By Stephen Williams

Voices from the rocks

Nature, culture and history in the Matopos hills of zimbabwe

By Terence Ranger

£14.99 James Currey

ISBN 0-85255-604-7

The issue of land, ownership and the state is currently centre stage in the central southern African nation of Zimbabwe. Terence Ranger, former Rhodes Professor and author of a number of highly acclaimed books, has a long and distinguished career as a historian and anthropologist dedicated to understanding this region of Africa. Falling foul of Winston Field’s Rhodesian Front government in 1963, he was expelled from Southern Rhodesia as an undesirable and took a number of overseas academic posts in the UK, US and Tanzania before returning to Zimbabwe shortly after independence in 1980. Currently he is Emeritus Professor of Race Relations in the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor of History in the University of Zimbabwe.

The Matopos Hills are the site where Cecil John Rhodes, the eponymous ‘founder’ of Rhodesia, chose to be buried. It is an area of spectacular natural beauty comprising monumental granite standing stones scattered across a rolIing landscape of hills and deep valleys, much of which (some 450sq kms) was declared a National Park and cleared of habitation by the colonial administration.

It is also the last resting place of King Mzilikazi who led his people to this area to escape the rule of the Zulu King Shaka and formed the Ndebele nation. Here, human occupation goes back some 40,000 years. For many generations before Rhodes and his British South African Company came to appropriate the land erroneously thought to contain rich seams of gold, the indigenous peoples had held the Matopos (in the local dialect known as Malindudzimu) as sacred, and had shrines to their Supreme God Mwali who spoke to man from the rocks themselves.

Professor Ranger’s work has always placed a heavy reliance on oral testimony and archival research. This book is no different, and also illustrates his long held opinion that formal scientific investigation is compromised by cultural pre - conceptions and ignorance. People in authority need to understand what is in the lives and minds of the people whose fate they are disposing.

The current political crisis in Zimbabwe is an example of just such a shortcoming. The issue of land reform has received a great deal of attention from politicians and the media, yet little regard has been made of a central tenet of land ownership within indigenous belief. While an ‘educated’ elite might not agree, many still believe that land ‘belongs’ to ancestors who have departed this life, and true authority over land rests only with those rulers who are able to intercede with the ancestors - through spirit mediums - to bring the rains that bless the earth. Concepts such as monetary values, titledeeds and leases are simply irrelevant.

Following independence, the Matopos were the scene of bitter fighting waged by the Zimbabwean army’s notorious 5th Brigade against supposed dissidents throughout Matebeleland. The desecration of the Njele shrine on the Shashe River which flows through the Matopos (a shrine that played a role in the first Chimurenga uprisings against colonists in 1896) is widely believed to have caused the drought years that followed.

One surprising fact thrown up by Terence Ranger is that Rhodes, considered by many as an arch colonialist robber-baron, was often seen as an ally by those African Nationalists who challenged the colonial authorities in pre-Indepedence Matebeleland.

They remembered that Rhodes had made a pact to secure peace in the area by promising that vast tracts of land that they occupied to the north and southwest of the Matopos would remain theirs in perpetuity. Even a hundred odd years after his death, Rhodes continues to exert a strong effect over modern Zimbabweans.

Some see him as some sort of father to the nation, that without him Rhodesia would not have been defined and hence Zimbabwe would not exist. Others want to dig up his grave and send his bones back to his homeland. If Britain won’t accept his remains they intend to throw them into the Limpopo River. The author’s interpretations of this and other issues are thought-provoking, clearly presented, even-handed, non-pedantic and, above all, timely.

Rumba on the River

A history of the popular music of the two Congos

By Gary Stewart

£40 Verso

ISBN 1-85984-744-7

Visit any urban centre south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo, from Dakar to Dar es Salaam and the chances are that emanating from nightclubs, bars, record shacks and radio station will be the infectious rhythms of Congolese Rumba. Better known as ‘soukous’ music in the west, this is the style of African music that has penetrated every corner of the continent and remains the number one perennial favourite dance music for most of Africa.

Just why this music should be so universally popular is a good question, and one answer is provided by Graeme Ewans, author of ‘Congo Colussus’, the seminal biography of Franco.

He makes the point that the music’s strength lies in that, like earlier West African highllfe, it is a fusion of African and foreign ingredients aimed especially at a non-tribal, inter-ethnic audience. Kinshasa and its twin city across the Congo River, Brazzaville, was the epi centre for a phenomenon that began when early recording equipment to produce 78 rpm records first got to these two cities. Initially, some enterprising local business men contracted local musicians to record their music simply as a marketing device to attract customers to their stores. Later, and when radios and record players became more readily available, they began to record and supply records direct to an appreciative public.

Gary Stewart has written a comprehensive history of the music’s history, from its very earliest days through to 1997. It is four hundred pages of intensely researched text, peppered with a selection of black and white photos, other illustrations and a commentary on political and social events in the Congos that place the story in context. The complexity of the music’s history, the hundreds of musicians involved and the fluid way that bands over the years formed and broke up are described in chronological sequence. The author makes extensive use of the popular newspapers and magazines that were published in Kinshasa and Brazzaville and covered the music scene, as well as his own interviews with musicians and music business people. While the text does not make that many direct references, a complete list of the author’s sources is found at the back of the book along with a select discography and bibliography. For such a bewilderingly complicated subject, his narrative reads with the same degree of effortless, unhurried elegance that characterises the music itself.

Buena Vista Social Club

The Book of the Film

By Wim & Donata Wenders

£14.99 Thames & Hudson

ISBN 0-500-28220- X

As Gary Stewart’s book makes clear, and any musicologist will affirm, one of the primary influences leading to the development of Congo rumba was the Cuban rumba styles, of which there were several variations. As the musicians were themselves invariably descendants of African slaves, the music had its roots in African rhythms and returned to Africa during the 1930s thanks to the GV series of records. They immediately became popular throughout west and central Africa, and local bands were inspired to begin developing their own particular rumba sound.

One of the biggest sensations in the music industry in recent years has been the rediscovery of Cuban music. Despite the US Helms-Burton Act which attempted to economically isolate Castro’s Cuba, the Buena Vista Social Club achieved massive international exposure thanks to their 1997 album produced by the American guitarist Ry Cooder. It was recorded in Havana’s only working sound studio.

The album went on to win a prestigious Grammy award. The band features a score of veteran musicians plucked from undeserved obscurity, including the 90yr old guitarist Compay Segundu and 80yr old pianist Ruben Gonzalez. In March of 1998, noted German film-maker Wim Wenders and his wife Donata filmed two concerts in Amsterdam and one at the Carnegie Hall in New York. The following month they travelled to Havana to film the ensemble in their home city. Now we have the book of the film featuring a selection of film stills and additional photography by the Wenders duo. These are accompanied by autobiographical statements and interviews by the previously named musicians and others, including producer Ry Cooder. Translations of many of the songs from the film, now released on video, are made from the original Spanish into English.

The Pharaoh’s Shadow

Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt

By Anthony Sattin

£20 Victor Gollancz

ISBN 0-575-06397-1

The great civilisations that developed along the banks of the Nile, begining some seven thousand years ago, continue to fascinate the world. Anthony Sattin admits to an abiding interest for Ancient Egypt. His main purpose in writing this book is to discover how the echoes of Ancient Egypt, the ideals, beliefs, customs and rituals of a distant past, have survived to this day in contemporary Egypt.

He explains that his curiosity was aroused by a chance event while visiting a ruined temple by the Nile. There he witnessed a women perform an ancient ritual that called on one of the old gods to bless her with a child.

Returning to Britain he researched the unpublished papers of Winifred Blackman held at the University of Liverpool’s School of Archaeology. Winifred Blackman was an anthropologist and photographer who worked in Egypt in the 1920s, and her studies are a springboard for the author’s own enquiries. A selection of her photographs, many previously unpublished, illustrate this book.

Previous incarnation

His research also led him to another remarkable Englishwomen, Dorothy Eady, later to be known as Umm Seti. Born in 1904, while still a child Umm Seti developed a strong belief that she had lived a previous life in Ancient Egypt, and was regularily visited in her dreams by the Pharoah Seti 1, her lover in this previous incarnation. At the age of 30 she married an Egyptian, moved to Egypt, and had a child whom she called Seti.

Although the marriage ended in divorce and her husband won custody of their child, she stayed in Egypt and devoted her life to Egyptology. As extrordinary as her claims of a previous incarnation might seem, her work was, nevertheless, highly regarded by her peers.

The author manages to trace a previously unpublished manuscript by Umm Seti which, although he was at first highly sceptical, he describes them as “some sort of animating spirit.”

At various times the influence of Persians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Mamalukes, Turks and Europeans have all had a powerful influence on Egypt’s peoples, as have the Judaic, Christian and Muslim faiths.

The author applies the anthropological theory that traces of ancient customs generally survive longest in the manners and ritual of fertility ceremonies and funerary rites. Consequently, much time is spent in tracing women who are respected for their knowledge which might help a childless wife to conceive. He also seeks out the occupants and guardians of cemeteries and shrines. Through these encounters the book provides ample evidence that while various peoples and religions have all left their indelible mark, ancient beliefs continue to survive.

Often these beliefs appear to contradict mainstream monotheistic religious precepts, but in fact within Egyptian society they manage to co-exist in a deep-seated, almost sub-conscious way. The cults of local saints, snake-charmers and magicians are able to survive side-by-sie with a devotion to Islam, just as many aspects of pagan worship are assimilated within the observances of the Christian faith. As Anthony Sattin conducts his research in Egypt, he writes succinctly about the nation’s history as he applies a keen eye to observe the Egypt of today. The ordinary people with life styles that have barely changed in thousands years are contrasted by the parallel Egyptian world of the mobile phone, computers and consumerism.

This raises the books central question. Will ancient customs survive the ever stronger challenges that fundamentalist extremism or the global embrace of modernity presents? On the evidence this book presents, ancient Egyptian ideals have proved so surprisingly resilient in the past, their place in any future is probable assured.

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