Roger Summers was not immediately rewarded with an answer. Only after gazing hard at the huge walls of Great Zimbabwe for a good many years did he realise that something was inexplicably ‘wrong’ with them: ‘The Zimbabwe ruins are very complex and contain a great variety of details which are very hard to explain by a complete acceptance of MacIver’s hypothesis,’ was his opening gambit in a dangerous game.
Summers was trained at the University of London’s Institute of Archaeology. He worked on the ancient ruins of the Zimbabwe culture from his post at the National Museum, Bulawayo, from 1947 until 1970, and served as Chairman of the Rhodesian Historical Monuments Commission for five years. His qualifications are impeccable. In his book, Ancient Ruins and Vanished Civilisations of Southern Africa (T.V. Bulpin, Cape Town, 1971), he lays down his ‘rules of logic’ for archaeological research: (1) All available factual evidence must be taken into account; (2) Evidence must be weighed critically, but personal prejudice must be avoided; (3) Simple explanations and proximate causes are always preferable to complicated or remote ones.
Professor Summers is no Romantic. In the main his beliefs fall within the framework of those of the Shona school and Summers is at one with ‘most recent commentators, [who] after careful re-examination of the evidence have accepted the view that Great Zimbabwe is a local phenomenon built by native peoples’.
So what is so ‘very hard to explain’ about the walls? What did others miss? Summers’ carefully chosen words were expressed at a time (1971) when the authorship of the ruins was a very hot topic politically. From personal experience of how dangerous any utterances about the origin of Great Zimbabwe could be, I am surprised to find Summers stepping into this ring at all. But step he did, and I am thankful for his courage, because the ‘wrongness’ writ large in these walls offers the best indication yet of those responsible for the lost city’s distinctive architecture. Summers believed he had found what amounted to a ‘third force’, a craftsman clan within Zimbabwe society which was either alien or alien-taught.
Down the years several attempts have been made to date-categorise the different wall types. Today there are four agreed ‘stages’, varying from irregular blocks piled in chaotic style with no evidence of courses, to equal-sized blocks with the blocks coursed in horizontal layers that form a very regular pattern. The first are believed to date back to the Iron Age at about the start of the Christian millennium and the last, of which Great Zimbabwe is the best example, to medieval times.
The start of this ‘best-built’ stage, especially in the case of the Great Outer Wall of the Elliptical Building, exhibit, as Summers puts it, ‘new and vastly improved techniques’.
He identifies six distinct improved techniques in the Great Wall:
1. Foundation trench with levelled floor, implying some form of levelling instrument.
2. Laying of first course as an even pavement over the whole of the foundation trench.
3. Careful trimming of foundation stones and very strict selection of all stones for thickness.
4. Levelling of all courses (see 1. above).
5. Thick walls with inward-sloped faces, the slope (batter) being even, implying the use of a plumb line.
6. Construction of wall patterns.
‘At least two and probably three [of the improved techniques],’ Summers adds, ‘never appear again in any ancient ruin.’ I have emphasised this statement because I believe it is as close as we can ever get to material evidence, writ in stone, of alien architectural influence in the Zimbabwe culture. Indeed, I would personally go a step further and propose that this, the moment when stone enclosures became works of art, might also be the moment when the Karanga moved from being a hard-working aboriginal society to becoming a culture.
What brought this about? ‘One may postulate the appearance of a genius among local architects, but it may involve less of a strain on credibility if one suggests the arrival of someone who was conversant with building techniques elsewhere, since the level and the plumb line have been known as building instruments for many centuries.’ Summers thinks this knowledgeable mason arrived and made his contribution some time between 1450 and 1600, the most favoured dates for the best period of Zimbabwe building. But what if this ‘best period’ started several centuries earlier? We still have that contentious carbon dating of AD 670 for the ubande drain supports under one of Great Zimbabwe’s most massive walls.
It emerges that Summers is plagued by similar thoughts. An earlier date for the building of the temple (Elliptical Building) would, he admits, ‘open all sorts of exciting possibilities such as MacIver could not have foreseen,’ and ‘it is not entirely stretching possibility to suggest that some Portuguese stonemason may have reached Zimbabwe and entered the service of the great chief living there. . . . Equally probable, although rather less plausible, is that some travelling Arab craftsman may have been responsible.’ Given the fact that we have now traced alien influence, most likely by ancient Moors, all the way back to the central African Stone Age we are entitled at least to consider that Arab craftsmen, or Arab-taught craftsmen, were influential in the raising of zimbabwes long before their work became so distinctive. Professor Summers was able to see evidence of it in the massive walls of Great Zimbabwe, before there were Bantu here perhaps?
Politically, Summers is now treading on very thin ice and, I presume in recognition of this, he follows the example of respected peers and leaves the country. In 1971 we find him not in Bulawayo but at the South African Museum, working on his book with a Cape Town publisher. It was a wise move, however, because Summers was actually harbouring a theory much more destructive to the Shona idyll of a home-grown Zimbabwe culture than anything he had expressed thus far. He had become convinced that the alien mason was neither Portuguese nor Arab, but a member of a subculture of artistic black craftsmen. On the face of it this should have put him right back in favour, but he had also decided that this subculture was not Shona and might possibly be alien. Remember, we are here reviewing the findings of a quiet, studious academic whose work reflects his great love of Africa and its people. What could he possibly have found that was causing him to wander so far off the safe, beaten track?
The Summers paradox, if we may call it that, starts with his observations that the mighty walls depend on level foundations, implying some form of levelling instrument. The walls, moreover, have inward-facing slopes, the slope (batter) being even, implying the use of a plumb line. But – and this is the paradox – Summers also observed that the use of other instruments vital to the sophisticated mason’s trade, particularly the square, were nowhere in evidence. Virtually nothing is square at Great Zimbabwe and there is literally no squaring of walls and corridors as are found in classic Arab and Portuguese architecture. The opposite is in fact true. Zimbabwe is a place of sensuous curves, even the doorways. It is, I think, the true appeal of the place. The architecture is, if you like, whimsical.
Summers thought this too and set out to try and prove it by a close study of the rationale of the architecture of the elliptical temple. All the doorways through its Great Outer Wall are rounded and particular care has been taken to make them very solid. They have even withstood destruction during collapses of other walls which, being all of granite, are immensely heavy. The main entrance to the northern section of the Great Wall has particularly complex and unusual curves for which Summers could find no architectural reason. The minimum section of the entrance narrows to 50 cm, curving out to 2.35 metres on the outer face and 3.30 metres on the inside. As a design for a doorway, says Summers, it is ‘fantastic’. As a design for providing a way through a thick, high, heavy wall it has no practical or utilitarian purpose whatsoever.
Summers then considered the problems this shape made for the designer – ‘who was manifestly a very clever and practical man’ – in particular the lintels, which would have been required to support another 6 feet of granite wall some 3 metres thick. Huge wooden lintels estimated at 600 kg would have had to be raised 3.5 metres above the floor because no stone lintels of this length were available. Extremely sophisticated masonry work was then designed for the wall above the doorway. The slope (battering) of the wall fades slowly and perfectly above the lintels, from 5° from the perpendicular to about 10° at the top. Leaving air spaces in the fill between the dressed faces also reduced the weighting on the wood beams. Perhaps I did feel a strange wind blowing through the walls all those years ago.
Doorways of this complexity create so many problems for the architect – a square one would have been infinitely easier and stronger. Summers presumes that the imperative was purely aesthetic. In other words – and important to other imperatives considered in a moment – it was conceived artistically and imposed on the architect. ‘Improvisation of this order can only be undertaken if normal method and underlying theory are understood, so they cannot be attributed to local people,’ says Summers. ‘Hence the suggestion that the architects obtained a very sound training in the sophisticated and civilised arts of the Arab communities on the East Coast.’
However, this still does not explain why our alien mason never used a square. ‘A third possibility has been suggested,’ Summers continues. ‘The external influence visible in the Great Walls was a second-hand one, derived through somebody who had learned his building trade under some Portuguese or Arab master craftsman but who had no contact with building in the outside world.’ What’s more, Summers believes he has identified an artistic, artisan subculture within the Zimbabwe culture known as the Mwenye. The name crops up in a number of ethnographic accounts. The Mwenye, Summers goes on, had living descendants who ‘still live in the northern Transvaal and the southern parts of Rhodesia, differ physically and culturally from the Bantu with whom they live and keep themselves socially separate, although they have no tribal organisation of their own. Their appearance, customs and traditions all point to their being the descendants of the “Moors” or people of part-Arab descent who were the actual traders sent inland by Arab merchants on the coast.’ They now comprise two small tribes living on both sides of the Limpopo river, called the Venda and the Lemba.
It would be unfair to leave Summers out alone on this deadly limb. His colleague, K.S. Robinson, Inspector of Monuments before Dr Garlake, had already suggested something similar. Robinson interpreted his pottery finds as suggesting that there had been two interventions in the cultural flow of the Zimbabwe culture, ‘marked by drastic changes and innovations’ with ‘fresh ideas introduced by immigrants who may have been the predecessors of the present Shona-speaking people’. Elsewhere Robinson spoke of ‘new and vital elements . . . the result of fresh and vigorous new blood’.
Dr Garlake himself admits to the appearance of better surface finishes on pottery at Great Zimbabwe and a radical change in hut building. ‘Pole-and-daga’ walls were sometimes replaced by solid walls of thick clay. Admittedly, he still denies alien influence as the causal factor in all this.
If, as was now being implied, artistic considerations had been a driving force – perhaps the driving force – behind the architecture of Great Zimbabwe, then there was just the man to offer a defining opinion – Frank McEwen, once Director of the Rhodesian National Art Gallery. In preparation for his Rhodesian appointment, he had familiarised himself with the Zimbabwean ‘winged angels’ in the British and Tishman Museum collections and he came out to Africa via Cape Town to inspect the many Zimbabwe works of art still on display there, in particular the Zimbabwe birds. Frank McEwen proposed the unthinkable, that a country with a tradition of carved stone birds and winged angels had to have an indigenous artistic tradition, even though it appeared to have been obliterated by colonialism. It was his ambition to get this phoenix back in the air and he made no secret of it. Within a few years, flouting a great number of laws, he had started a black artistic renaissance which, forty years on, is Africa’s most flourishing school of sculpture, its pieces occupying pride of place in institutions like the New York Museum of Modern Art.
What appeared to be McEwen’s most eccentric gesture – a giant battleur eagle which he kept on the balcony of his apartment at the gallery and flew in the park behind it – turns out to have considerable relevance to our story.
Things came to a head for Frank when Joseph Mazerika came into his gallery with his latest sculpture, a master work displaying interlocking male and female figures of amethyst quartz; the woman was carved in white quartz, the male in the darker rock. The racial implication did not go unnoticed in Rhodesia where it was illegal for a black man to have relations with a white woman. Frank was told to destroy the sculpture, but instead quit the country, taking the piece with him. Many years later, when I realised that a hundred years of research had thrown no new light on the role and function of the Zimbabwe birds and the importance of art to the Zimbabwe culture, I thought of Frank McEwen, finding him and his wife in a remote cottage in the south-west of England. The famous amethyst ‘loving couple’ still had pride of place in his house.
After listening to the progression of my research, culminating in the revelations of Roger Summers that Great Zimbabwe had been shaped aesthetically, Frank suddenly said: ‘You’ve tapped in to the hidden river.’ He agreed that there must have been artistic alien influence and pointed out that all the world’s great art schools had needed their promoters: Prince Philip IV of Spain behind Velasquez, Van Gogh’s famous brother, Theo, and the pharaoh, Akhenaton, whose patronage produced new styles of naturalistic art and literature, including the famous painted limestone bust of Nefertiti, Akhenaton’s queen. Frank seemed to find Akhenaton, who became pharaoh in 1379 BC, a particularly good model for the Zimbabwe culture. He was one of the first of the Egyptian pharaohs to worship one god, Aten the god of the sun, who later, of course, became the hawk-god Horus whose icons obviously attract comparison with the Zimbabwe birds. Moreover, Akhenaton was worshipped in a new kind of roofless temple. His reforms, however, were too radical and when he died in 1362 BC his temples were demolished. The followers of his reforms were persecuted and many fled this oppression.
McEwen saw himself as one such promoter, or patron, in the art vacuum he found in Mashonaland. Equally he was at great pains to stress that there is a world of difference between promoting and influencing artists. This is perhaps the world of difference which separates the Romantic (and often racist) theory of Semite aliens using natives to build megalithic stone cities with temples and art reflecting their own old religious beliefs, and the alternative – that a receptive, newly affluent Karanga accepted alien advice and art patronage to help with the creation of the Zimbabwe culture. ‘I couldn’t teach my people anything about the creation of the work,’ McEwen insisted. ‘They were teaching me.’
But these fledgling black artists he encouraged could easily have been seduced into what he called ‘airport art’ – mass-produced soapstone tourist souvenirs ranging from simple busts to napkin rings – so he took the school into hiding. McEwen found a valley in the eastern mountains near where the first zimbabwes had been built. This 1,200-acre sanctuary had no road to it and could only be accessed through a narrow opening between massive rocks. The artists asked that spirit-mediums first visit the valley to ensure it was ‘favourable’, confirming for McEwen that the ability to carve the mysterious images his artists were producing had a direct link with native traditions. These shamans also reported that they had found the remains of zimbabwes, ancient pots and grave sites, and that the area had caves containing the icons of ancestor-spirits, but McEwen was never shown any.
An access to the valley, just wide enough for a truck with building materials and food plants sufficient to sustain a community in traditional huts, was cut using the old Karanga practice of heat exfoliation. McEwen remembers his sense of awe as he stood and watched the creation of rock slabs identical to those of which Great Zimbabwe is built. ‘As soon as the artists settled in they were extremely happy,’ he recalls. ‘We ate nothing but home-grown vegetables and wild fruits together with fresh-killed meats.’ McEwen, who had stalked stag in his native Scotland, did the hunting. Speaking of the artists’ work, he says: ‘The results were immediately, well, extraordinary. . . . I knew Picasso rather well, and Matisse, Carot and Leger but I have never seen anything like this. I watched them very closely hoping to work out where the inspiration was coming from. They would go into a kind of dream-state seemingly staying that way until they could see the work in absolutely perfect three dimensions then quickly, before they lost the dream, execute it – execute it in a frenzy.’
McEwen took the works of his secret school – abstract sculptures, large and small – to France and an exhibition at the Musée Rodin. Reviewers enthused: ‘These Shona artists have taken up their tools where the fifteenth-century artists laid them down.’
Frank urged me also not to forget the winged angels anonymously tucked away in London and New York. The piece in the Tishman Collection was his particular favourite: ‘It is an absolute miracle. As great as any Egyptian sculpture and proves that these people understood the principles of advanced sculpture, the principles of three-dimensional art.’ McEwen also regarded this figure as artistic proof of a formal religion within the Zimbabwe culture. ‘Winged figures exist in all religions,’ he pointed out. The same was almost certainly true of the other soapstone carvings from Great Zimbabwe, especially the Zimbabwe birds, and of the more ornately carved columns and bowls unique to Great Zimbabwe. ‘Few religions function without sacred vessels.’
McEwen was, moreover, in general agreement with my conclusion that alien influence was a flickering flame playing across the whole history of the Zimbabwe culture. Perhaps a more accurate word for this influence is promotion of the latent talents of the indigenous people. ‘An artistic class would have grown up within the culture,’ Frank remarked, coming very close to the conclusions of Roger Summers. ‘Just as we have now with sons following in the footsteps of their fathers. It would have been closely connected with the indigenous religion, indeed many of the pieces carved today still represent ancient spirits from the old animist days.’ Then he too said that he thought the ancestors of this ancient artistic class could be traced to the Venda/Lemba. He was convinced that the hidden river had continued to flow, albeit sluggishly, with the Venda/Lemba who had remained known for their carvings, particularly of fish. Their work still attracts the higher prices in Cape Town’s smart African art shops.
Prior to my reunion with Frank McEwen I had always assumed that the Lemba people were all but extinct, a little like the Kalahari San, too few in number to retain any individual identity. I have also been wary of the proposition (made by almost every observer from Selous onwards) that certain Shona display non-characteristic facial features. Mrs Bent’s photograph of Chief Mugabe and his indunas, you will recall, was actually taken to illustrate the proposition. There is little in this photograph, and in the others I have seen, to indicate that among some Shona are to be found the more aquiline facial features of northern tribes like the Tutsi or those of Ethiopia, nor have I changed this view. It is in a line of enquiry too often tinged with racial prejudice to be worth pursuing. The more I studied material about the Lemba, however, there was no denying that they certainly shared a strange, quite detailed, legend of their origins which set them apart from other Bantu people, not least because it held that the Lemba were descended from North African or Arabian Semitic races. Or to put that more bluntly, most believed they were descended from a ‘white’ tribe.
Sadly I only ever interviewed one Lemba. He had applied for a job as a security guard at the television station I ran in Bulawayo and had been mistakenly listed by my secretary as ‘Bemba’, a large tribe to the north. The only reason I remember him is because, on his application form, he listed his religion as Jewish – and insisted Bemba be corrected to Lemba. A black Jew was not significantly unusual because for centuries western missionaries had ensured that Africans were exposed to most religions, certainly the established religions. There are flocks of black Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists – and Jews. But none of us (or hardly any of us) knew that Rhodesia housed remnants of a lost tribe claiming Jewish antecedents and the authorship of the Great Zimbabwe ruins nor that there was a tribal-sized group of them south of the Limpopo river in a very rural area of South Africa called Vendaland.
A South African ethnologist, Dr N.J. van Warmelo, who began his work in the early part of the last century and would become Chief Ethnologist to the Department of Native Affairs and the acknowledged expert on the Lemba, had in fact studied the Venda intensively. Moreover, his testimony is especially valuable because he had the advantage of working with the Lemba long before western influences had materially altered the remote rural areas of South Africa and, it has to be said, before being a Lemba set you apart and of interest to (in Lemba terms) well-heeled academics and, nowadays, tourists. Hopefully, I am not being gratuitously critical of modern Lemba but these factors could have an important bearing on the veracity and durability of their singular beliefs about themselves. What needs to be recognised right away is that essentially the Lemba core beliefs of their unique, frankly bizarre, origins have not changed since van Warmelo first went among them in the 1930s. From the beginning van Warmelo acknowledges this: ‘It cannot be assumed, even if some tales from the Old Testament have often been told to the natives, that these tales should have taken such a hold on their fancy as to cause them to be woven into the traditions of the tribe.’ What is ‘woven’ very tightly into these traditions runs as follows.
The original Lemba were made up of ten tribes like the Lost Tribes of Israel. The tribes diffused south from a place called ‘Sena’ in the Middle East whose exact location has been entirely lost to the Lemba. They settled first on the Zambesi then travelled to the Shona plateau and built Great Zimbabwe where they were known as the ‘Mwenye’. They were driven out of the lost city after an act of apostasy – they ate mice! Throughout their wandering the proto-Lemba carried with them a ceremonial drum, the ngoma lungunda. Van Warmelo described this as ‘the sacred drum which was borne along on their wanderings like the Ark of the Covenant’. Some Lemba believe that their wandering Jewish ancestors paused for a time among the Ethiopians who, of course, have their own myth of the rescue from Egypt of the Ark of the Covenant.
If we now step forward several decades to the second half of the twentieth century, Professor Gayre, the Scottish anthropologist, also engaged on a field trip to investigate Venda/Lemba legends of origin. He returns with stories told to him by the Lemba essentially supporting van Warmelo’s, but even more astonishing. The Venda/Lemba, Gayre claims, believe their male ancestors were white. ‘The Lemba do not eat rabbit, hare, pork, carrion or meat with the blood in it,’ Gayre wrote in Mankind Quarterly. ‘In addition the Lembas not only practice circumcision but are essential in the circumcision schools among their neighbors. It is not difficult to see that they adhere to the dietary laws of the Mosaic or Levitical code.’ It has been argued that Professor Gayre was a propagandist for white supremacy but his notes have subsequently been essentially confirmed by other researchers, right up to the present day.
The Revd Harald von Sicard, a fine Karanga linguist who spent twenty years studying and recording oral traditions of the Lemba (also B. Schlomann, O.C. Dahl, T. Price, and J. Blake-Thompson), found the same singularities as van Warmelo and Gayre in Venda/Lemba legends and practices.
They have facial characteristics usually associated with the Swahili Arabs of the east coast.
Lemba oral tradition holds that their ancestors came from overseas in a big boat.
There are similar words for ‘sun’ in the languages of the Lemba and the natives of Madagascar.
The Lemba are known as the Mwenye, which is also the word used in Mozambique for Indian Muslims.
The Moorish traders who used the Sabi valley and held regular markets in the interior were known as the Amwenye Vashava.
Professor Gayre dates the genesis of the Zimbabwean Mwenye to the sixth century AD building which fits well the earliest Carbon-14 dating for zimbabwe. Before this time, he correctly points out, the Arabs were Christian or Pagan.
Another jump forward to the middle 1990s finds the British ethnographer, Dr Tudor Parfitt, industriously beating this same trail in an attempt to locate legendary ‘Sena’. He finds that the Lemba legend has now started to bring tourists to Vendaland and there are established support groups with their own flag: a blue cloth embroidered in gold with the Star of David. He spends enough time with the Lemba for them to invite him to traditional gatherings, and is told essentially the same core story, but also hears revelations – tribal secrets – that embroider the fabric. A Lemba tribal headman, Solomon Sadiki, vice-chairman of the Lemba Cultural Association, tells him that he had been told by his father that the tribe came from Sena, which was in Egypt or Yemen, went to Ethiopia where they were called Falasha, then moved on south again: ‘Our forefathers reached the east coast of Africa. When they left the coast they went and built the great stone city of Zimbabwe. But the Lemba broke the law and the people thought Mwali [god] was cross with them and they went and lived among the nations.’ Another elder disagrees. He points out that in the Bible, Nehemiah lists the ten Lost Tribes of Israel and that one of them was from ‘Sena’ – ‘the sons of Sena, three thousand, nine hundred and thirty’. Sena, he affirms, was a town in Israel, north of Jericho.
So is there any bedrock to this legend? Dr Parfitt does not much like Professor Gayre (very reminiscent, in fact, of Dr Randall-MacIver’s dislike of Theodore Bent), describing him as ‘the editor of a racist journal called the Mankind Quarterly, in which in 1967 he had written a short article on the Lemba’. Dr Parfitt notes that Gayre went on to write a book, The Origins of the Great Zimbabwe Civilization, at the behest of the Rhodesian government, with the clear objective of showing ‘that black people had never been capable of building in stone or of governing themselves’. (Dr Parfitt later interviews the last Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith, who derides this as ridiculous and points out that he had better things to do with his time, and that it was not ‘in keeping with Government policy’. I knew Ian Smith quite well. He was politically deluded but rarely dishonest.) The ironic point of all this, however, is that Dr Parfitt apparently overlooks the fact that it was Professor Gayre’s book, The Origins of the Great Zimbabwe Civilization, which first confirmed the Lemba belief that its male line was once white.
It was the following-up of this bizarre lead by scientists, including Dr Parfitt, that has subsequently introduced an astounding new possibility into the Zimbabwe origin debate. It was also Professor Gayre who suggested another much-needed link in the proposed southern exodus of the people who may have been the Lemba.
It seems that there is another group of black Jews, even less well known than the Ethiopian Falashas, resident on the tiny Comoros islands in the Indian Ocean. (The word Falasha is Amharic for ‘stranger’.) Like the sect in Ethiopia these Comoran neo-Jews follow a truncated Hebrew tradition that reflects the knowledge of the people in south-west Asia at roughly the time of King Solomon. The Comoros are situated between the island of Madagascar and the Indian Ocean coast. Following the meridian west from the middle of Madagascar it passes just south of the Comoros and then hits both Sofala and Great Zimbabwe virtually on the nose. It is hardly surprising that Professor Gayre was drawn to conclude: ‘It would seem that the Falashas of Ethiopia and the Black Jews of the Comoros Islands derive their cultural descent from the Hebrew trading people in or about the region of Saba at the time of King Solomon and Hiram, King of Tyre.’
Very reluctantly, even the arch-sceptics of the Shona school have in recent times been obliged to acknowledge the singular skills of Venda/Lemba, although in this context no mention is made of their apparent Jewishness. ‘Similar sets of iron-working tools to those found by Bent and Hall,’ admits Dr Garlake, ‘were used in recent times by the Venda.’ He also lets slip that the Venda/Lemba ‘are known for their stone chiefs’ dwellings and their metal working skills’. More simply (and unbeknown to Theodore Bent who placed so much importance on the fact that all the natives lived in mud huts) there was, indeed is, a group of Africans in this region who traditionally built in stone.
We even have a contemporary description of the Venda/Lemba at this work. In 1931, Professor Percival Kirby, a musician from the University of the Witwatersrand, went to Vendaland to record the tribe’s distinctive music. En route he came across a kraal being built for the newly appointed Chief Tshivase, men from all over Vendaland having assembled for building operations which included (as Kirby told Dr Summers): ‘Huge retaining walls . . . to keep a series of terraces in position on the mountain side. Staircases of stone were constructed . . . and these, together with several connected passages were enclosed by walls which were furnished with loopholes. . . . Several of the walls were furnished with vertical stones [stelae] . . . some of the walls were at least 14 feet high and 5 feet thick.’
‘Even more recently,’ says Professor Summers, ‘Dr Revil Mason has visited Vendaland and seen not just the ruin of the building Kirby saw being built – but a new one being built for yet another Chief Tshivase.’ Dr Summers observes somewhat wryly that it seems the Venda could turn them out at the rate of six buildings to the century.
Finally, there is the testimony of the contemporary Zimbabwe archaeologist, Ken Mufuka:
The second tribe associated with the Dzimbahwe culture are the WaRemba [Lemba]. The WaRemba can definitely trace their history to the Mwene-Mutapa [Monomatapa]. Today they live among the BaVenda and are known for their custom of removing blood from a dead carcase. They were the adventurers of southern Africa: they travelled widely between the East Coast and Dzimbahwe. They lived by their wits; they were merchants and seemed only to have settled down after the demise of Dzimbahwe confederation. They were known particularly for their skill in stretching copper wire into fine bracelets. . . . Future research on Great Zimbabwe should move to the BaVenda and WaRemba rather than concentrate on the monument itself.
I agree, and it would have suited me well to have closed this book with the considered words of a Zimbabwean academic. But, by the time that was written, other scientists were already on the trail and had focused the most modern of tracing techniques on the possibility that there was an incredibly ancient answer to the origins of the lost city.
Just as everything to do with the science of archaeology changed dramatically in the middle of the twentieth century, with the invention of Carbon-14 dating, another new science – DNA ‘fingerprinting’ – has in the last few years resulted in a similar, even more startling, breakthrough with the Lemba. At the heart of the Venda/Lemba Jewish legend is the belief that a priest named Buba led the tribe out of Judea.
Orthodox Jews believe that their priests are a hereditary caste, the cohanim, the descendants of Aaron, the older brother of Moses. As the millennium closed the use of DNA sequences as a positive method of identifying individuals and their ancestors became commonplace and encouraged a group of geneticists to apply it to the Aaron–cohanim tradition. Dr Karl Skorecki – who is also a priest – of the Technicon-Israel Institute put the idea to Dr Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona, who studies the genetics of human populations and is a specialist in the Y, or male, chromosome. Y chromosomes are passed, mostly unaltered, from father to son. Where mutations have occurred they remain distinctive fingerprints in male lineages. In 1997, the Hammer–Skorecki team announced that their study of the Y chromosomes of Jewish priests (who are not the same as rabbis) and lay Jews had shown that a particular pattern of DNA changes were much more common among the priests than among laymen.
This work was taken up by Neil Bradman at the Centre for Genetic Anthropology at University College, London, who recruited an Oxford geneticist, David Goldstein. Could the Y chromosome technique be used to link and perhaps confirm obscure elements of the Jewish diaspora as well as any priestly links? The study confirmed that many Jewish priests do have a particular set of genetic mutations in common. Some 45 per cent of Ashkenazi priests and 56 per cent of Sephardic priests had the cohanim genetic signature, even though these two branches of the Jewish priesthood live geographically apart. In the whole Jewish population the frequency of this genetic signature is reduced to 3 to 5 per cent.
Goldstein was even able to make a calculation of when the owners of the cohanim genetic signature last shared a common ancestor. Depending on calculations of 25 and 30 years per generation he nominated 2,650 or 3,180 years ago. As legend has it that Moses assigned the priesthood to the male descendants of his brother, Aaron, after the Jewish exodus from Egypt 3,000 years ago these dates are, to put it mildly, intriguing. Even more intriguing for me, however, were the results of genetic tests Goldstein made from the Lemba; 9 per cent – twice the Jewish lay norm – of Lemba men displayed the cohanim genetic signature!
Lemba society is split into twelve ‘clans’ (some say ten) of which the most senior is named after Buba, the priest who they believe led the tribe out of Judaea and upon whose orders in their new African homeland they practised circumcision, kept one day a week holy, and followed Jewish dietary laws. Some 53 per cent of the Buba Lemba whose Y chromosomes David Goldstein studied displayed the cohanim genetic signature. Unless the whole science of genetic fingerprinting is somehow fatally flawed, the Buba clan of the Lemba must once have had descendants in the Jewish priest caste founded at the time of Solomon or earlier.