From here the Indian Ocean stretches away southwards, beyond countless horizons, to the bottom of the world. South-east lies the route back to Sumatra and China; far to the south-west is Madagascar. Beyond that is the cape where Africa makes its sudden turn into a more hostile ocean, so long unconquered by ships from either East or West.
The King of the African Castle
Mombaza, Quiloa and Melind,
And Sofala (thought Ophir) to the realm
Of Congo and Angola farthest south.
—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II
IF THE REST OF AFRICA can put forward any rivals to the pyramids of Egypt in monumental building, Great Zimbabwe must rank high among them. The grey granite outlines of this African capital, 1,200 miles south of the equator, are strewn on the edge of the high plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers; the names of the men who ruled here, 700 years ago, are long forgotten. (So is the original name of the place itself. Zimbabwe comes from the title given it by later inhabitants of the region: dzimbahwe, house of stone.) Yet even in a state of ruin, when first sighted by European colonizers in the nineteenth century, the place was so impressive that credit for its construction was given to Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, anyone but Africans.1 This revived the ancient legend that the gold-producing regions of southern Africa were Ophir, the destination of King Solomon’s ships.
Gold had certainly been a stimulus in the surge of activity which created Zimbabwe.2 The Indian Ocean port of Sofala was reached by a twenty-day journey, down from the plateau and due east across the coastal lowlands. At the coast the merchants waited with Syrian glassware, Persian and Chinese bowls, beads, cowrie shells, spoons and bells.3 The dhows, arriving on the monsoon, also brought cargoes of bright-coloured cloth, known as kambaya, from the great Indian port of Cambay. For centuries such goods had been an irresistible lure for the people of the interior.
Great Zimbabwe was occupied continuously for 400 years, and during much of this time it controlled the gold trade with Sofala. The rulers grew rich. They wore garments of imported silk (traditionally, coloured blue and yellow), but also had long capes of stiff cloth, woven locally from cotton grown in the Zambezi valley. When they gave judgement in disputes they sat on carved, three-legged stools, and were often hidden, speaking from behind a curtain. Gongs were sounded to announce their arrival, and petitioners had to crawl forwards on the ground, clapping their hands as they spoke, and never looking at the king. It was expected of a ruler, because of his divine powers, to keep a vast number of wives – perhaps as many as 300. He was also the custodian of all the nation’s herds, and ordinary people had use of the cattle as an act of royal patronage. Animals were slaughtered on the orders of the king to meet the needs of his subjects.
Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Great Zimbabwe was the most powerful capital in southern Africa, but there were dozens more stone-built settlements on the eastern side of the plateau, from which cattle were taken down to the lowlands to graze. Near the Limpopo river the earlier dzimbahwe of Mapungubwe was surrounded by terraced farmland, its rulers ate off celadon dishes from China, and relics found in graves include a sculpture of a rhinoceros, six inches long, completely sheathed in gold leaf. Only in Great Zimbabwe’s maturity did its rulers develop a similar interest in making ornaments out of the metal, rather than simply selling it as dust or nuggets.
What distinguished Great Zimbabwe, from about A.D. 1200, was an ability to plan and carry through construction work on a massive scale, with a steady advance in techniques. Blocks used for building were fitted together without the use of mortar, and as skills progressed, walls became adorned with various patterns; most pervasive was the chevron, a symbol of fertility.4
The origin of Great Zimbabwe lay in the building of a stone acropolis amid granite boulders on a hilltop surveying the countryside in all directions. This acropolis with its towers and turrets was, in effect, the palace, and meant that the king’s subjects knew that he was literally looking down on diem. At night they could see the glow of his fires. The climb to the royal presence was steep and exhausting. Entry was controlled by spear-carrying warriors; the doors in walls mounted on the natural rock were so small that a man could go in only by crouching low.
In the valley below were many enclosures, probably occupied by the king’s wives and powerful retainers. The walls of the biggest were six times the height of a man and had drainage channels from the interior floor levels. To make them, a million pieces of dressed granite had been shaped and carried to the site. Inside were circular thatched houses built in the typical African style, with walls of daga, a cement-like earth often taken from anthills. It was customary to paint these walls with bright geometric patterns. Clustered round the enclosures were the huts of the lowly subjects and the slaves, captive survivors from raids on neighbours. The population of the capital grew to as much as 20,000.
The Zimbabwe gold trade was to set off a chain reaction far across the continent. Elephant tusks, dried salt, and iron weapons and implements were carried along forest paths from one market to the next, until they gained a maximum barter value in the more densely-populated districts. Even 1,000 miles away, north of the Zambezi watershed, copper deposits which had been neglected for 300 years were again worked intensively.
The king of Great Zimbabwe ruled a warlike people known as the Karanga. He and the subject chieftains, who lived round the plateau in less imposing settlements, held sway over an area almost the size of France. Their territories spread into what today is Botswana on one side, into Mozambique on the other, and across the Limpopo into what is now South Africa; the granite ruins are their monuments.
The growth of Great Zimbabwe had happened in total isolation from the formation of city-states at much the same time far away on the western side of Africa. The empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay which rose and fell beside the Niger river might as well have been on another continent. They were almost as far to the north of the equator as Great Zimbabwe was to the south, and much of the 3,000 miles separating them was almost impenetrable tropical forest. Beside central Africa’s inland seas, from which the Nile takes its source east of the Ruwenzori (‘Mountains of the Moon’), lay cultures far more closely allied to Great Zimbabwe. Settlements almost on the same scale seem to have developed there concurrently, to gauge from massive earthworks and irrigation systems; but since their buildings were of wood and thatch, almost all the evidence has vanished in the intervening centuries. The people who lived in them seem, moreover, to have had no connection at all with the trade of the Indian Ocean.
However, one link is clear. In the great lakes region, as was the case 1,500 miles further south, iron-mining and smelting were central to the economy. Great Zimbabwe had grown rich from gold – there were more than 4,000 small gold-mines on the high plateau – but iron ruled the lives of ordinary people. Whereas most of the world first smelted copper, then progressed over many centuries to the making and hardening of iron, Africa took a single leap straight out of the stone age. This new ability spelled power, for wrought-iron weapons transformed the ways in which wars were fought and wild animals hunted; with iron axes men could chop down forests and with hoes dig more land to grow crops.
How iron-age technology developed in the interior of Africa, whether invented independently or acquired from outside, is much debated. It seems to have been used there at least as early as in Egypt or much of Europe. The first known iron-makers in sub-Saharan Africa lived to the west of what is now called Lake Victoria, just below the equator. Others were settled amid the hills of Rwanda and Burundi, in a fastness of extinct volcanoes capped with snow, of deep lakes and heavily-forested hills rich in red, haematite ore. The first traces of smelting in that remote region may date back to 1000 B.C.5
The identity of the smelters remains a mystery. They certainly did not come from among the bushman or pygmy communities, the ‘hunting and gathering’ aborigines, since they kept