Chapter 45Rhodesia — Bulawayo — Matoppos — KhamiRHODESIA — BULAWAYO — MATOPPOS — KHAMI
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Through desert-like country I now travelled through the Kalahari to Bulawayo in the new Rhodes-land, Rhodesia. Astonishing things have been created here in the short time since “Matabeleland” was handed over to the English by its chieftain1, thanks to Rhodes's energy and shrewdness. Then I went out to the Matoppo Hills, to his grave. Surely the most grandly conceived burial place in the world; all around, an endless hill country sown with “Coopjes,” giant boulders. Beside one especially gigantic rock his name is cut into a recumbent slab of stone: Cecil Rhodes — and nothing more. A grave as impressive as for a Moses. But did not Rhodes too make the water of life gush from stones?
And then I drove on besides, by motor-car — ah, for heavy money — to the immense ruin-site of Khami. It is said to be, in its kind, just as magnificent as the ruin-field of Zimbabwe, which for one person would have been all too costly, almost impossible to reach. But here in Khami too, after all, was “Ophir2,” the wonderland of the Queen of Sheba. Here too one finds everywhere those mysterious gold-smelting furnaces, as at Zimbabwe. At Khami there is an endless enclosing wall with the familiar herringbone pattern. The potsherds of millennia have been found among the brick ruins of seven vanished peoples and cultures. Some scholars will have nothing to do with the Ophir dream and the Queen of Sheba, and assert that Zimbabwe and Khami were simply Hottentot settlements, which the waves of peoples then flooded over in the course of the centuries and millennia with their most various cultures. Perhaps the one would be just as remarkable as the other. But can the Queen of Sheba not have had Hottentot blood? Or can the Hottentots only have come later? — Yes, many parts of world history are still dark.
All the ruins at Khami are overgrown with the most luxuriant vegetation. Everything sprouted and budded in millions of blossoms. With a shudder in my heart I strode through this immense solitude. What if I lost my way in this labyrinth and then by night became the prey of the beasts of prey hidden within it?
Bulawayo is a true new country with immense possibilities for its pioneers. I felt that at every step. It lay fairly in the air.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑handed over to the English by its chieftain — The gentlest possible description of a conquest. Lobengula, king of the Ndebele, signed away mineral rights in the Rudd Concession of 1888 under heavy persuasion; when that proved insufficient, Rhodes's Chartered Company took Matabeleland by war in 1893. Lobengula burned his own capital at Bulawayo, fled north and died early in 1894. Nothing was handed over — but the version she was told is the one the young colony told itself.
- ↑Ophir — The Bible's land of gold — the romantic theory that Great Zimbabwe and Khami were the work of Phoenicians or of Sheba's Sabaeans. Khami, capital of the Torwa state from about the fifteenth century, is a successor of Great Zimbabwe — African cities both. The Ophir legend sold books and suited colonial politics: if the ruins were ancient Semitic colonies, the English were merely the land's second civilizers. Scientific excavation had already settled the matter — David Randall-MacIver showed a medieval African origin in 1905 — but the dream died hard, and her guides clearly served her the gold-furnaces and the Queen of Sheba entire. Her own counter-question, why the builders should not have been African, stumbles in period dress onto the truth.