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David Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts
Have you ever been to places that you frolicked in as a child and felt sad?
How does it feel to get to your favourite spot and discover that your treasure has been allowed to lapse?
Ordinarily, places such as the ones that you and your friends or just other kids in the neighbourhood would gather in bring a smile to your face.
These days though, I find that hardly anyone else really cares about the world we left behind. One day there will be hell to pay for this, somewhere down the line.
Nostalgia is not such a bad thing because it also speaks of the need for conservation and preservation.
This is one of the reasons why heritage has in today’s world grown in significance. Much of the credit for this must go to the United Nations, in general, and to UNESCO in particular.
According to UNESCO, cultural heritage can be protected by means of:
standard-setting activities (concerning the preparation and implementation of international legal instruments, and acting as secretariat in that regard);
technical and scientific assistance, and support for training and capacity-building;
policies to combat illicit trafficking and for the return and restitution of cultural property;
preservation, safeguarding, rehabilitation and conservation measures (assistance for developing conservation tools and techniques, and museums, stressing the concept of access and the role of museums as places of exchange and education);
policies to promote, educate, raise awareness and inform aimed at the general public and professionals.
UNESCO is host to the Database of National Cultural Heritage Laws. These laws are one of the tools that can effectively be used to promote, raise awareness and inform the general public and professionals as a way of protecting cultural heritage.
Nevertheless, we may ask what cultural heritage is. When defining cultural heritage, there has been a tendency to think only of the monumental remains of cultures.
Our own Great Zimbabwe Monument fits well into this category of monumental remains.
Attempts by our traducers to trash our heritage, notwithstanding, the Great Zimbabwe monument is an eloquent witness of what once was, and can be, again.
Over time, however, the idea of cultural heritage has taken on board new categories. For that reason, the world now also speaks of intangible forms of culture.
These include voices, values, traditions and oral history. Intangible forms of culture are popularly experienced through cuisine (what we eat, how we prepare it and how we eat it), clothing, forms of shelter, traditional skills and technologies, religious ceremonies, performing arts and storytelling. These things are a veritable addition to artefacts (the mbira, for example) buildings and even landscapes.
The thinking today is that all items of tangible heritage belong together with those that belong to the area of intangible heritage. The two belong together and must both be conserved for posterity.
I could not help thinking about some of these things following news of the passing on of Zimbabwe’s iconic drummer Mr Douglas Vambe. Whenever I have listened to his distinct drum sounds, willy-nilly I found myself drawing analogies with other performers.
Referring to his trumpet music, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, the great jazzman and trumpeter once said: “Can’t nobody play nothing like it. Ain’t nobody played nothing like it since! Can’t nobody play nothing like it now.” Does that ring any bells? Wrestling perhaps? You often hear some in that ring say, “I am the greatest there is, the greatest there ever was, and the greatest there ever will be!”
Vambe is in that same league of greatest performers, because he, perhaps more prominently than others, made it possible for Zimbabwe’s Jerusarema Dance to be declared an intangible piece of heritage.
Jerusarema is a vibrant procreation metaphor and celebrates human propagation and continuity, artistically.
It talks about love and rhythm during the sacred duty of procreation and how couples must do what they do and enjoy it. Although Jerusarema is not Latin-American, it demonstrates how it takes two to tango and how two is company and three is a crowd. When one looks back at days gone by, it is difficult not to feel some nostalgia. Those warm savannah nights under a huge tropical moon — Jenaguru — were the height of youthful exuberance expressed in song and dance.
In all this, the drum was paramount and essential. The drum was the base of all the choreography associated with moonlit nights. In later years, bands excelling in township music were to borrow this technique and made the guitar direct the dance moves in terms of energy, precision and fervour. My father’s younger brother, Babamunini Dhegirasi, was a known drum wizard, a true maestro who could make the drum talk to you and make you feel you could do anything for as long as it was the soundtrack.
His drum could also fell your heart and make you just sit there and take it in. But then, he was a very gifted man.
My father said all other drummers in the village would only play the drum if Babamunini Dhegirasi was not there or before he began to play. Once he began to play his drum, people always felt that anyone else attempting to do the same could only achieve an anti-climax.
Babamunini Dhegirasi was gifted in other ways as well. He was an ace hunter who always brought something home for the cooking pot.
My mother told me that soon after she married my father and they had set up house, Babamunini Dhegirasi, single then, would ask her to cook the sadza. When she told him she had nothing with which people could eat the sadza, Babamunini insisted.
He would then call his dog and walk into the nearby bush. Before too long, he would be back with a hare, a duiker or a buck. My mother learned to trust him.
Where have all these things gone? I am glad that I am not alone in feeling deprived. You should listen to “Green Fields” a hit song by The Brothers Four.
Not only are the lyrics evocative and beautiful, the melody too is perennial and haunting. The Brothers Four sing:
Once there were green fields
Kissed by the sun
Once there were valleys where rivers used to run
Once there were blue skies with white clouds high above
Once they were part of an everlasting love
We were the lovers
Who strolled through green fields.
In these days of climatic change and heat waves in places where the sun has no business shining so bright and hot, those of us with different experiences cannot but help feeling that the world is fast losing out on things that we should never allow to die out. The chances are that once lost, we can never regain some of these things.
It is likely that when someone spoke about the decreasing numbers of dodos nobody paid them any heed until it was too late. The English proverb, “You never miss the water till the well runs dry” is apt for most experiences and occurrences where humanity has neglected to exercise caution and moderation.
Amateurish use of land, for example, has led to siltation and the drying up of rivers. The Birchenough Bridge over the Save is, for me, too incongruous to believe. I find it difficult to believe that such a feat of engineering would have been deployed for the sorry trickle of water that now snakes its way under it.
The Save was a mighty river with hippos, crocodiles and fish in abundance.
Now we can only look back with a tinge of regret in our voices when we recall the glory days. Our sentiments are captured in the pained “Green Fields” verse which says:
Green fields are gone now
Parched by the sun
Gone from the valleys where rivers used to run
Gone with the cold wind that swept into my heart
Gone with the lovers who let their dreams depart.
Where are the green fields that we used to roam?
What is clear is that we can extend the observations and sentiments I have just outlined to other areas of our lives as Zimbabweans.
Online Reporter