Bulawayo 1872

Burnside: The Lives Beneath the Trees

In July 2017, rainwater running down a path at Mabukuwene was exposing something that needed a closer look.

Six members of the National Museums and Monuments team came to investigate. They excavated a small trench, working down through the soil in measured layers. Among the material they recovered were glass beads, pieces of pottery and animal bones.1

The National Trust’s preliminary report interpreted the finds as evidence of a Ndebele settlement, probably dating from between 1870 and 1890. It awaited a fuller archaeological report, and the identity of the household was not established in the account.1

Still, those modest objects open a door. Before Mabukuwene became a place people visited for its trees and its family graves, people had lived there. Pots had been used and broken; beads had been worn or handled; the ordinary material of a household had gathered in the ground.

That earlier life deserves a place in Burnside’s story.

Many visitors associate Mabukuwene with Thomas Meikle. Monica Waddy records his journey from Scotland to Natal as a child, and the stores and hotels that later carried the family name.2 Here, in Burnside, the connection is more personal: he was buried at Mabukuwene after his death in 1939.3

Monica Waddy’s account, published in 1979, preserves a family story about the property. Tom had considered building a new house there, but Winifred preferred the home in which the family was already settled. He later arranged for a grave to be prepared in the granite. When his daughter Jane asked about it, Waddy records his reply: “I shall want it one day Jane.”2

It is a brief exchange, but it gives the familiar businessman a domestic setting: a wife with her own preference, a curious daughter, a father making plans she did not yet understand.

Jane, later Jane Redrup, also appears in the story of the property’s preservation. Accounts of the March 1979 handover to the National Trust describe her part in presenting the place on behalf of the family’s trust. A Tree Life account remembers her speaking of the retreat it had offered her father when business pressed upon him.24

The work around that handover was practical. Paths were cut, the summer house repaired and rethatched, and trees identified and tagged. The Meikle Trust, Aloe Society and Tree Society all appear in the record of bringing the grounds into use for visitors.4

A quiet place depends on that kind of work. Someone clears a path. Someone learns which tree is growing beside it. Someone returns to repair what weather has damaged. The people doing these tasks rarely become as familiar as the names on a grave, but they help determine what the next generation will find.

Mabukuwene gives us a particular place within that wider history. Its earlier residents, the Meikle family and the people who cared for the grounds belong to different chapters. None needs to erase the others.

The beads beneath the path are a useful reminder of that. There is always the possibility that a familiar place has more lives to disclose.

What are your memories of Mabukuwene and Burnside? Who first took you there, and what do you remember noticing?

Sources and notes

Footnotes

  1. National Trust of Zimbabwe, “Archeological Artefacts Excavated at Mabukuwene,” 21 July 2017. Preliminary institutional report. The interpretation and date range are attributed to it; the article does not identify a particular induna as the settlement’s resident. ↩ ↩2

  2. Monica Waddy, “Tom Meikle’s Grave Site,” Rhodesiana 40 (1979), pp. 39–40. PDF. The family anecdote is attributed to Waddy. Her acquisition date differs from later accounts and is not adopted here. The handover is not presented as proof of a statutory monument designation. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. National Trust of Zimbabwe, “Mabukuwene.” Read alongside Waddy’s account below for the family history and burial. Conflicting property-purchase dates have been omitted. This article concerns Mabukuwene within Burnside; it does not establish the neighbourhood’s naming decision or founding date, or present visiting arrangements. ↩

  4. Tree Society of Zimbabwe, Tree Life 15, June 1981, Mabukuwene account incorporating an introduction supplied by Janet Webber, followed by Meg Coates Palgrave’s observations. Its handover account overlaps other institutional retellings and is not counted as wholly independent confirmation of every detail. ↩ ↩2

Do you know more about this? Corrections, photographs and your own account are all welcome, and a correction is published on the page with the date it was made. Send something in.