The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (23 page)

There is even a debate about whether Dholo Dholo, Khami and Nanatali were part of the Great Zimbabwe empire. Subsequent aerial surveys have revealed some 15,000 primitive stone-walled
zimbabwes
running down South Africa as far as Kwazulu-Natal and it has been suggested that these owe their genesis to the spread of craftsmen cultures from the Sotho lands of the south-west among which gold-rich Mapungubwe may be numbered.

I sometimes wonder whether the fuss Randall-MacIver made of those sixteenth-century scraps of china – a storm surely in a broken tea cup – is not to do with the fact that his next dig, the big dig at Great Zimbabwe, is a failure. He finds gold and copper wire, bronze bangles, and glazed copper – but nothing new. These finds, he admits, are not ‘of the quality of some which, it is rumoured, have rewarded the search of certain gold-seekers in past days'. What he really means is that treasure hunters beat him to it and he is right. Randall-MacIver returns to his university and within the year his explosive theory, pivoting on the Nanking shards, is in print. It is summarised in five short paragraphs which sets the debate alight for the next century and will oblige the Rhodes Trustees to have it all re-checked two decades in the future:

Seven sites have been investigated, and from not one of them has any object been obtained by myself or by others before me which could be shown to be more ancient than the fourteenth or fifteenth century
AD
.

Not a single inscription has been found in the country.

The imported articles, of which the date is well known in the country of their origin, are contemporary with the Rhodesian buildings in which they are found, and that these buildings are mediaeval or post mediaeval.

That the character of the dwellings contained within the stone ruins and forming an integral part of them is unmistakably African.

That the arts and manufactures exemplified by objects found within these dwellings are typically African, except when the objects are imports of well-known mediaeval or post mediaeval date.

No room for doubt here, so can we now let our enquiry rest? Many did. The Shona school essentially bolted the door and threw away the key.

Thirty years down the road, however, a test is being invented – the Carbon-14 dating method – which will revolutionise archaeology and show David Randall-MacIver's guesses to have been at least a thousand years out.

Also emerging at this time were tales of intrigue and skulduggery, confirming that Randall-MacIver really had missed the boat. The following story is particularly relevant because the ancient artefact it features was authenticated by Randall-MacIver's scientific supervisor, Professor Flinders Petrie.

I came across this story by extraordinary chance. A good friend of ours learned that I had been working in Rhodes' library at Groote Schuur on original documents of the Shona occupation. She told me that John Rudd, the grandson of the Rudd whose name is now attached to the concession which opened the door to Ophir, ran a farm two hours from Cape Town and let rooms in the old farmhouse. We drove up the following weekend to an idyllic old Cape Dutch mansion set in the golden emptiness of the Great Karoo, the vast neo-desert that fills much of the northern Cape Province. Behind the mansion itself is a tower labelled ‘Think Tank'. It was once the house's water tower, today it is John Rudd's library and it is where I was shown, and hastily read, Hans Sauer's
Ex Africa
.

But first, let me remind you of Randall-MacIver's rules of evidence: ‘There is only one means by which the antiquity of the Rhodesian remains can be gauged. This is by comparing them with those for which the dating is already independently established.' I assume Sir William Flinders Petrie taught him this.

John Rudd had drawn my attention to a chapter in Sauer's book headed ‘The New Conquistadors'. It was the graphic inside story of what had gone on behind the scenes in Rhodesia's frontier days.

Dr Hans Sauer's family was famous in South Africa at the start of the twentieth century and Sauer Street in Johannesburg is still one of its main thoroughfares. J.W. Sauer was Secretary for Native Affairs in Rhodes' Cape administration and his brother Hans was a doctor trained by Sir Joseph Lister at the Edinburgh Medical School. He became a close confidant of Rhodes and eventually a land agent for him.

Hans caught the gold fever of the time and was one of the first to spot the incredibly rich potential of the reefs on what became known as ‘the Rand' around Johannesburg. With John Rudd's grandfather, Sauer bought up the land over these reefs and thus secured for Rhodes an even more massive fortune. Sauer got 15 per cent of the return from the diggings and was soon a very rich man in his own right. When Rhodes went in search of what was thought to be an eldorado of similar potential – Ophir – Hans Sauer trekked through Matabele country to see what he could find.

He was among the first of the treasure hunters to visit the Dholo Dholo ruin and his party immediately made extraordinary finds. These included two cannon, one Portuguese and the other a British naval gun. The pieces now guard the front door to Groote Schuur and I was able to repay something of my debt to the curator there by informing her of how and by whom they were found.

Hans Sauer's companion, Bradley, was examining Dholo Dholo's daga platforms. Sauer wrote: ‘. . . when he stooped down and picked up an alluvial gold nugget weighing about an ounce. Searching further we all began to find small alluvial gold nuggets. We got our boys to flush the surface with buckets of water, and after washing away the dust and debris we collected about a hundred pounds worth of gold in two hours. The bulk of it was alluvial, but there were a few bits of ancient gold chains. I sent Rhodes most of the gold we had collected in the fort.'

Sauer was understandably secretive about his gold finds but it is what comes next that casts a revealing light on the true nature of the treasure-hunting of the time and how much gold and prized artefacts were removed clandestinely. Or more to the point, how little was left for archaeologists like Randall-MacIver to discover.

Returning to Bulawayo, now a frontier town of gold prospectors, Sauer was approached by two Americans – ‘brothers-in-law, of the Western-cowboy type. One of the pair who would not take no for an answer, ultimately proposed to me that if I would tell him where we found the gold, he and his friend would go and explore the locality and would hand over to us one half of any gold or treasure they found.' Cutting this salutary story short, all Sauer ever saw from the deal was a copper axe, but:

The next time I saw Rhodes he told me the following story. When in London the two Americans called upon him at his hotel rather late in the evening. They entered carrying a heavy brown leather bag between them. For some reason or other they seemed anxious not to be recognised by people outside the hotel.

They had the appearance of conspirators with their overcoat collars turned up and their sombreros drawn over their faces. Having extracted a promise from Rhodes that he would not claim what they were about to show him they opened the bag which contained nearly £1,000 worth of alluvial gold, ornaments, beads, chains, bracelets and rings. All this treasure they had found in the ruins of the Insiza district, the bulk coming from the Dholo Dholo temple. They did not, however, tell Rhodes that one half of the treasure belonged to me!

It was from this same
zimbabwe
that Rhodes' licensed treasure hunters, Neal and Johnson, would later take another 700 oz of raw gold, plus gold beads, bangles and other items. As a very rough guide, the Dholo Dholo story indicates that only a fraction of the artefacts removed from the Rhodesian
zimbabwes
was declared or subsequently saw the light of day. Much of the worked gold was almost certainly melted down for ease of shipment and to disguise its origin.

From these same floors Hans Sauer retrieved ‘an earthenware bead of a certain colour and shape which I recognised as Egyptian, having seen many similar ones in the museum in Cairo'. This so intrigued him he took it to London:

I showed it to Flinders Petrie, at that time attached to University College [of London] in Gower Street, who at once declared that the bead was of the XII Egyptian dynasty. On my showing signs of disbelief, he took me into a room where I saw a large number of slanting desks, with numerous strings of Egyptian beads stretched over every one of them.

The Professor then asked me to look at the end of the hole which pierced the bead, and examining this carefully, I noticed a small chip. I pointed this out to him, and he asked me to compare the beads on one of the desks which he designated. I found that all the beads on this desk had the chip at the edge of the hole and all resembled mine in size, colour and shape.

Professor Petrie then told me that the chip on my bead was present only in the beads of the XII Egyptian dynasty. The bead had probably been brought into Rhodesia thousands of years ago by Egyptian traders.

Let us assume for the moment that Hans Sauer is not inventing all this. The methodology fits all the archaeological criteria for a proper dating. Flinders Petrie is the top man in his field. His basis of comparison is a university collection of dated artefacts with a distinctive feature. Petrie's dating is not a throwaway remark. He had taken time to examine Sauer's bead and he takes Sauer to his comparative collection and obliges him to witness a singularity in this style of bead – a distinctive chip – that allows a positive identification.

What of Dr Sauer's motivation? He was an educated man from an important political family. As a medical practitioner his veracity and personal reputation were particularly important to him. He was a rich, well-known collector of African artefacts who never attempted to hide what he found on his trips to several
zimbabwes
; in fact, the ‘Conquistadors' chapter in his book is devoted to describing such finds. His book enjoyed a wide international readership.

It is frankly inconceivable that Dr Sauer would have invented so detailed a story. He had absolutely nothing to gain and much to lose, not least his and Flinders Petrie's reputations; indeed, Petrie could have sued if the story was false. There are no rational grounds for disbelieving him. Reason demands, therefore, our acceptance of the fact that an identifiable artefact infinitely older than David Randall-MacIver's Nanking porcelain was found at this most affluent of
zimbabwes
. This would make it the oldest identifiable alien article ever found at any
zimbabwe
. There are also those beads from Mapungubwe which now enjoy a modern classification as the work of ancient Egyptians. If Sauer's bead was indeed Pharaoan Egyptian this story may have come full circle. We could be back in the time of Solomon and Sheba. At very least we are back to a time when the trade goods of the caravans of the old Moors included beads made well before the birth of Christ.

David Randall-MacIver would not, of course, have subscribed to this, although I must confess to wondering whether he would have changed his mind had he known the story and Professor Flinders Petrie's role in it. I am assuming he did not know because he would surely not have chosen to excavate at Dholo Dholo – indeed, base a dating of the Zimbabwe culture from artefacts found there – if he had known how extensively the treasure hunters had done the place over, Dr Sauer's party in particular. All in all, Randall-MacIver's monograph gives the impression of being a rushed job based, as he admits, on sites largely stripped of the materials he really needed. For the Shona school to regard it as their main plank of evidence in support of a stand-alone Karanga origin is, in my opinion, unsafe.

Randall-MacIver's work essentially adds nothing new to our enquiry because, while he affirms emphatically that the lost city is ‘typically African', he says nothing about the origins of these Africans and their ancestral heritage. With hindsight I would even question that ‘typically African' label. Virtually every corner of Africa has been explored since Randall-MacIver's time and nothing resembling my lost city (that is not probably part of the Zimbabwe culture) has been found. Great Zimbabwe is not typical of anything. It is unique.

But David Randall-MacIver did at least leave us with one new place to look. His work in Inyanga is, I think, the best and certainly the most revelatory. He observes, you will recall, that the Inyanga forts became less defensive in structure the further south of the Zambesi you go: ‘It looks as if the enemy against whom these people were defending themselves was in the north, not in the east or south, and the distribution of their buildings suggests the probability that they themselves first settled in the north, and later extended their range. . . . It was therefore, a Negro or Negroid race of Africans, coming I do not know from what quarter, but possibly north of the Zambesi, who made these buildings.'

I have no problem with that; in fact it puts us right back on track.

F
ar from resolving the origin debate as the Rhodes Trustees had hoped, David Randall-MacIver's dramatic conclusions provoked a decade of acrimonious debate. Battle lines were drawn, many of which are still in place today. Admittedly, Randall-MacIver had rubbed salt into long-open wounds by promoting his theory of a medieval lost city with almost evangelical arrogance.

‘Many no doubt will bewail that a romance has been destroyed,' he lectured an audience in Bulawayo. ‘But surely it is a prosaic mind that sees no romance in the partial opening of a new chapter in the history of vanished cultures. A corner is lifted on that veil which has shrouded the forgotten but not irrecoverable past of the African Negro. Were I a Rhodesian I should feel that in studying the contemporary natives in order to unravel the story of the ruins, I had a task as romantic as any student could desire. I should feel that in studying the ruins in order thereby to gain a knowledge of the modern races, I had an interest that the politicians should support and that the scholar must envy.'