The Covenant (15 page)

Nxumalo succumbed to its spell, and for nine days did not even bother to barter his treasures. When he visited the mosque, lately rebuilt and one of the noblest in Africa, he thought: That tower they call the minaret. It resembles the tower I worked on at Zimbabwe. But ours was built much differently. Perhaps someone like me came here to Kilwa, and saw this fine city and went home to do his building.

He visited all the ships then in harbor and the trading points on the mainland, and after a while he began to comprehend the intricate world in which black men and yellow and honey-tan like the Arabs met and traded to mutual advantage, each having something precious to the others. Because he had gold and ivory, he could deal on
a basis of equality with Egyptians and Arabians and Persians and Indians and the soft, quick people from Java.

He would have sailed with any of them to the far side of the sea; he would have been a willing passenger on any ship going anywhere; but in the end he arranged for the Arab’s brother to sail him back to Sofala for his entire cache of goods. He might have bargained for a slightly more advantageous trade with other merchants, but to do so would have been undignified for an officer of the court of Zimbabwe.

It was a long, drifting trip back to Sofala, and during such a protracted voyage anything might have happened, but the passage was calm and uneventful, with Nxumalo talking at great length with the Arab traders and learning from them of the vast changes occurring in the world. The significance of Constantinople was explained; although he knew nothing of the name, he deduced that the Arabs must now enjoy an enormous advantage. What was of greater interest were tales the Arabs told of changes along the Zambezi: “Many villages have new masters. Salt has been discovered and tribes are on the move.”

When their ship neared the mouth of that great river the captain pointed out the little trading post of Chinde, and Nxumalo began to recite the melodious names of this enchanted coast: Sofala, Chinde, Quelimane, Moçambique, Zanzibar, Mombasa. And the sailors told him of the distant ports with which they dealt: Jidda, Calicut, Mogadiscio, Malacca.

While these narcotic names infected him with their sweet poison he stayed on deck and watched the moon tiptoe across the waves of an ocean he still could not comprehend, and grudgingly he admitted that he was so enamored of this new world—the towers of Zimbabwe, his register of mines across the country, the fleet of ships at Kilwa and Sofala, the grand mystery of the ocean—he could never again be satisfied with his father’s village and its naked men plotting to snare a rhinoceros. His commitment lay with the city, not to any grandiose concept of its destiny but to the honorable task of doing better whatever limited assignment he was given. He would supervise his mines with extra attention and trade their gold to maximum advantage. He would work to strengthen Zimbabwe and help it maintain itself against the new hegemonies forming along the Zambezi. To undertake such tasks would mean that he could never go south to claim Zeolani, and as night faded, the moon sinking into the western sea seemed like the slow vanishing of that beautiful girl. At the moment
when the golden disk plunged into the waves it looked much like the Nepalese disk he had sent her, and he could think only of their love-making and of the sorrow that would never completely leave him.

At dawn he sought his Arab mentor and said, “I must buy one special thing … to send south … to a girl in my village.”

“You will not take it to her yourself?”

“Never.”

“Then make it something precious, for long remembrance,” and the Arab put before him a selection of items, and from them Nxumalo started to choose his gift, but as he looked past the trinkets he saw the slaves, chained forever to their benches, and he was in confusion.

When Nxumalo led his porters back to Zimbabwe at the close of 1459, he brought with him goods from distant lands and much intelligence regarding developments on the Zambezi, where Sena and Tete were becoming important trading towns. He brought rumors of areas farther up the river where salt was available and the land not exhausted. And he secreted in his bundle a jade necklace from China, which he sent south with the Old Seeker on the trip which that fellow again averred was his last.

For many days he met in the citadel with the king and the Mhondoro, discussing the Zambezi developments. He reported on all that the Arabs had told him, and he started an impassioned description of what steps must be taken to protect and augment Zimbabwe, but he did not get far, because the king cut him short with an astonishing statement: “We have decided to abandon this city.”

Nxumalo gasped. “But it’s a noble city,” he pleaded. “Even better than Kilwa.”

“It was. It is. But it can no longer be.” The king was adamant in his decision that Great Zimbabwe, as it was called then and forever, must be surrendered to the jungle, since further occupancy was impractical.

As he reiterated this doleful verdict the three men looked down upon the fairest city south of Egypt, a subtle combination of granitewalled enclosures and adobe rondavels, a city in which eleven thousand workers enjoyed a good and differentiated life. It was a place of constant peace, of great enrichment for the few and modest well-being
for all; its faults were that it had spent its energy searching for gold, its resultant income on ostentation. It had ignored clear signs that the press of people in the capital city had impaired the environment; the delicate balance between man and nature which had endured for so long was upset. Its economic stability and assured gold had pleased distant Arabs and Indian princes, but as its natural resources dwindled, its existence was doomed. Those long lines of slaves carrying in precious goods had done nothing to nourish the real city, so at the very apex of its glory it had to be abandoned.

On no one did the decision fall with harsher force than on Nxumalo, for on the dhow that night he had committed himself to the perpetuation of this city, yet on the day he returned to put his promise into action he was informed that the city would no longer exist. For two weeks he was disconsolate, and then it occurred to him that a worthy man dedicates himself not to one particular thing which attracts him, but to all tasks; and he vowed that when the time came to move this city to its new site, he would devote all his powers to that endeavor and, with Hlenga’s help, make the new city superior to the old.

It is difficult, five hundred years after the event, to describe in words the precise quality of thought available to the men who made this decision to abandon Zimbabwe, but because the act was so crucial in the history of southern Africa, an attempt must be made without inflating or denigrating reality. The king was no Charlemagne; he was unaware of libraries and monetary systems, yet he had an uncanny sense of how to keep a sprawling empire functional, and if he knew nothing about armies or military policy, it was only because he kept his nation at peace during a long reign. He spoke only one language, which had never been written, and he had no court painter to depict his likeness for foreign princes, yet he knew how to keep Zimbabwe beautiful; the additions he made to both the lower city and the citadel were commendable. He was a ruler.

The Mhondoro was certainly no Thomas Aquinas speculating upon the nature of God and man; indeed, he was sometimes little more than a shaman propitiating dubious spirits that might otherwise destroy the city. But if he lacked a comprehensive theology like Christianity or Islam with which to console his people, he did have remarkable skill in banishing their grosser fears, controlling their
wilder passions, and lending them the assurances they needed to keep working. He was a priest.

The condition of Nxumalo was more puzzling. Offspring of a minimal society, child of a family with extremely limited horizons, he had been allowed adventures which lured him always toward larger concepts. He was one of those wonderful realists who can add a tentative two to a problematic three and come up with a solid five. He saw Zimbabwe exactly as it was, a city fighting for its life in a rapidly changing world, but he also saw in his imagination the cities of India and China, and he guessed that they were struggling too. He realized that if there existed something as magnificent as an ocean, there could be no reasonable limit to the wonders its shores might contain. He could not read or write; he could not express himself in scholastic phrases; he knew nothing of Giotto, who was dead, or Botticelli, who was living, but from the first moment he saw those carved birds adorning the citadel he knew they were art and never some accidental thing from the marketplace. He was a pragmatist.

Any one of these three, or all as a group, could have learned to function in any society then existing, given time and proper instruction. The king certainly was as able as the Aztec rulers of Mexico or the Incas of Peru and markedly superior to the confused brothers of Prince Henry, who ruled Portugal abominably; had the Mhondoro been a cardinal at Rome, he would have known how to protect himself at the Vatican as it then operated; and if Nxumalo with his insatiable curiosity had ever had a chance to captain a ship, he would have outdistanced Prince Henry’s reluctant navigators. These three might be called savages, but they should never be called uncivilized.

Yet this is precisely what Henry the Navigator did call them as he lay dying in his lonely monastery on the forlorn headland of Europe. He sat propped in bed, surrounded by a lifetime of books and documents, striving to devise some stratagem that would speed his captains in their attempt to turn the southern tip of Africa and “discover and civilize” places like Sofala and Kilwa. It required an arrogant mind to consider these great entrepôts “undiscovered” merely because no white Christian had yet traveled up the eastern coast of Africa, whereas thousands upon thousands of dark Arabs had traveled down it, and had been doing so for a thousand years.

These were the closing weeks of 1460, while Zimbabwe still functioned as the capital of a vast but loosely ruled hegemony, with its royal compounds decorated by celadons from China, but Prince
Henry could say to his assembled captains, “Our mighty task is to bring civilization to the dark shores of Africa.” He added, “That the gold mines of Ophir should be occupied by savage blacks is repugnant, but that their gold should fall into the hands of those who worship Muhammad is intolerable.”

So in the final days of his life, while Nxumalo and his king wrestled with sophisticated problems of management, Prince Henry challenged his captains to round Africa. Two generations of these men would die before anyone breasted the cape, but Henry approached death convinced that the discovery of Ophir was close at hand. “My books assure me,” he told his sailors, “that Ophir was built by those Phoenicians who later built Carthage. It is very ancient, long before the days of Solomon.” He took real consolation in this belief, and when a captain said, “I have been told it was built by Egyptians,” he snorted, “Never! Perhaps Old Testament Jews drifting down from Elath, or maybe powerful builders from Sidon or Arabia.” Not in his worst fever could he imagine that blacks had built an Ophir, and worked its mines and shipped its gold to all parts of Asia.

And even had he survived long enough to see one of his captains reach Sofala, and if that man had sent an expedition inland to Zimbabwe, and if he had reported upon the city, its towers gleaming in the sun, its carved birds silent upon their parapets—and all managed by blacks—he might have refused to accept the facts, for in his thinking, blacks capable of running a nation did not exist.

There were dark-skinned Muslims who threatened the Christian world, and yellow Chinese of whom Marco Polo had written so engagingly, and soft-brown Javanese who traded with all, but there were no blacks other than the unspeakable savages his captains had met on the western coast of Africa.

“The only people with whom we contend,” he told his captains, “are the Muslims who endanger our world. So you must speed south, and turn the headland which I know is there, and then sail north toward the lands our Saviour knew. We shall confront the infidel and win a world for Christ, and your soldiers shall enjoy the gold of Ophir.”

Prince Henry was sixty-six years old that November, a worn-out man and one of the supreme contradictions in history. He had sailed practically nowhere, but had provided a fortune to his captains, threatening to bankrupt his brother’s kingdom, in his rugged belief that the entire world could be navigated, that Ophir lay where the
Bible intimated, and that if only he could get his ships to India and China, his priests could Christianize the world.

Henry of Portugal was an explorer
sans égal
, for he was goaded onward solely by what he read in books, and from them he deduced all his great perceptions. How sad that his captains, in his lifetime, did not indeed reach Sofala, so that he could have read their reports of a thriving Zimbabwe. Had he seen proof of this black civilization, it might have shaken his preconceptions, for he was, above all, a man of probity. And if the few remaining stragglers in the area had accepted Christianity, he would have found a respectable place for them in his cosmogony. But his people had neither reached Zimbabwe nor envisioned its existence.

Even sadder was the fact that after Vasco da Gama did finally reach Sofala in 1498, the Portuguese considered such ports merely as targets for looting, gateways to vaster riches inland. By 1512, fifty-two years after Prince Henry’s death, Portuguese traders were beginning a brisk business with the chiefdoms that had grown up in the shadow of Great Zimbabwe, and one priest composed a long report of his dealings with a representative from one settlement who had come down to Sofala leading sixty blacks bearing cargoes of gold and ivory and copper, just as the Bible had predicted:

His name, Nxumalo, third chief of a city I was not privileged to see but on which I interrogated him closely. He was very old, very black, with hair of purest white. He talked like a young man and wore no adornment or badge of office except an iron staff topped by feathers. He seemed able to speak many languages and talked eagerly with all, but when I asked him if his city was the ancient Ophir, he smiled evasively. I knew he was trying to mislead me, so I persisted, and he said through our Arab interpreter, “Others have asked me that.” Nothing more, so I pressed him, and he said, “Our city had towers, but they were of stone.” I told him he was lying, that our Bible avers that Ophir was made of gold, and he took me by the arm and said quietly, in perfect Portuguese, which startled me, “We had gold too, but it came from mines far from the city, and it was difficult to obtain, and now the mines have run dry.” I noticed that he had all his teeth.