GREAT Zimbabwe is an archaeological site which is a very important heritage resource in Southern Africa.
The name of our country Zimbabwe is based on the Shona term Dzimba Dzemabwe, meaning, ‘house of stone’.
The ruins of Great Zimbabwe provide evidence of an early and sophisticated civilisation.
This ancient settlement in tropical Africa, once a thriving religious and economic centre, still guards many of its secrets today.
In 1888, Cecil John Rhodes occupied the area of present day Zimbabwe and it became a British colony.
For nearly 100 years, until independence in 1980, the country was known as Rhodesia.
During this period of colonial rule, the African people of the area were dispossessed of their land, their rights and their heritage.
Although evidence clearly showed that Great Zimbabwe had been built by Africans, the Southern Rhodesian government did everything in its power to cover up this knowledge.
The first European account of the Great Zimbabwe was written in 1871 by German Geologist and gold prospector Karl Mauch.
He had been lured to the ruins by rumours of stone palaces and buried treasure. Legend had linked the ruins to ‘Ophir’, the biblical land of King Solomon’s mines.
The sophisticated stonework of the Great enclosure- quite unlike the humble thatched huts of the local Shona –convinced Mauch that the Great Enclosure and the Hill Ruins could not have been built by the Africans in particular the Shona.
In fact, Mauch decided that the ruins were the remains of a colony built in the 900’s B.C by white workers from the Mediterranean for the Biblical Queen of Sheba.
Cecil John Rhodes and other white settlers refused to believe that Great Zimbabwe was built by Africans.
Rhodes employed a miner called Theodore Bent to dig up bits of Great Zimbabwe in 1891.
Rhodes believed if Bent could uncover traces of previous white civilisation that had built Great Zimbabwe; this would provide scientific justification for the colonisation of African tribal lands by white settlers.
Bent excavated a number of areas inside the Great enclosure and the Hill Ruin.
But his discoveries were puzzling.
He found many fragments of African pottery mixed with Chinese porcelain vessels, Arabian glass, and gold beads.
Bent was cautious about linking the ruins with the Queen of Sheba and contented saying Zimbabwe was very ancient.
Bent‘s successor, Richard Hall, a British Journalist and strong supporter of Rhodes, was far bolder.
He shovelled his way through the Great Enclosure in 1903, paying little attention to proper archeological excavation techniques.
He concluded that Zimbabwe had been built by Ancient Arabians.
Africans he argued were mere squatters among the ruins, incapable of such architectural skill.
Hall’s white fellow settlers were delighted with his theories, which lingered long after what he did.
Next on the scene, in 1905, was British archeologist David Randal MacIver.
He examined all his finds –large and small, African and non African- with equal thoroughness.
He recognised the similarities between the pottery fragments found at Great Zimbabwe and pottery from the shona farming communities that flourished in the area in both modern and ancient times.
He also shipped tiny bits of Chinese porcelain he found in the ruins to experts who could date their style with great precision.
According to the experts’ reports, the porcelain was no more than 500 years old, far too young to have been brought to Great Zimbabwe by ancient Mediterranean people.
To the fury of local white settlers MacIver declared that Zimbabwe had been built by the ancestors of the Shona in about A.D.1500.
Angered by MacIver’s findings, local settlers discouraged further excavations until 1929, when British archeologist, Gertrude Caton- Thompson made even more careful excavations at the Hill Ruin.
She built upon MacIver’s findings and used ancient glass beads and porcelain to date the site between A.D. 700 and 1200.
In 1958, a team of archeologists led by Roger Summers of the National Museums and Monuments of Southern Rhodesia used a technique called radio carbon dating to refine the dates of Great Zimbabwe even further.
Radio carbon dating involves analysing the amount of a radioactive form of carbon in wood, charcoal, bones, and other organic remains.
Because radio carbon decays or changes into another form, at a known rate after a plant or animal dies, this analysis allows archeologists to determine the actual age of an object to within several hundred years.
Summers and his team concluded that Great Zimbabwe was built in the A.D300’s and abandoned in the 1500’s.
All the archeologists who conducted scientific excavations were faced with two major problems; first the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe left no written records that could guide archeologists in their digging and help them interpret their findings. Second the excavations by Bent, and especially Hall, were so destructive that they could almost be described as vandalism.
In their search for artifacts the two men had stripped off large areas of soil, especially in the ‘Great Enclosure’.
In doing so they had hopelessly churned the site’s archeological layers.
Despite colonial attempts to suppress the heritage of the African people of the area Great Zimbabwe became a potent symbol of African achievement and resistance. During the war years of the 1960s and 1970s, the African people held up Great Zimbabwe as a symbol of the African nationalist struggle for freedom.
However, it was only after independence that Zimbabwe was able to reclaim its history and heritage.
The ruins of Great Zimbabwe have become a symbol of the new state and its freedom from colonial rule.
Symbols of the ruins are used on Zimbabwe’s coat of arms and many other national documents and regalia.
Evidence was deliberately suppressed in order to promote the policies and belief systems of the white colonial government in what was then known as Rhodesia.
Paul Sinclair, once a Curator of Archaeology at Great Zimbabwe, exposed the colonial government in its attempts to suppress information on the Great Zimbabwe when he wrote: “I was the archaeologist stationed at Great Zimbabwe.
“I was told by the then-director of the Museums and Monuments organisation to be extremely careful about talking to the press about the origins of the Zimbabwe state.
“I was told that the museum service was in a difficult situation, that the government was pressurising them to withhold the correct information.
“Censorship was a daily occurrence.
“Once, a member of the Museum Board of Trustees threatened me with losing my job if I said publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe.”
Great Zimbabwe remains a compelling symbol of nationalist pride and of the deep ties between the Shona and their ancestral homeland.
While it exists, the Shona know that the vadzimu, their tribal ancestors, still watch over the land.
To Westerners, Great Zimbabwe serves as a powerful reminder that Southern Africa enjoyed a colourful past, a past that teaches about the great cultural diversity of humankind.
Next week this article looks at the structure of Great Zimbabwe and who lived there and its subsequent fall.