Raffaella Taylor-Seymour Tuesday September 24, 2024
This talk examines struggles over meanings of and orientations to the sacred in Zimbabwe’s landscapes over the past two centuries. It focuses on Matobo, a region of dramatic mountains and balancing rocks that has long been the site of Zimbabwe’s most important rain shrines and burial
place of chiefs and kings. The country’s first mission station was established in the area in the mid- nineteenth century, and these missionaries played a pivotal role in laying the groundwork for the extraction of the country’s mineral wealth and full-scale settler colonialism in the late nineteenth century. They also worked hard to deter local people from engaging with landscape’s materialities and nurturing longstanding relations with spirits that reside in it. Cecil Rhodes was so preoccupied with the beauty of the landscape that he requested to be buried there, leading to the emergence of a colonial pilgrimage site known as the Rhodesian Valhalla. These changes represent longstanding struggles over the meanings of the sacred under modernist religious and political orders in Zimbabwe, which worked to remake the landscape and transformed orientations to the sacrality of the area’s mountains, rivers, and pools. This talk sets these struggles against the backdrop of debates in religious studies and further afield that have argued that the disenchantment of nature is a crucial feature of the so-called Anthropocene. Seeking complicate such totalizing narratives, this talk examines how the arrival of colonists in Zimbabwe initiated a much more fraught set of processes that sought to reshape and reconstruct ‘religion’ across discursive and material boundaries, yet never fully succeeded.
