Really good music is characterized by the story it tells and the depth of the story is often created by the punctuation - the silences between the important parts in which there is time for your imagination to color in the extra spaces. At first glance the boulders in Matopos seem to be randomly distributed but when you look carefully there is rhythm, rhythm in their distribution and placement. The huge stones provide the overall rhythm, while the smaller components, the clumps of trees and thicker vegetation along the drainage lines, provide the support music. Individual trees and grasses are the backstage singers and minor instruments and all of them contribute to an immense symphony…
Early morning, the orchestra members clean their instruments, gently tune them, and find their place on stage. When you wake up early, and perhaps go scratch amongst the embers to blow a little warmth into the fire, you hear them slowly, almost self consciously, initiating their role as young members of the cast. The other morning I was looking over the lake as the first light struck a chord on the still water. Almost at once a group of firefinches cleaned their tiny instruments and after a few haphazard attempts got their act together and were engaged in a predawn ensemble of soft melodious sounds, almost as soothing as the first warm coffee over my own hoarse voice. As their endeavors intensified and they became more bold, they seemed to trigger a series of other feathered musicians who either reluctantly started talking amongst each other like the guinea fowl or contributed more boldly like the early morning black colored barbet duet. And then the light on the black water reflects the sky and suddenly it is day and everybody contributes with great vigor.
It is an amazing time, when the orchestra is all settled and the conductor has that lovely expectant expression. He raises his hands and all is quiet. You know what is about to happen. The babblers have fallen from their midnight perches and drop to the ground in a great joyous chorus. The conductor’s hair fall over his face and he closes his eyes. On cue, a fish eagle calls and the trumpeters bring a earthly melancholy to the tune - this is the music of life!
I walk down to the water and the mood changes. The sounds from the water birds are soft like the feathers of the cattle egret. The rhythmic wingbeats of some white-faced ducks sweep past in unison. They circle around as the conductor coordinates their flight and then a burst of whistles mixes with the sound of gently parting water as their aerial course transitions into the new medium. The music itself slowly changes. It becomes the gentle stuff you often hear in really good restaurants. Its there and it is good, but it does not penetrate the mind, only the heart.
Very little is out of place here. Even the barks of a distant troop of baboons are welcomed. The piano man looks up and sensing the new mood produces a new gutsy rhythm and the young baboons climber over their rheumatism-ridden grandmothers who are searching for a spot of limelight to warm their old bony hips. An almost inaudible buzz draws my attention closer and a brightly dressed dragonfly warms his thorax muscles and prepares for his early morning aerial assault on some unsuspecting insect.
I realize my intense connection with this world. Each and every one of these sounds, like the love songs of our younger days, reminds me of an important phase or event of my life. The memories of a lifetime can be wrapped up in the sounds of a single day. The guinea fowl’s song belongs in the same place in my heart as my grandfather’s big hands, his smoky beard and the gentle laugh in his eyes as he used to guide me on my first hunts as a child. The rhapsody of frogs near the water takes me back to nighttime fishing with my father, quietly being together and satisfied with each other’s presence. The cattle egrets tell me of the not-so-distant Ndebele farmers, their cattle still safely in the wooden kraals. I see the steam being blown from their noses, their bells will begin to toll soon. Later today the cicadas will take me back to my days in the southern Kalahari, the incessantly hot and endless desert. I smiled deeply inside the first time a barking gecko announced its presence here in Matobo too. The high cry of the eagles takes me back to my days at university and my ornithologist friends with their falcons and eagles. Tonight the owls will take me back to my young boy-man days, alone in my own private outside room, a simple place with a corrugated iron roof, where I became a man listening to the owls and the nightjars, the air often punctuated with the calls of jackal or the lonely whoop of a hyena. That is the best part of my day, the night, when the large groups of musicians have gone to bed, and only the smaller quartet of owls and crickets play their chamber music while we sip deep red wine and let the stars keep score of the day’s events.
