The native African people who once lived in Hwange ...

The native African people who once lived in Hwange National Park; Chapter 6 in:

HwangeNat i onalPar k

TheFor es twi t haDes er tHear t

Gar yHaynes

© Gary Haynes, 2014; all rights reserved.

Hwange National Park

The People

6. The People The first African man I met in Hwange National Park over 30 years ago had been one of thousands who came to the 1960s Wankie District looking for work. His name was Million M. He found work not in the coal mines but in the National Park. He was taught the Latin species names of plants, and his specialty was identifying the hundreds of trees, bushes, and grasses in the Park. Coming from a rural environment, he already had an enormous store of folk knowledge about the local vegetation – what things were good to eat, what things weren't, what twigs could be used to polish your teeth, what wood burns hottest and longest, what leaves can be crushed to poison fish. He had built a little homestead on communal farming land about 35 kilometers (ca. 21 miles) from Main Camp. He would work three months straight, seven days a week, then take off 18 days to farm the fields. He had built a pole-and-clay hut and painted the outside walls in two-tone geometric designs, as is the custom. When I visited I could see a dozen bony little dogs skulking around the bare swept ground, and chickens wandering freely in and out of the huts. Four or five goats gazed blankly at me, their ribs defined through their shaggy coats, and one small milk cow was usually staring a thousand meters into space. One year he was caught shooting animals in the Park for meat, the only good meat he could afford on his small salary. He was stripped of his seniority and transferred to a less comfortable and distant station in a remote Safari Area, a mild punishment on the surface but serious enough, for it shamed him and removed him from the friends he'd made in the last two decades. A few years later he was caught eating bush-meat again, and although he said the animal had been found dead, he was fired from National Parks. It seems ironic that Million was punished for eating wild animals from Hwange National Park. African animals have been going into African stomachs for thousands of years. After 1896, wild foods were much more difficult to find, and during the 20th century it would be against the law entirely for most Africans to kill wild animals.

Million M. at Shabi Shabi, in the Park, 1993

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First People – the Foragers I had little idea what kind of world I was traveling through when I first entered this forested sandsea over three decades ago. Zimbabwe had just become “independent” – ruled by its majority black people for the first time in its national history. The National Park’s field men, the Rangers and Wardens who managed the day to day tasks of running the enormous Park, were still mostly white, in those days. They were energetic, often unmarried and capable of wild masculine bravado, especially when drunk – which was most nights, it seemed to me – and yet quietly competent, tireless workers every day of the week. It wasn’t long before I joined them in their Officers’ Club nightly, to down bottles and bottles of beer. The dark hours, which are half the length of a day in the tropics, were festive, and the sunlit hours were long and full and absorbing, with a variety of tough jobs to do, such as repairing water pumps after half-day-long drives through thick bush, or stalking and shooting problem animals whose carcasses I could examine after butchering them, or long footslogs in search of vaguely reported archeological sites to confirm, or searching in thick bush for animal bonesites.

Over the months and years I rode along or drove thousands of kilometers through Hwange woodlands or along barely visible tracks and elephant paths. I went to most of the farflung corners of the Park, generally in a state of speechless hangover at the start of each trek but exhilarated and educated at the end, sometimes many days later. I crisscrossed wilderness in the Park’s center time after time, and tooled along its cryptic borders in my well worn 4-wheel drive vehicle for hours on end. One day in the 1990s I met Mrs. Penny Nkomo, the last of the Tyua (“bushman,” a word now universally replaced with “San”) brought to Main Camp by the first administrator, Ted Davison, in the mid 1930s. Research Scout Peter Ngwenya and I began regularly interviewing her about the past. She was much like anyone's grandmother, shy and sometimes amused at questions about long ago, but she put a human face on the historical portrait of Hwange National Park. Her family called me "djina thca," with a tongue click in the middle of the second word – this was the name of the place where she was born. The name was a joke on me, since I could hardly pronounce it at first. She lived on charity at the edge of the junior staff compound, near unmarked gravesites of her family and friends. Penny’s nieces Sinewe and Ngainthcwa were sources of many stories, songs, and recollections of life in the past. Ngainthcwa’s hands were as small as a little girl’s, and she had a sharp wit. One year she fell ill and died. Her sister Sinewe – always so alert and attentive – died two weeks later of a broken heart. Penny lived inside a windowless steel hut near the junior staff beerhall. She


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was small, always dressed in cast-off rags thickly layered to warm her. Her grandchildren and nieces and sister-in-law and at least a dozen other relatives lived in tiny steel huts around her. They were the poorest of the local poor, because they had no income, no pension, no possessions except what they were given or what they could scrounge. Penny had been named Poselani when she was born many kilometers southwest of here, a child of a “Bushman” 142 family camped at a waterhole called djina thca. The people at Main Camp called her Penny because of her copper skin color.

Most of her family was far away or dead. Five of her children died young. One last son lived in Botswana. He had left his mother many years ago when he was still a child, and never went back. Her last-born daughter worked in a small health clinic 100 kilometers (ca. 60 miles) away, but she lost her job and came to stay with her mother. Penny would sit with visitors so her face was towards the hot July sun, and her relatives and friends would lay out a scrap of worn burlap for visitors to sit on, facing her. I sat on the burlap, my back to the sunlight, under an overhanging branch of a tree, and Peter sat on a small wooden stool. We were soon surrounded by aging people who tried to recall faces and places, and who laughed at my bad accent and pale skin. They clapped their hands and sang the old songs for me. We passed around tubs of traditional beer and laughed and laughed again. The little children kept their distance and pointed and giggled: "Kiwa kiwa kiwa," over and over again, they said, then ran to hide. "White man."

Penny's people were the first keepers of this country. They are nearly forgotten now, but they had been among the first Africans recruited to work in the new Game Reserve. They worked side by side with the Reserve's Warden, a white man named Ted Davison, for more than 30 years. When they went out on monthlong patrols into the remotest parts of the game reserve, the Bushman trackers walked or rode donkeys; the white Warden rode a big horse. The Warden died many years ago, long after he had left the game reserve for another posting, but Penny's family never stopped speaking of him. Every Friday the Warden had shot four buffalo from the reserve and passed out the meat to the people in the compound. There were big feasts and happy dancing all night. The Warden was called umNgangane (pronounced ung-an-GAH-nee), because when he became angry his cheeks shook like a lion’s mane (this had also been the name of one of Lobengula’s main indunas in the 1890s). Penny and her family were insulted if you should call them "Bushman." They insisted they were Karanga – a local Bantu tribe that farmed and kept livestock. But when they learned to trust you, they proclaimed they were indeed "busumani." Penny was proud that her people had to teach their African neighbors how to hunt long years ago, and how to find water. Their first encounters with white men were disorienting to both sides. In


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1862 the traveling trader/explorer named James Chapman saw wild men hunting in the sand country around today's Hwange National Park. "The whole country [was]... a perfect waste of forest... All the waters we found were rainwaters...and these have such barbarous Bushmen names, that I found it impossible to put them to paper."143 The Bushmen drove game at night between two fences that funneled the animals into a pit. A successful drive ended with "50 to 100 head of game, writhing and smothering in agony. The Bushman rush in and put an end to the uppermost, which are struggling for liberty." 144

They were called AmaSili by the Africans living around them. They were "eaters of the meat," derived from the word ukusila, meaning "to live by hunting." 145 The Tswana people of Botswana called them BaSarwa, from the Bantu word stem rwa (or twa, or tua), meaning outlanders, or inhabitants of uninhabited land. They were hunters and gatherers, "a quick-witted, timid, slight, clean-limbed, often tall race of Bushmen, having straight profiles, high cheek-bones and light jaws...They combine great physical stamina with slight physique and poor constitution." 146 They mainly depended on the plant foods gathered by the women, supplemented with game meat usually hunted by the men. They ate roots, tubers, nuts, berries, termites, ants' eggs, insect larvae, frogs, tortoises, mice, birds, porcupines, springhares, and any kind of large animal they could kill with their arrows and spears. They were wide-wandering nomads who defined their home ranges with landmark trees, waterholes, or other natural features. They owned little that could not be easily carried on their backs or in bags slung over their shoulders. They moved often and sometimes for long distances. They were sociable, too, and loved seeing their friends and relatives as often as possible, to tell stories or to hold communal ceremonies, or to dance away the night. They passed their knowledge along by widely contacting distant neighbors and friends. They would range over 600 square kilometers (ca. 232 square miles), in groups of 15 to 100 people. Mongongo nuts were a staple food wherever the trees could be found. At times the people burned off dried vegetation, at the end of the dry season, clearing away grasses and herbaceous plants in order to give the wild melons a better chance to grow.

White people found them fascinating, but most writers could never understand how unique their lives were – they were called “Stone Age creatures who loved their freedom, but they were “savages with very little organization." "Their love of freedom amounts to a passion ..." "The Bushmen are extraordinarily alert and seem to notice everything." 147 They were "so weak in frame as to be incapable of toil, [although] they possessed great keenness of vision...and marvelous fleetness of foot and power of endurance in the chase." 148 One writer was drawn to thinking about them as “the last faint syllable of an old story. The present they live in is so fiercely demanding that it leaves them neither time nor the ability to think much about the future. This is a final mercy, for like other primitive remnants...they


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have no future.” 149

The neighboring black people did not all speak of them with contempt, but some called them snakes and treated them as vermin. The Ndebele people to the southeast thought of them as pests, but also hired them as cheap labor in the grain fields. In 1872 Ndebele men killed a number of Bushmen men, women, and children in the sand country around Hwange. The white traveler Frank Oates, who was to die of malaria soon afterwards, related how the Ndebele king accused these Bushmen of stealing from another Bushmen group; Oates visited the site of one massacre to collect Bushmen bones. "It was a pretty spot. Some large trees, laden with yellow blossoms...scented the air. Behind these rose a pretty rugged kopje, and in front of them were the old huts of the unfortunate Bushmen, and the screens from the sun which they erect. Heaps of ashes and game-bones, broken pots, and other remains lay around, amongst which the skulls of the Bushmen appeared conspicuously. We found three here, and three more lay in the grass at some little distance."150

In South Africa, where the first Bushman contact with whites was in the 16th century, the foreign colonists had often shot them on sight – men, women, and children. From the early 19th century nomadic or migrant Boers in Namibia and Botswana considered them enemies. Local white communities often consciously made efforts to destroy as many Bushmen as possible, because Bushmen stole livestock and crops. Yet they could also be almost idolized as superhuman trackers and fearless hunters: "If one is face to face with an angry lion, the Bushman tracker will stand by one's side and never quail," 151 as is generally believed about them even today. One of the most repeated stories is about a Bushman guide who seized the mane of an attacking lion, trying to drag it off a white man with his bare hands. "Courage could not go much further," people say. 152 After the Prussian Siegfried Passarge led an exploratory expedition into the Kalahari, financed by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company in 1897, he concluded that the Bushmen living in the desert were "racially" and "phylogenetically" bred to be hunters and nothing else. He also thought they were entirely incapable of re-adapting to farming or livestock-herding. They were clearly going to be barriers to the future civilizing of the Kalahari thirstland. "Does any possibility exist other than shooting them?" he asked. 153

The Bushmen succeeded in the Kalahari environment by discovering all they could about local conditions, then storing that knowledge or trading it for other knowledge, and passing on all they had learned to their descendants. They also succeeded by innovating or eagerly adopting new techniques for dealing with the land. The Bushmen left material traces of their flexibility – the clearest trace being


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the continuum of stone tools dating from at least a quarter of a million years ago in the Kalahari sands, to as late as the 21st century, and the presence of livestock bones and ceramic vessels dating back almost two thousand years. Long-distance trade brought iron tools and glass beads into the Kalahari 1,000 years ago, in exchange for ivory and animal skins.

By the late 19th century, Bushman were being hired to hunt for meat, skins, and feathers in the Kalahari area. Some kept kraals and homesteads for their family and livestock when possible, but traveled widely for game-products to sell or barter. The Ndebele offered pottery, iron, dhaka (raw clay for pottery or hut making), spears, hoes, and knives in exchange for ostrich-egg-shell beads, elephant ivory, feathers, horns, and game skins. The Bushmen sold or bartered water and food to travelers unable to find resources in the harsh thirstland, and they guided travelers.

"Wild" Bushmen were encouraged to domesticate by active government policy; and during severe droughts many roaming Bushmen found themselves camping at traditional water refuges in competition with cattle ranchers. The Bushmen had to be forcibly trained in new habits, given new foods to eat, and taught new ideas, such as wage-laboring, that irreversibly made them underclass participants in the revised economies of the colonial era. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, African farmers and herders compelled Bushmen to herd cattle and work in the fields for no pay, in return for living space, some food, and water. The Bushmen did not seem capable of protesting, and no government tried to emancipate them. 154 By 1912 the Wankie Bushmen were living anxious, uncertain lives, and many still chose to wander as nomadic foragers moving back and forth into the neighboring Bechuanaland Protectorate (now Botswana). They were very wary of people who wore uniforms. They disappeared into the bush and re-appeared often at settlements. They were a "reserved and aloof" people, not inclined to thievery or violence, except over failed love affairs. 155 They were known as abaNthca – the dwarfs.

Anthropologist Robert Hitchcock has studied how the Tyua people of the 20th century lived in the country just beyond Hwange National Park's southern and western edges. 156 They stayed in small groups, exploited territories of 200-400 square kilometers (roughly 75-150 square miles), and shifted camps frequently to maximize water and other resources. The groups which focused on the freshwater springs along present-day Hwange National Park's west side had the largest ranges and the lowest human density, but their ranges were smaller than those of foragers far away in Botswana's harsher Kalahari desert. The Tyua defined their territories as inherited foraging ranges, and kept within the boundaries marked by waterholes, hills, recognizable trees, or abstracted distances (such as ‘a day’s walk’ or ‘as far as the eye can see’). The people exploited


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over 80 different types of plants. Often they set fire to groundcover to encourage different plants to grow in different times of the year. Usually they stored foods for the lean dry season, such as beans, berries, and fruits. Snares and traps were set for small and large game animals alike. Some animals were ambushed at pans. As food became scarcer in the dry season everyone worked longer and harder to find more. In the very worst years long walks were made to distant places where the resources were thought to be better, sometimes involving 30-kilometer (ca. 18 miles) treks each way. 157 But even in lean times the people pooled resources and shared. Anthropologist John Yellen learned a valuable lesson about the sharing of knowledge among dryland foragers. The flat landscape of the Kalahari seems so featureless to visitors, but it is filled with meaning and memories. Many places that seem to rate no name at all are remembered by simple events or joint reminders – the recollection of once having stopped under a specific tree and being pestered by biting flies, for example – and these memories formed “a private map shared only among a few, an overlay crammed with fine, spidery writing on top of the base map with its named waterholes and large valleys, a map for friends to read.” 158

In 1951, physical anthropologist Phillip Tobias reckoned that at least 31,000 Bushman still lived in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (Botswana), 20,000 in southwest Africa (Namibia), 4,000 in Angola, about 200 in the Rhodesias, and only 20 in all of South Africa. Tobias counted anyone who called him/herself a Bushman, as well as anyone else other people called Bushman. Three centuries of colonization "brought ... hostility, extermination and hybridization to the Bushmen." 159 Only those Bushmen in the most arid parts of southern Africa had escaped extinction from disease, economic exploitation, or genocidal shooting.

In 1956 National Park Ranger Jim Gordon was sent into Hwange’s far interior to build a camp at the newly discovered Libuti pan/spring area. He found "scores" of depressions in the sands along the forest fringes, some with large trees growing in them. He thought them old Bushman wells. One yielded a piece of pottery two-anda-half meters (ca. 8 feet) below the ground surface. "From an archaeological angle excavations in this area might prove very interesting and reveal another Mrs. Ples [a famous South African hominid skull over a million years old]." 160 The potsherd was probably left by Bushman people, who no longer held much interest for the Rhodesian government, except when they illegally hunted game animals within the Park boundaries. In the communal lands south of Hwange National Park around the Nata or Amanzimnyama River, in Tsholotsho, about 1550-2000 Tyua people have homesteads or temporary living quarters today. During the droughts of the 1980s, newspapers from Bulawayo sometimes sent reporters to write about them: The headlines read: “San change their way of living. Nomadic Bushmen settle down.” 161 “San struggle to adapt to new ways.” 162 “Death threat: starvation might wipe out the


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San.” 163 An old woman in a photograph grimaces at the camera: "Degedege Mpofu aged about 100, sits on the sand cracking wild marula nuts with a stone." Are readers expected to laugh, or cluck in sympathy? "Two years ago she was forcibly removed from the jungle to the village of Makhulela..."164 ‘San’ is a new word in Zimbabwe, introduced from Botswana. But, like the labels Bushman or abaNthca or amaSili, it too means they are considered outsiders, scarcely thought of as fellow peasants, even though they have adopted common surnames such as Moyo (heart), Mpofu (eland), or Nkomo (cow). None of them could find enough money to pay the admission fee to enter Hwange National Park as a tourist. In 2013, the President of Zimbabwe stated publicly that the Tsholotsho San resist “getting more civilized” – they do not send children to school, they “like meat more than we [meaning the other people of Zimbabwe] do,“ and they “want to just…look after cattle and be in the bush.” 165 Zimbabwe’s Minister of Education in 2013 called for urgent action to undo the marginalization of the San community. ****

Many years ago, I heard stories about a barefoot Bushman who regularly walked into Hwange National Park to collect elephant-ivory from broken tusks or dead animals. Maybe he or his children's children still visit the great empty places of the Park walking from waterhole to waterhole, some known only to them and still unnamed on our maps. He may watch the campfires some nights from a distance, and he may have carefully walked wide arcs around my own camps over the years, not from fear but to guard his privacy. At a central Kalahari Bushman girl's coming-of-age ceremony, the adult women in her band would have shown her fruit from the woodlands and forests. They would have said to her, "This is the country of all of us, and of you; you will always find food here." 166

For over 50 years Mrs. Penny Nkomo lived in Main Camp, seeing it turn from a wooded bush into a thickly peopled suburb of a national park. There are graves everywhere, she said to me once, pointing first toward the little beerhall, then towards the houses in another direction. Whenever one of her Bushman neighbors and family died, a half-meter (ca. 18 inches) deep grave was dug out of the sand and the body placed in it. The burials were marked only by placing one of the dead person’s cups or a cheap enamel dish on the ground after breaking it. The breaking or chopping of the dishes killed them, too. Penny lived a long time surrounded by the dead, and she was the last person left alive from the old days, a woman who grew up finding food in the bush where white men starved to death. She lived on beer and charity from people not quite as penniless as she was. When she left, the remanence faded as the old graves disappeared in the sand and scrub. ****


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Tyua gravesites at Main Camp, photographed 1993, trampled by elephants and giraffes, burrowed into by gerbils and springhares, and disappearing into the sand and scrub

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Prehistory: The People More Distant in Time Even before the Tyua people kept this country, the ancestors of modern Homo sapiens – our own species – discovered the Hwange landscape as early as 400,000 years ago. The main types of tool made by our pre-human ancestors look like thick rock teardrops. They are called handaxes (photo right), but their precise functions are arguable – for digging, chopping, pounding, throwing? – although many archeologists believe they had multiple functions, a hallmark of stone-age implements.

Hwange National Park surrendered its first known handaxe to science in the mid 1980s when a Park Ranger – completely unaware of what it was – picked it up from the surface of a gravel-covered tourist road. No one remembers which road it came from. The specimen sat on a desk, unrecognized as the oldest object made by human or nearhuman hands in the entire expanse of the Hwange District. I found the second handaxe on another gravel road a few years later when I happened to be with the National Park’s Game-Water-Supply officer. One day he borrowed a 4wheel drive pickup to take a quick look at some of the National Park’s water points. He drove pell-mell through the Park’s notoriously winding tracks, his two workmen in the back bouncing in the open bed. After a couple of hours in the sandy bush the truck had a blowout. The two workmen took off the flat and replaced it with the one spare tire that we carried. Thirty minutes later we had another flat, but no more spare tires. The workmen, Africans who knew how to make do with what’s on hand, fixed the second flat by filling the inner tube with sand. We kept on driving in the middle of nowhere. Every few kilometers we would stop to cool the tire – sand produces a great deal of friction – and re-fill the leaking tube with sand, which was in plentiful supply. Sometimes we’d boil water to make tea while waiting for the tire to cool down and stop smoking. After several hours and about 20 more kilometers (ca. 12+ miles) of stop-and-go driving, the tire had finally burned itself into a smoldering mass of black fibers, stinking rubber, and smoke. And so we walked about four hours on a rough road covered with quarried calcrete and silcrete, mostly crushed into a fine matted dust. Occasionally I spied a butterscotch colored flake or chunk, made of chert or silcrete, a harder material sometimes formed in the buried duricrusts. One of those chunks was a handaxe, Hwange's second known specimen.

Still, I was cautious about these finds, because no archeologist had ever before suspected that human ancestors could have lived in the Hwange landscape. I wondered if maybe these rare finds were aberrant stone tools that dated from much later time periods. Then I found another handaxe at Dopi pan, and seven more handaxes at Giraffe pan, and eventually hundreds more at other sites, all of them


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associated with flakes and chunks of the local flakeable material. At about the same time these handaxes were making their existence known, other equally important types of flaked-stone tools were beginning to appear in numbers that would not justify more doubt about their great age. Now I know that Hwange's river terraces are virtually paved with stone tools left by ancient foragers. Thousands of stone implements are trod upon by elephants or dassies around the tourist camps in the Park. Every day tourists drive their cars over stone flakes and cores. Flaked-stone hammers or knives are strung out on the ground around half the larger pans in the center of the Park. The most ancient stone tools: handaxes, cleavers, cores

We cannot say much, if anything, about the human aspects of the stone-tool makers' lives, other than about their stone technology. A fair size literature can be found about Zimbabwe’s Stone-Age, ranging from books written by amateur archeologists to professional and very technical papers, to more recent scholarly studies by expert professionals. Yet we still know nothing of languages, beliefs, fears, and suppositions. The size of the braincases in the skulls found in Africa suggests the continuing enlargement of the brain over time, as a result of evolutionary development, but the brain is not the same as the mind, and the mind does not leave fossil impressions except in whatever is created materially. The handaxe makers left behind hundreds of stone tools, often found together in dense clusters. Each stone axe is symmetrical in shape, standardized in proportions, made by the same progression of steps, beginning with cobble-splitting through flakeremoval using one stone as a hammer that was struck against the edges of the handaxe. How much planning ahead or deliberate design went into creating these stone tools? Was a language-based learning process involved; were verbal instructions necessary to teach youngsters how to make them? Or were the handaxes made through learned motor actions based on watching someone else doing it, and not on symbolic instruction through the medium of language? The questions are perhaps not yet answerable, but bear directly on our own abilities to think, design, plan, and teach abstract concepts. When did these abilities first appear, distinguishing us from other animals in the world? Middle Stone Age tools


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These earliest people in the landscape were of course the least like us. The known sites with the very earliest stone implements are small and contain nothing more than clustered stone handaxes, cleavers, and cores and flakes. Hwange’s most ancient people seem to have passed through the rest of Hwange very quickly on their way to just a few toolstone-quarrying locales. These outcrops of preferred raw material stones were situated where surface water was also available, ensuring that plants and animals for food could also be found. In the Hwange landscape you can find a crucial clue to the timing of how quickly humans became more modern in behavior. The clue has to do with the differences between the Early Stone Age and the succeeding Middle Stone Age. Just behind the petrol and diesel pumps at the National Park's Main Camp, hiding from view behind thick scrub, is a gravel pit about 200 meters by 200 meters (ca. 600 feet x 600 feet). In the dry season, the pit may be completely bare ground, looking like massive cement or great blocks of concrete. Scattered on the surface are colorful bits of sharp-edged stone. In 1992 I picked up a piece of calcrete containing a distinctively shaped Middle Stone Age flake in its center, like the kernel of a very hard nut, and sent it to a dating laboratory. The lab reported a radiocarbon age of 33,000 years. The flake may have lain in Hwange's sand and mud for at least that long, but I wondered if it also might be much older. A few years later another laboratory dated a handful of fossil fragments of ostrich eggshell, discovered with Middle Stone Age tools and animal bones and teeth from an ancient campsite of ancestral humans. They were 100,000 years old.

Fossil animal teeth from Main Camp, about 100,000 years old

Some Middle Stone Age flakes look surprisingly similar to stone tools of the same age found in Europe or elsewhere in Africa. The most distinctive shape is called a "point." In France it would be called a Levallois point. In Africa it is called a Middle Stone Age point. I have collected them from many of Hwange's pans and gravel pits, widely scattered in the Park where calcrete layers are exposed by erosion. Long after the stone handaxes were no longer made, these highly standardized stone points were produced regularly by human ancestors who were able to instruct each other in the more abstract or tricky process needed to create the shape. A step upwards had been taken in intellectual ability by the Middle Stone Age, between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Another kind of step may have been taken, too – this time in the ability to hunt larger and often more dangerous wild animals. The Hwange landscape preserves broken bits of animal teeth and skeletons that are directly associated with


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Middle Stone Age stone tools. The fossils come from impala, warthog, ostrich, and even elephant, all of which are animals that dwell in wooded savannah and are water dependent, as are today’s creatures. It is tempting to envision a landscape very much like the one we see today in Hwange, although better watered. Archaic, heavy-browed hominids travel through this vision.

They are still not completely like us, even if they are very familiar. In some ways their behavior balances on a divide between human and not-human. They left behind discarded implements made by hand to very patterned shapes and sizes. They also left behind a homely refuse, such as the flakes chipped off the stone tool edges to sharpen them, or the fragmented bones of animals they had butchered. Their sites are often limited in size, suggesting infrequent occupation, and they left no clear distinctions among activity areas – no separate cooking areas, no sleeping areas, no tool-making areas separated from butchering areas. This is a very unmodern pattern. 167 The people must have traveled directly to certain target locales where water could be found, the same places preferred by large animals. Perhaps small groups of people traveled quickly on traditional routes only to particular points in the familiar landscape, carried out their tasks – killing, butchering, collecting plant foods – then traveled quickly somewhere else far away, maybe to a gathering place or base camp. 168 The pattern was successful for millennia. Then, around 25,000 to 50,000 years ago, very different artifacts began to appear in southern Africa. The time period just before the beginning of this technological change – called the Later Stone Age – was marked by drying climates, so the last people of the Middle Stone Age and the first people of the Later Stone Age did not often choose to inhabit the same sites in a continuous sequence.

Later Stone Age tools (dark squares=10x10cm)

Later Stone Age tools and implements include worked bone artifacts, such as polished points and awls, made to patterned shapes, and also ornaments or artwork made of bone and shell, such as beads and pendants. Ostrich eggshell beads, nearly


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identical to those in use by historical Bushmen, were being made by Later Stone Age people at least 15,000 years ago. Typically the stone tools are smaller, such as greatly reduced hide-scraper forms, as well as crescents, slivers, and other geometric shapes that are thought to have been inserted into wooden or bone shafts, for use as scraping or piercing tools. The bow and arrow were widely used during the Later Stone Age, and some very small flakes may have been arrow points. Fish-hooks and sinkers appear where there was water; also appearing were digging stick weights (shaped stones that look like doughnuts), carrybags made of animal skins, and other artifacts very similar to those used by recent Bushmen. Mungongo nuts – harvested from a Kalahari tree species – appeared in the archeological assemblages by 8,000 years ago, signaling a new thirstland 169 adaptation by the Kalahari's early people, as the climate became drier and warmer. Stone digging-stick weight, from Pandamatenga

The most evolved mental abilities and skills – abstract language, the creation of art, ability to control fire – are detectable by this time. The behavior and thinking of Later Stone Age people seem to be completely accessible to us. What the people left behind is so much more complete and complex than what the more archaic hominids left. We can see not only what Later Stone Age people habitually ate, but we can sometimes reconstruct individual meals. A tiny stone tool from Bumbusi Cave

In Hwange’s northern hills, steep sandstone ridges with rockshelters contain ash deposits left from Later Stone Age campfires. In the ashy dirt are broken and burnt mammal bones, shells of giant land snail and river mussels, fragments of ostrich eggs, beads made from the little eggshell fragments, and cracked-open mungongo nuts. These foods had been collected and eaten at different times of the year – the mussels and land snails were gathered in the wet season, and the mungongo nuts were collected in the beginning of the dry winter season. An orientation to seasonal resources sets apart modern humans from their earliest ancestors. The tiny and sharp-edged flaked-stone tools also found in these rockshelters and other sites in the landscape were a clever adaptation by Hwange’s foragers. In a landscape where large packages of flakeable stone were very rare and widely separated in space, the foragers adapted to this limitation by specializing in a stone-


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flaking technology that allowed them to use Hwange’s much more plentiful small pebbles and irregularly shaped little nodules of the high quality stone. The little bits of silica-rich rock are spread widely in the landscape, to be found where they erode out of exposed calcrete layers or where gravel deposits concentrate them in stream valleys. The tiny slivers flaked from the rocks could be fitted into wooden arrow shafts or handles, and they made fine cutting tools. Over the last few thousand years of the Later Stone Age, the razor-like barbs and pointed flakes – called microliths, for their small size – were probably used on poisoned arrows and spears. Foragers may have extracted poisons from certain plants or insect larvae 170 and carefully spread it on the arrow shafts below the barbs and slivers where it dried but remained deadly to whatever animal whose flesh it penetrated. The anthropologists Robert Hitchcock and Peter Bleed 171 suggest that in the drier sandy regions, poisoned microliths on arrows were preferred over larger unpoisoned spears; however, where surface water is not so scarce such as around the huge Makgadikgadi pan complex in Botswana, larger flaked-stone projectile points predominate, rather than the microliths. Archeologist Nick Walker thinks the use of poisoned microliths appeared along with the more complex technology of making multi-part arrow shafts – composed of main shaft, a foreshaft with barbs, and a tubular sleeve to link the shafts – and that having poisoned arrows was an advantage in game-scarce regions because it allowed smaller parties to hunt big game. There was no need to stun an animal with massive spears or many arrows if one poisoned little arrow shaft shot from one bow could make the kill. A single hunter with poisoned arrows could walk long distances searching for game, and he wouldn’t scare away game as often as a party of spear-wielding hunters foraging together. 172 One of the most creative expressions left by the people in this phase of life is the rock art of Hwange National Park. Several sandstone rockshelters in the Park contain carved hoofprints on the stone walls and boulders. The tracks of many species are represented at life-size – giraffes, sable antelope, baboons, even humans.

Engravings in a sandstone rockshelter on Bumbusi ridge

The Hwange sites are unusual, because carved imagery is so rare in the rest of Zimbabwe, where instead you find an abundance of bright painted figures of people, animals, and plants


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in rockshelters or on rock walls. We do not know why there are no paintings on the smooth rock surfaces in Hwange, when rocks like them are often covered with colorful paintings in the rest of Zimbabwe.

The engraved hoofprints in the Park may have been a bounded art style between different groups of hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers who lived in or on the edge of the Kalahari thirstland may have contacted other hunter-gatherer groups living in the woodlands to the east and north, and one or both groups may have felt the need to create visual displays such as the engraved hoofprints to communicate ethnic identity or spatial boundaries. If the art was indeed a boundary marker, there are certain implications that follow – such as the possibility of relatively high population densities, and the likelihood that groups frequently contacted their neighbors or lived in unexpectedly close proximity – and that would suggest hunter-gatherers could have had a much greater impact on the natural environment than we currently believe. More hunter-gatherers in more groups would have competed for animals, plants, and other resources. On the other hand, if the rock art was created for other reasons – such as the expression of a corporate foraging identity in response to the presence of Iron Age farmers and pastoralists – the implications about the early expression of ethnicity and cultural distinctiveness are important. The carvings may mean that even 1000 years ago true ethnic selfdifferentiation had occurred. A third possibility is that the art represents an aggregation area for widely dispersed foragers in different ecozones, indicating a very thin human population distribution.

Whatever the true implications, people were clearly oriented towards special places in this land's archeological record. We can see their spatial attachments in the rock art sites, and also in the many locales where stone tools had been made of strictly local raw materials. We can see it in the sites that were re-used and revisited time and again over the course of tens of thousands of years. Some of those re-visited sites contain only exotic raw materials, carried there from at least 50 kilometers (ca. 30 miles) away, and carried that distance many times in the last 100,000 years. What this means about the "wandering" nomads of the Stone Age is that they in fact did have a traditional sense of home or belonging or land ownership, and they were rooted in this huge country. Hwange’s later Stone-Age foragers probably used resources the same way the historically known Bushman bands did in the Kalahari’s western and southern stretches. The average density of Bushmen in parts of the Kalahari approached one person per 10 square kilometers (ca. 3.8 square miles). About a third of each person’s diet was meat from small, medium, and occasionally big game animals. Annually each person ate over 350 kg (ca. 772 pounds) of meat – almost a kilogram (ca. 2.2 pounds) per day on average in a good year. About 1% of the herbivore standing crop was killed and eaten in a typical forager range, which averaged almost 250 square kilometers (ca. 96.5 square miles). 173


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A ring of stones (foreground) made by Later Stone Age foragers many centuries ago, probably as a hunting blind, near Mtoa National Monument

If these numbers also held for Hwange’s early foragers, the impact on Hwange’s landscape could not have been especially great, although it was still measurable. Foragers killed a fairly small proportion of wild animals. They collected seeds and nuts, roots, melons, and edible plant parts, most likely often enough to affect the distribution and density of some plant species. They collected medicinal plants, too, also affecting the distribution of these species. They probably burned off old plant growth in the dry season, clearing out tangles and patches of dried grass, encouraging certain plant species to grow at the expense of others. Burning in certain seasons selects against early-seeding plant taxa. Some of Hwange’s woodland tree species are sensitive to fire, but most are resistant to the kinds of early dry-season grass fires that are not hot enough to ignite tree branches, trunks, and crown leaves. Animals may have changed their daily or seasonal migration routes as a result of hunting and burning, but probably only temporarily.

Overall the human effects on Hwange’s landscape were not severe. The animal bones in Hwange’s archeological sites reflect relatively low numbers of individual animals that had been killed and butchered. Hunting success rates were less than spectacular and plant-collecting was never intense, because people lived in small groups and were always mobile, never staying too long in any one place, never able to overexploit key resources. **** Ten years before I first found ancient bones in Hwange National Park, a Ranger named Stanwell had teased me about the meaning of fossils, which he knew I was looking for. "I am studying geology," he said, "and I have examined a fossil one day for some hours. It is my idea that it was in fact a rock." How right he was. He had a serious point to make, but he laughed while going on: "Is there an evolution from life to rock?" he asked. I was taken up short and couldn't answer right away, so he added, "I was wondering where we are going. Why do we exist?" He literally howled with laughter at the absurdity of his question, posed to a scientist. What is the point of finding fossils, I think he meant. Africa is full of the past. All our ancestors are buried there. We come back, over and over again, and we find older and older fossils


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from creatures that seem so different from us because their fossilized remains are embedded in rock. How can we hope to understand their visions of this landscape, a world so different from the one we see today? ⫷⫸⫷⫸⫷⫸

Sketches of Stone Age implements from Hwange National Park

Sketch of an iron spear point, from the Nehimba Village site In Hwange National Park


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The First Farmers Arrive In 1962 Wankie National Park employees reported seeing pieces of pottery and bones exposed by erosion in the Kapula River floodplain, near the Lukosi River, about 200 meters (ca. 600 feet) from a tourist road. More pieces of pots and clay from hut-floors were found buried about 30 centimeters (ca. 1 foot) deep. Archeologist Keith Robinson recovered stone hammers and grinding slabs from a dark soil in the grassy vlei near the usually dry Lukosi streambed. He also found two lumps of slag, an indicator that iron had been smelted at the site. The bones and teeth of big animals lay near the pottery, which looked like the earliest kind of clayware found elsewhere in Zimbabwe. Lumps of buried charcoal were submitted for radiocarbon dating – they were 1,100 to 1,200 years old. Robinson speculated that the Iron Age people who lived at the site must have cleared the vlei's grasses and scrub to prevent lions and leopards from hiding in the thick cover and terrorizing the villagers. 174 1200-year-old clay pot fragments from Kapula vlei

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Imagine living and farming in Hwange’s wild country in the distant past, long before firearms were known. Night was long, as it is today, deep darkness except when the moon was full. Elephants would have moved through that darkness wherever they wanted to go. The moon would rise to be swallowed by clouds like cotton wool, disappearing and re-appearing all night. On such nights lions prowled the woods, hyenas whooped, and the jackals would call, as the writer H. E. Bates wrote, "like a crowd of imprisoned human souls suffering all the tortures of the damned, wailing in unappeasable misery, in the depths of hell." 175 You might keep feeding your fire but the wind would blow the burning wood into cold ashes. In the early morning light before sunup you would see elephants walking by closely, noiselessly, with only a sidelong glance at you. Judging from the archeological finds, farmers appeared out of the blue between one and two thousand years ago, suddenly emerging in the midst of what had been the long time homeland of Later Stone Age people. We do not know how or when the change began. We do not know why it should have taken place at all, but one theory is that the exhaustion of wild food sources by ever rising numbers of people forced local cultures to increase their food supplies in the only way possible, breeding their own crops and livestock to replace the dwindling supplies of wild


plants and animals. 176

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1200 year-old cattle teeth from the Kapula vlei village site

Another theory is that the farmers invaded the land from somewhere else, unstoppably spreading into foragers’ territories. Eventually the earliest farming communities built solid and substantial people’s windbreaks and sleeping shelters. The farmers also began smelting iron in their own furnaces, replacing some of their stone tools with metal ones. Small streamside villages became homes for a still-egalitarian people whose lives centered on raising millet, sorghum, and livestock. Historian E. C. Tabler does not think the people living in today’s Hwange district had any cattle even in the 19th century – but archeological evidence has been found that suggests livestock were part and parcel of the local farming package. 177

The first farmers may have been associated with at least one unwanted major event affecting the Hwange landscape. Small-scale farmers in tropical woodlands typically cut trees and burn off the woodpiles to open up fields for cultivation, plant and harvest for a few years, then move on to clear other fields after the soil fertility declines. A possible clue about the extent of their earliest fires in Hwange comes from buried beds of wood charcoal preserved in the deep sediments of the Kalahari sands. The most abundant charcoal has been radiocarbon-dated 1,800-2,200 years ago, and it is unusually widespread throughout the sand country. It may have been the result of out-of-control burning of large tracts of woodland to clear pastures and fields. An alternate interpretation is that the charcoal resulted from many natural fires caused by lightning strikes during frequent rainstorms. Whatever the ultimate cause of the existence of so much charcoal, the picture is evocative of Hwange’s forests burning at around the time farming first appears south of the Zambezi River. 1900-year-old charcoal dug out of Kalahari sands

The success of the early farmers is still not fully understood by archeologists. It is the raising of livestock, especially cattle, in these African habitats that confounds us the most. Woodlands and forests often harbor tsetse flies, blood-sucking insects that can spread trypanosomiasis, a disease called nagana when it affects livestock, or sleeping sickness when humans are affected. The


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disease is caused by microscopic organisms called trypanosomes, which live in the host animal’s blood. When a tsetse fly bites an infected individual and then flies to another animal to feed again, it spreads the organisms to the new animal. The related illness in humans causes progressive lethargy and eventually death. A tsetse fly

How did villagers prevent the flies from killing their herds? Did they cut down and clear the woods, whose shade fosters the flies? Tsetse flies bite infected wild animals – which do not die from the disease as do livestock. Did the prehistoric villagers kill all the wildlife around their villages, because they knew that trypanosome organisms lived in the blood of wild animals?

Answers to these questions are important for understanding more about the impact prehistoric farmers and herders had on their immediate environment. If the woods were cleared on a large scale to eliminate tsetse flies, and wild animals were driven away or killed, then the Hwange environment was dramatically altered throughout the period when human groups may have been keeping livestock. This altering could have continued well into the later nineteenth century – and the Hwange environment we see today has to be appraised as a recovering one, not at all like the earlier environment of the Bushman foragers.

Ecologist John Ford has suggested a strategy that prehistoric stock-keepers may have used to deal with tsetse flies. 178 Possibly a continued low-level contact with tsetse infections spread via wild game allowed individual cattle to acquire some resistance to the disease, and they did not die quickly. If so, and if farmers understood about the resistance, then no attempts would have been made to clear the bush around pastures and villages to eradicate tsetse, and no attempts would have been made to wipe out all the wild game. The clearing of the bush to make paddocks and pastures would have opened up some patches of woods, but because the early farmers moved their villages often – perhaps every 5-10 years – the woodlands and bush would have had plenty of time to regenerate and recover. Browsing by cattle also may have contributed to bushland clearing, but not on a large and sustained scale. In short, the early farmers and herders may have allowed a tsetse reservoir to exist because it provided a means to keep their cattle alive, although at less than fully healthy levels. If prehistoric stock-keepers were indeed aware of how to minimize tsetse impacts, the implications are these: the bush stayed fairly thick and the wild game animals did survive, although maybe in relatively lower numbers. In the Hwange landscape, the scarcity of rich soils and permanent water sources restricted human settlements to certain places such as the Deka River watershed and the largest pan


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and vlei complexes on the margins of the Kalahari sands. Settlements may have been restricted in time, as well – restricted to periods of higher rainfall or cooler temperatures when evapotranspiration was reduced and the carrying capacity of the land was higher. The earliest settlements may have been dotted around inselbergs, the islands of boulders and bedrock rising from level ground, where runoff water concentrated, even in low-rainfall periods, or spread out in ribbon-like fashion along water courses and vleis. Perhaps cattle were driven deeper into the Kalahari sands during the wet season. Large expanses of uninhabited woodlands probably existed where water was scarce between villages.

Human settlements would have altered local ecologies in measurable ways. The people in their communities would have cleared competing trees away from fruit-bearing species, and allowed only selected shade trees to survive in special locations. No doubt mopane would have been a preferred tree species for fuel and building, probably harvested by trimming branches, but trees would not have been indiscriminately killed, because this species has the ability to send out new growth vigorously. The leaves from coppiced branches are actually more palatable as animal forage than the old leaves. The wood burns hot and strong,leaving behind only clean ash, making it a superior cooking fuel. Butterfly-shaped mopane leaves (and python)

Human settlements would have harbored animal communities unlike those in the surrounding bush. Among the indigenous animals living around settlements, rats and mice would have been at an advantage because they are grain eaters and scavengers of refuse, and can hide easily and conveniently in the built environment created by Iron Age people. Pied crows would have found a human settlement inviting, because they are opportunist feeders and tolerant of human activity, as are fruit- and grain-eating birds such as quelea. Monkeys and baboons would have learned how to raid gardens for vegetables and greens. Banded mongooses are adaptable to human settlements, as are hyenas and honey badgers, and these species would have thrived around homesteads. The hyenas and honey badgers would have nosed around after dark, and the mongooses would have fearlessly sniffed about in daylight. Impala may have flourished in the open fields and pastures cleared from the woodlands. The village farmers hunted for most of their meat, and therefore they kept the wild game densities moderately reduced, but they did not specialize in hunting,


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and probably ate a wide variety of game. Much of the hunting may have been communal, targeting the gregarious wild animals such as impala and zebra. Hwange National Park's vlei farmers of a millennium ago probably burned off floodplain and vlei grasses regularly, to attract game and to clear new farm fields. The people also collected wood for building huts and for fuel, over the course of their stay in the Kapula vlei site, clearing out the surrounding woodland.

This time period was usually called the Early Iron Age, although now the favored term for the era is the Early Farming Community period. The people lived in scattered small villages that were very much like the modern ones, judging by the archeological remains showing community sizes and hut densities. But the people left little behind within their old homesites. Their villages were dispersed clusters of houses, each family's homestead set apart from the others by bare ground. Today homesteads and family plots are called kraals, as are the cattle enclosures. Footpaths radiate out from the buildings, creating complex networks of trails and bypasses, leading to fields, water points, firewood-gathering places, men's talking areas, defecation areas, cattle enclosures, and many more locations. One village, then in the past and even today, commanded a wide territory of many acres. 179 The farmers were Bantu-speaking people, not Bushman. They or their ancestors may have migrated in, slowly spreading from homelands far away across the Zambezi River. We may never know what day-to-day effect their spread into ancestral Bushman country had on the original inhabitants of the land, but in the long run it seems to have encouraged the Bushman foragers to keep their distance, and to "retreat" into the Kalahari sands after the Iron Age settlements appeared.

Body measurements, blood chemistry, and skeletal studies indicate that the historical-era Bushman groups of southern Africa are distinctive when compared to South African Negro people. The same distinctions appear between fossil skeletons of each group: Iron Age skulls from Zimbabwe and South Africa that have been dated to about 1000 years ago clearly belong to the Negro ("Bantu") group and not to the ancient Bushman, reflecting the new appearance of a different racial/physical type near or at the beginning of the Iron Age. The Negro populations moving into southern Africa had with them the knowledge of iron-smelting technology, farming, pottery making, and several other cultural traits. The ultimate source of the cultural changes – such as the making and using of iron, and the economic adoption of domesticated livestock and plants, among others – was most likely in the distant Cameroons area of central-west Africa. These innovative changes spread by a combination of population expansion and diffusion. When farmlands became crowded, some people would have moved a few kilometers one way or another. Any neighboring people who may have been hunter-gatherers up to that point would have had opportunities to learn about livestock-keeping and crop-planting from the new migrants. Words from different languages would have intermingled when people intermarried or tried to communicate during trading expeditions.


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Whatever way it happened, the Bantu/Iron Age changes spread through east and west Africa and then southwards, between the time of its African beginnings 4000 years ago to about 1000 years ago, when the whole set of traits was found at the southernmost end of Africa. In some places – such as possibly the Matobo hills in Zimbabwe – dark-skinned, Bantu-speaking migrants firmly displaced resident Bushman populations. In other regions, the Bantu-speakers and Bushman intermarried, producing children with the physical characteristics of both groups, although eventually Negro traits came to dominate. Languages also interbred, so to speak; the Ndebele 180 language of Zimbabwe and South Africa includes the click sounds typical of Bushman languages. Words were taken from one language and incorporated into others. Some Bushman groups apparently adopted traits from the Bantu such as making ceramics and stock-keeping, but maintained their physical separation.

The farmers and herders could not succeed everywhere in the Hwange landscape, because much of it is simply too harsh. Where they lived was in the northern hills and the calcrete-underlain zone that is situated between the hills and the deep, soft Kalahari sands. Human densities across the landscape must have varied a great deal, but averaged higher than they had been during the earlier Stone Age phases. Perhaps you could find a low of 1 person per five square kilometers (about the same as 2 square miles) to a high of five people per square kilometer in Hwange’s northern hills. 181 Today in rural Zimbabwe about 2-3 goats per person are kept by villagers, and the average ratio of cattle to people is one to one. Earlier in the Iron Age the ratio would have been lower. The density of livestock around villages (if the people did have cattle) would have been about half the density of wild animals that used to live in the same places.

Each family in the earlier villages may have cultivated about 1-2 hectares (2.5 to 5 acres) for food. The fields were cleared for planting first by lopping off all tree branches in a plot of land that was approximately level and not too stony, just after the rainy season ended. The branches were then trimmed and piled around the bare trunks. Some months later the wood and dried leaves were set afire, producing an ash bed that fertilized the soil. When first rains fell at the end of the year, the seeds germinated in the soil and ash. Each person may have cut and used about one ton of wood per year for cooking, warming, and working. Each cluster of huts in a village – lived in by 10 to 20 people making up a single family unit – used about 3-5 more tons of wood to make the huts where they slept, cooked, and stored things. The houses lasted about 10-20 years before falling apart in the elements, and so one family unit’s use of fuelwood and housing-wood averaged to about 15 tons per year. Much of this would have come from smaller and straighter trees rather than the largest specimens, or from only selected branches of large trees. Some tree species such as mopane can recover from heavy trimming by coppicing, or sending out new


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branches from main stems, and thus they do not die when cut back repeatedly. In fact, as Stuart Marks found when he measured the impacts African villagers had on local habitats, mopane woodlands actually increase productivity in response to branch-cutting, thus opening up ground surfaces to seedlings and shrubs that were discouraged before and attracting animals to feed on the growth. 182

Families used brushwood, deadwood, and cut green wood to make fences around gardens and livestock pens, up to 20 tons of wood per family. These constructions are expected to last 10-20 years nowadays, so they probably lasted as long in the past. The woods chosen for fences and huts had to be exceptionally resistant to termites and rot, as is mopane.

Some tree species grow slowly and some quickly, but the densest and hardest woods are not fast growers. These species would have been slow to recover from human trimming. I would guess each prehistoric cluster of family villages – probably 50-150 people – completely cleared all the trees from 4 to 8 hectares (ca. 10-20 acres) for tilling and for cattle pasturing, and removed at least one-half of the biomass from several square kilometers (perhaps a couple of square miles) of woodland every decade. The Hwange landscape saw shifting patches of cleared land appear in its northern woodlands, get well used, then abandoned after 5-10 years. Meanwhile older, abandoned patches slowly were growing through successional recovery stages after opportunistic species had colonized the ground. The full succession from clearance through climax growth must have varied from place to place over the last 1,000 years, because there was so much variability in rainfall averaged year to year, decade to decade, and century to century. Hard frosts from time to time also greatly affected the trajectory of plant succession. Hwange’s woodlands could not have supported large cattle herds at any time over the last 2,000 years. Perhaps tsetse fly prevented cattle raising at all. Today droughts and overgrazing are the twin curses on southern Africa’s once-productive mopane woodlands and savannas, but I doubt if Hwange’s landscapes were as deeply affected by them in the past. At times, famines on different scales may have been felt in Hwange during the Iron Age, from serious to milder ones. It seems likely that during hard times such as dry intervals people were relatively bad off in the past, and infectious diseases may have spread through parts of the population. But because Hwange is not generous as a human habitat, the landscape probably never suffered through the kinds of major disasters seen in other parts of Africa 183 where overpopulation, drought, overgrazing, and epidemics combined to wipe out whole communities of plants and animals, and removed human populations from large regions. As a legacy of the shifting cultivation of the past, much of the Hwange landscape is now covered with an interlocking and complicated mosaic of differentage woodland patches, shrubland plots, and blocks of grassland, interspersed with


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old-growth and undisturbed pockets of vegetation – a crazy-quilt of old and not-soold and young communities. The landscape certainly does not preserve a picture of the past at one distant moment in time. ****

A rural village in Zimbabwe’s Hwange district, not far from the National Park

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Part of a wood carving (hand-coloured image) by an unidentified artist, depicting soil preparation for planting in northern Matabeleland


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The Nambya People: Living on the Edge Between about 1,500 and 250 years ago, farmers dominated the Hwange scene. Nomadic hunter-gatherers still made use of the landscape from place to place. And then about 2-300 years ago the Hwange populace was joined by yet another influx of people. The new people were a breakaway group of African farmers who had left their home culture's nuclear area on Zimbabwe's central plateau and migrated north and west, towards today's Park. Led by two brothers, they came from a culture with a central ruler generally referred to as Mambo, the leader of a tribal dynasty called Rozvi. This dynasty had been a later development in the Late Iron Age evolution of strong, centralized societies, stretching back to about 1100 AD, when the site of Great Zimbabwe was being built in the south-central part of today’s nation of Zimbabwe. The site has given its name to the country. 184 There, enormous free-standing walls of stone can still be seen, laid in regular course without mortar and reaching over 10 meters (ca. 30 feet) high in places, enclosing spaces reserved for elite families to live or ceremonial activities to take place. The rulers of this powerful state-like polity probably controlled trade networks dealing in gold, ivory, iron, and cattle. Several thousand people lived at the site of Great Zimbabwe during its peak existence, but after about 1450 AD competing and successor groups established similar stone-walled sites elsewhere in the region and its population dwindled away, although African families and clans were still living there at the time of white contact. The two brothers and their people from the breakaway group in the late 1700s AD established a string of settlements on their way towards the north of today's Hwange National Park. They spoke a language closely related to what is termed Shona, the corporate name for several similar languages spoken by most of Zimbabwe’s people today. They may have begun moving towards Hwange during a time period of drought, and their departure and migratory movements out of the cattle-oriented Rozvi homeland probably involved some hunting and gathering, some aggressive raiding for cattle and grain supplies, and some nomadic stockkeeping. When they finally arrived in the northern Hwange region near the end of the 18th century they came into contact with the earlier resident farming people and the scattered Bushman foragers. The encounter may have been violent or it may have been peaceful, but no one knows for sure. Apparently the people of the forests and woodlands have always had fluid and often shifting ethnic identities – choosing to assimilate or affiliate when convenient, or remembering and maintaining their separateness when possible. JoAnn McGregor’s book Crossing the Zambezi describes the various groups living in the landscapes just north and south of the Zambezi River, including these pre-colonial farming people. They often incorporated local groups into their centralized identity, and gave them clan names and responsibilities.


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Most importantly, the new migrants brought a very different new culture. In their way of doing things, communal cattle kraals had been replaced by men's assembly areas, thus changing part of the spatial expression that would have emphasized equal oppositions in earlier villages. Instead the new architecture emphasized political decision-making and social hierarchization. Rulers' residences were moved to the tops of hills. The ruling elite built low walls of carefully laid stone blocks, to define their space as separate from commoner spaces. The stone walls built to enclose elite houses, and the huts within and around them, overlooked great vistas in Hwange, each one a grand view towards hazy blue hills and mountains on the horizon. Today these walled sites seem to be visually almost absorbed into their natural settings. Ranges of hills and eminences fade into the distances. The piled stones direct the eye (and the mind) upward and away towards the far haze and the pale sky and the hills where other stone constructions can be found. The first walled village in the Hwange district was built at a place now called Shangano, near the present-day town of Hwange, just outside the National Park. The word shangano means the gathering point on the roof of a conical hut where support beams meet at a peak in the middle. I have found the remains of at least 20 other such villages that were eventually built in and near the future National Park, some of them occupied for only short times then abandoned successively, as each ruler's sons moved to new territory. Scattered around these walled sites were villages of less privileged families.

An unmistakable continuity is detectable between the main elements of prehistoric Late Iron Age culture – seen in archeological sites – and the living cultures encountered by the earliest European explorers and settlers. Men are pastoralists and women are cultivators of the soil. Men exchange cattle for women and children. Cattle are associated with ancestors, and they enrich men by giving life to them (in the form of children) and fertilizing the crops. Rulers, ancestors, and men maintain orderly relations with each other to ensure that fertility survives over each generation. Cattle are healthgiving and healing, and are associated with female childbearing; all these concepts are considered in opposition to processes that sterilize and pose great dangers to the whole system. Men pay bridewealth in the form of cattle to acquire legal rights to the children borne by wives. Children born when there has been no payment of cattle are not considered legitimate. Without cattle women would be dangerously infertile, or, equally to be avoided, illegitimately fertile. Southern Bantu homesteads reflected these abstract concepts in their physical layout – the idea of oppositions such as male and female, cattle-keeping and cultivation, ancestors and descendants, and rulers and subjects are still represented by spatial opposition in living sites, communities, and houses, using architectural designs such as concentric construction (where certain elements are


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associated with inner versus outer, or center versus periphery) or diametric layout (west versus east, up versus down, right versus left, front versus back). 185 The homesteads of prehistoric archeological sites – which lack all written records about them – show these same sorts of oppositions, suggesting similar thoughts and values.

Back home, English people had often found romance and poignancy in ruins, providing that the ruins were European-built. "We frequently prefer ruins to the thought of what they once were," writes one English journalist. 186 But Rhodesia's Iron Age ruins inspired little in the way of noble sentiment from the colonists. In the early years of Rhodesia, from 1896 into the 20th century, the stone ruins of Hwange and other districts were plundered by white settlers with the blessing of many colonial administrators. Some were found to contain gold, but most did not. No one lived in them any more, or at least no one who appeared to have built them, and native stories about them were hard to come by. One popular theory about the ruins was that they had been built by Arabs who came to interior Africa for gold and ivory. In fact, local people whose ancestors had never lived in the stone-wall sites often gained white interest by telling a story like this to inquiring officials. "They [the Arabs, or Mazungu] came for gold and elephants' teeth. There were many of them, and they built themselves houses," said Chiminya, a Tonga man from near Victoria Falls, when asked about the stone walls in 1916. 187 The Tonga people had never built such stone walls. In many districts the Native Commissioners got few, if any answers, to their questions. As the Gutu Native Commissioner put it, "it is difficult to get any information from the Natives. They are adverse to giving any information on these matters." 188

However, the truth about these stone-walled ruins was there to find. Local Africans who were descended from the builders of such sites did assert their relationship to the ruins. The Native Commisssioner in Wankie (now Hwange) town asked the local Africans about the district's ancient ruins, as directed by the Superintendent of Natives in 1921, 189 and found out that "the [Wankie] ruins...are claimed by the Natives to have been built by their forefathers." 190 An early 20th century Wankie Native Commissioner, H. Heman, after collecting tribal folklore and history about the district ruins, learned that the local Nambya 191 people made no secret of the knowledge that ruins like Bumbusi had been built by their forefathers. The Nambya also could recount historical events that occurred at the sites. 192 Later 1890s collectors 193 of Nambya lore placed the events in the lives of the early builders firmly within a dated framework, from the first "Hwange" of 1737-1780 – called Sawanga, pronounced Zhvankie by Leya and other people who spoke different languages – right down to the current chief, the 13th Nambya leader. 194 The chief is called Hwange, like his predecessors, but in the preferred Nambya orthography, the name would be spelled Whange. The nationally approved spelling does not recognize Nambya differences from the majority-spoken Shona language. 195 Here I consistently spell the dynastic title as Hwange, in the official


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government-approved way, to avoid making the text too complex, since there are several other alternatives.

Bumbusi Ruins, 1895, photographed by Albert Giese

****

The paramount leader of the people who had built Hwange’s stone-wall sites – the Nambya people – was not a violent or coercive leader, as a Chief may be expected to be, but he did exercise some control over the lives of his people. The Nambya people who owed him allegiance were relatively suspicious of leaders with too much power. But when British colonial authorities organized the lands of the local Africans into conveniently administered districts, elevating some leaders into "kings" or "chiefs,” in effect the colonists assigned tribes for Africans to belong to, thus adding rigidity to a loose set of kinbased polity. 196

The chief lived with his close family, perhaps up to 50 people housed in 1015 huts. Outside his huts were the stone walls and the distant views. The common people lived scattered around him in clustered houses and lesser village sites, perhaps an hour or two walk away, maybe even a full day's walk (which in this country can be 30 kilometers – ca. 18 miles – or so). Family life was regulated by tradition and strong standards of proper behavior. Descent was reckoned through one's father. Sisters and daughters moved away from their families upon marriage. People of similar ages or genders were often called "brother" and "sister," or "daughter" and "auntie," but these were terms of address and implied social and not biological relationships. Children were educated at home and while still very young were put to work caring for younger relatives, carrying water, feeding goats, cleaning the grounds.

Houses were round buildings made of upright poles woven together with flexible wood branches, then completely plastered over by smoothed mud that dried brick-hard. There were no windows, and the insides of houses could be smoky and dark. All tools, cooking pots, clothing, and toys were personally handmade. Some families made their own iron tools, while all families wove their own cloth, dressed animal skins, and grew all their own food.

Men and women spent most of their time separated. Even after death, men and women were given different roles to play – men were buried with their heads towards the east, so they could go off to work early in the morning, while women


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were buried with their heads towards the west, so they could prepare the big evening meal. Social life was quite formally arranged – older people stayed apart from younger, males stayed apart from females, leaders rarely associated with the common people. Competition among different individuals and families was never encouraged. The most striking aspect of African social life today – and probably also in the past – is the respect and politeness shown everyone. People shared with the needy. Chiefs regularly called their people together for tribute and to carry out ceremonies and feasts. The language spoken was closely related to Karanga, a dialect of the dominant Shona language, but over time it changed through an almost organic interweaving of words from the surrounding people’s languages – Leya, Tonga, Dombe, and Ndebele. Yet there are no "Bushman" words in Nambya, perhaps reflecting little contact.

We may never completely know the "texture of daily existence" in the Wankie district of the 19th century, to use the phrase of author Caroline Alexander to describe what is often missing in written history, "the mundaneness of...information that is ultimately so evocative; like sifting through the ashes of Pompeii and picking out the burned eggshells, or the broken homely tableware." 197 But the way of life of Hwange’s early and middle 19th century farming people probably was like that of most other Bantu farmers south of the Zambesi River. The cultivated fields were some distance away from the houses.

The goats – and cattle, if present – were left out to forage daily. Each village was subject to a headman; the domain of each man varied according to his ability to lead and his relationship to the chief. Some headmen may have led hundreds of people, while others may have had only a few dozen affiliates. A hierarchy of headmen answered to the paramount leader. Two of Chief Wankie's people chopping out honey near the Zambesi River, painted by Thomas Baines (1868)

Chief Wankie would have spent much of his time in an open-air public meeting place situated near his own hut, where he listened to petitions and complaints. He may have been paid in livestock for settling disputes, and he could order his people to perform work for him. His senior wives' fields were communally worked, and their produce was used to feed men drafted into service of one kind or another. The


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chiefs under a king provided a portion of their fields' produce to the king, as a civic responsibility. The chief's power rested in his own genealogical position – his family name – as well as in the support of his kinfolk and other lineages. If his subjects or kinsmen found themselves unhappy or in conflict, they were free to move and find a new chief. Wankie’s people were scattered and in general tribally and linguistically heterogeneous. His immediate family was certainly Nambya, but members of other linguistic groups around the Zambezi River, such as communities of Karanga, Tonga, and Leya, may have allied themselves with him because of his influence. Hence, the people were never coerced into promising allegiance to Wankie. This allowed a certain relaxed sense of fealty in the region, but meant that Wankie’s domain was insecure if the more militaristic tribes around him decided to plunder the district. Wankie was too intelligent to try organizing martial resistance to the occasional raids, knowing that he had no fighting chance. Raids for women, children, and booty occurred from time to time, and entire little villages were sometimes wiped out. Chief Wankie was also smart enough to know how to keep the better armed neighboring groups satisfied to let his tribe continue living at all – he traded with them for the kinds of coveted goods his remote territory had to offer, such as ivory from the large elephant population around the Zambezi country. ****

Thomas Baines bartering with Chief Wankie, sketched by Baines, 1862

In 1862, James Chapman and Thomas Baines traveled through the region of today’s Hwange National Park, and noted burnt houses that had been left when people recently fled Ndebele raiding. Baines mapped several places where Wankie’s people had their villages, both old and new ones. The earlier ones had been on the south side of Zambesi River, including “Wankies Old Town” on the Luisi River (now called the Deka), “Wankies Former Village” farther east and near the mouth of the Luisi River, and a “Village of Wankie” near the mouth of the Quaai


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River (now spelled Gwayi), while the most recent one (“Wankies, or Sapatane’s New Village”) was located on the other side, safe from marauding Ndebele parties.

Map showing some of the early known features of the late 19th century and their old spellings, in and around the future National Park, based on mapping by Thomas Baines, who travelled in the region in 1862, and F.C. Selous, who was there in 1873, 1874, 1877, and 1888. 'Bumbusi' marked on the map is a National Monument site today, a set of walled ruins, which was unknown to both Baines and Selous; it was the home village of Lusumbami, the hereditary Wankie killed by Ndebele king Mzilikazi in about 1853 to see if he had two hearts, as Mzilikazi had heard. This killing, and continued raiding by the Ndebele, led to Wankie's people moving across the Zambezi River.


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“Wankies Old Kraal”, late 1800s, near the Deka River

****

Between 1890 and 1896, the British South Africa Company, administrators of the future Rhodesia colony, devised a system of land designations that would partially surround the future Wankie Game Reserve with "native reserves." This was land easy to set aside – it was mainly thick bush and sandy soil, supporting some Bushman hunter-gatherers who dug pits for their water, or settled by scattered small farming villages. The two native reserves that were situated near the future Game Reserve, together totaling over 16,600 square kilometers (ca. 6,400+ square miles), were soon to be occupied by African people who thought of them "as cemeteries not Homes." 198Soil fertility was generally low, and there was little water. The new native reserves also had a particularly poisonous plant called m'khauzaan (or magow). Equally important was the fact that the villagers’ ancestors had not lived in the new places, and their remains were buried back in the old lands. This created a psychological burden for African people when they were moved out of ancestral lands. Two academic books –McGregor’s Crossing the Zambezi and Violence and Memory co-authored by Alexander, McGregor, and Ranger – contain descriptions of the historical and contemporary effects of such dislocations in the district and adjoining areas. **** In 1898, the government of Great Britain ordered the creation of a department of Native Affairs, ostensibly to safeguard African interests. The African people lost their options to hunt wild game over the next few years as colonial administrators laid down rules forbidding snaring, mass-driving, and the digging of game pits, which were the methods most in use by native hunters. The colonials thought of


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hunting as a "fair chase" exercise, more of a personal test and not so much a pursuit of food, certainly not a way of life. The colonial administrators also knew that overall numbers of wild animals were steadily dropping throughout the country. The de facto ownership of wild animals passed into the hands of civil servants. As wild animals disappeared in the face of shooting by colonial ranchers, minesuppliers, and transport operators, the indigenous African populations were made to share the blame. 199

Only in the very remote and hard to reach quarters, such as the deep Kalahari sands region where Hwange National Park would one day be located, could wildlife populations level off and slowly begin recovering, after suffering rinderpest and drought. Yet even as remote as Hwange’s landscape was, hunters of all skin colors still visited from time to time to kill animals. ****

Cape Buffalo; engraved image on the back of a Zimbabwe 100 Trillion Dollar note, 2008


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1915 Map of Native Reserves around the future Hwange National Park, re-drawn from file CO 1047/790, 'map no. 2' at The National Archives [Great Britain]. Spellings are from the original. Note some 'deductions' or land to be removed, and 'reserve reserves,' apparently not yet occupied land


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African lifeways in the new scheme of things were irresistibly transformed by the separation of Africans from their local resources. Rhodes's "big, simple, barbaric vision" 200 had been to destroy Lobengula's Ndebele kingdom, because he doubted Africans would ever function in a white-run industrialized state, and to open up a half million acres of land for European domination. One part of the developing view of industrialized life was an ethic to preserve wildlife as an aesthetic subdivision of nature, good to look at but separate from civilized lifeways. By making wildlife into state property, and limiting who could hunt them, white administrators transformed themselves from settler-pioneers to managers and developers of their own land, with complete control over useful and esthetically pleasing assets. 201 The area under control of the British South Africa Company, 1891

The Deka River country in Wankie's north was gradually re-populated by native peoples after the white men had put an end to Ndebele rule in 1896. Although some scattered villagers had always stayed in the region, more and more refugee families began coming back to their old country around the stone walled sites. In his 1994 master’s thesis, A History of Northwest Zimbabwe, G. Ncube recounts from Nambya oral history that a former Ndebele raider, originally a local man hailing from the Wankie district, took over the tribal leadership, causing many local families to disperse again to avoid his violent potential. The people who trickled back in were mainly Nambya, but there were also Tonga and Leya and Dombe and others from farther away. The Nambya language, once very similar to other Shona dialects, began drifting away as words were borrowed from the other languages. New kraals were established wherever lands could be ploughed and sweet water could be found, and the people settled down to farm in the notoriously unpredictable climate


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of the region. By the end of the 19th century, the man known as "Wankie" was back in the district named after him.

The African people didn't know it, but they only had a few more years left to enjoy the land. Soon – in the second decade of the 20th century – white farmers would take it, and then later in 1927 the government of Rhodesia would declare most of it a Game Reserve where no people could live. A new administrative district named for Wankie was established in 1903, mostly centering around recently explored coalfields. Within a few years, tsetse fly had expanded into the district, bringing disease that seriously affected cattle and humans. The advance of the fly may have been facilitated by a human exodus to the north of the Zambezi River where people could still use guns and the recently imposed hut tax was lower. 202 Without people, woodlands began growing back, which encouraged shade-loving flies. Another possible factor in the advance of the fly belt was the tendency of people to take cattle from the fly-infested country around the Zambezi River southwards through the once disease-free zone, bringing infected animals with them for local flies to bite and thus spread the disease locally.

Africans had two choices to survive in this new landscape – they could go to work for strangers as wage laborers, an unfamiliar notion, or they could stay in their unproductive reserves and struggle to survive. Yet in spite of the hard choices, important economic changes in African lives were not obvious immediately. Although with nearly no more cattle, little stored food, and often no more access to their ancestral fields, the African people still found alternatives to working in the white man's mines, stables, and warehouses, or on the rail line and the few white farms then starting up. Somehow Africans still managed to feed themselves.

This was to change soon enough. Early in the twentieth century the Wankie landscape was opened up to white settlers who were to have serious economic and social impacts on native African life. The whites were destined to become disappointed and bitter failures in the harsh country, and they guaranteed that African farmers also felt the pain. Rhodesia's directors had established an Estates Office in 1908, and within a few years the number of Rhodesian farms occupied by white farmers rose to over 2,000. 203 After 1912 most of the food needed in mining communities was supplied by white farms. The ultimate source of white-grown maize in Rhodesia was, ironically enough, the Africans themselves – seeds of the local successful varieties were originally obtained from African cultivators (although maize had been introduced to Africa 350 years earlier from its place of origin, the New World). The Africans' locally grown strains of cattle were also adopted by whites, some having been taken in the 1896 war. These cattle were a smaller, hardier race capable of enduring Rhodesia's extended dry spells and coarse natural forage. A native Commissioner made the ironic observation during the drought of 1912, 204 "the superiority of the condition of the native stock, as compared with the better breed animals owned by Europeans, was most marked." Hardy cattle


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imported from other African ranges were crossed with these little animals to increase their weight, and cattle-experts came to Rhodesia to consult on large-scale ranching. Typical Matabeleland cattle; with mixed characteristics of long and short horns, and humped and non-humped profiles.

By the end of the first 10 years of the 20th century, droughts had struck so often that the native reserves lost many formerly perennial water sources such as springs and streams.

The farming people who lived around the edges of the future National Park make only a brief appearance from time to time in government documents of the early 20th century. Little knowledge of their lives was ever collected. In 1912 the Wankie Native Commissioner, after a year on the job, pronounced the Nambya people's "political virtues" to be "docility and loyalty." They were honest and not secretive; they were not assertive, and also not very virile. They had exceptionally good manners, were kind-hearted, and they were great sharers of food during times of need. 205 The B.S.A. Police magazine The Outpost 206 jocularly described the Gwaai Native Reserve thus:

The Gwaai Reserve, though its name might give one to believe it is a place set aside for the preservation of tobacco (botanical name: Gwaai) [the Ndebele word for tobacco being igwayi)], is in truth a place set aside for the deterioration of thousands of Amandebele (zoological name: Matabele) ...[whose] name is taken from the only "river" which "runs" anywhere near it. This river is called the Gwaai (tobacco) River 207 with true Rhodesian humour, apparently because no tobacco has ever grown within 50 miles [ca. 80 kilometers] of any part of the river... [The Gwaai Reserve Police Station] is not as ugly as Nyamandhlovu[,]...not as hot and dirty as Wankie[, and]... not as cold and clean as Bembesi. ****

The Native Reserves – later renamed Tribal Trust Areas – have disappeared from Zimbabwe, replaced after 1980 by Communal Farming Areas. Villagers today live on lands that cannot yield much in the way of harvests without expensive fertilizers, which few farmers can afford. Rains are unpredictable and soils are often stony.


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Erosion has become a major problem in many regions when livestock eat all the groundcover. Trees are fast disappearing near villages. These are not the lands people would have selected for farming 100 years ago. Wildlife is long gone from many communal areas. Where wildlife does survive on the communal farm landscape, it is usually because the communal areas are near game reserves of one sort or another, such as a National Park or Safari Area. The animals disperse out of the protected region and into the communal farms. Wild animals sometimes go into the bellies of African people who snared or speared them, and the process breaks the law just as undeniably as it did when colonial rule separated native people from native wildlife. There is certainly not enough wild game to feed Zimbabwe’s African farmers on a sustainable basis, and few doubt that the government is justified in enforcing anti-hunting statutes. It would not take long for wild animals of all species to be wiped out by unregulated hunting in Zimbabwe. But all the same, African farmers look to what wild game provides – the meat, skins, tusks – as resources that must be used when crops fail or the survival of one’s family is at stake. Wildlife faces a great peril as Zimbabwe’s human population grows, the communal farming areas lose more and more soil fertility, and their water sources dry up or are exhausted from overuse. A chief named Dingaan ("found" in Ndebele) had his kraal seven or eight kilometers (ca. 45 miles) west of the Gwayi River, and his cattle grazed on the Dete vlei towards the Gwayi. (He is said by some today to be a Nambya man who spoke Ndebele, 208 but others call him the son of a bushman mother and a Kalanga father). A white Railway employee and farmer named Chatham went to Dingaan's kraal for 3 months in 1910; every week, as he reported, he was witness to a beer drink and communal dance that lasted to 2:00 a.m. 209 Another chief/headman named Ndabalangunga kept his cattle a kilometer and a half (ca. 1 mile) west of Dingaan's. Six and a half kilometers (ca. 4 miles) north were the cattle kraals of Ubite. 210 Another chief named Malindi had his name memorialized as a railway siding along the Park's border. We can only speculate what these tight-lipped natives thought about the white invaders who looked upon themselves as discoverers of Africa's sights and smells. By about 1920 as the land was being sold by the new government to white settlers, the chiefs of the resident African people were called together by Colonial administrators. Nemananga, Nekatombe, and Ngozi were told they must leave their villages. Nekatombe's people lived within the future Hwange National Park, around Tshakabika, Mzizi, and Nehimba springs, among other good places to raise cattle and plant millet. They were told to "go back to where they came from," which in the eyes of an ignorant government was the Nata River area south of today’s Park in Botswana. 211 They refused to go – it was not where most of them had ever come from. The government relented a bit, and said they could go the other direction, east, as long as they crossed the railway line and left the lands where new farms for whites were to be pegged. So Nekatombe's people "transferred" (in the words of


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those who remember the process) out of the northern hills eastwards to the Inyantue River region. But some of the transferring people had other ideas; they headed to the newly established white farms such as the one at Sinamatella, on the river originally called Lumbambala, where the white farmer was happy to receive them as a ready labor force. They lived on the farms, cultivated fields for the white farmers – who had African nicknames such as Chivhundu, Siakongo, Sikwesani, and Mancitshana (parsed to me by a Nambya speaker as "one who scares you," not really so bad a master, "big chest," "big beard," and "stingy") – and herded cattle and built the roads and fences and dams, until about 1950 when the government bought back the farms from the whites and told the African labor-force they had two years to get off the land. The people loaded their possessions on donkeys and walked to the nearest railway stations, put their things on the train to Inyantue siding, and thus left the game reserve for good. As they walked away, the game rangers burned their huts. Late Iron Age arrow points from the Park, less than 200 years old

Small clusters of clay hut floors can be found in the Park. Most are nearly melted away from rain and 50 years of animal-trampling. Around them lie metal arrow- and spear-points and stone slabs used to grind grain into flour. The homesteads have a slim kind of remanence, I think. The bush has grown up over once-cultivated fields, the dug-out termite mounds have been reshaped by the termites, and only the daydreaming elephants tread through the kraalsites on a hot mid-day, or sleep standing in the shade of the mopane trees. ****

Many kilometers from Penny’s shed and the tourist camp I also visited the Park’s Iron Age stone walls and ancient hut floors, to keep an eye on elephant damage or to look for more sites. Once I visited Mtoa ruins with a few Nambya elders and Chief Senga RomanoNekatambe on a rare day in the dry season, when the sky was full and heavy with dark clouds, and the crispy old leaves on the trees rustled in the wind. The chief was paid by the government to administer some of Hwange’s rural people, many tracing ancestry to the original builders of the stone walls in the 19th century. We had a cheerful look at the walls, which Nekatambe had never seen. He explained that while the site was relatively small compared to Bumbusi, it was in a far better location than Bumbusi ruins many kilometers northwest. At Mtoa's rocky perch you could see around for miles and miles. Off in the hazy distance, almost ducking below the horizon, was Bumbusi Hill.


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Chief Nekatombe at Shangano, outside Hwange, late 1990s

After a lunch of dried meat, bread, water, and cookies, we took off our shoes and sat facing the walls. The elders and the Chief made a little ritual prayer asking to be forgiven for dropping in unannounced, and also asking for good luck. We clapped our hands quietly and slowly, and when the prayer was over we were relaxed and smiled at each other. Nekatambe wanted to find a nearly whole cooking pot to take home, but all the old pottery had long ago been broken into fragments by trampling elephants or baboons rooting for insects.

At the time, Nekatambe was a tall and robust 70 years old, with eyes that looked blue, strangely enough, and a kind of distracted and thoughtful manner. Sometimes I wonder if the children of the children of the farmers and foragers born first in this country felt bereavement over the loss of the land. I didn’t see grief in the eyes and faces of Nambya elders at Mtoa, but African people have learned to hide what they feel. They are polite and private. This distancing irritates many whites – the vacant gaze of no interest, the look of incomprehension when asked a question. But it is necessary distancing, perhaps, because these people have lost everything else, and they will not allow their last degree of separateness to be lost too.

African people find ways to laugh often, but they also must feel the losses of the past 120 years. There is an abstracted focus in the eyes of the older people, especially when they are asked about the time long ago when they lived in the land that became Hwange National Park. Lawrence Ngwenya, a man of some eloquence (having been a schoolmaster for years) told me once he was jealous of Hwange's flat and sandy country; his farm in Songwa outside the Park is hilly and very stony. Move the wild animals to his rocky farmland, he said, and let him take his cattle and maize to Hwange’s woodlands, where the ploughing will be easier.

Chief Nekatambe recalled how his childhood village of 60 years ago was thickly wooded; now it is mostly bare rocky ground and scrub. Wild dogs once hid in the bushes and preyed on the cattle and goats. Nekatambe wanted to move into the National Park where there still are thick trees and plenty of grass for his cattle.


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Dry maize stalks, grown amongst the rocks in Lambo Communal Farming Land, near Hwange National Park

****

The bottom surface of a Nambya basket, made by an unknown craftswoman living in the Lukosi River area, near the Park


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Nambya and the Park Today

The logo of the Nambya Cultural Association, established in the 1960s to ensure survival of the language and culture. The website URL is http://nambya.org/

Nambya rainmaking ceremonies have frequently been conducted at the walled ruins of Bumbusi National Monument in the Park, although they were discontinued for a time when a party of Nambya visitors became lost in the Wankie Game Reserve in 1946. 212 Since Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980 and the beginning of majority rule in the country, the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe have been assisting local people in developing a Nambya Cultural Centre in Hwange town. The local Nambya people are virtually invisible and silent to Park visitors, but one day they may be given rights of free access to the stone-walled sites their ancestors lived in, allowing them to carry out rituals or ceremonies and spend time in landscapes of memory. The National Park may allow National Museums and Monuments to erect informative plaques relating the history of the Nambya in the landscape, so tourist visitors can understand the relationship of local communities to this great seemingly empty land and see that besides its natural riches it has a cultural heritage so often overlooked by outsiders who come to view wild animals. 213 Certainly the Nambya farming people with deep roots in the land, along with the Tyua descendants of the stone-age foragers, deserve acknowledgement and homage. ⫷⫸⫷⫸⫷⫸

Image engraved on the back of a Zimbabwe One Dollar note, 2006


Notes

214

142

Ever since colonists invaded southern Africa, Bushmen have been manufactured into mythical veld mouseketeers by anthropologists, or into vermin and subhuman thieves by white farmers and police. The term "Bushman" was historically applied to foraging people of the Kalahari who did not fit into other (tribal) categories. They were often considered subhuman by colonists and settlers in southern Africa, mainly because they were social bandits, existing on the outskirts of civilized society. Much has been written about "the politics of labeling Bushman" (Gordon 1992:4) and the squabbling goes on over better terms to call them. The indigenous people of the Kalahari area, those people who seem to be able to trace their ancestry to local hunter-gatherer groups resident for at least 20,000 years in the same region, "do not see themselves as a single integrated unit, nor do they call themselves by a single name" (ibid., p. 4); therefore the category "Bushman" can be thought of as merely a colonist's convenience for organizing people seen as very different from the rest of southern Africa's many kinds of humanity, none else of whom were so nomadic, so independent of central authorities, so landscape-oriented rather than law-andstate-oriented. The alternative term "San" has been snorted at by some sensitive social scientists as being just as arbitrary and politicized as "Bushman," in that it once again reduced a people with a rich range of cultural diversity into a single class that is clearly different from all other citizens in the modern nations they inhabit, and hence open to discriminatory politics. Some other social scientists think the word San, or, better yet, each peoples' self-referent names, avoid the racist stigma attached to the word Bushman (Wilson and Thompson 1969; Wilmsen 1989). Wilmsen prefers assigning "Bushman" and "San" to the ashcan of history, but retaining "Khoisanspeaking," "Khoe-speaking," or "San-speaking," because language names seem relatively harmless labels to him, while Gordon thinks that the huge number of self-referent names used by each different San-speaking group would make the discontinuance of convenient names like Bushman impossible and confusing. Wilmsen thus sees Gordon's rationalizing of the keeping of the label "Bushman" as just another unjustified homogenization of diversity, a typical Eurocentric scientist's reaction, and perpetuating the powerlessness of these diverse San-speaking groups.

I cannot restore power to these people by calling them any special names, either those they attach to themselves or those that nations give them. I do not mean to gloss over all their ethnic differences by labeling them all indiscriminately as Bushman, but I do wish it to be known that while the term Bushman politically and socially has been used to classify peoples without power in governments and without favor from the colonizers (both European and Bantu) who settle their lands, to me it signifies the most ecologically empowered of all people who ever lived in the region of Hwange National Park. 143

Chapman 1868:87.


144

Chapman 1868:30.

145

Dornan 1925:77-78.

Notes

215

146

NAZ NBH 1/1/1, p. 1.

147

Dornan 1925:53, 84-110, 112.

148

Theal 1899:3.

149

Rayner 1962:24.

150

NAZ OA 1/1/1; also see Oates 1881:232-233. Frank Oates wanted to fill a sack with Bushman bones, but this upset his local guides greatly, especially a man who had helped kill the Bushmen. 151

Dornan 1925:206.

152

Dornan 1925:206.

153

Trans. by Robt Gordon (1990:509), original source Passarge (1907).

154

Motzafi-Haller (1994) examines the historical processes behind the social and economic marginalization of people considered “Bushman” even when they have not hunted and gathered for generations. 155

NAZ NBH 1/1/1, p. 2.

156

Hitchcock 1988.

157

Hitchcock 1988.

158

Yellen 1985.

159

Tobias 1964:73.

160

J. Gordon, 1956, "Report to Chief Game Warden for period 15-5-56 to 30th June '56" (manuscript). 161

The Sunday News 26 September 1993, p. 1 and 2.

162

The Bulawayo Chronicle 18 September 1993, p. 1, col. 2-4..

163

The Bulawayo Chronicle 17 July 1995, p. 1, col.1-4.

164

The Bulawayo Chronicle 10 June 1995, p. 1, col. 2-3.

165

Bhebhe 2013: News Day 14 May 2013, Nqobile Bhebhe: “San People Resist Civilisation: Mugabe.” 166

Silberbauer 1981:152.


Notes

216

167

Lyn Wadley and students have demonstrated the clear spatial distinctions between earlier and later stone age behavior through excavations and analyses at Rose Cottage Cave in South Africa; in other parts of the world an identical contrast appears as well (well summarized by Klein 1999). 168

Brooks 1996; A. Brooks 1996, Open Air Sites in the Middle Stone Age of Africa, pp. 249-253 IN Middle Palaeolithic and Middle Stone Age Settlement Systems (Proceedings of the XIII Congress, International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, 1996, Forli [Italy]). A.B.A.C.O. Edizioni. 169

A thirstland is the Victorian term applied to near-deserts and bush where the rainfall is highly seasonal, and surface water is rare much of the year.

170

Steyn 1957; Woollard 1986; Woollard et al. 1984; see Hitchcock and Bleed 1997.

171

Hitchcock and Bleed 1997.

172

Walker 1995a.

173

The figures used here were put together by Scholes and Walker 1993 from different sources.

174

Robinson 1966.

175

Bates 1972:92.

176

Paul Harrison (1992) has envisioned the larger trends in society that accompanied this change in subsistence: At first Hwange's low-density foragers founded their cultures and their survival on land – unlimited, free land to be explored and traveled widely. Maybe all of it wasn't entirely free – different bands of people may have staked claims to nut groves or waterholes or certain hunting ranges, but for the most part the land's resources were available to anyone who knew how to find and prepare them for use. A wide diversity of foods was there for the taking, as the Kalahari bushpeople knew. There are animals to catch, roots and tubers to dig, nuts and fruits and seeds to eat, and there is fiber for rope and fabric, and many more kinds of decorative and nutritious and functional materials. Little concentrated work was needed to extract support from the land. Population densities increased a bit as technology was adapted to the forests and savannas. Then a wall was dropped in the foragers' track, a wall of climate change perhaps, or a wall of lowered carrying capacity. The local ranges no longer could support the same number of people as it had before. The crisis was addressed through a revolution, or an innovation. As diversity in foods was reduced, the intensity of food harvesting was made to increase. Cultivation was added to foraging, and people became more sedentary to tend the crops (which may have been new domesticants, or wild species). Before long, land was being worked a couple of hours a day, every day, to clear it and prepare it and plant and weed and harvest. Low-density cultivating foragers were moderately well off until the next wall dropped, possibly another climate change, or a vegetation change caused by climatic change. Perhaps this new crisis was one of arable-land shortages. The revolution in response this time was a shift from land as the sole source of food (wild or cultivated) to land with livestock. The foragers who farmed now became farmers who occasionally hunted and gathered. No hunting-gathering group would have become obligate cultivators unless they had to, because there is much more work involved in farming than in foraging. Foragers reluctantly evolved into


Notes

217

settled village farmers. To supplement their income, or their returns from tilling the soil, the farmers took to exploiting minerals and other non-food resources. Iron was smelted and traded by some. Ivory and gold and eggshell beadwork were also traded and perhaps sold. Some new and valuable resources were limited and localized, so control over them conferred unusual power to people who before had always been equals. Some people became more important than others; they made decisions about allocating land for ploughing or pasturage, and they hoarded livestock. Denser human populations, along with their goats and cattle, tend to deplete land resources, since fields cannot be allowed to lie fallow very long, if at all, to recover their fertility. Wood is cut for hut-building and to burn as fuel. Trees are burned twice to smelt iron – once to make charcoal, and once to superheat iron-making furnaces. Another ecological wall begins to drop, and another revolution in society, technology, and politics must be created. Ironically, growing human populations make for stronger and stronger governments. Markets and demands expand, social controls formalize. Individuals are worked longer and harder. Communications improve, and more and more of social behavior is supervised. More wealth can be accumulated where more people live together. Technology and work habits become more efficient, wresting more returns from less land or lesser quality land. Extra labor and cooperative labor add to productivity. Scarce resources are reduced in cost as demand rises and more of them go into circulation. Specialist classes are created, and items difficult to procure or manufacture appear in greater quantities, lowering their price. Resource re-distribution by decree makes sure that the better off workers keep the less well off workers adequately supplied. Bigger populations mean stronger rulers and stronger peoples, forced into communal actions on a large scale to survive periods of stress and scarcity. 177

Tablet 1955: 119.

178

Ford 1971.

179

du Toit 1981.

180

The prefixes Si- or Chi- may be commonly added to the base tribal noun to indicate the language spoken by that group.

181

Scholes and Walker 1993 put together these estimates based on ethnographies in South Africa.

182

Marks 1976.

183

For an example, see Plug and Voigt 1985.

184

The site of Great Zimbabwe and its regional precursor and successor sites are the subjects of many excellent scholarly studies. Recommended sources for information about the archeological finds and the controversies about Great Zimbabwe’s political and symbolic values are: Beach 1980; Caton-Thompson 1931; Fontein 2007; Garlake 1973; Huffman 1987; Matenga 1998; Ndoro 2001; Pikirayi 2001; Pwiti and Ndoro 1999; Robinson 1961; and Sinclair 1987. 185

See Huffman 1984 or van Waarden 1989.

186

Levin 1987:125.

187

Dornan 1916.


Notes

188

NAZ N 3/33, folio 3, letter of 10 January 1923.

189

NAZ N 3/33/1-4.

190

NAZ N 3/33, folio 19, memo from F. Posselt, 4 April 1918.

218

191

The prefix Ba- added to the base noun Nambiya denotes a plural. Similar prefixes indicate plurals in other tribal names, such as AmaNdebele and AmaSili. To keep the text simple, I do not use these forms.

192

Hemans 1913.

193

Such as Henson 1973; Hayes 1977; Ncube 1994; Tafangenyasha 1990.McGregor 2005 is an excellent source of information about Nambya oral history and written references. 194

The migrant people, who began to call themselves BaNambya (the plural form of Nambya), were independent of the large state they had broken from. The Nambya people who still live in the area keep alive an oral folkloric tradition of their origin. The tradition attributes the Rozvi migration to overcrowding, possibly a result either of pressure put on the state by hostility from other tribes, or by sustained drought. One version of the origin legend attributes the migration to an invasion by a king named Zwangendaba. Zwangendaba killed the Rozvi king (called "mambo") – possibly by skinning him alive – but the king's sons escaped and fled northward. At any rate, the migration was just one more aspect of a period of social disruption that peaked around 1820 to 1840 in southern Africa. This period, called the mfecane or difequane, meaning "the grinding,” is the beginning of modern southern Africa, and a tumultuous beginning it was. 195

McGregor (2009: 197; 2005: 131) notes that many Shona speakers from the rest of Zimbabwe regarded the Nambya language as a “distortion” of proper Shona, or a dialect of sorts, rather than a separate language. The Nambya-preferred spelling (reflecting the local pronunciation) Whange was rejected by central government and local Shona-speaking officials. Hwange is the only spelling to be found on country maps. 196

Davidson 1992.

197

Alexander 1989:126.

198

Palmer 1977:33.

199

MacKenzie 1988. Hunting had been an aristocratic activity in England, where the King's parks and forests were closed to hunting by the lower classes. The British had a long history of restricting social access to hunting – the activity as well as the places in which to do it – since the Middle Ages. 200

Oppenheimer 1972:72.

201

There is a solid literature on colonial attitudes towards wildlife, and the evolution of those attitudes. See Mackenzie 1988 for an entree into the readings, and Carruthers 1995 for a good description of South Africa’s historical developments. 202

McGregor 2009: 70.

203 Palmer

1977:91. 1977:94. 205 NAZ NBH 1/1/1, "Report of the Native Commissioner Wankie District for the Year 1912," p. 3. 206 TheOutpost Vol. XV, No. 4, Oct 1937, p. 14. 207 An alternative source of the river's name is that it was the parched utterance of a party of thirsty BaSotho hunters in the region who asked where the nearest water was ---"Ukayi?" – which SiNdebele speakers pronounced as Gwayi (Parker 1934:56). 208 Interview of 7/94 with Poselani. 209 Chatham NAZ Source?? 210 NAZ A 3 2/8, folio 129. 211 Interview with Ndobale Shoko, 7/95. 212 See McGregor 2009: 131-136 for a discussion of the Nambya’s attempts to promote their own connections with the Hwange landscape; also see Ncube 1994. 213 McGregor (2005) describes the conflicts between local African communities and the Iron Age ruins in Hwange National Park. In a similar vein, Terence Ranger’s book Voices From the Rocks (1999) is an examination of how culture (and politics) are important parts of the heritage that should be made more publicly available in Matobo National Park. A third noteworthy study, Joost Fontein’s book The Silence of Great Zimbabwe (2007), is an extended study of the same sorts of issues at Great Zimbabwe, namely the officially unrecognized local cultural meanings and values imbued in a nationally important site. 204 Palmer