The Sculptors of Mapungubwe

by Zakes Mda

  The leader of the slavers took Chata’s rock rabbit skin bag in which he kept his silk, a few gold ingots and a piece of dried meat.

  “Ha! You must have stolen these from the market.”

  He also confiscated his spear and shield.

  “If I were you,” said the slaver to Chata’s Swahili mates, “I’d get out of here as fast as you can before I suspect you are also my Zanj slaves and take you to my ship.”

  Chata’s mates didn’t wait for a second hint; they hurried away without ever looking back.

  Though Chata tried to fight, the slavers of Kish soon overpowered him. They frog-marched him back to the docks and bundled him in chains into the slave baggala.

  Goodbye freedom, he told himself as the slavers stripped him of his robes, gave him a loincloth to cover his nakedness and pushed him down the hatch. He dropped on a group of men sprawled out in the hold. The slavers closed the hatch and there was absolute darkness.

  People talked among themselves in tongues that Chata could not understand. Some were mumbling like madmen while others were talking to their Gods. Next to him were Azande men – from villages more than a moon’s journey from Mogadishu – who had been captured in battles and skirmishes with the Habash people and were sold to the Arab slavers by Habash generals. Chata struggled to understand their language, and after a few days a smattering of a conversation could take place. He was surprised that some of the words were similar to the words of his language and also of Swahili.

  It seemed there was some problem. The slave baggala remained docked for more than a week and the slaves on board did not know why it was not sailing away. The crew and the guards kept mum, and the stench of sweat sent Chata’s head reeling. The chute through which waste matter was disposed of didn’t seem to do the trick and sometimes it was blocked until some brave soul tried to unblock it with his own hands.

  Occasionally the slavers opened the hatch and the light flooded in. They threw chunks of bread and lowered some swill that looked like dirty water in bowls tied to strings. A kindly guard would leave the hatch open for some hours and from his angle Chata could see the guards walking on the deck. Once or twice he saw the guard who stole his rock rabbit bag strutting about with the bag hanging across his chest. When the hunger pangs attacked because of the meagre rations he thought longingly of the dried meat in the bag. The thieving guard must have eaten it by now. He doubted if his silk material and his gold ingots were still there. It was likely that the guard had sold them.

  The crew was getting impatient. Chata heard them complain; he didn’t know what about because he didn’t understand their language. In fact, they were complaining about the long wait. There was a dispute with the port authorities over some taxes that the slavers owed from a previous expedition. There was a lot of anxiety in the dhow because the slaves were needed urgently by the rulers of Kish for the harvest of sugar cane in southern Mesopotamia. Some of them would be used as soldiers who would fight wars and defend the King of Kish.

  When Chata heard what awaited him he panicked. Unlike the Azande men who seemed to be resigned to their fate, Chata could not bear the thought of working in the fields of strangers or defending their king – things he never did even in Mapungubwe. He missed his carefree life and blamed his wanderlust for his predicament. He missed the familiar ebony faces of the townspeople and the way they ribbed him. Most of all he missed his gold. He imagined himself taking some of it out of the secret chamber in his house. He saw it shimmering in the morning light that sneaked in through the window. He saw himself touching it and caressing it. He missed his gold more than he missed the people and their town. It would be safe for now, he was certain. Ma Chirikure was looking after his house and Anopa was looking after Zwanga’s mine. Ma Chirikure would never let anyone into the house, and if people did enter they would never find the gold. Mapungubweans knew that he was a gold hoarder but no one knew where he kept it or how. For sure, if anything happened to him and he did not return to Mapungubwe Ma Chirikure would not look after his property for ever. For one thing, she would die one day. And since people would have given him up for dead Baba-Munene would allow them to go into his house and make a thorough search. Maybe one day they would become wise to the fact that the house was smaller inside than it was outside because of the secret chamber. They would find the secret entrance and discover his gold. Chata was certain that Baba-Munene would divide it in three equal parts among the King’s coffers, Zwanga and Rendi. The latter two, of course, would be regarded as his only kin and therefore his heirs. As these thoughts raced through his mind he admonished himself. He would not be resigned to his fate like his fellow prisoners. He was determined to escape. There was nothing he could do at that moment so he would pretend to be docile until he got to Kish. But once there, it did not matter if they sent him to the sugar cane fields or to the military, he would spend every waking moment planning his escape. His spirit would not rest until he was able to escape and find his way back to his gold.

  One night the slaves were woken up by a commotion on the deck. The baggala was under attack.

  “Dil caruurta Kish! Dil cadowga!” Kill the offspring of Kish! Kill the enemy! Yells resounded throughout the vessels.

  “The Barbaroi pirates!” the slaves heard a guard shout.

  The Barbaroi were armed with swords, axes and spears and were hacking wildly at everything and everyone in sight. They opened the hatch and lowered the rope ladder. The captives fell over themselves climbing up the rungs. As soon as they landed on the deck they joined the skirmish though they were unarmed. Some took daggers and swords from the fallen slavers. The men of Kish had no chance. They were slain even as they raised their hands in surrender. Chata went straight for the guard who had his rock rabbit bag and found him lying in a pool of blood, with the bag still hanging around his neck. He grabbed the bag, the slaver’s scimitar, his cape and turban. He climbed down the hull and made his escape from the baggala. It seemed to him the Barbaroi were swishing their swords indiscriminately and did not care whether they slew slave or slaver. It was not for the love of freedom that they had stormed the dhow but for the love of loot.

  Chata was able to escape the bloodbath with two Azande men. Although his rock rabbit bag was bloody, his silk cloth and gold ingots were still there. Obviously the guard regarded them as his personal booty; that was why the bag was with him all the time.

  THE MEN TOOK SOME of Chata’s stories cum grano salis, as the ancient Romans used to say when intelligence was required to sift fact from fiction. His travels were indeed amazing, but the worlds he portrayed were so strange that the Mapungubweans failed to recreate them in their imaginations. Yes, he was gone for many full moons, for more than four seasons even, which meant that he had gone very far indeed; perhaps right up to the edge of the world. When he returned he was no longer the Chata they knew. He was a brooding Chata and a Chata who preferred his own company – more so than ever before. Then he started telling his stories.

  As the fifty or so men sat under the gigantic baobab tree whose branches stretched out like roots in the air above Baba-Munene’s compound, and on the boulders that were lined along the stakes that formed a fence, carving pales into human and animal figures for the King’s new palisade, Chata regaled them with stories of how he and his Azande companions traversed the land of the Barbaroi, crossing rivers and forests into al-Habash, and then proceeded in a south-westerly direction until they got to the land of the Azande. By this time Chata’s feet were as hard as rock from all the barefoot walking. He had also gained some fluency in Pazande, the language of the Azande.

  Throughout this journey he had been nagged by the regret that he could not recover his shield and spear from the slavers – the only items left that reminded him of his beloved Mapungubwe, save for the gold ingots, which didn’t count because sooner or later he bartered them for his survival. The pain caused by the loss of his weapons, which were more accoutrements tha
n instruments of death, had been somewhat palliated by the scimitar. Not only was it handy in his defence against man or beast, it was his trophy. It would forever remind him of his experiences with the men of Kish and of his journey with the Azande.

  Chata told the carvers how he and his companions joined the Azande army and participated in a number of raids on neighbouring peoples. And how he was struck by the ferocity of the Azande soldiers, by the attention they paid to their coiffures, by their fierce-looking scarification marks and teeth that were filed so sharp they looked like those of wild animals, and by their broad brown shields decorated with white crosses. He had marvelled at the range of weaponry that the Azande had in their arsenal, some of which he hoped to reproduce in Mapungubwe in the event there was a war. These included the makraka, a curved blade that the soldiers used for decapitating the enemy, and the makrigga, a long spear with backward-facing hooks that could rip a man’s stomach bringing back with it his intestines and all the other innards. There was also the throwing knife called kpinga that could kill the enemy from a distance. Chata had learnt the use of all these weapons, he told the carvers, including the bows with poisoned arrows that were reminiscent of his mother’s !Kung people.

  But what floored the carvers of Mapungubwe most was the part where Chata told them that after every successful campaign, after every raid when the victorious army came back with spoils, there was a lot of rejoicing and the soldiers were rewarded with intercrural sex with teenage boys. The men of Mapungubwe didn’t believe that there were nations where such practices were sanctioned by law and custom. In Mapungubwe men who were inclined to such intimacies did them in secret and were laughed at if they were discovered; they were deemed to be the kind of men who were afraid of women. Or they might even be shunned for behaving like herdboys who were prone to such behaviour among themselves; why, some herdboys even did it with goats. Only certain orders of diviners and shamans were allowed sacred male-to-male or female-to-female sex in Mapungubwe. Yet among the ferocious Azande soldiers intercrural intercourse among males was an activity in which men participated as part of the victory rituals after battle.

  “You also did it, mukomana?” asked Rendani, laughing.

  Everyone looked up to see him standing near the entrance to Baba-Munene’s palisade. No one had seen him arrive. He was resplendent in his leopard kaross and a royal feather on his head; not the kind of attire for a man who was ready to carve wood but more for a ndzhinga who was bent on showing off his status. He had been scarce since the men started carving the pales; he claimed that he had urgent and protracted business to settle with some members of the Council of Elders. That was why he had assigned Chata to do what he, Rendani, should be doing as Royal Sculptor in the first place – take charge of the carvings.

  “Oh, yes,” said Chata, “every soldier did it. It is the custom of the Azande. They told me it is what made them fierce and undefeated.”

  Chata told the carvers that he acquitted himself so well in battle that the Azande chiefs and elders wanted to reward him with wives and fields.

  “Oh, they did not know that you are afraid of women?” said one man and the rest laughed.

  Although they were ribbing Chata, most of the carvers did believe that there was some truth in it. Why else was he not married at his age? However, they did not doubt part of the story. His prowess in battle was well known, though many seasons had passed since there was any kind of war in the region. They also knew that Chata continued to excel in the war games that men played in times of peace.

  His expertise in blacksmithing stood him in good stead with the Azande, and that enhanced his reputation among the people. But he couldn’t imagine himself living among them for the rest of his life. The shimmer of his stash of gold continued to flash before his eyes at the same time as he heard the call of the Mapungubwe wilderness. It was a different kind of wilderness with flat landscapes broken only by hills and hillocks instead of mountains, and by scraggy marula and mopane trees with an occasional ancient baobab instead of the lush and thick Azande forests that stretched for a journey of many days. Every wind that blew in his direction carried the call loud and clear. He imagined himself roaming the plains and breathing the air of his ancestors in freedom, or hunting the meat animals that once were people. He saw himself moulding creatures of his dreams in ivory and gold in Zwanga’s old smithy.

  One night he stole away.

  He knew that the Azande would feel betrayed and would send search parties after him. He used the ways of the !Kung to disguise his trail making it look like that of a leopard, and sometimes like the spoor of two wild dogs. To achieve this, he had to perform a specific dance of the !Kung, the contorted movements of which imprinted only his heels, toes, elbows and fingers on the ground. Even on those pathways that were carpeted with rotting leaves he continued the forward-moving dance; he knew that expert hunters could easily detect a spoor even in places where a novice’s eye could see nothing.

  Deep in the thick forests he took refuge among the BaTwa people – the short folk who could easily be mistaken for Zhun/twasi, except for the fact that they dwelt in the forest from which they gathered fruit and roots and hunted monkeys for meat. The Zhun/twasi, on the other hand, roamed the plains and the deserts and the hills and found shelter in the caves where they left their sacred paintings for posterity.

  He kept on walking, armed with a makraka, a makrigga and an Azande shield – his silk cloth still in his old rock rabbit skin bag which had long lost its fur – until after a season of crossing more forests, mountains and rivers, he arrived back home in Mapungubwe.

  “We heard you had been eaten by cannibals,” said one carver.

  “What I heard was that he had become a phuli in the land of the Arabs,” said Anopa, Chata’s assistant at Zwanga’s mine.

  That’s what was spread by the Swahili traders who came to the town. Chata was an Arab slave, they said. Obviously they had heard from those who had heard from those who had heard from Hamisi wa Babu or from members of his crew.

  “What I heard,” said Rendani, “was that he was hiding with the forest people because he did not want to honour our King with his carvings of the pales.”

  Rendani said these words as if he was joking, but they stung Chata. He had missed the last carving of the King’s palisades because when the season came for the work to be done he was either enslaved in an Arab dhow or wandering in the lands of the Azande fighting their battles. It was not the first time that Rendani implied that he had been playing truant from his responsibilities as a man and a sculptor of Mapungubwe. On the very day of his return from the wanderlust he had gone to greet Rendani at his homestead and to tell him of the wonderful and terrible things that had befallen him. Instead of the joyful welcome that he had expected from his mukomana he received a tongue-lashing about the duties he had shirked in his absence: the sowing and hoeing of the royal tribute fields – the dzunde – which was the duty of every adult Mapungubwean before they attended to their own fields, the extension of the zimbabwes – the stone enclosures – that surrounded the southern part of the town and were intended to encompass the whole town eventually, and of course the carving of the palisades which was the obligation of every carver in the realm. Why, even amateur and apprentice carvers looked forward to this activity because that’s where they learnt new skills from the masters and also displayed their own skills for greater and wider recognition.

  The palisade that surrounded the sacred house at the Royal Compound where the King and his rain doctors conducted the secret rites of mixing rainmaking medicines had to be replaced every year during the sacred month when no farming was done and men were idle. It was the season that fell between harvest and the preparation of the fields for new planting. Another reason why people looked forward to this period was that the activity brought together carvers from various parts of the kingdom – from the town, from the farms on the floodplains, from the cattle posts, from th
e mining communities, and from villages that lay beyond the hills and were under sub-chiefs and headmen who paid tribute to the Thovhele of Mapungubwe, as the King was also called. This gathering was therefore valued for inculcating unity and solidarity among different clans. But what the carvers liked most were the festive atmosphere and the meat and beer that were served as they carved the pales.

  Indeed, it was time for feasting and Rendani gave way to a string of women and girls carrying on their heads bowls of sorghum cooked with pumpkin leaves and beans, groundnuts and meat. They were followed by another string of women with clay pots of marula beer and gourds that the men used for drinking.

  “Oh, that’s why Rendani has graced us with his presence,” said Chata. “He knew it was time for food.”

  The men laughed. Rendani pretended to laugh too. But he knew that Chata was trying to get even. It was obvious to him that his mukomana was still smarting for having been roped into taking charge of the carving ritual. Rendani knew that he had got him where he wanted him. In the previous years that Chata had participated he had quickly done his share by carving one of his creatures that did not look like any creature on earth, making it twist and turn along the long thin shape of the pale, and then leaving on his own business. This time he was bound to stay because he was overseeing the whole process. After the men had carved their pales, turning their tops into sculptures of animals of their choice, or of women with children on their backs, or of spears, battle-axes, ploughs and hoes, he had to see to it that they used the carved pales to build the new palisade. He had to be there as the men sang lamentations and burned the carved pales from the old fence, letting the smoke billow up as an incense to soothe the Great Mwali where He sat in the dimension of the dead and the unborn surrounded by the ancestors who were His councillors – ranging from the previous kings who reigned from the timeless past, even before the people migrated to Mapungubwe, to the dead father of the present King. The incense would also reach the second tier of ancestors, that of patricians, artists and artisans, and of course the third layer composed of the ancestors of all common men and women. They too had the ear of Mwali and their descendants on earth could speak to Him via them. No human being – be it King or commoner – could speak with Mwali directly.