Far from resolving the origin debate as the Rhodes Trustees had hoped, David Randall-MacIver’s dramatic conclusions provoked a decade of acrimonious debate. Battle lines were drawn, many of which are still in place today. Admittedly, Randall-MacIver had rubbed salt into long-open wounds by promoting his theory of a medieval lost city with almost evangelical arrogance.
‘Many no doubt will bewail that a romance has been destroyed,’ he lectured an audience in Bulawayo. ‘But surely it is a prosaic mind that sees no romance in the partial opening of a new chapter in the history of vanished cultures. A corner is lifted on that veil which has shrouded the forgotten but not irrecoverable past of the African Negro. Were I a Rhodesian I should feel that in studying the contemporary natives in order to unravel the story of the ruins, I had a task as romantic as any student could desire. I should feel that in studying the ruins in order thereby to gain a knowledge of the modern races, I had an interest that the politicians should support and that the scholar must envy.’
This, in a country which had just bloodily suppressed the local Negroes, was either outrageously naïve or outrageously provocative. I suspect the latter.
Public meetings were called by Richard Nicklin Hall and his supporters to condemn David Randall-MacIver as an upstart whippersnapper, and a number of European academics supported this view simply on the limited time Randall-MacIver had spent on his excavations. At the same time Hall began a massive tome of rebuttal entitled Prehistoric Rhodesia.
Most damningly, Hall was also able to call into question Randall-MacIver’s scientific process, showing it to be self-serving and careless in key areas. Hall claimed straight away, quoting his excellent field records, that Randall-MacIver’s most important archaeological stratifications of a trench, for which he claimed an unbroken progression from the present to the most ancient past, was not a pristine site. Hall (as Garlake confirmed with a new dig in 1958) had already removed several feet of deposits from the top of it. Hall in fact enjoyed the support of almost the entire South African historical establishment and a number of senior European academics. At least three other learned treatises all proposing a different authorship for the Zimbabwe culture to Randall-MacIver’s were in preparation at this time.
What is most intriguing, however, is that the smoke and fire of this dispute seems to have disguised the fact that none of David Randall-MacIver’s findings, or the conclusions of Richard Hall, added anything very revealing to the real origin debate. By that I mean the earliest beginnings of a stone-building phenomenon that has no precedent anywhere in south-central Africa was (and frankly, is still) a mystery to contemporary south-central Africans.
The Romantic and the Shona schools of thought had got stuck trying to date the grand zimbabwes – the jewels of what was, by the time they were all up, a highly developed Zimbabwe culture funded by a sophisticated gold industry. Hall had settled for his Phoenicians in league with King Solomon, although he had not a shred of hard evidence to support this idea of a large Semite occupation. Randall-MacIver believed the oldest remains in the country ‘appear to be those of the northern district between Inyanga and the Zambesi’ and on the strength of another piece of stoneware found near Umtali, affirms that the ‘site may be considered to belong to the fifteenth century’.
Great Zimbabwe, he insists, is later (early sixteenth century) and the earliest possible date (his emphasis) is two centuries before this. His evidence is that Sofala, on the east coast, was at this time a flourishing port inhabited by a colony of Arabs who traded with the interior for gold: ‘As Zimbabwe, being the great distribution centre, must have owed its very existence to the trade with the coast first opened up by the Arabs of Magadoxo, the earliest possible date for any settlement there [Zimbabwe] is the eleventh century AD.’
This method of dating the genesis of the very first stone structures is dubious. Arab settlements on the coast – even the earliest ones like that of Magadoxo – would only have become ‘settlements’ once trade with the hinterland had become reliable and sustainable. It takes hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years for settlements to grow into stone cities devoted to trade. So an eleventh-century Magadoxo or a ‘flourishing’ port at Sofala in the fifteenth century actually dates the start of the trade that created and sustained them to a much earlier period.
We are anyway not primarily concerned with the Arabs, Negroes and Swahilis who serviced the Zimbabwe/Magadoxo/Sofala trade between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I am now looking for the traders or tribes (or both) who first found gold and other valuable trade goods in the Shona hinterland and who built the very first stone enclosures for their cattle, or as protection for their camps and caravans. These are the original founders of the Zimbabwe culture. Romantic guesses about a Phoenician occupation certainly do not take us back as far as we need to go and Randall-MacIver’s ruminations based on imported ceramics from a time when Great Zimbabwe was already a mighty monument are of even less help.
Even though they did not realise it (or admit to it), Hall and Randall-MacIver actually had a belief in common which should have caused them to recognise that the gold trade and the building of the grand zimbabwes had different evolutionary histories. They both believed the best buildings were built after invasions, albeit different invasions. In other words the construction of many of the best buildings had not been as a result of ‘natural gradual evolution’ but the other way around.
This could not have been the way it was with the gold trade. Nobody really disputes that it started before the arrival of the Bantu, with bushmen trading alluvial gold. It then went through major technological change from this alluvial gold-collecting industry based on barter, to deep-reef mining in long runs of deep shafts. There was also an associated gold-processing industry manufacturing gold bars and cast ingots, jewellery and art objects like the Mapungubwe rhino.
But neither Randall-MacIver nor Hall believed that the Zimbabwe culture’s better buildings were the product of a similar slow evolution of style and craftsmanship. Hall visualised an invasion by Phoenicians who enslaved the natives to put up the grand zimbabwes. The society then became decadent and the quality of building declined. Randall-MacIver believed in an invasion across the Zambesi by Bantu from the north-east. Their best buildings – strong hill forts with fortified cellars – were the first to go up, ‘protected behind one of the vastest series of entrenchment lines to be found anywhere in the world’. Later Inyanga buildings were inferior as the culture grew more secure.
Essentially, whether you believe either of them or not, Hall and Randall-MacIver are both saying that invaders imported the necessary skills. That for me is perhaps the most important thing the pair of them have to say; indeed, Hall may well have identified the genesis of the gold trade, Randall-MacIver the stone-builders. I am probably the first to suggest that both Richard Nicklin Hall and David Randall-MacIver, in this sense, did sterling work. All that has been remembered of their relationship, though, is the row, and it just went on and on. Even so it would be another twenty years before the Rhodes Trustees recognised that Randall-MacIver had not put the ghosts of the lost city to rest and that they needed to try again.
In 1929 they appointed Gertrude Caton-Thompson, another Oxbridge archaeologist who had also learned her trade under Flinders Petrie. Again a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, she dug more thoroughly than any of her predecessors, on nine ruin sites. I have no wish to denigrate Ms Caton-Thompson’s work by giving it short shrift here; indeed, I am advised that it was an exemplary piece of early twentieth-century archaeology. But sadly she has little of a revelatory nature to add to our tale as she and David Randall-MacIver were to be contradicted in a decade or so on the crucial issue of dates by the new techniques of Carbon-14 dating.
Caton-Thompson dug an interesting trench under the conical tower, proving it was solid. This enigmatic tower evidently attracted her and she allowed a comparison with a minaret at Zanzibar, thought to be ancient, which also had a double chevron pattern built into its walls. Otherwise she largely supported Randall-MacIver’s datings and his theories of how the people who did the work at Great Zimbabwe were housed. Like him she also avoided speculation on enigmas such as the stone birds. Indeed, she avoided speculation on any of the enigmas, which, as a result, left the issue of authorship somewhat more of a puzzle than it had been before.
Her final report included this apparently definitive comment on the key issue of authorship of the Zimbabwe culture and its buildings: ‘If by indigenous we mean an origin born of the country on which they stand, then the ruins are in my opinion, indigenous in the full sense of the term.’ The Shona school claimed this with glee, reading it as proof positive that the Zimbabwe culture was entirely of their making.
Take a close look at her phraseology, however, and you find that it might not mean that. Is Gertrude Caton-Thompson in fact covertly questioning an ‘indigenous’ Bantu origin? Personally I am convinced that she chose to be ambivalent. ‘Born of the country on which they stand’, is an odd phrase by any definition, but is obviously carefully chosen. Caton-Thompson was well aware of the history of the region and of the long-term influence of aliens like ‘ancient Moors’ who by medieval times could have been permanently resident, not to say integrated. Born of the country on which they stand, in fact.
Moreover, Caton-Thompson uses this peculiar phrase to answer the key question she has been sent in to resolve when she could very easily have made a simple, unequivocal answer such as: these monuments are the spontaneous, unassisted work of the Karanga cattle-herders who lived here. I think there is significance in her avoiding this plain answer if only because I can see no other rationale for her conditional answer. Was she really trying to suggest: we have no idea of the composition or the antecedents of the elite who created the Zimbabwe culture but whoever they were, they, not invading aliens, built these extraordinary buildings. Given that the rest of her report so closely reflected David Randall-MacIver’s, was she in fact carefully choosing her own words to echo his evasive answer to this point: ‘As to which particular tribe of Negroes erected the buildings I make no suggestion’? In the light of all this ambivalence I find it very surprising that Gertrude Caton-Thompson and her meticulous, encyclopaedic report, at least so far as academic opinion was concerned, closed the case.
Hereafter, the monuments were known as the ‘Zimbabwe ruins’, which is how they were referred to throughout my time in Rhodesia. Rather than an exotic antique connecting at least two cultures and linking Great Zimbabwe to ancient golden ages, it was henceforth simply the neglected evidence of a decayed black kingdom. And it is hard to convey how quickly public interest worldwide fell away in the wake of the Caton-Thompson report.
The concrete arc of the Mazoe Dam which the colonialists built over a river I now know to be the conduit for a vast treasure in gold was then at least as big a tourist attraction as these native ruins and certainly better publicised. No school party from Churchill High School, where I was a founder pupil, ever bussed down to Fort Victoria to see the largest stone temple-city south of the Valley of the Kings. So far as I know, no black school parties went there either. This is the real tragedy of the lost city. Not a day has passed since I have been involved with this project without some intelligent person admitting that they have never heard of the place. Perhaps one in a thousand, and this includes people with some knowledge of Africa, have even an inkling that Great Zimbabwe is the largest stone monument south of the Pyramids or that there are several thousand zimbabwes. An extraordinary international cultural attraction that Zimbabwe can patently ill-afford to lose has vanished almost as effectively as Atlantis.
But how do you lose the Incas or the Aztecs? Time has shown, I believe, that these early archaeologists, blinkered by scientific disciplines which have been relaxed a great deal since their time, failed to recognise that there are two seminal issues to be addressed here, not just the dates of the grand zimbabwes. To define the Zimbabwe culture we also need to know: (1) The origins and make-up of the original Bantu settlers; and (2) The elements that evolved into the Zimbabwe culture. These questions address the most intransigent of the riddles: how and from where did the natives acquire the know-how, the design skills, the decorative patterns, the architectural mathematics, measuring and levelling instruments and the business acumen to pay for the movement of tens of millions of tonnes of well-shaped tiles of granite? Moreover, if any one of these was alien in origin then the prevailing theory of authorship has to be rewritten and Great Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe culture has to be accorded a very much more exotic history than it has been credited with for the last half-century.
On the information we have at the moment there is actually no justification for rejecting the idea that these were King Solomon’s mines, and even the most sceptical of the archaeologists has never questioned that Great Zimbabwe was a temple of sorts. They have also largely sidestepped the question: a temple to whom? That said, I am not intending to lose our way in the Romantic mists of Carl Mauch’s erotic theories. The pioneer archaeologists, especially Ms Caton-Thompson, have at least given us an idea of where to look for the founders of the Zimbabwe culture.
Mauch’s idea that the actual Queen of Sheba built a temple at Great Zimbabwe can, I think, now safely be set aside. If Sheba’s biblical trip to Africa is, however, apocryphal like so many other Bible stories, it is not yet safe to dismiss the possibility that the first itinerant traders here could have worshipped Sabaean gods and, when the gold trade was at its most lucrative, directed the building of a temple. They at least would have known how. The pivotal question now is not whether there was alien influence, but how much and how early did it come into play. Admittedly this has to be speculation, but there is no way forward (or more importantly, backward) if you deny, as the Shona school largely continues to do, the impact of material alien influence. The dramatic waning of interest by the international scientific community (and the tourist trade) which has caused Great Zimbabwe to remain all but ‘lost’ for the last century is in my opinion a direct result of this door being wrongly closed.
After Gertrude Caton-Thompson appeared to swing it shut, the lost city could only attract the attentions of poorly funded local enthusiasts either directly or peripherally connected to a body called the Rhodesian Historical Monuments Commission. Its brief was about the preservation and – where damage was hazardous – also the restoration of the zimbabwes. Few of these zealous enthusiasts were academically trained; indeed, one of the most active, K.S. Robinson, who would become Inspector of Monuments the year I arrived, was self-taught. Largely unsung and perhaps with the exception of some of the ‘restoration’, they all did an excellent job. Dr Roger Summers, who after training in the archaeology school of the University of London was Secretary, later Chairman, of the Historical Monuments Commission from 1950 to 1967 and from his post at the National Museum, Bulawayo, gave energetic leadership to this disparate crew. And in the end their work was distinctive and unique because of a sensational American invention – a technique for dating carbon based on its residual radioactivity. More of that in a moment.
Summers wrote what I regard as the best general primer on the zimbabwes, Ancient Ruins and Vanished Civilisations of Southern Africa, that sadly, like all others with the exception of Hall’s, is long out of print. Robinson did a particularly useful stratification of part of the Western Enclosure on Zimbabwe hill. Hall had already removed 5 feet of deposits in 1903. Much of the remainder had been shovelled out by the Public Works Department in 1915, fearing wall damage.
Robinson started to dig at an undisturbed point where the remains of a ‘modern’ circular hut protruded and in the fabric of which he unearthed sherds of pots with well-defined necks and graphited interiors. Beneath this were 8 feet of daga flooring, the floors and disintegrated superstructures of successive huts which appeared once to have been of better construction than the ‘modern’ remains. Several hundred beads were found and a carbonised wooden pole which gave a Carbon-14 dating of AD 1440, ± 150 years or so. Archaeologists were delighted that this date supported the guesses of their learned predecessors, although they recognised that they were dating huts, not the grand zimbabwes. At levels below this Robinson found more burned pole-impressed daga flooring and another carbonised pole which gave a dating of AD 1075, ± 150 years.
Randall-MacIver, you will recall, avowed that the Zimbabwe culture could not possibly be older than the eleventh century. Robinson soon realised that several layers of daga floors lay below his eleventh-century pole. Three more trenches were dug which indicated that daga flooring had once covered the whole enclosure. In what he thought was a midden between base-rock boulders, Robinson found the remains of a further 77 vessels, 29 of which were the same as in the level above. He retrieved 42 beads similar to those found elsewhere, plus a handful of beautiful beads of translucent greyish-green glass with snapped ends. These were definitely alien.
The find which excited the most interest was a number of pottery figurines in this lowest level: animals, phalli, long-horned cattle and humans, plus the remains of thirty-four pottery vessels decorated with stamped impressions, which could be attributed to a well-known Iron Age tradition. If these pottery figures are religious artefacts of a kind – and the consensus opinion is that they are – then they are pointers to an embryonic ‘culture’ in the making at Great Zimbabwe from much earlier times than had previously been contemplated. This was apparently confirmed by another carbonised wood sample found below the midden on natural earth. It carbon-dated to AD 320, ± 150 years, which takes us back to the early Christian era, a thousand years earlier than any of the early archaeologists had dared suggest. The crucial element here is, however, that it seemingly dates the remains of a settlement. It was, moreover, a settlement of quality huts (rather than nomadic bivouacs), whose occupants knew how to fashion ornamented ceramics and icons for their religious practices.
Settlements of that complexity certainly do not arise overnight. We have no way of knowing when the very first walls rose round this settlement or indeed when it was first occupied but it is not unreasonable at least to wonder if its roots were not established well before the start of the Christian millennium. And when did people first stop and trade here? No one has seriously asked that question since Carl Mauch; indeed, it may well be a question – the key question – which is beyond the skills of archaeology to answer, because these founders left all but nothing for the archaeologist to work with.
Robinson’s dig provided for the first time a complete stratigraphic map of a Great Zimbabwe settlement from its Iron Age beginnings through to the golden age of mighty stone monuments. In spite of the new and paradoxical carbon datings, however, these local workers chose in the main to follow the party line of their academic predecessors at eminent British universities.
In 1973, the Historical Monuments Commission’s Chief Inspector of Monuments from 1964 to 1970, Peter Garlake, wrote a much-admired ‘definitive’ treatise entitled Great Zimbabwe (Thames & Hudson) which assessed Robinson’s findings, asserting unequivocally that the Rhodesian research supported the conclusions of Caton-Thompson and Randall-MacIver. From the moment I opened the pages of Garlake’s book I experienced a sense of unease, triggered in particular by this sentence where he comes to the defence of his fellow-archaeologist, David Randall-MacIver: ‘Randall-MacIver’s approach had been faultless, his excavations careful, and his assessment of the basic culture of the occupants of Great Zimbabwe unassailable.’ That is very debatable. Randall-MacIver’s approach had been hurried, and even Garlake goes on to admit that his dating evidence came from the stratification of a trench from which Hall had earlier removed several layers of deposits. Does this constitute careful excavation and unassailable assessment?
My heart sank further when I read the book’s introduction by the eminent British archaeologist, Sir Mortimer Wheeler: ‘I welcome this book as a comprehensive and probably final account of Great Zimbabwe as we can now recover it from the depredations of half a century of largely (though not entirely) untutored curiosity.’ Oh dear. Not another final account to keep the untutored curious at bay and the lost city safe for archaeology. Not only that, but the definitive book which, I have to say, it has remained to this day.
But Garlake’s book is doubly fascinating. It contains many new revelations, not only because archaeology, post-1949, has been revolutionised by the Carbon-14 dating technique, but also because it is the first true piece of propaganda reflecting the new political relevance of Great Zimbabwe in a country about to dissolve into internal racial war. For the moment, however, we need to go back to that epoch-making by-product of an earlier war, atomic fusion, and consider how much credence can be placed on this Carbon-14 method of dating.
Ordinary wood, or charcoal, contains a known portion of radioactive carbon (Carbon-14). The radioactivity decays at a known rate from the time the wood ceases to live so its age can be calculated by measuring the amount of extant radioactivity. The technique has a margin of error, a ‘standard deviation’ averaging ± 100 years. There is also the problem that the level fluctuates. We now know that there were fluctuations after AD 1100, and between AD 1400 and 1800 they were quite violent.
Robinson went on to find another paradoxical piece of ancient wood, this time actually under a massive wall in the Elliptical Building at Great Zimbabwe – the lintels of a drain in fact. This unquestionably had to be an item of building material from the golden age of the monuments – the wall would probably not have still been there without it. Or if we stay loyal to Caton-Thompson and Randall-MacIver, it had to be of the fourteenth century or later.
Robinson’s timber was local ubande (Spirostachys africanus), probably the same as Mauch took for cedar and caused him to speculate about cedars of Lebanon, and Solomon and Sheba. The younger of the two timber samples dated AD 700 ± 95, the older AD 590 ± 120. That makes it possibly as old as AD 470, and that is all but a thousand years earlier than the scientific guesses. Let us also not forget that this is a relic from the great days of monument-raising, not a burned hut pole from the Zimbabwe culture’s founding time.
More dramatically, the lintels are earlier than some expert opinion believed the Bantu entered the country. The implications of this particular point electrified everyone, not least Peter Garlake, who immediately engaged in damage control on behalf of the archaeological establishment. He proposed: ‘These dates (for the ubande) were earlier than both MacIver and Caton-Thompson’s estimates of the building’s age but they did not in fact date the building. They only showed that the wall must have been constructed at some indefinite time after the fifth century. Spirostachys is a tree which lives for up to 500 years so if the samples were taken from the heart of the tree then the radiocarbon dates could be that much earlier than the dates the poles were cut.’
Garlake also suggests that the poles could have been reused from earlier buildings. This is pure supposition. He has no way of knowing whether the wood was old or new, or recycled, and by the rules of his trade, adjusting findings speculatively is disallowed. Garlake would further have us believe that skilled ancient carpenters went hunting for the oldest ubande in living memory. My information and experience is that very few live anything like 500 years, especially in an area where good wood would have been in great demand for buildings and as a cooking fuel. Is it at all reasonable to suggest that masons about to build Great Zimbabwe’s most spectacular wall would have chosen a truly ancient tree or recycled a piece of old timber?
At no time does Peter Garlake even contemplate that the dating could be correct and there were carpenters/masons here long before anyone previously suspected, craftsmen experienced in the construction of massive dry-stone walls, on level foundations, properly battered and with efficient drains. These drains would, of course, have needed to be calculated for flow and structural stress before the stonework commenced. The walls above the drain rise 10 metres.
Why is this avenue of possibility not pursued? Presumably because the dating conflicts with the accepted archaeology and plays into the hands of the Romantics. Instead, Garlake focuses on the extensive pottery finds and decides they demonstrate ‘a gradual internal evolutionary process within a single tradition’, ending at Great Zimbabwe with ‘luxurious glazed ceramics’. There is, he admits, ‘a single abrupt change’ around AD 1000. Garlake also concedes that one of the designs – guilloche – is foreign and ‘a pattern probably too complex to have been developed independently by a people with apparently no tradition of arabesque design’. He gets round this by suggesting that the pattern could have been copied from an imported article with guilloche decoration. Imported by whom, and when?
A similar strange defence is mounted to explain Chief Mugabe’s ignorance of ancestors who slowly evolved a great culture: ‘The invasion [of Zimbabwe hill] of an unimportant Karanga chief finally disrupted a continuous historical tradition that can be traced back through the Rodzwi, the Tora, Mwene Mutapa and Mbire to the foundations of Great Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s incomprehension of the history, significance or purposes of the buildings allowed him to turn them into cattle kraals and use many of the stones to build the rough walls that block and divide several enclosures.’ Garlake adds this rider, giving the first hint that other – political – currents are running beneath the surface here: ‘The same ignorance eventually fortified white questioners in their mistaken beliefs that the indigenous people had nothing to do with the building of Great Zimbabwe.’ For a man of liberal tendencies who is doing his best to support the Shona school of origin this is a most patronising description of a Karanga chief.
One cannot propose a case for a continuous cultural evolution by Mugabe’s ancestors, then reject the chief’s testimony because he does not fit into this scheme of things or have any recollection of it. Chief Mugabe would have worshipped his ancestors as much as most Shona do and his ancestors would have been revered in oral tradition. The right conclusion here is surely that Mugabe’s people had no oral traditions of elite ancestors. Why? Perhaps the only reasonable answer is because they had gone elsewhere or ‘died out’ too long ago even for Chief Mugabe’s ancestors to have remembered them.
Garlake is maligning the ‘white questioners’ as well. I know of no ‘white questioner’ (with the possible exception of Richard Hall) who has said that the indigenous people had nothing to do with the building of Great Zimbabwe. Who gathered up those millions of tons of stone; indeed, who raised them? It is the level and the nature of indigenous involvement in the conception and the sophistication of the construction that has been questioned.
To resist, as Garlake does, the very idea of alien influence seems to me to create an artificial barrier to discovery. In fact the only ‘gradual internal evolutionary process’ at Great Zimbabwe for which we have incontrovertible evidence in the form of artefacts is trade with aliens. Remember that the point of all this is that Garlake’s Great Zimbabwe, endorsed by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, is still widely regarded as the defining text on the Zimbabwe culture. Nothing remotely as comprehensive has been published in the thirty years since it appeared. It still has pride of place in Zimbabwe academic establishments.
Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I found proof that Garlake was also laundering his evidence to support his case. He quotes Rhodes’ scout, Frederick Courtenay Selous, in support of his theory of an entirely indigenous origin: ‘Selous was a man who had spent many years travelling throughout Mashonaland and who, because of an unparalleled knowledge of the country and the people, had been employed to guide the B.S.A. Co’s occupation forces into the country. He consistently said he knew no reasons of organisation, skill, technology or opportunity, why the Karanga should not have built Great Zimbabwe.’ Does this not give the impression that Selous, who was probably the most expert observer we have, supported the indigenous Bantu theory of origin?
I had done quite a lot of work on Selous by the time I read Great Zimbabwe, being fortunate enough to have access to a first edition of his wonderful Travels and Adventures in South Central Africa through the Travellers Club in London. I was, however, at that time studying Garlake from a first edition found in Cape Town. Where might I find another first edition of Selous’s book? It occurred to me that Rhodes was certain to have acquired a first edition of his scout’s famous journal and a quick call to Groote Schuur produced not just a confirmation but another invitation to work in Rhodes’ library.
Here is what Selous actually said about the Karanga and the Zimbabwe culture:
Let us suppose, then, that two or perhaps three thousand years ago a commercial people penetrated from Southern Arabia to Mashonaland. They were acquainted with the requirements of the civilised nations of Asia at that period and understood the value of gold. This metal they discovered amongst the hills and the streams of Mashonaland.
In time these Arabian merchants gained a footing in the land and taught the black aborigines to mine for them. Their principal station was at Zimbabwi, where they built with the forced labour of the aborigines, a temple for the worship of Baal and a strongly built and well-situated fortress.
But I take it that, like the Arabs in Central Africa at the present day, these ancient Arabians brought few or no women with them, but took a very handsome allowance of wives from amongst the aboriginal blacks.
For a long period intercourse was kept up with Arabia, and during this period the gold seekers spread over the whole of south-eastern Africa from the Zambesi to the Limpopo, everywhere mixing with the people and teaching them their own rude arts of wall-building and gold-mining.
In course of time we will suppose that events happened in Arabia which put an end to all the intercourse with the distant colony in Mashonaland, and as time went on, as the alien race were still in small numbers compared with the aboriginal blacks, and as they had none of their own women with them, they gradually became completely fused and nationally lost amongst the aborigines . . . at any rate I am absolutely convinced that the blood of the ancient builders of Zimbabwe still runs (in a very diluted form, if you like) in the veins of the Bantu races, and more especially so among the Barotosi of the Upper Zambesi, who are, there is little doubt, a branch of the Barotsi tribe who were destroyed by the Matibili in Mashonaland, though the separation took place long prior to this event.
I make this suggestion after much thought, a study of the relics unearthed at Zimbabwe, and a knowledge of the natives of South-Eastern Africa gained during many years of travel.
Selous is actually the star witness for the school of alien influence – very ancient influence – not as Garlake implies, the other way around! Or am I doing Garlake an injustice? Did he secretly believe – he certainly never admits to it – that the Karanga were a mixed race descended in part from the ancient Moors?
Then another bizarre thought crossed my mind. With so much evidence to suggest that there had been alien influence, why was Garlake trying to hold a line he was frankly too intelligent to have believed in so absolutely? Were other forces at work? I have no particular axe to grind with Peter Garlake because as we will see in a moment he did have other reasons for being parsimonious with the truth. Nor am I that qualified to question his presentation of what is undoubtedly the most powerful case ever put for a spontaneous Karanga authorship of Great Zimbabwe. Garlake had by then, however, attracted stern criticism from a number of academics who were suitably qualified.
‘In order to escape from the conclusive Carbon-14 evidence,’ says Professor Gayre of Edinburgh, ‘those among the later archaeologists who have constituted themselves the exponents of the pro-Bantu school have been forced to ludicrous shifts to explain the evidence away.’ He turns his attention on the two pieces of wood supporting the drain. The Carbon-14 dates are, you will recall, AD 615 and AD 727 with a margin of about 100 years. ‘We are therefore justified in taking the average date as between AD 615 and AD 727 which gives us AD 671 as the approximate date for the erections of which they were a part. . . . The timber was taken from that part of Zimbabwe where the quality of the stone and craftsmanship is of the best. . . . We are, because of this, forced to conclude that the seventh century AD is about the central point in time when the most advanced and skilled builders were at work. Basing his estimates on W.T. Libby [the American who did the Carbon-14 tests], Professor R.A. Dart gives terminal dates of AD 377 and AD 941.’
Professor Gayre accuses Garlake of a ‘complete misrepresentation of the evidence to fit a Bantu-origin theory’, and reminds Garlake of graves at a zimbabwe near the Zambesi river which Garlake himself had admitted are ‘not African’, yet have been positively dated from AD 680 to AD 800–900. These human remains were buried with, or wearing, fine pottery, gold and ivory ornaments. Gayle fulminates:
Here we have a whole jumble of unproven, and in some cases disproved, assumptions, all designed to maintain the myth of Bantu origins. There is no evidence that the Bantu had settled in large numbers in Rhodesia at this time . . . any stray Negroids can be explained by the possibility of scattered and small settlements having been established from the Congo to the coast in the Zambesi valley. But such Negroids were not the occupants of the land, which at this time was in the hands of the Cappoid Bushmen and Hottentots. Therefore the erection of Zimbabwe, as established by Carbon-14 dating, is prior to the large-scale arrival of the Negroid-Bantu in Rhodesia.
Peter Garlake, surprisingly, survived this hot debate. No one seems to have noticed his manipulation of Selous’s testimony. His boss, the long-serving Dr Roger Summers, while remaining a card-carrying member of the Shona school, had admittedly started to question some enigmatic features of the building techniques at Great Zimbabwe, but these were never voiced loudly enough to prevent Garlake’s thesis becoming the contemporary theory of the Zimbabwe culture that the archaeologists and the Shona most liked.
Here then is a summary of his view of the Karanga Zimbabwe culture:
A period when the Karanga ancestors lived in huts in the rocks and raised cattle and grain. In the west there was a separate culture called the Leopard Rock people. The Zimbabwe culture may have been an offshoot of it.
Pottery shows a ‘single abrupt change’. Early walls of poor quality are built, also improved solid-daga walled huts. A Karanga elite begins to emerge. The early wall on the hill may have initially been for defence, later for show/status. Religion, bringing cohesion, develops.
Great Zimbabwe mostly built. The Leopard Rock people flourish on the gold trade. Entrepot towns grow on the east coast. Valley settlements expand, work gold, copper, bronze, and engage in spinning and weaving. Eastern ceramics are imported as are glass beads. Great outer wall built. Extensive trade ensues with communities like the Ingombe Ilede in the north-west and on the Zambesi; ‘Swahili’ middlemen run this trade. The period sees the growth of provincial centres with populations of between 1,000 and 2,500 adults. Trained (Bantu) masons travel to the provincial sites and undertake the building.
Building at Great Zimbabwe climaxes with the construction of the temple, the tower, platforms and monoliths. The Western Enclosure acquires special sanctity, evidenced by soapstone artistry.
The social structure is a rich elite ruling country peasants. The Zimbabwe culture starts to lose control of the provinces and its population uses up too many resources. The Ingombe Ilede prosper through direct access to the Zambesi river. Shortage of salt obliges Karanga King Mutota to move north where the Mwene Mutapa empire is founded. The Mazoe river, a tributary of the Zambesi, may still have been controlled by Mutota. Mwene Mutapa gains control of trade, particularly gold, and overuns the Ingombe Ilede.
Mwene Mutapa kingdom is short-lived and by the end of the century is gone. Great Zimbabwe is now the provincial residence of Mweni Mutapa’s wives. The southern Rozwi kingdom arises from breakaway southern provinces, ruling in the south from their own stone courts. It continues to flourish until the eighteenth century, trading by then with the Portuguese.
In the 1830s these southern provinces are invaded by a series of Ngoni armies from the south and the Rodzwi suffer defeat and destruction so complete that the only material evidence of their former greatness is their ruined stone buildings.
My view of all this is that had Peter Garlake simply allowed the possibility that the grand zimbabwes had enjoyed foreign input I would have had no argument with an otherwise scholarly thesis. Similarly, I would expect him at least to allow for the idea that ‘old Moors’ had sought gold in these parts, possibly for thousands of years.
But Garlake will have none of that and, in spite of hundreds of contradictory alien artefacts, prefers to keep his theory of a home-grown Karanga craft-culture pristine. In my view that reduces the thesis to a politically inspired myth. It also places it outside the real origin debate because it continues to sidestep the seminal question – how did these cattle-herders learn how to raise the largest stone city south of the Pyramids?
Although I have never met Peter Garlake I have great sympathy for his predicament and believe I understand the pressures he was under because at the time I, too, was caught up in the strange political currents produced by the end of colonialism in central Africa. Ian Smith’s party, the Rhodesia Front, introduced ever more draconian laws to ensure that published or broadcast ‘information’ toed the party line or, more specifically, did nothing to support black nationalism. In time Smith’s parliament would pass the Law and Maintenance Amendment Act which proscribed dissemination of any information likely to cause ‘alarm and/or despondency’, under threat of two-year prison sentences. As Controller of Rhodesia Television in Bulawayo fronting my own evening news show this put me right in the front line. We were once banned from broadcasting the Maize Marketing Board’s crop forecast because it was judged bad enough to cause alarm and/or despondency. In the end it made my job untenable and within two years I would decide it was safer to leave the country.
The evidence that Peter Garlake got caught up in this farce is there, if you know where to look for it. There is, as a start, his enigmatic book dedication: ‘For John and all who share his beliefs and therefore his present circumstances.’ We are not told who John is but I think it is safe to assume that he is somewhat persecuted. Then the foreword, which starts out innocently enough: ‘From July 1964 to December 1970, I was the Senior Inspector of Monuments of the Historical Monuments Commission of Southern Rhodesia’, and he thanks all those he worked with. He signs the foreword with the simple initials ‘P.S.G.’ but then one realises that he is writing not from Rhodesia but from the Institute of African Studies, University of Ife, Ile Ife, Ife, Nigeria. In a kind of exile, I suspect.
Peter Garlake’s suggestion that the Zimbabwe culture was black through and through would certainly have alarmed the last Rhodesian white government; indeed, the thesis had already provoked angry outbursts in their parliament. In 1969, G.H. Hartley, the Rhodesian Front member for Fort Victoria, complained to the legislative assembly:
There is one trend running through the whole of the presentation of the image of the ruins which is apparently being directed to promoting the notion that . . . these buildings were originally erected by the indigenous people of Rhodesia. This may be a very popular notion for adherents to the Zimbabwe African People’s Union and Zimbabwe African National Union and the Organisation of African Unity but I wish to make the suggestion that this notion is nothing but sheer conjecture.
I feel that it is quite wrong that this trend should be allowed to continue to develop . . . this trend among people, particularly among members of the staff of the National Historical Monuments Commission to portray the ruins in one light only, should be corrected. . . .
The Minister of Internal Affairs as recorded in Hansard agrees: ‘I have intimated to those concerned . . . that it would be more correct that, as yet, no irrefutable evidence is available as to the origins of the ruins . . . it would be wrong to allow particularly visitors to this country to be influenced unduly by one train of thought. There is a great deal of evidence, which I personally have studied a good deal myself, to indicate that what I have said is correct: there is no irrefutable evidence of the origins of the ruins at the present time. I have made this point to the persons likely to be concerned.’
A year later Parliament heard that: ‘The [Honourable Member for Victoria’s] remarks . . . on Zimbabwe have certainly borne fruit. There was something of a storm in a teacup over them but the results have been satisfactory and a new guide book is being prepared on behalf of the Historical Monuments Commission in which all theories relating to Zimbabwe will be presented absolutely impartially.’ This was confirmed in a government White Paper of c. 1970 which formally ordered that no official publication could state unequivocally that Great Zimbabwe had been created by Africans.
I can only deduce that Garlake became caught up in this whirlpool but it is to a degree supported by a cryptic comment that is the last line in his book. He records that shortly after these exchanges in parliament, the director of the Rhodesian Ancient Monuments Commission gave a press interview in which he avowed: ‘The Commission holds no view of Zimbabwe’s origins – that is for the museum to argue.’ ‘A particularly ironic conclusion,’ Garlake observes, ‘for the Rhodesian museums no longer employ an archaeologist.’
Thankfully by then Ian Smith’s government and white supremacy in Africa was on its last legs. Robert Mugabe successfully led his troops in a war of independence under a ‘Zimbabwe’ banner, but his victory, understandably, also ended serious research into alternative authorship theories. Subsequently, a whole pack of sleeping dogs have been left to lie.
More than a century after the first Royal Geographical Society expedition sought to resolve the origins of the lost city, none of the seminal riddles have been answered and the Zimbabwe culture has instead been parked in a politically correct cul-de-sac.
The official record is now one of listless guesses. The geometrical conical tower, for example, is relegated to a ‘symbolic Karanga grain bin’. The mysterious soapstone columns ‘may well have served as reminders or tallies of the individual dead’. The unique Great Zimbabwe birds are dismissed as ‘stiff, crude diagrams; conventional statements of a generalised avian theme’. I have even seen a suggestion that the very early pottery figurines were toys.
Is it any wonder that this lost marvel of the southern hemisphere becomes less well known with every passing day? Rather more dangerous is that politically correct but observably questionable interpretations of events have now become the official record taught to children. You will recall my quoting from a recent (1998) primer by Harvard University’s Dean, Mark Bessire, which borrows Garlake’s title, Great Zimbabwe. It concluded with the following timeline:
c. AD 1000, Ancestors of the Shona arrive on the Zimbabwe plateau.
c. 1250–1300, Mapungubwe becomes important trading centre.
c. 1270–90, First major building projects at Great Zimbabwe.
c. 1300–1450, Great Zimbabwe reaches the height of its power.
Can you spot what has happened here? This children’s primer should say that the first major building could have started in AD 671 which is the mean Carbon-14 date of that piece of ubande wood under one of Great Zimbabwe’s most massive walls. However, it has been corrected by almost exactly the 500 years Peter Garlake said was the lifespan of the tree even though nobody knows its real age. Time has made gospel of a dubious guess.
So from here on I propose to abandon the argument – it is going to run a while yet – as to exactly when the grand zimbabwes were constructed and concentrate instead on the ancestors of the people who built the first stone buildings and on the people who started formal trade in the precious metal that paid for them. Who were the first blacks to enter these lands from across the Zambesi, what skills did they bring with them, and were they gold traders? Or were there other people with them with special skills and did they deal their gold through others? So far as I am aware no one has backtracked to any of these original settlers with a view to establishing what knowledge they could have brought with them.
Then one morning at Groote Schuur, Alta Kriel, the ever-helpful curator, put on her white gloves and pulled down from the shelves of Rhodes’ study a pristine first edition of a book called The Sacred Cities of Ethiopia – by Theodore Bent! This is such a rare book (the author was dead of malaria by the time it went into circulation) and of so little general interest I could not escape the feeling that the last hands to turn its pages might have been those of Rhodes himself. Indeed, the only reference I had ever even seen to the book was in the Royal Geographical Society’s obituary to Bent:
In the winter of 1892 Mr and Mrs Bent set out for Africa, this time to investigate the extensive ruins in the north of Abyssinia. This journey threw much new light on the early connections between the people of Abyssinia and those of south-west Arabia, whence both the writing and the language of the old Abyssinians must have been derived.
It is described in Mr Bent’s volume, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians. In the winter of 1893–4, Southern Arabia, the mother country of both the peoples whose antiquities had been examined in the two preceding years, was visited and a considerable addition made to our knowledge of the little-known Hadramut country.
This was revisited during the succeeding winter, while that of 1895–6 was devoted to exploration of the African coast of the Red Sea. The last fatal journey is said to have resulted in the discovery of fresh archaeological matter in Sokotra and Southern Arabia, in the latter of which some new ground was broken.
This makes no mention of Great Zimbabwe, so what new ground is being referred to? Within minutes of opening Rhodes’ copy of The Sacred Cities of Ethiopia, however, that became obvious. Theodore and Agnes Bent had never stopped tracking the people he had termed the ‘authors’ of the Zimbabwe culture; indeed, Bent had given his life to that very Grail.