Isdore Guvamombe : Reflections

Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust or Guruve, village elders with cotton tuft hair and the autochthons who saw the virginity of the sun say when eyes are not decorous, one must travel wide and far to see and learn. Recently this villager took off for Mbire to see for himself a forest where trees turned into stones.Strange as it may appear and sound, it was a worthwhile excursion into an abyss of prehistoric happenings.

The road to Mbire leads due north of Harare. For over 300km it runs between vast farmlands, their homes set far back out of sight behind acre upon acre of intermittent maize and tobacco fields in Mazowe, Concession, Mvurwi and Guruve.

Thereafter, three times the road winds its way between communal lands dotted with clay-walled huts and tiny fenced-off fields, then it straightens and flows through former commercial farms in Horseshoe then Bakasa on the edge of the Zambezi Escarpment.

On the side of the road, men hovered by the side of whitewashed shops and beerhalls in their faded formal clothes. A few staggered after drinking one too much of the home brewed and conventional beer. Probably with a cigarette of mbanje as an additive.

Women sauntered through the grass verge, children at their heels, toddlers clasped on their backs, firewood or water buckets balancing delicately on their heads.

On rare occasions you would have come across a spirit medium clad in black regalia that exuded an aura of sacred spirituality.

Jam-packed buses, tractors, trucks, ox or donkey-drawn carts and cyclists dashed along or crawled between the villages and the business centres and farms.

At Bakasa, just as the road starts to descend it makes a wide sharp curve around the edge of the Zambezi Escarpment, and lo and behold! The Zambezi Valley spreads out yawning flat and wide, north, north and further north, east and west. Vast! Wide.

On a clear day, the Zambezi River sparkles from a vantage point of the escarpment, some 150km away. And then, within 15km, the road altitude falls by a whopping 6 000 metres! The break in altitude is felt sharp and critically as it announces your arrival at Mahuwe Business Centre.

At Mahuwe, the gravel road begins and the journey slows down. Crawl! The heat is fierce, remorseless, baking and caking earth.

As the road runs north to Mushumbi Pools, the great, stout hunches of the mountains rise up blunt and grey behind. Four large rivers, Dande, Hunyani (Manyame), Kadzi and Angwa (Hangwa) drain from the escarpment into the Zambezi Valley and villages cling on to their banks and those of their tributaries. Away from these rivers and villages, Mbire is wild with pale sharp grass, dense with thin contorted trees and scattered towering baobabs.

About 10km after Mashumbi Pools, small dotted homesteads pronounce Kemanzambara Village and on its eastern verge lies the petrified forest. Stone and not wood trees, lie stubbornly on the ground.

Villagers here say their trees’ story is older than history. Trees turned into stone, hard stones. If it was fossilization it was strange one.

Located just 11km to the north west of Mushumbi Pools, just off to the side of the road to Kanyemba via Angwa, one will see a sign directing you to the Petrified Forest. Follow the directions and you will soon find yourself being enthusiastically taken through something older than history, a multifarious array of trees that turned into stones. Yes, stones!

While the Petrified Forest is not a forest by the traditional definition of the word, the area is the location of a number of preserved tree trunks, one of which measures up to 4m in length. The Petrified Forest is situated on a huge savannah woodland forest dominated by Mopane trees.

Here, a large collection of petrified trees, their stumps and trunks lie scattered as a reminder of pre-historic events that defy magazine diction hyperbole.

A secondary forest of trees has grown from the ashes of what used to be a prehistoric forest but has failed to dampen the spirit of the trees that turned into stone.

Many Zimbabwe do not know that God and the ancestors bestowed upon this country such a historical gem that is worth visiting and cherishing.

Karitundundu, the ageless village autochthon of wisdom and knowledge, says the whole forest was God’s grandeur. It was beyond human conception.

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