Exploring the Legacy of Great Zimbabwe

A mysterious ruin in the heart of Southern Africa, proclaimed by racist colonizers to be the work of an ancient white civilization, stripped by ignorance and prejudice of its priceless artifacts. Is it too late to unlock the secrets of Great Zimbabwe? I'm John Rhys Davis. Join me as we explore a city that is only now reclaiming its history. Next on Archaeology. Rising out of the highland plains of southern Africa, these ghostly grey walls lay empty for centuries before the first white man lay eyes upon them. The African people who lived around the ruins, the Shona, called them Zimbabwe, or sacred houses. But they offered outsiders no clues to the mysterious lost culture that had flourished here. To the would-be colonizers of this African heartland, the magnificent city spoke of some ancient white civilization that had burned brightly in... gone out thousands of years ago. Some envisioned in these walls the biblical palace of the Queen of Sheba. Others saw a city established by the Phoenicians venturing south from their Mediterranean homeland thousands of years before before the birth of Christ. The great Zimbabwe was none of these things. It stood at the heart of a thriving African culture, a magnet for trade from as far away as China and a home to skilled artisans and stonemasons. But white colonizers, with a contempt born of arrogance, ravaged the city's legacy and plundered its ruins. Only today is the great Zimbabwe reclaiming its proud heritage. From a scientific standpoint, it is an object lesson. Great Zimbabwe is probably the most abused archaeological site in the world and has been subject to more clearly incorrect speculation and also physical destruction by colonialists working at the site early in the century. The battered, yet still stunning ruins of Great Zimbabwe sit at the head of a secluded mountain valley about 200 miles south of Zimbabwe's capital city of Harare. Sprawling over some 1,800 acres, the dense maze of walls and towers fashioned from local granite are the largest stone constructions south of the Sahara Desert. The remarkable thing about this very beautiful masonry is that it is all done with dry stone walling, without the use of mortar, and apparently done with no preconceived architectural plan. It is being built in many ways like the cathedrals were built in Europe by a labor force that was working to a design that was in their heads rather than on paper. Without question, the construction of these freestanding stone walls required great skill. But by the time the Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, the city lay empty. The identity of its... builders would remain a mystery to outsiders for hundreds of years. The Portuguese learned from Swahili traders of a fabulous abandoned city in the interior. These European Christians speculated that the rumors described the fabled capital of the Queen of Sheba, commissioned after her visit to Solomon. It would be almost another 400 years before the first European laid eyes on Great Zimbabwe. German geologist Karl Mauch seized on the theme of biblical origins for the site. I do not think I am far from wrong, he wrote. if I suppose that the ruin on the hill is a copy of Solomon's temple on Mount Moriah, and the building on the plain a copy of the place where the Queen of Sheba lived during her visit to Solomon. Well, the fact that the ruined complexes in southern Africa were supposed to be of biblical origin was very convenient to the Afrikaners in a number of respects. It gave a historical precedent for colonization, and in a sort of a double whammy, gave them also a biblical sanction for the colonization and exploitation of Africans. Great Zimbabwe, like so much of Africa, would suffer cruelly under these imagined biblical sanctions. First came the big game hunters in 1880, hacking away the soapstone carvings of the strange animals and birds as artistic trophies over the protests of local people. Then a decade later came a more devastating incursion. Fortune hunters and English settlers, lured by the promise of African gold, flooded across the Limpopo River into the land of the Shona. Cecil Rhodes, the driving force behind this colonization, was determined to prove the theory that the Great Zimbabwe had been the capital of an ancient Phoenician colony. And he did so because he was interested in establishing this foreign origin for these sites, again as a justification for the use of Africans as cheap mine labor, which was his main objective since he now controlled the original gold mines in the area. The interesting sidelight to this is that the African miners had been far too efficient, and the gold deposits in that area were largely exhausted by the time the whites got. control of the area and they were never really very profitable as a result. The Africans had basically beaten Rhodes to it by a few hundred years. In 1902, A new curator was appointed to the great Zimbabwe ruins, a journalist by the name of Richard Hall. It was under Hall's direction that the ruins would suffer the most abuse under the guise of archaeology. He was specifically ordered not to excavate, but Hall had very blatantly racist attitudes, and he set out, and this is a direct quote from him, to remove the filth and decadence of... of Kaffir occupation from the site. Hall had no archeological training, but he had previously headed the Ancient Ruins Company, a colonial enterprise created to quarry African ruins for gold objects. In his eagerness to find evidence of the Phoenicians, Hall effectively stripped the ruins of all their African artifacts. What he did then was to clear away the occupation debris from the entire interior of the great enclosure and much of what was left on the hill ruin, thus making it impossible to get precisely accurate archaeological dates. for those sites. He did considerable damage to other ruins as well, removed many of the art objects, a number of which ended up in Cecil Rhodes'office as souvenirs, and did truly immeasurable damage to this archaeological site. You can see in this photograph The depth of the deposit that Hall removed, the tree in the center and that pillar of soil, was the original ground level of the elliptical building when it was encountered by Europeans. And it appears to be almost two meters, a meter and a half to two meters, of stratified archaeological deposit systematically removed and discarded. Relatedly, Hall's pillaging of the site raised an outcry in England. In 1906, for the first time, a qualified archaeologist set foot in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. David Randall McIver, upon surveying the devastation of the ancient city, almost despaired. Despite the damage, MacIvor soon found irrefutable evidence of the true builders of the mighty walls. His work would touch off a bitter dispute and eventually an appalling cover-up by a colonial government that would last for another 75 years. The scientific community had finally had enough of Hall's brutal treatment of the Zimbabwe ruins. They demanded that he be replaced. So an unbiased professional archaeologist was sent in by the British Association of Advanced... for the Advancement of Science in 1906, a fellow by the name of... David Randall MacIver, who conducted brief excavations in what was left of archaeological deposits at the site and came to the conclusion that they were entirely of African origin and medieval in date, and he even estimated the age for the elliptical building at somewhere in the 15th century due to his knowledge of the Chinese glassware found in the site. This was a very astute observation because later radiocarbon and structural analysis places those buildings very close to that date. MacIver had spoken the unspeakable, suggesting that the despised native Africans were capable of an achievement on the scale of Great Zimbabwe. His conclusions were dismissed out of hand by Rhodesia's white government. So volatile were the passions unleashed by... MacGyver's findings that it would be more than two decades before another qualified archaeologist was allowed onto the site. In 1929, Gertrude Caton Thompson investigated Great Zimbabwe, again at the request of the British Association. Her pioneering work in one of archaeology's first all-woman digs confirmed MacIvor's discoveries. Every object she found was of African origin and medieval date. In her own words, she, soon tired of the Phoenicians. Local settlers meanwhile made plans for a golf course in the ruins. That contempt for archaeological truth would only intensify when Ian Smith's white government broke with the British Commonwealth and rejected demands for black majority rule. But Richard Wall's attempt to interpret Great Zimbabwe perhaps can be excused in the sense that this was a time when people really had a very, very sort of backward view about African civilization. What is surprising is that even during the UDI days, the days of Ian Smith, we find that Great Zimbabwe, that there is an attempt to try and discredit the connection between Great Zimbabwe and the Africans. In 1971, the head of Rhodesia's Antiquities Department resigned after receiving a secret directive from the breakaway white government. The directive prohibited any mention of the possibility of African origin in the official guidebook distributed to tourists at the ruins. It shows the mysterious elliptical building, the ghost of the Queen of Sheba, and an African bowing down and offering tribute to this foreign power. And this is precisely the colonialist myth that was perpetuated around Zimbabwe for nearly 75 years. In 1980, after a bloody civil war, the government of Rhodesia came under black majority rule. Finally, the people of Zimbabwe were free to search for their past among the ruins from which the newly independent country had taken its name. What is important is that now, for the first time, in the last 10 to 15 years, a body of African students are beginning to learn archaeological techniques and apply their own understandings, their intimate understandings of African culture to African archaeological sites, not only in Zimbabwe but in many of the surrounding countries. But the questions remained. How much of Zimbabwe's past could be reclaimed from the stripped ruins? And how much had been lost forever? The first people to settle at Great Zimbabwe were cattle farmers, who arrived in around AD 350. They were drawn by rich grazing land and a temperate climate free of the tsetse fly that plagued the cattle of the African lowlands with sleeping sickness. The reason why Great Zimbabwe became a very big urban centre is mainly due to the wealth accumulated from cattle wealth. There is quite a lot of evidence to show that the people at Great Zimbabwe were keeping quite a lot of cattle and this cattle was used initially for local trade and the wealth from the local trade went on to fuel international trade with the east coast. The people who would settle and exploit this rich region were ancestors of the present-day Shona people of Zimbabwe. They built mud and stick homes in and around their evolving stone walls. The pottery which was made during the Zimbabwe period is the same as the pottery which is made by the Shona people today. So that gives us direct evidence to show that it was built by the ancestors of the Shona. The site was first occupied around 1900 AD. This was when they were not building in stone. They started building in stone around 1100 AD. And from 1100 AD to about 1450 AD, AD, the site was occupied and it grew from a small village to a very big urban center. Pottery shards and beads dating to around 1100 testify to the city's rapid rise as a commercial center. By 1300, the Zimbabweans were trading their gold and ivory down the nearby Sabi River to the coast, exchanging them for beads and porcelain from as far away China. And what you see here are examples of Arabic pottery. This is the decoration fused into the shed. And these are Arabic potteryware with this one, which had a small piece of lettering, Arabic lettering, at one end, but it's not very visible now. and the rest you see are Chinese, which came in through trade. In the 1300s, as Europe was nearing the end of its Middle Ages, the great Zimbabwe's master masons began work on their most enduring monument, the Great Enclosure. More recent than the hill ruins, the enclosure was the most important. testifies to the confidence and skill of a thriving culture. For example, the entrances up the hill, most of them are round entrances. In the valley and in the great enclosure, I tend to get square entrances. entrances. You also tend to get quite a lot of conical towers within the great enclosure and the valley ruins. I think this is a development which comes in later when people now add on new things with development of skills. They can now do quite a lot of other things which they couldn't do in the hill. And this is seen in the great enclosure with the conical tower as I said as well as with some of the platforms. which are very, very sort of intricate. There is also a new development at the Great Enclosure, the idea of decoration. The decorations are now much more elaborate, as shown by the double chevron pattern at the back of the Great Enclosure. 20,000 tourists now visit the great Zimbabwe each year, eager to reclaim for themselves some of the city's rich heritage. Clambering among the ruins and scavenging for keepsakes, they are taking their toll on the ancient stone. walls. The caretakers of the site have recently enlisted the help of modern technology to preserve the labor of long-dead masons. In the most fragile areas, each surface stone is marked and entered into a computer. When walls collapse, advanced architectural programs will plot their reconstruction. Berzik Dube surveys the walls with a keen eye for signs of structural failure, classifying the walls into three categories of vulnerability. The walls that normally collapse are the P-walls. Our walls are generally small walls and they normally don't give us problems, but P-walls collapse most of the time because the bonding between adjacent blocks is not very good compared to the Q-wall styles. Why Great Zimbabwe itself finally crumbled is still a mystery. At its height, the city may have had some 18,000 inhabitants, as many as medieval London. Archaeologists believe that Zimbabwe, like many large cities, simply overtaxed its resources. There's quite a lot of exploitation of the land. This led to erosion, clearing of forests, and this led to shortage of firewood. And again, with time, with the exploitation of the environment, this could no longer be supported, and hence it was abandoned. The truth Zimbabweans may have understood was the one expressed by the archaeologist Gertrude Caton Thompson in 1929 when she wrote that an African origin for the Zimbabwe ruins enriches, not impoverishes, our wonderment at their remarkable achievement. It cannot detract from their inherent majesty. Rising out of the heart of Africa, the great Zimbabwe is today a monument to a mighty African civilization that thrived while Europe languished. The city's ruin will forever bear the scars of ignorance and racism, but her true African origins and the greatness of her people can never again be denied.

Next on Archaeology. Rising out of the highland plains of southern Africa, these ghostly grey walls lay empty for centuries before the first white man lay eyes upon them. The African people who lived around the ruins, the Shona, called them Zimbabwe, or sacred houses.

But they offered outsiders no clues to the mysterious lost culture that had flourished here. To the would-be colonizers of this African heartland, the magnificent city spoke of some ancient white civilization that had burned brightly in... gone out thousands of years ago. Some envisioned in these walls the biblical palace of the Queen of Sheba. Others saw a city established by the Phoenicians venturing south from their Mediterranean homeland thousands of years before before the birth of Christ.

The great Zimbabwe was none of these things. It stood at the heart of a thriving African culture, a magnet for trade from as far away as China and a home to skilled artisans and stonemasons. But white colonizers, with a contempt born of arrogance, ravaged the city's legacy and plundered its ruins.

Only today is the great Zimbabwe reclaiming its proud heritage. From a scientific standpoint, it is an object lesson. Great Zimbabwe is probably the most abused archaeological site in the world and has been subject to more clearly incorrect speculation and also physical destruction by colonialists working at the site early in the century. The battered, yet still stunning ruins of Great Zimbabwe sit at the head of a secluded mountain valley about 200 miles south of Zimbabwe's capital city of Harare.

Sprawling over some 1,800 acres, the dense maze of walls and towers fashioned from local granite are the largest stone constructions south of the Sahara Desert. The remarkable thing about this very beautiful masonry is that it is all done with dry stone walling, without the use of mortar, and apparently done with no preconceived architectural plan. It is being built in many ways like the cathedrals were built in Europe by a labor force that was working to a design that was in their heads rather than on paper.

Without question, the construction of these freestanding stone walls required great skill. But by the time the Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, the city lay empty. The identity of its... builders would remain a mystery to outsiders for hundreds of years.

The Portuguese learned from Swahili traders of a fabulous abandoned city in the interior. These European Christians speculated that the rumors described the fabled capital of the Queen of Sheba, commissioned after her visit to Solomon. It would be almost another 400 years before the first European laid eyes on Great Zimbabwe.

German geologist Karl Mauch seized on the theme of biblical origins for the site. I do not think I am far from wrong, he wrote. if I suppose that the ruin on the hill is a copy of Solomon's temple on Mount Moriah, and the building on the plain a copy of the place where the Queen of Sheba lived during her visit to Solomon.

Well, the fact that the ruined complexes in southern Africa were supposed to be of biblical origin was very convenient to the Afrikaners in a number of respects. It gave a historical precedent for colonization, and in a sort of a double whammy, gave them also a biblical sanction for the colonization and exploitation of Africans. Great Zimbabwe, like so much of Africa, would suffer cruelly under these imagined biblical sanctions. First came the big game hunters in 1880, hacking away the soapstone carvings of the strange animals and birds as artistic trophies over the protests of local people.

Then a decade later came a more devastating incursion. Fortune hunters and English settlers, lured by the promise of African gold, flooded across the Limpopo River into the land of the Shona. Cecil Rhodes, the driving force behind this colonization, was determined to prove the theory that the Great Zimbabwe had been the capital of an ancient Phoenician colony. And he did so because he was interested in establishing this foreign origin for these sites, again as a justification for the use of Africans as cheap mine labor, which was his main objective since he now controlled the original gold mines in the area. The interesting sidelight to this is that the African miners had been far too efficient, and the gold deposits in that area were largely exhausted by the time the whites got.

control of the area and they were never really very profitable as a result. The Africans had basically beaten Rhodes to it by a few hundred years. In 1902, A new curator was appointed to the great Zimbabwe ruins, a journalist by the name of Richard Hall.

It was under Hall's direction that the ruins would suffer the most abuse under the guise of archaeology. He was specifically ordered not to excavate, but Hall had very blatantly racist attitudes, and he set out, and this is a direct quote from him, to remove the filth and decadence of... of Kaffir occupation from the site.

Hall had no archeological training, but he had previously headed the Ancient Ruins Company, a colonial enterprise created to quarry African ruins for gold objects. In his eagerness to find evidence of the Phoenicians, Hall effectively stripped the ruins of all their African artifacts. What he did then was to clear away the occupation debris from the entire interior of the great enclosure and much of what was left on the hill ruin, thus making it impossible to get precisely accurate archaeological dates. for those sites. He did considerable damage to other ruins as well, removed many of the art objects, a number of which ended up in Cecil Rhodes'office as souvenirs, and did truly immeasurable damage to this archaeological site.

You can see in this photograph The depth of the deposit that Hall removed, the tree in the center and that pillar of soil, was the original ground level of the elliptical building when it was encountered by Europeans. And it appears to be almost two meters, a meter and a half to two meters, of stratified archaeological deposit systematically removed and discarded. Relatedly, Hall's pillaging of the site raised an outcry in England.

In 1906, for the first time, a qualified archaeologist set foot in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe. David Randall McIver, upon surveying the devastation of the ancient city, almost despaired. Despite the damage, MacIvor soon found irrefutable evidence of the true builders of the mighty walls.

His work would touch off a bitter dispute and eventually an appalling cover-up by a colonial government that would last for another 75 years. The scientific community had finally had enough of Hall's brutal treatment of the Zimbabwe ruins. They demanded that he be replaced. So an unbiased professional archaeologist was sent in by the British Association of Advanced...

for the Advancement of Science in 1906, a fellow by the name of... David Randall MacIver, who conducted brief excavations in what was left of archaeological deposits at the site and came to the conclusion that they were entirely of African origin and medieval in date, and he even estimated the age for the elliptical building at somewhere in the 15th century due to his knowledge of the Chinese glassware found in the site. This was a very astute observation because later radiocarbon and structural analysis places those buildings very close to that date.

MacIver had spoken the unspeakable, suggesting that the despised native Africans were capable of an achievement on the scale of Great Zimbabwe. His conclusions were dismissed out of hand by Rhodesia's white government. So volatile were the passions unleashed by...

MacGyver's findings that it would be more than two decades before another qualified archaeologist was allowed onto the site. In 1929, Gertrude Caton Thompson investigated Great Zimbabwe, again at the request of the British Association. Her pioneering work in one of archaeology's first all-woman digs confirmed MacIvor's discoveries.

Every object she found was of African origin and medieval date. In her own words, she, soon tired of the Phoenicians. Local settlers meanwhile made plans for a golf course in the ruins.

That contempt for archaeological truth would only intensify when Ian Smith's white government broke with the British Commonwealth and rejected demands for black majority rule. But Richard Wall's attempt to interpret Great Zimbabwe perhaps can be excused in the sense that this was a time when people really had a very, very sort of backward view about African civilization. What is surprising is that even during the UDI days, the days of Ian Smith, we find that Great Zimbabwe, that there is an attempt to try and discredit the connection between Great Zimbabwe and the Africans.

In 1971, the head of Rhodesia's Antiquities Department resigned after receiving a secret directive from the breakaway white government. The directive prohibited any mention of the possibility of African origin in the official guidebook distributed to tourists at the ruins. It shows the mysterious elliptical building, the ghost of the Queen of Sheba, and an African bowing down and offering tribute to this foreign power. And this is precisely the colonialist myth that was perpetuated around Zimbabwe for nearly 75 years.

In 1980, after a bloody civil war, the government of Rhodesia came under black majority rule. Finally, the people of Zimbabwe were free to search for their past among the ruins from which the newly independent country had taken its name. What is important is that now, for the first time, in the last 10 to 15 years, a body of African students are beginning to learn archaeological techniques and apply their own understandings, their intimate understandings of African culture to African archaeological sites, not only in Zimbabwe but in many of the surrounding countries. But the questions remained. How much of Zimbabwe's past could be reclaimed from the stripped ruins?

And how much had been lost forever? The first people to settle at Great Zimbabwe were cattle farmers, who arrived in around AD 350. They were drawn by rich grazing land and a temperate climate free of the tsetse fly that plagued the cattle of the African lowlands with sleeping sickness. The reason why Great Zimbabwe became a very big urban centre is mainly due to the wealth accumulated from cattle wealth.

There is quite a lot of evidence to show that the people at Great Zimbabwe were keeping quite a lot of cattle and this cattle was used initially for local trade and the wealth from the local trade went on to fuel international trade with the east coast. The people who would settle and exploit this rich region were ancestors of the present-day Shona people of Zimbabwe. They built mud and stick homes in and around their evolving stone walls. The pottery which was made during the Zimbabwe period is the same as the pottery which is made by the Shona people today. So that gives us direct evidence to show that it was built by the ancestors of the Shona.

The site was first occupied around 1900 AD. This was when they were not building in stone. They started building in stone around 1100 AD.

And from 1100 AD to about 1450 AD, AD, the site was occupied and it grew from a small village to a very big urban center. Pottery shards and beads dating to around 1100 testify to the city's rapid rise as a commercial center. By 1300, the Zimbabweans were trading their gold and ivory down the nearby Sabi River to the coast, exchanging them for beads and porcelain from as far away China.

And what you see here are examples of Arabic pottery. This is the decoration fused into the shed. And these are Arabic potteryware with this one, which had a small piece of lettering, Arabic lettering, at one end, but it's not very visible now.

and the rest you see are Chinese, which came in through trade. In the 1300s, as Europe was nearing the end of its Middle Ages, the great Zimbabwe's master masons began work on their most enduring monument, the Great Enclosure. More recent than the hill ruins, the enclosure was the most important.

testifies to the confidence and skill of a thriving culture. For example, the entrances up the hill, most of them are round entrances. In the valley and in the great enclosure, I tend to get square entrances. entrances.

You also tend to get quite a lot of conical towers within the great enclosure and the valley ruins. I think this is a development which comes in later when people now add on new things with development of skills. They can now do quite a lot of other things which they couldn't do in the hill. And this is seen in the great enclosure with the conical tower as I said as well as with some of the platforms. which are very, very sort of intricate.

There is also a new development at the Great Enclosure, the idea of decoration. The decorations are now much more elaborate, as shown by the double chevron pattern at the back of the Great Enclosure. 20,000 tourists now visit the great Zimbabwe each year, eager to reclaim for themselves some of the city's rich heritage. Clambering among the ruins and scavenging for keepsakes, they are taking their toll on the ancient stone.

walls. The caretakers of the site have recently enlisted the help of modern technology to preserve the labor of long-dead masons. In the most fragile areas, each surface stone is marked and entered into a computer. When walls collapse, advanced architectural programs will plot their reconstruction. Berzik Dube surveys the walls with a keen eye for signs of structural failure, classifying the walls into three categories of vulnerability.

The walls that normally collapse are the P-walls. Our walls are generally small walls and they normally don't give us problems, but P-walls collapse most of the time because the bonding between adjacent blocks is not very good compared to the Q-wall styles. Why Great Zimbabwe itself finally crumbled is still a mystery. At its height, the city may have had some 18,000 inhabitants, as many as medieval London.

Archaeologists believe that Zimbabwe, like many large cities, simply overtaxed its resources. There's quite a lot of exploitation of the land. This led to erosion, clearing of forests, and this led to shortage of firewood.

And again, with time, with the exploitation of the environment, this could no longer be supported, and hence it was abandoned. The truth Zimbabweans may have understood was the one expressed by the archaeologist Gertrude Caton Thompson in 1929 when she wrote that an African origin for the Zimbabwe ruins enriches, not impoverishes, our wonderment at their remarkable achievement. It cannot detract from their inherent majesty. Rising out of the heart of Africa, the great Zimbabwe is today a monument to a mighty African civilization that thrived while Europe languished. The city's ruin will forever bear the scars of ignorance and racism, but her true African origins and the greatness of her people can never again be denied.

Transcript for:Exploring the Legacy of Great Zimbabwe

Transcript for:
Exploring the Legacy of Great Zimbabwe