The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (32 page)

There would also have been time for the traders to acquire gold in Africa during the refit periods. Says Professor Gayre: ‘The location of Ophir as a place in India becomes almost a certainty, but only as the entrepot – the trading port – where African gold was traded for the other items that appear on Solomon's exotic shopping list, like peacocks and spices. . . . Since India was always an importer of gold not an exporter, it means that these passages had to include a gold-rich country. The only one of consequence along these sailing routes was Mozambique with its hinterland of Rhodesia.'

Gayre's sailing plan has always struck me as an ingenious but a somewhat expedient explanation of those enigmatic three-year voyages by Solomon's fleet, although it has to be said that other scholars have noted how secretive the Phoenicians were. ‘They gave no thought to proclaiming discoveries,' comments Constance Irwin in her book on the Phoenicians (W.H. Allen, 1964), ‘being less concerned with their public image than private profits. Theirs was in fact a conspiracy of silence. Although they disseminated culture along with the more profitable items of trade, they never shared information regarding trade routes, markets or winds and currents. The routes were their roads to riches, and as such were shielded from prying potential competitors.'

So the Greek monk, Cosmas's, account that Theodore Bent unearthed, remains for me the only description of early African trading expeditions with sufficient detail to be plausible. But again, if we read a little deeper between its lines there are a number of indications that both Ophir the entrepot, and Havilah, the source of the gold, were in Africa, not India. Dr Hromik's excellent descriptions of the age and nature of the Indian gold industry have also convinced me that Cosmas's translation describes African trading expeditions. If, as he insists, the Indian gold industry has a 6,000-year history of supplying the Indian ruling classes and its affluent religions with a precious metal which demonstrated status, it is hardly likely that this elite would have allowed what amounted to Arab pirates to land and bribe the peasants into trading ingots of the national gold supply for scraps of meat, iron and salt. Nor indeed do Indian peasants fit Cosmas's description of wild natives gullible enough to trade in this way.

But Dr Hromik's observations do make it more likely that ancient trading forays did go south from Ethiopia and find gold, and this eldorado would not have remained a secret forever. In any event a southern exodus of settler-migrants was inevitable, as people sought peace and religious freedom away from the interminable conflicts in the states around the horn of Africa.

Each new piece of information entering the origin debate is now beginning to render untenable the Shona school's seminal belief that the Zimbabwe culture was built without alien influence.

Regrettably Cosmas's translation, while otherwise very explicit, does not provide a location for the place where ingots of gold could be traded for tender meat and iron tools. It seems likely, however, that he would not have bothered to record the expeditions if they were no more than trading outings to other parts of Ethiopia. But can we at least give the southern ethnic gold producers a name and could it be the aforementioned ‘Zeng' (sometimes referred to as Zang or Zindj)? Were they a black diaspora?

There is unfortunately a ‘Dark Age' shadow across south-central Africa at the start of the Christian millennium, a veil as impenetrable as that over Britain after the departure of the Romans. Even the Shona school, which claims to be able to define a continuity of African evolution through kingdoms, with names like Karanga B, Mwene Mutapa, and Rodzvi (of which more in a moment), admits a 200-year gap in the record.

Professor A.H. Keane, Vice-President of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, researched the ancient records of the enigmatic Zeng and quotes from several accounts of them controlling the African east coast from the Somal horn to dominions as far south as Sofala: ‘From them the seaboard itself took the name Zanguebar [Zanzibar], the Balid-ez-Zeng or “Land of the Zeng”.' The
Periplus of the Red Sea
, a seaman's guide to these waters,
c.
AD
110, warns mariners that Zeng lands extend down the east coast as far as a land called Azania. When in 1964 Julius Nyerere made Tanganyika and Zanzibar island independent of colonial control he called the new state Tanzania.

Tanzania, or if we go back to its earlier name Azania, bordered several countries which must have been involved in any southern migration: Zambia, Congo, Burundi and Rwanda are to the west; Mozambique and Malawi to the south; Uganda and Kenya to the north. Kenya shares a boundary with Ethiopia and Tanzania. Zambia, to the north of Mashonaland, is Tanzania's neighbour.

Any southern diaspora from Arabia/Ethiopia would most likely have called at Zanzibar island. When I came to Africa in 1947, docking at the port of Mombasa, the adjoining island of Zanzibar was still ruled by Arabs, and their ocean-going dhows, which appeared to have sailed straight out of history, still plied these harbours. We followed the traditional route south, first inland to Tanganyika and then down the still-unpaved Great North Road to northern Rhodesia and finally southern Rhodesia, settling in Mashonaland. It is patently a much older road than ever I imagined, and almost certainly, as we shall see, the route of the Bantu migration to Mashonaland. I retraced part of the journey for this book two years ago. There are still dhows coming down the coast to Zanzibar and, a further indication of how slow change can be in Africa, the Great North Road is in worse shape now than it was half a century ago.

Professor Keane's research revealed that Claudius Ptolemy, writing in the second century ad, supports the Greek
Periplus
and describes dark-skinned people as far south as Mozambique. His account has been used to support the claim that there were Bantu in the Great Zimbabwe region much earlier than some would put them there. Others have suggested that the Zeng were a mix of Negroes and Arabians whose dominion was confined to coastal lands. These people came to be called Swahilis and the Shona school has decided that these are the people who traded and transported the gold of the hinterland. Writing in the tenth century the Arab traveller, Masoudi, gives the most detailed description of the Zeng living near Sofala. They were ruled by an elected king called Waqlimi, the name meaning ‘the Son of the Supreme Lord' and they worshipped a God by the name of Moklandjalou.

And did this black diaspora keep on the move? A Zimbabwe ethnologist, James Mullan, points out that
Waqlimi
is phonetically surprisingly close to the Sesotho term
Morwa wa ka Limi
. The Sotho, who today live in Botswana, Basutoland and elsewhere, call their god
mulimi
. The coastal blacks encountered by later explorers called themselves by a name which has been phonetically recorded as ‘Wak Waks'. It is at least probable that the people Masoudi describes as worshipping Waqlimi were Waks; their god-king being
Wak-limi
. Travelling further south to the Zulu nation, the word for god is
Mkulunkulu
, which is not a million miles removed from the Zeng god
Moklandjalou
, bearing in mind that Masoudi reported everything phonetically.

Are these the first faint footprints of a Nilotic diaspora spreading right down Africa, accompanied, or certainly serviced, by Arab traders? The archaeologists can help somewhat. Dr Garlake says that in about the ninth or tenth century (at about the time Masoudi was describing a Zeng presence) new immigrants entered southwestern Matabeleland to create what is known as the Leopard Rock culture: ‘Their pottery shows such a marked typological break with early Iron Age wares that, in this instance, there can be little doubt that these people were immigrants who had no direct cultural relationships with the previous inhabitants . . . they were a pastoral people for whom cattle, for the first time in south-central Africa, played important cultural and economic roles.' Garlake goes on to acknowledge the ‘rather risky' supposition that these people came from Botswana; that is, they were the early Sotho Bantu. They are possibly the ancestors of the people who built Mapungubwe, the gold-rich, artistic settlement south of the Limpopo which pre-dates Great Zimbabwe. They may indeed have founded the dynasty which went on to build Great Zimbabwe. Garlake prefers the idea that two groups developed ‘in the same direction at much the same time'. The word ‘Zang' may also simply have been a generic term (like ‘Kaffir' was a century ago) for central African black tribes about whom little was known.

The pottery record tends to support the idea of a two-pronged Bantu migration that already had trading contacts with foreigners. One style of ceramics prevails in Iron Age sites along the whole of the Zambian watershed. Another type is found in Malawi and Zimbabwe – the route of the Great North Road. The people who made the Malawi/Zimbabwe pots could not have come down through Katanga and across the inhabited Zambian watershed without their ceramics being influenced by the Zambian style. This pottery evidence dates from very old communities. Ceramic sherds of the Malawi/Zimbabwe style at Great Zimbabwe were associated with Robinson's burnt posts that carbon-dated to
AD
320 ± 150. Moreover, every one of these early Iron Age sites in the south contains evidence of trade with foreigners, mainly glass beads and pierced cowrie shells.

It is, however, from a Stone Age cave in the Zambian watershed that we have, so far as I am aware, the earliest apparent evidence of contact between the ancient black inhabitants of central Africa and ancient Moors. My discovery of it was a piece of extraordinary luck. Lodged as a bookmark in an expensive volume on the life of Rhodes, in a Cape Town bookshop, I found a battered paper on the northern Rhodesian Stone Age by Dr J. Desmond Clark, who in the 1950s worked at the Rhodes–Livingstone Museum. Two diagrams caught my eye.

One is from a cave in the Mpika district north of the Zambesi and is a typical bushman painting of the type found all over southern Africa. (These artists have been named the Nachikufu culture and the earth floors of their caves have revealed many kinds of Stone Age implements.) Another cave from the same site displayed, in faded red pigment, a very strange drawing. The pigmentation appears to be the same as the bushman painting and implements for grinding pigments were among the Stone Age implements found. ‘There is,' observes Dr Desmond Clark, ‘a sudden change to entirely stylised drawing – circles, ladders, strokes, capital Us and Is, crescents, tectiform designs and combinations of lines, dots and circles.' The second drawing is alien and – he was told by expert Orientalists he consulted – represented: ‘a debased form of some kind of Arabic writing, drawn by illiterate or semi-literate persons, in imitation of some ornamental piece of decoration or writing. As yet it is impossible to date this art style but it has been tentatively suggested that [it] may be a debased version of the Cufic word for Allah. . . . In addition to the paintings there are engravings in the same style. They are known from one rock-shelter, but more usually are found on flat, exposed rock surfaces near the banks of streams or rivers. . . . A significant fact is that the distribution of the schematic art style appears to coincide with the known areas of Arab penetration of the sub-continent. Similar paintings occur in Tanganyika superimposed on the naturalistic art group.'

Subsequent excavations by Desmond Clark revealed that these Stone Age deposits were overlaid by a Bantu occupation layer. Moreover, the Stone Age deposits here contained artefacts resembling those from the Tanganyika plateau and stone tools found in late Stone Age middens on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Clark's work provides an important missing link in the genesis of alien influence in south-central Africa, and if there were old Moors trading, possibly semi-resident on the Zambesi in the Stone Age, then this is much earlier than most experts had previously conceded. It also has a dramatic bearing on the race of those traders, as we will discover shortly.

The significant elements of our ‘Time Line' of alien influence now read like this:

950 bc
Solomon makes an alliance with the Phoenician Hiram of Tyre and they share the wealth of foreign expeditions, returning with distinctly African goods, particularly gold.

611 bc
Neku II circumnavigates Africa.

470 bc
Phoenicians sail to the Azores and Madeira. Himilco, to the British Isles.

110 bc
Eudoxos of Cysicus is sent by Cleopatra to India. Blown off course returning home he lands on the east coast of Africa where he finds a wrecked Phoenician ship from Gades mounting a distinctive horse-head prow.

24 bc
Aelius Gallus, Roman Prefect of Egypt, invades Yemen with an army of 10,000 Roman infantry seeking to take over the Sabaean colonial trade. Illness among the troops forces a retreat.

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The Greek
Periplus
records that the Sabaean King Kharabit controls East Africa to ‘an indefinite extent'.

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(or earlier) Ancient Moors leave their trade markers (or Stone Age artists copy Arab markers) north of the Zambesi in south-central Africa.

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Ptolemy's map of the world records accurate details of East Africa, including the correct positions of Mashonaland and Mozambique, which are shown south of ‘The Mountains of the Moon'.

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The Bantu migrate into Mashonaland.

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Masoudi reports that the Muslims of Oman sailed on the Zang Sea as far south as Madagascar and ‘Sufalah' where they meet the ‘Wak Wak'.

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Idris enlarges on these Wak Wak of Sufalah, describing them as horrible aboriginals whose speech resembles whistling. Hottentots (‘Chinese' Hottentots) were later reported as using the name Quae Quae. The San are today mostly known by the generic ‘Khoi Khoi'.