SYMHC Classics: Great Zimbabwe

This 2017 episode covers Great Zimbabwe, a massive stone city in southeastern Africa that was a thriving trade center from the 11th to 15th centuries. When Europeans learned of it in the 16th century, they were certain it wasn't African at all.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
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

(00:56):
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,

(01:16):
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

(01:41):
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

(02:03):
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

(02:26):
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,

(02:47):
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

(03:09):
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

(03:30):
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

(03:54):
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

(04:16):
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

(04:36):
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

(05:00):
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

(05:20):
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

(05:43):
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

(06:04):
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

(06:26):
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

(06:48):
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

(07:09):
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

(07:30):
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

(07:51):
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

(08:13):
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

(08:33):
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,

(08:58):
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

(09:22):
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,

(09:51):
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

(10:13):
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

(10:37):
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

(10:58):
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

(11:22):
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

(11:46):
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

(12:11):
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

(12:31):
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,

(12:54):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:08):
It was.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
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,

(13:35):
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,

(13:58):
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

(14:19):
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

(14:40):
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

(15:03):
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

(15:24):
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

(15:44):
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

(16:08):
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

(16:31):
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

(16:51):
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

(17:13):
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

(17:34):
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.

(17:57):
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

(18:19):
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

(18:45):
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

(19:07):
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

(19:27):
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

(19:49):
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

(20:13):
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

(20:35):
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,

(20:56):
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

(21:19):
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

(21:42):
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.

(22:03):
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

(22:23):
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

(22:45):
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

(23:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
Now.

Speaker 1 (23:26):
Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Our old house stuffworks, email address no longer works. You
can find us all over social media at missed in History,
and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a

(23:51):
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.