Great Zimbabwe & The First Cities of Southern Africa // History Documentary

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Africa: where the human story began. Yet, for most of us here in the West, we know less of African history than anywhere else on Earth. Nowhere is this more true than in the south, where spoken history and oral tradition have long reigned supreme. When Europeans first came here in the 1800s, such was their fixation on the written word that it was argued this place had no history at all. One of those men was a German-American big-game hunter named Adam Renders. Whilst hunting in the Highlands of the Interior in 1867, he found something astonishing. 1500 kilometers inland, on the Highland plateau of modern-day Zimbabwe, surrounded by an endless array of massive rocks in a seemingly barren landscape, he found the ruins of a magnificent ancient city, crafted in expertly worked stone. The walls here curved and flowed along the contours of the ground, with nothing besides gravity and the extreme architectural precision of those who built them to keep them in place. [Music]

The most formidable structure of the city, known as the Great Enclosure, has walls 11 meters tall and six meters wide at the lowest point, that extend for 250 meters. Built using millions of bricks, this is the largest pre-modern structure south of the Sahara Desert. Renders wasn't the first European to come upon this place. More than three hundred years earlier, several Portuguese sailors described the city in detail, one of them arguing that it must have been built by the devil himself, such was the foreboding architecture of the place. It existed in local legend – of course, the Shona people of the region continuing to retell their past in song and story. The city had never been lost to them; as far as they were concerned, it was a place of their ancestors. Yet, when German explorer Carl Mauch arrived in the area to conduct the first archaeological survey in 1871, he concluded that the city was so impressive it could never have been built by native Africans, instead associating it with the long-hypothesized biblical site of King Solomon's Mines. [Music]

At the time, it was widely believed that Africans south of the Sahara simply never had the sophistication needed to smelt iron, work gold, or build a kingdom. Over the decades to come, though a number of scholars did argue to the contrary, the white minority government of Southern Africa continued to toe this line, with arguments to the city's origins ranging from the Queen of Sheba to long-lost Phoenicians to ancient Egypt. [Music] Finally, by the mid-20th century, the growing weight of evidence could simply not be ignored any longer. Great Zimbabwe, as the site was now known, once home to between 18 and 25 thousand people, had in fact been built by Africans. Not only that, but this city was part of a much larger system, being the center of a rich African trading kingdom between the 11th and 15th centuries, now thought to have dominated all of the lands from the Zambezi to the Limpopo rivers, including much of modern-day Zimbabwe and Mozambique. Alongside a huge amount of native pottery and metalwork, items have been found here from China, Persia, and all over the Indian Ocean trade network. Though it is the largest stone town of its type in Southern Africa, Great Zimbabwe is not the first nor the last; in fact, some 200 others exist across the region. [Music] Most containing similar styles of architecture, suggesting a long-lasting and widespread culture, the descendants of which now live all across Southern Africa, having dispersed into many groups and nations. The ruin even gave its name to the country of Zimbabwe when it became independent in 1980.

But why is this place not more widely known? Well, until the 1970s, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the official government line in Rhodesia was that Great Zimbabwe was a mystery. This is a story that was very nearly lost forever and has only begun to be taught in African school curriculums in the last few decades, let alone in the West. This is the story of Great Zimbabwe and the first cities of Southern Africa.

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When the Romans took control of Egypt during the first century BC, they came into direct contact with an ocean-born world to the south and the east. Here, on the lost shores of the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean beyond, existed an ancient system of trade, one of the most important crossroads in world history. For those daring enough to attempt the voyage from Southern Arabia across to the multitude of emporiums on India's western coast, a fortune could be made; and then, due to the curious monsoon winds of the sea, if all went to plan, they could be blown all the way back to where they started with little effort. Sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, a hard-headed Greek sea captain made a record of the various ports and anchorages across this vast ocean of opportunity. We know it as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. That unnamed merchant sailor, clearly a veteran of the trade winds, not only describes a huge multitude of Indian, Persian, Arabian, Yemeni, and Egyptian ports, but he describes the world to the south – for it wasn't just India that Greco-Roman merchants would travel to to sell their wares, but Africa too. [Music]

The third-century prophet Mani, a Persian by birth, regarded the Aksumite Empire in modern-day Ethiopia as one of the four great powers of his time, alongside Persia, Rome, and China. In the next century, this city-building civilization, with links to the Middle East lasting thousands of years, would become one of the first Christian powers in the world. Further south, in modern-day Somalia, a multitude of other cities are described, until finally we get to our southernmost port, Rhapta, somewhere on the coast of modern-day Tanzania. The great second-century geographer Ptolemy also describes the lands further inland from here, suggesting Alexandrian travelers knew of Mount Kilimanjaro and the Great Lakes region where the Nile originates. It's more than likely that they first made port at the trading emporium of Rhapta. According to the Periplus, a source of ivory, tortoiseshell, and rhino horn – items originating far inland – perhaps an outpost of the Himyarite Kingdom of Yemen. Historian James Ennis Miller argues that Rhapta may have once formed a vital trade link between modern-day Indonesia and consumers in the Mediterranean. [Music]

For centuries, the location of Rhapta was thought to have been lost, and it is still debated today. In recent decades, however, Tanzanian archaeologist Dr. Felix Chami discovered on the islands of Mafia and Shirani a heavy concentration of Roman and Egyptian coins dating from the first few centuries AD, suggesting this may have been the location of the lost trading hub. From the fourth until the ninth centuries, as Rome declined, East Africa largely disappeared from the Western historical record, though Rhapta does seem to have survived for a time, being mentioned by the sixth-century trader Cosmas Indicopleustes and by Stephanus of Byzantium. [Music] Yet, by this time, most of the merchants active in this region originated in Southern Arabia. Thus, with the birth of Islam in the 7th century, it was Islamic traders who began to dominate the coastal routes. [Music]

Now, finally, we have our first mention of native Africans along the southern African coastline: a Bantu-speaking group of farmers and fishermen known as the Swahili. The Swahili language – the word itself coming from the Arabic for coast – is a melting pot, reflecting the diverse groups of peoples who plied this coast, also containing Indian and even Portuguese words. By the 9th century, all along modern-day Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, urbanized Islamic communities began to form, building in stone and in coral. Long thought to have been built by Islamic emigres, modern archaeology and even contemporary accounts now heavily suggest that, though Islamic in origin, this was a native African tradition. Perhaps the most important of these sites now sits on a remote Tanzanian island: the ruined city of Kilwa Kisiwani. Settled from around the ninth century onwards, often referred to as a stone town, Kilwa is in fact built in coral, cut from the living rock itself and then plastered over. The coral architecture here, contemporary with Gothic architecture in Europe, is not only beautiful but technically sophisticated. [Music]

Ibn Battuta visited here in the 14th century. He describes the Great Mosque as one of the wonders of the world. When the Portuguese came later, they wrote of the hundred-room palace of the Sultan, along with possessing a vast fortune of innumerable precious stones and gold. The Sultans of Kilwa even minted their own coins, the first in Southern Africa. This was a period of remarkable prosperity, with merchants here able to import such luxury goods as Thai stoneware and porcelain from late Song and early Ming Dynasty China; and crucially for us, they traded them with merchants from the hinterlands. At this port in modern-day Tanzania, traders from the outer world – India, China, and Arabia – would all come to sell their wares, but they weren't the source of Kilwa's wealth; for the merchants here were middlemen. The source of their trade goods lay far away in the interior, on the Highland plateau of Zimbabwe, 1500 kilometers away, where coins from Kilwa have been found alongside items from China, Persia, and Arabia. Though even before the rise of Great Zimbabwe in the 11th century, we get hints of a long-standing trade relationship with the interior, a thriving system perhaps dating back to the time of Rhapta. The great Islamic traveler and geographical writer al-Masudi, who journeyed in person down the East African coast in around 922, recorded a substantial trade in ivory and gold with the interior at this time. The king of this interior realm bore such titles as "Son of the Great Master," "That God of the Earth and Sky," and was the foremost of all African rulers known by the Arabs. In other words, he was most certainly a follower of native African religion, as we shall see were the builders of Great Zimbabwe.

In the 1970s, in modern-day Mozambique, a vital link between the coast and the interior was discovered in the form of a medieval walled city. Manyikeni – a Bantu word meaning "the place where people give to each other" – was a stone-built capital site; and crucially for our story, gold wasn't just a commodity here, it was buried with the dead, just as it was at Great Zimbabwe, reflecting a non-Islamic African tradition. A unique type of cattle-feeding grass grows here, a type originating on the Zimbabwean Highlands and not found anywhere else in Mozambique, leading experts to suggest that this was an outpost of Great Zimbabwe. In a devastating twist, the museum holding the priceless artifacts excavated here was destroyed in a fire – not the first or the last time elements of African history were lost forever. [Music]

When Europeans first began carving up Southern Africa in the 1800s, a lack of written history made it easier for them to justify their civilizing mission, mostly ignoring the often inconvenient oral history of the place. Today, by using modern archaeological techniques and by investigating the fragments of oral history that do survive, we can arrive at a somewhat basic picture of the history of this land. Just as Greek and Indian sailors crossed over the Erythraean Sea to make their fortunes in the first few centuries AD, another migration took hold over much of Africa. We know this period as the Bantu migrations. [Music] Climatological data tells us that the Sahara Desert suffered a significant drying up around this time, in part leading to a mass population movement to the south and eventual revolution in metalworking and society throughout the continent. As early as 300 AD, certain Iron Age Bantu pastoralists got as far south as the Limpopo River on the border of modern-day South Africa, bringing their herd animals, secrets of metalworking, and perhaps the legacy of Sudanese kingship and kingdom-building to the region for the first time. More groups continued to arrive from the Great Lakes region over the centuries to come, either displacing or merging with existing hunter-gatherer groups, until finally, by around 900 AD, complex sedentary states began to form, many of which share a common material culture. One of these sites, occupied from at least the ninth century onwards – the same time Kilwa put down its roots on the coast – gives its name to this entire culture. Discovered on a small hilltop near the town of Bulawayo in 1947, Leopard's Kopje is a relatively small site, though one with notable evidence of metalworking, insila pottery, building in stone, and as time went on, trade. The staple diet for most people remained agricultural produce: sorghum, millet, beans, and squash; though cattle raising became an important economic force, clearly demonstrated by cattle pens in most villages being the major meeting place and ceremonial center, and by the miniature figurines of long-horned cows and cattle horns – evidence of a pre-Christian and pre-Islamic African civilization, the direct ancestors of today's Shona people, the largest ethnic group in modern-day Zimbabwe. [Music]

A multitude of rival towns likely existed at this time, all vying with each other for lucrative trade rights with the Swahili coast. For our story, one of the most important of these early stone towns is a site known today as Schroda, named for the farm it was found on. Modest Schroda may seem, yet this settlement is the first link in a chain eventually leading to the architecture of Great Zimbabwe. In many Bantu areas today and other pastoralist groups all over the world, people still measure wealth in terms of how many cattle you owned, still being used as dowry in many cases even today. Business and important meetings are still often undertaken in the cattle corral, the center of the community. Just over a thousand years ago, it was this fixation that may have led to the formation of the region's first elites; only the richest could afford each other's bride prices, thus setting them as a people apart. At Schroda and other sites in the Limpopo Valley, we have archaeological evidence of the jump from pastoralist farmers to complex centralized states, increasingly dependent on the ivory trade with the east. Vitally, more glass beads are found at the site than anywhere else in the area at this time, suggesting a monopoly over trade with the Swahili coast, which may have exhausted ivory links further east to the sea and been forced to look further inland as a result, those kick-starting this societal shift at Schroda. These traveling merchants found good trading partners, and the elites became rich. It's thought by some scholars that glass beads may have even begun to replace cattle as a form of currency. It is also this time that gold mining begins. Was this the native African kingdom spoken of by al-Masudi? [Music]

With great prosperity, however, always comes a price. The new elites at Schroda had effectively placed a target on their backs. By around 1000 AD, a new group, attracted by Schroda's wealth and trade with the outside world, moved in and conquered the area, pushing the people of Schroda away to the west and establishing their own settlement, complete with a cattle corral. We know it as K2, a particularly large site. K2 has an especially rich material culture, suggesting a powerful elite here with an increasingly important class distinction between social groups. Manufacturers here even began making their own beads, perhaps having seized the means of how to do so from traders of the coast. Another important leap begins here too, as gold is mined in far greater frequencies than before, perhaps after the people here realized the high prices it could get from the traders from the Swahili coast. As more gold was mined, trade increased dramatically, attracting more and more people to the area. Cattle was now no longer the sole determinant of wealth, and corrals began to make way for law and royal trade courts. By around 1075, something astonishing happens: the royal elite at Khami seem to have made a conscious decision to separate themselves from their ever-growing population of subjects, relocating permanently to a nearby hilltop, a site that may have been used previously for ceremonial purposes. We know it today as Mapungubwe Hill, meaning "place of stone" and "place of jackals" in the local languages – the beating heart of south-central Africa's first verifiable kingdom.

On an imposing hilltop at the very northern tip of modern-day South Africa exists one of the most important archaeological sites in the whole of the continent; for this is where kingship in the south truly began. Here, at the meeting point between the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers, once existed the thriving capital of a pre-colonial kingdom. The wooden and stone structures that once filled this landscape are now long gone, yet evidence does remain, etched into the barren earth and the living rock. 900 years ago, stone and wood were used here together, creating a beautiful synthesis of humanity and nature. Archaeologists found evidence here of a grand stone enclosure, not too different to the one at Great Zimbabwe, as well as a wooden palisade wall, built for defense and for the privacy of the elite; for the royal family here were very much a people apart. Just like at Manyikeni and at Great Zimbabwe, they were laid to rest with gold. Most of the city's population would have lived inside an enclosing wall on the plains below the hilltop. Spatial organization in the kingdom involved the use of stone walls to separate areas based on social distinction – for the first time – a system that would later be replicated in countless other sites up until the 19th century. The common people would come up to pay tribute or bring supplies, but mostly they would stay down below. The growth in population here may have led to full-time specialists in ceramics – specifically pottery – but also metalworking, most of which is lost today due to neglect and treasure hunting in the early 20th century, though some does survive, hinting at an astonishing material culture. Gold is an easier material to smelt than iron, which had already been mastered by Bantu for centuries. Gold working thus came naturally to these people, with significant evidence of mining found from this era, and gold itself became extremely important, perhaps taking on a ritualistic, spiritual quality, being valued for more than just its monetary price and buried with rulers. It was also gold that attracted people back here in the late 1800s and early 1900s, leading to the widespread looting and melting down of gold items. It is a wonder that this golden rhino, buried on top of the hill, survived to the present – one of the most iconic artifacts of the site, thought to represent a black rhino, an animal associated with the ancestors in Shona tradition. It spent most of the 20th century locked away in a storeroom at Pretoria University.

At least 24 skeletons were unearthed on Mapungubwe Hill in the 1930s. We don't know any of their names or even the name they called themselves as a people, and most of them disintegrated almost as soon as they were exposed to light and air. Eleven, however, were available for analysis. Recent genetic studies found that two individuals – a male and a female – were in fact of Chopi descent and thought to be a king and queen of the city. All of the bodies were laid to rest in the traditional Bantu burial position, with legs drawn to the chest, arms folded around the front of the knees, and facing to the west. One was found with this beautiful gold mace or scepter; another with this golden headdress, once thought to be a ceremonial bowl. We can only wonder what other items once rested here. [Music]

Up until well into the 20th century, local tradition here still saw Mapungubwe Hill as a cursed, dangerous place, with the potential repercussions for trespassing including death and going blind. It was these superstitions – perhaps a leftover of the ritualization of sacred kingship – that saved the burial grounds here from grave robbers for so long; for the king here was loved, feared, and perhaps at times worshipped by his people, for he held the power to distribute wealth. This was the secret to the kingdom's success, how it stayed together for so long, and why he and his family had to live apart from their subjects. This tradition of common people below and the ruling family living on a hilltop above was carried on at later sites such as Great Zimbabwe and is also found at other contemporary sites such as Michaela, found in 1967, though it remains unclear what the connection between the two was. Many experts think the king may have been a priestly figure, with his family members doing the day-to-day running of the state in the city below.

Performing more of a ceremonial role, the city below probably housed a population of up to 5,000 people, with a number of outlying settlements. The sheer wealth and unique material culture discovered here and at other sites suggests a kingdom dominating the Limpopo Valley, potentially spanning an area some 30,000 kilometers in size—an area no doubt kept in line through military prowess. There is a reason why we don't know much about mapping Got—we, like Great Zimbabwe.

The first archaeologists to undertake research here went into the dig with preconceived notions of what he was about to find. For he was Guy Gardener, and as far as he was concerned, this was a long-lost ancient Egyptian colony. From 1935 until 1940, Gardener worked at the site largely alone, with a modest team of African diggers. According to many historians, a crucial aspect of Gardener's research was the lack of care given; the wheelbarrows of topsoil dug up were only sifted every now and again, for the most part being thrown off the side of the hill in the search for larger items, vital knowledge being lost forever in the process.

Mapungubwe remained a little-known, obscure site, and Gardener's findings were only published 23 years later. It would be many years yet before the native African roots of this site would be recognized. We know not the names of any of the Kings who ruled here, and soon enough their time was up. Perhaps the kingdom fell in battle; perhaps the ivory or gold ran out, or the cities of the Swahili coast found new trading partners. For many experts, however, it was climatic conditions that ended life at Mapungubwe. By the Little Ice Age, making life simply not feasible here anymore, by 1290, the place was abandoned for good, with the last of its inhabitants moving on to better climbs to the north.

On this in Bambata way and Plateau, one of these sites was about to enter a golden age, for a new kingdom was on the rise. [Music]

In 1905, British archaeologist David Randall-MacIver arrived at Great Zimbabwe to embark on a new analysis of the city. The previous century had not been kind to the heritage of this Imbabwe and Plateau, with the pickaxes of gold prospectors soon being followed by the spades of looters. Perhaps the most notorious of these were two Brits named Neil and Johnson, founders of the Rhodesian Ancient Ruins Company. They made an absolute fortune from amassing irreplaceable medieval gold from the region before melting it down into ingots, around 50 kilos in all, in the late 19th century. Any artifacts lying near to the topsoil at Great Zimbabwe suffered a similar fate. In 1904, a freelance scholar named R.N. Hall, convinced that the place was originally a Phoenician city, removed as much as 12 feet of topsoil and occupation layers in order to get down to what he saw as the ancient layers below, referring to the occupation layers of the Shona city as “African detritus,” throwing it away into the surrounding bush.

Yet, nevertheless, when MacIver arrived at the site, the city was so large that more than enough evidence remained to conduct his analysis. Having no preconceived notions of what he would find at the site, instead simply taking the evidence at face value, he found absolutely nothing to suggest that the site hadn’t, in fact, been built by Africans. The issue remained a controversial one, however, and MacIver’s stance far from a fully established consensus. Yet, in 1929, another dig undertaken by Gertrude Caton Thompson came to much the same conclusions. And finally, in the 1950s, Peter Garlake, with the aid of carbon-14 dating, put the matter to rest once and for all, though he himself was forced to leave the country in 1970. Everywhere besides Rhodesia, now agreed Great Zimbabwe, a medieval city that thrived from the 11th to the 15th centuries, had been built and lived in by Africans.

For Garlake, the evidence overwhelmingly suggested that the rulers of Great Zimbabwe had been a tightly organized aristocratic kinship group possessing a court culture existing alongside numerous other Shona groups and traditions. The sheer size and material wealth at the site suggests a monopoly over internal and external trade in the region and very probably a long-term military, economic, and social dominance over the entire plateau, heavily fortified by religious power and devotion. Situated at the southeastern end of this Imbabwe and Plateau, Great Zimbabwe wasn’t actually in the gold-producing areas, which extended around it in a wide arc. These were already well established by the time that it was built. It was a site chosen on purpose due to its temperate climate and varied agricultural potential, midway between dry grazing lands and damp valleys, on a crossroads that captures the moist southeast trade winds from the coast and receives unusually constant and reliable rainfall. As a result, the place was at the center of an internal system of trade as well as the external one it had a monopoly over. Significant evidence exists of raw products from the entire plateau being brought here in order to be reworked by master craftsmen. Records prior to its looting in the 19th century show that the site was a center of craft and industry. Metal bracelets and bangles in various states of production were found all over the hill ruin and the great enclosure, along with gold beads, gold wire, and thin sheets of gold thought to cover buildings. Cotton was spun and woven here, evidenced by many spindles found all over the sites, and local soapstone was used to make, amongst other things, flat dishes engraved with beautiful carvings of long-horned cattle, zebras, baboons, and other animals. Terracotta models are found of animals too, mostly in the form of cattle, reminiscent of earlier finds at sites of the Leopard’s Kopje culture.

Perhaps the most impressive finds of all, however, were made in 1902: a horde of trade goods that not only exemplify overseas contacts but were sufficiently important enough to qualify as more than “African detritus.” A great quantity of iron, copper, bronze, and gold was found, along with three iron gongs—musical instruments associated with kingship in Shona and Bantu tradition—and various iron hoes. Other items often associated with Shona kingship; most important of all, however, were the mysterious soapstone bird carvings that have been found nowhere else before and nowhere else after, seeming to be completely unique. Thought to represent African fish eagles, the statues—nine of which have been found, some of them the size of a person—may represent divine messengers, a link between the earth and the sky, or even symbolic images of the ancestors. They are now on the flag of modern-day Zimbabwe. Alongside these native finds was a vast plethora of foreign goods, mostly dating from the 14th or 15th centuries, thought to be the heyday of the city: calico shelves from the Indian Ocean, a Persian bowl bearing an Arabic inscription, Chinese celadonware vessels, and tens of thousands of glass trade beads. Perhaps this was tribute received by the ruler here, a tiny hint of the immense amounts of trade that once went on. [Music]

Though slightly later than the period of Great Zimbabwe’s height, in 1517, we get a near-contemporary description of those who lived on this Imbabwe and Plateau from the Portuguese writer Duarte Barbosa, the brother-in-law of Ferdinand Magellan, the first circumnavigator of the globe. Barbosa spent much time on the Swahili coast during the early 16th century. According to him, emissaries from the interior regularly came to the coastal ports to buy cottons from India and silks from China. [Music] The most noble of these wore skins with tassel tails that trailed on the ground, tokens of their dignity and status. They carried swords thrust into wooden scabbards bound with much gold and other metals; others carried spears or bows with arrows of finely pointed iron, for they were warlike men as well as great traders. [Music] Their court was three weeks’ journey away inland, and there stood the king’s palace, a very large building, curious and well constructed, in which no cement can be seen, well known as the King’s Zimbabwe, meaning “big house of stone.”

The wealth of the city was indeed derived from exports. We can clearly see a huge enrichment of the whole site sometime in the 13th century, with jewelry, gold ingots, copper, imported Chinese porcelain, and Persian glazed ware all arriving at this time, curiously coinciding with the decline of Mapungubwe. Had the elites there relocated to Great Zimbabwe, or had the Great Zimbabwe elite simply usurped the trade links from their rivals? [Music]

For most people, however, life remained largely the same, with wealth being reinvested in cattle pastured on the southern slopes of the plateau and moved up and down hill in a transhumance lifestyle. The rulers, of course, lived a life apart; they could use imported goods such as rich textiles to reward their followers and to fund the colossal enclosures we can still see today. More outposts were built during this time—commanding the places of pasturage and gold production to the north—all the hallmarks of an expanding kingdom. [Music]

Permanent settlement at Great Zimbabwe seems to have begun sometime in the 11th century, the hill complex probably being the earliest area of occupation. At first, the walls were relatively crudely built and similar to other contemporary sites of the Leopard’s Kopje culture. Situated on an ecological crossroads where many climatic areas meet, Great Zimbabwe may have begun as a trade fair. Soon enough, however, a royal family definitively established themselves and their retinues on the hilltop, with everyone else living down below, much like Mapungubwe before. Infrastructure here was impressive; all the necessary water, food, and building materials had to be painstakingly brought up the hill in order to support the elite, and they were supported for centuries. For the ruling class and royal family controlled the flow of wealth and the influx of gold. On top of the hill, supplied with beer and vegetables from local producers and milk and meat from royal herds kept moving around the country, the rich almost certainly kept apart from normal people. Though pieces of iron ore were found in a cave on the hill complex as well as the remains of smelting furnaces nearby, commoners were not usually allowed up here, for this was the royal burial place of kings.

For most people of the kingdom, a cow was an invaluable commodity in itself; its milk and cheese able to sustain entire families. For the king, however, it was different. Evidence of significant numbers of cattle being slaughtered and presumably their meat being consumed has been found on top of the hill. This was a status symbol, clearly demonstrating the power of the elite. This is also remarkably similar to another originally pastoralist group who placed a spiritual emphasis on cattle raising even after settling down to a sedentary lifestyle: the early Germanic people of Europe, said by the Roman historian Tacitus to have only farmed reluctantly. The hill complex may have been the ritual center of the kingdom; there was even a cave where the king could bellow out and be heard in the valley below. [Music]

Like Mapungubwe before it, and a wealth of neighboring sites before, at the same time, and after, enclosures are found at Great Zimbabwe, the result of many centuries of experimentation and developments and perhaps evolution from earlier Bantu cattle corrals rather than individual buildings. Enclosures never had roofs; they were used to cut off a particular area of the settlement in a private setting. It’s thought that each one would have been filled with circular clay-walled buildings for sleeping, cooking, entertaining guests or merchants, and housing animals. The largest may have had areas designed for ceremonies and for holding court, but they were all set in a private context, each perhaps forming a family dwelling for an elite group or for different professions. Historians remain divided on the issue. The very concept of stone walling is completely unique to this region and reflects both the geographical isolation of the builders here and their insular culture compared to other areas of the world. As far as we can tell, there are no streets, no public gathering areas, no monumental buildings, but there are intriguing structures which defy complete explanation, such as this one thought to possibly be a sundial.

As time goes on, particularly through the 13th century, increased sophistication of construction begins, with steps and alters on terraces being incorporated into walls. Sometime, probably in the 14th century, at the height of the power of the city, the most famous and largest of these structures was built. We know it as the Great Enclosure. Each stone here was painstakingly put in place with human hands; there are no straight lines, only curves, clearly demonstrating a highly sophisticated level of stone masonry. The absence of mortar and the thickness of the stones at the bottom gave these walls the flexibility to survive movement without collapse. The winding maze of passageways here, thought by many experts to have been designed in an ingenious way to keep each social class away from each other, merge into an inner wall encircling a series of structures and a younger outer wall as well as a tower 9 meters high. [Music] Perhaps a residence for royal queens, a temple complex, or a sort of royal court where the king could resolve disputes whilst remaining cut off from the people, the exact function of the Great Enclosure remains disputed, though more than 12 smaller structures of a similar style are found at the site too. Nevertheless, these enclosures only housed people of the elite class; everyone else—farmers, artisans, and craftsmen—the vast majority of the population here lived outside in wattle and daub houses that leave little trace, though as many as six thousand households are thought to have existed here, perhaps housing as many as 25,000 people at the height of the city, spanning an area of over seven square kilometers.

As we have seen time and time again, Great Zimbabwe didn’t exist in isolation. More than 80 other contemporary sites have been found, all containing elite enclosures of a similar type. Unfortunately, few have been investigated properly, and many were looted at the end of the 19th century. [Music] Many of these sites were simply far too small, and Great Zimbabwe too large, to have any kind of an independent existence, possibly being satellite settlements. But a handful, such as Khami, Dhlo-Dhlo, and Nalatale, do have surviving walls on a scale like Great Zimbabwe, hinting at a more complicated geopolitical situation than can ever be satisfactorily described from archaeology alone. And, of course, not everyone lived at Great Zimbabwe or one of the other satellite towns, mostly living in poverty in the countryside. These peasant farmers—perhaps kept in check by ritualized kingship—made up the majority of the population, being depended on by rulers for food, manpower, and ultimately their wealth.

By the mid-15th century, archaeology suggests Great Zimbabwe ceased being a trade center of major importance. People continued to live here, perhaps even into the 18th and 19th centuries to a certain degree, yet power had most certainly shifted away from the city, like Mapungubwe before it. No one knows definitively why the city collapsed, with speculation ranging from environmental catastrophe, an expansionist ruler who overextended himself, knock-on effects from the Portuguese arrival and swift annexation of several Swahili settlements including Kilwa for a time, or simple competition from increasingly powerful regional rivals. Yet the culture that had existed here most certainly survived, with succeeding archaeological sites such as Khami, capital of the kingdom of Butua, suggesting a continuation and mastering of stone building techniques. A multitude of newer stone towns fill the gap left by Great Zimbabwe’s fall, but eventually, by around the sixteenth century, one of them—the kingdom of Mutapa, said by Shona oral tradition to have been founded by a renegade prince from Great Zimbabwe—would find a new profitable trading partner in the form of the Portuguese, eventually extending its control over all the others. [Music]

That prince, perhaps the first named Zimbabwean in history, Nyatsimba Mutota, is said to have abandoned his home in the south and moved north to the Zambezi because of a shortage of salt, perhaps reflecting a dire economic or agricultural situation that made living at the city unfeasible. A second tradition outright states that there was a great hunger in the kingdom from which the prince fled. By the early 17th century, the Portuguese increasingly sought to monopolize their influence in the area, and a complicated and devastating series of wars began, leading to the collapse of all of the previous kingdoms and the rise of a new empire as a direct response to the Portuguese. Unlike previous trading states, this was an inward-looking warrior empire led by a warlord named Changamire Dombo, said in some legends to have practiced black magic, known as the Rozvi, roughly translating as “destroyers.” This increased militarization, including the adoption of muskets and a professional army, led to another series of lengthy conflicts and the eventual expulsion of the Portuguese from the interior, but also, now that outside trade links had been cut off by the Portuguese presence on the coast, increasingly widespread raiding and looting of neighbors. By the early 19th century, this new culture of war had spread, leading to the rise of one of the most famous yet least understood African rulers in history: Shaka Zulu. As the Zulu nation went on the warpath to the south, this began a 25-year period of chaos known as the Mfecane, usually meaning “the crushing” or “scattering,” an especially violent period of civil conflict in southern Africa that led to the deaths of millions upon millions of people. By the mid-1830s, when the Voortrekkers, descendants of Dutch settlers on the far southern tip of Africa, began moving inland to escape British rule, they found the territory to be mostly empty. Thus followed the carving up of the continent by the industrialized European powers, culminating in 1890 when Cecil John Rhodes formally took control of much of the area, naming part of it after himself: Rhodesia. Thus began a close to 90-year period when the white minority government made every effort to deny any link between the stone cities that dotted the landscape and the contemporary Africans of the region.

Even after independence in 1980, the historical ordeal of Great Zimbabwe was not over, when government officials put pressure on historians to make the city appear revolutionary in nature to match their own political sentiments. Nevertheless, kingship still survives today in rural areas of Zimbabwe, a direct continuation of the medieval cities that once ruled this land. This video is part of Project Africa, a collaboration between more than 20 history YouTubers. Be sure to check out the video before this one by Hikmah History and the one after by Alma Kadima. You can find links to everything in the description below. [Music]