Reclaiming African History and Civilizations

There is definitely a deeply ingrained idea in the Western world that Africans are a people without history. Even the Regis Professor of Modern History in my old university, Oxford, in my own lifetime could address a mass audience in the United Kingdom through the media and say, maybe in the future... there will be African history but at the moment there is none there is only the history of Europeans in Africa the rest is darkness and darkness is not a subject of history The great African civilizations relied on an oral tradition to pass on their ancient legends of mighty chiefs and tribal conflicts. Generation after generation heard these stories, but gradually the memories faded. Even the names of kings were forgotten. With no written record, the mighty empires of Africa's past became as vulnerable as their land. Eight hundred years ago, this rugged terrain near the South African border with Zimbabwe was the site of one such kingdom. All outward signs of their civilization have long vanished, yet the local Venda people know, through whispers from their ancestors, that great kings and queens were once buried here, high above the bushveld on the summit of a cliff. A burial ground created with thousands of tons of soil carried here to cover the bare rock of the clifftop. Each body was adorned with gold treasures before the royal graves were sealed. Eight centuries later, in 1932, an Afrikaner adventurer with a thirst for gold persuaded a local villager to take him to the ancestral burial site of Mapungubwe. Today, Ernst von Mappen is the only one who has ever been to the site. John Grahn, grandson of the explorer, retraces that journey. Well, my grandfather, he was a treasure hunter. He was always interested in finding gold, and he was actually looking for this place for almost five years. Centuries of superstition had protected this royal burial ground from theft. Their guide dared not even look at this sacred hill, fearing he would be struck blind. The local Wendow people, they call this hill Mopngupe, the hill of the jackal. And they call it the hill of the jackal because they believe there's evil spirits and things going around there. When I approached the hill, there was these vertical cliffs, and it seems to be impossible to get onto the hill. And then they found this secret passage going up behind me. As Van Graan's team began their climb, they found holes carved into the rock face, an ancient stairway to the top of this hidden chimney. They feared the climb to the royal burial site could well be booby-trapped, with giant boulders poised to fall and crush them at any moment. But their ascent was safe. They were about to uncover some of the last remaining royal treasure in all of southern Africa. Normally, recovered gold objects were destined for the melting pot. Another important chapter in African history would have been doomed. And originally that was their plan. Luckily, at the last moment, Van Graan Jr. suffered a pang of conscience. Among the finds were a golden scepter and a gold rhinoceros. Small trinkets compared to Tutankhamen's treasures, yet they were the few precious remaining links to a long-forgotten past. Van Graan had been a history student in Pretoria. He knew the significance of these artifacts and decided to donate them to the university. Though rescued, these treasures remain hidden from public view, locked away in archaeology department vaults. Pottery, later excavated at the site, proved there was once an enormous settlement at Mapungubwe. Yet to this day, the University of Pretoria has allowed only a few archaeologists access to these remarkable finds. These are the most important artifacts in sub-Saharan Africa, reluctantly brought out to be photographed on special occasions, then locked away again. They might as well still be buried. All this secrecy has its roots in apartheid. Dutch settlers maintained that blacks and whites had arrived in the area at roughly the same time, giving them equal claim to the territory. When radiocarbon dating placed Mapungubwe as early as 1200 AD, white South Africans were stunned. They refused to believe blacks had arrived in the region more than 400 years earlier than the first white settlers. The Afrikaner scientists tested and retested Mapungubwe, making it one of the most radiocarbon dated sites in all of southern Africa. Yet the result was always the same, 1200 AD. With many white settlers in Southern Africa, much of their argument had rested on the proposition much of this land was, in any case, free of African people. What do you mean it belongs to Africa? We arrived at about the same time as the Africans, so they have no greater claim than we have, so we have as much right as they have. So to tell them that, look, but they were here hundreds of years before you, undermines... some of their basic claim to a special status in South Africa. This civilization was ancient, it was prosperous, and it was black. But what happened to these people remains a mystery. Perhaps they drove their cattle herds further north to the lusher pastures and cooler climate of higher ground. Or perhaps they became the long-sought ancestors of another African kingdom. For only 100 years later, 200 miles beyond the Limpopo River, one of the greatest African empires would be founded. While Europe was in the Middle Ages, Southern Africa was dominated by the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe. Their kings ruled from a court enclosed by a colossal circular wall, over 25 feet high and 16 feet thick. Little is known about the empire. Even the names of their kings are now forgotten. We do know they owned thousands of head of cattle and provided ivory and gold to Swahili merchants on the east coast. The first link in Africa's trade network with the world. Today, the country of Zimbabwe takes its name from this ancient kingdom. Zimbabwe means Great House of Stone. Until recently, its real history was denied by white people. They were convinced that black Africans could not have created such monumental structures. For hundreds of years, Europeans dreamed of finding a lost white civilization of incredible wealth somewhere in Africa's dark and savage interior. Karl Mauck, a German explorer, had heard tales of ancient stone ruins in unexplored territory north of the Limpopo River. He searched for months before finally stumbling across these magnificent remains. Tuesday, 5 September 1871. I saw a short distance away an apparently round edifice. It's built without any mortar of hewn granite slabs. The outer wall is about 150 yards in diameter. The local natives call these ruins Zimbabwe. Mauk was overcome by the splendor and sophistication of these ruins. But believing black Africans too primitive to build such walls, he was convinced they were the work of a lost white tribe. Finally, I stopped in front of a tower-like structure. It stood quite undamaged. I learned from the local inhabitants that they themselves have only lived here from about 40 years ago, that the region was quite uninhabited before that time. All are absolutely convinced that white people once inhabited the region. He drew African artifacts in his notebook, but refused to believe that this city was built by blacks. Finally, he found evidence he believed would prove his theories. I cut some splinters off the crossbeam. A comparison with the wood of my pencil shows that it must be cedar wood, and this must have come from the Lebanon. Furthermore, only the Phoenicians could have brought it there. Solomon used a lot of cedar wood for the building of his palaces, and these ruins are an imitation of Solomon's buildings in Jerusalem. The great woman who built the enclosure could have been none other than the Queen of Sheba. This place, according to Mauch, was biblical Ophir, the city of gold. The story of the Queen of Sheba is first told in the Bible. Laden with precious gifts of gold and gems, this mythical white queen visits King Solomon in Jerusalem. She is said to be a temptress, with a lustful body beneath her silken robes. She gives the king everything he desires. Karl Mauck concluded the Queen of Sheba must have been the queen of Great Zimbabwe, and this place her palace. Mauck's racist theories were quickly seized upon as valuable propaganda by white settlers seeking to expand the British Empire. Any proof that whites had been here in biblical times would help justify their new exploitation of the region. By the middle of 1890, Cecil Rhodes, a wealthy British industrialist, had founded Rhodesia, a country that remained under white rule until 1980, when the black majority renamed it Zimbabwe. Rhodes carved out for himself thousands of miles of land, rich in diamonds and gold, including the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. Claiming it was a Phoenician palace, he oversaw an orgy of looting that robbed these ruins of their most precious artifacts. One of the great tragedies of Great Zimbabwe is that people were doing intensive excavation work here in the firm conviction that at the bottom of all this... Debris was the key to the mystery, the Phoenicians, whoever it was who built it. And, of course, once they got down to the bottom and the clearance was complete, they had destroyed all the evidence of all the human habitation that actually went with these walls. This act of historical vandalism still angers Peter Garlick, once an official in charge of the site. So great was the damage that the true history of this place was almost lost forever. But in 1929, a large-scale expedition of British archaeologists attempted to unlock Great Zimbabwe from the bosom of the Queen of Sheba. Gertrude Caton Thompson, the leader of the group, was determined to solve the riddle of Great Zimbabwe once and for all. Gertrude Caton Thompson was a formidable woman. Her archaeological standards were of the highest. It was an all-woman team. I think very deliberately she always worked with women and was one of the first feminists in archaeology. After weeks of digging, her team still hadn't found enough material to date the site. Demoralized? They sought another area worth exploring. Caden Thompson needed to locate unpillaged ruins. A determined explorer, she persuaded a friend to loan her an airplane. As she swept past the back of the Acropolis, she noticed an uncharted path to the top. It was obscured by vegetation and led to a new set of walled enclosures. At last, she had found a place untouched by white hands. The work began the following day. They would eventually collect all the proof she needed. Her conclusion? Ancient Bantu people had built Great Zimbabwe in medieval times, starting around the 11th century. But her report was not popular among white Rhodesians. Gertrude Caton Thompson's work gave her the highest reputation among academics and scientists. It did nothing to persuade the settler to overcome his prejudices. The settler, like all colonial settlers, knew his native. He knew that the native could not do this. He knew that the native was a savage. And nothing that anyone could do, either Caton Thompson or in the 50 years subsequent to her, were going to convince people with such strong racial prejudices that Great Zimbabwe was not exotic. There are unenlightened persons who assert complacently. that these unexampled structures are of Bantu artistry. Bantu people are unchanging. They are as they used to be. Farmers, herdsmen of small brain capacity. She had a special file for such poisonous propaganda. Many years later, a black servant was still shown bowed before a white queen of Sheba in an official Rhodesian travel poster. Great Zimbabwe was being used as a symbol of white racial superiority. Today, the same image is the icon of the new nation of Zimbabwe. The attempt was to undermine the legitimacy of the claims of African nationalists and to say this land is as much ours, if not more so, than you was. If you suddenly demonstrate, but look, these walls testify against you. Because these have been here for hundreds of years, and they were erected by Africans, silent witnesses that Africans were here centuries before you, they can't take it. So they say the witness is lying. It wasn't built by Africans. For centuries, Great Zimbabwe has suffered an entirely fictitious history. But what was this great African kingdom really like? In its heyday during the 14th century, Great Zimbabwe was a thriving metropolis, unique in all of Africa. It was as big as London at the time, with a population as large as 18,000. crammed into just a few square miles. Inside its great stone walls was sub-Saharan Africa's oldest known urban culture. The noise must have been overwhelming. Smoke from hundreds of miles away. hundreds of cooking fires would have darkened the sky. It was the capital of an empire that stretched for thousands of miles and contained hundreds of mini Zimbabwe's, each with its own ruler. In Great Zimbabwe, a king's influence carried on long after he died. Spirits of ancestors remained an ongoing presence, both as powerful rulers and spiritual advisors. Today, the local Shona people are thought to be descendants of the people that built Great Zimbabwe. In modern Shona culture, the spirits of ancestors are still regularly contacted through a ceremony performed by a medium in a place called the Shona. cave below the Acropolis ruins. They're shown as a very religious people. They believe strongly that their ancestors are not dead and gone forever, that they are alive. Through their mediums, they can punish them, they can bless them, they can pray for them. And therefore, if you don't follow what they say, you are likely to come into misfortune. Stan Mudinge, a Zimbabwean government minister, has studied the ancestors of the Shona people. Usually the spirits of the ruler, the dead rulers, were the most powerful spirits on matters of state. And these spirits possess mediums and they become, in every respect, the emperor back in human form. High on the Acropolis overlooking the kingdom is a sacred enclosure, where we can imagine what used to happen. During times of trouble, the king would come here to pay tribute to his ancestors and ask for guidance from his spirit medium. The medium would work himself into a trance and be taken over by the spirit of a long-dead ruler. This supernatural link between the king and the nation's founding fathers was fundamental to the culture. Through his medium, the king exerted influence over the spirit mediums of lesser rulers. In addition to military might, he wielded a powerful spiritual control over any who would challenge him. You didn't need a huge army to control you. You had control psychologically. You could make people peaceful. You could make the pronouncements which people would follow and would obey. These great stone birds were symbols of that power, and are among the few icons to be salvaged from this sacred place. This was a civilization which represented the highest achievement of the Bantu-speaking people in this part of Africa. The wealth which they accumulated enabled them to build such massive structures as they have built here at Great Zimbabwe, especially down there in the valley, I think. There was sheer arrogance, pomposity, the great madness which seized Louis XIV to build the great Vesayo Palace. That was not a place for one man to live in. That was making a statement of his wealth, the significance of his country, and what he thought of himself. And the same madness sees the people here and build these huge, magnificent stone structures, which we now admire. Great Zimbabwe was constructed over several centuries by a devoted people. One million stone blocks were shaped just to build the outer wall. Each subject paid tribute to the chief with seven days of labor each month, not slave labor. They built this monument to honor their king and provider. The original builders of these walls came to granite outcrops like this one. Today they still quarry blocks, as they have for centuries, to repair the broken walls of their ancestors. By heating the granite with fire and throwing water along the fault lines, the rock shatters into thick slabs. Then begins the slow process of breaking and shaping the rocks for the dry stone walls. Although it's easy to understand how they built these walls, why they built them is the subject of fierce debate. Was the great enclosure a fortress or a palace? The narrow passage between these towering walls has generated lurid theories. Many believe it stopped men from spying during female initiation ceremonies. Most likely, though, it was simply to maintain absolute privacy for the royal household. That still leaves the enigma of the giant cone-shaped tower. The first Victorian investigators focused in on it as a sexual symbol, as a male penis in stone. This has been resurrected on several occasions subsequently, but there is no evidence... Either in its form, its decoration, to suggest it. There are fragmentary traditions that suggest that it represents in stone the great clay grain bins in which the staple food was stored. And this makes some sort of sense of the monarch, the king, as provider of his people's food. Funding this vast construction in the 1300s required a booming economy. And the source of that wealth was cattle. A chief's status was based on the number of cattle he owned. A rich man would have many cattle, so he could afford many wives, who would bear him many children, who would provide more labor to cultivate more land. During the dry season, when there was little work, farmers became gold miners. Digging for gold in these narrow mine shafts was so dangerous, laborers had to be bribed to go underground. Most preferred panning in the riverbeds. Gold was the monopoly of the king. He paid his miners in cattle, reserving the gold for himself, for exchange and barter with the Swahili merchants of the East African coast. At the height of their power, the great Zimbabwe rulers controlled the flow of gold and ivory to the trading ports of East Africa. And this trade would fuel construction of some of the most magnificent cities in the ancient world. In the 14th century, Africa's Swahili coast was an exotic place, described by Arab sailors as vibrant and affluent, with the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world. This was the setting for the legendary adventures of Sinbad and the Arabian Nights. Persian carpets were exchanged for African ivory. Porcelain was traded for gold. Merchants who came from India and Arabia, even from the Far East, had to deal with Swahili brokers, medieval middlemen, who were their only link to goods from Africa's interior. The Swahili built and sailed the Dows and navigated the treacherous channels to the many trading ports. By controlling the sea, they maintained firm control over all commerce in the region. Every year, hundreds of boats awaited the monsoon winds to carry their goods back to the Middle East. By the 10th century, gold, ivory, and quartz were pouring into the Mediterranean, commerce on a scale not seen since Greek and Roman times. This prosperous coastline had ports and cities that stretched 1,800 miles from present-day Somalia to Mozambique. Their trade networks extended from Arabia to India and on to China. In the 15th century, the Swahili even exported a giraffe to China, causing a sensation at the imperial court. This extensive contact with other cultures produced a cosmopolitan society, influenced by both Arab and Indian traditions. Yet despite their widespread success, this region of Africa has also suffered a history denied. The confusion can be traced back to the first Arab traders and the introduction of Islam. The Swahili adopted Islam a thousand years ago, and this shared religious code helped create mutual trust in business deals. The call to prayer would have brought together the Arab traders and the African merchants. They would have washed in cisterns like these, then entered mosques as grand as the medieval cathedrals of Europe. But the mystery is, who built these once great cities? Arabs or Africans? Archaeologist Mark Horton is studying the ghost towns of Africa's coast. He has revolutionary ideas about their origin. When archaeologists first came here in the 1920s and found these ruins covered by jungle, they naturally... I assume they must be the work of Arabs. You've got here stone tombs made of coral from the sea, decorated in porcelain bowls. You've got houses and palaces with elaborate niches and toilets. You've got mosques with their minarets and with their mihrabs. This surely must be the work of Arabs. But I now believe that the fact this interpretation is wrong, that these are an African society. The raw material for these towns was mined from coral deposits. Until recently, it was assumed Arab settlers used African slaves to build their mosques and palaces. Once again, many found it hard to imagine Africans constructing permanent buildings. Now it is thought the Swahili played a much more active role in creating this trading empire and that the wealthy merchants who built these coral towns were African, not Arab. It's a complicated story to untangle. By the 18th century, long after many of these coastal cities had gone into decline, the east coast of Africa was actually ruled by Arab sultans from the island of Zanzibar. To support their territorial claims, they insisted Africans were mere bystanders in the development of Swahili civilization. For ten years, Mark Horton has been helping the Swahili rewrite their history and lay claim to their rightful legacy. For Horton, this derelict building is a testament to the betrayal of the Swahili people. It's called the House of Wonders. This vast building represents the final humiliation of the Swahili. It was a present by the British to the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar in the 1880s. The British wanted to carve up large tracts of East Africa, but unfortunately the Swahili were in the way. They were the people who'd lived there for thousands of years. And so they pretended that the Swahili had no history, it was simply Arab history. And by giving this building to the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar, it was possible to create a whole new myth about the history of East Africa. And that is why we no longer have an idea of who the Swahili were. Horton believes the only way to find out who they were is by digging. His goal? To find evidence of an early African settlement on the island of Pemba off the Tanzanian coast. He leads his team of workers to a site where he thinks he has found the legendary city of Kanbalu. According to Arab records from the 10th century, Kambalu was the first Muslim city on the Swahili coast, so it is of crucial importance. In the best African tradition, Horton issues orders from his perch while his wife Kate digs below. They are starting to uncover the floor of a mosque that has completely collapsed. Horton hopes it will reveal how Islam came to East Africa. An old Arab legend offers one explanation. Abdul Juma, Zanzibar's chief archaeologist, turns it into a campfire story for the weary workforce. It comes from the journal of an Arab explorer. Back in 922 AD, he wrote that a ship of Arab sailors set sail from Oman to an African trading post called Kambulu. But a storm drove them much further south along the coast. Now the people of this coast were reputed to be cannibals, so the sailors feared for their lives. The frightened Arab merchants were brought ashore and dragged before the king. Luckily, he seemed more interested in trading than eating. He was dazzled by the Arabian jewels, so they exchanged presents. The sailors had good reason to praise Allah. When it was time to go, they invited the king onto the ship to say farewell. The Arab captain had a wicked thought. In the Oman slave market, this African king could fetch 30 dinars. He gave the order to sail. And when they reached Oman, the king was sold into slavery. Over the next year, the king learned Arabic and studied the Koran and eventually became a devout Muslim. Then one day he escaped from his master and walked back thousands of miles to his village. Years later, the Arab captain who had betrayed the king set sail on another voyage to Kambalu. Once again, their ship was blown south. Once again, they found themselves off the land of Zans. The Arab merchants were stunned to see the king they had sold years before and begged for mercy. Go, you traitors, he said. If I have forgiven you, it is because through me you have introduced my people to Islam. So in future, when Muslims come here, we will treat each other like brothers. This time, the king did not see them off. The moral of the tale is that the Swahili might have become Muslim to avoid being sold into slavery. Horton thinks the spread of Islam along the Swahili corridor was a kind of insurance policy against the Arab slave trade. Canbalu, the Arab captain's destination in the tale, was a thriving trading port along the east coast of Africa. If this is Kambalu Horton has found, then beneath the floor of this stone mosque, there could well be earlier mosques, built in a more traditional African style. On this beach, the temporary fishing village has a wooden mosque. Swahili only live here during the fishing season, as they have for a thousand years. But they always build a mosque. similar to the very first Swahili mosques. So Mark, this is a timber built mosque with thatch, typical of early mosques on these villages. And when they abandoned... and these they graduate to one made of mud? Yes, mud and timber mosques. And usually it becomes larger than this one, timber mosque. And then, again, one then has a stone one. Yes, they built a stone on the same spot. One on top of another. One on top of another. Heavy rainfall brings a halt to the digging. The downpour softens the soil just enough to quicken Mark Horton's pulse. Beneath the stone mosque, they begin to find remnants of two wooden mosques, one on top of the other. the other, the earliest dating back to the 8th century. This place is probably the site of Kambalu. We know from historical evidence that Kambalu is the first place on the East African coast with Muslims. Perhaps this is the first structure that I am kneeling on, the very place that the Muslims came to East Africa. A Muslim festival honors the birth of Mohammed, but on the Kenyan island of Lamu, the celebration pulses to a uniquely African rhythm. The clans race dhows around the archipelago and surge along the harbor front. Islam may have come from Arabia, but this is a Swahili celebration in a Swahili town. Yet even many Swahili continue to believe the foundations of their civilization are Arab. Some of the confusion was self-perpetrated in the sense that many Muslims among the Swahili people preferred to identify themselves in Arab terms. So they added to the racist tendencies of outsiders who wanted to deny Africans any credit anyhow. So these Muslims had quasi-religious reasons for self-Arabization. and Western observers had racist reasons for crediting the Arabs with Swahili civilization. And the two forms of reasons converged to create the confusion. There can be no denying the external forces that molded towns like Lamu. The intricate wooden carving on doorways is a typical Swahili feature. Perhaps several centuries ago, Indian craftsmen visited and taught Africans how to carve elaborate designs into wood. But then the Swahili absorbed and adapted these lessons to fit their own culture. Perhaps Persians introduced the ornate designs carved into the walls of houses. But today, Swahili craftsmen practice the art of molding wet plaster. Six centuries ago, rich African merchants built villas decorated by the finest craftsmen. Lammu was as sophisticated as medieval Venice. These opulent houses were built on the foundations of the Arabian and Indian trade. Today, most of that trade is gone, and the economy depends on a trickle of tourism. But the town probably looks much as it always did. The streets bustle with donkey traffic. They're too narrow for cars. And the original open sewer meanders through the alleys. Lamu's labyrinthine streets are mirrored in those of many ghost towns along Africa's east coast. During the 16th century, hundreds of these towns fell into ruin. It's not obvious why the flourishing commerce came to an end. Everyone benefited from the trade. The gold diggers of the interior, the Swahili middlemen, the sailors, the merchants, and even consumers around the medieval world from Europe to China. Perhaps the fortunes of rival merchant families ebbed from generation to generation, much as corporate dynasties rise and fall today. Perhaps the bubonic plague brought worldwide recession and the demand for African commodities fell. It was the end of a glorious era for the kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili coast. By the end of the 1500s, the buildings would lie forgotten, but their cultural legacy would suffer an even worse fate. All societies select what they want to remember, but only Africans have been totally denied a history of their own for so long. But remember, this is where our species began on present evidence. This is where the first humans walked on Earth. So the first habitat of the human species seems to be the last to be properly understood. We are paying a price for not understanding it. When European settlers first came to Africa, they dreamed of discovering a lost white civilization of fantastic wealth and beauty. Surprisingly, even today the myth lives on. This is South Africa's lost city, a living monument to an imaginary lost white tribe. It's part of the Sun City Resort, one of the most luxurious theme parks in the world. The artificial beach is packed with white South Africans on vacation. A labor force of several thousand black South Africans keeps the dream of the lost white tribe alive. Each night, they return to their shanty towns, discreetly hidden behind the hills. Perhaps in centuries to come, when future archaeologists uncover these ruins, they'll identify them as the remnants of a lost white tribe of Africa. Only perhaps this time they'll be right. Siyamulah, Siyamulah, Siyamulah

Even the names of kings were forgotten. With no written record, the mighty empires of Africa's past became as vulnerable as their land. Eight hundred years ago, this rugged terrain near the South African border with Zimbabwe was the site of one such kingdom. All outward signs of their civilization have long vanished, yet the local Venda people know, through whispers from their ancestors, that great kings and queens were once buried here, high above the bushveld on the summit of a cliff.

A burial ground created with thousands of tons of soil carried here to cover the bare rock of the clifftop. Each body was adorned with gold treasures before the royal graves were sealed. Eight centuries later, in 1932, an Afrikaner adventurer with a thirst for gold persuaded a local villager to take him to the ancestral burial site of Mapungubwe. Today, Ernst von Mappen is the only one who has ever been to the site. John Grahn, grandson of the explorer, retraces that journey.

Well, my grandfather, he was a treasure hunter. He was always interested in finding gold, and he was actually looking for this place for almost five years. Centuries of superstition had protected this royal burial ground from theft. Their guide dared not even look at this sacred hill, fearing he would be struck blind. The local Wendow people, they call this hill Mopngupe, the hill of the jackal.

And they call it the hill of the jackal because they believe there's evil spirits and things going around there. When I approached the hill, there was these vertical cliffs, and it seems to be impossible to get onto the hill. And then they found this secret passage going up behind me. As Van Graan's team began their climb, they found holes carved into the rock face, an ancient stairway to the top of this hidden chimney.

They feared the climb to the royal burial site could well be booby-trapped, with giant boulders poised to fall and crush them at any moment. But their ascent was safe. They were about to uncover some of the last remaining royal treasure in all of southern Africa. Normally, recovered gold objects were destined for the melting pot.

Another important chapter in African history would have been doomed. And originally that was their plan. Luckily, at the last moment, Van Graan Jr. suffered a pang of conscience. Among the finds were a golden scepter and a gold rhinoceros.

Small trinkets compared to Tutankhamen's treasures, yet they were the few precious remaining links to a long-forgotten past. Van Graan had been a history student in Pretoria. He knew the significance of these artifacts and decided to donate them to the university. Though rescued, these treasures remain hidden from public view, locked away in archaeology department vaults.

Pottery, later excavated at the site, proved there was once an enormous settlement at Mapungubwe. Yet to this day, the University of Pretoria has allowed only a few archaeologists access to these remarkable finds. These are the most important artifacts in sub-Saharan Africa, reluctantly brought out to be photographed on special occasions, then locked away again. They might as well still be buried.

All this secrecy has its roots in apartheid. Dutch settlers maintained that blacks and whites had arrived in the area at roughly the same time, giving them equal claim to the territory. When radiocarbon dating placed Mapungubwe as early as 1200 AD, white South Africans were stunned.

They refused to believe blacks had arrived in the region more than 400 years earlier than the first white settlers. The Afrikaner scientists tested and retested Mapungubwe, making it one of the most radiocarbon dated sites in all of southern Africa. Yet the result was always the same, 1200 AD. With many white settlers in Southern Africa, much of their argument had rested on the proposition much of this land was, in any case, free of African people.

What do you mean it belongs to Africa? We arrived at about the same time as the Africans, so they have no greater claim than we have, so we have as much right as they have. So to tell them that, look, but they were here hundreds of years before you, undermines... some of their basic claim to a special status in South Africa.

This civilization was ancient, it was prosperous, and it was black. But what happened to these people remains a mystery. Perhaps they drove their cattle herds further north to the lusher pastures and cooler climate of higher ground. Or perhaps they became the long-sought ancestors of another African kingdom. For only 100 years later, 200 miles beyond the Limpopo River, one of the greatest African empires would be founded.

While Europe was in the Middle Ages, Southern Africa was dominated by the kingdom of Great Zimbabwe. Their kings ruled from a court enclosed by a colossal circular wall, over 25 feet high and 16 feet thick. Little is known about the empire.

Even the names of their kings are now forgotten. We do know they owned thousands of head of cattle and provided ivory and gold to Swahili merchants on the east coast. The first link in Africa's trade network with the world. Today, the country of Zimbabwe takes its name from this ancient kingdom.

Zimbabwe means Great House of Stone. Until recently, its real history was denied by white people. They were convinced that black Africans could not have created such monumental structures. For hundreds of years, Europeans dreamed of finding a lost white civilization of incredible wealth somewhere in Africa's dark and savage interior.

Karl Mauck, a German explorer, had heard tales of ancient stone ruins in unexplored territory north of the Limpopo River. He searched for months before finally stumbling across these magnificent remains. Tuesday, 5 September 1871. I saw a short distance away an apparently round edifice. It's built without any mortar of hewn granite slabs.

The outer wall is about 150 yards in diameter. The local natives call these ruins Zimbabwe. Mauk was overcome by the splendor and sophistication of these ruins. But believing black Africans too primitive to build such walls, he was convinced they were the work of a lost white tribe.

Finally, I stopped in front of a tower-like structure. It stood quite undamaged. I learned from the local inhabitants that they themselves have only lived here from about 40 years ago, that the region was quite uninhabited before that time. All are absolutely convinced that white people once inhabited the region. He drew African artifacts in his notebook, but refused to believe that this city was built by blacks.

Finally, he found evidence he believed would prove his theories. I cut some splinters off the crossbeam. A comparison with the wood of my pencil shows that it must be cedar wood, and this must have come from the Lebanon.

Furthermore, only the Phoenicians could have brought it there. Solomon used a lot of cedar wood for the building of his palaces, and these ruins are an imitation of Solomon's buildings in Jerusalem. The great woman who built the enclosure could have been none other than the Queen of Sheba.

This place, according to Mauch, was biblical Ophir, the city of gold. The story of the Queen of Sheba is first told in the Bible. Laden with precious gifts of gold and gems, this mythical white queen visits King Solomon in Jerusalem.

She is said to be a temptress, with a lustful body beneath her silken robes. She gives the king everything he desires. Karl Mauck concluded the Queen of Sheba must have been the queen of Great Zimbabwe, and this place her palace.

Mauck's racist theories were quickly seized upon as valuable propaganda by white settlers seeking to expand the British Empire. Any proof that whites had been here in biblical times would help justify their new exploitation of the region. By the middle of 1890, Cecil Rhodes, a wealthy British industrialist, had founded Rhodesia, a country that remained under white rule until 1980, when the black majority renamed it Zimbabwe. Rhodes carved out for himself thousands of miles of land, rich in diamonds and gold, including the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.

Claiming it was a Phoenician palace, he oversaw an orgy of looting that robbed these ruins of their most precious artifacts. One of the great tragedies of Great Zimbabwe is that people were doing intensive excavation work here in the firm conviction that at the bottom of all this... Debris was the key to the mystery, the Phoenicians, whoever it was who built it. And, of course, once they got down to the bottom and the clearance was complete, they had destroyed all the evidence of all the human habitation that actually went with these walls. This act of historical vandalism still angers Peter Garlick, once an official in charge of the site.

So great was the damage that the true history of this place was almost lost forever. But in 1929, a large-scale expedition of British archaeologists attempted to unlock Great Zimbabwe from the bosom of the Queen of Sheba. Gertrude Caton Thompson, the leader of the group, was determined to solve the riddle of Great Zimbabwe once and for all.

Gertrude Caton Thompson was a formidable woman. Her archaeological standards were of the highest. It was an all-woman team.

I think very deliberately she always worked with women and was one of the first feminists in archaeology. After weeks of digging, her team still hadn't found enough material to date the site. Demoralized?

They sought another area worth exploring. Caden Thompson needed to locate unpillaged ruins. A determined explorer, she persuaded a friend to loan her an airplane. As she swept past the back of the Acropolis, she noticed an uncharted path to the top. It was obscured by vegetation and led to a new set of walled enclosures.

At last, she had found a place untouched by white hands. The work began the following day. They would eventually collect all the proof she needed.

Her conclusion? Ancient Bantu people had built Great Zimbabwe in medieval times, starting around the 11th century. But her report was not popular among white Rhodesians. Gertrude Caton Thompson's work gave her the highest reputation among academics and scientists.

It did nothing to persuade the settler to overcome his prejudices. The settler, like all colonial settlers, knew his native. He knew that the native could not do this.

He knew that the native was a savage. And nothing that anyone could do, either Caton Thompson or in the 50 years subsequent to her, were going to convince people with such strong racial prejudices that Great Zimbabwe was not exotic. There are unenlightened persons who assert complacently. that these unexampled structures are of Bantu artistry. Bantu people are unchanging.

They are as they used to be. Farmers, herdsmen of small brain capacity. She had a special file for such poisonous propaganda. Many years later, a black servant was still shown bowed before a white queen of Sheba in an official Rhodesian travel poster.

Great Zimbabwe was being used as a symbol of white racial superiority. Today, the same image is the icon of the new nation of Zimbabwe. The attempt was to undermine the legitimacy of the claims of African nationalists and to say this land is as much ours, if not more so, than you was. If you suddenly demonstrate, but look, these walls testify against you. Because these have been here for hundreds of years, and they were erected by Africans, silent witnesses that Africans were here centuries before you, they can't take it.

So they say the witness is lying. It wasn't built by Africans. For centuries, Great Zimbabwe has suffered an entirely fictitious history.

But what was this great African kingdom really like? In its heyday during the 14th century, Great Zimbabwe was a thriving metropolis, unique in all of Africa. It was as big as London at the time, with a population as large as 18,000. crammed into just a few square miles.

Inside its great stone walls was sub-Saharan Africa's oldest known urban culture. The noise must have been overwhelming. Smoke from hundreds of miles away. hundreds of cooking fires would have darkened the sky. It was the capital of an empire that stretched for thousands of miles and contained hundreds of mini Zimbabwe's, each with its own ruler.

In Great Zimbabwe, a king's influence carried on long after he died. Spirits of ancestors remained an ongoing presence, both as powerful rulers and spiritual advisors. Today, the local Shona people are thought to be descendants of the people that built Great Zimbabwe.

In modern Shona culture, the spirits of ancestors are still regularly contacted through a ceremony performed by a medium in a place called the Shona. cave below the Acropolis ruins. They're shown as a very religious people.

They believe strongly that their ancestors are not dead and gone forever, that they are alive. Through their mediums, they can punish them, they can bless them, they can pray for them. And therefore, if you don't follow what they say, you are likely to come into misfortune. Stan Mudinge, a Zimbabwean government minister, has studied the ancestors of the Shona people.

Usually the spirits of the ruler, the dead rulers, were the most powerful spirits on matters of state. And these spirits possess mediums and they become, in every respect, the emperor back in human form. High on the Acropolis overlooking the kingdom is a sacred enclosure, where we can imagine what used to happen. During times of trouble, the king would come here to pay tribute to his ancestors and ask for guidance from his spirit medium.

The medium would work himself into a trance and be taken over by the spirit of a long-dead ruler. This supernatural link between the king and the nation's founding fathers was fundamental to the culture. Through his medium, the king exerted influence over the spirit mediums of lesser rulers. In addition to military might, he wielded a powerful spiritual control over any who would challenge him.

You didn't need a huge army to control you. You had control psychologically. You could make people peaceful.

You could make the pronouncements which people would follow and would obey. These great stone birds were symbols of that power, and are among the few icons to be salvaged from this sacred place. This was a civilization which represented the highest achievement of the Bantu-speaking people in this part of Africa.

The wealth which they accumulated enabled them to build such massive structures as they have built here at Great Zimbabwe, especially down there in the valley, I think. There was sheer arrogance, pomposity, the great madness which seized Louis XIV to build the great Vesayo Palace. That was not a place for one man to live in.

That was making a statement of his wealth, the significance of his country, and what he thought of himself. And the same madness sees the people here and build these huge, magnificent stone structures, which we now admire. Great Zimbabwe was constructed over several centuries by a devoted people.

One million stone blocks were shaped just to build the outer wall. Each subject paid tribute to the chief with seven days of labor each month, not slave labor. They built this monument to honor their king and provider.

The original builders of these walls came to granite outcrops like this one. Today they still quarry blocks, as they have for centuries, to repair the broken walls of their ancestors. By heating the granite with fire and throwing water along the fault lines, the rock shatters into thick slabs. Then begins the slow process of breaking and shaping the rocks for the dry stone walls. Although it's easy to understand how they built these walls, why they built them is the subject of fierce debate.

Was the great enclosure a fortress or a palace? The narrow passage between these towering walls has generated lurid theories. Many believe it stopped men from spying during female initiation ceremonies.

Most likely, though, it was simply to maintain absolute privacy for the royal household. That still leaves the enigma of the giant cone-shaped tower. The first Victorian investigators focused in on it as a sexual symbol, as a male penis in stone.

This has been resurrected on several occasions subsequently, but there is no evidence... Either in its form, its decoration, to suggest it. There are fragmentary traditions that suggest that it represents in stone the great clay grain bins in which the staple food was stored.

And this makes some sort of sense of the monarch, the king, as provider of his people's food. Funding this vast construction in the 1300s required a booming economy. And the source of that wealth was cattle.

A chief's status was based on the number of cattle he owned. A rich man would have many cattle, so he could afford many wives, who would bear him many children, who would provide more labor to cultivate more land. During the dry season, when there was little work, farmers became gold miners. Digging for gold in these narrow mine shafts was so dangerous, laborers had to be bribed to go underground.

Most preferred panning in the riverbeds. Gold was the monopoly of the king. He paid his miners in cattle, reserving the gold for himself, for exchange and barter with the Swahili merchants of the East African coast. At the height of their power, the great Zimbabwe rulers controlled the flow of gold and ivory to the trading ports of East Africa.

And this trade would fuel construction of some of the most magnificent cities in the ancient world. In the 14th century, Africa's Swahili coast was an exotic place, described by Arab sailors as vibrant and affluent, with the most beautiful and well-constructed towns in the world. This was the setting for the legendary adventures of Sinbad and the Arabian Nights.

Persian carpets were exchanged for African ivory. Porcelain was traded for gold. Merchants who came from India and Arabia, even from the Far East, had to deal with Swahili brokers, medieval middlemen, who were their only link to goods from Africa's interior. The Swahili built and sailed the Dows and navigated the treacherous channels to the many trading ports. By controlling the sea, they maintained firm control over all commerce in the region.

Every year, hundreds of boats awaited the monsoon winds to carry their goods back to the Middle East. By the 10th century, gold, ivory, and quartz were pouring into the Mediterranean, commerce on a scale not seen since Greek and Roman times. This prosperous coastline had ports and cities that stretched 1,800 miles from present-day Somalia to Mozambique.

Their trade networks extended from Arabia to India and on to China. In the 15th century, the Swahili even exported a giraffe to China, causing a sensation at the imperial court. This extensive contact with other cultures produced a cosmopolitan society, influenced by both Arab and Indian traditions.

Yet despite their widespread success, this region of Africa has also suffered a history denied. The confusion can be traced back to the first Arab traders and the introduction of Islam. The Swahili adopted Islam a thousand years ago, and this shared religious code helped create mutual trust in business deals. The call to prayer would have brought together the Arab traders and the African merchants. They would have washed in cisterns like these, then entered mosques as grand as the medieval cathedrals of Europe.

But the mystery is, who built these once great cities? Arabs or Africans? Archaeologist Mark Horton is studying the ghost towns of Africa's coast.

He has revolutionary ideas about their origin. When archaeologists first came here in the 1920s and found these ruins covered by jungle, they naturally... I assume they must be the work of Arabs.

You've got here stone tombs made of coral from the sea, decorated in porcelain bowls. You've got houses and palaces with elaborate niches and toilets. You've got mosques with their minarets and with their mihrabs. This surely must be the work of Arabs. But I now believe that the fact this interpretation is wrong, that these are an African society.

The raw material for these towns was mined from coral deposits. Until recently, it was assumed Arab settlers used African slaves to build their mosques and palaces. Once again, many found it hard to imagine Africans constructing permanent buildings.

Now it is thought the Swahili played a much more active role in creating this trading empire and that the wealthy merchants who built these coral towns were African, not Arab. It's a complicated story to untangle. By the 18th century, long after many of these coastal cities had gone into decline, the east coast of Africa was actually ruled by Arab sultans from the island of Zanzibar.

To support their territorial claims, they insisted Africans were mere bystanders in the development of Swahili civilization. For ten years, Mark Horton has been helping the Swahili rewrite their history and lay claim to their rightful legacy. For Horton, this derelict building is a testament to the betrayal of the Swahili people. It's called the House of Wonders.

This vast building represents the final humiliation of the Swahili. It was a present by the British to the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar in the 1880s. The British wanted to carve up large tracts of East Africa, but unfortunately the Swahili were in the way.

They were the people who'd lived there for thousands of years. And so they pretended that the Swahili had no history, it was simply Arab history. And by giving this building to the Arab Sultan of Zanzibar, it was possible to create a whole new myth about the history of East Africa. And that is why we no longer have an idea of who the Swahili were.

Horton believes the only way to find out who they were is by digging. His goal? To find evidence of an early African settlement on the island of Pemba off the Tanzanian coast. He leads his team of workers to a site where he thinks he has found the legendary city of Kanbalu.

According to Arab records from the 10th century, Kambalu was the first Muslim city on the Swahili coast, so it is of crucial importance. In the best African tradition, Horton issues orders from his perch while his wife Kate digs below. They are starting to uncover the floor of a mosque that has completely collapsed.

Horton hopes it will reveal how Islam came to East Africa. An old Arab legend offers one explanation. Abdul Juma, Zanzibar's chief archaeologist, turns it into a campfire story for the weary workforce.

It comes from the journal of an Arab explorer. Back in 922 AD, he wrote that a ship of Arab sailors set sail from Oman to an African trading post called Kambulu. But a storm drove them much further south along the coast. Now the people of this coast were reputed to be cannibals, so the sailors feared for their lives.

The frightened Arab merchants were brought ashore and dragged before the king. Luckily, he seemed more interested in trading than eating. He was dazzled by the Arabian jewels, so they exchanged presents. The sailors had good reason to praise Allah. When it was time to go, they invited the king onto the ship to say farewell.

The Arab captain had a wicked thought. In the Oman slave market, this African king could fetch 30 dinars. He gave the order to sail. And when they reached Oman, the king was sold into slavery.

Over the next year, the king learned Arabic and studied the Koran and eventually became a devout Muslim. Then one day he escaped from his master and walked back thousands of miles to his village. Years later, the Arab captain who had betrayed the king set sail on another voyage to Kambalu. Once again, their ship was blown south.

Once again, they found themselves off the land of Zans. The Arab merchants were stunned to see the king they had sold years before and begged for mercy. Go, you traitors, he said. If I have forgiven you, it is because through me you have introduced my people to Islam.

So in future, when Muslims come here, we will treat each other like brothers. This time, the king did not see them off. The moral of the tale is that the Swahili might have become Muslim to avoid being sold into slavery. Horton thinks the spread of Islam along the Swahili corridor was a kind of insurance policy against the Arab slave trade.

Canbalu, the Arab captain's destination in the tale, was a thriving trading port along the east coast of Africa. If this is Kambalu Horton has found, then beneath the floor of this stone mosque, there could well be earlier mosques, built in a more traditional African style. On this beach, the temporary fishing village has a wooden mosque. Swahili only live here during the fishing season, as they have for a thousand years. But they always build a mosque.

similar to the very first Swahili mosques. So Mark, this is a timber built mosque with thatch, typical of early mosques on these villages. And when they abandoned...

and these they graduate to one made of mud? Yes, mud and timber mosques. And usually it becomes larger than this one, timber mosque.

And then, again, one then has a stone one. Yes, they built a stone on the same spot. One on top of another. One on top of another. Heavy rainfall brings a halt to the digging.

The downpour softens the soil just enough to quicken Mark Horton's pulse. Beneath the stone mosque, they begin to find remnants of two wooden mosques, one on top of the other. the other, the earliest dating back to the 8th century. This place is probably the site of Kambalu.

We know from historical evidence that Kambalu is the first place on the East African coast with Muslims. Perhaps this is the first structure that I am kneeling on, the very place that the Muslims came to East Africa. A Muslim festival honors the birth of Mohammed, but on the Kenyan island of Lamu, the celebration pulses to a uniquely African rhythm. The clans race dhows around the archipelago and surge along the harbor front.

Islam may have come from Arabia, but this is a Swahili celebration in a Swahili town. Yet even many Swahili continue to believe the foundations of their civilization are Arab. Some of the confusion was self-perpetrated in the sense that many Muslims among the Swahili people preferred to identify themselves in Arab terms.

So they added to the racist tendencies of outsiders who wanted to deny Africans any credit anyhow. So these Muslims had quasi-religious reasons for self-Arabization. and Western observers had racist reasons for crediting the Arabs with Swahili civilization.

And the two forms of reasons converged to create the confusion. There can be no denying the external forces that molded towns like Lamu. The intricate wooden carving on doorways is a typical Swahili feature. Perhaps several centuries ago, Indian craftsmen visited and taught Africans how to carve elaborate designs into wood.

But then the Swahili absorbed and adapted these lessons to fit their own culture. Perhaps Persians introduced the ornate designs carved into the walls of houses. But today, Swahili craftsmen practice the art of molding wet plaster. Six centuries ago, rich African merchants built villas decorated by the finest craftsmen. Lammu was as sophisticated as medieval Venice.

These opulent houses were built on the foundations of the Arabian and Indian trade. Today, most of that trade is gone, and the economy depends on a trickle of tourism. But the town probably looks much as it always did.

The streets bustle with donkey traffic. They're too narrow for cars. And the original open sewer meanders through the alleys. Lamu's labyrinthine streets are mirrored in those of many ghost towns along Africa's east coast. During the 16th century, hundreds of these towns fell into ruin.

It's not obvious why the flourishing commerce came to an end. Everyone benefited from the trade. The gold diggers of the interior, the Swahili middlemen, the sailors, the merchants, and even consumers around the medieval world from Europe to China. Perhaps the fortunes of rival merchant families ebbed from generation to generation, much as corporate dynasties rise and fall today. Perhaps the bubonic plague brought worldwide recession and the demand for African commodities fell.

It was the end of a glorious era for the kingdoms of Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili coast. By the end of the 1500s, the buildings would lie forgotten, but their cultural legacy would suffer an even worse fate. All societies select what they want to remember, but only Africans have been totally denied a history of their own for so long.

But remember, this is where our species began on present evidence. This is where the first humans walked on Earth. So the first habitat of the human species seems to be the last to be properly understood. We are paying a price for not understanding it. When European settlers first came to Africa, they dreamed of discovering a lost white civilization of fantastic wealth and beauty.

Surprisingly, even today the myth lives on. This is South Africa's lost city, a living monument to an imaginary lost white tribe. It's part of the Sun City Resort, one of the most luxurious theme parks in the world.

The artificial beach is packed with white South Africans on vacation. A labor force of several thousand black South Africans keeps the dream of the lost white tribe alive. Each night, they return to their shanty towns, discreetly hidden behind the hills.

Perhaps in centuries to come, when future archaeologists uncover these ruins, they'll identify them as the remnants of a lost white tribe of Africa. Only perhaps this time they'll be right. Siyamulah, Siyamulah, Siyamulah

Transcript for:Reclaiming African History and Civilizations

Transcript for:
Reclaiming African History and Civilizations