Great Zimbabwe National Monument

Zimbabwe National Monument*
UNESCO World Heritage Site
State Party	Zimbabwe
Type	Cultural
Criteria
Reference	364
Region**	Zimbabwe
Inscription history
Inscription	1986  (10th Session)
* Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. ** Region as classified by UNESCO.

The Great Zimbabwe, or "stone buildings", is the name given to hundreds of great stone ruins spread out over a 500 km² (200 square mile) area within the modern-day country of Zimbabwe, which itself is named after the ruins.

Name

The majority of the people of Zimbabwe speak a language called ChiVanhu or ChiShona, which consists of several dialects the major ones being ChiKaranga, ChiZezuru, ChiManyika and ChiNdau. The Shona people, in their language, call themselves Vanhu who speak a language called ChiVanhu. The term Shona is a SiNdebele word derived from "entshonalanga", which means "people of the West", named byMzilikazi as he invaded from Mozambique. The history behind the name, Zimbabwe, has not been established. However, the word is a ChiVanhu or ChiShona word with a clear meaning today among ChiVanhu or ChiShona speakers. As the analysis in this section will reveal, the word "Zimbabwe" is clearly a from the ChiKaranga dialect of Chivanhu or ChiShona. However, there are three schools of thought regarding the historial origin of the name, Zimbabwe.

Overview of Great Zimbabwe. The large walled construction is the Great Enclosure. Some remains of the valley complex can be seen in front of it.

In the first theory, the word "Zimbabwe" is a short form for "ziimba remabwe" or "ziimba rebwe", a Shona (dialect: ChiKaranga) term, which means "the great or big house built of stone boulders". In the ChiKaranga dialect of the Shona language, "imba" means "a house" or "a building" and "ziimba", or "zimba", mean "a huge/big building or house". The word "bwe" or "ibwe" (singular, plural being "mabwe") in the ChiKaranga dialect means "a stone boulder". Thus, a linguistic analysis of the word "Zimbabwe" clearly indicates that the origin of the word refers to the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe whose huge buildings were built of stone boulders. The ChiKaranga-speaking Shona people are found around Great Zimbabwe in the modern-day province of Masvingo and have been known to have inhabited the region since the building of this ancient city

A second theory is that Zimbabwe is a contracted form of "dzimba woye" which means "venerated houses" in the Zezuru dialect of the Shona language. This term is usually reserved for chiefs' houses or graves. It should also be noted that the ChiZezuru-speaking Shona people are found to the northeast of Great Zimbabwe, some 500 km away.

A third theory is that "Zimbabwe" comes from the modern ChiKaranga phrase, "dzimba dza mabwe", which means "houses of stones", referring to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.

The first theory could be said to have the advantage of a linguistic analysis that produces an outcome that ties in with the physical nature of the Ancient City of Great Zimbabwe and that is based on the language in use today among the people who are found in the surrounding area today.

The second theory of the origin of the name "Zimbabwe" brings in the concept of veneration of the ancient city which is known to be associated with Great Zimbabwe as a national monument. However, a linguistic analysis would seem not to be as sound as that of the first theory. For example, "dzimba woye" cannot, in both ChiKaranga and ChiZezuru, be sensibly contracted to become "Zimbabwe". "Dzimba" literally means "houses" and "woye" is merely an sound used in respectiful solicitation. Thus, the two words cannot lead to the name, "Zimbabwe". Furthermore, the chiKaranga word "bwe" does not exist in ChiZezuru and its meaning in ChiKaranga is equivalent to the ChiZezuru word "dombo". It should be noted that ChiZezuru and ChiKaranga are merely dialects of one language called Chivanhu or Shona and only a few words lie outside their intersection, e.g., "bwe" and "dombo". The lack of proximity of the Zezuru-speaking Shona people to the Great Zimbabwe seems to further weaken the second theory. Further to this, the veneration of Great Zimbabwe as a shrine or religious centre seems to have started sometime after its inhabitants deserted the ancient city for reasons historians have found difficult to determine with speculation associating it with overpopulation and disease. Hence, the attribute of "veneration" could not be said to be as permanent and all-time as the attribute of the city's buildings being built from "mabwe" or "huge stone boulders".

The ChiZezuru theory of "dzimba woye" could be said to be close in sound to a 16th-century Portuguese explorer's rendering in "Symbaoe". However, reliance on a linguistic analysis of the language that is closely associated in space and time to the original builders of Great Zimbabwe would appear more reasonable and sound than a reliance on a foreign rendering of an indigenous language. The Portuguese explorer figured out that the name was given to the buildings and that its meaning in the local language was "court", which could be considered to be close to the second Zezuru theory. However, the first theory does not exclude veneration, "court" or "chief's house", since in Shona culture "stone boulders" around Great Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Zimbabwe were/are associated with the chief's courts, veneration and religious shrines, for instance, there is today a "venerated" stone boulder "Dombo raMwari" (Stone of God). As noted earlier, "Dombo" is the ChiZezuru word for "bwe" or "ibwe" in ChiKaranga. There is also a place called "Chibwedziva" in Chiredzi, which also indicates a culture of venerating stone structures as well as water in natural dams or lakes.

Description

Built consistently throughout the period from the 11th century to the 15th century^[1], the ruins at Great Zimbabwe are some of the oldest and largest structures located in Southern Africa. At its peak, estimates are that the ruins of Great Zimbabwe had as many as 18,000 inhabitants. The ruins that survive are built entirely of stone. The ruins span 1,800 acres (7 km²) and cover a radius of 100 to 200 miles (160 to 320 km).

In 1531, Viçente Pegado, Captain of the Portuguese Garrison of Sofala, described Zimbabwe thus:

The conical tower inside the Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe

The ruins can be broken down into three distinct architectural groups. They are known as the Hill Complex, the Valley Complex and the famous Great Enclosure.The Hill complex was used for as a temple, the Valley complex was for the citizens, and the Great Enclosure was used for by the king. Over 300 structures have been found so far in the Great Enclosure. The type of stone structures found on the site give an indication of the status of the citizenry. Structures that were more elaborate were probably built for the kings and situated further away from the center of the city. It is thought that this was done in order to escape sleeping sickness.

What little evidence exists suggests that Great Zimbabwe also became a center for trading, with artifacts suggesting that the city formed part of a trade network extending as far as China. Chinese pottery shards, coins from Arabia, glass beads and other non-local items have been excavated at Zimbabwe.

Nobody knows for sure why the site was eventually abandoned. Perhaps it was due to drought, perhaps due to disease or it simply could be that the decline in the gold trade forced the people who inhabited Great Zimbabwe to look for greener pastures.

History of research

Exterior wall of the Great Enclosure. Picture taken by David Randall-MacIver in 1906.

Portuguese traders were the first Europeans to visit the remains of the ancient city in the early 16th century. The ruins were rediscovered during a hunting trip by Adam Renders in 1867, who then showed the ruins to Karl Mauch in 1871. They became well known to English readers from J. Theodore Bent's season at Zimbabwe, under Cecil Rhodes's patronage.

Bent, whose archaeological experience had all been in Greece and Asia Minor, stated in The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland (1891) that the ruins revealed either the Phoenicians or the Arabs as builders. Mauch favored a legend that the structures were built to replicate the palace of the Queen of Sheba in Jerusalem.^[2] Other theories as to their origin abounded among white settlers and academics, with one element in common: they were probably not made by sub-Saharan Africans.

The first scientific archaeological excavations at the site were undertaken in by David Randall-MacIver in 1905–1906. He wrote in Medieval Rhodesia of the existence in the site of objects that were of African origin.^[3] In 1929, Gertrude Caton-Thompson was the first to conclusively state that the site was indeed created by Africans.^[4] Since then artifacts and radiocarbon dating have proved that the oldest remains date back to the 1200s.

Martin Hall writes that the history of Iron Age research south of the Zambezi shows the prevalent influence of colonial ideologies, both in the earliest speculations about the nature of the African past and in the adaptations that have been made to contemporary archeological methodologies.^[5] When European colonialists like Cecil Rhodes first saw the ruins, it was seen as a sign of the great riches that the surroundings would yield to its new masters. When it was finally proved that the builders were in fact Africans, it was also characterized as "product of an infantile mind" built by a subjugated society. Later researchers confirmed this condescending view and refused to accept that Great Zimbabwe could have been a product of internal processes, but rather had to be the result of outside stimulus. After the white minority attempt at gaining independence from colonial rule in 1965 the theories about the black population having been subjugated by outside overlords was reconfirmed. Later on, after the independence of the modern state of Zimbabwe in 1980, Great Zimbabwe has been employed to mirror and legimitize shifting policies of the ruling regime. At first it was argued that it represented a form of pre-colonial "African socialism" and later the focus shifted to stressing the natural evolution of an accumulation of wealth and power within a ruling elite.^[6]

Archaeologists generally agree that the builders probably spoke one of the Shona languages, and so were members of the Bantu family. Some have postulated that Zimbabwe was the work of the Gokomere people, who gave rise to both the Warozwi people, and the Mashona people. Great Zimbabwe and various stone cities in east Africa are also claimed by the Lemba, an ethnic group who claim ancient Jewish descent.^[7] Certain features of Swahili architecture on the East Coast resemble those at Zimbabwe, in particular the great tower.

The ruins of this complex of massive stone walls undulate across almost 1,800 acres (7.3 km²) of present-day southeastern Zimbabwe. Begun during the eleventh century A.D. by Bantu-speaking ancestors of the Shona, Great Zimbabwe was constructed and expanded for more than 300 years in a local style that eschewed rectilinearity for flowing curves. Neither the first nor the last of some 300 similar complexes located on the Zimbabwean plateau, Great Zimbabwe is set apart by the terrific scale of its structure. Its most formidable edifice, commonly referred to as the Great Enclosure, has walls as high as 36 feet (11 m) extending approximately 820 feet (250 m), making it the largest ancient structure south of the Sahara Desert. Investigations were conducted during the first few decades of the twentieth century which confirmed both the antiquity of the Great Zimbabwe and its African origins.

Political implications

A close up of Great Zimbabwe ruins, 2006

Despite this evidence, the official line in colonial Rhodesia was that the structures were built by non-blacks. According to Paul Sinclair, interviewed for None But Ourselves:^[8]

I was the archaeologist stationed at Great Zimbabwe. I was told by the then-director of the Museums and Monuments organization to be extremely careful about talking to the press about the origins of the [Great] Zimbabwe state. I was told that the museum service was in a difficult situation, that the government was pressurizing them to withhold the correct information. Censorship of guidebooks, museum displays, school textbooks, radio programmes, newspapers and films was a daily occurrence. Once a member of the Museum Board of Trustees threatened me with losing my job if I said publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe. He said it was okay to say the yellow people had built it, but I wasn't allowed to mention radio carbon dates... It was the first time since Germany in the thirties that archaeology has been so directly censored.

The Zimbabwe Bird, depicted in Zimbabwe's flag

To black anti-colonialist groups, Great Zimbabwe became an important symbol of achievement by black Africans. Reclaiming its history was a major aim for those wanting independence. In 1980 the newly independent country was renamed for the site, and its famous soapstone bird carvings became a national symbol, depicted in the country's flag.

Some of the carvings had been taken from Great Zimbabwe around 1890 and sold to Cecil Rhodes, who was intrigued and had copies made which he gave to friends. Most of the carvings have now been returned to Zimbabwe, but one remains at Rhodes' old home, Groote Schuur, in Cape Town.

Great Zimbabwe has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

Image gallery

See also

• History of Zimbabwe
• Nyanga, Zimbabwe
• Ziwa
• Dhlo-Dhlo
• Khami
• List of World Heritage Sites in Africa
• Gertrude Caton–Thompson

Notes

Sources

• Garlake, Peter (2002) Early Art and Architecture of Africa Oxford, Oxford University Press ISBN 0-19-284261-7
• Ndoro, Webber. "Great Zimbabwe" Scientific American (November 1997)

Further reading

• Garlake, Peter S. (1972). Great Zimbabwe. London: Thames & Hudson. 

External links

• Chapter on Great Zimbabwe from "Ending Stereotypes for America"
• Great Zimbabwe entry on the UNESCO World Heritage site
• Pictures of Great Zimbabwe
• Ampim, Manu. "Great Zimbabwe: A History Almost Forgotten". Retrieved 18 April 2006.
• Tyson, Peter. "Mystery of Great Zimbabwe". Retrieved 18 April 2006.
• The Story of Africa: Great Zimbabwe — BBC World Service