The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  When Theodore Bent arrived here a few months later the guns captured from the Portuguese were still on display in the British compound. Bent then reveals: ‘Mr Swan had constructed a map of the route from observations and bearings taken at every possible opportunity by day and by night. And at the same time we had formed opinions on the country from our own point of view.’ He adds, sounding as though he was party to the whole plot:

  Umtali [the BSAC frontier post] is the natural land terminus of this route and the British South Africa Company hope to call it Manica and to make it the capital of that portion of Manicaland which they so dextrously, to use an Africander word, ‘jumped’ from the Portuguese.

  There is a legend still told that the defenders of this fort of Massi Kessi were obliged to cast bullets out of gold nuggets when cheaper material came to an end. After this the inland country was practically abandoned to the savages. Old treaties existed but were not renewed; lethargy seemed to have taken entire possession of the few remaining Portuguese who were left here, a lethargy from which they were rudely awakened by the advent of the Chartered Company.

  What better argument do we want for the reoccupation of this country by a more enterprising race than these forts abandoned and in ruins, and the treaties with savage chiefs long since neglected – consigned to national archives?

  Here we see a secondary use being put to the research Rhodes had paid Dr Theal to do. It was not ‘pure’ research to feed Rhodes’ interest in Ophir. He was checking on the validity of old Portuguese treaties! And we should also remember that Theodore Bent’s brief from the Royal Geographical Society certainly did not extend to scouting rail routes for Rhodes or evaluating Portuguese treaties.

  But if Bent was a spy or an agent for Rhodes it was all about to go very wrong. Queen Victoria was not pleased with any of this and she ordered her government to set aside all Rhodes’ most recent ‘treaties’, although not the original one with Lobengula, and agreed a demarcation of territory with the Portuguese. It created Portuguese East Africa and left Rhodesia landlocked for all time.

  Theodore Bent thereafter travels not to Great Zimbabwe, where there is still much work to be done, but to Fort Salisbury where he is welcomed and entertained by the administrators of the British South Africa Company who are now operating to all intents and purposes as the government of Mashonaland.

  ‘The same motives, namely the thirst for gold,’ Bent comments philosophically ‘which created the hoary walls of Zimbabwe and the daub huts of Fort Salisbury, probably the oldest and the youngest buildings erected for the purpose by mankind, ever keen after that precious metal which has had so remarkable an influence on generation after generation of human atoms.’

  But behind the philosophising lurk unpalatable home truths about Shona gold. So little of it is left, the whole occupation is turning into a costly farce. Bent attends a depressing first anniversary party:

  A grand dinner was given to about eighty individuals at the hotel to celebrate the event: representatives of the military, civil, and business communities were bidden; gold prospectors, mining experts, men of established and questionable reputation – all were there, and the promoters underwent superhuman difficulties in catering for so many guests, and gave fabulous prices for a sufficiency of wine, spirits and victuals properly to celebrate the occasion.

  It was ostensibly a social occasion to celebrate an ostensibly auspicious occasion; but one after-dinner speech became more intemperate than the other: the authorities were loudly abused for faults committed by them, real or imaginary; well-known names, when pronounced, were hooted and hissed; and the social gathering developed as the evening went on, into a wild demonstration of discontent.

  Finally, Bent goes back to work. From contacts made at this party he learns that the prospectors are mostly not prospecting at all but simply looking for abandoned native workings and then burrowing down in the hope of finding the reef. In the process they have discovered dozens of zimbabwes. Almost the only recreation for a prospector is to loot ruins. The Bents mount a new expedition on horseback to the pretty Mazoe valley 25 miles from Fort Salisbury, where in the company of a gold prospector, Mr Fleming, they inspect a row of vertical mine shafts clogged with debris which Bent presumes are connected underground. He also concludes from the debris and large trees growing in the blocked shafts that they have not been worked for years.

  On the hill slopes a mile and a half away they come upon a shaft which Fleming had cleared to a depth of 55 feet into which, with some difficulty, they are able to climb and there find ancient horizontal shafts connecting a maze of holes bored into the gold-bearing quartz. Shafts in the nearby Hartley hills go as deep as 80 feet. Bent concludes that these ancient workers had followed reefs with all the skill of European miners: ‘All about here the ground is honeycombed with old shafts of a similar nature, indicated now by the same round depressions in straight lines along the reef where different shafts have been sunk; in fact the output of gold in centuries long gone by must have been enormous.’

  Returning to Fort Salisbury, and talking to prospectors whenever he can, Bent concludes that these old workings extend up and down the country wherever there is gold-bearing quartz. Very often they are associated with zimbabwes – miles and miles of them up the Mazoe valley, all along the Nswezewe river, in the Tati district, Hartley and Fort Victoria areas: ‘Everywhere in short where the pioneer prospectors have as yet penetrated, overwhelming proof of the extent of the ancient industry is brought to light.’

  One of these hunter-prospectors, Mr E.A. Maund, attends the Royal Geographical Society to give a report on the Mswezwe district: ‘On all sides there was testimony of the enormous amount of work that had been done by the ancients for the production of gold. Here, as on the Mazoe and at Umtali, tens of thousands of slaves must have been at work taking out the softer parts of the casings of the reefs and millions of tons have been overturned in their search for gold.’ This reference to slaves stems from the discovery of long lines of ‘crushing stones’ placed at regular intervals around the workings. Bent observes that there are depictions on Egyptian monuments of gangs of slaves at work chained together in rows. The practice is also described by Diodorus.

  The Mining Commissioner in the Mazoe district takes Bent’s party to see the perfect model of an ancient zimbabwe-protected mining enclave. In a high valley they meet and dine on eland steaks with the white prospectors working the new ‘Yellow Jacket’ mine on the site of extensive ancient workings. Overlooking the site they climb a kopje to a ruin where the remaining walls are constructed with a ‘wonderful regularity’ to rival Great Zimbabwe. Enough remain standing to show that this gem of a fort had been almost 20 feet in diameter.

  Already, however, creeping doubts are setting in that all this might be a literal ‘flash in the pan’ at least so far as large-scale modern mining is concerned. ‘Strictures,’ Bent reports, ‘have been passed by experts that the gold reefs in the Mazoe valley “pinched out” and did other disagreeable things which they ought not to do.’ With rare foresight he also goes beyond this and forecasts: ‘The Mazoe valley is one of the pet places in Mashonaland: the views in every direction are exquisite, water is abundant everywhere, and verdure rich; and if the prospectors are disappointed in their search for gold, and find that the ancient have exhausted the place, they will have at any rate, valuable properties from an agricultural point of view.’ Which ignores, of course, the fact that the Rudd concession was restricted to mineral exploitation.

  Rhodesia did go on to build quite a healthy little gold industry but it was never eldorado. By the time I arrived in the Mazoe valley it was famous for its irrigated citrus and wonderful orange squash.

  Theodore Bent did, however, decide that the prolific ancient gold workings in the Mazoe valley (to the extent that he was prepared to go along with such romantic descriptions) were probably the King Solomon’s mines of ancient legend. Bent points out that this was also the opinion of the Portuguese writer, Couto: ‘The r
ichest mines are those of Massapa, where they show the Abyssinian mine from which the Queen of Sheba took the greater part of the gold which she went to offer to the temple of Solomon. It is Ophir, for the Kaffirs call it Fur and the Moors Afur. The veins of gold are so big … they expand with such force … they raise the roots of trees two feet.’ These riches, says Couto, are traded at three Portuguese markets: ‘Luanhe, thirty-five leagues from Tete south between two small rivers which join and are called Masouvo [Mazoe]; Bacoto, forty leagues from Tete [on the Zambesi river]; and Massapa, fifty leagues from Tete up the said river Masouvo.’

  Bent calls this a ‘quaint legend’ but concedes that there is ample evidence of ancient alien influence to be found in the old shafts. At the new Jumbo mine in the Mazoe valley he is given fragments of delft pottery recovered when the shaft was cleared. Scraps of Nankin pottery are found in the same spoil. Bent is able to successfully barter for some large Venetian glass beads ‘centuries old; the ancient trade goods given by traders to the subjects of the Monomotapa’.

  And then he appears to promote a rumour of his own. I think I know Bent’s mind well enough by now, his checks and balances, his prejudices and his strengths (both of which he possesses in potent measure) to make this judgement. He has never previously engaged in fiction – he is frankly too much of a Victorian for that and he knows a book comes next, a book he hopes will earn him scientific and intellectual credibility. So what is this story? ‘It is rumoured amongst the inhabitants of the Mazoe and the Manica that long ago, in the days of their ancestors, white men worked gold and built themselves houses here.’ Bent immediately tries to avoid this getting him lodged with the Romantics. ‘The rumour most probably refers to the Portuguese, who at the three above-mentioned places had churches and forts, faint traces of which are still to be found in the district.’

  But it doesn’t really suggest that, and he knows it. If anyone ever worked gold hereabouts it was ancient Moors, not Portuguese. Bent is resurrecting the idea that there were Semites here once, people who would have looked white to the negroid natives; stone-city-raised Semites from Arabia who engaged ‘thousands of slaves’ in the mining of Mazoe gold.

  In support of this he leaves us with an opinion of Corvo’s from his journal Provincias Ultramarinas: ‘The early Portuguese did nothing more than substitute themselves for the Moors, as they called them, in the ports that those occupied on the coasts; and their influence extended to the interior very little; unless indeed through some ephemeral alliance of no value whatever, and through missions without any practical or lasting results.’

  I think we can safely conclude, even if he does not quite name them, that Theodore Bent has decided that the authors of the Zimbabwe culture were ‘Moors’ who came here first to buy alluvial gold and then founded a deep reef-mining and manufacturing gold industry.

  FIVE

  The Gold of Ophir

  Ancient gold is the key to all the riddles of the lost city. Without huge quantities of gold, the Zimbabwe culture and all its works – works much more monumental and extensive than Theodore Bent even dreamed of – could not have existed. But this single, incontrovertible fact immediately presented Bent with more riddles than it solved. He reasoned:

  That the creation of a stone-bound Zimbabwe empire was a task beyond the skills and manpower of ancient Moorish trading caravans who may have been coming here since time immemorial.

  That it was also beyond the competence of the Shona of Bent’s time and, according to records going back 500 years, beyond the competence of their Karanga ancestors.

  The Shona were entirely ignorant or, if you prefer, innocent, of the true value of gold. But some African hegemony must have been aware of it in the past or Great Zimbabwe and the other massive monuments would surely never have been built.

  These golden riddles have remained thorns in the side of the Great Zimbabwe origin debate for more than a century and have never been satisfactorily resolved.

  The more one looks at the paradoxes the more contradictory they become. For example, the deep mining of gold, as opposed to the simple collection of gold from river sand, are not skills just picked up. This applies even more to the delicate skills and apparatus required to smelt and work gold into plate, wire and jewellery.

  It does not necessarily mean, however, that these gold adepts were white (Semite) aliens as the Romantic school founded by Carl Mauch would have us believe. They could have been coastal blacks of mixed origin (Swahilis), non-Bantu blacks (Hottentot and bushmen) and immigrant blacks from gold-producing countries (such as Nubians and Ethiopians).

  Nevertheless, it is currently claimed, and has been for the last few decades, that the Karanga/Shona did spontaneously conceive, design, fund and build Great Zimbabwe and all the other monuments. It is easier to conclude, though (as indeed a lot of Bent’s contemporaries did), that the Karanga were not the authors of the Zimbabwe culture. That suggests they were not the original gold miners either. There are even questions, as previously mentioned, as to whether enough Karanga were settled in this part of Africa when the Great Zimbabwe culture and the first stone structures were built.

  As speculation is the only route open to us at this stage let me try and enhance Bent’s suppositions of more than a century ago with some of the research that has been done since.

  Having obtained the intelligence of itinerant Moorish explorer-traders that the Karanga hinterland is an eldorado, expeditions are mounted by, say, Egyptians, or Romans, Solomon’s Phoenicians or Sheba’s Sabaeans – or combinations of these. Biblical and other sources name all four groups and we know that their appetite for gold was enormous and insatiable.

  The Hiram-Solomon expedition was away, according to the Bible, for three years so they must have made long stops somewhere. There are Carbon-14 traces of established settlements of indeterminate age on the hill overlooking the valley in which Great Zimbabwe is sited. They could date back to the pre-Christian millennium. Initially, these settlements could have been no more substantial than the grass mat structures of the San but if the assembly points turned into primitive trading posts or gold ‘fairs’, stone structures would sooner or later have proved better protection for the people, cattle for food (Hottentots kept both cattle and goats), the trade goods and the traded gold. Where suitable stone is available as with, say, Hadrian’s Wall, or Awwam in Yemen, where there is a stone ring that is virtually a mirror-image of Great Zimbabwe, stone structures almost always get built. British Iron Age round houses which are identical in structure and style to Karanga rondavels were there on many a site that would later become Roman forts and in time, Norman castles.

  To begin with the aliens buy alluvial gold from the nomadic Stone Age bushmen and Hottentots now known as the San who are also well able to scramble down narrow shafts and work low adits when the outcrops are followed underground. Many die in the numerous accidents, leaving their bones to history.

  A new, more settled race – entirely dependent on their cattle – begins to infiltrate the rich Zimbabwe grasslands. At first they coexist with the San, picking up their skills as rock painters and engravers. Some integrate but by the middle of the first Christian millennium they are in sufficient numbers to push out into the neighbouring neo-deserts those of the San who have remained hunter-gatherers. Moorish traders find these new people even easier to trade with. Their cattle culture is not interested in gold and they happily swap the metal, meat and farm produce for the baubles, bangles, beads and iron tools the Arabian traders and their coastal cohorts, the Afro-Arabian Swahilis, ship up country.

  When the gold industry expands and hundreds of mines are being worked, there is a huge demand for labour and the Bantu are drawn to the mining settlements, bringing Bantu women with them. These Nilot women are famously beautiful; indeed, have been prized additions to Arab harems for centuries. Miscegenation is as inevitable as the long empty nights. This exotic mixing of genes spawns the most advanced race in southern Africa, that grows ever richer on the insatiable
demand for gold. Just like every other civilisation in the history of the world it finally crowns its glory with monolithic buildings, some temples, to house an evolving religion with icons of worship remarkably similar to those of the countries buying their gold. Then, after peaking in medieval times, it splits into warring factions which are no match for the several waves of Bantu invaders from the south and west. The most organised of these, the Matabele, turn the Shona into a slave tribe who in turn succumb to an even better-organised and certainly better-armed invader who makes the whole place a colony of Britain.

  The irony of all this pure or perhaps impure speculation is that it exactly echoes the most recent and well-documented invasion to exploit Zimbabwe gold – that mounted by Cecil John Rhodes. Even the fine detail is the same. Just like the old Moors, Rhodes used explorer-traders (Selous and Posselt among others) to confirm the existence of gold in the unexplored hinterland. Carrying superior arms they brushed aside the indigenous opposition (as indisputably did the Bantu to the San), they built defensive forts like Fort Victoria, adjoining Great Zimbabwe, and Fort Salisbury. The forts were mud-walled at first but quickly fortified with stone.

  These settlers lived initially in makeshift shelters but when they became a settled elite and money was coming in from the goldfields, they quit their tents and built protectively in the local stone. There was even a good deal of miscegenation with the beautiful native women (viz. Adam Renders) in those early days; in fact, the whites saw it as such a threat to their racial identity they established the infamous system of apartheid. Finally, they built monuments of local stone including temples.