One by one, with the setting of the sun, the twinkling stars started to appear in the evening sky. This was the time of day when the winds began to change, the sky hung close and the spirits of the ancestors whispered faintly in the breeze. I was visiting a very special place, high on a lonely hill in western Zimbabwe, which the Matabele tribesmen called Malindidzimu, or ‘the dwelling place of spirits’. On this hill, one indeed felt close to the spirit of Africa, for here amongst the outcrops of granite boulders lay the final resting-place of Cecil John Rhodes, the British born Empire builder. For many hundreds of years, the rocky hill had originally been revered as a place sacred to both the Matabele and the Shona tribesmen, but in 1902, Cecil Rhodes decided in his will that he would like to be buried on this lonely outcrop. At the tribesmen’s request no farewell volley was fired less it would disturb the ancestral spirits and even today there were signs remaining, which forbid visitors to bring any radios, alcohol or even domestic animals into the area. In a far corner of the hill, I noticed another grave, it was the final resting place of thirty-four people, the remnants of a military patrol and some pioneers that had been massacred by the Matabele. In the twilight, I searched along the rocks for some wild flowers to leave on the grave, in silent respect of those men who once slept under the moonlight with only the roar of the lion to keep them company. In the not too distant past, these daring men and women had climbed impassable mountains and trekked across the savannah plains, travelling through a landscape of dangerous animals and even fiercer natives in a valiant attempt to forge a new home in the interior of Africa. They were people with an insatiable ambition, who daily courted new diseases and dangers, pioneers who followed Rhodes inland from the Cape to create a new country, a shield shaped crescent of land that they called eventually Southern Rhodesia. Now their bodies rested beneath the night skies of the nation they had come too, content at last, at one with the ancestral spirits of Africa. For a while, I sat beside amidst the windswept boulders, where only the pea green colour of the plants that I had scattered on the graves broke up the yellow ochre of the rocks and read again the simple epitaph on the bronze tablet that marked the great explorers grave. I remembered the words of Michael Palin in his series ‘Pole to Pole’ and knew that Rhodes was only 49 when he died in Cape Town, and that a special train designed by the Pullman Company of Amercia, brought him back to his resting place near Bulawayo. It was said that Rhodes had left meticulous instructions in his will stating that he desired to be buried ‘On the hill where I used to visit and which I called "The view of the world".

And so it was, on this windswept hilltop, which peered primordially over the lands of the Matabele that his body was finally laid to rest. This indeed was a sacred place, where one felt at one with the spirit of Africa, but the white family who had brought me to the grave seen things differently and probably wondered to themselves, how long more the spirits would guard the mountains, for these were troubled times and the present leader of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, had threatened to dig up the bodies and send them back to London.

Overhead, gathering clouds started to veil a rising moon and as nocturnal sounds began to replace the more familiar tones of daylight, I decided to make my way back downhill to join the old farming couple who had kindly brought me to the rock. They had said that if we waited until sunset, as the flickering lights came in the vleis and kopjes (valleys and outcrops) of the Matopos Hills below, I would see why Rhodes wanted to be buried here, forever looking down on the nation, which beared his name.

The Matopos were a range of hills about 50 kms south of Bulawayo, which the couple told me, had taken their name from the Matabele word for ‘bald headed’, a term used to describe the whaleback granite outcrops that littered the area. Timothy was an aged tobacco farmer that I had met in Bulawayo earlier in the week and he and his wife drove a little lime green A40, which they had lovingly kept together for more years than they cared to remember. His hair had long greyed, but his eyes flickered back to life as he spoke, leaving me with the feeling that they had once burned with a brighter blue, many years before. He had brought me to his farm and showed me the grave of his only son who had died on bush patrol, fighting ‘terrs’ down on the border with Mozambique some years before. When they buried him, I felt that part of the old man’s spirit died with him. In the passing of time, a bond of friendship somehow built between us, and as he talked about days gone past, a fuller flush seemed to settle on his tanned face, although at times, he seemed to hold a deeper conversation with himself, chatting to the voices of his memories.

On the way back to Bulawayo, he told me that he had been born on a farm outside the city, sometime around the end of the Great War, and for a while he reminisced about his childhood years, fondly remembering his journeys into town at the weekend with his father. Everything seemed to be different then, the streets were cleaner and decoratively lined with hydrangeas and blooming jacaranda. He told me how his father could turn a whole team of oxen near the bank building on Fife Street, without touching a flowering plant and then bring him back along Queens Road to listen to the music on the bandstand. They would pass the railway station, where his father would show him the steam trains that had just arrived from Plumtree or Mafikeng and then point at the painted platform, which his father told him ‘was the longest stand anywhere in the world’. They would then pull up at the hitching post at Grey’s Inn Hotel, where his father would take a few pennies from the bank bag and tell him to go over to Mason’s for the latest edition of The Bulawayo Chronicle. That evening, they would make their way homeward as the saffron sun sank behind the mountains. As darkness fell, the cotton bag would again appear and be placed on a table on the verandah and under the light of an old hurricane lamp, the bossboy would call out the farm workers one by one, and his father would hand them sealed brown envelope with their pay. The African women would stand close by, brightly dressed in their blue and white Manchester cotton and they would open the envelopes to count the shillings and sixpences to make sure their husbands were not being cheated. Then as the night grew colder, his mother would call him to bed and he would hide a while by the river before going inside.

"Africa was different then and everything and everybody had its place!"

"Now the country is totally destroyed with those bloody communists crooks in charge, the Zim dollar is worthless and half the kaffirs have AIDS!" he continued.

"If Rhodes knew what had happened to God’s own country, he’d turn in his grave!"

From the window of the car, I peered out across the wonderful view of the yellow lights down in the Maleme valley. Then, the old farmer’s colonial voice slowly started to wane and through the roving mists of time, the words of one of Bob Marley’s songs seemed to emerge, sounding a new beat to the secure rhythm of that well-worn Austin engine. Marley had the distinction of being the only performer outside of Africa to be invited to the Zimbabwean independence celebrations by Robert Mugabe in 1980. He sang,

"It’s you, it’s you I’m talking to, why do you look so sad and forsaken

When one door is closed, don’t you know another is open"

Somehow, I thought Timothy and his wife would never see it that way, just as the little green Austin A40 hit another pothole and the familiar sounds of ‘communists, crooks and kaffirs’ crept back into my consciousness.