A Zimbabwean archaeologist reimagines the story of an African civilisation
economist.com
economist.com
It is one of those subjects where the intersection of religious fervour and scientific rigour has produced endless falsehoods - yet with every scrape in the dirt we get more and more truth behind human history.
As an armchair fan of archeological endeavours from Gobekli Tepe to the forests of the Amazon, I can only hope that the elevation of Great Zimbabwe in the human lexicon results in further enlightenment with regards to our human history. It is very rewarding to see the veils of christian political movements falling from the stage of archeological accomplishment. We need more of this.
Idk. why but people often forget that the race ideology (crossed with nationalism and religion) which is today often seen a "being a nazi thing" was very wide spread even before the German Nazis became a thing all around the western world (and also outside of the western world replacing "european-white supremacy" with e.g."japanese-asian supremacy", but that kinda doesn't matter for this discussion).
A good example how the mindset affected "historic" research for a long time, is how for a long time it was believed that in pre-human history in each step of evolution there where always a few "evolved" sub-subspecies from a human predecessor and only one survived "by itself/without mixing". Which as it turns out is complete bs as there was a constant interbreeding of such species and the modern human is a result of this interbreeding (sure some species traits dominated, but either way it wasn't still constant DNA exchange of sub-species, i.e. "pre-humans" which are noticeable more different then any two modern humans of different ethnicity).
Or do you consider that the rising economies and cultures of Africa are 'part of the west', now?
I think it says a lot that a non-European archeologist had to do the field work on this site to start to convince the world that the prejudiced conclusions made decades ago were incorrect.
I concur with you that people discount the racism of our cultures that existed prior to nazism - heck they do it with our extant cultures in the modern era too. There are plenty of examples in the modern era where racism and prejudice preclude an honest look at a nation states pre-history (cough Australia cough) and these, in many cases deep-rooted prejudices are most definitely an affliction of our modern era.
Which is why it is great to see a non-Western academic address the issue of Great Zimbabwe in a way that reveals the truth of the matter - naysayers in the entrenched, hallowed European halls be damned ..
de-westernization == removal of (modern) western researchers from the topic
Internationalization == adding researchers of many/all nations
Also I'm not so sure about the premise of "says a lot that a non-European archeologist had to do the field work on this site to start to convince the world".
EDIT: I'm also not saying it's not a problem.
I'm pretty sure I have seen "western" docus years ago which point out this problem (in general not necessary specific to that case).
He won 2 awards for his research, 1 in 2019 from Antiquity. Which is from the UK and so western.
I think most people want to find out the truth and that's it.
The problem was that there was not much similar evidence for this architecture to buy build nearby, so some archeologists had wrong conclusions.
It don't think anyone benefits from pushing a false dogma.
At least, i don't see how they could benefit x centuries afterwards.
On the contrary, the named archeologists could have had more success by acknowledging it's history ( even though they didn't acknowledged it) and helping investigation.
Because it was mentioned in the article that the original discovering western archeologists, who were incredulous that such advanced construction could have come from the 'races' in the era, completely overlooked the fact that these buildings could have been constructed by the local indigenous people, for decades, until a non-western-indoctrinated archeologist came along and provided the counter argument. It was a wealth of information made unavailable to the local culture because of prejudice and bigotry, plain and simple - and this has been seen time and again in western archeology, which is not innocent in the "racist prejudice" department.
>I think most people want to find out the truth and that's it.
I think it depends whether the truth aligns with your funders goals and purposes or not. Certainly in the 19th and 20th centuries there are countless examples of 'archeology' degrading itself for the purposes of the institutions from where the funds are derived. And even today we still have the heinous situation that cultural artifacts are still 'being protected' in predominantly white european institutions (museums) due to the prejudices of the institutions towards the people from where the artifacts were stolen.
The article doesn't say they are doing it on purpose. Some archeologists didn't align with his thinking because 1) other similar locations aren't there and 2) not understanding of the Shona culture.
2) Those institutions actually awarded him 2 times for his discoveries, making him the only person to win it twice. Do you have an indication of something factual except a disagreement on interpreting findings?
3) As far as I know, a lot of those artifacts are bought by museums because of a seller or given in custody by a private collector.
I don't know the circumstances of those transactions, but i don't even see how that's related to the article... ?
May I ask if this is a "close to heart" article?
Compare Great Zimbabwe to the 2000 year older Gate of Ishtar, or even the 3500 year older Ziggurat of Ur.
Even backwaters like Scandinavia had more impressive structures a millennium earlier, in the iron age, like Eketorp.
Stole, or bought? Increasingly common to erase all acquisition as theft because it happened a long time ago. Can think of other examples too. The famous cock from Cambridge "returned" a few months ago. For example
See also: Manhattan's "sale" for $24 of beads. Contemporary Americans spend years in court arguing that sums far less were stolen from them in far more legitimate "sales."
The government currently controlling the surrounding land? Ethnic tribalism? Genetic essentialism? Protection of the artifact? Exposure/accessibility of the artifact? ‘Feelings’-based reasons like ‘spiritual’ significance or paternalistic rich nations graciously returning things to the poors?
Much to ponder
They're more qualified to answer these questions than I am, but my layman's opinion is that a national museum in the country where the artifact originated seems like a reasonable first-blush recipient. There are, doubtless, exceptions.
Wouldn’t this boil down to a might-is-right approach in almost all cases? Don’t really see how a contemporary government annexing the land by force is much different than a foreigner simply taking the artifact. Other than that it might evoke more ethnic/tribalist gripes from people.
But less flippantly: it's no more "might-makes-right" than the original theft/"sale" was, and is arguably less so, given that national museums tend to survive regime changes (usually for nakedly political reasons, such as the incoming regime lashing its legitimacy to the country's heritage).
And on the aesthetic side: all things being equal I, a mostly disinterested Westerner, would rather see artifacts in their regional and cultural contexts than in a dimly lit room in the British Museum.
Clearly the specifics matter, but it gets more interesting when these 2 ‘sides’ have equally tenuous claim to the artifact, as IMO is quite often the case.
I suspect like in most ambiguous situations we’ll get a lot of politics/feelings based decision making. But again I don’t know, which is why I’m interested.
I have been to the British Museum and the lighting was excellent in all rooms.
As you can see, the discussion is already well advanced from the starting point you recommend.
I use NoScript to block unnecessary JavaScript on websites, so I'm used to pages failing to load. But this article's nice scrolling 3D animation works fine on mobile with only the 'economist.com' domain allowed to run JS.
Talk about a refreshing change of pace.
in its prime, from around 1200 to 1550, Great Zimbabwe was home to about 10,000 people. The state covered 1,779 acres, more than twice the area of New York’s Central Park.
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From Ancient Egypt to Carthage to the Malian Empire (with wealthy cities like Timbuktu) there are so many remarkable parts in Africa.
That seems... absolutely tiny? 7km^2, so a reasonably fit person could run around the entire country in an hour. Population of 10k at a time when the total population of Africa was in the tens of millions. Not a value judgement, but I'm honestly shocked how small those numbers are.
Rome was significantly more densely populated, but that can also be explained by geographic and economic factors (seafaring economies, &c.).
Edit: the area within the inner Servian Walls was ~1/3rd that of Great Zimbabwe (~2.5km^2).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian_Walls#/media/File:Map...
Why? Why do they feel the need to do this?
Because of a history of archeology degrading the people of the region, perhaps, and a desire to apply the same civilization-building moral standards to Africa as the rest of the world?
A 250 meter long wall, 11 meters tall .. made out of nothing but bricks (no mortar, remember) .. surviving mostly intact after 10 centuries? That is definitely a triumph of engineering, by anyones standards ..
See basically any technical media created by women for thousands more examples of this. Some woman makes a video about coding or something and people focus on how she doesn't use vim efficiently enough, she doesn't have a good enough mic set up, she is only working on "basic crud apps" etc etc.
The Great Zimbabwe site was built by a people who clearly had more understanding of the world of physics during their time than we allowed for in our pro-European narratives, so far.
The same is true of many, many other sites around the world, which don't fit the narrative of western academics' world view of themselves and their Eureopean cultures, and which undermine the perspective that prior civilizations were primitive in their approach to technology and application of scientific discoveries.
The hubris and arrogance of this field is slowing being peeled away, layer by layer, and replaced with facts which update the context of human history. Its not without some relief that I personally note that this is no longer the exclusive purview of european academics with an agenda ..
The term "civilization" has a technical meaning in archaeology which includes things such as permanent settlement and a hierarchical social order. Walls and drainage are absolutely treated as evidence of civilization when discussing other ancient civilizations such as the Sumerians and the Maya.
The fact that Great Zimbabwe is not as sophisticated as other civilizations of the same time-period is a moot point because the thing that is interesting about it isn't how it stacks up to contemporary Eurasian society but the fact that it apparently is an entirely home-grown civilization in southern Africa.
Then why call it "sophisticated"? Nobody would have had a problem with the article if it just stuck to proof of civilization. Even an extremely small enclosed area like this (not even a village) is still proof of people working together, ornaments speak for themselves, etc. That is clearly a civilization. They clearly had some engineering skill. But "sophisticated" and "triumph" are pathetic exaggerations which result in the exact opposite effect than what was intended.
Synonyms for sophisticated:
baroque, byzantine, complex, complicate, complicated, convoluted, daedal, elaborate, intricate, involute, involved, knotty, labyrinthian, labyrinthine, tangled
My house is sophisticated to the point where doing any electrical rewiring is a pain. Hiding it all in the walls? Whose bright idea was that? And encasing nails in plastic for the nailgun? No thanks, I’ll use a hammer and try to spew less plastic on the ground. Et cetera.
[0]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/sophisticated
It is not obvious to me. Can you to tell us more about why the context is not provided, if you are better informed?
> To black nationalist groups, Great Zimbabwe became an important symbol of achievement by Africans: reclaiming its history was a major aim for those seeking majority rule. In 1980 the new internationally recognised independent country was renamed for the site, and its famous soapstone bird carvings were retained from the Rhodesian flag and Coat of Arms as a national symbol and depicted in the new Zimbabwean flag. After the creation of the modern state of Zimbabwe in 1980, Great Zimbabwe has been employed to mirror and legitimise shifting policies of the ruling regime. At first it was argued that it represented a form of pre-colonial "African socialism" and later the focus shifted to stressing the natural evolution of an accumulation of wealth and power within a ruling elite.
These are important details that the article does not mention. I presume that's to heighten the appeal of "Great Zimbwawe" to other nationalists who share similar insecurities about their state's eminence in the world but don't actually benefit from Zimbabwe's internal politics.
Don't get me wrong, the actual ruins look like a noteworthy accomplishment. But exaggerating it into a wonder of antiquity seems like a ploy by a small group of people to gain clout at the expense of African history. As other commenters and wikipedia points out, Rhodesia also played the same game with the ruins, just in reverse.
Peoples investment in the authority and altitude of their own cultures is like a giant boat that won't be turned by anything but a major current. We are but waves on these arrogant bows, friend.
I'm not sure how to phrase this without being accused of dog-whistling, but I do think there's a subversive effort, especially in the media, in painting the history of Africa into something that it's not.
Not sure where you're getting the idea that Mugabe is fondly remembered or that Ian Smith wasn't a racist either tbh
In music African Americans have thrived and lifted each other up and created all kinds of amazing music.
Why isn't this repeated in film industry?
Numerous filmmakers have come from literally off the street.
Tarantino and Kevin Smith and Spike Lee all came from pretty much nothing
Well, I'm not sure how you come by that conclusion. I do hope you are familiar with the civilizations of Kush, Aksum, Congo, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, etc. If you are, it seems disingenuous on your part to claim that African history is being portrayed as something it is not.
If anything, popular depictions of African history are woefully lacking in the knowledge of these and other civilizations that existed in ancient times. We need more dissemination of what is known to academia regarding African civilizations, and more research into these barely explored sites.
The exhibit and movie you mentioned are clearly meant to be fiction, so I'm not sure what they have to with a supposed "painting the history of Africa into something that it's not"
You could also add the Swahili coast to this list.
Or was it primarily tribal conquering/uniting?
In case it’s the latter, then your slant of:
> northern Mediterranean/Nile influenced groups
is weird. Many European cultures were influenced by the Romans, who were influenced by the Greeks, who were influenced by other cultures. The flow of ideas across time and space is what actually gives rise to civilizations.
So what if an African civilization was influenced by another civilization? Does that make it less meaningful?
As for what civilizations Africa had, you can read about Kerma/Napata/Kush/Nubia, Aksum, Kongo, Swahili coast, Ghana/Mali/Songhai, Kanem-Bornu, Egypt, etc. However, I suspect you have your mind made up, hence the dismissive “Or was it primarily tribal conquering/uniting?”
The idea to use European civilisational and technological development as the measure for all other places is also absurd, because you could sample various points in time where e.g. Britain was a place of warring tribes with pointy sticks while China or the Middle East had thriving civilisations. Real life history is not a game of Civ where everyone starts at the same point and races through a bunch of predetermined milestones.
Inoculation, iron metallurgy and myriad practices in agriculture including rice cultivation and terraced irrigation. There are also technologies not adopted that are still pretty cool, including talking drums.
That's a complicated question that I'm not qualified to answer (Congo maybe?), but I'd point out that even in the ancient near east, trade and contact with foreigners preceded the development of civilization in those regions and European civilization especially owes a lot of its success to contact with outside civilizations. So the fact the most well-known African civilizations had regular trade contacts with Eurasia should not do much to diminish the accomplishments of those civilizations as such.
For example, it's possible that iron smelting began in the Sahel in Africa, and from there spread to the Near East/Mediterranean rather than the other way around which would mean that Africa entered the iron age well before the rest of the world. [1]
Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves, who were forced to mine gold and made up much of the Empire's military. Slavery in Mali continues to this day with an estimated 200,000 people held in direct servitude to a master [1]. Maybe that's why we don't hear so much about the Mali Empire, or the Ghana Empire for that matter. Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.
Oh wait, we continually hear about the glorious "exploits" of the Vikings.
As for this supposed "Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves", where's your evidence for that?
>As for this supposed "Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves", where's your evidence for that?
Again I'll refer you to my original comment, specfically the "before colonization" section of the Slavery in Mali Wikipedia link. It cites various books and articles written and researched by professional historians.
Firstly, it seems highly unlikely that the wealth of the West African empires was primarily from slave use and trading. This is an argument that is made by people who do not actually understand the region and its history. Even the eminent Henry Louis Gates makes a similar error in an article [1], where he says:
> the Asante Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold.
The Ashanti could not have been importing gold, since they were rather the source of much of the gold in the region. The wikipedia article on the Ashanti Empire [2] contains this statement:
> Before the Ashanti Kingdom had contact with Europeans, it had a flourishing trade with other African states due to the Ashanti gold wealth.
More generally, this is what [3] has to say about the economy of the west African empires with respect to gold:
> From the seventh to the eleventh century, trans-Saharan trade linked the Mediterranean economies that demanded gold—and could supply salt—to the sub-Saharan economies, where gold was abundant. ...Increased demand for gold in the North Islamic states, which sought the raw metal for minting, prompted scholarly attention to Mali and Ghana, the latter referred to as the “Land of Gold.” For instance, geographer al-Bakri described the eleventh-century court at Kumbi Saleh, where he saw gold-embroidered caps, golden saddles, shields and swords mounted with gold, and dogs’ collars adorned with gold and silver. The Soninke managed to keep the source of their gold (the Bambuk mines, most notably) secret from Muslim traders. Yet gold production and trade were important activities that undoubtedly mobilized hundreds of thousands of African people. Leaders of the ancient kingdom of Ghana accumulated wealth by keeping the core of pure metal, leaving the unworked native gold to be marketed by their people.
Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading. And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves. And gold was much more likely to bring in a lot of income than slave trading. Clearly, the source of Mansa Musa's great wealth was gold. This is attested to by the story of gold losing its value in Egypt because he gave so much of it away during his pilgrimage to mecca.
So I don't know where you get this idea that the wealth of the west African empires was primarily based on slave trading.
Secondly, even if slave trading was widespread, other empires and nations have done worse, and we still hear about their exploits. We hear about the supposed heroism of the Vikings and Columbus and his cohort all the time, even though they committed many, atrocities, including exterminations and genocides.
So your thesis fails on both counts.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html
>You said the reason we don't hear about those West African empires is that their wealth was built on the back on slaves.
Here is the sentence from my original comment which I asked you to re-read:
>Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.
To be painstakingly clear, we don't hear much about the Mali Empire in popular discourse because their wealth was built on the back of slaves, AND the slaveholders were black. In the USA where I live, a dominant political framing device is that white people are responsible for slavery, period. The existence of rich black African empires built on slavery and conquest challenges this narrative. Therefore these empires, despite the examples they provide of black Africans building powerful, complex, and influential civilizations, are not frequently mentioned.
>Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading.
It was mostly mined by slaves. See sources cited in that article I asked you to read. I said Mansa Musa's wealth was "built almost entirely by slaves", not "by slave trading." You're confusing your words for my own and responding to things I never said.
>And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves.
I see we're at the part where you just make stuff up. Here is what actual historians say; from "African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa" [0] by Michael A. Gomez [1], a recent and excellent history of the Mali Empire:
>Mali as a critical source of servile labor is overshadowed in the immediacy of the eighth/fourteenth century by its mineral resources, so much so that the extensive nature of slavery in Mali is not readily grasped. But from every indication, slavery was entrenched and ubiquitous, hidden in plain sight.
>While estimates of the enslaved accompanying the mansā vary, all agree there were thousands upon thousands, with several reports particularly taken with the high number of females, perhaps as many as fourteen thousand. Given their vulnerability to sexual exploitation, they may have been viewed by Egyptians as a veritable harem in motion, a misogynistic moveable feast, the largest ever witnessed.
>As for soldiers, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa reports the mansā was always accompanied by 300 armed slaves, while al-‘Umarī distinguishes between these 300 and the thirty mamlūks or “Turks and others” brought from Egypt.
>The enslaved served in other capacities, working in the salt mines of Taghaza and, as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa records, both enslaved men and women (al-‘abīd wa-‘l-khadam) performed the arduous work of mining copper at Takedda (and maybe “Zkry”).
>Yet another task assigned to the enslaved, male and female, was transporting commodities. As previously cited, Ibn Khaldūn mentions the Malians “use only slave women and men for transport but for distant journeys such as the Pilgrimage they have mounts,” a convention confirmed by Valentim Fernandes, who wrote that “each [Jula] merchant has with him 100 or 200 black slaves or more, to carry the salt on their heads from Jenne to the gold mines, and to return from there with gold.
>This mostly qualitative evidence indicates slavery was rapidly evolving in the region, and while a more thorough analysis awaits the recovery of greater detail with the emergence of imperial Songhay, what can be stated here is that these differentiated servile deployments—from domestics to soldiers, and from office holders to their exploitation in mining and possibly agriculture—represent, in the aggregate, something distinct from earlier epochs in Ghana and Gao. There is a noticeable increase in their numbers as well as the variety of their occupations under Mali, further suggesting such expansion was part and parcel of the imperial project in West Africa, and predicated on such myriad mobilization.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/African-Dominion-History-Empire-Medie...
I'm having doubts regarding that art exhibit titled "Afrofuturism" which is "speculating about history which never was". My main issue is that the exhibit name contains "futurism" which would imply anything related to a potential future, not past history.
Reluctant to dig around on the web as I sense some bullshit logic in the previous statement.
Ian Smith's own words and actions are all the paint that's needed.
I’ve never met one in person, and never met an actual Zimbabwean who believed such nonsense.
Black Panther...was a good movie? And people liked it? I'm a little confused about your "in the media" comment--wouldn't the box office receipts represent, you know, what the market actually liked?
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with revisiting _actual_ history, which (as https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/06/27/medieval-africa-... points point) had been often significantly misrepresented.
There's a painting of the Congolese ambassador to the Dutch Republic in the Danish National Gallery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait_of_Don_Miguel_de_Cast...). The history of this painting reflects the significant political power held by West African kingdoms--I for one (having had a standard American historical education) was struck by how little I knew about the complex cultural and political institutions in sub-Saharan Africa before and during the early slave trade.
In a way, it's not surprising; as David Graeber wrote in "Debt", it was culturally convenient for Europeans--who at the time in many ways appeared quite culturally backwards!--to misrepresent the power and cultural dynamics and justify their own barbarism. In that light, while we certainly should hold research everywhere to the same evidentiary standards, we shouldn't be surprised to learn about more sophisticated cultural histories in Zimbabwe as well, or other places skipped over by the standard history.
(Another odd aspect of my American education: I was given the distinct impression that civilization went from Greece to Rome to Enlightenment Europe to America. Strange how nobody questioned who preserved the thinking of all those Greek philosophers after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.)
But just because you don't know something--just because the history you were taught must be revised--doesn't make it revisionist history.
Ian Smith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Smith) was a racist. He let a white supremacists government to UDI and civil war because he believed that black people were incapable of self-government. It doesn't get much more obviously racist than that.
The desired end-point narrative changes with the political objective.
120 years ago Cecil Rhodes was keen to prove that Zimbabwe was fantastically advanced for its time and place, because it would prove it could not have been built by the locals, and therefore he could take the land from the present occupants, because they had taken it from someone else.
As Michener puts it in his (fictionalized) account:
"So now, if Rhodes could prove that no black society had ever been advanced enough to have built Zimbabwe, his theft of Matabeleland would seem more palatable. It would, after all, be rather ugly to have stolen a kingdom in order to bring it civilization if that kingdom had once been civilized."
Why? I think it's to make themselves feel better in comparison. They get some kind of happiness or satisfaction from elevating their own ancestors, or degrading others'.
Because the still common belief that Africa was in a very primitive state before the Europeans showed up and "civilized" them.
It was little clues in the text that gave it away, like this: "That is because, says Mr Chirikure, Great Zimbabwe should be a “symbol”, not just of Africa’s power and potential, but of how outsiders have too often told Africans’ stories—and got them wrong."
If the prevailing idea is that this relatively rudimentary technology was too advanced for the people of the region, then this discovery is evidence to disprove that. It doesn't have to be "sophisticated" on an absolute scale. Only relative to expectation.
Imagine a 5 yr old wrote working Java code. Any working program, even the equivalent of a drainage ditch, would be worthy of praise. And something as simple as a linked list could be described as a "sophisticated technique" (for a 5 yr old)
Understanding context and reading the article are, as ever, the keys.
(write as in write down, not write as invent)
I think that we are so conditioned to have shitty experiences, that we brace ourselves at the first sign of multimedia.