The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (22 page)

Elsewhere, in another confusing reference, he acknowledges that the Shona hinterland is ‘inexorably interwoven' with the foreign Arab settlements on the coast but warns ‘that there is no historical warrant for ascribing any high antiquity to any of these east coast colonies'. This is not true. Among others there are ‘historical warrants' to the fifth-century Pharaoh Sahu Ra (
c.
3000
BC
) and Menuhotep III (
c.
2500
BC
) sending ships to the Land of Punt which the consensus opinion locates either in Ethiopia or Somalia. The Turin museum has an Egyptian papyrus map thought to date from 1600
BC
showing a gold-mining district in Nubia. Neku II (
c.
611
BC
) is recorded as sending an expedition under the command of Phoenicians to circumnavigate Africa: Herodotus reports that it was successful and we assume it was because in 470
BC
Xerxes ordered it repeated. Randall-MacIver knows of these warrants but sets them aside as inadmissible evidence: ‘Unaided documentary evidence does not permit us to suppose that there was any oriental traffic even with Sofala, the gate of the old gold bearing regions of the interior.'

He would not, for example, have given any credence to the famous thirteenth-century journals of exploration by Marco Polo, which offer detailed descriptions of how the Arabs navigated the very difficult currents off Madagascar. To be believed, Randall-MacIver insists evidence has to be dug up and confirmed by physical comparison to some authenticated artefact: ‘The spade of some fortunate explorer may in the future, bring to light traces of settlements on the east coast just before and after the Mohammedan era, but we have no right to assume their existence until they are found.' He takes his own spade to the terraces and agrees that they are quite extraordinary. Streams had been tapped and directed into conduit ditches by small dams, allowing the water to be carried along the side of the hills. There are many such conduits and they often run for several miles. ‘The gradients are admirably calculated, with a skill which is not always equalled by modern engineers with their elaborate instruments.' Randall-MacIver then casually breaks his own house rule banning speculation based solely on comparative evidence by comparing it with a system he has seen in Algeria. Later researchers have observed that the Inyanga layout is all but identical to terraces in the Yemen built by Sabeans.

So did all this ‘skill which is not always equalled by modern engineers with their elaborate instruments' somehow spring unaided and spontaneously from the Shona earth? David Randall-MacIver continues to insist it did. If it did, what was it all for? Vastly more food could have been grown on the terraces than was needed to supply the local community. Cecil Rhodes probably supplied the answer to these questions with the thousands of tons of fruit his farms exported from Inyanga. Properly managed, the region can supply the nation with all the deciduous crops it needs. Certainly it did so in my day. Randall-MacIver is not supposed to offer opinions of this nature but faced with these magnificent decayed edifaces he cannot help it. He endorses the opinion of his respected guide: ‘There has been as much labour expended here as on the buildings of the Pyramids, or even more.'

Randall-MacIver's first important revelation therefore (although he never lists it as such) is that at the dawn of the Zimbabwe culture a large number of people were engaged in labour so hard that we normally reserve it for criminals. Another large force was employed in the equally tough work of gold mining, which also involved the movement of millions of tons of rock.

All these people would have needed food – lots of food – and there can surely be little doubt that much of that food came from the Inyanga breadbasket, which raises the awkward conundrum of what impelled the people to do such alien work? What was their motivation and what were the imperatives here? No one has ever really dared address this seminal enigma of the Zimbabwe culture. It has too many racial overtones.

The Shona people are cheerful, enthusiastic, obliging, hardworking and exceptionally artistic. They do live, however, in a part of the world where it is very hot for a good part of the year and you do not, without very potent imperatives, choose to shift slabs of granite for a living. Nor is it necessary. Crops grow easily and prolifically here. Even under post-UDI sanctions Rhodesia was self-sufficient in food. There is frankly little point in building stone houses either. The clay from which the people build their rondavels is readily available all over the country and a thatched roof provides a perfectly adequate dwelling which is cool in summer and warm in winter. The clay – called
daga
– can be puddled to a very fine finish and, mixed with cattle dung, forms a hard floor which can be polished.

So what impelled the ancient people of the Zimbabwe culture to break with both ethnic tradition and reason and start transporting and assembling the heaviest of stone for structures of which they had no need? A lot of Rhodesian whites of my peer group and much of the Romantic school assumed it was done under duress, hence the Inyanga
slave
pits. David Randall-MacIver refuses to accept, however, that the people of Inyanga were slaves and he avoids the issue of imperatives. I suspect we may never know the answer to this riddle. Surely so dramatic a shift of work and cultural behaviour is pretty powerful evidence of a country and a population dominated by a powerful elite. This elite has proven skills as water engineers, stone craftsmen, builders and deep gold miners and it runs an administration which is able somehow to oblige the population to engage in unnaturally hard and seemingly pointless labour. These skills are not naturally the attributes of cattle-dependent semi-nomads.

Randall-MacIver found no evidence of an enriched working class. In fact he reported just the opposite: ‘many of the implements and articles of daily use are identical with those found amongst the modern inhabitants of the country'; that is, of a poor rural peasantry. The peasants could have worked for food and favours as Dean Bessire has suggested, but again it is hard to see a large population of serfs shifting masses of rock across the centuries for no better reward than their daily bread and the occasional handout. Revolution is a more likely outcome.

If rewards are removed, it seems you are left with two other possibilities. Firstly, that there was a cultural imperative – the population built temples to their gods – and secondly, that the workforce was under duress, if not as slaves then as serfs; people eking out a subsistence existence from the land who were required to pay tribute to the lords of the manors, some of which could have been in the form of labour. This is the preferred Shona school solution to the labour riddle and one which could also go some way to explaining the fortified estates at Inyanga.

The Romantics have a not dissimilar explanation for the Inyanga castles. They say this is where the skilled alien elite first settled after crossing the Zambesi. They propose, with a good number of documentary references to back them, that Mount Darwin, a few miles closer to the Zambesi to the north of Inyanga, was known formerly as Mount Fura, a suggested corruption of Ophir. The only part of this that Randall-MacIver would have agreed with is that the Inyanga settlements are older than Great Zimbabwe and that their northern defensive orientation suggests that these first settlers saw the threat as coming from the north. Perhaps because there was more of their militant kind where they came from?

David Randall-MacIver leaves Inyanga for the bigger
zimbabwes
in the south, pausing briefly to inspect a collection of objects that has been found near the new capital of the eastern region, Umtali. This remarkable hoard comprises copper wire bangles, solid copper bangles, pieces of copper and iron wire, pottery figurines of animals, fragments of earthenware pottery and fragments of foreign stoneware with a sea-green glaze. At the very least it is a milestone to the passage of skilled metal workers, artists, traders and possibly, priests.

On an adjoining hill, where he is told there were many boulders ‘on which naturalistic emblems and rude markings had been scratched', more figurines come to light, all of soapstone. The figurines are intriguing for a number of reasons. They are effigies of short-legged people with large heads, which would suggest an origin more associated with the bushmen than the Bantu. They are of soapstone, the chosen material for the Great Zimbabwe birds and the incised stelae, a material seemingly used only at the lost city. They are mostly female and it has therefore been suggested that they are icons of mother-goddesses. (The Romantics see an obvious association with the mother-goddess of ancient Egypt, Hathor, who in the guise of a hawk had special responsibility for the welfare of foreign miners.) They have especially intrigued contemporary Romantics because the larger figurines appear to be wearing space helmets.

Admitting that the figurines are unique and the site is an ‘altar', Randall-MacIver nonetheless decides: ‘The style of the work is, of course, quite Africa.' This is about the time when I started to lose patience with him. No soapstone figures have been found anywhere in Africa other than at Great Zimbabwe, so where is this all-African precedent drawn from? He completely ignores the report of the boulders ‘on which naturalistic emblems and rude markings had been scratched', closing the subject as follows in his monograph: ‘Neither here [Great Zimbabwe] nor anywhere else has anything of the nature of an inscription been found.'

The Umtali emblems and markings must have meant something to the people who made them and, given the nature of the other artefacts from the site, it is likely that the marks were of religious significance. Randall-MacIver even acknowledges this when he judges the site to have been ‘an altar'.

It is my opinion that the figurines were among the most intriguing artefacts Randall-MacIver would see. Most experts since have agreed with his judgement that this was an altar of sorts; a number suggest that the figurines are pagan Madonnas or fertility charms. The most intriguing question they raise is whether the site was a ‘mission' outpost of the Great Zimbabwe sect, or the other way around, a shrine on the road to Great Zimbabwe built by a cult that came
down
the trade route from the north. Was Randall-MacIver the first British archaeologist to examine a rural shrine of the ancient Zimbabwe diaspora? If so, he did not recognise it as such. The Umtali figures were given to the Rhodes Estate who sent them to the British Museum.

Randall-MacIver's first excavation proper is conducted at the Dholo Dholo ruin, one of the grand
zimbabwes
which forms part of the great southern complex. It is a peculiar place to start because these ruins were a favourite of the treasure hunters. Randall-MacIver appears unaware that the clay floors here have actually been washed for gold and other artefacts. He decides that Dholo Dholo is another fortified town. He notes the superior quality of the fine, small, stonework comprising the walls, and the complex decorations on these walls – chessboard, cord, herringbone and particularly beautiful inlaid patterns using serpentine rock.

As the first true archaeologist here he is particularly interested in the floors, which he describes as interlocking platforms of strengthened cement apparently made of powdered gravel rather than clay. He drives a number of trenches through these floors and through an adjoining area which he labels a midden (rubbish heap). He is convinced that the daga platforms once supported huts very similar to those on the platform-roofs of the Inyanga pit-forts. In the midden dig he finds items which excite him most: two large fragments of Nanking china. At last he can date the Zimbabwe culture to the satisfaction of his scientific peers.

He also finds bangles of solid copper, smelted copper, coiled copper wire studded with beads, fragments of tin, the bowl of an iron spoon, fused glass, ivory and glazed beads both plain and coloured. The most enigmatic of these discoveries are Stone Age implements alongside a pair of iron handcuffs, an ornamental silver pin surmounted by a cross, a bangle of twisted gold and enamelled copper wire, fragments of bell-metal (an amalgam of tin and copper) and beads of ivory and shell. In other words, scraps of goods that could have been carried in the pockets of half the trading races of the world, not to mention bushmen (shell beads) and proto-Karanga (ivory beads).

David Randall-MacIver makes a cursory, dismissive examination of this treasure trove and finally concedes an alien presence here. The gold wire coiled in alternate strands with enamelled bronze is ‘perhaps the most beautiful thing discovered on the site . . . and it is difficult to suppose that the natives were conversant with the art of enamelling so that this is probably an article of oriental importation'. The glazed porcelain beads are identified as ‘Cambray beads'. They are listed in ancient chronicles as popular trade goods and were made at Negapatum in India. But it remains all just medieval trade stuffs. The good item – meat for the archaeologist – is the broken china, because it meets his crucial formula of archaeological probity: ‘There is only one means by which the antiquity of the Rhodesian remains may be gauged. This is by comparing them with those of other countries for which the dating is already independently established. The Nanking china is of a style known to be not earlier than the sixteenth century.'

But what is so significant about this? Accounts by contemporary explorers of his time such as the artist Thomas Baines, and Frederick Courtenay Selous, have long since suggested that the exquisite southern
zimbabwes
were major trading entrepots ruled by Rodzvi chiefs (the ill-fated Mombos) until about a century before the arrival of the first white explorers. There is also acceptable documentary evidence of this. Early photographs of Great Zimbabwe which Randall-MacIver must have seen show mature trees with lifespans of hundreds of years growing – indeed overgrowing – the conical tower.