A Rock and a Hard Place

by George Zelt PhD

  “Howwww . . . howwww . . .” he continued, louder, as they pelted him with guano again. He staggered back toward me.

  “Get out of the entrance!” I yelled to Henry, who by now needed no instructions as some of the bats forged past, brushing him.

  Once again I raised the flashlight and waved. The bats, now hysterically confused, responded immediately as did the chief. All raced for the entrance.

  The tunnel emptied of bats. The chief lay outside, coughing and swearing as Henry tried to calm him.

  “White boy crazy! White boy crazy!” he wheezed.

  Scanning the walls with my flashlight, I quickly found a six-inch-wide seam of bornite. Hurrying, I followed it farther into the mine. “Take me to the mother lode,” I said aloud, my fingers tracing over the seam.

  “What did you say?” Henry’s voice echoed down the tunnel.

  “The copper,” I replied mechanically, completely engrossed at the sight of the seam. The light from my flashlight brought the beautiful ore to life as the morning sun might.

  I followed the seam with my fingertips as fast as I could for another ten feet, where it decreased to four inches. Not good. Not good at all, I thought as I stumbled along. I scanned the wall on both sides of the tunnel. A few feet farther, the seam abruptly wedged out to a pencil-line thickness. I stared at it blankly.

  “How’s it looking?” Henry called.

  “It’s wedged out.”

  “You mean disappeared?”

  “No value, Henry,” I called back to him as I stared at the wall. “No market value at all.” The seam ended in nothing. “Nothing,” I repeated out loud. My chance for wealth disappeared into the mountain. Ahhhh, shit. Crestfallen, I turned to slowly walk out of the tunnel.

  As I neared the entrance, I could see his motionless silhouette and then the disappointment on his face.

  Without speaking, we returned to the Land Rover, where the chief, stippled with guano, waited, drinking yet another beer.

  “You’re starting to look like a white man,” Henry said to the chief, who looked at him without comment.

  We drove back to Henry’s store.

  Once there, and refreshed after sleeping the whole way back, the chief asked for his payment of three blankets.

  Henry gave them to him and explained that there wasn’t enough of the purple rock in the old mine. The chief thought about this and then said that he knew where there was a very big hill of purple rock. If Henry would give him some brass wire, a shirt, and a pair of shoes, he would show us where it was.

  Chapter 23

  The Procession: Baby’s Coffin in Red Clay

  A year and a half passed quickly. During that time I’d visited my field area in Namaqualand with Martin, my new advisor. I looked at countless thin sections, read papers on other scientists’ parallel work, and plotted hundreds of graphs using the chemical data I’d collected at UCT. I also began drafting chapters of my dissertation. And before I knew it, just six months were left of the four years allocated for study. It was time to finish my presentation.

  I began working twelve hours a day and more, seven days a week. My life rolled on without variation, like a clock ticking without numbers. And then, one day, helped along by Martin’s unwavering encouragement, I finished my dissertation. To this day, Martin remains one of the most instinctive and intelligent men I’ve ever known.

  It was 1980. The title of my dissertation: “A Geotraverse across Namaqualand, South Africa: The Petrology, Geochemistry, and Structural Relations of a Proterozoic High-Grade Metamorphic Terrain.” It was 203 pages long and bound in book form.

  All the data collected during my time at the PRU pointed to the same major scientific conclusion. That is: Namaqualand is the site of an extensive Proterozoic granulite terrain from which the bulk and mineral chemistry of the mafic specimens show no consistent variation in the concentration of Al2O3, Fe2O3, FeO, MgO, and CaO along its forty-five mile length. The evidence showed that the coastal five-mile lower-grade zone adjacent to the granulite zone is the result of later retrogressive metamorphism rather than progressive metamorphism, as previously suggested in the literature.

  It said Afrikaner Joost was dead wrong.

  The university submitted my dissertation for external review to three eminent, widely published geology professors based in Britain, Australia, and South Africa. Martin had selected them because of their knowledge of metamorphic petrology, geochemistry, and related structural geology as demonstrated by their publications. I knew I would have to wait at least a month before I received their responses. I also knew it would be a long month.

  Martin felt confident that my work would be accepted. But after all the negativism I’d been through at UCT, I was not so sure. In spite of Martin’s reassurances and calm voice, my nerves were ragged as I awaited their feedback.

  * * *

  During the waiting time, I was offered a lecturing position at another university. It would start in a few months. To take my mind off waiting, I decided to return to the Transkei, look for minerals, and wander a bit in the rolling countryside.

  A few days later, I found myself at the top of a golden grassy hillside, one in a long line of foothills in a very rural area of the Transkei. Surrounding me were elongated and round large white granite boulders nestled within a meadow of the earth’s tresses. It was an early, clear morning, a suitable place for looking off into the distance over lone green trees and rolling valleys.

  Three teenaged native boys joined me in digging. I was searching for minerals that had formed millions of years before but might lie just below the earth’s surface.

  South Africa has the lion’s share of the earth’s mineral reserves: nearly 90 percent of the platinum metals, 80 percent of the manganese, more than 70 percent of the chrome, 45 percent of the vanadium, and 41 percent of the gold. Why is the country so mineral-rich? No one knows, but a running theory is associated with the unusual presence of very ancient rocks older than those I’d studied. Given such rock has survived, this suggests that subsequent erosion and tectonic activities may have been less than those affecting other areas of the world where such ancient rock did not survive. Therefore, vast mineral reserves also survived here.

  Such wealth could be under my feet. I looked around me and once again saw earthen rondavel homes nestled here and there along the steep grassy slopes characteristic of the Transkei Wild Coast. On average they were twelve feet in diameter and seven feet high. They were like the tops of huge mushrooms and they stretched into the distance. Through shimmering heat waves, the trodden red-clay earth surrounding each hut looked like a target. A characteristic circular fence made of thorn branches and grotesquely shaped tree limbs enclosed each dusty earth patch, creating an open yard-like area.

  African women were up before the sun rose, sweeping these courtyards, not wanting their neighbors to think them untidy. Uninvited people were not to enter the yard. That was as bad as barging into a Western home unannounced. Inside the one-room huts, each member of the family had a mat to sleep on. During the day, the rolled-up mats hung suspended from the roof alongside woven grain baskets and similar items. A few huts had Western furniture, such as a metal table or a plastic chair, depending on whether the head of the family worked in faraway cities and mines.

  Some hours passed before a gray and bearded village elder, his walking stick in hand, slowly zigzagged his way up our hill and sat down beneath a nearby acacia tree. Although the man was dressed in rags and seemed to lack status, it was important that we show respect to his age. He had come to make sure his share of the young boys’ wages was paid. Tradition demanded that. Otherwise, the sun would have confined him to his home in his chair—a crate that he moved around his hut to catch the shade. At midday the sun forced him to go inside and sleep. Life could not be hurried here.

  A sparrow-size titihoya flew past us. Perhaps its thorn-tree nest was nearby. I listened to its desolate cry, so characteristic of the African veld. One boy instinctively grabbed a fra
gment of rock from our diggings and hurled it at the feathered creature, killing it. He hastily collected handfuls of dry grass and twigs and laid them in an already sun-heated, saucer-shaped depression in one of the white granite boulders. Then he set fire to the collection with the bird on top.

  A minute later the boys laughed at the size of the portion each received, their white, straw-polished teeth dominating their faces, capturing all my attention. The elder had respectfully accepted the largest morsel from the hunter.

  The remaining ash and drops of blood marred the brilliance of the white boulder. It would be a monument to the bird until the rain washed it clean.

  I looked away to see a group of Xhosas on the next hill. They shuffled in single file around knots of boulders constricting their path as they wound downhill. The rope-thin path led to the valley between them and us. I could see them clearly, a funeral procession. Their meager clothes reflected the color of their land.

  My young diggers glanced across the valley and then returned to their labor while the old man stared. The procession carried a child-size crude wooden box, the best they had. Splinters would surely remain in their hands, but they wouldn’t notice. The hole they had dug and were now moving toward was similar to ours but closer to the dry valley streambed. When the floodwaters laden with blood-red clay came, the earthen tomb would be secure.

  The Xhosas gathered around the grave. A single caring voice rose from the silent others. It penetrated the valley’s calm.

  The mourners lost little time. They quickly filled the small hole with clay and rock fragments. The rich red earth, scorched by the sun, lashed by the wind, and shriveled by the drought performed yet another service. Except for two figures that stayed behind, the quiet procession trod back up the hillside.

  The child would be in his grave while the land above him would be torn and cleansed when the spring rains came. Life would return to the way it was, just as it had after the bird’s passing.

  Sitting and staring into the distance, my knees up and my arms folded across them, I thought about my life. The early stage was over, sooner than I believed it would be. It gave me enchanting campfires and dreams to follow. Would there be many more?

  Chapter 24

  1979: The Doctorate and the Witchdoctor

  After several weeks, Martin informed me that the first response to my dissertation had arrived. He handed it to me, as I tried to interpret the expression on his face.

  I riffled through the pages. Several contained comments on spelling and word corrections and suggested figure and graph caption improvements. The annotations were a normal procedure designed to instruct me in ways to make the document better. I sped through them all, my heart pounding as I took in every other word, looking for the punch line.

  Finally, near the bottom of the final page was the magic statement: “I have no objections to the degree of doctor of science being awarded.”

  My mind exploded with happiness, and then I brought myself back to reality. I needed two of the three reviewers to approve my dissertation if I was to get the degree.

  The tension continued. I began to go for runs. No matter what I did, regardless of Martin’s unstinting support, nothing put my mind at ease. I suppose I was somewhat paranoid thinking that somehow I would be defeated. I decided to do what had worked before—I got into my Land Rover on Sunday morning and took to the road.

  My destination was a valley not far from Durban on the road to Pietermaritzburg, known to the Zulus as eMkhambathini, the place where the giraffe thorn—a type of acacia tree—grows. God created the valley, say the Zulus, when he became disgusted with the world and crumpled it in his hands and then released it when he changed his mind. The result was a rugged valley with high, sharp peaks rising to breathtaking heights and a deep, plunging valley formed by the Umgeni River on its travels to the ocean. The valley looks like moss growing on gigantic pieces of broken, sharp glass.

  The land, like many such places in Natal, is a mystical place. It gives rise to superstitions and myths. The isolated people living there believe that the mountains, rivers, waterfalls, and rocks have spirits. It is the center of the universe, they’ve concluded. God had evidenced that belief by creating crumpled mountains. Beyond the mountains, the land is flat, with no significance. The residents of eMkhambathini are convinced they have the best part of the world.

  On the day I visited, I passed Zulu villages and colonial dwellings in the valley. Tourists stop at some of the villages. Most remain secluded, however, as access is difficult and strangers are not encouraged.

  I drove my Rover slowly along a road obviously not much used, and came on a clearing in the forest. A sangoma lived there—a practitioner of herbal medicine, divination, and counseling. I saw him sitting on a crate in the sun, dressed as only as a sangoma dresses. He looked about ready to fall asleep—maybe he already had.

  A number of mud huts with straw roofs surrounded him. They were beehive-shaped, one for each of his wives, some of whom were outside watching me as I drove. An assortment of goats was busy sorting through garbage, and several chickens strutted about, twisting their heads.

  I decided to stop. Such men are normally intelligent, sociable, trustworthy, and curious, so I was hopeful he wouldn’t mind my intrusion.

  “Hello,” I said, introducing myself. A pungent herb aroma emanated from the hut just behind him.

  He looked to be about thirty. He stood, and we chatted a bit above the noise of the goats. He would expect a little money after our talk.

  He wore a small tartan blanket around his shoulders that had been washed and exposed to the sun to the point of blandness, and a loose-fitting squat leather dress. Beads were everywhere, but the most notable ensemble was a large collection draped off his head and woven into his hair. The patterns of alternating white-and-black rectangular ceramic beads emphasized his ebony skin and honest face.

  Atop his head were shrunken animal stomachs and other such vessel organs, extracted, I assumed, according to ritual proceedings. I thought I saw a small mirror and bone tucked away, also. Leather thongs wrapped around wherever possible. I estimated they had been in position for some time. Around his neck hung his cow-horn identification.

  I asked him about “throwing the divining bones.” I was thinking about my dissertation.

  “I do not know answers to questions about life,” he replied, “or about what I’m doing and why I live and die. No one else I have met does, either, although some pretend to know. I look for answers to questions that affect people’s lives here. That makes sense to me—answers let me and my people live. I talk to my ancestors and throw the bones. I get answers I need. Who else can give the answers needed? No one.”

  I knew Africans practiced ancestor worship. Some, like the Rhodesian Shona, believed all illnesses had a cause that could be found only in the spirit world.

  “And the bones you throw? Are they really just bones?”

  “We call them divining bones,” he said, chasing a fly away with his cow’s tail fly swatter. “Each sangoma collects his own, and they may be anything he thinks is important or represents a significant time or accomplishment in his life. Or a patient of his might give him something as a reward for helping him. It could be a bullet or domino, shells, nuts, dice, or a part of an animal. No matter what it is, it can become part of the sangoma’s divining bones.”

  “How do you interpret the thrown bones? What do you say to someone who is sick and wants to be cured?”

  “I instruct my patients based on how the items land when I throw them like dice, as well as what my ancestors tell me. For example, I may tell a patient to sleep for one day or walk to a certain point.”

  “How do you know when you are speaking to an ancestor?” I asked.

  “Sometimes my patients speak to me in a language they have never spoken before. Then I’m sure I’ve reached an ancestor. He is speaking to me from somewhere.”

  I looked at his garb and realized that it was an integral part of his ri
tual. It added to his authority. I thought about the allopathic physician’s white coat and stethoscope. A patient sees those and believes help is on the way. A sangoma proceeds on the basis that if the mind is healed, the body will be okay. The Western doctor is more apt to treat the ailment and assume if that’s remedied, the mind will be okay.

  The healer showed me a three-foot-tall wooden statue he had carved some years before. It was of a thin female leaning somewhat forward with a straight back and jutting breasts. Wrapped around her waist was a short rawhide dress. The leather was stiff because the curing procedure had been crude.

  Her base was uneven, as are most that stand on sand when they are carved. If placed on a flat surface, it would fall. The sangoma had no other statues that I could see and was not selling such things. It seemed it was his creation for himself; he wanted to carve it like some painters want to paint. I liked him; he was genuine and I wanted to bring something of his back to Durban with me. Not knowing much about carvings, I asked him if he wanted to sell it, thinking it would help him and me.

  He paused. “For money?”

  “Yes,” I replied, “I don’t have anything to trade.”

  “Okay,” he said and asked a price of ten dollars which, given the circumstances, seemed fair.

  “You must take it quickly,” he said. “Or my wives will become too upset. They think it brings them luck.”

  I again thought about my dissertation and decided to take the statue for luck.

  Indeed, when the women saw me carrying it to the Land Rover, they began to wail in protest. I almost left it there, not wanting to cause disruption. I looked back, and he pointed for me to go.

  Some ten years later while I was in the United States, a dealer in African art offered me $10,000 for it. But to this day, through the trials, tribulations, and travels of my life, I’ve kept that statue. I’ve lost track of countless other things, but never that. Each time I admire it, I remember the Zulu nation and Africa. I think about luck, and the sangoma who carved it, and always about my dissertation. Then I acknowledge my full, healthy life.