 Sub-Saharan
Africa probably has no greater a monument to its pre-colonial past than
the ruins of Great Zimbabwe*, a massive stone city that impresses on so
many counts: sophistication, mystery, wealth and power. The monument is
located in southeastern Zimbabwe on a granite plain, about 160 air miles
south of Harare, modern Zimbabwe’s capital city.
For 16th-century Portuguese, the first Europeans
to see the city, the ruins, strewn over almost 1,800 acres, had to have
been the seat of some great power. They theorized that the site might have
been the capital of the Queen of Sheba or perhaps the legendary African
Christian king, Prester John. Whoever Great Zimbabwe’s ancient monarch may
have been, the Portuguese knew they had come upon something grand. The
site’s biggest structure, later named the Elliptical Building or Great
Enclosure, was a huge oval space formed by a mortarless granite wall up to
32 feet high, 17 feet thick and 800 feet in circumference. Its dimensions
and massiveness reminded the Portuguese of the great castle walls of
Europe.
The Great Enclosure (which some claim housed a harem) was the second of
Great Zimbabwe’s three major sites to be built. Preceding it was the
nearby Hill Complex, constructed around 1250 A.D., which included housing
and religious structures. A third element, the Valley Complex, was the
smallest of Great Zimbabwe’s precincts, and was probably built in the
early 15th century.
Amazingly, these first Europeans arrived on the scene
probably only a few decades after the city’s demise. It had been built by
the Shona, ancestors to Zimbabwe’s Bantu-speaking tribes, between 1100 and
1400 A.D. It was not an uncommon structure for the plains of southern
Africa, joining scores of other stone enclosed areas on the Zimbabwean
plain.
But it was easily the most massive. No structure as large as
it has ever been built south of the Sahara by indigenous people. On a
continent that has always been hobbled by disease, the lack of good ports
and navigable rivers, and a scarcity of domesticable plants and animals,
it is the closest thing to a Chichen Itza, ancient Rome or Great Wall that
sub-Saharan Africa has.
When the Shona abandoned the site, sometime in the 15th
century, they left behind no written records. So, great mystery surrounded
the site from the beginning of its exposure to the outside world. Nobody
knows why the Shona built such a great structure at this particular
location. The area has poor soils and can support large-scale agriculture
only through great effort, yet Great Zimbabwe had a population of 18,000
people at its height – a huge number by historical sub-Saharan African
standards.
Debate over why the city came to be centers on religion and
gold. Some claim, given the sacred connotations of its name, that Great
Zimbabwe was a religious center, inspired by the worship of Mwari, the
creator and sustainer of all things. For whatever reasons, very clear to
the Shona if not to their successors, Great Zimbabwe’s site made perfect
sense despite its drawbacks.
Others say the Shona discovered a huge deposit of gold and
constructed Great Zimbabwe as a combination mine, smelter, treasury,
fortress and temple.
 Another theory, advanced recently by a South African
astronomer, has it that Great Zimbabwe was Africa’s version of Stonehenge,
a giant observatory aligned with the stars to help in determining dates
for worship and agriculture. The same scientist claims that a nearby
tower, part of the overall complex, was constructed specifically to
observe a supernova around 1300 A.D. As bold as his assertion seems,
modern astronomers say there are indications of a supernova appearing in
Southern hemisphere skies around that time. The flaring star was not
observable by any literate cultures, so it will be hard to ever know if
the sophisticated Shona were also adept astronomers.
Whatever its builders’ motivations, Great Zimbabwe became
southern Africa’s greatest trading city during its heyday. Archaeologists
have found foreign objects from as far away as China, giving support to
the idea that the site was a great trading center that was known to Arab
and Chinese merchants.
Like its distant Mayan counterparts, no one theory
definitively explains why Great Zimbabwe declined just before the era of
European exploration. Probably a combination of events became too much for
the city to handle: The gold played out; the ecology simply couldn’t
sustain the population; merchants began bypassing the city for newer and
more convenient trading sites; enemies began raiding and sapping the
city’s wealth; the old religion began losing its hold over the people.
Great Zimbabwe was given World Heritage Site status in 1986.
*Zimbabwe is variously interpreted as
“place of the king” or “sacred house.”
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