15. Matobo Time

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

Matobo Time

We sat high above Matopos on the warm granite with the cool breeze in our faces when Emile asked me how long I am going to be. “A lifetime...,” I answered. 

I watched him for a little while as the wind played in his hair. “The lifetime of the bacteria decaying this dung beetle or the lifetime of the big guy down there?” he asks as he sits up and points with a piece of grass to a white rhino down below in the valley. In my mind’s eye I suddenly see this place in a different dimension. I see Matobo made up, constructed of time, the make-up of life itself. At the smaller lever I “see” mitochondria buzzing around in cells and cells dividing and things growing and happening relatively fast at a microscopic level, as I did as a young zoologist. At the other end of the scale, under my hand I rubbed the fine dust off the granite rock, also at a microscopic level but at a temporal scale even my relatively intelligent mind struggles to fathom.  I wonder how long that took. As I gazed over the landscape surrounding me, instinctively the scientist in me started to divide the world around me into discrete groups of individuals, events and processes based on the relevant timescale during which it happens or lives. 

When you consider the whole, the entire ecosystem, the time scale is millennia or eons, the longer yardsticks of time. However, when you break the system down into an array of increasingly smaller sub-systems, smaller and more precise units of time are required. You could measure the lifecycle of a rhino in years, while months are more appropriate to measure the gestation period of his equally obnoxious wife, but the passage rate of the grass through his digestive system is more appropriately measured in days. Fertilization of his calf took place within a few seconds while oxygen exchange in his enormous lungs is probably measured in smaller fractions of time. Many measures of time are appropriate to discuss the lifecycle of our rhino, but for others the entire process is over in a few seconds or even less. 

The shortest of events and lifetimes

A gust of wind may sweep across a field of grass and a million grasses are pollinated, just like that. End of story. A significant event that took a few fleeting seconds, but its impact will be prominent when a million grass seeds germinate in a few months time after the rains. Some critical events take place over a very short period of time. Raindrops fall, and the soil is instantly wet, just as the water was a fluid one moment and the next it's a gas.  Some smaller species complete an entire lifecycle in a few days. Some mysterious flowers only open to be pollinated at night, and then only for a few nights, and then its all over. Many of the smaller critters and plants typically only live for one season, then their duties as denizens of their world is complete. For them seconds and hours and days are far more relevant. Months are towards the outer extreme of time measurement for them.

Some lower organisms, live for only a very short periods of time, those single cell organisms and smaller invertebrates in ephemeral ponds transcend dry seasons as spores.  Similarly, some lower plants, some fungi live for very short periods of time, and are highly opportunistic in their approach to life. These shorter life cycles are controlled and affected by the duration of shorter environmental cycles, like day and night, the seasons with wet and dry cycles, cold and warm periods, and even the ratios between light and day. 

The annuals

Some plants and animals live according to very strict annual cycles. One year is the limit for them. Their life-cycles are punctuated by the seasons, normally starting with the rains and ending with the winter. Then there is a period of rest, the dormant stage. Annual plants transcend this period as seeds. The plant itself is no longer there, but many seeds remain behind to initiate new cycles of life. The animal equivalent to annuals are the many insect species who live for only short periods of time and survive the harsh period as eggs. Butterflies are the most typical of these. The eggs hatch in spring and the caterpillars eat their way to adulthood, go through their incredible metamorphosis and emerge as butterflies, painting the landscape in small sections from flower to flower.

For most of these smaller creatures, the annual cycle is all they will live through and experience. No memories of last year, or the year of great floods or the drought of 1982. They just have now, as there is no real past, apart from yesterday and last week and if they are really lucky last month. There also is no real future, no next year or ‘one day’. Perhaps they don't miss it because they don't have it. Perhaps now is enough.

Those who live a little longer

Others have a past and a future. I watch the young impala play, learning about their futures.Their lives are measured in years rather than months. Other processes within them are measured in shorter yardsticks. Their gestation period is 7 months. They are affected by the annual cycles, breed highly seasonally so all the lambs are born in a very short time. Like the life cycles of the short lived species of Matobo, their lives are hugely controlled by the seasons, breeding cycles, times of abundance and shortages,  but the adults cross over into the next season and the next. For them, there must be more of a sense of the past and the future. Hence, the learning as youngsters, butting heads and chasing each other in mock predator prey plays. 

The barrier from the one season to the next, in Matobo, is winter, the dry season. I often think, in terms of evolutionary jumps/progress, crossing that invisible barrier must have been a great challenge and achievement. There are many ways in which to cross that bridge between being one and being two years old! Some plants do it by going dormant in the harsh part of the year. Some trees loose their leaves and sit out the winter. They just hang in there, expending as little energy and resources as possible. Others, like many reptiles will eat as much as they can before the winter and then find a cosy place to hibernate, allowing their body temperatures to drop. They use as little energy as possible to stay alive and then emerge pretty lean when spring arrives. Others are simply big enough, mobile enough and store enough reserves to carry them through winter. These are often the warm blooded part of the family, those who can collect and burn energy to stay with us on the surface during winter. These guys can often live for many many years. Think rhino and elephant. The cold blooded strategy also works well for crocodiles and pythons and tortoises. They live long because they use their energy sparingly and add up the years that way. For them the lifespan yardstick is very long... decades.

Leaving individual lives behind...

There are other timescales that are also relevant. Those which goes beyond the scale of individual lives. When we think about how the whole of the system evolves and develops, it essentially operates at a time scale way beyond the relevant measures of the oldest of individuals. The growth of, and the interactions between individuals within populations, allows for individual species to evolve into functional groups of communities, whether they are antelope communities, grasslands, forests or wetlands. At this level, shorter processes and limited lifespans merge into one another and all fuse to produce larger infinite timescales. The shorter timescales are still important, but they have merged into one another and like the different pieces of a mosaic they loose their individual relevance when looked at from a distance. Similarly, at least in my mind the cyclic nature of the smaller time intervals merge into processes of extended duration, creating the larger infinite temporal landscape. 

This is the scale at which the larger environmental processes are important. Cycles of dry and wet periods follow on each other, the result being the specific dynamics of forests and grasslands competing for area, predators and prey oscillate in numbers as some species increase and others crash.  All of this contributes to the overall variability within the larger system. These are experiences individual short-lived individuals and annuals species will never know about.

We watch the sun rapidly falling from the sky, announcing the end of another day, and we are forced down the hill to get to our vehicle before darkness turns Matobo into a stage for the nocturnal critters to play their role.

Emile walks down in silence, guiding us, and I think about circadian rhythms. It is the pulse of life,  while lunar cycles pace out the months, adding up into years, and years becoming decades and decades accumulate into longer and longer time periods, making up time itself and we are in there somewhere.

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe. 

12. The scale of life.

Please visit the The Arts in Focus to obtain information about our 2014 Matopos Calendar - 

an initiative supporting rhino conservation in Zimbabwe.

As I sit in my son’s sailboat on Mtshelele dam in Matopos, a tiny insect reminiscent of a mayfly perches on the clear water amongst the lilies near me. It does not even create the tiniest of ripples on the surface of the water. I watch this little critter for an instant or two before it shoots off into its own vast world. Instinctively I lift my gaze to take in the entire scene around me. I look up at the massive granite rocks on the other side backed up by an almost endless rolling landscape of hills and mountains and once again I am struck by the scale of this place. Go up one more level from this tiny insect fulfilling her life on a tiny part of this relatively small reservoir of water and this little dam becomes as small as my mayfly. Above a fish-eagle calls and I look up at his world spanning an area that would probably make Matopos itself seem limited. At his level my mayfly is insignificant… or is it?

Scale is often a very difficult concept to integrate or grasp when challenged with a large variation of dimensions or distances, heights and depths. Although we see very well in three dimensions, that capacity often gets distorted in complex environments and visual confusion may set in. We easily loose our ability to judge the size of exceptionally large things, such as a vast expanse of dunes, or a massive mountain range… Sometimes I think most people just give up, and focus simply on the surface, because the deeper layers make the world too complex to comprehend. Matopos itself is not nearly as vast as the Kalahari or Namib deserts, or the Drakensberg. In terms of geographical phenomena Matopos is relatively small. But the vast array of dimensional variety one has to deal with in a short period of time or over a very short distance is astounding. This multidimensionality is probably one of the main reasons it has been declared a world heritage site! It’s simply amazing the way the place is put together.

Not only is the scale of the structural components enormous, the scale at which things happens here is immense! From minute, microscopic to massive mountain sized repetitions of the same general theme… There are only so many ways in which granite can be formed and only so many in which it can be eroded, and only so many ways in which it can be stacked or ordered. However, add to this the continuous scale from millimeters to centimeters all the way up to kilometers in pretty much all the combinations possible, then you have many things going on at the same time. And that is only when you contemplate the rocks! Add to this the multitude of insects, other invertebrates, small vertebrates, the amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals from smaller than my little mayfly friend on his patch of lilies all the way to white and black rhinos that you may see from time to time… All of these can be seen in context when you place them into their little boxes on the food chain and tied together by their roles in the complex ecology of the natural world. Add to this the plant life from the lower forms (such as my beloved lichen and mosses, sticking it out in the harshest of environments in this place but contributing massively by pioneering new habitats and painting this enigmatic place with brilliant colors millimeter by millimeter per year) to the grasses and the more advanced plants all the way to the large trees. Some acacias bind life-giving nitrogen while others increase the structural world by supporting eagles’ nests and even the tiny flycatchers and the ever audible babblers. Just like the lichen, but much more noisily, they paint my mind with beautiful colors… All of these are incredibly interconnected and in my mind if you change something here, the effects can be seen elsewhere, if not today or tomorrow then somewhere in the future in the complex interactions that make up this incredible beast. Thus, the structural scale also determines the scale of the dynamics and processes at play here.

Then, as I begin to think that I have a vague hold on the construct of this place - from the tiny organisms that make up a single lichen to the rock they established themselves on to the hill itself, the valley between them and the subsequent valleys - just then in the distance the thunder announces another dimension to this world. I lie in my tent and watch as the immense lightning bolts crash through the rocks and echo in the valleys. I sit up and watch as the world braces itself for the next thunderous attack. I think of my delicate mayfly and I think of my vibrant lichens holding on to those rocks and those rocks holding on to larger ones! We have to keep this place safe, all places like these… from the lichens and the mayflies to the rhinos, the rocks and the little dam all the way up to the lightning, as well as the processes that renders these incredible components a functional system.

Just then a bolt of light floods the plains in glorious light and for a moment I see my world as if in the light of day. For that fleeting moment, like the flash of my own camera, this world is etched into my mind - a still image of my life. The clouds, where the lightning originated, the earth accepting it, exchanging their electric loads and I think of my soil science professor and the nitrogen released by the bolt of energy. I think of the role of the fresh water finding its way into the soil with the vital nutrients it contains. I think of them finding their ways into the stream and into the dam in which we will sail again tomorrow.

8. Fire

Although there are a whole bunch of glossy magazines out there suggesting we eat our vegetables raw, the mere fact the we, or our ancestors rather, were able to cook their food, changed the course of human evolution and we were well on our way to yuppies driving four wheel drive SUVs clutching cellular phones!

Huge plumes of smoke, painted with light
from the fire and the setting sun!

The ability to hold a root over the fire, provided Zog and family with an opportunity to detoxify the tubers and other plant materials, increased their palatability, so the toddlers would also eat roots and tubers otherwise filled with vile tannins, increasing its digestibility. To cook meat so it would last a little longer also contributed significantly to improve diets and reduce the body's strain against toxins and other strange chemicals… Cooking increased our culinary diversity and many great thinkers suggest therefore that fire lit up human evolution and put it into overdrive… some even suggest that the use of fire lead to the rapid increase in human brain size! So its clear that since our days as cave-dwellers, fire has played a clear and directing role in the evolution of humankind.

However, this is not a lesson in anthropology! And I am seriously digressing!! I am simply trying to justify my innate attraction to fire… I love fire, and as a scientist I need to have an hypothesis as to why it is such a demanding factor in my make-up as a modern man writing blogs!

Systematically consuming all dry vegetation
converting biomass into heat, ash and carbon dioxide  

My theory is that fire had such a profound impact on the collective human construct that our fascination and attraction to it remains to this day. Not only did it cook and preserve our food but it prevented us from freezing to death in our wintery caves, and crucially it kept the predators at bay. Fire therefore contributed in various ways to reduce mortality in the human line able to control it. That is not trivial and we will not forget that! Reinforcing the role of fire, it gave us the opportunity to invent graffiti, and the written language was born as our ancestral toddlers started playing noughts-and-crosses on the cave walls using charcoal left over from last night’s tuber and ostrich BBQ!

The other side of fire, the uncontrolled wild fire, is incredibly devastating! It destroys, it requires oxygen and fuel and creates heat and if that fuel is your grassland or house or car, then fire is an immense enemy! That side of me also hates fire. As a biologist I understand the role of fire, positive and negative on the environment. It can transform a golden waving grassland into ash and black soot in minutes and hours… an entire season’s growth can be destroyed in a single fire lasting no longer than a few hours. A year's rainfall can go up in smoke and leave us with nothing but bare soil and starving herbivores. The reality is that Africa still burns probably much like in the days when Zog and his clan discussed ways in which to control this new innovation! Its been part of this (and other) continents for a very very long time. It shaped the vegetation and everything else with it. No part of this world is untouched by it (apart from the poles, to some extent!). In short, fire shaped the way this continent and its inhabitants evolved and it will continue to do so in many ways.

Captivating the human mind and soul.

So as I leave the office and drive home at night in the winter, and I turn onto Matopos road my eyes start looking for the tell tale glow on the horizon. I am looking for it cause I don’t want to see it! I love watching the savanna grow and ripen into a rich honey colored mass of waving grass in the late summer. To see it destroyed with all its inhabitants is soul destroying. Then when you see it, that red and orange smokey glow in the distance your heart pounce in your throat, just like in my younger days on the farm, where fire was enemy number one and everyone in one’s household was ready to assist if a neighbor would call and say the dreaded word “FIRE”.

But when you see it and when you are over the initial shock of it, and like the rest of Africa, who has accepted death and destruction to a large extent - when you get to that point, then the ancient role of fire takes its effect on me. I cannot drive past it, I can not ignore it though other cars speed by. I, however, have to stop and look, get out the car and walk to it, as I am drawn to it. You often hear the anger in it - its amazing how much noise it makes, an angry beast consuming everything in its way. An incredible number of minute explosions, as oils and resins and gasses ignite with audible cracks and sizzling sounds are emitted as gasses are extruded from confined spaces in dead and live wood and dense grass stands.

The contrasts are amazing - dry grass, bright fire, dull smoke
and an amazing array of smells and sounds

When you stop and watch, it is mesmerizing… it consumes your mind like it consumes the dry vegetation. Sometimes rapidly it will lunge itself forward into large clumps of dense fuel, other times it will gently find its way through the short grass, bridging itself to the next large accumulation of dry matter… almost like an athlete pacing himself, for the final assault on the finish line. Sometimes during these the gentle periods, there are patches which are rejected, or forgotten by the fire or simply not worthy of being devoured, either the biomass is too sparse or the fire out-burned itself and then cant get to it… I love looking at these patches of unburnt vegetation amongst a sea of black, after the fire. They remind me of last standing pieces on a chessboard, the last remaining subjects of a game between masters… the last men standing in a war.

While fires are attractive - be sure not to ge trapped!

While devastating, and highly destructive, fire is also amazingly life-giving. How contradictory can this be? Like the rest of this continent, there are paradoxes and ironies and sometimes just plain illogical phenomena. Yet, soon in contrast to the otherwise black world a new sword of green grass will emerge, bright green, greener than where the veld did not burn - or perhaps it is a cynical play of color in your eyes and in your mind! The reality is that this world sometimes needs it - where we live and work in rural Africa, the grass are habitually burned every year, which is not good. But in places with “sound” management - there is often the need to burn.. To remove the dead wood, the moribund grass and reset the system. Some plants only germinate after smoky fires stimulate their seeds from dormancy… So its not all completely negative! It facilitates and initiates the next cycle, its just that sometimes these cycles follow too rapidly after each other.

Fires at night are simply amazing. Captivating, Awesome!

Whichever the case may be, in the day that may follow such fires, I always look for the new grass, those green little guys bravely pushing their heads into this great new world, unaware of what may follow. Not knowing whether they fill the simple stomach of a locust, the complex series of fermentation chambers of a ruminant like the impala or the sheep and goats, whether it will be a stately sable antelope or if they would survive the cycle and be consumed by Africa’s ultimate herbivore, fire.

Turing reality into a temporary fairy land of color and a
hypnotic theatre of which the aftermath is a cruel black world. 

So, I stop and look, perhaps allow the fire to play with my eyes and my mind a little… allow myself the luxury to travel back to the cave days where our ancestors may have scavenged the after effects of these fires, just like modern raptors swoop down and catch insects fleeing in the face of the fire or other scavengers searching the barren landscape for half cooked victims of the fire…. I may take a few photographs… smell the smoke, wonder about the puff-adders and squirrels again… and when I have had my fix I drive home. There, I greet my family, eat a well cooked meal, pour something smooth and settle in front of my fireplace, and contemplate my day and the ones to follow.

Read some more!

Please look at Gary Larson’s cartoon

On the earliest evidence for habitual use of fire in Europe.  Wil Roebroeksand Paola Villa 

The New York Times; Of Tubers, Fire and Human Evolution, By MARK DERR, Published: January 16, 2001 

7. Components

It not just Matopos, its a characteristic of all places. In fact it is not only a characteristic of ecosystems, its there in many things we deal with… the basic components or parts of the larger whole. The elements that constitutes the whole. When reading a little more about the word component - the dictionary suggested to also look at the word compound, and that brought me to the word aggregation… which is very different from compounds, but each describes in its own way how these systems are constructed. So this is how I look at my world, and therefore how I see Matopos, the larger whole made up of many different building blocks, some in compounds others mere aggregations of elements - which ever way it comes together - there are numerous elements which ultimately constitutes what we know as Matopos.

There is a lot which is of importance here - its not only what the specific components or “ingredients” are, but more importantly how they all are assembled, how they fit together and in some cases how they merge or fuse into something else or change in character. At another level, the overall whole is affected by the way in which these components, aggregations and compounds interact - how they integrate to create a larger whole. Their specific dynamics create the whole which we often refer to as the ecosystem, or should we want to be smart and include the human component, which we should, then we refer to it as the socio-ecological system. This system is then controlled or its interactions determined, or driven by outside factors such as sunlight and rainfall, and economies at various levels. So while the system is composed of specific components the way in which they are assembled, aggregated and fused, determines their interactions and dynamics - and ultimately the behavior of the system.

The individual components my be inert - sterile, but the way in which they act and react upon one another, how they interact and these smaller interactions merging and fusing into larger dynamics - this is what makes it special, functional and worthy of further consideration!

Most probably because of this, I often get the feeling this place is alive… yes its alive with animal and plant life, but more than that, when you pause to look and feel, you often feel it breath… not hear, feel. There’s the presence of the place that gets to you. Like a ridiculously large behemoth. In places the ancient exoskeleton is exposed and the granite is pealing off like old dry skin… with a mosaic of lichen dandruff and warts and large grassy hairs remaining in the creases and crevices. New growth is evident in the soft areas between the hard exterior and the softer belly. Where the hard exterior gives way to the softness of dark rich soil. Covered with vegetation, drying in the winter sun like a huge butterfly waiting for its wings to harden against the forces brought upon it by the next part of its continuous life-cycles. In a not too dissimilar fashion this place reveals all the possibilities of evolutionary life seen in times gone by and present. 

When I stand at the edge of numerous wetlands or vleis in summer and the ducks arrive from no-one really knows where, and the frogs and other amphibians emerge from their clay tombs, I think of it as the gills of an exceptionally large salamander, most sensitive and vulnerable to the outside world if not treated with care. I think of pollutants burning into those sensitive breathing apparatus and wish for a major storm to flush it clean of chemicals, to leave it clean and pristine so the heron can stare at it own reflection for days on end…. So other critters can complete life-cycles of their own and birds can hang their nests out of harms way… so life can play its role in the lives of the different layers of life represented in this place.

Further afield the rocks and boulders build up in massive aggregations or monstrous monoliths, like the one near Mbalabala, a huge wart on our critters back, together they all form when you fly over Matopos the wrinkled back of our friend. Trusting the world, its exposed capillaries merge into small veins and arteries joining in where valleys merge into larger rivers channeling life giving water to man and beast. It amazes me how hard the skeleton can be and how trusting it exposes the softest parts of its existence to the world, to use and abuse.  Not questioning our intentions - jut giving and trusting.  

The outer layer is in most places, hard crusty rock - like the exoskeleton of an old insect of ancient crocodilian, in places it gives way to softer skin, rich soils from which grass and trees emerge making then best of the opportunity provided to them. When you scratch too hard here, you will expose the soft inner being, and if you dont care for it, it will become infected and erode away into large gullies, which like the wounds of an old person, it never really heals. So be careful where you place your roads and stalls and gates. Just like the human hand is composed of delicate bones and tendons and muscles and skin, perfected with nails and pores and hair in the masculine version or simply soft and smooth…. Such are the places in Matobos when you look for it, or if you are prepared to see it…  delicately put together with the minimal use of components, unlike the the extravagant rain forests of Costa Rica or elsewhere, Matobo is a place of modest minimalism. How contradictory can that be? Let em explain - the individual components are minimal, simple without ostentatious flair, just there - but when you look at the whole, you allow the human eye and mind to comprise the symphony of place and spirit to come together, then it the simplicity merges into the greater whole… the basic components aggregates and compounds into what we realized in our simplicity as a place worthy of international conservation status…