The traders stop at a certain point, make a hedge of thorns piled together, and establish themselves there. Then they kill their oxen and expose pieces on the thorns, also salt and iron. Then the natives approach bringing ingots of gold called ‘tanchara’ and each one gives gold for the pieces of meat, the salt, the iron – one, two or three ingots.
(Cosmas)
Probably the best ethnographic documentary maker of my generation, Adrian Cowell, spent years making a film in the Brazilian Matto Grosso entitled The Tribe That Hides from Man.
The Tribe was a remarkable film with an extraordinary ring of authenticity, largely because Adrian spent five years in appalling conditions failing to find the tribe. He and Chris Menges walked for days, weeks, months and finally years, through the dark green forest, following in the footsteps of two Brazilian conservationists who were determined to make contact with the tribe and move it to safety before it came into conflict with new white settler-farmers from the slums of Rio. These conflicts resulted, almost inevitably, in the death of the naïve Indians. If they attacked with their lethal blowpipes the settlers destroying the forests on which their entire livelihoods depended, they were shot. If they tried to integrate with the settlers they caught diseases to which they had no natural resistance. They also had little resistance to the flashy goods of settler-traders, especially alcohol, and they had no understanding whatsoever of prostitution.
Thinking back on those miles of film I realised that I had seen re-enacted the process of contacting aboriginal people as described by the Greek monk, Cosmas, in the translations quoted by Theodore Bent. In Indian clearings in the Amazon delta, Menges filmed the Villas Boas brothers hanging out food, bright new pots and tools to entice the Indians. They arrayed their lures, moved out of the clearing, then climbed into their hammocks and waited. Even in the cases of successful contacts, several of these baiting sessions were required and the waiting could be interminable. In this case the lures vanished without trace. Nobody ever saw an Indian, just fleeting shadows of human forms in the thick foliage. It was tremendously dangerous work because the little darts fired with great accuracy by invisible blowpipes really were lethal.
The poignant thesis of the film was that here was a cheerful, happy, independent race who lived with nature, valued it and had determined to stay that way. The truth of the matter was that if you put out enough trade goods and hung around long enough you would make contact in the end. There are no tribes hiding from man in the Matto Grosso today, although Adrian and his associates did live to see the creation of a huge Indian sanctuary now protecting some of those who took the bait.
There are certainly no tribes hiding from man in Mashonaland, presumably because those ancient Moorish traders described by Cosmas learned the same lesson. The proto-Karanga or the San (if, indeed, they were the people who picked up the Arab barter goods) needed salt and iron for weapons. Swapping such valuable commodities for useless gold ingots would have been irresistible.
Cosmas’s description of the initiation of the trade process via barter is fortunately quite detailed and for me, a reporter, detail has always proved the most reliable guide to the authenticity of an account. For example, barter, rather than trade via a currency, seems to have been the favoured exchange of the Zimbabwe culture throughout the long centuries of its tenure. Certainly no evidence of a mutually acceptable currency, with the possible exception of some cowrie shells, has ever come to light.
There are several other details in the Cosmas translation, which can be read for clues. The Ethiopian (or traders in partnership with Ethiopians) expeditions were not random explorations of territory where the natives were still ‘wild’, but dedicated sorties every two years to barter with people the traders knew had gold. They must have been there before to know that there was gold on offer and they must have known the kind of goods the natives would swap it for.
The use of oxen feels like a system worked out from experience. Beef would have been a very succulent food to a Boskop people used only to tough game meat. As we shall see in a moment, it is also thought that the first Karanga migrants to Mashonaland did not possess cattle so they too would have liked tender meat. The ergonomics of a system whereby you use oxen to pack in your heavy trade goods like iron and bags of salt, butcher the oxen to enhance the display and only have to carry home bags of gold nuggets, is sophisticated. The traders even established a rough rate of exchange – one, two or three ingots for meat, salt or iron, says Cosmas.
The reference to a hedge of thorns could be another pointer. They are used protectively all over east and south-central Africa. The cattle-dependent people who live on the fringes of the Tsavo East National Park in Kenya build thorn bomas for their cattle, strong enough to be lion-proof. These hedges are invariably made of an acacia with a long white thorn that I have seen used for drying beef to ‘biltong’. ‘Butcher-bird’ shrikes hang grasshoppers on these aptly named ‘wait-a-minute’ thorns until they are ripe for eating.
Then there is the reference to ‘iron’ that the natives crave as much as the salt and tender meat. This surely indicates that the natives have no iron of their own, or are dealing with superior ironsmiths; that is, that they are Stone Age people.
Reading between Cosmas’s lines also reveals a rough clue to the date of these expeditions. Although they are undertaken to a schedule – every two years – they do not appear to be dealing with settled communities. The proto-Karanga would have lived in settlements of sorts from the time of their arrival. Cosmas’s description more closely suggests contact with the tough little San hunter-bowmen of the Stone and early Iron Age who lived nomadic lives, surviving mostly in primitive bush bivouacs. The Boers have many a salutary tale to tell of how fierce the Hottentots and bushmen could be; indeed, in the early days in the Cape they hunted them as vermin. You certainly needed caution to approach them.
The expeditions were apparently dedicated to the acquisition of gold. There is no mention in Cosmas’s account of ivory, precious stones, slaves or even almug trees. Most significantly the gold came in ingots and this detail really does suggest that Aksum’s expeditions took place long before any form of deep mining and gold processing had been implemented. Remember also Dr Sauer’s description of how gold ingots of an ounce in weight, along with ancient Egyptian beads, could be garnered from the floors of zimbabwes simply by washing them. On the down side, the land of Sasov rings no bells with anyone so there is no way of positively identifying the country described in the Ethiopian account. But we do have some more clues.
Other than the badlands of Ethiopia, no significant source of gold exists in Arabia or north-east Africa and it is unlikely that the Ethiopians would have taken two years to come and go from their own up-country gold fields. Mashonaland is indubitably the nearest large goldfield. If we assume that expeditions mounted every two years equated to expeditions lasting two years then Mashonaland is about the right distance away whether you choose to do the journey on foot, by sea, or a combination of both. It took David Livingstone years to travel across half of Africa on foot and by boat.
Perhaps most intriguingly, Cosmas’s account goes some way, as no other account ever has, to eliminating the only other prime candidate for the actual builders of the Zimbabwe culture being entirely alien, in this case Indians. Because throughout the ages India has always produced gold, and Indians have an observable passion for the precious metal, there has always been a potent school of thought that India was the gold-producing nation that sustained the dreams of avarice of Solomon, Sheba and Hiram – especially as the Phoenicians are known to have sailed as far as India.
The subject has been widely broadcast in a documentary by Anthony Irving, that he called Behind the African Mask. His thesis is based on the work of the Slovak-American historian, Dr Cyril Hromik, who in addition to exploring the Indian connection has compiled an impressive set of statistics on the extent of the Zimbabwe culture. Some 18,000 zimbabwes or stone ruins have now been plotted in southern-central Africa. One conurbation covers 36 square kilometres. There are 100 kilometres of ancient canals, terracing covering 5,000 square kilometres, 2,000 stone pits and 2,000 known ancient mines. It is the largest collection of ancient ruins in Africa outside Egypt. And it is Dr Hromik’s passionate conviction that he has the physical evidence to prove that this was all built by Indians who came here for the gold, beginning so far back in historical times that any trade with Solomon is of comparatively recent origin. Moreover, this was not a creative partnership between Indians and the Bantu (the Bantu were not in southern Africa then), but initiated by ancient Indians who sailed here in catamarans, the earliest form of ocean-going boat.
All manner of ethnographic and physical evidence has been collected by the industrious Dr Hromik to support this radical idea, and is somewhat impressive, especially when supported by the pictures in Anthony Irving’s film. Dr Hromik starts with a good number of linguistic connections. In southern India 2,000 years ago, for example, the word that Buddhist monks used for gold was shona. The same root word for the precious metal exists in a number of other Indian languages. Perhaps more intriguing is his observation that in Indian Dravidian weddings the bride, called bali, was ritually mutilated by having a joint of her finger removed. Some Khosa tribes in South Africa used to employ a marriage priest known as Mama Bali to carry out the same operation. The word ‘Bantu’ is echoed in the Tamil language as ‘brother’ or ‘kinsman’ and there are Indian words for cotton-cloth and medicine very like Bantu words. ‘Manica’, as in Manicaland where some of the most impressive zimbabwes are located, is an Indian word meaning ‘precious stones’. Without questioning any of the above we should not forget (as Dr Hromik has the grace to remind his audience in Irving’s documentary) that India has 400 languages, including 94 forms of Hindi.
More focused is the work done by Oxford and Princeton University which shows a connection between the blood groups of the Quena (bushmen) and Bantu people and Indians, which does not show in West Africans.
Very old Indian maps show the Cape province separated from the African continent, and label it ‘Diab’, an Indian word for ‘two waters’. The boats which plied these two waters were, according to Dr Hromik, the ancient marine-going ‘catamarans’, a word which in India means ‘tied logs’.
But Dr Hromik is at his best when he turns to the religions, monuments and icons of India, going back 6,000 years to when gold mining and processing started in India and introduced a love of the precious metal which has been sustained since. Indians still dress themselves and their temples in as much gold as they can afford to lay their hands on. Some 450 tons of it are used cosmetically every year. In the old days it was crushed with stone rollers in rock mortars, which can still be found today. Mine props have been found that carbon-date back to the time of Christ. Two hundred and fifty years before the birth of Christ the Indian King, Ashoka, is recorded on a rock stela as having issued instructions to his missionaries to go out into the world, spread the Buddhist religion – and find gold. In the gold-bearing districts of India, stone-workers to this day cut symmetrical tiles of granite, as in Mashonaland, and build them into temples and village houses.
Ancient temples, of course, are India’s pride and joy but Dr Hromik draws us away from the magnificent structures to a variety of lesser-known shrines with distinct echoes in Africa. He visits Indian temples hand-carved into the bedrock, as in Ethiopia. On some sites upwards of 200,000 tons of stones have been sculptured by the monks to create a monolithic temple complex. In the mountains are more simple places of worship: ‘Sky’ cells without roofs for prayer, rings of rocks with great religious significance, lingams (rounded rocks very like miniature Zimbabwe towers), dolmans (three-cornered shrines containing round religious stones), Yoni stones representing Shiva’s female aspect which have holes bored through the middle and are very like the round stone ‘drums’ and ‘spinning whorls’ the Bents found at Great Zimbabwe, and game boards using stone pieces like the Bents discovered both at Great Zimbabwe and in Ethiopia. Recent research into San agriculture has recorded that they actually weighted their digging sticks with stones shaped just like this.
Dr Hromik makes much of the alignment of significant rocks, paths, arches in caves, and other geographical features that he suggests were used to predict the solstices and act as celestial clocks. The alignment of these features and of some of the zimbabwes imply to him that they were Indian holy places, as all Indian temples have an alignment which is religiously meaningful. But so many complex measurements on so many different locations are a little speculative for my taste. The one thing that you can virtually guarantee in the granite kopje country of southern Africa is that rocks of interesting shape will line up with a hill behind which the sun will obligingly rise or set. Theodore Bent’s cartographer, R.M.W. Swan, speculated about this to his cost. Dr Hromik also traces stone-walled paths in Africa leading to stone circles where he has, more convincingly, found anachronistic round stones echoing significant religious markers in many primitive Indian temples.
For me this all rather peters out somewhat when Dr Hromik, like so many historians, antiquarians and archaeologists before him, tries to fit all this fascinating collection into a single homogeneous theory. His theory requires a very substantial Indian labour force to cut and raise all that stone. Why have they left so few incontrovertible signs of their extended presence? Indians revere monuments, especially religious monuments, and their country boasts some of the most magnificent in the world. The zimbabwes, even the grand zimbabwes, are very plain by comparison and show few of the features, not least the very intricate wall carving, of Indian monuments. So far as I am aware no statues or definable icons of the ubiquitous Indian deities, like Shiva, have been found. Given that the grandest of the African monuments, Great Zimbabwe, does feature very clear-cut icons – the Zimbabwe birds – this absence is surely strange.
Dr Hromik says the Indians lost interest in southern African gold when it became more difficult to produce using the techniques available at the time. They abandoned the trade to the Arabs now firmly settling on the east coast. Why was this, if it was still a viable trade for Arabs, and India’s appetite for gold has remained consistent? Dr Hromik’s general thesis that there could have been an ancient Indian trading presence in southern Africa from very ancient times is an acceptable one. If, as he says, it was linked with the San then he may have made an invaluable contribution to the enigma of the bodies in the Mapungubwe graves and even to the idea, so far unresolved, that the great southern zimbabwes and the Zimbabwe culture as a whole owes more to various San–alien partnerships than has previously been acknowledged. Moreover, Dr Hromik is not alone in suspecting a significant Indian contribution to the evolution of the gold trade in southern Africa that was after all the springboard for the Zimbabwe culture.
The Scottish academic Professor Gayre devoted a good part of his book, The Origin of the Zimbabwean Civilisation (Galaxie Press, 1972), to proving how the monsoon wind systems would have carried ancient ships from the Middle East to India from November to May, then reversed to allow return trips, resulting in landfalls in the region of Madagascar, from May to November. Theoretically these ancient mariners could have done the round trip in a year but that would have allowed little time for trade so they probably took longer. Professor Gayre suggests that for the navies of Tyre, Israel and Saba the route was first southwards on the north-east monsoon, taking in Punt until they reached Madagascar for refitting and provisioning ahead of the long journey across the Indian ocean. They may even have had to spend a season there growing a food crop. The following year they would take the south-west monsoon to India, a voyage of three months, followed by a trading period. In the third year they crossed back across the Indian Ocean on the north-east monsoon, refitted and provisioned again and caught the next south-west monsoon home through the Gulf of Aqaba. These winds are predictably regular and this neatly fits the biblical accounts of three-year gold-collecting voyages for Solomon.
There would also have been time for the traders to acquire gold in Africa during the refit periods. Says Professor Gayre: ‘The location of Ophir as a place in India becomes almost a certainty, but only as the entrepot – the trading port – where African gold was traded for the other items that appear on Solomon’s exotic shopping list, like peacocks and spices. . . . Since India was always an importer of gold not an exporter, it means that these passages had to include a gold-rich country. The only one of consequence along these sailing routes was Mozambique with its hinterland of Rhodesia.’
Gayre’s sailing plan has always struck me as an ingenious but a somewhat expedient explanation of those enigmatic three-year voyages by Solomon’s fleet, although it has to be said that other scholars have noted how secretive the Phoenicians were. ‘They gave no thought to proclaiming discoveries,’ comments Constance Irwin in her book on the Phoenicians (W.H. Allen, 1964), ‘being less concerned with their public image than private profits. Theirs was in fact a conspiracy of silence. Although they disseminated culture along with the more profitable items of trade, they never shared information regarding trade routes, markets or winds and currents. The routes were their roads to riches, and as such were shielded from prying potential competitors.’
So the Greek monk, Cosmas’s, account that Theodore Bent unearthed, remains for me the only description of early African trading expeditions with sufficient detail to be plausible. But again, if we read a little deeper between its lines there are a number of indications that both Ophir the entrepot, and Havilah, the source of the gold, were in Africa, not India. Dr Hromik’s excellent descriptions of the age and nature of the Indian gold industry have also convinced me that Cosmas’s translation describes African trading expeditions. If, as he insists, the Indian gold industry has a 6,000-year history of supplying the Indian ruling classes and its affluent religions with a precious metal which demonstrated status, it is hardly likely that this elite would have allowed what amounted to Arab pirates to land and bribe the peasants into trading ingots of the national gold supply for scraps of meat, iron and salt. Nor indeed do Indian peasants fit Cosmas’s description of wild natives gullible enough to trade in this way.
But Dr Hromik’s observations do make it more likely that ancient trading forays did go south from Ethiopia and find gold, and this eldorado would not have remained a secret forever. In any event a southern exodus of settler-migrants was inevitable, as people sought peace and religious freedom away from the interminable conflicts in the states around the horn of Africa.
Each new piece of information entering the origin debate is now beginning to render untenable the Shona school’s seminal belief that the Zimbabwe culture was built without alien influence.
Regrettably Cosmas’s translation, while otherwise very explicit, does not provide a location for the place where ingots of gold could be traded for tender meat and iron tools. It seems likely, however, that he would not have bothered to record the expeditions if they were no more than trading outings to other parts of Ethiopia. But can we at least give the southern ethnic gold producers a name and could it be the aforementioned ‘Zeng’ (sometimes referred to as Zang or Zindj)? Were they a black diaspora?
There is unfortunately a ‘Dark Age’ shadow across south-central Africa at the start of the Christian millennium, a veil as impenetrable as that over Britain after the departure of the Romans. Even the Shona school, which claims to be able to define a continuity of African evolution through kingdoms, with names like Karanga B, Mwene Mutapa, and Rodzvi (of which more in a moment), admits a 200-year gap in the record.
Professor A.H. Keane, Vice-President of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, researched the ancient records of the enigmatic Zeng and quotes from several accounts of them controlling the African east coast from the Somal horn to dominions as far south as Sofala: ‘From them the seaboard itself took the name Zanguebar [Zanzibar], the Balid-ez-Zeng or “Land of the Zeng”.’ The Periplus of the Red Sea, a seaman’s guide to these waters, c. AD 110, warns mariners that Zeng lands extend down the east coast as far as a land called Azania. When in 1964 Julius Nyerere made Tanganyika and Zanzibar island independent of colonial control he called the new state Tanzania.
Tanzania, or if we go back to its earlier name Azania, bordered several countries which must have been involved in any southern migration: Zambia, Congo, Burundi and Rwanda are to the west; Mozambique and Malawi to the south; Uganda and Kenya to the north. Kenya shares a boundary with Ethiopia and Tanzania. Zambia, to the north of Mashonaland, is Tanzania’s neighbour.
Any southern diaspora from Arabia/Ethiopia would most likely have called at Zanzibar island. When I came to Africa in 1947, docking at the port of Mombasa, the adjoining island of Zanzibar was still ruled by Arabs, and their ocean-going dhows, which appeared to have sailed straight out of history, still plied these harbours. We followed the traditional route south, first inland to Tanganyika and then down the still-unpaved Great North Road to northern Rhodesia and finally southern Rhodesia, settling in Mashonaland. It is patently a much older road than ever I imagined, and almost certainly, as we shall see, the route of the Bantu migration to Mashonaland. I retraced part of the journey for this book two years ago. There are still dhows coming down the coast to Zanzibar and, a further indication of how slow change can be in Africa, the Great North Road is in worse shape now than it was half a century ago.
Professor Keane’s research revealed that Claudius Ptolemy, writing in the second century ad, supports the Greek Periplus and describes dark-skinned people as far south as Mozambique. His account has been used to support the claim that there were Bantu in the Great Zimbabwe region much earlier than some would put them there. Others have suggested that the Zeng were a mix of Negroes and Arabians whose dominion was confined to coastal lands. These people came to be called Swahilis and the Shona school has decided that these are the people who traded and transported the gold of the hinterland. Writing in the tenth century the Arab traveller, Masoudi, gives the most detailed description of the Zeng living near Sofala. They were ruled by an elected king called Waqlimi, the name meaning ‘the Son of the Supreme Lord’ and they worshipped a God by the name of Moklandjalou.
And did this black diaspora keep on the move? A Zimbabwe ethnologist, James Mullan, points out that Waqlimi is phonetically surprisingly close to the Sesotho term Morwa wa ka Limi. The Sotho, who today live in Botswana, Basutoland and elsewhere, call their god mulimi. The coastal blacks encountered by later explorers called themselves by a name which has been phonetically recorded as ‘Wak Waks’. It is at least probable that the people Masoudi describes as worshipping Waqlimi were Waks; their god-king being Wak-limi. Travelling further south to the Zulu nation, the word for god is Mkulunkulu, which is not a million miles removed from the Zeng god Moklandjalou, bearing in mind that Masoudi reported everything phonetically.
Are these the first faint footprints of a Nilotic diaspora spreading right down Africa, accompanied, or certainly serviced, by Arab traders? The archaeologists can help somewhat. Dr Garlake says that in about the ninth or tenth century (at about the time Masoudi was describing a Zeng presence) new immigrants entered southwestern Matabeleland to create what is known as the Leopard Rock culture: ‘Their pottery shows such a marked typological break with early Iron Age wares that, in this instance, there can be little doubt that these people were immigrants who had no direct cultural relationships with the previous inhabitants . . . they were a pastoral people for whom cattle, for the first time in south-central Africa, played important cultural and economic roles.’ Garlake goes on to acknowledge the ‘rather risky’ supposition that these people came from Botswana; that is, they were the early Sotho Bantu. They are possibly the ancestors of the people who built Mapungubwe, the gold-rich, artistic settlement south of the Limpopo which pre-dates Great Zimbabwe. They may indeed have founded the dynasty which went on to build Great Zimbabwe. Garlake prefers the idea that two groups developed ‘in the same direction at much the same time’. The word ‘Zang’ may also simply have been a generic term (like ‘Kaffir’ was a century ago) for central African black tribes about whom little was known.
The pottery record tends to support the idea of a two-pronged Bantu migration that already had trading contacts with foreigners. One style of ceramics prevails in Iron Age sites along the whole of the Zambian watershed. Another type is found in Malawi and Zimbabwe – the route of the Great North Road. The people who made the Malawi/Zimbabwe pots could not have come down through Katanga and across the inhabited Zambian watershed without their ceramics being influenced by the Zambian style. This pottery evidence dates from very old communities. Ceramic sherds of the Malawi/Zimbabwe style at Great Zimbabwe were associated with Robinson’s burnt posts that carbon-dated to AD 320 ± 150. Moreover, every one of these early Iron Age sites in the south contains evidence of trade with foreigners, mainly glass beads and pierced cowrie shells.
It is, however, from a Stone Age cave in the Zambian watershed that we have, so far as I am aware, the earliest apparent evidence of contact between the ancient black inhabitants of central Africa and ancient Moors. My discovery of it was a piece of extraordinary luck. Lodged as a bookmark in an expensive volume on the life of Rhodes, in a Cape Town bookshop, I found a battered paper on the northern Rhodesian Stone Age by Dr J. Desmond Clark, who in the 1950s worked at the Rhodes–Livingstone Museum. Two diagrams caught my eye.
One is from a cave in the Mpika district north of the Zambesi and is a typical bushman painting of the type found all over southern Africa. (These artists have been named the Nachikufu culture and the earth floors of their caves have revealed many kinds of Stone Age implements.) Another cave from the same site displayed, in faded red pigment, a very strange drawing. The pigmentation appears to be the same as the bushman painting and implements for grinding pigments were among the Stone Age implements found. ‘There is,’ observes Dr Desmond Clark, ‘a sudden change to entirely stylised drawing – circles, ladders, strokes, capital Us and Is, crescents, tectiform designs and combinations of lines, dots and circles.’ The second drawing is alien and – he was told by expert Orientalists he consulted – represented: ‘a debased form of some kind of Arabic writing, drawn by illiterate or semi-literate persons, in imitation of some ornamental piece of decoration or writing. As yet it is impossible to date this art style but it has been tentatively suggested that [it] may be a debased version of the Cufic word for Allah. . . . In addition to the paintings there are engravings in the same style. They are known from one rock-shelter, but more usually are found on flat, exposed rock surfaces near the banks of streams or rivers. . . . A significant fact is that the distribution of the schematic art style appears to coincide with the known areas of Arab penetration of the sub-continent. Similar paintings occur in Tanganyika superimposed on the naturalistic art group.’
Subsequent excavations by Desmond Clark revealed that these Stone Age deposits were overlaid by a Bantu occupation layer. Moreover, the Stone Age deposits here contained artefacts resembling those from the Tanganyika plateau and stone tools found in late Stone Age middens on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Clark’s work provides an important missing link in the genesis of alien influence in south-central Africa, and if there were old Moors trading, possibly semi-resident on the Zambesi in the Stone Age, then this is much earlier than most experts had previously conceded. It also has a dramatic bearing on the race of those traders, as we will discover shortly.
The significant elements of our ‘Time Line’ of alien influence now read like this:
950 bc Solomon makes an alliance with the Phoenician Hiram of Tyre and they share the wealth of foreign expeditions, returning with distinctly African goods, particularly gold.
611 bc Neku II circumnavigates Africa.
470 bc Phoenicians sail to the Azores and Madeira. Himilco, to the British Isles.
110 bc Eudoxos of Cysicus is sent by Cleopatra to India. Blown off course returning home he lands on the east coast of Africa where he finds a wrecked Phoenician ship from Gades mounting a distinctive horse-head prow.
24 bc Aelius Gallus, Roman Prefect of Egypt, invades Yemen with an army of 10,000 Roman infantry seeking to take over the Sabaean colonial trade. Illness among the troops forces a retreat.
ad 35 The Greek Periplus records that the Sabaean King Kharabit controls East Africa to ‘an indefinite extent’.
ad 100 (or earlier) Ancient Moors leave their trade markers (or Stone Age artists copy Arab markers) north of the Zambesi in south-central Africa.
ad 150 Ptolemy’s map of the world records accurate details of East Africa, including the correct positions of Mashonaland and Mozambique, which are shown south of ‘The Mountains of the Moon’.
ad 700–1000 The Bantu migrate into Mashonaland.
ad 943 Masoudi reports that the Muslims of Oman sailed on the Zang Sea as far south as Madagascar and ‘Sufalah’ where they meet the ‘Wak Wak’.
ad 1140 Idris enlarges on these Wak Wak of Sufalah, describing them as horrible aboriginals whose speech resembles whistling. Hottentots (‘Chinese’ Hottentots) were later reported as using the name Quae Quae. The San are today mostly known by the generic ‘Khoi Khoi’.
ad 1220 Yakut records in his geographia that Sofala is the furthest south city in the country of ‘Zang’.
ad 1250 Marco Polo reports (by hearsay, but from Arab sources) that goods are brought by ships to the African side of the Red Sea, then shipped by camel on a thirty-day overland journey to the Nile, then on to Cairo and Alexandria. He also describes the Negroid features of the Zeng. He is cognisant of the powerful current (the Agulhas) between Madagascar and Mozambique, warning that in places it runs so fast that sailing vessels would make no headway even with favourable winds. He must have been told this by Moorish mariners with whom he voyaged to India.
ad 1487 Captain Bartolomeu Dias de Novaes finds the African coast north of Walvis Bay, then rounds the Cape and sails north to Bushman’s River. Vasco da Gama follows him, also rounding the Cape. He encounters large groups of San and has to shoot one to get safely back to his ship.
ad 1502 Portuguese explorers visit Sofala and, from old Moors, hear of a ‘wonderful rich mine’. They decide this is King Solomon’s mines.
ad 1505 The start of Portuguese colonialism with the annexation of Sofala leading, by 1609, to many descriptions of the hinterland. Trade is in the hands of ancient Moors; there are 300 mosques in Sofala. A detailed report by the reliable Dominican missionary, Joao dos Santos, who lived and worked among the Karanga, produces the first detailed testimony of an ancient trade: ‘The people of these lands, and especially some old Moors who have preserved a tradition of their ancestors, say these houses were in olden times the trading depots of the Queen of Saba and that from these depots they used to bring to her much gold, following the rivers of Cuama [Zambesi] down to the Ethiopian coast up to the Red Sea. They entered the Red Sea and sailed to the shores which touch Egypt and there they used to off load all this gold which was brought by land to the Queen of Sheba.’
1800s
Adventurous western treasure seekers like the American, Adam Renders, find spectacular ruins in the hinterland. They certainly trade and intermarry with the natives.
The first eyewitness account of Great Zimbabwe is that of Carl Mauch who ‘finds’ the lost city. Land-grabbers, some like Cecil Rhodes, whose appetites aspire to whole continents, turn their eyes north.
Mashonaland, the homeland of a race called the Karanga, part of a black diaspora from the north, c. 700–800, becomes Rhodesia where, c. 1947, I become an alien settler as part of a post-Second World War white diaspora.
An acrimonious debate between the Romantic school and the Shona school fuelled by the conclusions of (alien) archaeologists rages for the first quarter of the twentieth century, neither side giving ground till this day.
The earliest scientifically authenticated artefact is an Egyptian bead found by Dr Hans Sauer among gold ingots.
Some time earlier the Zimbabwe chief of the time, Mugabe, is photographed by the wife of the leader of the Royal Geographical Society’s expedition to Great Zimbabwe, Mrs Bent, wearing what her husband identifies as a necklace of Venetian origin.
Returning us to the present, I have become convinced that this necklace is one of the great undetected clues to several unresolved enigmas in the origin debate. It is certainly the most important photograph Mrs Bent ever took, even though the Bents were interested in the facial features of these Shona, not their alien accoutrements.
The picture casts grave doubts on the critical comments made of Chief Mugabe. He was disparaged as a minor rural chief and maligned for knowing nothing about his ancestors and/or the authors and craftsmen who raised the stone monoliths and in whose shadow he raised cattle from a makeshift village of pole-and-daga huts. Indeed, he was accused of fuelling Romantic arguments by recounting legends of a ‘white’ origin. I would suggest that Chief Mugabe is exactly what he appears to be, an authoritative-looking African elder statesman, obviously familiar with traders from the outside world; indeed, he is rather magnificently adorned with their trade goods, as are his indunas.
How much of all the evidence, I wonder, have we failed to take at its obvious ‘face value’? Chief Mugabe’s photograph is not the only instance where answers to some of Great Zimbabwe’s intractable riddles may have been staring everyone in the face for the last century. The researcher who spent more time than any other puzzling over the origins of the grand zimbabwes, Dr Roger Summers, was, throughout the latter part of his term as Director of the Historical Monuments Commission, troubled by similar thoughts about certain singular features of the walls of Great Zimbabwe. Could it be, he pondered, that the evidence of alien influence was literally written in these stones?