The mastery of smelting may have spread southwards from the Nile valley, from the Nubian city of Meroë, mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in 450 B.C. On the outskirts of Meroë are huge mounds of iron-slag – the city has been called the ‘Birmingham of ancient Africa’. However, the earliest evidence of iron at Meroë is dated at about 500 B.C. Another possibility is that the pioneer iron-workers may have migrated to Rwanda and Burundi from the Red Sea, herding their cattle for as much as 2,000 miles until they halted in the fertile heart of the continent. Iron-hardening methods had been ‘discovered’ in Assyria in about 2000 B.C., and the secret spread southwards from there to Arabia.
Once the skill was established at the equator, it advanced steadily southwards along the rocky backbone of Africa. By A.D. 300 iron was being smelted almost at the Cape. In some areas, the remains of hundreds of furnaces are discernible, proving the existence of highly-organized village industries. Iron hoes, like cattle, could be used to buy a bride. The metal-workers formed themselves into guilds, being regarded as men apart. It was the rule that they must practise sexual abstinence before the ores were smelted, and goats were sacrificed when a deposit was discovered. The spirit of the clay furnaces was always female; some were built with protuberances on the outside representing breasts.
At Great Zimbabwe, teams of metal-workers were constantly at their tasks. Those not making iron tools or spears were busy casting the capital’s distinctive H-shaped copper ingots, which served as a form of currency. Smoke from many furnaces hung in the air. Like most other daily activities, smelting was closely concerned with magic. It could well be imagined that restless spirits had been active inside the furnace if the metal proved impure. Rituals must be performed to set them at peace.
The king and his close advisers took divine guidance on such matters at their religious shrines in the acropolis, where the spirits of royal ancestors were worshipped.6 The time of the new moon was most auspicious. The senior sister of the king played a main role, for like the king she was regarded as being in direct contact with the ancestors. At Great Zimbabwe the shrines were adorned with green soapstone carvings of mysterious creatures, part bird, part beast, adorned with beads and tautly stylized. Since each is different they may represent the spirits of former kings. These carvings were set on tall monoliths round the shrines and below one of the birds a lifelike crocodile crawls up the pillar. The beaks of the birds are like those of eagles: in Karanga belief, the eagle carries messages between the earth and Murenga, the deity.
Other artistic remnants of the religious rituals are contorted sculptures of men and women, made in soapstone brought from a hundred miles away. The stone was also carved to form circular bowls, twenty inches across, with hieroglyphic-like designs of animals, such as zebra, baboons and dogs, on their vertical sides.
The stone-working skills of the Great Zimbabwean craftsmen, and their ability to make ornaments in gold and copper, had grown out of the traditions of wood-carving and moulding in terracotta. Wooden artefacts have been lost to time and the African climate, but proof of the depth of artistic tradition in southern Africa is to be found in the fired earthenware sculptures discovered on the edge of South Africa’s Drakensberg mountains. Made in or before A.D. 600, what are called the ‘Lydenberg Heads’ were elaborately moulded masks, big enough to be worn completely over the head. The biggest is fifteen inches tall and still bears traces of painted decoration on the terracotta. These heads, dating to at least seven centuries before Great Zimbabwe’s maturity, show an aesthetic sophistication which must have even earlier roots.
Most puzzling of the stone structures at Great Zimbabwe is a conical tower, dominating the largest enclosure. Built of granite blocks, with a core of rubble, it hides no treasure, nor does it guard a royal grave. Meaningless today, the tower was so carefully constructed that it must have carried a precise message to all who saw it in the capital’s time of greatness. Perhaps this represented an African grain store, to assure the people that the king cared about their welfare and would never let them starve. Legend says that this enclosure, more than 800 feet in circumference, within which the tower stands, was built for the ruler’s senior wife. So this might have been yet another symbol proclaiming the virility of the royal line. Two entrances to the enclosure were marked with male and female symbols: a horn and a groove.
For the king’s humbler subjects, in their clusters of huts below the acropolis, life was little different from that in any village on the plateau. Water still had to be carried by the women from the nearest stream, firewood collected, grain pounded and cooked, the dark red earth of the gardens hoed; children looked after the goats and chickens; menfolk herded cattle, hunted game, moulded clay cooking pots, and prepared for war with their spears and clubs when orders came down from the acropolis. Much beer was drunk, especially on feast days such as the new year, when the king’s fire was rekindled and all other fires lit from it.
Existence was governed by fantasy and superstition. When the rainy season did not start on time the people took part in sacrifices at shrines where unseen ‘owners of the land’ had to be appeased. If such sacrifices failed to induce enough rain, women spirit mediums were consulted.
It was a mark of their spirit power – and, without doubt, their ruthlessness – that Great Zimbabwe’s monarchs held their subjects together for centuries around the nucleus of a city-state. But there was a fatal limitation: the ability to keep records was never mastered, nor was any form of writing borrowed from the Indian Ocean cultures with whom the gold trade had put its rulers in touch. In the course of more than three hundred years, coundess trade caravans were sent to the coast, where the leaders would have seen accounts being recorded in Arabic. Emissaries must likewise have travelled inland, bearing written messages to be read out to the king of what the Arabs called ‘Zabnawi, the land of gold’. More than any other sub-Saharan society, Great Zimbabwe had the opportunity and the need to start keeping written records, yet failed to take the decisive step to literacy.7
Instead, it was stultified by clinging to the oral culture of African rural life. When a ruler felt the need to send tidings or commands to an outlying village he would choose a courier who could be relied upon to memorize his words. During a long journey the courier would tie knots in a string to record how many days it had taken, and on his return the string was saved for future reference. Various methods of arithmetic were used and bundles of sticks tied with cords or marked with notches were used as tallies in trade.
Religious practices remained simple: there was no scholarly priesthood dedicated to setting down the precise form of rituals and the days in the calendar when they must be performed. The lunar months were divided into three weeks, made up of nine or ten days. Law-giving was not based upon written statutes, but on social customs, and the interpretation of signs. Above all, the spirits of the ancestors permeated everything in life: the spirit world was indivisible from reality and existence was as repetitive as the seasons. The keeping of records would have meant a linear progression in time, a rejection of the past, but the presence of the spirits weighed heavily against that.
A civilization could not be built on the shifting sands of memory alone, and black Africa’s only literate people, apart from the Muslim converts of West Africa and the Zanj coast, remained the Ethiopians, far away in the north-east, using their ancient Ge’ez language. All the wealth of the gold trade had failed in the end to transmute the fundamental nature of Great Zimbabwe’s society.8
As Al-Mas’udi had discovered in the tenth century, wealth in cattle was what always mattered most in southern Africa: from early times, figurines of oxen had been revered and cattle were ceremonially buried. The king ruled the herd as he ruled the people; he was, in reality, just the most powerful pastoralist. So when some insoluble problems confronted the state, shortly after 1400, Great Zimbabwe was simply abandoned. With his cattle and his people, the king moved on.
What tolled the knell of Great Zimbabwe can only be guessed at. It may have been a conflict among the rulers over the succession, or a long drought and the exhaustion