SYMHC Classics: Great Zimbabwe

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Since Great Zimbabwe was one of the episodes that got a quick update in our latest installments of Unearthed, we thought we would bring it out as Today's Saturday Classic. This episode originally aired on January eighteenth, twenty seventeen.

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Speaker 2: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 1: Hello, and Welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We touched really briefly on today's topic way back when we did our condensed history of Rhodesia. It is Great Zimbabwe, which is a huge stone city in what's now southeastern Zimbabwe, and it's been on my to do list for that entire time. We also recently, I'm not quite sure if the letters were from the same person or if people were just copying and pasting the same text, but we got multiple identical requests for it. There you go from different email addresses, so moved up the list after that. In a way, Great Zimbabwe has multiple histories. Obviously, there is the history of its founding and its construction and the people who originally lived there, but then there's also this completely separate and one hundred percent incorrect history that European explorers and colonists sort of bestowed upon it. And this was a history that insisted that Great Zimbabwe in southeastern Africa had not been built by Africans. So today we're going to talk about the site itself and how what we know about its construction and who live there, and then we're also going to talk about these first colonial histories that were written about it and how they were so colossally wrong and the damage that came from that. Great Zimbabwe, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was most likely inhabited all the way back to the year one hundred, but from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries it was a large, thriving city. And the word Zimbabwe means the house in stone, though it's also sometimes translated as sacred house or royal house. The descriptor of great distinguishes Great Zimbabwe from smaller stone cities in the area. It's one of about one hundred and fifty major stone ruined sites in Zimbabwe and Mozambique. There is some debate about exactly which Sub Saharan African people built Great Zimbabwe. The most commonly cited are the Shona who are a Bantu speaking people who migrated into the area from the Sahara Desert sometime around the ninth century. The Shona people still exist today, with a population of between ten and thirteen million, living primarily in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, bo Tswana, Zambia, and the northern parts of South Africa. There are multiple culture groups and dialects of the Shona language within this population. Although Great Zimbabwe itself is a ruin, now shown of people still living in the area do view it as a sacred site and use it for spiritual purposes. But there are other Bantu speaking people suggested as Great Zimbabwe's builders as well, including the Venda and the Lemba. Lemba burial traditions are similar to those practiced at Great Zimbabwe, and they were also known for being traders, and Great Zimbabwe was an active trading hub. Even so, the Shona are the most commonly sighted and in many discussions of Great Zimbabwe they're actually the only people that get mentioned. The Great Zimbabwe Ruins as they exist today, are roughly described in three areas. There are the Hill Ruins or the Hill Complex, the Great Enclosure and the Valley Ruins. Or valley complex. The Hill Ruins are along a very steep hill that rises two hundred and sixty two feet, which is about eighty meters above the surrounding landscape. The Hill Ruins were home to Great Zimbabwe's ruling class, and through archaeological evidence, we know that the Hill Ruins were occupied pretty much continually from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. The Hill Ruins were basically a royal city, built from both shaped granite blocks and natural boulders, regardless of which was used. They were built without mortar and very narrow, sometimes covered passageways connected the different structures. Too. Walled enclosures, which are both pretty large, are part of the Hill Ruins. The West Enclosure was most likely where the chiefs lived. The East Enclosure's purpose is a little bit less clear, although excavations revealed that it contained a collection of soapstone posts about a meter tall, all carved with or all topped with carvings of birds, so it clearly had some kind of specific purpose. It might have been religious or ceremonial, and these soapstone birds are now known as Zimbabwe birds and they're represented on Zimbabwe's flag and also many smaller versions of these birds have been found on the site as well. Also part of the Hill Ruins is a shallow cave that was probably reserved for the use of the king in addition to providing shelter and a view of the surrounding countryside, the shape of the cave and the surrounding hills basically creates a natural pa system, so a shout from the cave would echo from the hills and be audible by anyone in Great Zimbabwe. The Great Enclosure, which lies to the south of the Hill Ruins, is the largest ancient structure in Sub Saharan Africa. It probably served one of two purposes. It was either the royal residence or a temple. So if the Great Enclosure was the royal residence, then the Hill Ruins were sort of the greater royal city, where other people in the ruling class lived, but not necessarily the king and his immediate family. The Great Enclosure itself is encircled by a huge elliptical wall that runs for eight hundred and twenty feet that's about two hundred and fifty meters in places, flanked by an inner parallel wall, and the walls are made of granite blocks and they're quite tall. The Great Wall is thirty six feet, which is eleven meters ish at the tallest, and these walls aren't squared off or rectangular at all. They're actually a series of curves. The builders of Great Zimbabwe built these curving walls out of square and rectangular granite blocks. The granite slabs that are part of the area's natural landscape split along straight lines when you break them, which made it possible to shape them into these regularly shaped square or rectangular forms. These walls were built in curves by placing the blocks one on top of the other and positioned so that the wall itself would have a slight inward slope that would help keep it stable. Even though these walls look quite imposing, it's likely that they were built as a show of strength, not as an active defense. Regardless of their purpose, though, they're a true feat of craftsmanship and engineering. Within the Great Enclosure are smaller walls separating the living areas for different families, and most of these areas include two living huts, a kitchen, and a common area. One of the most distinctive features of the Great Enclosure, besides that enormous and impressive encircling wall is a large conical tower and its purpose is unknown, but it resembles a grain bin. It's thought to have had a religious or possibly symbolic purpose. At both the Hill Ruins and the Great Enclosure, there are smaller structures like living quarters that were made from daga. Daga is a type of earth and brick made from granite, sand and clay. Originally, the daga structures might have been almost imposing as the stone walls are, but because they were made of clay instead of stone, they've been subject to a lot more weathering and decay over the centuries that have passes they were built. Today of the daga structures have been reduced down to mounds rather than being recognizable as what they were originally built to be. The Valley Ruins, as their name suggests, stretch out through the valley. They're newer than the rest of Great Zimbabwe, with some of the structures dating as recently as the nineteenth century, and these new structures are brick rather than stone blocks. The Valley Ruins would have been home to Great Zimbabwe's citizens, with the Great Enclosure and the Hill Complex reserved for the royalty and upper social class. From the eleventh to the fifteenth century, Great Zimbabwe was an active, thriving, functioning city with a population of up to eighteen thousand people, making it the largest city in Southern Africa at the time. Its artisans and crafts people were particularly skilled at both stonework and making pottery. Many of the artifacts at the site were carved soapstone, like small statues, figures, decorated bowls, things like that. Was also an agricultural society, cultivating crops and raising cattle, both for food and as a symbol of the ruling classes wealth. In addition, Great Zimbabwe, as we mentioned before, was a huge trading hub, in part because it was positioned between gold mines and the coast. Archaeologists have found beads, porcelain, glassware, and other materials that came from China, Persia, and India. There there are also coins from the Arab world. So the trading network moving through Great Zimbabwe was enormous and it extended far beyond Southern Africa. Eventually, Great Zimbabwe's residence moved, and we will talk about when and why that happened and what happened afterward. After a quick sponsor break, so in the late fifteenth century, Great Zimbabwe was abandoned, at least in terms of a society of people continually living there. Over the course of the city's history, area around it had been deforested, and eventually there wasn't enough food available to continue to support its population. The direction of trade had also shifted a little to the north, which left Great Zimbabwe out of a lot of the most commonly used trading routes. A series of civil wars in the area may also have prompted people to relocate as well. So while most or all of Great Zimbabwe's population did relocate, it did continue also to be an important site culturally from a spiritual and a cultural perspective. Many of Great Zimbabwe's population relocated to the city of Kami, and the Kami Ruins also still exist in Zimbabwe. Like Great Zimbabwe, they are a UNESCO World Heritage Site because so many of Great Zimbabwe's residents moved to Kami. Kami's construction and layout have some similarities to Great Zimbabwe's. The same is true for pottery that was made at Kami that follows a lot of the same techniques as earlier work at Great Zimbabwe, and Kami is basically a later creation of the same culture that built Great Zimbabwe, and it's the second largest stone monument in Zimbabwe after Great Zimbabwe. Europeans started hearing about Great Zimbabwe in the sixteenth century. One of those first sources was Jua Debarro, who was a Portuguese historian who chronicled Portugal's history in Southeast Africa and parts of Asia. He wrote of quote a square fortress, masonry within and without, built of stones of marvelous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them. And even though he says the word square, which Great Zimbabwe is definitely not square. This is usually interpreted as being about Great Zimbabwe, probably based on a description that someone gave to him, not something he had visited himself. Word of this wonder started to spread, mostly through trading ports in Mozambique. Dbarrow and others who heard about Great Zimbwe suspected that it was an important historical site, but they thought it was probably opher the site of King Solomon's mines. Soon, among European people who were interested in such things, it became basically common knowledge that somewhere in southeastern Africa were biblical ruins. So in eighteen seventy one, German Karl Mauch set out on an expedition that he hoped would reveal the site of ofer. In August of that year, he made up with a German trader who described quote quite large ruins which could never have been built by blacks. Mack hired a local guide and then reached Zimbabwe on September fifth of that year, becoming at that point the first European known to have actually visited the site. While exploring the ruins, he found some reddish, fragrant wood that resembled the wood of his pencil, and he concluded that it was cedar, imported from Lebanon, and that it was an import brought to the area by the Phoenicians, who he thought must have built the site for the Queen of Sheba. It was really sandalwood. It's not what he thought.

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Speaker 2: It was.

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Speaker 1: Just one poorly identified piece of wood. Really steered things completely off course. Yeah. His his theories that great Zimbabwe was built by the Phoenicians and had been home to the Queen of Sheba captured the attention of Cecil Rhodes, who we talk about a lot in our past podcast on Rhodesia. Rhodes's views were unquestionably steeped in white supremacy, so when he went to visit the ruins himself in the late nineteenth century, was described as quote the ancient temple which once upon a time belonged to white men. Rhodes in the British South Africa Company then enlisted J. Theodore Bent to investigate. Bent had an interest in the subject but no formal training, and like Rhodes and Mauch, approached the task from the point of view that this city had to have been built by white men. He visited Great Zimbabwe with his wife and a man named Robert Swan who acted as a cartographer. Before even getting to Great Zimbabwe, Bent and his party passed through many of the other stone ruins in the area. Bent even wrote that he added the word great to the name Zimbabwe to distinguish it from all the other smaller Zimbabwes, but the presence of other similar ruins all around Southeastern Africa didn't signal to him that Great Zimbabwe was part of a building tradition of the people still living in the area spanning over centuries. He continued to approach Great Zimbabwe, specifically as the work of outsiders drawing comparisons to ancient cities in Malta, Sardinia, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Bent began an excavation that unearthed artifacts that fit right into the context of African archaeology. Weapon points, tools and pottery were all totally consistent with what should have been expected of a Southeast African civilization. Ben thought the zimbabwe birds were meant to represent quote the Assyrian astarte or venus, namely the female element in creation, and he found it quote obvious that quote the ruins and the things in them are not in any way connected with any known African race. The objects of art and special cult are foreign altogether to the country. He concluded that the ruins and the furnaces that were there, and the walls were all dedicated to the production and the protection of gold. Ben's conclusion quote a prehistoric race built the ruins, a northern race coming from Arabia, closely akin to the Phoenician and Egyptian, and eventually developing into the more civilized races of the ancient world. The next effort to study the site was downright damaging from a physical perspective, not just a historical one. Richard Nicklin Hall, a journalist, was appointed as the curator of Great Zimbabwe, and what he was supposed to do was just preserve the structures, not to do further study. Instead, he decided to remove the quote filth and decadence of the site's occupation by the local black population, and he removed and discarded stratified archaeological deposits to a depth that ranged from three to twelve feet. He was fired for this, but unfortunately the damage of his efforts was done at that point. You can't unring that bell, and he didn't even seem to comprehend that anything that he had done was wrong or damaging. He wrote or co wrote the books The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia and Great Zimbabwe, and he delivered a lecture at the African Society on October twelfth, nineteen oh four, in which he described what he'd done as quote. Large areas of the ancient temples were cleared of debris to a considerable depth, and the original floors as well as ancient walls and other structures were disclosed, while prehistoric relics were unearthed, which overwhelmingly proved the extensive practice of nature worship of an exceedingly old cult. He went on to express some chagrin that J. Theodor Bent had only seen the ruins in their quote buried condition. He really seems to have genuinely thought that he did the right thing. It was not the right thing. That that's how you do archaeology. You go in with a vacuum, in a mop and you take everything away. This is one of the reasons we didn't have as much to share about what life was like in Great Zimbabwe in the first act of the show today. So many of the archaeological findings that could have told us this were destroyed by a man thinking that he was removing quote the filth and decadence of the people who had actually built the place and lived there, thinking it had instead been built by white people and that the actual artifacts were instead a contaminant. Most of the analysis made of the site before the destruction actually happened were also made by people working off of the assumption that what they were looking at was relics from a Phoenician, Egyptian or Greek civilization that had moved into Sub Saharan Africa, not a sub Saharan African one. So while there were people who did study of the site before this destruction happened. That study was not archaeologically sound. Yeah, it was all based on a completely incorrect presumption. But the record was finally set mostly straight, and we're going to talk about that after we first paused for a little sponsor break. So although Richard Nicklin Hall never seemed to grasp what he had done, the fact that he had done real harm was completely understood by the British South Africa Company and they then hired David Randall McIver to investigate. He he was an actual archaeologist, and his verdict was that the ruins at Great Zimbabwe quote are unquestionably African in every detail and belonging to a period which is fixed by foreign imports, as in general medieval. So this was in nineteen oh five. It was after Europeans had thought that Great Zimbabwe was a Biblical city built by someone not from Sub Saharan Africa for hundreds of years, and that it was a Phoenician city built for the Queen of Sheba for decades. Another English archaeologist, Gertrude Caton Thompson, confirmed Randall mc ivor's findings in nineteen twenty nine, and she wrote quote examination of all the existing evidence gathered from every quarter still can produce not one single item that is not in accordance with the claim of Bantu origin and medieval date. The interest in Zimbabwe and the Allied Ruins should, on this account to all educated people be enhanced a hundred fullld. It enriches, not impoverishes our wonderment at their remarkable achievement. For the mystery of Zimbabwe is the mystery which lies in the still pulsating heart of Native Africa. The idea that Great Zimbabwe was the work of white people rather than Africans persevered. Though white colonial governments in the region were explicitly racist and they viewed the black population as inferior and frankly incapable of building something like Great Zimbabwe, talking about its real origins became best a touchy subject. During the period in which the nation was known as Rhodesia and was governed specifically as a white supremacist state. The government actively tried to suppress discussion of Great Zimbabwe as an African archaeological and historical site built by africans Ian smith. Rhodesia's Prime minister even commissioned a false history to that end. Eventually, Zimbabwe became an independent nation with the government that's more presentative of its racial demographics. And even so, Great Zimbabwe has continued to face obstacles as a historical site. At various points, people managing the site have undertaken well meaning but poorly documented attempts to rebuild fallen walls and you know other things that naturally happen to hundreds of year old historical sites. After Great Zimbabwe became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which happened in nineteen eighty six, the process of conservation and restoration moved to be much more in line with modern standards, but even so it's far from a perfect process. The spiritual and cultural significance of the site to the Shona and other Bantu speaking peoples is sometimes at odds with its status as a historical site. For example, that site is now overseen by the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, which charges admission, which some view as a desecration or a closing off of a site that used to be open and alive. And the nation of Zimbabwe has had ongoing issues with corruption and hyperinflation. So even though it is a protected site, there is still controversy that sort of broils around it. Yeah, this is when I started working on this. I knew because we mentioned it in our episode about Rhodesia, that it was so impressive that like the white colonial governments that arrived in the area just assumed that it could not have been built by people actually living there and instead cited things like Phoenicians or Egyptians, which just to remind everyone, Egypt is also in Africa. So like, like, I already knew that piece of it, but I did not realize until I actually got into researching what had happened that it wasn't so much just people got there and were like, oh, that probably like Phoenicians built that, But it was much a much bigger effort to classify the site as something that was bo not built by Sub Saharan Africans and was related to the Bible. That part was news to me when I got into the episode. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete.

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Speaker 2: Now.

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