Drape Rhodes' grave with human dung and dance 'borrowdale' on it

While Rhodes sleeps, sleeps well at the Matopos, he sits on one in Cape Town, the place he lived most and from where he dreamt colonising Africa, north of the Limpopo. Among his many beneficiary institutions was the University of Cape Town, which today empties a whole bucketful of faecal matter on the man so revered by the western world, the British especially. In the Arab world they pelt you with a shoe. Here we drape you with our own dung, the ultimate statement of rejection, of expulsion.

I am struck by the irony of it all. Rhodes never lived here, only came here to pacify his rebellious army that had invaded our country, and of course to make peace with the leadership of a part of our national resistance. It was then that he saw .the Matopos, and this after our elders had shown him the final resting place .of our great forefather, Mzilikazi, whose remains are interred in one of the many caves of Matopos. Enraptured by the sights of Matopos, but more importantly, wanting to bestride and reduce to vassalage the spirit of our nation, Rhodes made a "will" clad in iron, which provided that his body had to be encased by the barren boulders of Matopo, well above the remains of Mzilikazi, all to give this country a spiritual hierarchy founded on conquest.

He sleeps there, to this day, completely undisturbed, never lonely given the many who visit him from across the western world throughout the year to say hello and to pay tribute.

The day they yelled Bayethe!

The late Sir Robert Tredgold, once upon a time Chief Justice of this country under colonial rule, captured the drama on the day of Rhodes' burial, with lots of Indunas in attendance. His brother, Frank, who led the proceedings described Rhodes as the chief induna, adding he was now committing his spirit to the natives of this country who would look after him, who would keep him forever.

To which the Indunas responded: "Bayethe!" In that short word, this country was thus committed to keeping uLodzi. To this day, we have done remarkably well in looking after the man who subjugated us, who plotted and executed our ruin.

President Mugabe, himself a fierce critic of imperialism in its colonial and neo-colonial forms, has a different way of carrying forward this assignment from Frank Rhodes.

He says the late empire-builder never paid taxes in his lifetime, never paid taxes to this country and its black owners. He does it now in his death, thanks to the tourism value of Matopos. I like the argument, but I don't like the escape from the spiritual significance of what Rhodes' continued stay atop the Matopos means to the national soul.

This country lives with the reality of a spiritual hierarchy, one naturalised, nay even sold to us as a tourist benefit to us.

They day I couldn't dance

The last time I was at Matopos, I threatened a "borrowdale dance" on the backbone of Rhodes' grave. The guards dissuaded me on pain of imprisonment. Meekly, I walked away, leaving our pantheon to sleep, revered, undisturbed. But what I found most disturbing were two things.

First, you go on a tour alone, with no guidance from our historians. You are left to narrativise what you see, to walk into the whole pilgrimage with your own meaning. Given our colonial history, given the preponderance of white visitors, you don't have to be clever to guess what text gets embedded, entrenched.

Judged from reigning narratives, Rhodes remains a true king of his demesne!

Secondly, at the bottom of the hills, there is a clear injunction from the colonial Government that no other person should be buried on Matopos, unless they deserve well of their country. Interestingly, since the burial of Rhodes, Jameson, the Wilson group and others, no other person has been buried there. The beautiful ones are yet to be born!

And in case you think Manheru is stretching facts of history, it helps to know that soon after the Posselt brothers picked the remaining birds at the Great Zimbabwe, Rhodes immediately asked for them, to lodge them in Grote Schuur, his home. He was no fool.

Conquering the spiritual layer Then you have the story of Pupu down in Lupane, across the mighty Shangane River. I visited the place last month. Pupu is where Lobengula wiped out the Allan Wilson group when it was about to abort his escape.

The whole lot rotted there, which is how the place got its name to denote stench-ful disgust: puu—puu. For this is how passers-by would acknowledge the existence of the decaying bodies of this contingent of invaders.

Today there is a bruised cenotaph built by historically conscious Rhodesians, all its narrative plaques removed or defaced. But what you still see are markings of a mass grave. Not of the dead whites whose remains were collected away with loud reverence. But of our "amajahas" who fell in that titanic battle which goes unrecorded, uncelebrated by our most advanced sense of history as a people.

The truth is the white men took away their dead. To where? Ahaa! To re-bury them at Great Zimbabwe, then reckoned as the spiritual centre of the country. They knew this country had a spiritual reality and that whoever needed to govern it had to own those spirits. I hope you begin to see a method, a systematic conquest and supplanting of our shrines and spiritual fontanelles. Only much later were these bones exhumed yet again for Matopos.

Dear reader, nations are constructed, are imagined. They are never born tectonically. In case you still have more doubts, read Ken Flower's Serving Secretly. Starting the third phase of our struggle obviously from a Rhodesian perspective, he makes an amazing admission: the moment we discovered that the "terrorists" had "abducted" spiritual mediums of the Korekore people, we knew we had lost the war.

This was a reference to the likes of Sekuru Chidyamauyu and others who had crossed the border to give a spiritual layer to the war of resistance. Indeed they lost the war.

Black man's burden But I had a good one from the South African Star newspaper. Dealing with the same matter, the paper crowned it all by a headline titled "The Black Man's Burden".

Just by way of background, the empire, unlike us, bore its own poets and eulogists, among whom was one Rudyard Kipling, an ex-colonial born in colonial India. His stay in India gave rise to a novel called "Kim". Imbued by Victorian expansionist spirit, he authored a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden", which sang for British colonial conquest, suffusing it with a near- biblical mission and aura. The Star's leader was a play on Kipling's well- known poem. The editorial started in a typical meander around the controversy around the effigy of a sitting Rhodes, eyes cast northwards to us who still remained to be conquered into the British empire.

It dwelt on the rich emotion triggered by the debate, admitting that the effigy indeed was an effrontery on African sensibility, and should have long been toppled. I would have added, toppled the same way we toppled him here to throw him away at some grounds around the National Archives Building where he lies prostrate, like Ozymandias!

We saw the Americans doing that in Baghdad, soon after Saddam fell, which means there is living materiality to these things we think innocuous. Much earlier, the Allied powers had done the same with Nazi cityscape so overpopulated with effigies that celebrated Nazi icons.

Colonial edifice complex

But expertly, the real meaning of the editorial comment was burdened on the last two paragraphs. In summary here was the paper's argument. Inevitably Rhodes was a core part of Southern African history. And to say so was not to like him or dislike him. It was simply to state a fact of history. More fundamentally, toppling his effigy would not, by that act alone, end his baneful legacy on Southern Africa. But equally, black anger against these symbols of white colonial history, is real and cannot be ignored. To get the right balance between purging black anger against colonial white symbols, and realising the inherent futility of thinking that such purgation resolves neo-colonialism, that, says the Star, is the black man's burden! Colonialism created its own edifice complex. We need to invent our own narrative complex solidified in new edifices from our past, which, after all, is replete with historic moments.