Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe is a ruined stone city in the hills of south-eastern Zimbabwe, near the town of Masvingo. Built between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries by ancestors of the Shona people, it was the capital of a kingdom that grew rich on the gold trade with the Indian Ocean coast. Covering about seven square kilometres, it is the largest stone-built complex in precolonial southern Africa, and for nearly a century it was also the centre of a bitter argument about who had built it.

Farming communities had lived in the valley long before any stone was laid. Iron-working villagers of the Gokomere or Ziwa culture occupied it in the first millennium CE but built nothing in stone; their successors, the Gumanye, are thought to be ancestors of the Karanga, the Shona group credited with the city.

Stone construction began in the eleventh century and continued for more than three hundred years. The oldest part, the Hill Complex, sits on a rocky ridge and was occupied from the eleventh to the thirteenth century. Below it lies the Great Enclosure, used from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, whose walls extend for some 250 metres and rise up to 11 metres high. They are built of dry stone, laid without mortar. Inside stands a solid conical tower about 9 metres tall. The Valley Complex, with its scattered enclosures, was occupied from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century.

Older estimates put the population at its height at around 18,000 to 20,000, but a 2017 study using statistical modelling concluded that it probably never exceeded 10,000. Most people lived in houses of mud on wooden frames that have not survived. Eight birds carved from soapstone, set on pillars, were found at the site and have become national emblems.

Around 1300 Great Zimbabwe replaced Mapungubwe as the leading trading centre of the region. Its wealth came from controlling routes between the goldfields of the plateau and the Swahili ports of the coast, such as Sofala, through which gold and ivory reached the wider Indian Ocean world. Excavations have turned up Chinese celadon and blue-and-white porcelain of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Persian and Syrian wares, glass beads and Arab coins, probably arriving through networks linked to ports such as Kilwa Kisiwani.

Long-distance trade fell away from the early fifteenth century. Shona oral tradition links the city's decline to a shortage of salt; other explanations include exhausted soils and water problems. According to tradition, a prince named Nyatsimba Mutota led part of the population north and founded the Mutapa Empire, while to the west Khami became the capital of the kingdom of Butua. New trade routes along the Zambezi valley drew wealth away, and the site was abandoned in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

Portuguese writers on the coast heard of the stone buildings in the early sixteenth century. One, the captain of Sofala, recorded the name Symbaoe in 1531 and explained that it meant a royal court. In 1867 the hunter Adam Render came upon the ruins, and in 1871 Karl Mauch described them, rejecting the idea that local people could have built them and linking them instead to the Queen of Sheba. That legend took hold among white settlers. Theodore Bent excavated in 1891 with funding from Cecil Rhodes and argued for Arabian builders, and later diggers, including Richard Nicklin Hall and treasure-hunting companies, stripped and destroyed deposits.

Scientific work told a different story. David Randall-MacIver concluded in 1905 and 1906 that the builders were ancestors of the Shona, and Gertrude Caton-Thompson confirmed this in 1929. A consensus on African origins was reached by the 1950s and supported by radiocarbon dates. Even so, the white-minority government of Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s officially maintained that the city was not built by Black Africans, and archaeologists who disagreed faced censorship or left the country.

When the country became independent in 1980 it took its name from the site, and the soapstone bird appears on its flag and coat of arms. Restoration work after 1980 was itself criticised for causing damage and for sidelining local communities. UNESCO inscribed Great Zimbabwe National Monument on the World Heritage List in 1986, and it is managed by the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe.