The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (33 page)

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Yakut records in his geographia that Sofala is the furthest south city in the country of ‘Zang'.

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Marco Polo reports (by hearsay, but from Arab sources) that goods are brought by ships to the African side of the Red Sea, then shipped by camel on a thirty-day overland journey to the Nile, then on to Cairo and Alexandria. He also describes the Negroid features of the Zeng. He is cognisant of the powerful current (the Agulhas) between Madagascar and Mozambique, warning that in places it runs so fast that sailing vessels would make no headway even with favourable winds. He must have been told this by Moorish mariners with whom he voyaged to India.

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Captain Bartolomeu Dias de Novaes finds the African coast north of Walvis Bay, then rounds the Cape and sails north to Bushman's River. Vasco da Gama follows him, also rounding the Cape. He encounters large groups of San and has to shoot one to get safely back to his ship.

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Portuguese explorers visit Sofala and, from old Moors, hear of a ‘wonderful rich mine'. They decide this is King Solomon's mines.

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The start of Portuguese colonialism with the annexation of Sofala leading, by 1609, to many descriptions of the hinterland. Trade is in the hands of ancient Moors; there are 300 mosques in Sofala. A detailed report by the reliable Dominican missionary, Joao dos Santos, who lived and worked among the Karanga, produces the first detailed testimony of an ancient trade: ‘The people of these lands, and especially some old Moors who have preserved a tradition of their ancestors, say these houses were in olden times the trading depots of the Queen of Saba and that from these depots they used to bring to her much gold, following the rivers of Cuama [Zambesi] down to the Ethiopian coast up to the Red Sea. They entered the Red Sea and sailed to the shores which touch Egypt and there they used to off load all this gold which was brought by land to the Queen of Sheba.'

1800s

Adventurous western treasure seekers like the American, Adam Renders, find spectacular ruins in the hinterland. They certainly trade and intermarry with the natives.

The first eyewitness account of Great Zimbabwe is that of Carl Mauch who ‘finds' the lost city. Land-grabbers, some like Cecil Rhodes, whose appetites aspire to whole continents, turn their eyes north.

Mashonaland, the homeland of a race called the Karanga, part of a black diaspora from the north,
c.
700–800, becomes Rhodesia where,
c.
1947, I become an alien settler as part of a post-Second World War white diaspora.

An acrimonious debate between the Romantic school and the Shona school fuelled by the conclusions of (alien) archaeologists rages for the first quarter of the twentieth century, neither side giving ground till this day.

The earliest scientifically authenticated artefact is an Egyptian bead found by Dr Hans Sauer among gold ingots.

Some time earlier the Zimbabwe chief of the time, Mugabe, is photographed by the wife of the leader of the Royal Geographical Society's expedition to Great Zimbabwe, Mrs Bent, wearing what her husband identifies as a necklace of Venetian origin.

Returning us to the present, I have become convinced that this necklace is one of the great undetected clues to several unresolved enigmas in the origin debate. It is certainly the most important photograph Mrs Bent ever took, even though the Bents were interested in the facial features of these Shona, not their alien accoutrements.

The picture casts grave doubts on the critical comments made of Chief Mugabe. He was disparaged as a minor rural chief and maligned for knowing nothing about his ancestors and/or the authors and craftsmen who raised the stone monoliths and in whose shadow he raised cattle from a makeshift village of pole-and-daga huts. Indeed, he was accused of fuelling Romantic arguments by recounting legends of a ‘white' origin. I would suggest that Chief Mugabe is exactly what he appears to be, an authoritative-looking African elder statesman, obviously familiar with traders from the outside world; indeed, he is rather magnificently adorned with their trade goods, as are his indunas.

How much of all the evidence, I wonder, have we failed to take at its obvious ‘face value'? Chief Mugabe's photograph is not the only instance where answers to some of Great Zimbabwe's intractable riddles may have been staring everyone in the face for the last century. The researcher who spent more time than any other puzzling over the origins of the grand
zimbabwes
, Dr Roger Summers, was, throughout the latter part of his term as Director of the Historical Monuments Commission, troubled by similar thoughts about certain singular features of the walls of Great Zimbabwe. Could it be, he pondered, that the evidence of alien influence was literally written in these stones?

R
oger Summers was not immediately rewarded with an answer. Only after gazing hard at the huge walls of Great Zimbabwe for a good many years did he realise that something was inexplicably ‘wrong' with them: ‘The Zimbabwe ruins are very complex and contain a great variety of details which are
very hard to explain
by a complete acceptance of MacIver's hypothesis,' was his opening gambit in a dangerous game.

Summers was trained at the University of London's Institute of Archaeology. He worked on the ancient ruins of the Zimbabwe culture from his post at the National Museum, Bulawayo, from 1947 until 1970, and served as Chairman of the Rhodesian Historical Monuments Commission for five years. His qualifications are impeccable. In his book,
Ancient Ruins and Vanished Civilisations of Southern Africa
(T.V. Bulpin, Cape Town, 1971), he lays down his ‘rules of logic' for archaeological research: (1) All available factual evidence must be taken into account; (2) Evidence must be weighed critically, but personal prejudice must be avoided; (3) Simple explanations and proximate causes are always preferable to complicated or remote ones.

Professor Summers is no Romantic. In the main his beliefs fall within the framework of those of the Shona school and Summers is at one with ‘most recent commentators, [who] after careful re-examination of the evidence have accepted the view that Great Zimbabwe is a local phenomenon built by native peoples'.

So what is so ‘
very hard to explain
' about the walls? What did others miss? Summers' carefully chosen words were expressed at a time (1971) when the authorship of the ruins was a very hot topic politically. From personal experience of how dangerous any utterances about the origin of Great Zimbabwe could be, I am surprised to find Summers stepping into this ring at all. But step he did, and I am thankful for his courage, because the ‘wrongness' writ large in these walls offers the best indication yet of those responsible for the lost city's distinctive architecture. Summers believed he had found what amounted to a ‘third force', a craftsman clan within Zimbabwe society which was either alien or alien-taught.

Down the years several attempts have been made to date-categorise the different wall types. Today there are four agreed ‘stages', varying from irregular blocks piled in chaotic style with no evidence of courses, to equal-sized blocks with the blocks coursed in horizontal layers that form a very regular pattern. The first are believed to date back to the Iron Age at about the start of the Christian millennium and the last, of which Great Zimbabwe is the best example, to medieval times.

The start of this ‘best-built' stage, especially in the case of the Great Outer Wall of the Elliptical Building, exhibit, as Summers puts it, ‘new and vastly improved techniques'.

He identifies six distinct improved techniques in the Great Wall:

1. Foundation trench with levelled floor, implying some form of levelling instrument.

2. Laying of first course as an even pavement over the whole of the foundation trench.

3. Careful trimming of foundation stones and very strict selection of all stones for thickness.

4. Levelling of all courses (see 1. above).

5. Thick walls with inward-sloped faces, the slope (batter) being even, implying the use of a plumb line.

6. Construction of wall patterns.

‘At least two and probably three [of the improved techniques],' Summers adds, ‘
never appear again in any ancient ruin
.' I have emphasised this statement because I believe it is as close as we can ever get to material evidence, writ in stone, of alien architectural influence in the Zimbabwe culture. Indeed, I would personally go a step further and propose that this, the moment when stone enclosures became works of art, might also be the moment when the Karanga moved from being a hard-working aboriginal society to becoming a culture.

What brought this about? ‘One may postulate the appearance of a genius among local architects, but it may involve less of a strain on credibility if one suggests the arrival of someone who was conversant with building techniques elsewhere, since the level and the plumb line have been known as building instruments for many centuries.' Summers thinks this knowledgeable mason arrived and made his contribution some time between 1450 and 1600, the most favoured dates for the best period of Zimbabwe building. But what if this ‘best period' started several centuries earlier? We still have that contentious carbon dating of
AD
670 for the
ubande
drain supports under one of Great Zimbabwe's most massive walls.

It emerges that Summers is plagued by similar thoughts. An earlier date for the building of the temple (Elliptical Building) would, he admits, ‘open all sorts of exciting possibilities such as MacIver could not have foreseen,' and ‘it is not entirely stretching possibility to suggest that some Portuguese stonemason may have reached Zimbabwe and entered the service of the great chief living there. . . . Equally probable, although rather less plausible, is that some travelling Arab craftsman may have been responsible.' Given the fact that we have now traced alien influence, most likely by ancient Moors, all the way back to the central African Stone Age we are entitled at least to consider that Arab craftsmen, or Arab-taught craftsmen, were influential in the raising of
zimbabwes
long before their work became so distinctive. Professor Summers was able to see evidence of it in the massive walls of Great Zimbabwe, before there were Bantu here perhaps?

Politically, Summers is now treading on very thin ice and, I presume in recognition of this, he follows the example of respected peers and leaves the country. In 1971 we find him not in Bulawayo but at the South African Museum, working on his book with a Cape Town publisher. It was a wise move, however, because Summers was actually harbouring a theory much more destructive to the Shona idyll of a home-grown Zimbabwe culture than anything he had expressed thus far. He had become convinced that the alien mason was neither Portuguese nor Arab, but a member of a subculture of artistic black craftsmen. On the face of it this should have put him right back in favour, but he had also decided that this subculture was not Shona and might possibly be alien. Remember, we are here reviewing the findings of a quiet, studious academic whose work reflects his great love of Africa and its people. What could he possibly have found that was causing him to wander so far off the safe, beaten track?

The Summers paradox, if we may call it that, starts with his observations that the mighty walls depend on level foundations, implying some form of levelling instrument. The walls, moreover, have inward-facing slopes, the slope (batter) being even, implying the use of a plumb line. But – and this is the paradox – Summers also observed that the use of other instruments vital to the sophisticated mason's trade, particularly the square, were nowhere in evidence. Virtually nothing is square at Great Zimbabwe and there is literally no squaring of walls and corridors as are found in classic Arab and Portuguese architecture. The opposite is in fact true. Zimbabwe is a place of sensuous curves, even the doorways. It is, I think, the true appeal of the place. The architecture is, if you like, whimsical.

Summers thought this too and set out to try and prove it by a close study of the rationale of the architecture of the elliptical temple. All the doorways through its Great Outer Wall are rounded and particular care has been taken to make them very solid. They have even withstood destruction during collapses of other walls which, being all of granite, are immensely heavy. The main entrance to the northern section of the Great Wall has particularly complex and unusual curves for which Summers could find no architectural reason. The minimum section of the entrance narrows to 50 cm, curving out to 2.35 metres on the outer face and 3.30 metres on the inside. As a design for a doorway, says Summers, it is ‘fantastic'. As a design for providing a way through a thick, high, heavy wall it has no practical or utilitarian purpose whatsoever.

Summers then considered the problems this shape made for the designer – ‘who was manifestly a very clever and practical man' – in particular the lintels, which would have been required to support another 6 feet of granite wall some 3 metres thick. Huge wooden lintels estimated at 600 kg would have had to be raised 3.5 metres above the floor because no stone lintels of this length were available. Extremely sophisticated masonry work was then designed for the wall above the doorway. The slope (battering) of the wall fades slowly and perfectly above the lintels, from 5° from the perpendicular to about 10° at the top. Leaving air spaces in the fill between the dressed faces also reduced the weighting on the wood beams. Perhaps I did feel a strange wind blowing through the walls all those years ago.

Doorways of this complexity create so many problems for the architect – a square one would have been infinitely easier and stronger. Summers presumes that the imperative was purely aesthetic. In other words – and important to other imperatives considered in a moment – it was conceived artistically and imposed on the architect. ‘Improvisation of this order can only be undertaken if normal method and underlying theory are understood, so they cannot be attributed to local people,' says Summers. ‘Hence the suggestion that the architects obtained a very sound training in the sophisticated and civilised arts of the Arab communities on the East Coast.'