Digging For the Truth: Who Built Great Zimbabwe?

As early as the 1500s Portuguese writers passed along tales of a great stone complex located far inland on the African continent. One writer in particular, Joao de Barros, a Portuguese historian, referred to the stone complex as Axum, the fabled city of the Queen of Sheba. Other writers theorized the complex was Ophir, which is said to be the place where the Queen of Sheba acquired the gold for Solomon’s Temple. Unfortunately in the 19th century archeologists were more concerned with ignoring evidence and rewriting history to fit their own racial views.

Adam Renders, an American-born German hunter and explorer found the stone remains in 1867. He found structures built with granite slabs that fit so tightly together that there was no need for mortar.

In 1871, Carl Mauch, a German geologist, hypothesized that a section of the complex other archeologist refer to as the Great Enclosure was built especially for the queen.

Many of these 19th century archeologists found it difficult to admit Africans themselves had the know how to build such an intricate set of structures. Adam Renders stated Great Zimbabwe “could never have been built by blacks”. Cecil Rhodes, the architect of British imperialism, visited the site in the 1890s where he advised Bantu chiefs that he had come to see “the ancient temple that once upon a time belonged to white men.”

Theodore Bent, who was hired by Rhodes to work the Great Zimbabwe site thought the complex had been built by “a northern race coming from Arabia…” He was referring to the Phoenicians or Egyptians.

White explorers and archeologists continued to believe and promote the dribble even when there was clear evidence that local people had inhabited the complex for some time. There were no artifacts found that would have given evidence to whites building or living at the complex. Artifacts that were found included pottery relics, bronze and copper spearheads, adzes, axes, and tools for working with gold, and they all pointed to the Bantu people.

Finally, in 1906, David Randall MacIver began to see the light. He stated the complex was “unquestionable African in every detail” describing mud dwellings belonging to a period “which is fixed by foreign imports as, in general, medieval.” His findings did not sit well with British Imperialist who basically banned further archeological study of the site for approximately twenty-five years.

Gertrude Caton-Thompson, another British archeologist, identified Chinese and Persian artifacts on site as imports dating from the 1300s to the 1500s. She also found large numbers of articles produced locally by excavating down to the bedrock. She found evidence of Africans living at the site through each layer of earth and published her findings in her book The Zimbabwe Culture: Ruins & Reactions (1931). She based her work on the found artifacts, the dwellings themselves, and the oral traditions of the people living in the area at the time.

Once myths take hold, however, they are hard to eradicate. In the 1960s, Ian Smith controlled a minority white government that broke away and became Southern Rhodesia. The falsification of Great Zimbabwe continued. Guidebooks were printed that showed tribal leaders bowing low to Europeans. Visitors were led to believe Great Zimbabwe was built by Europeans. Rumors continued that Great Zimbabwe was built and maintained by foreigners continued until Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980.

Radiocarbon dating in the 1960s shows The Great Zimbabwe is not ancient, but there is no evidence that is was built or inhabited by white men. An accepted view today is the complex was built by the Shona who are the ancestors of the Bantu people.

References consulted for this post include Great Zimbabwe by Peter Gazlake (1973) and The Atlas of Holy Places and Sacred Sites by C. Wilson (1996)