths are metaphors of a cultural thought system that translates the intangible to the cultural and environmental present. Using Great Zimbabwe, I ask pertinent questions about how the focus on monumentality abbreviated traditional cultural landscapes and how these can be reconstituted through understanding landscape narratives in the form of legends.
In Africa, allowing people to tell their stories is also allowing multiple interpretations and recognising the various social layers that a place has. Memory has always been a way of representing the past as evidenced by griots and family keepers of history found in African communities. When used in heritage management, these narratives correct the epistemological injustices of archaeology, which was developed outside Africa, practiced for much of the colonial period by non-Africans, and is still practised with theories created outside Africa. The purpose of narrative inquiry is not to prove the efficacy of the stories, but to find their performative contexts and also read differently so that they feed into archaeological inquiry as well as heritage management. It is these contexts that can provide information on people’s struggles to understand and appreciate the environment in which they find themselves in. Stories are built around and people and places and can be used to map cultural landscapes that have gone through political raptures. There is a collective social process in telling the story and as a collective process the story captures intimate connections between the community and their landscape.
Cultural landscapes are not only a result of ingraining of culture on a landscape but also mark the development of an environmental literacy in a new environment (Basso 1996). The layers of environmental information collected, and the struggles to establish a society on that landscape, creates the invisible sacred bond between land and people. The stories of attaining environmental literacy and of the struggle to understand the landscape sometimes come down as myths and legends. By their nature, sacred landscapes cannot have boundaries. Narratives are therefore part of the memory of that struggle to understand a new environment and can give us an understanding of the old landscapes before a rapture caused by the colonial experience, traumatic events or natural disasters. A cultural landscape is therefore encoded with events, personalities, and institutions and passed on through myths, performance, and other forms of narratives.
A cultural landscape provides a ‘geopsyche’ in which people feel secure both physically and emotionally. The level of absorption, understanding, and memorialisation of the cultural landscape determines where ‘home’ and ‘house’ are located; home being a place with deeper personal and emotional connections and house being an emotionless space you occupy away from ‘home.’ Every person outside his or her familiar landscape does not feel secure enough and is also unable to read the cultural information within that landscape. The landscape is not simply a repository of human achievements as suggested by other definitions, but is also an actor in itself, influencing both the living and the dematerialised forces (Kohn 2013). It is thus not a passive commodity that can be conquered, used, and sold, but is an actor who can ‘avenge’ with brutal force a man’s transgressions (Basso 1996). Western philosophies find difficulties in dealing with these concepts because of the inability to understand cultural landscapes beyond the ‘use-value framework’ (McFarlane 2014) and to understand that value is not always measurable.
People understand the landscape first before embedding it into collective memory, through using it initially as a source of food and security, and later, in enhancing their identity. That landscape is named with what is experienced in each particular feature. The process of narrating and naming the landscape is the initial stage of understanding that landscape (Spirn 1998). Placemaking is not only cultural; it is also an environmental activity in which the elements of the surroundings are recorded as both resources and mapping tools. A combination of the inserted culture and environmental literacy in a place creates cultural and social identities. Social and cultural identities linked to landscapes are only expressed once environmental literacy has developed. This connection to the land, once established, creates an ontological security for people living in it. The rupture of this security can be devastating for societies, but it also creates a nostalgic need which can create new narratives on top of the older narratives. The colonial experience in Africa is an example of such ruptures.
Among the Shona of Zimbabwe, a place acquires a human personality and behaves according to how it is treated by people. An individual learns of his or her landscape from childhood starting with where your umbilical cord is buried. The soil that it is buried in is imprinted into your being and will control and draw you back even when you move away from this environment. When an individual is asked where they come from, the answer is usually where their umbilical cord was buried and not where they have a house. This burial is symbolic of the intermingling of the human with the soil from which he is literally ‘born’ (Chitakure 2016). In this way, the landscape has a permanence that people and animals do not have and, in a way, it owns all these and controls their fate and not the other way round. Indeed, isotope studies have shown that the environment that nurtures us has a permanent print of in our bones. This should make us understand that focusing on human exceptionalism within cultural landscapes will not make us understand the connection that people have on land and landscapes. (Kohn 2013: 89). It is the mechanistic rationalism that makes it difficult to understand the intangible within the tangible without having to separate the two. In reality, the intangible is the reason we understand the tangible. In heritage studies, however, the intangible element is a surrogate of monumentality. Understanding the ‘intangible’ as metaphors of a cultural landscape can equip archaeologists and heritage managers with landscape literacy to read landscapes in the same way as those that societies that have experiences in them perceive them.
The Great Zimbabwe landscape
Currently being managed by the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NNMZ), Great Zimbabwe (Figure 14.1) is listed as a ‘World Heritage Site’ not a cultural landscape. This categorisation of Great Zimbabwe as a ‘site’ has been problematic as narratives about the place show an intimate relationship between the wider landscape and the people who live in it. The word ‘site’ is used by archaeologists to show the presence of cultural heritage in a place. A cultural landscape, on the other hand, has no boundaries and considers both culture and nature as components of place. In a description given to UNESCO, Great Zimbabwe ‘existed between 1000 and 1450 AD’ (UNESCO, 2018). In other words, Great Zimbabwe has scientifically established boundaries both physically and chronologically. The major areas of interest include the Hill Complex, where stone walls easily blend into the boulders which are used as part of the architecture. The Hill Complex receives at least 70% of all visitors to Great Zimbabwe.
Umberto Eco (1998) argues that new worlds are not only discovered; they are read through ‘background books’ which determine how you see and interpret that new world. Archaeology, as a part of the colonial experience in Africa, is a part of those ‘background books’ that determine the perception of the new world. The colonial experience in Zimbabwe as a form of ‘discovery’ reflects these ‘background books’ in the way that Great Zimbabwe was researched, used, named, interpreted, and managed (Figure 14.2). The superimposition of the European experience at Great Zimbabwe and the surrounding landscape was not only a deconstruction of the native cultural landscape but a production of new stories used in claiming the new space understood through cultures of the ‘old world.’ The processes that the Great Zimbabwe has gone through, from a sacred landscape to a global heritage ‘site,’ reflect the use of these ‘background books.’ It was appropriated, mapped, renamed, and its uses changed. What the communities called Dzimbabwe, the hilltop royal residence, became the ‘Acropolis,’ the ancient citadel of Athens.
The new names become woven into new stories of colonial adventure, gallantry, and discovery and erased the previous narratives about the landscape. This, however, is the nature of landscapes – they are etched into the mind and are transferable to new territories. As ‘existential spaces,’ they ‘are difficult to experience if you are not a part of that culture’ (Dodge 2007: 8) and hence one has to find new ways to understand new landscapes. The colonial state inscribed new names to places, not only for appropriation purposes, but to also insert new meanings on these landscapes and create a new sense of belonging. Indeed, a part of Nyuni Mountain, north east of Great Zimbabwe, was renamed Glen Livet because it was a ‘duplicate of the River Spey, caressing Glen Livet Mountain in my own county of Banffshire … Scotland’ (Sayce 1978: 112).
Source: National Archives of Zimbabwe.
The landscape was developed for the enjoyment of the European settler population. The first hotel was constructed in 1898 followed by a golf course, which cleared much of the vegetation and created the open areas from the hotel to the Great Enclosure. Vegetation was also thinned within the stone-built area and, in some cases, it was replaced with exotic trees (jacaranda, eucalyptus) imported from elsewhere. A eucalyptus plantation was also planted in an area southwest of the Great Enclosure just above a sacred spring. It is this eucalyptus plantation that affected the water table, resulting in the drying up of the sacred Chisikana spring mentioned later. A camp for prisoners was also constructed south of the Great Enclosure to help with conservation work in the times when the Historical Monuments Commission did not have enough manpower to run to the site (Ndoro 2011: 61). Accompanying all these changes were the new narratives about the landscape. New stories of Great Zimbabwe being a city built by King Solomon or Queen of Sheba emerged in contrast to the local narratives told by communities. The original ‘myths,’ however, have been resilient and have continued to be narrated by elders within the Mugabe and Nemamwa communities living near Great Zimbabwe.
In current politics, Great Zimbabwe is the primordial source of modern Zimbabwe and part of the narrative of nation. It directly connects the modern state to the ancient polity and nullifies the existence of colonial Rhodesia (Fisher 2010). As a World Heritage Site, the site is also a preferred tourist destination for many foreign visitors to Zimbabwe. Indeed, before the current political and economic problems, Great Zimbabwe attracted a modest 150,000 visitors annually. Its potential to attract foreign and domestic visitors makes it a valuable site for the government, which collects revenue from hotels and the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), which collects entrance fees. It is, of course, still a valued archaeological resource as many researchers have used it to launch their careers. As an archaeological site, Great Zimbabwe is regarded as an archaeological island surrounded by rural areas where archaeology is absent. Archaeological maps end at the boundary of the estate as if archaeology is determined by the estate boundary.
Community memory and the landscape at Great Zimbabwe
For local communities, however, ‘Dzimbabwe’ is not a bounded piece of land but a centre of a cosmological network that creates an ontologically secure environment for people, nature and the non-human elements. Though it has monumental stone walls, it is not only the monumental stone walls that are valued. It is the totality of the landscape including mountains, springs, streams, and rivers not within the demarcated estate. To locals ‘Dzimbabwe’ is only a centre of that wider cultural landscape and is not more special than the other sacred parts of this landscape. These sacred places are said to be connected with Great Zimbabwe through various ways. Each of them thus suffers when one of them is negatively impacted by, for instance, development. One community story narrates of two pots that ‘walked’ from Great Zimbabwe to mountains and springs that surround Great Zimbabwe (Interview: Participant 3 and 5: 2016). The pots (a female and a male) visited Chepfuko spring, Bingura Hill, the Mutirikwi River before proceeding to prominent mountains, like Boroma, Nyuni, Beza, Ruvhure, Nyanda, Chamazango, and Mupfurawasha, which surround the Great Zimbabwe. One of the stories about the vessels (Pfuko ya Kuvanji) was recorded quite early (1871) by a German explorer, Karl Mauch. When he climbed up the mountain, his porters refused to accompany him (Burke 1969: 139). Great Zimbabwe is also said to be connected to the nearby hills of Mupfurawasha, Ruvhure, Nyuni, and Beza through tunnels from the Hill Complex.
According to the narratives, Great Zimbabwe also has ‘entrances’ (interviewees called them ‘doors’) that can be opened and locked through performances of certain rituals. One of these ‘doors’ is to southeast of the Hill Complex (Mujejeje). Mujejeje is ‘a linear intrusive vein of quartz exposed on solid granite making a narrow bar ridge’ (Summers 1965), situated 400m in the eastern limits of the Valley Ruins (East Ruin). For those travelling into or through Great Zimbabwe, this threshold is not to be crossed without carrying out a ritual or the traveller would suffer some misfortune. Individuals reaching this point in the course of their travel to Great Zimbabwe have to pick up a pebble and tap it along the line, murmuring a prayer to the ancestral spirits of the area and God and ask to enter into sacred space, which still has an ancestral presence. Bent also records this narrative during his excavations in the early 1890s after he observed his porters performing this ritual when they entered Great Zimbabwe from the east (Bent 1893: 75).
Source: Photograph by A Sinamai.
There is also a scared spring, Chisikana, that developed where a young girl who was kidnapped by a mermaid emerged from it after a long absence. This story has two versions: interviewees from the Nemamwa clan say that the little child was sent to fetch water from the sacred spring where she was kidnapped by mermaids. She disappeared for a very long time, after which she emerged from the spring as a very powerful spirit medium and healer. Participants from the Mugabe clan also claim her as a member of their clan. Both clans, however, agree that the spring became perennial and a stream developed. Along this stream were sacred pools in which fish were caught at certain times of the year. It is also from this spring that water for all religious ceremonies was collected.
The difference between the stories that emerge about Great Zimbabwe from these two clans is not about who has the truth as Fontein (2015) seems to suggest, but it is about what is the most sacred feature at Great Zimbabwe. How the two groups connect to the sacred sites is not important. The Chisikana Spring master-story has its key elements: a proficient natural spring, a girl, a kidnapping, and the empowerment of the spring and the river and the ceremonies that were carried out there. What is important is not whether the girl came back or belonged to the Mugabe or Nemamwa clan, but the centrality of water resources for people who have lived in this environment. The stories are thus accumulated wisdom collected through centuries of interaction with the environment around Great Zimbabwe. Their knowledge of water sources and the climate that creates this environment, for example, is apparent in these stories. The stories identify the perennial springs and rivers within the basin that supplied water to Great Zimbabwe.
Great Zimbabwe lies in the middle veld altitude 1,150 to 1,250 metres above sea level. The geology around the Great Zimbabwe basin is dominated by granites to the south with the north dominated by metasediments and felsic metavolcanics with greenstone belts. These northern hills also contain a few gold-bearing veins, which were probably exploited during the occupation of Great Zimbabwe. The ancient city itself is on the southern edge dominated by granite which is useful in building the stone walls. The granites of the south were a valuable source of the building materials needed in the construction of the city. The northern ranges are much steeper and higher than the granites, rising above 1,544 metres in the case of Nyuni and, together with the granite hills to the south, they create a sheltered basin with its own micro-environment. Local people recognise that the area enclosed by these mountains has a micro-environment which is only maintained by respecting the presence of sacred places like Great Zimbabwe. Their interpretation of the basin is thus not based on the rivers as suggested by Pikirayi et al. (2016) but on the sheltering mountains that create this micro-environment. Their recent hydrological description of the Great Zimbabwe area gives a northwest-south direction of the basin and focus on the rivers, streams, and springs (Pikirayi et al. 2016). The local communities, however, have a different perception of the landscape focusing on an east-west basin sheltered by these mountains, recognising the role of the mountains in creating this unique climatic environment.
In the Chisikana legend, the young girl becomes a relative of a recent, known ancestor. The storylines are however hardly changed and are actually strictly maintained, and in some cases, the same words are used to tell the stories. One reference to a voice calling someone to bring a milking can (hwedza) was quoted verbatim and this may be emphasising the centrality of cattle in the Great Zimbabwe culture. Great Zimbabwe being the centre of the cultural landscape is linked to all narratives told about sacred places around it. This description of Great Zimbabwe is not packaged for tourists and many walk past or through the very sacred areas without any knowledge of their existence. These narratives are not material evidence and so they remain unrecognised as they are difficult to quantify. They are also not monumental and are therefore not of interest to the researchers and tourists who emphasise the visual experience over the abstract connections of heritage and the mind.
Re-mapping the cultural landscape
Narratives and material culture are both equally tools of memory. Where material culture depends on sight and touch, immaterial heritage depends on experiences of the mind. Sight does not record an experience; it is the mind that keeps records of what is seen. Space cannot be a cultural landscape unless there is an effort to record it and etch it into the mind of individuals and communities and claim it. The narratives are a way of recording and remembering, and naming is the claiming of space and can be used to identify the most important components of an existing or past landscape. The current Great Zimbabwe ‘site’ is a place conceived through western conservation philosophies of monumentality. Supported by the national legislation governing heritage, these concepts have restricted what can be used to define and interpret the cultural landscape. The narratives told by communities about Great Zimbabwe show that it is not a ‘site’ but a part of a much wider cultural landscape. The narratives emphasise ‘connection’ through tunnels, the vessels that ‘walked’ to certain places as well as the fires that burnt the mountains towards the rain season. This connection highlights what is important around Great Zimbabwe and provides valuable information about the environment which archaeologists should have used to understand Great Zimbabwe.
The narratives collected highlight the centrality of water in the location of Great Zimbabwe. In these myths, water is represented by the mysterious mist that often covers the hills, the drizzling rain (guti) that falls often around Great Zimbabwe, the sacred springs, streams and rivers. When one looks closely at the mountains that are mentioned in the narratives, it is easier to see that Great Zimbabwe is located in a hydrographical basin. The sacred springs and streams and rivers within this area could withstand the serious droughts that the area often experiences and hence became important aspects of the landscape and hence their appearance in the legends.
The sacredness of Great Zimbabwe is also brought out through stories about sightings of lions within Great Zimbabwe. Lions, however, have been eliminated from this environment for over a hundred years. All participants, however, mentioned a cave on the northeastern slopes of the Hill Complex called the Cave of Lions where lions can be seen at a certain time of the day. Two elderly participants claim to have seen these lions when they were younger (Interviews Participant 2 and 4, 24 March 2016). Recent sightings have been reported by workers of the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe and at least one tourist (Memo NMMZ, Interview Participant 12). For the local communities, the appearance of these lions is usually a warning of an impending problem that the community could face. Last year’s sighting by a local tour group was therefore taken as a warning for the drought and the heatwaves that the area faced over a period of seven months. Lions are associated with royalty and represent the royal spirits which are said to still live at Great Zimbabwe. As important intercessors to God for issues that affect all the communities living near Great Zimbabwe, these spirits are important for ensuring rain not only around this area but for the rest of Zimbabwe as well. It is not surprising that the sightings of lions have been linked to the drought that area faced in 2015/2016 season.
Conclusions: landscape mapping, narratives, and the archaeological sub-disciplines
As Schmidt (1983: 75) posits, it is only ‘when cultures in Africa participate in the interpretation of their own past, we can begin to build a self-enriching tradition of archaeology free from the domination of Western paradigms.’ Using narratives inquiry in trying to understand the meaning of folklore, myths, and legend about a place is one way which the African voice can be present in archaeological enquiry. At Great Zimbabwe these voices identify the most important components of the landscape, many of which had been ignored by heritage managers before. Studying these narratives bring traditional knowledge systems to the foreground – which could be a way to identify the intangible outside of Western philosophies where they are taken as ‘values.’ They can help those of us trained in western philosophies to read landscape through the lenses of people that created them. The voices, the animal sounds that feature in community narrative are a memorialisation of the soundscape. Not only do the voices represent the wisdom from ancestors, they also record the animals that are within the cultural landscape.
The narratives are preserved for a purpose: they are occasionally used to subvert mainstream narratives that are sponsored by the political power of the state. State power threatens not only to change culture through single narratives but also through the denial of rights to performances of religion. In many postcolonies, archaeological research has dogmatically privileged state’s needs against those who demand cultural rights. The discipline of archaeology thus militates against local sensibilities and aspirations in that it denies the presence of their religion and perpetuates the colonial presence in heritage management. Archaeologists have shaped cultural landscapes with what they know best: cultural/archaeological remains (Spirn 1998: 23). When archaeologists carry out archaeological surveys, the aim is to identify those elements of the landscape that are archaeological and they hardly invest time in narrative inquiry to acquire an African reading of heritage places they study (Schmidt 2014: 173).
Elsewhere archaeologists have argued that archaeological collaborations with the public have failed (Lane & Mapunda 2004) and this has been attributed to archaeologists failing to communicate the benefits of archaeology (Pikirayi 2011). The failure, however, lies not in failing to communicate but in failing to listen. Archaeologists and heritage managers have a top-down approach which does not recognise other forms of knowledge; they consider themselves to hold superior knowledge. Cultural landscapes should be read through artefacts, monuments, and sites, but also through an understanding of the minds of people who created it, lived in it, and have told stories about it. Telling a story about a place is a social process and understanding that social process will enhance landscape literacy among archaeologists.
Understanding the myths as metaphors of the landscape creates opportunities for meaningful collaboration between the researcher and the people that he or she is researching on. This makes people, and not artefacts, central to archaeological inquiry. The narratives also contain very crucial environmental information which can be used to define research agendas beyond the limits of archaeological boundaries. It forces archaeologists to think of every place as a part of a wider landscape and not just a ‘site.’ Narratives can also be used to question the authorised discourses which often focus on national agendas at the expense of local concerns. By allowing people to tell their stories one is also allowing multiple interpretations and recognising the various social layers that a place can have. Stories have places and people in them and can be used to map cultural landscapes.
Heritage cannot only deal with the ‘premier’ monumental achievements but must be reflective of all that societies deem important in a place including how it is memorialised (Breen Rhodes 2010: 34). Understanding this will give us tools to seek an understanding of other knowledges beyond archaeology and create an understanding of other people and how they relate to land and the past on that land. Very important sacred places at and around Great Zimbabwe were desecrated (and sometimes destroyed) through a landscape illiteracy promoted by Western philosophies of conservation. Some like the Chisikana spring were desecrated by practices which would be soundly condemned as environmentally unsustainable today. To dry out the marshes created by the spring and stream, eucalyptus trees were planted at the headwaters of the spring. In another sacred area with a spring, a public toilet has been constructed.
Recently the communities around Great Zimbabwe complained at the vandalism at Mujejeje (the ‘threshold’). The stones that had piled at each end of the linear extrusion of quartz were removed by unknown individuals. In fact, workers at Great Zimbabwe had seen people in this part of the monument, but bothered to check what they were doing because they thought that part of the monument was not important. Indeed, it has not been important enough to monitor it in the same way that walls at the site are. The importance of these parts of Great Zimbabwe is clearly shown in the myths of place, but, through landscape illiteracy, these places have been physically damaged and desecrated. The inherited colonial legislation that archaeologists use to manage the landscape today defines what is to be preserved and celebrated, but it is apparent from problems experienced that there is a need to listen to community stories in managing and interpreting this cultural landscape. The stories about voices and animal sounds being heard from the Hill Complex point to the loss of a soundscape, but this aspect of heritage at Great Zimbabwe has been consistently eroded through various activities that communities have complained about in this landscape (Sinamai 2017). The narratives therefore assist heritage managers in identifying the important elements of a cultural landscape without separating them from the material culture. These narratives of place show that the landscape is not memorised by seeing it. It is an emotive experience that requires the use of all senses in creating intimacy of land. Current landscape studies seem to focus on current relationship between the land and the people, but, in actual fact, it is created by layers of ancestral experiences passed from one generation to the next through narratives. Without understanding community narratives as memory tools, we will continue to misread cultural landscapes.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to communities living around Great Zimbabwe who allowed me to collect their stories and use them for this chapter. The research was funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme (Project: METAPHOR No. 661210).
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