THE GLOBAL AFRICAN COMMUNITY
T R A V E L N O T E S
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GREAT ZIMBABWE:
INTRODUCTION TO AN AFRICAN JOURNEY
| DEDICATED TO THE SCHOOL OF AFRICAN AWARENESS |
"A nation without a past is a lost nation, and a people
without a past is a people without a soul."
--Seretse Khama
The summer of 2000 will forever be for me a season to cherish and a time to remember. It was a glorious and spellbinding period. Beginning May 22, 2000 I traveled to ten countries, including Germany, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, the Netherlands, Australia, Trinidad, Guyana, Curacao (Netherlands Antilles), Barbados, and Costa Rica, not returning to the United States until the last week of August. I lectured in eight of these countries (nine if you count Curacao) and learned a great deal in all of them. It was a whirlwind of experiences, many of which I am only just now beginning to digest. Perhaps equally important, from one's own viewpoint, I am able to report what I perceive as a tremendous amount of personal growth, inner development, and emotional maturity that came as a result of these rich travel experiences. Indeed, there were times when I felt that the Ancestors were giving me stern examinations in regards to temperament, stamina, patience, tenacity, and humility regarding the application of my life's work. Much of this will be revealed in travel essays to come. My lecture series and sojourn in Namibia I have already written about in a travel note titled "Namibian Nights." In this current essay I will provide some background, first hand observations, and insight concerning my travel experiences in Zimbabwe. In fact, of all of my summer travels, only Australia, a country to which I actually led a tour group, surpassed Zimbabwe in terms of length of stay and depth of experience.
ZIMBABWE
The word zimbabwe is derived from the Shona language, and means houses of stone. Due significantly to the actions of Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe and the reclaiming of Zimbabwean land by its indigenous people, Zimbabwe has been catapulted prominently into the international news headlines for the past several months. The economy is deteriorating, tourism is down, and a number of people, including several Whites, have been killed over the past few months. There has been great anxiety in many circles that the phenomenon of Africans reclaiming African land for African people will spread to the rest of Africa, and President Mugabe himself has gained a heroic stature among African nationalists.
With the completion of my Africa Day lecture series in Namibia on May 28, 2000, I caught an Air Namibia flight from Windhoek, Namibia to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. After a journey of a little less than two hours, my mission was accomplished. I quickly secured my visa, and stood for the first time on Zimbabwean soil. It was wintertime in Zimbabwe, and the weather was dry and cool. The country was beautiful, the people seemed friendly, and I had the sense of great personal satisfaction that I had realized another dream of a lifetime.
Like Namibia, but even more so, I had wanted to go to Zimbabwe from way back. In fact, after Egypt, Zimbabwe was my favored African travel destination. Indeed, the ruins of its stupendous stone cities built by the Shona people of northeast Zimbabwe had intrigued me for a long time. In addition to the historical, archaeological, and political aspects of the trip, however, and on a more personal note, my first name, Runoko, given to me as a university student a long time ago, is in fact a Zimbabwean name.
Zimbabwe, in southeast Africa, is a country of more than eleven million people. More than 95% of its citizens are Black. Most of them, more than seventy percent, are Shona, followed numerically by the Ndebele. Whites and Asians constitute less than five percent of the total population. English is the official language followed by Shona and Sindebele. Most of the Whites are of English origin with more than half of them coming to the country after 1945. There are probably less than 100,000 White people, total, in Zimbabwe today. The country of Zimbabwe finally achieved its independence from White minority rule in 1980.
Geographically, Zimbabwe (known during the colonial period as Southern Rhodesia) is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the west, Mozambique to the east, and Zambia to the north. The capital of Zimbabwe is Harare, in the northeast, a city of more than a million people. The second largest city is Bulawayo with a population of about 700,000 people, mostly Ndebele. Most of my time in Zimbabwe was spent in and around Bulawayo.
THE SCHOOL OF AFRICAN AWARENESS
The School of African Awareness was the principal sponsor and coordinator of my trip to Zimbabwe. As such, the SAA organized my housing, transportation, lecture schedule, and overall itinerary. The essential goal of the SAA, a non-governmental and non-profit organization launched in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe on Africa Day, May 25, 1997, is to "address issues pertaining to African cultural awareness and self-help and self-reliance. Its main focus is to disseminate information to all those committed to the well being of Africa and its people."
The initial idea behind the SAA came through the efforts of its founder, Sabelo Sibanda, an exceptionally articulate and extremely committed activist in his mid-thirties. Having lived and worked in African communities in both the United Kingdom and the United States, Sibanda has developed a keen sense of Pan-Africanism, and is a strong proponent of the need for global African intercooperation.
LECTURES AND MEETINGS
My lectures in Zimbabwe began less than twenty-four hours after my arrival in the country. After securing a taxi and being driven for several hours from Victoria Falls to Bulawayo (where I consumed a hot meal, and caught a night's rest), I spoke the following day at the United College of Teachers. Here, on this day, on which I gave the first of several talks at the college, I spoke to a single class of prospective teachers. Interestingly enough, the college did not even have a history component, and the only reason the lecture materialized at all was through the tireless efforts of Mr. Sibanda. Both the students and the teacher were very receptive, however, and I did a broad-ranging slide-presentation that focused on the African presence globally, ancient and modern. I was to repeat the presentation with minor variations with great success during the course of my stay in Zimbabwe. I tried to inspire the students with the history of African people, and make them proud of themselves. A key component to the success of each presentation was the period allotted to questions and answers that followed every talk. It was a real struggle though, for I was fighting what I perceived to be the strong belief that to embrace Africa was to embrace backwardness, while to embrace Europe was to embrace modernity. Almost all of the students wore western style clothes, consisting of shirts and ties for the men, skirts and nylon stockings for the women. A good deal of the women students wore their hair straightened. These were some of the not so pleasant realities of the trip. I suppose that I, like others, have a kind of idealized vision of what Africa and Africans should be, and it is admittedly disappointing when the vision does not materialize. However, there were those Africans, in the minority just like me, who were, in fact, struggling to realize that vision, and identifying and building with this minority made all of the hard work worthwhile.
The tone for each of my presentations was set at the very beginning. I wore nice African shirts whenever possible, and stated up front that I did not see myself as a visiting American scholar, but rather as an African brother trying to share his knowledge while returning home in search of his family after a prolonged period of exile. This struck a highly responsive chord with my audiences throughout the course of my African travels, and resulted in extremely close and familial bonds. Altogether I did four major lectures at the various teachers' colleges, and two major talks in the African community itself, including a tribute to African women that I thought was one of my best.
In addition to the talks that I gave, I toured the city of Bulawayo extensively, visiting both its townships and its most plush neighborhoods. With the various talks, private meetings, public discussions, TV, radio, and newspaper interviews, every day was a busy one, and I remained fully occupied throughout the course of the trip. Among the most important of the sessions in which I participated were full meetings with the Bulawayo Affirmative Action Committee and the Informal Traders Association. Through these sessions, I was able to gain some kind of understanding concerning the local and national political scenes, and gather some insight into Zimbabwe's economic life. I was also fortunate enough to visit one of the white-owned farms being occupied by the war veterans. These Africans, veterans of Zimbabwe's independence struggle against colonial rule, seemed resolute about holding onto the lands that they are currently occupying. Although they were sorely disappointed when I told them about the manner in which the western media was portraying their actions, their morale was high, and got even higher when I told them of the overwhelming moral support that they enjoyed from African-Americans in general.
One of the great highlights of the entire Zimbabwe trip came on a day that I didn't lecture and was driven far from the confines of Bulawayo. In an emotional ceremony held within the centrality of several villages, attended by the local elders and community residents, and augmented by dancers and drummers, I was warmly received, and officially acknowledged as an African finally returned home. I was presented with a magnificent wooden staff, and told that I had finally found my family. It was a wonderful episode, and an experience never to be forgotten. I was so moved emotionally, that when asked to speak at the ceremony, I respectfully, but firmly, declined, as I knew that I would have broken down, and wept like a child.