Great Zimbabwe

What Mauch told the newspapers

Adam Render, a hunter, reached the ruins in 1868. Karl Mauch, a German geologist looking for the biblical land of Ophir, arrived on September 5, 1871, guided there by Karanga men, and stayed nine months with Render. He concluded he had found the palace of the Queen of Sheba and the source of Solomon's gold, and he sent that version to the overseas press.

It was wrong and it was useful. A ruined African city built by Africans was an inconvenient object in a colony being assembled on the argument that Africans built nothing. A lost Phoenician or Sabaean city was not.

Clearing the evidence

In 1902 Cecil Rhodes's chartered company put the journalist Richard Hall in charge of the site. Hall stripped sediment to a depth of as much as two meters across the ruins, describing the work as removing "the filth and decadence" of African occupation. Those layers were the stratigraphy. Most of the datable archaeological record was gone before any archaeologist arrived to read it.

Two excavations, then a law

David Randall-MacIver dug at Great Zimbabwe in 1905 and 1906 and found nothing of non-African origin in the occupation layers. He concluded the builders were local people. In 1929 the British Association for the Advancement of Science sent Gertrude Caton-Thompson, who confirmed it, placed the structures in the medieval period, and traced trade goods that had come across the Indian Ocean.

That settled the archaeology and not the politics. In 1970 the Rhodesian government imposed censorship forbidding official publications from stating as fact that Great Zimbabwe was African-built. Peter Garlake, the government's own Inspector of Monuments, and Roger Summers of the National Museum both left the country rather than work under it. Garlake published from outside in 1973: twelfth to fifteenth century, built by the ancestors of the Shona.

Zimbabwe took its name from the site at independence in 1980, and a soapstone bird carried off the hill stands on the national flag.

Open daily from 6am to 6pm. Entry runs about $15 for international visitors and $5 for residents, which covers the site museum, and official guides wait at the entrance for roughly $10 to $15 on top. Taking one is worth it, since the chevron course along the Great Enclosure wall and the acoustics of the narrow passages are easy to walk straight past.

The monument comes in three parts, the Hill Complex, the Great Enclosure and the Valley Ruins, spread across a large area. The climb to the Hill Complex is steep and rocky. Half a day is the realistic minimum, and the museum, which holds the surviving soapstone birds, is the part visitors most often skip.

There is a small cafe by the museum and little else, so carry water. Early morning is cooler and the low light on the granite is better. The monument sits outside Masvingo, which is where the lodging and the fuel are.