The Ghosts of Great Zimbabwe: An imagined journey

Great Zimbabwe is an enigma. We know so little about central and southern Africa before 1500. Archaeologists have had to pore over scraps of old pots, glass beads, iron tools and carbon date old bits of wood. Some have searched for hints in rock paintings. Anthropologists have sought a window into a past that is more than 600 years old through wondering how modern day cultural practices have evolved from the Iron Age. Historians have sifted through oral stories, myths and legends for threads of the story of prehistoric Zimbabwe.

It has all been guess work because until Portuguese traders and missionaries arrived in the early 16th Century after Vasco de Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498, nobody wrote anything down. There does not seem to have been any form of written communication in pre-modern Africa south of the Sahara, except possibly cave paintings.

But there are tantalizing clues to how the people who resided in what was surely the city of Great Zimbabwe lived: to how they became wealthy and the city a centre of southern African trade. But these clues must be seen clearly and dispassionately, beyond the controversy that has surrounded the Ruins since they were introduced to the wider modern world in the Victorian era. Some of the old controversies have been calmed or widely dismissed, but new ones have grown.

This book sets out the record of a journey into imagining life at the Great Zimbabwe Monument at the height of its prestige and influence when it dominated central southern Africa in the Middle Ages.

174 pages