One
of the tragedies of the modern colonization of Africa has been the reinvention
of African history in a European image. Prior to Portuguese incursions, from
around the 1500s, Europeans knew very little about the geography and culture of
Africa. It was a “dark continent,” and most European knowledge had been
received through the limited filters of the Bible, classical histories, and
other fragmented sources. As Western interests and colonies became established
across Africa, it was presented as a place ripe for discovery by the civilizing
forces of modern empires. But in so doing, African history was largely written
within a Eurocentric framework. As a result, many aspects of that history were
distorted or ignored.
The
Western “discovery” of Africa from the 16th century onwards, was underpinned
by two basic assumptions—both deeply racist. The first held that black people
were incapable of understanding or writing a history of their own; therefore,
white people had to discover and write it for them. But the second assumption
was even more insidious—black people were deemed incapable of having a
history. Thus, throughout the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the history
of Egypt, of the Bible, and of other sources with direct bearing on the history
of both the Middle East and Africa, were reinterpreted and reinvented to present
a view of ancient civilizations of which the West was the sole inheritor.1
One
astonishing example of this re-writing of history is the treatment of Great
Zimbabwe, the greatest stone monument in sub-Saharan Africa. Great Zimbabwe,
situated in the southeast of Zimbabwe, is a massive site, which appears to have
housed over 16,000 people in its heyday.2
It is the largest of more than 100 sites constructed in broadly similar ways
across southern Africa, which collectively have come to be termed
“zimbabwe,” from the Shona term madzimbabwe, meaning “venerated
houses.” The monument consists of a large series of enclosures, constructed
and surrounded by elaborate drystone walls.
Archaeological
work throughout the 20th century has established the stratigraphic sequences,
revealed large amounts of luxury items—including imports from as far afield as
India and China—, and firmly dated the later levels to the medieval period,
1200-1500 BCE. It is now accepted that Great Zimbabwe was the center of a
powerful medieval southern African state, with strong roots in indigenous
African traditions. However, despite a hundred years of work at the site, this
view has only been accepted relatively recently.
Until
modern archaeologists were able to excavate the great sites of earlier epochs,
understandings of the history of such places were largely confined to
interpretations of written and oral sources. Several sources extant during the
time the Portuguese arrived on southern African coastlines indicate traditions
placing Great Zimbabwe—and the territory it ruled—in an explicitly Arabian
context of trade and influence. Some sources even declared the monument to be
the Biblical Ophir—the land of the Queen of Sheba.3
Given
the general paucity of written records of the first European encounters in
eastern Africa, the range of extant sources needs to be evaluated carefully.
Nonetheless, the Europeans themselves encountered a region under strong Arabic
influence. Such influences appear to be confirmed by the archaeology at Great
Zimbabwe: the number of exotic imported items at the site, and the clear
evidence for its role in trading routes with coastal networks, would indicate
that Great Zimbabwe represented an African city whose pre-eminence was bound up
in medieval trade routes centered on the Indian Ocean.
When
the British colonized Rhodesia in the late 19th century, however, the subtleties
of this evidence were dismissed and reworked to create a racist myth. Many
argued that Great Zimbabwe was built by Arabs, probably Phoenicians; and,
reiterating earlier claims, may have been the palace of the Queen of Sheba
herself. This was the case, so the thinking went, for two main reasons. The
first was because black Africans couldn’t build anything so sophisticated. The
second was because, as a small, sea-based imperial nation, the British had much
in common with the Phoenicians; and as a Christian nation, they also laid claim
to be the heirs of Biblical civilization. Hence, anything done by
“civilizing” influences in Africa must have, if only indirectly, been done
in association with superior British culture itself.4
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Inside
the walls of Great Zimbabwe
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The
early archaeological adventures at Great Zimbabwe are shocking testaments to
this approach. The first archaeologist at the site in 1871, Carl Mauch, declared
Great Zimbabwe to be of Arabic origin, because he found some wood used in the
construction of the site that was very like the wood of his pencil. Therefore,
he concluded, the wood must be cedar from Lebanon and must have been brought by
Phoenicians. It didn’t take long for Phoenicians, and hence the builders of
Great Zimbabwe, to become “white men.” Once Rhodes had colonized Mashonaland
in 1890, he hired J. Theodore Bent to investigate the monument, followed by the
appointment of Richard Hall as curator. Hall, desperate to excavate the site to
prove its Arabic origins, proceeded to destroy much of the deposits because it
represented the “filth and decadence of the Kaffir occupation.”5
The
British South Africa Company was forced to dismiss Hall, but much of the damage
had been done. David Randall-MacIver, a former student of Flinders Petrie, was
then called in to investigate. Randall-MacIver quickly concluded that former mud
dwellings within the stone enclosures “are unquestionably African in every
detail and belong to a period which is fixed by foreign imports as, in general,
medieval.”6
This view has been reiterated by all subsequent archaeological work, but many
Europeans who remained in southern Africa refused to believe it.
In
this way, the history of Great Zimbabwe became politicized around views that
were European in origin and interest. The now established view of the
monument—that it is indigenous in origin—has profound symbolic importance to
Zimbabweans, since the monument has become the symbol of black national
liberation from colonialism. But, as several commentators have pointed out, this
in turn represents a new form of the politicization of African heritage; one
which is also in danger of ignoring aspects of the history of the site that
don’t fit easily with its contemporary symbolic role.7
Principal
among these are those features that do point to Arabic and Middle Eastern
influence. We have already briefly explored the range of oral histories that
point to Arabic influence in medieval Africa. To that, we can add archaeological
material confirming the role of Great Zimbabwe in trade networks centered on the
Indian Ocean. Moreover, oral tribal histories in southern Africa also point to
complex histories about the monument’s origins.
As
Tudor Parfitt—an anthropologist at the School of Oriental and African Studies
in London—has documented, several southern African tribes claim to be the
descendants of those who built Great Zimbabwe.8
They include the Shona, the largest tribe in eastern Zimbabwe; the Venda, who
occupy territory in Zimbabwe and southwards in northern South Africa; and the
Lemba, a tribe whose members are scattered across southern Africa. Remarkably,
the Lemba claim to both have built Great Zimbabwe and to have Middle
Eastern origins, since the Lemba claim that they are Jewish. The Lemba practice
a range of rituals and food taboos that certainly appear to indicate Middle
Eastern influence: they circumcise their boys, they refuse to eat pork, and they
will only eat meat slaughtered by other Lemba. The Lemba have long claimed
Jewish origins. Early ethnographies indicate they were making this claim before
missions had brought a Christian influence to bear in the region. Recent
experiments indicate that the Lemba claim to have Semitic roots has some basis
in genetic fact: over half of Lemba genes in some sub-clans appear to have
characteristics linking them to Middle Eastern origins, characteristics passed
down through the Y (male) chromosome.9
Much
recent work, therefore, indicates complex histories in relation to Great
Zimbabwe, in which medieval African chiefdoms developed alongside and in the
context of influences from Arabic groups, including those who may have converted
to Judaism. This would explain the evidence at the site: in particular, the ways
African elites consolidated power over a state framework buttressed by
indigenous production of commodities such as cattle, gold, and iron on the one
hand, and by the trade in exotic items from the East on the other. Parfitt has
suggested the ancestors of the Lemba may have been a Semitic group, well known
in medieval Africa for their trading, masonry, and metal-working capacities, who
intermarried with indigenous Africans and occupied a privileged position among
the Venda royal family that controlled Great Zimbabwe.10
In
being subsumed to a European framework, the history of Africa has frequently
been written in a racist context. Yet the evidence from Great Zimbabwe indicates
a rich and deeply textured history, in which the fortunes of Middle Eastern and
African civilizations were closely intertwined. Understanding that history is
therefore also a process of claiming it, since the pre-colonial dynamics within
and between Africa and the Middle East are key to understanding the subsequent
history of these regions. Middle Eastern and African scholars have a rich
terrain in which to explore the complexities of the background and origins of
their own societies. The question then becomes whether such scholars will have
sufficient resources and capacity to be able to do so, or whether history will
continue to be produced in Eurocentric contexts only, as part of the ongoing
burden of civilization.
Kate
Prendergast, is a British
freelance researcher and journalist with a particular interest in African
politics and development. Your emails will be forwarded to her by contacting the
editor at: bridge@islam-online.net.
[1]
See for example, Martin Bernal, 1987, Black Athena, The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilisation, Vintage.
[2]
Peter Mitchell, “The
Great Enclosure,” Great Zimbabwe, African Studies, University of
Oxford.
[3]
Peter Tyson, “The
Mystery of Great Zimbabwe,” The Lost Tribes of Israel, Nova, Public
Broadcasting Service.
[4]
Tudor Parfitt, 2000, Journey to the Vanished City: The Search for a Lost
Tribe of Israel, Vintage.
