Who built Zimbabwe? According to some King Solomon is the responsible. Others say its the Queen of Sheba. Archaeologists claim to have had the answer for years…
“Rhodesia! What a foolish name for our country,” they said. “It shall disappear off the map! We shall have a proper African name at last: Zimbabwe!” The name Rhodesia memorialized the great British imperialist and colonizer Cecil John Rhodes, clearly a symbol of white supremacy that they undertook to perpetuate in southern Africa. To them “Zimbabwe” connoted nothing more than a curious stone ruin, located in the south-central part of the country, an interesting tourist attraction whose origins are unknown but interesting to speculate about.
—Lemme tell you, the Zimbabweans did not build this and is likely to have been linked to the slave traders and shit to do with some monarchy in North Africa. Come on man, they had not even discovered the f***ing wheel before the white man came to Africa and mud huts all over the country, testimony they had absolutely no masonry skills. This was an advanced culture that died out or left the region. Seeing they have f***ed up much of the country, it is not a legacy to be proud of, you know this part;
Eventually the city was largely abandoned and fell into ruin….
One would expect in a culture of oral tradition to have found more of these villages when the white man arrived and also occupied. It is not like there were square rocks lying around to build with. One does not abandon a fortress this well constructed even if an earthquake caused its demise.
Their forefathers may have built it but they were supervised and probably slaves IMO. In 1900+ years of this “advanced” civilisation, one expects to see progression not regression. The big question is WHY did we not find this?
They still build mud huts as THAT is the oral tradition passed down. Then when the owner dies, they burn the frigging thing down.
I suppose in another 200 years folk will see further (modern) ruins and claimants made to the engineering ingenuity of the blacks in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It does seem there is a political twist to the history of these ruins.—click image for source…
Photographs of Zimbabwe usually emphasize its most remarkable feature, a conical windowless tower built ofsmall granite blocks. It rises among tumble down walls, all enclosed by a monumental wall that is thirty feet high and tapers from a thickness of seventeen feet at the base to about a yard at the top. Not far from this elliptical enclosure is a kopje- one of the steep, rocky hills characteristic of this part of the world- topped with ruined granite walls. The whole place looks mysterious and beautiful as well, for the warm grey granite blocks, which fit trimly together without mortar, are overgrown in places by lush pink vine and shadowed by graceful trees.
—Antique (Vintage) Original Postcard, Standard Size (3.5″ by 5.5″), Real Photograph, —click image for source…
For many years the Great Riddle was a subject much talked about. Were the builders Phoenicians? The Queen of Sheba? Portuguese? Some extinct or forgotten race? Or was there, after all, something to the theory that Zimbabwe was the work of Africans themselves? Of course, such an obscure archaeological question was loaded with consequences since race and politics was the locus of all and any flashpoints in white Rhodesia. It was far from idle pleasantry since a person’s answer was likely to be taken as a quick index to political bias. After all, for to contend that Africans could of their own initiative build so rugged and impressive a structure as Zimbabwe was to suggest that one’s houseboy has a capacity for building something substantial, too-possibly even a government.
In looking at the evidence, the record begins in the sixteenth century, when a Portuguese historian gave the first account. But the Portuguese may have obtained their information second hand from the Arabs, who for centuries had been venturing inland from the port of Sofal in present day Mozambique. Until about a hundred and fifty years ago, geographers found nothing new to say about Zimbabwe, unless, as in the case of an imaginative eighteenth-century Englishman named George Miller, they made it up. ( to be continued)…
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