Douglas Schorr

Too much, too quick for a culture change.

Cowboys chasing Indians—not for me! My games featured Cecil Rhodes’ pioneers and Lobengula’s Matabele impis. Shucks, I was where it all happened—Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia. It was 1958, and I was an impressionable 9.

I had a flat. My annoyance turned to delight when Muhle, the school gardener and my personal time machine to the 1890s, joined me. He was headed for Pelandaba Township to visit his nephew, the first of his family to leave school with a full 6-form certificate. I’d heard it was a busy place.

“Big!” he snorted. “It and Mpopoma house more than there were Matabele when I was your age. Don’t push your bike like that. Hold here, walk straight, save your back.”

He’d never had a bike except when the job provided. He’d spent his whole life barefoot, developing powerful wide paddles with thick leather-like soles for feet.

As we neared Durham Road junction, we spotted Uncle Charlie on his rock under the sprawling Marula tree. Muhle called out something in Ndebele that made Charlie laugh so hard he dropped his pipe.

“Muhle says you’ve been babbling about colonialism all the way from school! What were you trying to explain in your terrible Ndebele? Roads or Rhodes?”

I blurted my confusion: “Mrs. McGregor said there were no roads before colonialism. But that can’t be right—how would people get around? So Muhle hadn’t a bike, but Magdalene takes the bus home!”

The men exchanged glances. “Look around you, boy,” Charlie said gently. “That bicycle track, this double lane tarred road with bridges, those traffic lights, even that hospital where your sister was born—came with colonialism.”

“You should be confused. This is all you’ve ever known,” Muhle added. “But sixty years ago? Not a single house stood here. Just bush teeming with animals. Where Pelandaba stands was the Royal Kraal with thousands of huts of senior generals spread around—half the Matabele nation in one spot. Some kraals were up here on the ridge all the way to your school. There were paths for the women to the river for water, and Lobengula had a wagon from Rhodes, so a few tracks existed. Hillside Road was one! But otherwise, none of what you see.”

My jaw dropped. “Nothing? My school?”

“Mostly built a little over 10 years ago by post-WWII immigrants. I was a builder’s boy then,” said Muhle. “Many schools were built then, and Mpilo Hospiddle…” He stumbled over the word. The two ancients laughed, then suddenly began throwing English words at each other—engineer, bridge, boiler, railway, coach, wagon, oxen, transport, rifle…”

“Whoa, whoa,” I shouted.

“Language,” said Uncle Charlie, “is the barometer of a nation’s sophistication.”

“Correct,” nodded Muhle, “Bantu languages are incredibly simple because they only dealt with hunter-gatherer life. Our word game shows you none of those modern words exist in my language because those things weren’t here.”

“Even Magdalene’s mother—she’s the daughter of a slave, you know—was born in terrible, unhygienic conditions in the open with a couple of aunts assisting. Clinics, beds, nurses, and water-in-a-tap are all European imports. No township for my nephew to escape the tribal system, no African secondary schools where Mrs. McGregor’s husband is headmaster.”

My worldview was suddenly paper-thin.

Uncle Charlie’s engineers helped the first Zeederberg Coach cross the Limpopo! Muhle hid behind a tree when that “box on wheels” first entered Bulawayo and people got out!

“Engineers?” I squeaked when Charlie mentioned that his camp had been on the bank of the stream directly behind my home. “Like my dad?”

“Of course!” Charlie frowned. “Why the surprise?”

Muhle explained my confusion—Mrs. McGregor had shown us photos of a completed Bulawayo, as if it had sprung fully formed from the earth.

“Progress is a process, not an event,” Charlie explained. “Even that farmhouse being demolished for the new high school took planning. For a city? Site selection, inspections, surveying, and pegging—months of work before the first visible signs. Bulawayo rose in record time, as did the railroad to Victoria Falls and beyond!”

“Wherever roads and railways went,” Muhle reflected, “growth followed. The country became a builder’s yard. As tribal wars ceased, farms sprouted, and industries emerged. But there was always too much work for the incoming skilled settlers and never enough trained locals. The Rhodesias could have been grander.”

“So true,” said Uncle Charlie. “Score 6/10 for initial success only because the rush from black Africans to urbanize gathered momentum, forced the pace, and derailed the “jobs first” policy.

“No jobs? How did Magdalene’s parents pay for her?”

“They lived in an extended family, under a Head Man,” Muhle explained, “sharing everything. Magdalene was lucky to pick up some English from her parents to get a position with your mother. Magdalene’s lucky-earning while learning under your mom’s guidance. Same for Enoch in your father’s veg garden. Your father’s strictness and detailed instructions are crucial—without them, he would flounder, lose his job and his confidence. He’s getting an experience of a lifetime. Skills he can take to the next job, and the next.”

“But he’s so big and strong,” I said.

“He’s Matabele, bred for warrior life. He is so fortunate he is so young. Others had no adjustment period. Our nationalist leaders somehow believe we can leap millions of years of tribalism directly into modernity. It cannot happen.”

“But it did in South Africa,” I protested, recalling my 3 weeks in Johannesburg Central Hospital.

Muhle nodded. “It looks that way, but the reality is millions aren’t coping. With old world skills they compete in a new world. 75% of all black workers need supervision. For most, at Enoch’s level. But the strictness tapers off with experience and skill. But South Africa also has tribal animosities requiring more supervision, and there are not enough non-black intermediaries and supervisors.”

“My aunt said Johannesburg alone had ten times more whites than all of Southern Rhodesia!”

“She’s right,” Charlie nodded. “The developments are phenomenal. Despite their separate development policy, they invested massively in townships, hospitals, schools, sewage, rubbish removal—the works! Rhodesian, Nyasaland and Mozambique men go for the good money, better safety, and this will continue as long as urbanization happens at a planned pace. In the homelands, extension officers teach modern land, crop, and animal management. The traditional ways are gone—a new economy must replace the intertribal warring economy of just 100 years ago just to keep up with the population explosion.”

“But understand, nobody anywhere ‘had all that’ to begin with. For thousands of years, everyone learned from everyone else. By the 1800s, Cape Town and the Western Cape were reasonably developed. The 1820 British settlers arrived at what became Port Elizabeth, finding only abandoned fires of herdsmen who watched from hiding. As these white Africans-to-be ventured inland and the locals approached, they discovered people living as Europe had in the Dark Ages.”

“So just like Bulawayo, but 75 years earlier?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” Muhle said proudly. “My grandfather was a senior induna under King Mzilikazi. When Reverend Moffat got permission to teach in 1861, my father was chosen. Some Matabele boys wrote their names before most South African blacks!”

“How’d people get jobs if they couldn’t read?” I wondered.

“Most jobs needed strength, not letters,” Muhle shrugged. “Miners dug, farm workers weeded, railwaymen lifted, road crews hauled cement. Only supervisors—engineers, bankers, officials and teachers—needed schooling.”

“Colonialism is a knowledge transfer process,” Charlie added. “Now, 60 years on, your dad needs his men to read, write, and do sums. He needs to know who phoned and why, and his linemen must know their stocks. And he is a good teacher. That’s how progress works. That’s why Eskom (South Africa’s giant power facility) works.”