THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 11, 1996 TAG: 9602130447
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEPHEN HARRIMAN, TRAVEL EDITOR
DATELINE: NEAR MASVINGO, ZIMBABWE LENGTH: Long : 202 lines
THE EERIE SILENCE befits this mysterious place. The only sound I hear is my own heavy breathing as I climb steep, carved stone steps that lead past drystone walls, regularly coursed and carefully dressed, and through narrow rock crevasses.
A dragonfly hovers over the gray granite. Lizards dart in and out of the cracks in the ancient walls.
As I make a rest stop in my climb to the vast hilltop complex, often incorrectly called the ``Acropolis,'' at the edge of a 300-foot cliff face, a shaft of sunlight pierces a brooding sky the color of a much-chalked blackboard and focuses my attention on the enormous elliptical wall of the Great Enclosure in the valley below.
Here I begin to comprehend the magnitude of this place called Great Zimbabwe.
These ruins in the southeast part of the African nation of Zimbabwe, covering some 2 1/2 square miles, are the largest and most dramatic man-made complex south of Egypt and the Sahara Desert.
They are the remains of what was, briefly, one of the world's premier capitals, the center of a powerful black kingdom that rose monumentally in stark grandeur amid the granite hills and rich savannahs - its regal heart high above on the hilltop, compounds of comfort and splendor below.
The dense labyrinths of enormous stone walls dominate the remains of a city that may have had a population as large as 20,000 between the 13th and 15th centuries. The people lived in thatched huts built with a mixture of clay and granite gravel, while the dwellings of the important families were located inside the stone-walled enclosures. Much the way Europeans were living in the same time period, the dawn of the Renaissance.
All serious scientific, anthropological, archaeological and ethno-historical evidence irrevocably points to the conclusion that Great Zimbabwe was a product of indigenous Africans - the Shona people.
Today it is a vast monument to black history and civilization, appropriately designated as both a national monument and a World Heritage Site.
It wasn't always that way.
There are several reasons for this. One is that the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe apparently abandoned the place, perhaps as early as the 1500s, certainly by about 1700. No one knows for sure why they left or where they went. They left no written records, for they had no written language.
The second reason this place has remained shrouded in mystery is due largely to racial prejudice.
Racism is actually a rather modern sickness, but an insidious one. It is largely an outgrowth of the trans-Atlantic slave trade that destroyed a great part of the fabric of African culture. White conquerors of black Africa came to regard Africans at best as helpless children and at worst, and more often, as an inferior species of savages in order to justify taking their land from them and them from their land.
Whites became so blinded by prejudice that, rather than accept that blacks had a history of their own, they fabricated a history that fit their beliefs.
Probably no other prehistoric site has given rise to such strong, widespread and often emotional responses to questions about its birth, life and death as Great Zimbabwe.
If I had come here a century or so earlier - white man of European heritage that I am among an indigenous people alienated and subjugated - I have no doubt that I would have been taken by the (now) fanciful conjectures of the time about the origins of this place.
It may have been incomprehensible for me to accept that this isolated place in the African interior was a complex social, economical and historical capital of a highly centralized, wealthy state. More likely I would have accepted that it was. . . .
The center of the great lost Christian kingdom of Prester John.
Or the fabulous Ophir, source of the great wealth of King Solomon. The fortress of the hill was no doubt (some believed) a copy of his temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem.
Or perhaps a city of the Queen of Sheba. The elliptical building in the valley was (some believed) a copy of the palace she inhabited when she went to Jerusalem in the 10th century to visit Solomon. Maybe it was where she got her gold.
There was also a ``Phoenician School'' of thought. Their dogma: ``What the great British Empire is to the 19th century, Phoenicia was to the distant ages, when Solomon's temple was built in Jerusalem.'' That is, a tiny country perched on the edge of a continent that led all nations in trade, whose seamen had sailed to the far reaches of the globe and whose citizens had colonized the entire known world.
When Cecil Rhodes, the billionaire king of diamonds who regarded this part of Africa as something of a personal fiefdom, first visited the ruins, the local chiefs were told that ``the great master'' had come ``to see the ancient temple which once upon a time belonged to white men.''
This attitude - racist or chauvinistic - is not exclusively a European colonialist trait.
Americans in the 19th century had great difficulty or reluctance in believing that the great mound structures - some truncated pyramids, others serpentine or effigy in style - found across much of the eastern U.S. but concentrated in the Ohio River Valley could have been made by ``savage'' native American ``Indians.'' Some chose to believe they were the grand works of the Lost Tribe of Israel.
Gradually, though, blacks are reclaiming their heritage, and whites are learning of its existence.
The laughter of two young Shona children climbing the stone steps of what is, for them, a heritage trail to the hilltop complex, reminds me that this was once a vibrant community.
Exactly what it was like remains unfortunately vague.
Early on, studies of the site concentrated more on ``who?'' and ``when?'' than on the more interesting and equally fundamental questions of ``how?'' and ``why?'' Worse, much of the complex was ravaged by reckless treasure hunters and unskilled investigators who removed all traces of stratified deposits that bore testimony to the function of the place.
More recently, much of the shroud of mystery has been removed through the works of Peter Garlake, an architect turned professional archaeologist, who was from 1964 to 1970 the country's senior inspector of historical monuments.
His conclusion: ``Great Zimbabwe was the residence of the most powerful ruler in the southeastern interior of Africa, surrounded by the houses of his family, of the families of his tributary rulers and of the officials of his court - the ruling class at the heart of a city.''
The hilltop enclosure is a ``kingly'' place with its turrets and bastions and stepped platforms and its wonderful panoramic view of the countryside, but it is the walled enclosures in the valley below that most inspire awe when viewed up close.
There is no other architecture quite like this. The walls of precisely cut and dressed granite, stacked without mortar, seem to grow out of the landscape, their sensuous, harmonious curves following the contours of the ground.
The outer walls of the Great Enclosure are massive - as high in places as 33 feet, 16 feet thick, more than 820 feet in circumference and at its widest point more than 330 feet across.
Part of the outer wall is adorned along the top with a two-foot by 228-foot decorative chevron band, perhaps, as elsewhere in Africa, paying homage to the ``snake of fertility.''
The Great Enclosure is dominated by a conical tower, a solid stone structure rising more than 36 feet. Its purpose and significance remain a riddle.
Garlake believes that the walls were built primarily as a political statement, a demonstration of grandeur, rather than as a fortification. Even today the walls are mute testament to a society that had the manpower, skill, organization and wealth to build great monuments.
He says that there was a religious center or temple because Shona religion is a matter of personal relationships expressed within the family, living and dead, that does not demand collective public display. He says that there was no market place because there was no market economy.
Great Zimbabwe's economy apparently was dependent on cattle, an economy that demanded control of near and distant pastures. When this area was first settled there is evidence that it was an island of green, even during the dry winter months, with unusually moderate climate. There are few indications of any significant cereal agriculture.
The site is not near any unusual concentration of natural resources, although there is evidence of a coppersmith's works, gold refining and a considerable textile industry.
Although many whites refused to believe until rather late in this century that these Africans had a trading network that stretched across the known world, archaeologists have found glass beads probably made in India, 13th century glazed Chinese dishes, a Persian bowl and some Far Eastern glazed stoneware in what was apparently the royal treasury.
``One wonders,'' writes Garlake, ``how much else of of the hoard, like the silks and brocades of traditional foreign trade, had perished through natural decay.''
So, what happened? The answer probably is rooted in ecology.
The people may have been forced to move elsewhere after destroying the forest and wood cover and overgrazing the surrounding grassland.
But it may have been that trade routes from the interior to the Indian Ocean shifted to a more northerly route using the Zambezi River. Or it may have been that neighboring ``states'' usurped Great Zimbabwe's power.
For whatever reason, Great Zimbabwe was abandoned. Its people left no explanation. And no forwarding address.
Only an enigma. For more information. . .
About Great Zimbabwe, contact National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe, Box CY 1485 Causeway, Harare, Zimbabwe, Africa.
About the country, contact a local travel agent or Zimbabwe Tourist Office, Rockefeller Center Suite 412, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020; (212) 332-1090. MEMO: Great Zimbabwe is located 180 miles east of Bulawayo and about 17 miles
southeast of Masvingo (formerly Fort Victoria), a few miles off the main
road linking Harare (Salisbury), the capital of Zimbabwe, with
Johannesburg, South Africa. There is a museum at the site and a detailed
and well-illustrated trail guide for touring the complex on your own.
There are food and lodging accommodations nearby. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
Two young Shona children climb the stone steps of what is, for them,
a heritage trail to the hilltop complex of Great Zimbabwe.
Photo
STEPHEN HARRIMAN
Visitors gather at the entrance to the hilltop complex of Great
Zimbabwe, once the center of a powerful black kingdom.
Graphic
ORIGINS
Zimbabwe is a Shona word that is usually taken to be a
contraction of dzimba dza mabwe or ``houses of stone.'' However, the
word probably is better derived from dzimba woye, literally
``venerable houses'' and hence usually used for chiefs' houses or
graves.
There are many similar stone complexes throughout south-central
Africa. Great Zimbabwe is called ``great'' because it is the
largest.
by CNB