The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (34 page)

However, this still does not explain why our alien mason never used a square. ‘A third possibility has been suggested,' Summers continues. ‘The external influence visible in the Great Walls was a second-hand one, derived through somebody who had learned his building trade under some Portuguese or Arab master craftsman but who had no contact with building in the outside world.' What's more, Summers believes he has identified an artistic, artisan subculture within the Zimbabwe culture known as the
Mwenye
. The name crops up in a number of ethnographic accounts. The
Mwenye
, Summers goes on, had living descendants who ‘still live in the northern Transvaal and the southern parts of Rhodesia, differ physically and culturally from the Bantu with whom they live and keep themselves socially separate, although they have no tribal organisation of their own. Their appearance, customs and traditions all point to their being the descendants of the “Moors” or people of part-Arab descent who were the actual traders sent inland by Arab merchants on the coast.' They now comprise two small tribes living on both sides of the Limpopo river, called the Venda and the Lemba.

It would be unfair to leave Summers out alone on this deadly limb. His colleague, K.S. Robinson, Inspector of Monuments before Dr Garlake, had already suggested something similar. Robinson interpreted his pottery finds as suggesting that there had been two interventions in the cultural flow of the Zimbabwe culture, ‘marked by drastic changes and innovations' with ‘fresh ideas introduced by immigrants who may have been the predecessors of the present Shona-speaking people'. Elsewhere Robinson spoke of ‘new and vital elements . . . the result of fresh and vigorous new blood'.

Dr Garlake himself admits to the appearance of better surface finishes on pottery at Great Zimbabwe and a radical change in hut building. ‘Pole-and-daga' walls were sometimes replaced by solid walls of thick clay. Admittedly, he still denies alien influence as the causal factor in all this.

If, as was now being implied, artistic considerations had been a driving force – perhaps
the
driving force – behind the architecture of Great Zimbabwe, then there was just the man to offer a defining opinion – Frank McEwen, once Director of the Rhodesian National Art Gallery. In preparation for his Rhodesian appointment, he had familiarised himself with the Zimbabwean ‘winged angels' in the British and Tishman Museum collections and he came out to Africa via Cape Town to inspect the many Zimbabwe works of art still on display there, in particular the Zimbabwe birds. Frank McEwen proposed the unthinkable, that a country with a tradition of carved stone birds and winged angels had to have an indigenous artistic tradition, even though it appeared to have been obliterated by colonialism. It was his ambition to get this phoenix back in the air and he made no secret of it. Within a few years, flouting a great number of laws, he had started a black artistic renaissance which, forty years on, is Africa's most flourishing school of sculpture, its pieces occupying pride of place in institutions like the New York Museum of Modern Art.

What appeared to be McEwen's most eccentric gesture – a giant battleur eagle which he kept on the balcony of his apartment at the gallery and flew in the park behind it – turns out to have considerable relevance to our story.

Things came to a head for Frank when Joseph Mazerika came into his gallery with his latest sculpture, a master work displaying interlocking male and female figures of amethyst quartz; the woman was carved in white quartz, the male in the darker rock. The racial implication did not go unnoticed in Rhodesia where it was illegal for a black man to have relations with a white woman. Frank was told to destroy the sculpture, but instead quit the country, taking the piece with him. Many years later, when I realised that a hundred years of research had thrown no new light on the role and function of the Zimbabwe birds and the importance of art to the Zimbabwe culture, I thought of Frank McEwen, finding him and his wife in a remote cottage in the south-west of England. The famous amethyst ‘loving couple' still had pride of place in his house.

After listening to the progression of my research, culminating in the revelations of Roger Summers that Great Zimbabwe had been shaped aesthetically, Frank suddenly said: ‘You've tapped in to the hidden river.' He agreed that there must have been artistic alien influence and pointed out that all the world's great art schools had needed their promoters: Prince Philip IV of Spain behind Velasquez, Van Gogh's famous brother, Theo, and the pharaoh, Akhenaton, whose patronage produced new styles of naturalistic art and literature, including the famous painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, Akhenaton's queen. Frank seemed to find Akhenaton, who became pharaoh in 1379
BC
, a particularly good model for the Zimbabwe culture. He was one of the first of the Egyptian pharaohs to worship one god, Aten the god of the sun, who later, of course, became the hawk-god Horus whose icons obviously attract comparison with the Zimbabwe birds. Moreover, Akhenaton was worshipped in a new kind of roofless temple. His reforms, however, were too radical and when he died in 1362
BC
his temples were demolished. The followers of his reforms were persecuted and many fled this oppression.

McEwen saw himself as one such promoter, or patron, in the art vacuum he found in Mashonaland. Equally he was at great pains to stress that there is a world of difference between promoting and influencing artists. This is perhaps the world of difference which separates the Romantic (and often racist) theory of Semite aliens using natives to build megalithic stone cities with temples and art reflecting their own old religious beliefs, and the alternative – that a receptive, newly affluent Karanga accepted alien advice and art patronage to help with the creation of the Zimbabwe culture. ‘I couldn't teach my people anything about the creation of the work,' McEwen insisted. ‘They were teaching me.'

But these fledgling black artists he encouraged could easily have been seduced into what he called ‘airport art' – mass-produced soapstone tourist souvenirs ranging from simple busts to napkin rings – so he took the school into hiding. McEwen found a valley in the eastern mountains near where the first
zimbabwes
had been built. This 1,200-acre sanctuary had no road to it and could only be accessed through a narrow opening between massive rocks. The artists asked that spirit-mediums first visit the valley to ensure it was ‘favourable', confirming for McEwen that the ability to carve the mysterious images his artists were producing had a direct link with native traditions. These shamans also reported that they had found the remains of
zimbabwes
, ancient pots and grave sites, and that the area had caves containing the icons of ancestor-spirits, but McEwen was never shown any.

An access to the valley, just wide enough for a truck with building materials and food plants sufficient to sustain a community in traditional huts, was cut using the old Karanga practice of heat exfoliation. McEwen remembers his sense of awe as he stood and watched the creation of rock slabs identical to those of which Great Zimbabwe is built. ‘As soon as the artists settled in they were extremely happy,' he recalls. ‘We ate nothing but home-grown vegetables and wild fruits together with fresh-killed meats.' McEwen, who had stalked stag in his native Scotland, did the hunting. Speaking of the artists' work, he says: ‘The results were immediately, well, extraordinary. . . . I knew Picasso rather well, and Matisse, Carot and Leger but I have never seen anything like this. I watched them very closely hoping to work out where the inspiration was coming from. They would go into a kind of dream-state seemingly staying that way until they could see the work in absolutely perfect three dimensions then quickly, before they lost the dream, execute it – execute it in a frenzy.'

McEwen took the works of his secret school – abstract sculptures, large and small – to France and an exhibition at the Musée Rodin. Reviewers enthused: ‘These Shona artists have taken up their tools where the fifteenth-century artists laid them down.'

Frank urged me also not to forget the winged angels anonymously tucked away in London and New York. The piece in the Tishman Collection was his particular favourite: ‘It is an absolute miracle. As great as any Egyptian sculpture and proves that these people understood the principles of advanced sculpture, the principles of three-dimensional art.' McEwen also regarded this figure as artistic proof of a formal religion within the Zimbabwe culture. ‘Winged figures exist in all religions,' he pointed out. The same was almost certainly true of the other soapstone carvings from Great Zimbabwe, especially the Zimbabwe birds, and of the more ornately carved columns and bowls unique to Great Zimbabwe. ‘Few religions function without sacred vessels.'

McEwen was, moreover, in general agreement with my conclusion that alien influence was a flickering flame playing across the whole history of the Zimbabwe culture. Perhaps a more accurate word for this influence is
promotion
of the latent talents of the indigenous people. ‘An artistic class would have grown up within the culture,' Frank remarked, coming very close to the conclusions of Roger Summers. ‘Just as we have now with sons following in the footsteps of their fathers. It would have been closely connected with the indigenous religion, indeed many of the pieces carved today still represent ancient spirits from the old animist days.' Then he too said that he thought the ancestors of this ancient artistic class could be traced to the Venda/Lemba. He was convinced that the hidden river had continued to flow, albeit sluggishly, with the Venda/Lemba who had remained known for their carvings, particularly of fish. Their work still attracts the higher prices in Cape Town's smart African art shops.

Prior to my reunion with Frank McEwen I had always assumed that the Lemba people were all but extinct, a little like the Kalahari San, too few in number to retain any individual identity. I have also been wary of the proposition (made by almost every observer from Selous onwards) that certain Shona display non-characteristic facial features. Mrs Bent's photograph of Chief Mugabe and his indunas, you will recall, was actually taken to illustrate the proposition. There is little in this photograph, and in the others I have seen, to indicate that among some Shona are to be found the more aquiline facial features of northern tribes like the Tutsi or those of Ethiopia, nor have I changed this view. It is in a line of enquiry too often tinged with racial prejudice to be worth pursuing. The more I studied material about the Lemba, however, there was no denying that they certainly shared a strange, quite detailed, legend of their origins which set them apart from other Bantu people, not least because it held that the Lemba were descended from North African or Arabian Semitic races. Or to put that more bluntly, most believed they were descended from a ‘white' tribe.

Sadly I only ever interviewed one Lemba. He had applied for a job as a security guard at the television station I ran in Bulawayo and had been mistakenly listed by my secretary as ‘Bemba', a large tribe to the north. The only reason I remember him is because, on his application form, he listed his religion as Jewish – and insisted Bemba be corrected to Lemba. A black Jew was not significantly unusual because for centuries western missionaries had ensured that Africans were exposed to most religions, certainly the established religions. There are flocks of black Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists – and Jews. But none of us (or hardly any of us) knew that Rhodesia housed remnants of a lost tribe claiming Jewish antecedents and the authorship of the Great Zimbabwe ruins nor that there was a tribal-sized group of them south of the Limpopo river in a very rural area of South Africa called Vendaland.

A South African ethnologist, Dr N.J. van Warmelo, who began his work in the early part of the last century and would become Chief Ethnologist to the Department of Native Affairs and the acknowledged expert on the Lemba, had in fact studied the Venda intensively. Moreover, his testimony is especially valuable because he had the advantage of working with the Lemba long before western influences had materially altered the remote rural areas of South Africa and, it has to be said, before being a Lemba set you apart and of interest to (in Lemba terms) well-heeled academics and, nowadays, tourists. Hopefully, I am not being gratuitously critical of modern Lemba but these factors could have an important bearing on the veracity and durability of their singular beliefs about themselves. What needs to be recognised right away is that essentially the Lemba core beliefs of their unique, frankly bizarre, origins have not changed since van Warmelo first went among them in the 1930s. From the beginning van Warmelo acknowledges this: ‘It cannot be assumed, even if some tales from the Old Testament have often been told to the natives, that these tales should have taken such a hold on their fancy as to cause them to be woven into the traditions of the tribe.' What
is
‘woven' very tightly into these traditions runs as follows.

The original Lemba were made up of ten tribes like the Lost Tribes of Israel. The tribes diffused south from a place called ‘Sena' in the Middle East whose exact location has been entirely lost to the Lemba. They settled first on the Zambesi then travelled to the Shona plateau and built Great Zimbabwe where they were known as the ‘
Mwenye
'. They were driven out of the lost city after an act of apostasy – they ate mice! Throughout their wandering the proto-Lemba carried with them a ceremonial drum, the
ngoma lungunda
. Van Warmelo described this as ‘the sacred drum which was borne along on their wanderings like the Ark of the Covenant'. Some Lemba believe that their wandering Jewish ancestors paused for a time among the Ethiopians who, of course, have their own myth of the rescue from Egypt of the Ark of the Covenant.

If we now step forward several decades to the second half of the twentieth century, Professor Gayre, the Scottish anthropologist, also engaged on a field trip to investigate Venda/Lemba legends of origin. He returns with stories told to him by the Lemba essentially supporting van Warmelo's, but even more astonishing. The Venda/Lemba, Gayre claims, believe their
male
ancestors were white. ‘The Lemba do not eat rabbit, hare, pork, carrion or meat with the blood in it,' Gayre wrote in
Mankind Quarterly
. ‘In addition the Lembas not only practice circumcision but are essential in the circumcision schools among their neighbors. It is not difficult to see that they adhere to the dietary laws of the Mosaic or Levitical code.' It has been argued that Professor Gayre was a propagandist for white supremacy but his notes have subsequently been essentially confirmed by other researchers, right up to the present day.