The Karanga people began building a city of stone walls more than 800 years ago on a high plateau in southern Africa. After it was largely abandoned about 1450, its ruins remained hidden from much of the outside world, but rumors of a great stone city persisted for centuries. When a European hunter reached Great Zimbabwe in 1867, many Europeans refused to believe that Africans had built it.
The Karanga
The Karanga were farmers and cattle herders before they became long-distance traders. Cattle supplied meat, milk, hides, and a visible measure of wealth. Families grew grain and made pottery and cloth, while craftsmen worked iron and copper into tools and ornaments. They traded cattle, grain, iron, copper, and gold with their neighbors long before their goods reached the Indian Ocean coast. From there, gold and ivory traveled by sea to Arabia, India, and China. In return, the Karanga received glass beads, fine cloth, and porcelain dishes from Asia.
The City of Stone
Although many of the city’s homes vanished, its stone walls remained. Zimbabwe means “stone dwelling” in Shona, the primary Bantu language of the region. No mortar held the walls together. The builders used granite from nearby hills. The rock naturally split into flat slabs, which workers broke into rectangular blocks and stacked so tightly that the walls stood on their own. In the Great Enclosure, a curved wall up to thirty-six feet high and twenty feet thick circles a large courtyard.
The city was not built all at once. Generations of workers added walls, terraces, and enclosures as Great Zimbabwe grew. At its height in the 1300s, the city spread across nearly 1,800 acres and was home to as many as 10,000 people.
Decline
By the mid-1400s, trade was shifting to new centers of power. The old city may also have outgrown its farmland, water, and pasture. Its people did not disappear. Some moved to newer kingdoms, including Mutapa in the north and Khami in the west. The ruins remained important to local communities and were probably still partly occupied into the 1600s.
Colonial Myths
European hunters and explorers reached the ruins in the 1860s and 1870s. Their reports revived old rumors that Great Zimbabwe had been King Solomon’s gold mines or the palace of the Queen of Sheba. In 1890, British settlers took control of the region, which they named Rhodesia in 1895. Unwilling to credit African builders, many settlers claimed that ancient Phoenicians, Arabs, or Hebrews had built the city.
In 1902, Richard Hall, the government curator in charge of the ruins, ordered workers to clear away archaeological layers while he searched for proof of foreign builders. His work destroyed evidence that later archaeologists could have studied. Three years later, David Randall-MacIver found local pottery and ironwork but no sign of foreign builders. He concluded that Great Zimbabwe was “unquestionably African in every detail.” In 1929, Gertrude Caton-Thompson led an all-women team that confirmed Randall-MacIver’s findings.
Denial
Rhodesia’s white-minority government refused to accept the evidence. In the 1970s, Prime Minister Ian Smith pressured museums and guidebooks to avoid saying that Africans had built Great Zimbabwe. African nationalists made the ruins a symbol of their history and fought a long war against Smith’s government.
New Nation, Old Name
When the African majority of Rhodesia won independence in 1980, they chose a new name for their country. Rhodesia had honored Cecil Rhodes, the British mining magnate whose company helped conquer the land for white settlers. Zimbabwe linked the new nation to the ancient African city that colonial officials had tried to deny.
Resources
Download this lesson as a Microsoft Word file or an Adobe Acrobat file.
Mr. Donn has an excellent website that includes a section on African History.