Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Great Zimbabwe

As trade with the Indian ocean grew in scale and gold became a major export from the interior while Indian cloth was imported, the nearer peoples on the eastern highlands of present day Zimbabwe organised trading networks to their own benefit and the routes to the ocean were taken over by Great Zimbabwe and Khami. The walled structures of Great Zimbabwe, replicated to a lesser extent for hundreds of miles to the north and south and including the Lovedu, were known as madzimbahwe, the Shona term for the residence of a chief. Most of these stone walled structures are on the edge of the highland plateau in present day Zimbabwe, looking over the lowlands of the Limpopo and Sabi rivers to the south and east and the Zambezi to the north. Garlake describes the structure now known as the Elliptical building thus ‘on a low granite shelf stands the greatest structure of Great Zimbabwe, once known to the Karanga as ‘the house of the great woman’ or Mumbahuru. The outer wall of this building is over 800 feet lng, 17 feet thick and 32 feet high…it is by far the largest single prehistoric structure in sub-Saharan Africa and has been estimated to contain 188,000 cubic feet of stonework, more than in all the rest of the ruins combined’ (1973: 27). Early visitors to the ruins, including the German traveller Carl Mauch, were convinced that the ruins had been built by the Phoenicians and were the residence of the biblical Queen of Sheba. Garlake records that on his last visit to the ruins, Mauch cut some wood from the collapsed lintels of the doorways of the Elliptical building and found it reddish, scented and unaffected by insects ‘similar to the wood of his pencil’ Mauch claimed that the wood was cedarwood, ‘ brought by the Phoenicians from Lebanon’, he surmised that ‘the great woman who built the rondeau was none other than the Queen of Sheba’. Garlake notes that the properties of the wood Mauch found are similar to those of Spirostachys Africana, or Cape sandalwood, a local hardwood used elsewhere in building the walls of the elliptical building and mentioned by Wilmsen as an important trade wood in the Kalahari (1989). Cecil Rhodes took up the fantasy of the Queen of Sheba having bought plundered objects, such as a soapstone bird, from Great Zimbabwe from the German trader, Posselt. Rhodes suggested ‘Zimbabye is an old Phoenician residence’ and that the peacocks of the Bible could be read as parrots, green parrots being common in the area. The fascination of Europeans with Great Zimbabwe was not so much with the ruins, which they did not understand, as with the gold ornaments and objects found associated with numerous burials some at Great Zimbabwe and at sites such as DhloDhlo, Mundie, Chumunungwa and Mtelegwa ruins. Here were revealed skeletons buried with gold necklaces, bangles, gold wire and beads but the hoards of gold the prospectors hoped for did not materialize.