Great Zimbabwe: The Lost City Colonial Historians Said Africans Could Never Have Built
HISTORY 360
M. Muñoz · AI-narrated by Madison (from Google)
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When European visitors first saw the massive dry-stone walls of Great Zimbabwe in the nineteenth century, many refused to believe that Africans had built them, inventing theories about Phoenicians, the Queen of Sheba, and lost white civilizations rather than credit the Shona-speaking people whose ancestors actually raised them. This book tells the true story those colonial fantasies tried to erase: a Southern African kingdom that thrived roughly between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, built without mortar on granite hilltops, and grew wealthy on cattle, gold, and a trade network stretching to the Swahili coast, where Great Zimbabwe's gold was exchanged for Chinese porcelain and Persian glass. It follows the kingdom's rise from the earlier trading center of Mapungubwe, the engineering behind its massive Great Enclosure, and the soapstone bird carvings that became sacred symbols of kingship, before turning to its eventual decline and the rise of successor states like Mutapa and Torwa that carried its stone-building traditions forward. The book also traces the uglier second half of Great Zimbabwe's story: how colonial Rhodesia looted its artifacts and suppressed its African origins for political reasons, and how twentieth-century archaeologists, and eventually an independent nation that took its very name from the ruins, restored Great Zimbabwe to its rightful place in African and world history.
When European visitors first saw the massive dry-stone walls of Great Zimbabwe in the nineteenth century, many refused to believe that Africans had built them, inventing theories about Phoenicians, the Queen of Sheba, and lost white civilizations rather than credit the Shona-speaking people whose...
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