Here is what Selous actually said about the Karanga and the Zimbabwe culture:
Let us suppose, then, that two or perhaps three thousand years ago a commercial people penetrated from Southern Arabia to Mashonaland. They were acquainted with the requirements of the civilised nations of Asia at that period and understood the value of gold. This metal they discovered amongst the hills and the streams of Mashonaland.
In time these Arabian merchants gained a footing in the land and taught the black aborigines to mine for them. Their principal station was at Zimbabwi, where they built with the forced labour of the aborigines, a temple for the worship of Baal and a strongly built and well-situated fortress.
But I take it that, like the Arabs in Central Africa at the present day, these ancient Arabians brought few or no women with them, but took a very handsome allowance of wives from amongst the aboriginal blacks.
For a long period intercourse was kept up with Arabia, and during this period the gold seekers spread over the whole of south-eastern Africa from the Zambesi to the Limpopo, everywhere mixing with the people and teaching them their own rude arts of wall-building and gold-mining.
In course of time we will suppose that events happened in Arabia which put an end to all the intercourse with the distant colony in Mashonaland, and as time went on, as the alien race were still in small numbers compared with the aboriginal blacks, and as they had none of their own women with them, they gradually became completely fused and nationally lost amongst the aborigines … at any rate I am absolutely convinced that the blood of the ancient builders of Zimbabwe still runs (in a very diluted form, if you like) in the veins of the Bantu races, and more especially so among the Barotosi of the Upper Zambesi, who are, there is little doubt, a branch of the Barotsi tribe who were destroyed by the Matibili in Mashonaland, though the separation took place long prior to this event.
I make this suggestion after much thought, a study of the relics unearthed at Zimbabwe, and a knowledge of the natives of South-Eastern Africa gained during many years of travel.
Selous is actually the star witness for the school of alien influence – very ancient influence – not as Garlake implies, the other way around! Or am I doing Garlake an injustice? Did he secretly believe – he certainly never admits to it – that the Karanga were a mixed race descended in part from the ancient Moors?
Then another bizarre thought crossed my mind. With so much evidence to suggest that there had been alien influence, why was Garlake trying to hold a line he was frankly too intelligent to have believed in so absolutely? Were other forces at work? I have no particular axe to grind with Peter Garlake because as we will see in a moment he did have other reasons for being parsimonious with the truth. Nor am I that qualified to question his presentation of what is undoubtedly the most powerful case ever put for a spontaneous Karanga authorship of Great Zimbabwe. Garlake had by then, however, attracted stern criticism from a number of academics who were suitably qualified.
‘In order to escape from the conclusive Carbon-14 evidence,’ says Professor Gayre of Edinburgh, ‘those among the later archaeologists who have constituted themselves the exponents of the pro-Bantu school have been forced to ludicrous shifts to explain the evidence away.’ He turns his attention on the two pieces of wood supporting the drain. The Carbon-14 dates are, you will recall, AD 615 and AD 727 with a margin of about 100 years. ‘We are therefore justified in taking the average date as between AD 615 and AD 727 which gives us AD 671 as the approximate date for the erections of which they were a part… . The timber was taken from that part of Zimbabwe where the quality of the stone and craftsmanship is of the best… . We are, because of this, forced to conclude that the seventh century AD is about the central point in time when the most advanced and skilled builders were at work. Basing his estimates on W.T. Libby [the American who did the Carbon-14 tests], Professor R.A. Dart gives terminal dates of AD 377 and AD 941.’
Professor Gayre accuses Garlake of a ‘complete misrepresentation of the evidence to fit a Bantu-origin theory’, and reminds Garlake of graves at a zimbabwe near the Zambesi river which Garlake himself had admitted are ‘not African’, yet have been positively dated from AD 680 to AD 800–900. These human remains were buried with, or wearing, fine pottery, gold and ivory ornaments. Gayle fulminates:
Here we have a whole jumble of unproven, and in some cases disproved, assumptions, all designed to maintain the myth of Bantu origins. There is no evidence that the Bantu had settled in large numbers in Rhodesia at this time … any stray Negroids can be explained by the possibility of scattered and small settlements having been established from the Congo to the coast in the Zambesi valley. But such Negroids were not the occupants of the land, which at this time was in the hands of the Cappoid Bushmen and Hottentots. Therefore the erection of Zimbabwe, as established by Carbon-14 dating, is prior to the large-scale arrival of the Negroid-Bantu in Rhodesia.
Peter Garlake, surprisingly, survived this hot debate. No one seems to have noticed his manipulation of Selous’s testimony. His boss, the long-serving Dr Roger Summers, while remaining a card-carrying member of the Shona school, had admittedly started to question some enigmatic features of the building techniques at Great Zimbabwe, but these were never voiced loudly enough to prevent Garlake’s thesis becoming the contemporary theory of the Zimbabwe culture that the archaeologists and the Shona most liked.
Here then is a summary of his view of the Karanga Zimbabwe culture:
EARLY IRON AGE
A period when the Karanga ancestors lived in huts in the rocks and raised cattle and grain. In the west there was a separate culture called the Leopard Rock people. The Zimbabwe culture may have been an offshoot of it.
TWELFTH TO THIRTEENTH CENTURY AD
Pottery shows a ‘single abrupt change’. Early walls of poor quality are built, also improved solid-daga walled huts. A Karanga elite begins to emerge. The early wall on the hill may have initially been for defence, later for show/status. Religion, bringing cohesion, develops.
FOURTEENTH TO FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Great Zimbabwe mostly built. The Leopard Rock people flourish on the gold trade. Entrepot towns grow on the east coast. Valley settlements expand, work gold, copper, bronze, and engage in spinning and weaving. Eastern ceramics are imported as are glass beads. Great outer wall built. Extensive trade ensues with communities like the Ingombe Ilede in the north-west and on the Zambesi; ‘Swahili’ middlemen run this trade. The period sees the growth of provincial centres with populations of between 1,000 and 2,500 adults. Trained (Bantu) masons travel to the provincial sites and undertake the building.
EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Building at Great Zimbabwe climaxes with the construction of the temple, the tower, platforms and monoliths. The Western Enclosure acquires special sanctity, evidenced by soapstone artistry.
MID-FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The social structure is a rich elite ruling country peasants. The Zimbabwe culture starts to lose control of the provinces and its population uses up too many resources. The Ingombe Ilede prosper through direct access to the Zambesi river. Shortage of salt obliges Karanga King Mutota to move north where the Mwene Mutapa empire is founded. The Mazoe river, a tributary of the Zambesi, may still have been controlled by Mutota. Mwene Mutapa gains control of trade, particularly gold, and overuns the Ingombe Ilede.
SIXTEENTH, SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
Mwene Mutapa kingdom is short-lived and by the end of the century is gone. Great Zimbabwe is now the provincial residence of Mweni Mutapa’s wives. The southern Rozwi kingdom arises from breakaway southern provinces, ruling in the south from their own stone courts. It continues to flourish until the eighteenth century, trading by then with the Portuguese.
NINETEENTH CENTURY
In the 1830s these southern provinces are invaded by a series of Ngoni armies from the south and the Rodzwi suffer defeat and destruction so complete that the only material evidence of their former greatness is their rui
ned stone buildings.
My view of all this is that had Peter Garlake simply allowed the possibility that the grand zimbabwes had enjoyed foreign input I would have had no argument with an otherwise scholarly thesis. Similarly, I would expect him at least to allow for the idea that ‘old Moors’ had sought gold in these parts, possibly for thousands of years.
But Garlake will have none of that and, in spite of hundreds of contradictory alien artefacts, prefers to keep his theory of a home-grown Karanga craft-culture pristine. In my view that reduces the thesis to a politically inspired myth. It also places it outside the real origin debate because it continues to sidestep the seminal question – how did these cattle-herders learn how to raise the largest stone city south of the Pyramids?
Although I have never met Peter Garlake I have great sympathy for his predicament and believe I understand the pressures he was under because at the time I, too, was caught up in the strange political currents produced by the end of colonialism in central Africa. Ian Smith’s party, the Rhodesia Front, introduced ever more draconian laws to ensure that published or broadcast ‘information’ toed the party line or, more specifically, did nothing to support black nationalism. In time Smith’s parliament would pass the Law and Maintenance Amendment Act which proscribed dissemination of any information likely to cause ‘alarm and/or despondency’, under threat of two-year prison sentences. As Controller of Rhodesia Television in Bulawayo fronting my own evening news show this put me right in the front line. We were once banned from broadcasting the Maize Marketing Board’s crop forecast because it was judged bad enough to cause alarm and/or despondency. In the end it made my job untenable and within two years I would decide it was safer to leave the country.
The evidence that Peter Garlake got caught up in this farce is there, if you know where to look for it. There is, as a start, his enigmatic book dedication: ‘For John and all who share his beliefs and therefore his present circumstances.’ We are not told who John is but I think it is safe to assume that he is somewhat persecuted. Then the foreword, which starts out innocently enough: ‘From July 1964 to December 1970, I was the Senior Inspector of Monuments of the Historical Monuments Commission of Southern Rhodesia’, and he thanks all those he worked with. He signs the foreword with the simple initials ‘P.S.G.’ but then one realises that he is writing not from Rhodesia but from the Institute of African Studies, University of Ife, Ile Ife, Ife, Nigeria. In a kind of exile, I suspect.
Peter Garlake’s suggestion that the Zimbabwe culture was black through and through would certainly have alarmed the last Rhodesian white government; indeed, the thesis had already provoked angry outbursts in their parliament. In 1969, G.H. Hartley, the Rhodesian Front member for Fort Victoria, complained to the legislative assembly:
There is one trend running through the whole of the presentation of the image of the ruins which is apparently being directed to promoting the notion that … these buildings were originally erected by the indigenous people of Rhodesia. This may be a very popular notion for adherents to the Zimbabwe African People’s Union and Zimbabwe African National Union and the Organisation of African Unity but I wish to make the suggestion that this notion is nothing but sheer conjecture.
I feel that it is quite wrong that this trend should be allowed to continue to develop … this trend among people, particularly among members of the staff of the National Historical Monuments Commission to portray the ruins in one light only, should be corrected… .
The Minister of Internal Affairs as recorded in Hansard agrees: ‘I have intimated to those concerned … that it would be more correct that, as yet, no irrefutable evidence is available as to the origins of the ruins … it would be wrong to allow particularly visitors to this country to be influenced unduly by one train of thought. There is a great deal of evidence, which I personally have studied a good deal myself, to indicate that what I have said is correct: there is no irrefutable evidence of the origins of the ruins at the present time. I have made this point to the persons likely to be concerned.’
A year later Parliament heard that: ‘The [Honourable Member for Victoria’s] remarks … on Zimbabwe have certainly borne fruit. There was something of a storm in a teacup over them but the results have been satisfactory and a new guide book is being prepared on behalf of the Historical Monuments Commission in which all theories relating to Zimbabwe will be presented absolutely impartially.’ This was confirmed in a government White Paper of c. 1970 which formally ordered that no official publication could state unequivocally that Great Zimbabwe had been created by Africans.
I can only deduce that Garlake became caught up in this whirlpool but it is to a degree supported by a cryptic comment that is the last line in his book. He records that shortly after these exchanges in parliament, the director of the Rhodesian Ancient Monuments Commission gave a press interview in which he avowed: ‘The Commission holds no view of Zimbabwe’s origins – that is for the museum to argue.’ ‘A particularly ironic conclusion,’ Garlake observes, ‘for the Rhodesian museums no longer employ an archaeologist.’
Thankfully by then Ian Smith’s government and white supremacy in Africa was on its last legs. Robert Mugabe successfully led his troops in a war of independence under a ‘Zimbabwe’ banner, but his victory, understandably, also ended serious research into alternative authorship theories. Subsequently, a whole pack of sleeping dogs have been left to lie.
More than a century after the first Royal Geographical Society expedition sought to resolve the origins of the lost city, none of the seminal riddles have been answered and the Zimbabwe culture has instead been parked in a politically correct cul-de-sac.
The official record is now one of listless guesses. The geometrical conical tower, for example, is relegated to a ‘symbolic Karanga grain bin’. The mysterious soapstone columns ‘may well have served as reminders or tallies of the individual dead’. The unique Great Zimbabwe birds are dismissed as ‘stiff, crude diagrams; conventional statements of a generalised avian theme’. I have even seen a suggestion that the very early pottery figurines were toys.
Is it any wonder that this lost marvel of the southern hemisphere becomes less well known with every passing day? Rather more dangerous is that politically correct but observably questionable interpretations of events have now become the official record taught to children. You will recall my quoting from a recent (1998) primer by Harvard University’s Dean, Mark Bessire, which borrows Garlake’s title, Great Zimbabwe. It concluded with the following timeline:
c. AD 1000, Ancestors of the Shona arrive on the Zimbabwe plateau.
c. 1250–1300, Mapungubwe becomes important trading centre.
c. 1270–90, First major building projects at Great Zimbabwe.
c. 1300–1450, Great Zimbabwe reaches the height of its power.
Can you spot what has happened here? This children’s primer should say that the first major building could have started in AD 671 which is the mean Carbon-14 date of that piece of ubande wood under one of Great Zimbabwe’s most massive walls. However, it has been corrected by almost exactly the 500 years Peter Garlake said was the lifespan of the tree even though nobody knows its real age. Time has made gospel of a dubious guess.
So from here on I propose to abandon the argument – it is going to run a while yet – as to exactly when the grand zimbabwes were constructed and concentrate instead on the ancestors of the people who built the first stone buildings and on the people who started formal trade in the precious metal that paid for them. Who were the first blacks to enter these lands from across the Zambesi, what skills did they bring with them, and were they gold traders? Or were there other people with them with special skills and did they deal their gold through others? So far as I am aware no one has backtracked to any of these original settlers with a view to establishing what knowledge they could have brought with them.
Then one morning at Groote Schuur, Alta Kriel, the ever-helpful curator, put on her white gloves and pulled down from the shelves
of Rhodes’ study a pristine first edition of a book called The Sacred Cities of Ethiopia – by Theodore Bent! This is such a rare book (the author was dead of malaria by the time it went into circulation) and of so little general interest I could not escape the feeling that the last hands to turn its pages might have been those of Rhodes himself. Indeed, the only reference I had ever even seen to the book was in the Royal Geographical Society’s obituary to Bent:
In the winter of 1892 Mr and Mrs Bent set out for Africa, this time to investigate the extensive ruins in the north of Abyssinia. This journey threw much new light on the early connections between the people of Abyssinia and those of southwest Arabia, whence both the writing and the language of the old Abyssinians must have been derived.
It is described in Mr Bent’s volume, The Sacred City of the Ethiopians. In the winter of 1893–4, Southern Arabia, the mother country of both the peoples whose antiquities had been examined in the two preceding years, was visited and a considerable addition made to our knowledge of the little-known Hadramut country.
This was revisited during the succeeding winter, while that of 1895–6 was devoted to exploration of the African coast of the Red Sea. The last fatal journey is said to have resulted in the discovery of fresh archaeological matter in Sokotra and Southern Arabia, in the latter of which some new ground was broken.
The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba Page 20
