The Sculptors of Mapungubwe

by Zakes Mda

  Chata knelt in the water. Not on the low bank of the stream, but in the stream itself. He scooped the water in his hands and tossed it about and it splashed all over his body. Then he turned to his astonished companions and said: “There is gold in those hills.”

  He showed them sediment deposited by the flowing water; it had traces of what he identified as gold. It was the turn of his assistants to sing and dance. They jokingly tried to mimic his clicky song, but broke out laughing because theirs was obviously nonsense. The ox and the quagga ignored their antics and drank the cool water with its alluvial gold.

  The three men and their beasts followed the stream up the rocky slopes to its primary source. It was not a long stream and a few hours later they reached the reefs that Chata’s tutored eye knew at once contained gold.

  “We’ll set up our mine here,” said Chata. “A mining village will grow on these slopes. We’ll pay tribute to whichever chief or king has jurisdiction over these lands.”

  Chata explained to them that the only kind of mining that was likely to succeed here was hard-rock mining, the same method used by Mapungubwean miners of copper ores. It was a different process of mining from what he was accustomed to at Zwanga’s mine in the southern escarpments of Mapungubwe. There, because of the terrain and the location of the gold ore deposits, mining was underground, with open stopes of horizontal excavations and vertical shafts with underground stopes. It was possible to do this at Zwanga’s mine because the mine was located in a valley that sloped only slightly. Chata’s new mine, however, would be on steep ridges. It would not be difficult to do hard-rock mining at first because some of the gold was visible in the quartz reefs. With crowbars and hammers and chisels the men would break the rock and start extracting the gold ore.

  But first they would build a house for themselves and a stockade kraal for the ox and the quagga. They would explore the neighbourhood and establish relations with whatever villages were in the vicinity and pay tribute to their headmen and chiefs. They would acquire cows for milk, and maybe even sheep and goats if there were any in the region. They would recruit more workers when the need arose and their village would grow into a thriving mining village like all the mining villages in Mapungubwe.

  “And, of course, to solidify the ties with our neighbours you must marry their maidens, which would mean more hands at the mine,” said Chata to his assistants.

  They chuckled and Batsirai said, “What about you? You should be having five wives by now.”

  “You leave me out of it,” said Chata, smiling.

  PART TWO

  RAIN DOCTORS HAD DONE their work on distant hills. The King, as a living ancestor, had performed his role of entreating his fellow ancestors – those who were in the ground – to request Mwali to wet the land so rivers could flow, fields could luxuriate and cattle could fatten. He was truly the rainmaker, and rain doctors merely provided the rain medicine that was kept in a horn in a sacred rain house behind the King’s own quarters where he spent most of his life in sacred seclusion. When the skies failed to weep the fault did not lie with the rain doctors but with the King. Granted, the rain medicine must be strong for the King to use it effectively to provoke rain into falling and doctors with strong horns made it possible for the King to be a successful rainmaker. The King and his rain doctors depended on each other in the constant war to ward off food crises.

  Drought was slowly squeezing the life out of Mapungubwe and the consensus was that the King had become weak. A strong King was a strong rainmaker. Of course, commoners could not complain to him directly; he lived in sacred seclusion and was seen only during rainmaking ceremonies. They complained to members of the Council of Elders who complained to Baba-Munene, the nation’s Younger Father.

  “It is not the weakness of the King that is the problem here,” said Baba-Munene. “Our rain doctors’ horns have become too weak.”

  He could not say what had weakened them since they were kept in the medicine house all the time.

  There was a lot of blame to go around. Some said because of the material wealth that pervaded the hilltop the grandees of the land were forgetting to honour their ancestors in the appropriate manner. Even at the bottom of the hill there were those whose lives had been taken over by greed, like the ṅame Chata who had flouted the laws and the traditions of the land, and even stubbornly defied the ruling of the Royal Court. But there were many Mapungubweans who insisted that the King, and the King alone, must take the blame. In the same manner that those who came before him took the blame when they failed to produce rain. In their view, this King was particularly guilty because after a bountiful harvest almost four seasons ago Baba-Munene – on behalf of the King – was supposed to preside over the thevhula rituals to honour the Royal Ancestors before the beginning of the new farming season. But because the members of the Royal Household were preoccupied with entertaining guests from Sofala, Kilwa and Arabia, and engaging in mercantile activities with them, the rituals were only made almost a season after the appropriate time. By then the ancestors were angry; they felt spurned and insulted. When ancestors were spurned and insulted they withheld the rain. What hurt the ancestors most was that they were being ignored because the grandees were more interested in feasting and drinking and impressing these foreign men for the civet and sandalwood perfumes that they brought to the kingdom. It was one long orgy on the hilltop while the ceremonies and rituals that sustained the land were in abeyance. As a result the whole rhythm of life was put off balance.

  Chiefs and headmen in the outlying villages were only allowed to call rainmakers to conduct local rainmaking rituals after the thevhula rituals on the hill and since these were late that year everything else was late. By that time the ancestors, and indeed Mwali Himself, were occupied with other business and couldn’t waste their time on the Mapungubweans.

  The King fired his rain doctors.

  Baba-Munene sent emissaries to the people of the south, the Khoikhoi and the Zhun/twasi, to find their reputed rain doctors and bring them to Mapungubwe.

  “Chata will be the best emissary,” said Rendani. “After all, his mother was a !Kung woman. He will know how to convince his mother’s people to help us with their rain doctors.”

  Baba-Munene agreed. But Chata was nowhere to be found. Ma Chirikure did not tell them that he had gone prospecting for gold. All they knew was that he had left on a long trip and had been gone for that whole season. They suspected that he might have crossed the Zanj seas in the Swahili dhows again, perhaps to get rid of all his gold in the lands of the Persians and the Arabs. If that was the case he had not kept to the terms of the judgement; he was supposed to give at least half to Baba-Munene for the payment of the Royal Household debts. But all this was speculation of course. No one but Ma Chirikure knew where Chata had gone.

  When one full moon had passed without anything being heard from the emissaries the Mapungubweans became restless. The planting season was upon them and there was no rain. Since the fields were far from the town men and women had relocated to the temporary field houses for the season. The fields had been set on fire to retard the growth of wild plants and turn them into ash that would fertilise the soil. But, alas, the soil was as hard as rock. Rain refused to come.

  Finally, after days and weeks of agonising, a medium of a revered mhondoro – or ancestral spirit – from the new town of splendid zimbabwes that was emerging in the north, built in part by some of those families that had emigrated from Mapungubwe, came trudging along with a small group of acolytes. He had heard from the ancestral spirits of the plight of his old homeland and immediately decided to trek south to help his erstwhile people.

  The first thing he did was to entreat Baba-Munene to bring back all the rain doctors who had been fired. They were the ones who were better versed in the complex maps to the abode of local ancestors. Firing them was a mistake in the first place. Ah, exclaimed the pundits, the King was bungling in his desp
eration! A desperate King could not make rain.

  At dawn the booms of cowhide drums and the sounds of kudu horns of various sizes could be heard some distance away. The people of Mapungubwe knew that the medium from the north was leading the rainmaking rituals. A long journey was beginning. The King, surrounded by the rain doctors, their acolytes, some noblemen and a few senior military officers, was trekking to a distant hilltop located a day’s journey from Mapungubwe where rainmaking rituals would be performed. Every member of the party, including the King himself, was dressed in tanned black hide from black bulls that had fallen in sacrificial rites over the years. Those who were partial to cloth were wearing black-dyed cotton. They were carrying black pots and black horns with rainmaking medicine brewed in secret by the medium from the north with the help of the local rain doctors. Everything was black to appeal to black rain clouds to form.

  The rainmaking site had to be a distance away in order to separate the domestic from the sacred. Very few Mapungubweans had been to such hills because they were approached by the chosen few only as a last resort when all else had failed. But everyone knew that fires would be lit on that hilltop. The smoke that billowed to the sky did not only challenge the hiding rain clouds into showing themselves, but it transformed the old into the new and fresh. That was why old and dry grass was set alight in order for new grass to grow. People looked forward to the return of the rainmaking party for that would mark the beginning of the fire ceremonies in Mapungubwe where there would be songs and dances.

  It was at this moment that Chata returned to Mapungubwe. He came riding on his quagga to the admiration of the neighbourhood children who had never seen a domesticated quagga before. The only quaggas they knew lived in the wild and would never let a human come close to them. Ma Chirikure was ecstatic to see him after so many moons, especially because she had run out of answers when people enquired after him. She was fearful that the Council of Elders might order that his house be searched to find out what might have happened to him and his gold. Up to that point they had not done so because of their respect for any man’s personal property. But if he did not show himself sooner or later they would justify the search with concerns for his whereabouts and his safety rather than their greed for his hoarded gold.

  “I would not have allowed them,” said Ma Chirikure. “They would have had to walk over my dead body to enter your house.”

  Whatever did I do to deserve a mother like this? Chata asked himself as he tethered his quagga to one of the poles of his veranda. Yes, Ma Chirikure was just as good as his mother. There were moments when he had a searing longing for the !Kung woman, but the sight of Ma Chirikure, she who knew the !Kung woman better than anyone else, always served as balm that calmed the ache. He took his sack inside and from it he retrieved a smaller bag made from a bull’s testicles. He opened it and looked at its contents with awe.

  It was fine gold grain from his mine. His own mine. Not a mine of which he was caretaker and overseer, but his own property. A mining hamlet had grown in the vicinity as men and women came to join his enterprise. Chata, who enjoyed the protection of a minor Karanga chief, personally trained them in the mining techniques that were suited to that region. Most of them were completely inexperienced, and those who had worked at a mine before were only familiar with underground mining where shafts were sunk – a method totally unsuited for Chata’s ridges. Gold was in the quartz reefs and Chata taught his miners how to stack wood and charcoal and hard cow dung dug from ancient kraals against the rock face. The pile was set alight, and the raging flames loosened the ore-bearing deposits as the brittle quartz cracked. He taught them how to harvest the quartz after it had cooled down and how to crush it so as to extract gold from it. This task was done by women who used the guyo and the huyo stones to grind it as they did millet and sorghum. Then they took the crushed ore to the very clear stream that first led Chata and his companions to these ridges of untold riches to wash away the quartz in shallow wooden bowls, leaving the gold dust at the bottom.

  Chata could now afford to leave all these mining activities in the hands of his two faithful assistants, Batsirai and Chindori, and return to Mapungubwe to commune with the gold that he had left in his house and to introduce it to the new dust from the lands of the Karanga. He had trained them well and in his absence they would hold the fort and make sure that discipline was maintained among the workers. Each family of miners mined for itself provided it gave half of whatever it produced to Chata. His assistants would see to it that each one of them kept to their obligations.

  Later that day Chata rode his quagga to the top of the hill to see Rendani. He was greeted by women and children variously wailing, bawling, sniffling and weeping at Rendani’s compound. Some were his wives and children, while others were neighbours.

  “The elder has left us,” said Rendani’s senior wife.

  “Our grandfather woke up dead,” said Rendani’s daughter.

  Zwanga was gone. And he went without getting so much as an apology from him. Without getting his side of the story. He left believing that Chata had failed him.

  Chata rode to Zwanga’s house. Men had gathered outside, some standing in small groups while others were sitting on stools in front of the house. They were talking in soft tones, planning the ceremonial send-off of the revered elder and artist. They looked at him and his animal curiously. He could see hostility in the eyes of some members of the Council of Elders.

  “Rendani,” called one man, “Chatambudza is here.”

  Rendani walked out of the house and went to meet Chata who was still sitting on his quagga.

  “What happened, mukomana?” asked Chata.

  “What happened? You ignored the orders of the King, that’s what happened. You have not delivered the gold tribute to Baba-Munene as a sign of repentance for your misdeeds. That’s what happened.”

  Chata paused, taken aback by Rendani’s vehemence. He also wondered at his choice of words. Tribute instead of fine. After all, he paid his tribute like all miners under the jurisdiction of the King of Mapungubwe. This was supposed to be some kind of punishment for imagined crimes: doing undefined things with a Khoikhoi woman and allegedly hoarding gold.

  “We can talk about that some other time. I want to know about our father.”

  “My father has left us to join the ancestors. I am tired of protecting you, Chatambudza. When you do these things, who do you think has to answer for them? Me! It was me who defended you when they wanted to give you a harsher punishment. They wanted to banish you from the kingdom once and for all, but I pleaded with them. My father-in-law had to make a special plea to the King to give you a much lighter sentence, to pay half the gold you are hoarding to the King. You have not done that. You continue to defy the King with impunity.”

  The father-in-law, of course, was Baba-Munene; Rendani wouldn’t let Chata forget his royal connection. This made him into an aggrieved party at a more personal level.

  “Do you know that it has not rained all this time?” Rendani shot the question at him as he sat on his animal at a loss for words.

  “It has nothing to do with me, Rendi. I don’t have any gold to give to the Royal Household.”

  “What about all the gold you have mined from my mine?”

  “From Zwanga’s mine.”

  “From my mine. Zwanga is dead. Everyone knows that you have been hoarding it.”

  “They think they know. But I don’t have any gold, Rendi. I have a mine of my own now. I came to tell you before I heard that our father has escaped us. It promises to yield a lot of gold and I will certainly give some of it as tribute to our King. And of course the fine.”

  “A mine of your own? Baba-Munene knows nothing about that. Otherwise he would have told me.”

  “It is in the land of the Karanga people. I pay tribute to their rulers. But I undertake to pay some of it to the King of Mapungubwe because I continue to be his subjec
t.”

  Rendani accused him of lying. But Chata ignored his rant, dismounted and tethered the animal to a tree. He went to join men of his age-group who were standing near the hozi – the grain storage house – while Rendani followed him, fuming. The men fell silent when Chata joined them. The group began to break up; the men departed one by one leaving him standing there alone. He went to join another group, which also made it clear through an unspoken language that he was not welcome in their midst.

  It was like that throughout that day.

  When Zwanga was laid to rest under the ground with his favourite crucible and other personal items accompanying him, Chata was in his house behind a closed and bolted door bathing his exhausted body and battered spirit in the healing glow of gold. He never got to know that among the personal items that were buried with the elder was the bronzed fantasy animal that he, Chata, had created when he was a boy. Yes, the figure that had mesmerised Zwanga. It made Rendani sick to his stomach when he discovered that his father had kept this monstrous work all those years and had instructed that it be buried with him. Rendani had no choice but to comply because you build a kraal around the word of the dead. Chata also never got to know that the last words to escape the elder’s mouth as he was dying were “Chata . . . pass my greetings to him.” No one passed the greetings.

  THE HEAVENS HAD STUBBORNLY refused to open up despite all the sacred rituals on distant rainmaking hilltops. More had to be done to silence the refrain The King is weak, the King has lost all his potency. The only thing that would shut the wailers up and restore the dignity of the King was rain. It was more than just the famine that would follow in the next two years if it did not rain. It was the King’s authority and sovereignty that would be eroded by the drought. What good was a King who could not make rain?