Monts Matobo

Brève description

Valeur exceptionnelle

Critère (iii) : Les monts Matobo abritent l’une des plus grandes concentrations d’art rupestre de l’Afrique australe. Les riches témoignages apportés par les fouilles archéologiques et les peintures rupestres de Matobo illustrent parfaitement la vie des sociétés de cueilleurs-chasseurs de l’âge de la pierre et la manière dont les sociétés rurales leur ont succédé.

Critère (v) : L’interaction entre les communautés et le paysage se manifeste par l’art rupestre mais aussi par les traditions religieuses qui restent associées aux roches et sont des réponses communautaires à un paysage.

Critère (vi) : La religion Mwari, centrée à Matobo, qui remonte probablement à l’âge du fer, compte parmi les traditions divinatoires les plus puissantes du sud de l’Afrique.

Description longue

The Matobo Hills have one of the highest concentrations of rock art in Southern Africa. The rich evidence from archaeology and from the rock paintings at Matobo provide a very full picture of the lives of foraging societies in the Stone Age and the way agricultural societies came to replace them. The interaction between communities and the landscape, manifest in the rock art and also in the long-standing religious traditions still associated with the rocks, are community responses to a landscape. The Mwari religion, centred on Matobo, which may date back to the Iron Age, is the most powerful oracular tradition in southern Africa.

The area exhibits a profusion of distinctive rock landforms rising above the granite shield that covers much of Zimbabwe. The large boulders provide abundant natural shelters and have been associated with human occupation from the early Stone Age right through to early historical times, and intermittently since. They also feature an outstanding collection of rock paintings. The Matobo Hills continue to provide a strong focus for the local community, which still uses shrines and sacred places closely linked to traditional, social and economic activities.

The landscape is visually and ecologically distinguished from the surrounding dry savannah. A profusion of distinctive granite landforms, densely packed into a comparatively tight area, rise up to form a sea of hills. Their forms have resulted from the varied composition and alignment of the granites, which responded differently to millions of years of weathering, leaving inselbergs (large individual vertical rocks), kopjes, crenellated ridges, dwalas or hump-backed domes, and what look like randomly heaped boulders.

The discrete and often small sheltered spaces, formed between this dense collection of rocks, have fostered a wide variety of microclimates, allowing the development of an extremely diverse range of habitats. The resulting species rich vegetation has in turn provided much sustenance for a wide range of fauna. The valley between the rocks contains numerous streams and springs supporting a wide range of flora. Out of 189 mammal species indigenous to Zimbabwe, 88 have been recorded in the Matobo Hills, plus a further 70 pairs of bird species.

These natural attributes have also been the dynamic focus for people living in the area since the early Stone Age. In fact within natural caves, and on boulders and cliff faces are to be found a dramatic corpus of rock art.

The earlier paintings, dated back at least 13,000 years, are essentially naturalistic interpretations of people, animals and trees. They are associated with hunting and gathering and are mostly executed using a red ochre pigment, mixed with an as yet unknown binder. The later paintings associated with farming communities used white pigment from kaolin or quartz. This distinction is common within the region, but stylistically Matobo is part of a rock-art 'region' stretching from South Africa to Tanzania. It is also impressionistic in that many of the paintings distorted body proportions to convey a sense of movement, or size to convey importance. In many sites there are layers of paintings superimposed one on top of the other. Images in the later paintings also appear to display a complex cosmology linked to religious beliefs.

An abundance of archaeological evidence has been amassed from the shelters for the Stone Age and Iron Age, which when combined has contributed a great deal to the understanding of the pre-colonial history of the region. However, the Matobo Hills also contain very important historical sites and sites from the colonial and post-colonial periods.

Matobo is the home of the wide-ranging oracular cult of the High God, Mwari, whose voice is believed to be heard from the rocks. This powerful oracle links the indigenous communities to the hills where the ancestral spirits live in sacred forest, mountains, caves, hollow trees and pools. Within the Matobo Hills, certain places have become known as shrines.

Description historique

Les fouilles archéologiques et l'analyse des peintures rupestres fournissent des témoignages sur les débuts de l'histoire de la région. Ceux-ci indiquent un usage long et peut-être ininterrompu des grottes depuis l'âge de la pierre jusqu'au début des temps historiques, d'abord par les sociétés de chasseurs-cueilleurs puis par une nouvelle population de l'âge du fer qui pratique l'agriculture. Dans le contexte du Zimbabwe, la séparation entre les périodes préhistorique et historique est mal définie.

Les sites d'art rupestre sont d'abord signalés dans les carnets des missionnaires, des chercheurs de minerais et des explorateurs qui relatent l'arrivée et l'installation du groupe Ndebele au cours de la première moitié du XIXe siècle sous la conduite du roi Mzilikazi. Mhlahlandlela, dans les limites nord des monts Matobo, fut l'un des premiers villages. La ville de Bulawayo fut fondée peu après. À peu près à la même époque, les Nguni, fuyant le Zululand, arrivèrent dans la région.

La résistance des populations locales aux premiers colons est bien connue. Pendant les confrontations de 1893 et 1896 entre Cecil Rhodes et les Ndebele, les monts Matobo jouèrent un rôle central en offrant un refuge à la population locale qui fut inspirée par les oracles des sanctuaires Mwari.

La plus grande partie de la région, qui forme désormais le parc national Rhodes Matopos, fut déclarée zone de conservation naturelle en 1926.