The 'Great Zimbabwe Builders' Mystery

© Allan Street, 2008


During the mid 16th century, reports began to appear along the coastal ports and marketplaces, of a most wondrous palace built of nothing but stones, and located at Mozambique, in central southern Africa. One such report, written by Joao de Barros in his book, called Da Asia, and being written in the year 1552, holds a statement written by De Barros and recounting a story that spoke of “a square fortress, masonry within and without, built of stones of marvellous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them”. This report was later to become what was known as one of Portugal’s most complete chronicle of their conquests and as such stands as an authoritative source.

Although De Barros, himself, had not actually see the site which the story spoke about, he jumped to the automatic conclusion that this fortress must be one of the cities, built and maintained by Queen of Sheba, and better known as Axuma. However, scepticism arose, when a group of Portugese Chroniclers of the time decided that, because of the amount of gold traded in this region, that it was possibly the ancient city mentioned in the Bible and known as Ophir. It was from Ophir that the Queen of Sheba was said to have produced gold for the famous Temple of Solomon.

It seems that not only had these Chroniclers convinced themselves, but also, many of the population, as this belief stayed solid through the test of time and was believed well into the early 19th century, when this mysterious city was discovered by Europeans in 1871. It seems that Great Zimbabwe was discovered almost by accident, as it’s discoverer, Carl Mauch, found it while out seeking the fabled city of Ophir, where his travels took him deep into the heart of southern Zimbabwe.

During the month of August, Mauch’s luck seemed to change, when he came across another fellow German trader and got into a discussion where he learned from the trader that there were remains of an ancient city nearby, and describing them as ‘quite large ruins which could never have been built by blacks!” Following this discovery and searching for a way to find these ruins, Mauch met a local Karanga tribesman who took Mauch out to visit the site on the 5th of September.

When he got to the site, Mauch found it to be hidden amongst the surrounding barren granite bearing hills, and sitting among a tree covered savannah plain. The ruins themselves formed what was once a large stone city, with carefully crafted walls and using an architecture fond of curves and bends. The landscape around the ruins displayed a land scattered with stoned of all sizes, from large boulders to small handful sized stones. De Barros noted that none of the stones where fixed together with any form of mortar, indicating their early age of construction, and yet these walls towered into the surrounding sky, standing over 30 feet tall. The whole site of the ruins stretched for as far as the eye could see, and later measured to approximately 100 acres of city ruins. Intriguingly, not a single wall or building was built using a straight wall, every wall meandered and curved away.

After his investigations of the site, Mauch did not delve too deeply into the origins of the ruined city, instead preferring to stick with the conventional Portugeuse theories for the origins of the city, as shown in further reports made by him. In these reports mention such thoughts as his discovery of soapstone artefacts, namely an eagle, that the society who built this city must have been civilised, which was a nice way of saying must not have been blacks! Another report has Mauch taking a small piece of wood from the site that was reddish in colour, and also had an aroma to it as well. This lead Mauch to make an assumption that this wood must be Cedar, as is found in nearby Lebanon, and therefore must have been brought in by the Phoenecians who came to trade. Because of this assumption, Mauch went on to make another assumption that would have the site being one of the cities constructed by the Queen of Sheba.

Both of Mauch’s assumptions may well have been wrong, as in recent years we have discovered that the wood used at Great Zimbabwe, was not Cedar as Mauch thought, but instead, was Sandalwood. Sandalwood is a commonly found hardwood of the region and is a logical as well as now, proven, resource.

The work Mauch had done at the site and the theories he produced, took the interests of the owner of one of Africa’s then largest companies, being the British South Africa company, better known as BSA. The owner, a Mr Cecil Rhodes, owned much of the land that the site rests on, having owned it since the late 1800s and on into the 20th century.

Mr Rhodes, it seems, although agreeing with Mauch’s theories about the origins of the ruins of this city, still insisted on launching his very own private investigation into the origins of the site, and using his company, BSA, to fund his investigations, and also believing in the racial views of his counterpart Mauch, he brought in a team to help investigate the ancient site. Rhodes and his crew, also including an outside source, whom it turns out, only had minimal experience, and even that was based more in the antiquities of the region as opposed to its civilisations evolution history. It was also reported that the services of outside source may also have been chosen on the fact that Rhode’s choice of outside sources shared just as much of the racial sentiments as Rhodes did, and as such set to work on trying to further the theory that the ancient ruined city of Great Zimbabwe was built by white races and not black races!

Rhode’s outside source, known as a Mr Bent, uncovered many artefacts and ruins around the site that would seem to point more towards the creators of Great Zimbabwe as being indigenous, or black races, as opposed to the previously held belief that the site was built by white races. In fact, those artefacts that Mr Bent did uncover, where so similar in design and operation to the local tools used by the Karanga tribe, that the theory began to sway and become less solidly held as true. Yet it is said, that due to Mr Bent’s racial views of the origins of this site, that he completely overlooked this fact and continued to rally in support of the builders of Great Zimbabwe as still being a white race, even against the face of the evidence produced. In the end, Mr Bent, went on to state that “a prehistoric race built the ruins…. A northern race, coming down from Arabia….. closely akin to the Phoenician and Egyptian races….. and eventually developing into the more civilised races of the ancient world.”

After Rhodes and Bent had been to the site and done their tinkering about and made their various discoveries, control of the site was handed down to a local journalist, named Richard Nicklin Hall, and who also produced another famous work on the area in his book titled ‘The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia”. The BSA company passed down a mandate stating that Richard Nicklin Hall was to be tasked with the preservation of the site. They went on to name Richard as the official curator of the ancient site and given him instructions to ensure the site would not get damaged in any way!

What happened next, in this story, was to shock not only the BSA, whom funded him, but also the rest of the academic world then and since, who may have spent time working on the site. Even though he had been supplied with an official mandate that stated he was to be the curator and protector of the site, ensuring that other researchers or visitors to the site, would not destroy any of the complexes by removing or rearranging the stone ruins in any way, Bent went on to begin what he termed as a full scale archaeological investigation into the origins of the site.

Things went smoothly at the site for a short time as Hall sent back regular reports to the BSA company who funded him, that he was active in clearing the site of, in his terms, “the filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation” of the site at that time. However, even though, Hall was sending in these reports to say that things were fine, he was really putting his full scale archaeological investigation into place. During his time as curator of the Great Zimbabwe site, Mr Hall spent much of his time, searching the site thoroughly for any indications, that would prove his theory correct, that this site was constructed by white civilisations and not black races. In his so called, full scale archaeological investigation of the ancient city, Mr Hall ended up removing, in different sections, up to 10 feet of the standing walls and buildings throughout the site.

Shortly after Mr Hall had performed his full scale investigations of the site, a few reports came back, stating that his actions at the site were “reckless blundering …. Worse than anything I had ever seen”! As these reports began to come back to the BSA company, about the severely damaging actions of Mr Hall upon the Great Zimbabwe site, he was instantly investigated and as a result was fired from his position with them.

Seemingly acting out of regret and a genuine desire to make right the acts that had been done at the site, the BSA company went on to employ a very well known and well respected archaeologists of the time, a Mr David Randall MacIver. It was the involvement of MacIver on the Great Zimbabwe site that finally set a spark of hope free as far as the truth of the site coming to light. After investigating the site for himself, MacIver went on to surmise that the use of mud hut type dwellings inside of the stone walls of the site “are unquestionably African in every detail and belongs to a period which is fixed by foreign imports as, in general medieval.”

Due to the work of the newly appointed curator of the site, the experienced archaeologist, Mr David Randall MacIver, the foreground had been set for further professional archaeological investigations at the site of Great Zimbabwe. However, up until the modern era, in the decade between the 60s and 70s, the racial viewpoints of the origins of Great Zimbabwe, continued to hold strong, as the white African government ( the African Nationalist movement) made several efforts to suppress any further evidence of the site’s builders being indigenous dark skinned races.

These racial motivations stayed in place until the country, known today as Zimbabwe, and also being named after the site, finally reached a state of majority rule, that resulted in a fairer government free of the racial undertones, and appearing during the 1980’s.

To this day, however, the true origins of this great African city of the ancient past, are as yet, still unknown to modern history. There are a number of possible theories as to who might have built the city that now lay in ruins, however, none can produce any certifiable proof. And so, even to this day, the origins of the city of Great Zimbabwe, remain a mystery to us that may never be truly known!

Could Great Zimbabwe, have been one of the first cities ever constructed in our civilised human history? Could this city hold the keys to the starts of human population growth and movement, or is it simply an unknown remainder of the cities of either the Queen of Sheba, or the ancient Phoenician races.

Time will tell, but until then I leave it to you to decide:

“Who were the mysterious builders of this even more mysterious place?”


About The Author:
Allan Street is a professional writer and owner of the Shadow’s Articles Blog. He has written numerous published articles of his own, since the mid 90s, and for many others as well, helping new website owners and ezine, newsletter or opt in list creators, to develop quality, fresh and up to date content for their projects. You can search through a growing list of Allan’s latest articles, to be found at his new blog, Shadow’s Articles:
http://shadowsarticles.blogspot.com/