The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (24 page)

This, in a country which had just bloodily suppressed the local Negroes, was either outrageously naïve or outrageously provocative. I suspect the latter.

Public meetings were called by Richard Nicklin Hall and his supporters to condemn David Randall-MacIver as an upstart whippersnapper, and a number of European academics supported this view simply on the limited time Randall-MacIver had spent on his excavations. At the same time Hall began a massive tome of rebuttal entitled
Prehistoric Rhodesia
.

Most damningly, Hall was also able to call into question Randall-MacIver's scientific process, showing it to be self-serving and careless in key areas. Hall claimed straight away, quoting his excellent field records, that Randall-MacIver's most important archaeological stratifications of a trench, for which he claimed an unbroken progression from the present to the most ancient past, was not a pristine site. Hall (as Garlake confirmed with a new dig in 1958) had already removed several feet of deposits from the top of it. Hall in fact enjoyed the support of almost the entire South African historical establishment and a number of senior European academics. At least three other learned treatises all proposing a different authorship for the Zimbabwe culture to Randall-MacIver's were in preparation at this time.

What is most intriguing, however, is that the smoke and fire of this dispute seems to have disguised the fact that none of David Randall-MacIver's findings, or the conclusions of Richard Hall, added anything very revealing to the real origin debate. By that I mean the earliest beginnings of a stone-building phenomenon that has no precedent anywhere in south-central Africa was (and frankly, is still) a mystery to contemporary south-central Africans.

The Romantic and the Shona schools of thought had got stuck trying to date the grand
zimbabwes
– the jewels of what was, by the time they were all up, a highly developed Zimbabwe culture funded by a sophisticated gold industry. Hall had settled for his Phoenicians in league with King Solomon, although he had not a shred of hard evidence to support this idea of a large Semite occupation. Randall-MacIver believed the oldest remains in the country ‘appear to be those of the northern district between Inyanga and the Zambesi' and on the strength of another piece of stoneware found near Umtali, affirms that the ‘site may be considered to belong to the fifteenth century'.

Great Zimbabwe, he insists, is later (early sixteenth century) and the
earliest possible date
(his emphasis) is two centuries before this. His evidence is that Sofala, on the east coast, was at this time a flourishing port inhabited by a colony of Arabs who traded with the interior for gold: ‘As Zimbabwe, being the great distribution centre, must have owed its very existence to the trade with the coast first opened up by the Arabs of Magadoxo, the
earliest possible date
for
any
settlement there [Zimbabwe] is the eleventh century
AD
.'

This method of dating the genesis of the very first stone structures is dubious. Arab settlements on the coast – even the earliest ones like that of Magadoxo – would only have become ‘settlements' once trade with the hinterland had become reliable and sustainable. It takes hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years for settlements to grow into stone cities devoted to trade. So an eleventh-century Magadoxo or a ‘flourishing' port at Sofala in the fifteenth century actually dates the
start
of the trade that created and sustained them to a much earlier period.

We are anyway not primarily concerned with the Arabs, Negroes and Swahilis who serviced the Zimbabwe/Magadoxo/Sofala trade between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. I am now looking for the traders or tribes (or both) who first found gold and other valuable trade goods in the Shona hinterland and who built the very first stone enclosures for their cattle, or as protection for their camps and caravans. These are the original founders of the Zimbabwe culture. Romantic guesses about a Phoenician occupation certainly do not take us back as far as we need to go and Randall-MacIver's ruminations based on imported ceramics from a time when Great Zimbabwe was already a mighty monument are of even less help.

Even though they did not realise it (or admit to it), Hall and Randall-MacIver actually had a belief in common which should have caused them to recognise that the gold trade and the building of the grand
zimbabwes
had different evolutionary histories. They both believed the best buildings were built after invasions, albeit different invasions. In other words the construction of many of the best buildings had not been as a result of ‘natural gradual evolution' but the other way around.

This could not have been the way it was with the gold trade. Nobody really disputes that it started before the arrival of the Bantu, with bushmen trading alluvial gold. It then went through major technological change from this alluvial gold-collecting industry based on barter, to deep-reef mining in long runs of deep shafts. There was also an associated gold-processing industry manufacturing gold bars and cast ingots, jewellery and art objects like the Mapungubwe rhino.

But neither Randall-MacIver nor Hall believed that the Zimbabwe culture's better buildings were the product of a similar slow evolution of style and craftsmanship. Hall visualised an invasion by Phoenicians who enslaved the natives to put up the grand
zimbabwes
. The society then became decadent and the quality of building declined. Randall-MacIver believed in an invasion across the Zambesi by Bantu from the north-east. Their best buildings – strong hill forts with fortified cellars – were the first to go up, ‘protected behind one of the vastest series of entrenchment lines to be found anywhere in the world'. Later Inyanga buildings were inferior as the culture grew more secure.

Essentially, whether you believe either of them or not, Hall and Randall-MacIver are both saying that invaders
imported
the necessary skills. That for me is perhaps the most important thing the pair of them have to say; indeed, Hall may well have identified the genesis of the gold trade, Randall-MacIver the stone-builders. I am probably the first to suggest that both Richard Nicklin Hall and David Randall-MacIver, in this sense, did sterling work. All that has been remembered of their relationship, though, is the row, and it just went on and on. Even so it would be another twenty years before the Rhodes Trustees recognised that Randall-MacIver had not put the ghosts of the lost city to rest and that they needed to try again.

In 1929 they appointed Gertrude Caton-Thompson, another Oxbridge archaeologist who had also learned her trade under Flinders Petrie. Again a member of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, she dug more thoroughly than any of her predecessors, on nine ruin sites. I have no wish to denigrate Ms Caton-Thompson's work by giving it short shrift here; indeed, I am advised that it was an exemplary piece of early twentieth-century archaeology. But sadly she has little of a revelatory nature to add to our tale as she and David Randall-MacIver were to be contradicted in a decade or so on the crucial issue of dates by the new techniques of Carbon-14 dating.

Caton-Thompson dug an interesting trench under the conical tower, proving it was solid. This enigmatic tower evidently attracted her and she allowed a comparison with a minaret at Zanzibar, thought to be ancient, which also had a double chevron pattern built into its walls. Otherwise she largely supported Randall-MacIver's datings and his theories of how the people who did the work at Great Zimbabwe were housed. Like him she also avoided speculation on enigmas such as the stone birds. Indeed, she avoided speculation on any of the enigmas, which, as a result, left the issue of authorship somewhat more of a puzzle than it had been before.

Her final report included this apparently definitive comment on the key issue of authorship of the Zimbabwe culture and its buildings: ‘If by indigenous we mean an origin born of the country on which they stand, then the ruins are in my opinion, indigenous in the full sense of the term.' The Shona school claimed this with glee, reading it as proof positive that the Zimbabwe culture was entirely of their making.

Take a close look at her phraseology, however, and you find that it might not mean that. Is Gertrude Caton-Thompson in fact covertly questioning an ‘indigenous' Bantu origin? Personally I am convinced that she chose to be ambivalent. ‘Born of the country on which they stand', is an odd phrase by any definition, but is obviously carefully chosen. Caton-Thompson was well aware of the history of the region and of the long-term influence of aliens like ‘ancient Moors' who by medieval times could have been permanently resident, not to say integrated. Born of the country on which they stand, in fact.

Moreover, Caton-Thompson uses this peculiar phrase to answer the key question she has been sent in to resolve when she could very easily have made a simple, unequivocal answer such as: these monuments are the spontaneous, unassisted work of the Karanga cattle-herders who lived here. I think there is significance in her avoiding this plain answer if only because I can see no other rationale for her conditional answer. Was she really trying to suggest: we have no idea of the composition or the antecedents of the elite who created the Zimbabwe culture but whoever they were, they, not invading aliens, built these extraordinary buildings. Given that the rest of her report so closely reflected David Randall-MacIver's, was she in fact carefully choosing her own words to echo his evasive answer to this point: ‘As to which particular tribe of Negroes erected the buildings I make no suggestion'? In the light of all this ambivalence I find it very surprising that Gertrude Caton-Thompson and her meticulous, encyclopaedic report, at least so far as academic opinion was concerned, closed the case.

Hereafter, the monuments were known as the ‘Zimbabwe ruins', which is how they were referred to throughout my time in Rhodesia. Rather than an exotic antique connecting at least two cultures and linking Great Zimbabwe to ancient golden ages, it was henceforth simply the neglected evidence of a decayed black kingdom. And it is hard to convey how quickly public interest worldwide fell away in the wake of the Caton-Thompson report.

The concrete arc of the Mazoe Dam which the colonialists built over a river I now know to be the conduit for a vast treasure in gold was then at least as big a tourist attraction as these native ruins and certainly better publicised. No school party from Churchill High School, where I was a founder pupil, ever bussed down to Fort Victoria to see the largest stone temple-city south of the Valley of the Kings. So far as I know, no black school parties went there either. This is the real tragedy of the lost city. Not a day has passed since I have been involved with this project without some intelligent person admitting that they have never heard of the place. Perhaps one in a thousand, and this includes people with some knowledge of Africa, have even an inkling that Great Zimbabwe is the largest stone monument south of the Pyramids or that there are several thousand
zimbabwes
. An extraordinary international cultural attraction that Zimbabwe can patently ill-afford to lose has vanished almost as effectively as Atlantis.

But how do you lose the Incas or the Aztecs? Time has shown, I believe, that these early archaeologists, blinkered by scientific disciplines which have been relaxed a great deal since their time, failed to recognise that there are two seminal issues to be addressed here, not just the dates of the grand
zimbabwes
. To define the Zimbabwe culture we also need to know: (1) The origins and make-up of the original Bantu settlers; and (2) The elements that evolved into the Zimbabwe culture. These questions address the most intransigent of the riddles: how and from where did the natives acquire the know-how, the design skills, the decorative patterns, the architectural mathematics, measuring and levelling instruments and the business acumen to pay for the movement of tens of millions of tonnes of well-shaped tiles of granite? Moreover, if any one of these was alien in origin then the prevailing theory of authorship has to be rewritten and Great Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe culture has to be accorded a very much more exotic history than it has been credited with for the last half-century.

On the information we have at the moment there is actually no justification for rejecting the idea that these were King Solomon's mines, and even the most sceptical of the archaeologists has never questioned that Great Zimbabwe was a temple of sorts. They have also largely sidestepped the question: a temple to whom? That said, I am not intending to lose our way in the Romantic mists of Carl Mauch's erotic theories. The pioneer archaeologists, especially Ms Caton-Thompson, have at least given us an idea of where to look for the founders of the Zimbabwe culture.

Mauch's idea that the actual Queen of Sheba built a temple at Great Zimbabwe can, I think, now safely be set aside. If Sheba's biblical trip to Africa is, however, apocryphal like so many other Bible stories, it is not yet safe to dismiss the possibility that the first itinerant traders here could have worshipped Sabaean gods and, when the gold trade was at its most lucrative, directed the building of a temple. They at least would have known how. The pivotal question now is not whether there was alien influence, but how much and how early did it come into play. Admittedly this has to be speculation, but there is no way forward (or more importantly, backward) if you deny, as the Shona school largely continues to do, the impact of material alien influence. The dramatic waning of interest by the international scientific community (and the tourist trade) which has caused Great Zimbabwe to remain all but ‘lost' for the last century is in my opinion a direct result of this door being wrongly closed.

After Gertrude Caton-Thompson appeared to swing it shut, the lost city could only attract the attentions of poorly funded local enthusiasts either directly or peripherally connected to a body called the Rhodesian Historical Monuments Commission. Its brief was about the preservation and – where damage was hazardous – also the restoration of the
zimbabwes
. Few of these zealous enthusiasts were academically trained; indeed, one of the most active, K.S. Robinson, who would become Inspector of Monuments the year I arrived, was self-taught. Largely unsung and perhaps with the exception of some of the ‘restoration', they all did an excellent job. Dr Roger Summers, who after training in the archaeology school of the University of London was Secretary, later Chairman, of the Historical Monuments Commission from 1950 to 1967 and from his post at the National Museum, Bulawayo, gave energetic leadership to this disparate crew. And in the end their work was distinctive and unique because of a sensational American invention – a technique for dating carbon based on its residual radioactivity. More of that in a moment.