History in the public imagination has always struggled with standards. No matter how hard
we try to be objective, our innate perspectives and backgrounds will always influence how we see
the past. We compare ourselves against the accomplishments of our ancestors,
and we measure their societies by what we value today. That leads to many tricky conversations
and hopefully a lot of introspection, because half the fun History is exploring these differences,
getting challenged by what we learn, and being surprised by what’s possible. It’s cool stuff
my guys – when our standards are challenged, our understanding expands. But… sometimes,
none of that matters, because the much more pressing issue is good old fashioned bias.
The conviction that We must be right, so we’ll contort the history to fit, truth be damned.
Now… what on earth could that have to do with today’s video on African history…
Hmmmm. Well, as we head to the south of the continent and explore the magnificent world
of Great Zimbabwe, we have a prime opportunity to question our standards of what societies can
accomplish, both architecturally and culturally. Because, hypothetically, it would be silly to deny
that this medieval African wonder of engineering was actually built by Africans. Dumber, even,
to do that for hundreds of years in spite of overwhelming evidence. But that rascally devil we
call Bias can make even the obvious an impossible pill to swallow, especially when the agenda behind
that bias is colonial power. However, I am not here to wallow in the infuriating
injustices of Africa’s colonization, I’m here to teach you about an amazing civilization,
so let’s. do. some. history.
Our story begins in the mid first millennium with the southward migration of the Bantu people,
and in particular, the arrival of the Shona to the Limpopo river valley sometime around the 200s AD.
They were one of several major subgroups from the Bantu language family, and shared in skills
such as ironworking, but while the Shona went the furthest south and got situated the latest,
they absolutely ran with it in the following millennium. Set up on the temperate grasslands
just south of the river, they grew their crops, herded cattle, and began to cluster into
settlements of earthen-brick and stone houses. By the latter centuries, they were trading locally
in pottery, leather goods, jewelry in copper and gold, iron tools and weapons, as well as salt for
food and export. At the end of the millennium, they reached through the major seafaring hubs
on the Swahili coast to tap into a burgeoning globalized trade along the Indian ocean. All this
increasing wealth, complexity, and stratification meant more robust cities with thousands of people
and fancier social structures, such as at Mapungubwe. For the next century and a half,
the common people and artisan workers lived in the valley below the main hill, while the elites and
royals lived up top, enjoying such far-flung trade goods as Indian glass beads and Chinese porcelain.
So the artefacts and
structures tell us a story of this civilization at work, but we’ve got some lingering questions,
because in the 1200s, Mapungubwe declines and the people move to a settlement north of the Limpopo
river, right at the foothills of the high inland plateau. So why the shift? Maybe overpopulation,
maybe the climate changed, Unclear – but what happened next? Well well well,
let me introduce you to Great Zimbabwe and the largest stone structures in Africa south of the
Pyramids. And that’s in the name, the etymology probably derives from dzimba-dza-mabwe, meaning
Houses of Stones; and like Mapungubwe before it, Great Zimbabwe was spread over a varied geography,
with a stone-built Hill Complex above and a Valley Complex of earthen-brick and stone houses below,
enough to accommodate 10-20,000 people. Among those were thousands of potters,
weavers, blacksmiths, stonemasons, and goldsmiths working to make Great Zimbabwe the new regional
powerhouse. So as Indian Ocean trade intensified during the medieval period, Great Zimbabwe was all
too happy to export artisan goods, ivory, and as much as 30% of the medieval world’s gold,
sending it through the cities of the Swahili coast and out to the world beyond. And with trade
influence came political influence, as the Kingdom of Great Zimbabwe controlled the land between the
Limpopo and Zambezi rivers via a network of 150 minor zimbabwes; that is, minor houses of stones.
So speaking of all that stone,
a remarkable feature of the city is how it didn’t use any mortar. The granite was quarried from
local outcrops by heating the surface and dousing it in water, which caused thin and
uniform sheets to break off. Give ‘em a little tap-tap to size, stack ‘em up nice and even,
and you’ve got 30-foot-high walls of dry, un-mortared stone that were strong enough
to survive the last seven hundred years. The most singularly spectacular structure of the lot was
the Great Enclosure, running 800 feet around and surrounding a 32-foot tall conical tower. The
precise purpose of this is, once again, tricky to pin down – royal residence, ceremonial site,
granary??? – but the sheer artistry on display is astounding. Every wall gently tapers toward
the top, and every surface is smoothly curved. Straight lines? Getouttahere! They even found
time to flex with decorative patterns built into the walls themselves, all of that with no
mortar! And up in the Hill Complex especially, this fluidity has the effect of melding the
human-made stone-works into the granite hills around it, augmenting the natural landscape
rather than overwriting it. Let’s not get into the trap of overexoticizing this as mysterious
and otherworldly, instead, we can appreciate this as the product of a vastly different design
philosophy than most of us are used to. This harmonious extension of the material and shape
of the land are the kinds of ideas we’re only just understanding in modern western architecture,
but here’s a masterclass on it from the 12-1300s! For instance, the pathway to the conical tower
runs narrowly between two walls so high the sun barely reaches to the bottom, contrasting
the scale of what a human is against the scale of what they can do. This goes beyond raw aesthetics
to become an architecture of feelings – there’s a symbolic purpose that we don’t have the context
to understand, but boy howdy the vibes on it are striking. As with Mapungubwe before, we’re
at a loss for most of the material culture, but in this instance it’s because all the remaining
treasures were plundered by colonists in the late 1800s. Among the precious few artefacts to make
their way back after Zimbabwean independence in 1980 were a handful of soapstone-carved birds,
which has become the modern national symbol.
So okay, Great Zimbabwe could build a city like a champ and had a major hand in the world’s largest
trade network, but whaaaaat happened to them? Well, like with Mapungubwe, we’re making guesses.
Maybe the gold mines were exhausted, or they couldn’t maintain their population size,
maybe disease, drought, take your pick, but around 1430, the legend goes that prince Nyatsimba Mutota
left Great Zimbabwe and set out north in search of salt, finding it after conquering some neighbors
and setting up a new kingdom of Mutapa, leading to the abandonment of Great Zimbabwe and the hegemony
of Mutapa for the next two centuries. And in broad strokes, this seems to be the case in a couple
places, as the mid 1400s also saw a group head west and found a new dynasty at the city of Khami,
once more trading in cattle and gold and building magnificent stoneworks. But as Great Zimbabwe lay
abandoned, the kingdom of Mwenemutapa back up north became the powerbrokers of east African
trade, to the amazement of European explorers who reveled in Mutapa’s riches. Hilariously, when the
Portuguese tried to muscle in and colonize the coast of Mozambique in the early 1500s,
it almost didn’t matter to the Mwenemutapa because they maintained full economic leverage over the
colonizers and carried on just as before, only losing their power because of their own dynastic
struggles a century later.
It was after these first encounters that Europeans expressed doubt that a civilization as impressive
as Great Zimbabwe could have possibly been created by Black Africans, and started spouting all kinds
of nonsense conspiracy theories from wayward Phoenician settlers to lost tribes of Israel.
Even as late as the 1970s, decades after Great Zimbabwe was conclusively proven to be of local
medieval origin, historians and official tourism brochures were censored into saying that there
was no proof that Black Africans could possibly have made it. Of course, we can see that this was
an insecure farce to justify a white-supremacist regime, but more constructively, the continuity
through early Shona settlers, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Khami, and Mutapa shows a society
growing and evolving through multiple states and several centuries to adapt and adjust for longterm
success. Great Zimbabwe is magnificent all on its own, but it takes on a greater brilliance when
we’re able to see it in the context of the broader African civilization who created it. I don’t
have a joke to end on that’s just a genuinely important historical takeaway. Don’t be racist,
you’ll look like an idiot.
Thank you so much for watching, and happy Black History Month. I had mentioned Great
Zimbabwe in passing on a couple of occasions in the past so I had a great time giving it
some proper coverage here. Thanks as always to our community of patrons,
whose names you can see scrolling along on screen, and I will see you all in the next video.