The Ancient Highway Adventure

BBC Four Collections -

specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.

For this collection, Sir David Attenborough

has chosen documentaries from the start of his career.

More programmes on this theme, and other BBC Four Collections,

are available on BBC iPlayer.

DRUMS BEAT

PEOPLE CHANTING

DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: The largest single sheet of falling water

in the world. A mile and a quarter long.

The Victoria Falls.

Here the Zambezi plunges over a cliff

and thunders into a chasm 350 feet deep.

The cliff into which the entire river pours

runs parallel to the line of the falls

and is only a mere 100 yards across.

Clouds of spray swirl up in such volume

that they condense on the opposite side of the chasm

to form new cascades.

But these never reach the bottom again,

for the enormous volume of water crashing into the gorge

causes such a tremendous updraught of air

that it catches these streams

and once more blows them into the sky.

At a few places, you can scramble down into the gorge itself.

Down here, at the foot of the falls,

the spray from the tumbling water

keeps these gorges saturated in moisture.

And, as a result, all sorts of plants grow here

that are not found at the top of the falls.

These palms, for example, wouldn't grow

on the sun-baked, parched land 300 feet above.

And as a result of that,

there are all sorts of birds and animals that live here

that are not found up above.

Among them are the little hyraxes.

A hyrax looks a bit like a rabbit,

but, in fact, it's quite unrelated.

Indeed, its exact relations are something of a mystery.

But from the nature of its teeth and its feet,

people think that it's related, perhaps,

to the elephant, surprisingly enough.

Anyway, they live among those boulders over there.

At the moment, I can't see any at all.

But the hyrax has a very high-pitched whistle,

and I'm going to see if I can't persuade some of them to come out

by blowing on this very high-pitched dog whistle.

HE BLOWS WHISTLE

HE BLOWS WHISTLE

WHISTLING CONTINUES

Hyrax, or dassies - as they're called in these parts -

live in small, family colonies.

They're about a foot long and vegetarians.

But only during the night and at dusk and dawn

do they venture away

from the security of their rocky labyrinths in order to graze.

During the daylight hours,

they spend most of their time

basking in the sun on the hot boulders.

They have few enemies.

A leopard, maybe.

Man, of course.

And hawks.

But when the shadow of a hovering, hunting hawk

drifts over the boulders,

then the hyrax quickly scamper to safety.

On the river above the falls, there is an abundance of animal life

and of the most spectacular kind.

THROATY RUMBLING

ELEPHANT ROARS

Elephants don't like you to approach too closely.

And once they've caught your scent through their uplifted trunks,

they can behave in a somewhat alarming way.

But however threatening they may seem,

you're usually pretty safe in a boat on the river

for they seldom charge into the water.

They are immensely destructive creatures,

and they have to be, in order to satisfy their vast appetites.

An adult elephant munches about

five hundredweight of vegetation a day.

There are still large numbers of them on this part of the Zambezi.

So many, in fact, that in parts they've devastated the bush.

Herds roam close to the outskirts of the town of Livingstone,

beside the Victoria Falls,

and every evening plod across the main road

on their way down to the river to drink,

so that a motorist coming fast round a corner at night

has to be ready to jam on his brakes in a hurry.

Like all game, elephants are dependent on water.

Every day they drink between 30 to 50 gallons, if they can get it,

so that in times of drought

a herd can quickly suck a waterhole dry.

The technique of drinking by putting your nose in the water,

sniffing up a trunk full, and then blowing it back into your mouth,

is not one which, apparently, comes naturally even to elephants.

The little babies, when they first come down,

take some time to learn the trick.

Occasionally, you can see a really young one imitate its elders

by dipping its tiny, stubby trunk into the water,

and then putting it straight into its mouth,

without realising that if you want to drink like that

you must take a sniff in between the two actions.

Finally, it has to give up and go down on its knees

and drink directly with its mouth.

ELEPHANT RUMBLES

ELEPHANT RUMBLES

After drinking, the elephants attend to their toilet.

And there's nothing they enjoy more than a good mud bath,

splashing one another by swinging their feet in the black mud.

The little babies almost recklessly frolic in the wallows

between the legs of their six-tonne mothers.

It seems a miracle that none ever gets sat on.

Sometimes the adults themselves abandon their dignity

and lie down and wallow with the babies.

But usually they cover themselves with mud

simply by squirting it

with astonishing accuracy over their backs.

ELEPHANTS ROAR AND TRUMPET

When everyone is nicely covered in glistening, black mud,

then they powder themselves off with a dust bath.

This bull, with his trunk resting on his tusk

and his forelegs crossed,

is patiently waiting for the ladies to finish their toilet.

The lives of a whole host of creatures

revolve around elephants and their activities.

When the herd has left the waterhole,

the ground is littered with their droppings.

And then, down come the hornbills.

For elephant dung is often full of camel thorn seeds.

The hornbills can't get these directly from the tree,

because there the seeds are enclosed in a hard pod,

which the birds can't crack.

So, if it wasn't for the elephants,

the hornbills couldn't enjoy this particular food.

Oddly enough, the camel thorn tree also is dependent on the elephant.

Its seeds not only have a hard pod, but an extremely tough rind.

If they drop from the tree directly onto the ground,

few of them will germinate.

Only when they've been chewed by the elephant

and have been softened by its digestive juices will they sprout.

Elephant dung is much relished by termites.

And in search of the termites

come troops of banded mongeese.

MONGEESE SQUEAK

Insatiably curious, they examine everything,

squeaking with excitement, turning over the dung

and eating not only the termites

but beetles and any other little creatures that they can find there.

MONGEESE SQUEAK

In fact, animals of all sorts swarm around the Zambezi

both above and below the falls.

Even the falls themselves provide a home for special birds.

A colony of swifts, which every day

swoop across the curtain of falling water

in search of insects.

This huge fissure in the surface of the Earth

is the creation of the river itself,

for here it flows over a sheet of basalt rock,

which is crossed by a series of parallel faults.

And by pounding relentlessly along one of these

the river has gouged out this gigantic trench.

Waterfalls, from our point of view,

seem to be very permanent features of the landscape.

This one has hardly changed at all since Livingstone discovered it,

over a century ago, in 1855.

This picture, which was painted by Thomas Baines

only seven years after Livingstone was here,

matches almost exactly the scene as it is today.

But in terms of the geological history of the world

they're very, very temporary affairs.

The waters of the Zambezi, that have already eroded this chasm

along a line of weakness through the basalt,

have now discovered another line of weakness

which stretches from here at the western end

diagonally in that direction.

Slowly and inexorably, the waters are working their way along there.

Already, the Devil's Cataract here

is considerably lower than the main line of the falls.

It may take many thousands of years, but eventually

the Victoria Falls will migrate

and move into a new channel over there.

And when that happens, the present chasm

will be yet another in the line of gorges

which follow it downstream.

Below the falls, the Zambezi,

which so recently was a mile and a quarter wide,

is now compressed into a channel no more than 50 yards across.

Each of these zigzag lines

of the deep, desolate gorges through which the river boils

has been excavated by the river itself.

And each marks the site of the falls in bygone centuries.

30 or 40 thousand years ago, the waters of the Zambezi

were thundering over this line of cliffs behind me.

It's taken them all that time

to work their way up the seven miles of gorges

from here to the present line of the falls.

People haven't always thought that the falls were necessarily beautiful.

The Portuguese who came here in the 1870s described them

as being "sublimely horrible".

And a Frenchman who came along in the '90s

called them "a veritable hell".

But no-one can remain indifferent to this tremendous sight.

The Africans of Livingstone's time regarded the place as sacred

and buried their dead on the islands above the lip of the falls.

And there are even indications that prehistoric man

regarded the place with tremendous awe.

For all around me, on the lip of the gorge here,

there are flint implements strewn among the gravel.

The people of that time didn't make very elaborate implements.

Just simple scrapers and arrowheads and knives.

This, perhaps, was a scraper.

And here, another one.

And this, maybe a small knife.

But all of them unmistakably chipped by human hands.

But although these implements are so common around here

you only have to go about a mile away

and you won't find any at all.

So it seems almost certain that

at the time that the waters of the Zambezi

were thundering and smoking over those cliffs,

prehistoric man had a large encampment here.

Why did he select this place?

Well, maybe he too regarded the falls

as places of magic and mystery and awe.

Since ancient man was here,

many migrating tribes have used the Zambezi

as a highway into the interior.

The most primitive of the people

living in the valley today are the Batonka.

Until recently, the outside world had touched them very little.

Even now, the women, who seldom go far from their villages,

still follow their traditional way of life.

A Batonka girl, to look her best,

must anoint her body with red ochre.

She must wear heavy brass anklets and bracelets.

She must mat her hair with fat,

and decorate it with beads

and a little circlet of cowrie shells,

traded up from the coast hundreds of miles away -

a coast she has never seen.

THEY SPEAK IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE

Through her nose, she must wear a length of straw

and many of the older women still smoke curious calabash pipes.

THEY SPEAK IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE AND LAUGH

During the initiation rites, all Batonka girls are disfigured

by having their two front teeth knocked out,

which gives even the young women an unnaturally aged look.

THEY SPEAK THEIR OWN LANGUAGE

As the dry season advances,

most of the creeks and swamps that flank the river dry out.

And many water-living creatures are stranded,

so that the mud pans are littered

with shrivelled bodies, such as this of a freshwater crab.

But some animals have special devices

which enable them to survive until the next rains.

This frog, called xenopus,

manages to prevent being dried to death

by burrowing deep into the mud as the waters fall.

Below ground, it can remain alive,

for there, except in the worst droughts, the earth is still moist.

It's an odd-looking creature,

rather like an ordinary frog that's been squashed flat.

And it has the very un-froglike characteristic

of claws on its hind legs.

But one creature has a much more complicated device

for survival than xenopus.

At the bottom of this burrow is a hard,

almost leathery object with a tiny hole in the centre.

The mud beneath is still slightly moist.

So it's possible to crack it open and reveal the strange object

that lies cocooned at the bottom of the burrow,

shrouded in a crinkled, parchment-like skin.

If you want to see what is within the cocoon,

we can persuade it to hatch by putting it in water.

It then behaves as though the rains have come

and its swamp has once more become submerged.

For an hour or so, bubbles appear at the little hole at the top.

And then, the cocoon begins a series of convulsive shudders.

Slowly, it loses its outer hard skin,

which is, in fact, formed of dried mucus.

Then, at last, a head appears.

This, in fact, is a lungfish -

a fish that can live and breathe out of water

and can survive completely dried up in its cocoon for up to four years,

without eating anything.

When it first emerges, its eyes are milky and it seems to be blind.

It'll be several days before it regains its sight.

While it was cocooned,

it lived by absorbing its muscle tissues.

And after being dried up for a particularly long period,

a fish may have consumed almost half its original weight.

The changes necessary in its body chemistry

to enable it to digest food again are so complicated

that it will be a week or so before they're complete,

and it can eat normally once more.

But when they do start feeding, they put on weight fast,

for they're aggressive creatures with a very powerful bite,

and they can grow up to three feet long.

There are few creatures whose lives are not governed by the water supply,

and none are more dependent on it than the big game

wandering across the hot, open plains of central Africa.

The herds of wildebeest come down every day to the water holes,

usually in the mornings and again in the evenings,

their lives one constant trek from pastures to the water and back again.

The daily procession is a marvellous sight,

and if you can find a reasonably concealed position,

with the wind blowing in your face

so that the approaching animals can't catch your scent,

then you may sit there all day

as the herds queue up to take their turn to drink.

With these wildebeest came a family of warthogs - bold, cheeky creatures

who will barge their way through any antelope to get to the water.

The loveliest of the antelopes on the Zambezi must surely be the sable.

In Kenya and Uganda, the sable is so rare

that catching sight of one is something to talk about for days.

But the Zambezi is their homeland,

and here, these splendid, heraldic creatures

come down to the water holes in herds up to a hundred strong.

This male is chasing a reluctant female

who apparently doesn't welcome his attentions.

The sable, wherever they go, are accompanied by tick-birds.

And when the antelope come down to drink,

the tick-birds sometimes hop off their hosts

and take a drink themselves.

Often, too, they move onto other animals,

so that the water hole is a sort of railway junction

for tick-bird passengers,

where they can change from one conveyance to another.

Here comes the male sable again to claim a place at the water.

Eland, the biggest of all the antelope.

They, too, bring tick-birds down with them.

The tick-birds are of service to their hosts

by eating not only cattle ticks which may infest the animals

but also by removing other insect pests.

Most beasts submit to their attentions uncomplainingly,

though one can't help feeling it must be extremely irritating

to have a bird crawling not only into your ear,

but right over your eye.

But the birds are something of a mixed blessing,

for often if an animal has a wound or a sore,

then it's precisely here that flies will lay their eggs,

and here that the tick-birds

will therefore find their richest meal of grubs.

But because they peck so continuously at the sores

they often keep them open long after they would otherwise have healed.

But, whether the animal appreciates the bird or not,

there is little any of them can do to rid themselves of their guests.

Although the middle of the Zambezi remained unexplored

until Livingstone came here a century ago,

the mouth of the river was well known to the Portuguese,

who by the 15th century had mapped the coast with astonishing accuracy.

Vasco da Gama skirted round the continent

on his way to India in 1497.

He sailed up the east coast and landed,

but the local people attacked him, so he didn't stay long.

Nevertheless, East Africa was now open to European exploitation.

The Portuguese were soon back in force,

and this time they came to stay,

for from here they could control a sea route to India.

Where they could, they made treaties with the local chiefs.

Everywhere they built forts.

Between 1505 and 1507, working from their base on Mozambique Island,

they erected a network of fortifications

around the coast and up the rivers.

Some of the forts still stand to this day,

like this one at Tete on the Zambezi 200 miles up the river.

None of them are big,

just simple rectangular strongholds 100 yards or so square,

which, in times of trouble,

could house a garrison of a few hundred men.

All are heavily fortified with thick stone walls

which were easily proof

against the arrows and spears of the local people.

Cannonballs still litter these ramparts,

and indeed, in the 16th century, the Portuguese had to be well armed

and had real need of these fortress walls,

for there was more or less continuous battle and warfare

with the local African tribes.

Again and again, the Portuguese settlements were overrun

and all the inhabitants slaughtered.

But the rewards for staying here were great.

For one thing, there were slaves to be captured and taken down river

to be sold in the great markets of the east coast of Africa.

And then there was ivory.

300 years ago, no part of Africa was richer in elephant

than this part of the lower Zambezi.

And across the Indian Ocean in the Portuguese colony of Goa,

the craftsmen were clamouring for ivory.

But above all, there was gold.

Away to the south lay a great African kingdom,

the kingdom of Monomotapa,

and from it came a steady trickle of gold.

The Portuguese were sure that there was much more down there,

because down there, they believed, lay King Solomon's mines.

And the Arabs, who came up from the south,

brought stories of a great stone city that was rich in gold.

DRUMBEATS

Such a golden city really did exist away to the south,

although it's unlikely that the Portuguese ever reached it.

Indeed, it wasn't until the end of the 19th century

that men from the outside world set eyes on this,

the citadel of Great Zimbabwe.

By the 19th century, the existence of the kingdom of Monomotapa

had largely been forgotten, and no-one could believe

that these astonishing ruins were the work of an African people.

After all, the local tribesmen built only simple mud huts.

How could they ever have understood

the complicated technique of building in stone?

And so, to explain these ruins, some fanciful antiquaries

remembered once more the stories of King Solomon's mines.

Perhaps these were they,

or maybe this was the golden city of Prester John.

Some felt certain it was a fortress built perhaps

2,000 years ago by the Phoenicians.

And others, recalling the pinnacle towns on the Red Sea,

suggested that it might have been built by Arabs.

But one thing was certain,

whoever had built Zimbabwe was certainly rich in gold.

The first European visitors to the place,

perhaps with the thoughts of King Solomon's mines

fresh in their mind, ransacked the place in search of gold.

There was even a company set up to seek for treasure.

It was called the Ancient Ruins Company Ltd.

One man, by his own admission,

took out over £4,000 worth of gold from these ruins.

And even today, after the rains of the wet season

have washed away another layer of earth,

sometimes you can pick up little golden beads

or little blocks of gold.

Like these.

Today, much of the mystery that once shrouded Zimbabwe

has been unravelled.

Systematic excavations by archaeologists have shown

that this was once the capital and the ritual centre

of a great African kingdom

that reached its heyday about the 15th century.

There are signs that this rock mountain

was inhabited from the earliest times,

but it wasn't until about 1100AD that the people living here

invented the curious and individual style of building

that's characteristic of Zimbabwe.

They began to improve the shelter provided by the granite boulders

by laying lines of stone walls on the rocks themselves

without cement of any sort.

And they continued to develop and improve their technique

during the next 300 or 400 years.

During that time, 15,000 tonnes of granite were knocked into shape

and carried up the hill to construct these walls.

But what was this place,

and why was it built so laboriously on the top of the hill?

Judging from what we know

of the rituals and beliefs of other African people,

it seems certain that Zimbabwe was a highly sacred place,

a sanctuary inhabited by a king who was almost a god.

Such a being was so sacred

that he was shut away from the eyes of his people.

It's unlikely that any common folk

were allowed to come up to this hilltop citadel.

They waited in the valley below

while sacrifices were being made up here in the temple.

Along these narrow stone corridors,

the divine king would once have made his way to perform the rituals

believed necessary to bring rain after drought

or to ensure the fertility of the land.

And from this position up here

it's possible that the priests, unseen, spoke to the people.

For these huge granite boulders around me

produce the most extraordinary acoustical effects.

And it's quite possible for a man standing here

to speak in a normal voice and be heard and understood

in the great enclosure across the other side of the valley

half a mile away.

Down there in the valley,

it's still an eerie experience

to hear a voice come floating down to you from the sky.

This impressive wall of the great enclosure down in the valley

was constructed somewhat later than the buildings on the hill.

When the masons began to erect the gigantic wall,

at this point, their technique was at its most refined.

Here the stonework is laid in narrow courses,

beautifully regular and elegantly shaped.

The granite was quarried from the hillside,

and the labour involved must have been immense.

There's as much masonry in this one wall

as in the whole of the hilltop buildings put together.

But it seems that, as the work proceeded,

the masons lost heart in their enterprise,

for as they worked their way around the wall,

which at its beginning is over 30 feet high,

it becomes lower and the workmanship less fine.

And here, where so many of the passages

inside the great enclosure converge,

and where I can look through one of the gateways

straight across the valley to the holy of holies up on the hill,

is this big platform of stone.

When it was first discovered,

it was buried beneath a lot of decaying leaves.

But when they cleared the rubbish away,

they found that on top of it were a large number of ox bones

and a great quantity of charcoal.

It seems certain, in fact, that this was an altar

on which sacrifices of oxen were made to propitiate the rain god.

So this was the palace of the king of Monomotapa,

built by Africans about 500 years ago.

But although, through the work of archaeologists,

we now know so much about Zimbabwe, about who built it,

when it was built and what it was used for,

there are still a lot of unsolved mysteries here,

and not the least of them is this tower.

At the end of the 19th century,

one investigator, perhaps in search of gold,

tried to tunnel down from the top in case it was hollow,

but he found nothing but rubble.

Later on, a trench was dug beneath it to see if there was anything there.

They found nothing.

And so it remains a total enigma.

Zimbabwe still guards some of its secrets.

RAPID DRUMBEATS

MACHINERY RUMBLES AND BUZZES

In 1955, engineers and mechanics, geologists and construction workers

descended into the Zambezi Valley

at a place where the river wound its way through a gorge

which the local people called the Trap.

Here, the newcomers built

the most impressive construction since Zimbabwe -

the Kariba Dam.

Behind the huge, curving wall

stretches the largest man-made lake in the world,

which flooded the valley for over a hundred miles upstream.

Water now covers land that once was parched desert and desolate scrub.

Whole forests were drowned.

Herds of hippopotamus now swim above the country

where once the Batonka planted their cassava.

The bulls open their vast jaws in what looks like a yawn

but is more probably a display of their might to the rest of the herd.

Out on the lake, the Batonka are given lessons

by government-trained instructors.

For these people, resettled on the shores of the vast new lake,

had no traditional knowledge

of how to exploit the riches on their doorsteps.

And so the techniques of fishing in deep water with nets

had to be explained to them.

MEN CHATTER IN THEIR OWN LANGUAGE

The harvest they reap is indeed a rich one -

catfish, bream, tiger fish, and all of them good eating.

The fish inspectors note carefully the weight of the yield

and the types of fish

so that the biological progress of the lake can be charted.

- 23. - 23.

Many of the Batonka men had worked on the building of the dam

and had learned the ways of the outside world,

so most of them now wear European clothes.

But the women, whose job it is to gut and scale the fish,

have still remained secluded in their villages,

and they are still dressed as they've always been.

WOMEN CHATTER

The engineers of Kariba

control not only life upriver but downriver as well,

for by the operation of the floodgates

they can bring drought or flood

to the people farther east in Mozambique.

And so the Zambezi approaches the end of its 2,000-mile journey.

It began as a tiny stream in the heart of Africa.

Its water has given life to the herds of elephants

and antelope that browse along its banks

and abundant fish to the people who live beside it.

The Portuguese and the explorers who came after them

used it as a highway to the interior,

and modern man has harnessed its waters

to bring power to central Africa.

But now the river is old.

It drops its burden of sand and silt

in a series of sandbanks that clog its mouth.

It meanders sluggishly on,

threading its way between the sandy islets of its estuary

until it reaches the coast.

And then, at last, it loses itself in the Indian Ocean.

PERCUSSIVE DRUMBEATS AND AFRICAN CHANTING

SOLO MALE VOICE CHANTS

MASSED VOICES JOIN IN CHANT