The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba

by Robin Brown-Lowe

  Rhodes’ expedition also lends obvious credibility to the idea that all this could have been achieved in ancient times by quite a small alien force. Rhodes did the job with about 500 armed men and a few hundred miners and then went on to dominate hundreds of thousands of Shona and Matabele for seven decades, a good many of whom came to be employed digging and processing gold and a wide range of precious metals.

  But before we get carried away by the analogy, not one word of this, of course, would be acceptable to the present chief. President Robert Mugabe is so certain that the Zimbabwe culture is Bantu to the core he first named his political party after it, and later the country. Nor is it certain that he is wrong, even though the story is too complicated to be that polarised. In truth it would be preferable for him to be right if only because these fantastic buildings and the gold mines of Solomon and Sheba could then be promoted as the seventh wonder of the world that they truly are.

  Sadly, however, the arguments advanced by the Shona school in favour of an all-Bantu Zimbabwe culture, are less convincing than the Romantic theories of alien authorship.

  A dean of Harvard, Dr Mark Bessire, says in his book on Great Zimbabwe published in 1998, ‘In return for gold, Great Zimbabwe received glass, beads, porcelain, and other luxury items that were relatively inexpensive in the countries where they were produced. Thus the ruling elite of Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili traders both gave up things they valued little. The ruler of Great Zimbabwe used the imported luxuries as signs of his status and power, and he gave some of them to members of the elite as rewards. Some imports may have been traded for cattle, which remained the people’s measure of wealth.’

  In my view, this is more than a little disingenuous. It describes a class of Swahili trader I have never met. Their contemporary brothers and sisters who run the dukas and much of the economy of East Africa are among the toughest street-traders you are ever likely to meet. To suggest that they ever ‘gave up things they valued little’ (things they would have risked their lives to carry hundreds of miles into the hinterland) is dubious.

  Also, were the old Karanga chiefs, chiefs said to have built the largest stone city south of the Pyramids, incapable of working out that the more gold you traded, the more ‘rewards’ you could distribute and the greater your ‘status’? Was this the first and only human society with a natural immunity to the lust for gold? It was never so in my time, it is certainly not so with the present-ruling Mugabe and, worse, it is patronising.

  I am convinced that it was this intractable gold paradox which caused Theodore Bent to abandon any thoughts of a native origin for the ruins and to institute a search which might prove the presence of gold experts from outside the country. His resumed dig at Great Zimbabwe had begun to turn up physical evidence of a gold industry which was actually wasteful of the precious metal. Crucibles were found still liberally coated with a skin of gold. Other treasure hunters would puzzle over gold nuggets left lying in the dust of ruined floors. Large quantities of gold were found in native graves, but it was mostly in the form of wire and appears to have been valued no higher than the iron and copper wire also found on the bodies.

  Mrs Bent noticed, and photographed, old Chief Mugabe wearing ‘a string of large white Venetian beads of considerable antiquity’. Nor was this Karanga chief of Great Zimbabwe unaware of the value of decorated emblems of authority. He carried ‘an iron sceptre, the badge of a chief, and a battle-axe lavishly decorated with brass wire’. Not a trace, however, of gold wire or plated gold objet d’art, even though Rhodes’ treasure-seekers would reveal a wealth of both buried in the spoil beneath the hooves of Chief Mugabe’s cattle, nor any recollection of a gold trade involving thousands of mines that had been going on for several centuries at least.

  Thanks to Rhodes’ investment in research we have excellent records going back more than 500 years, which show that Renders and Mauch were also simply following well-trodden footsteps. First ivory, then slaves and finally gold were the dreams of avarice which initiated and sustained European exploration of south central Africa, and long before that there were the ubiquitous Moors.

  In 1487 John II of Portugal sent Pedro de Covilham and Alfonso de Payva to Cairo essentially as diplomatic spies with a particular commission to find out what the Moors knew of the sea routes to gold-rich Ophir. In those days, India, another known source of gold, was also a candidate for the lost kingdom, and Portuguese spies obtained copies of ancient Moorish sea-charts to the Indies. Senor de Covilham apparently obtained information which convinced him that Ophir was more likely to be found in south central Africa and he carried his search for the gold of Ophir as far south as Ethiopia.

  He also carried a political commission from his King. Ethiopia was thought then to be the legendary lost Christian kingdom of the aforementioned Prester John, with whom European Christians since the start of the Crusades had been trying to find and link up with in the hope of outflanking the forces of Islam. This is not the place to pursue that trail, although Ethiopia and Great Zimbabwe have apparent links, not least ancient gold-workings. We will revisit the enigmatic John and his intriguing stone-bound kingdom in some detail later.

  De Covilham was, so far as is known, the first European to seek to make a commercial-political treaty – a forerunner of Rudd’s concession with Lobengula – for the gold of Ophir. Unfortunately we know nothing of the details because he died in the attempt. It seems likely, however, that he was able to get useful information out to his partner, Alfonso de Payva, because, within a decade, his fellow national, the mariner Vasco da Gama, also with a royal commission to find a sea route to Prester John, rounded ‘the Fairest Cape’ for the first time on record.

  The next Portuguese marine expedition, by Alvarez de Cahal in 1505, secured the golden Grail when they navigated all the way up Africa’s Indian Ocean coast to the old Arab port of Sofala (the closest to Great Zimbabwe) and found in its harbour two Arab dhows laden with gold. They took over the town, appointed a permanent Portuguese commander, Pedro de Nhaya, and garrisoned the old Arab fort in the name of the King of Portugal.

  It is worth pausing here to consider some research which Theodore Bent presented in his report on Great Zimbabwe. Bent took the trouble to examine old Arab accounts from the start of Portuguese colonialism at Sofala in the hope of establishing who held power in the hinterland; it having become immediately apparent to the Portuguese that the Arabs only controlled the coastline.

  The Portuguese mariner, Duarte Barbosa, reported to his King in 1514: ‘The merchants bring to Sofala the gold which they sell to the Moors without weighing it, for coloured stuffs and beads of Cambay.’

  An Arab traveller, Omar ibn l’Wardi’, is on record as saying that the Arabs were being kept out of the interior by a fierce African tribe called the ‘Zindj’: ‘Whose habitations extend from the extremity of the gulf to the low lands of gold, Sofala ‘t il Dhab … which adjoins the eastern borders of the Zindj … the most remarkable produce of this country is its quality of native gold, that is found in two or three meskalla, in spite of which the natives generally adorn their persons with ornaments of brass.’ He also states that these natives have skill in working iron, and that ships came from India to fetch it.

  Other exotic descriptions of these Zindj are provided by a writer who Bent calls the ‘Herodotus of Arabia’, El Masoudi. This Arab viewed the Zindj as naked Negroes dressed in panther skins who filed their teeth and were cannibals, fought with long lances and had ambuscades for game. They hunted elephants but never used for their own purposes the ivory and gold in which their country abounded.

  Is this the genesis of the ignorance about gold?

  Who the Zindj were is very unclear, even though El Masoudi’s description fits well some of the warlike tribes of northern Kenya and Somalia among whom I have worked. They fight and hunt with long lances, ambush game, kill elephants and many of them file their teeth. So far as I know they do not eat people but I would not put it past a hungry Somali shufta a long way fr
om home. Somalia also adjoins the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia, thought by many to be the ancient gold-rich Land of Punt.

  El Masoudi did claim that his Zindj descended from the north and Theodore Bent goes on to suggest that: ‘The irruption of the wild Zindj tribes probably caused the destruction of the earlier civilisation.’ Note his use of the phrase ‘wild Zindj tribes’, hinting at several incursions.

  Almost everyone agrees that the culture that built the grand zimbabwes collapsed and had been derelict for hundreds of years before the Portuguese dared to pursue the gold of the hinterland. If it was violent Zindj incursions which caused the collapse (or a shortage of salt, as some have more prosaically suggested), what followed was the equivalent of the Dark Ages in Britain after the Romans. Several zimbabwes have produced evidence of burning, hastily abandoned damaged treasure, and bodies that had evidently met violent ends.

  There are also the reports of the Matabele. By the time they crossed the Limpopo in quite modern times there was no evidence whatsoever of an extant Zimbabwe culture, least of all one administered by the Shona, hence the contempt in which the Matabele held the Shona. Burning and looting, they quickly reduced the Shona to a slave tribe who went into hiding whenever a Matabele raiding party hove in sight. Moreover, the Shona tribe that the Matabele subjugated in the 1800s appears to have been engaged in a social and agrarian lifestyle all but identical to the one reported in the 1600s by the first serious Portuguese missionary to the interior, the Jesuit, Father dos Santos. Dos Santos meets a high chief, Monomatapa – ‘munhumatapa’. It is the first reliable reference to any sort of African ‘kingdom’ in the region and today underpins the Shona school’s case for a spontaneous Karanga history of the Zimbabwe culture.

  The problems with this interpretation begin immediately, however, when one reads the good priest’s detailed and affectionate descriptions of the lifestyle of the people among whom he has settled. Furthermore, dos Santos admits, ‘munhumatapa’ is not the description of an empire, albeit past its best, but a generic term for ‘high chief’. There are a number of munhumatapas around. Dos Santos’ descriptions of rural Karanga life are in fact exactly the same as those Theodore Bent recorded at the turn of the last century: ‘Feasts in honour of their ancestors, an infinity of fowls, curious pianos with bars of iron enclosed in a pumpkin, wine of millet, copper bracelets, little axes, spears, assegai-points, mattocks, arrows all made of iron and the beating of palms [hands] as a mode of courtesy.’

  One can hardly blame Father dos Santos, who appears from his writings to have been a kindly man, well disposed to this rural community, for not believing that these were the people who conceived and built the lost city and carved the artefacts found in it. He discusses these mysteries – ‘the many things which would otherwise have been obscure’ – with a Monomatapa. These are the best ‘oral traditions’ ever recorded. He is told that in a previous age a high chief sent three of his sons each to govern a province. They refused to return their lands to the heir when the father died and the country became divided into four. Since then it had been subdivided again and again. The Monomatapa had nothing at all to say about the people who had built the grand zimbabwes.

  The fact that Father dos Santos has related this story does indicate that an important local chief believed there had been better times. Subsequent researchers have built from it a history of the decay of the Zimbabwe culture produced by royal family feuds and territorial splits. My problem with it is that if the Monomatapa could remember these oral traditions and describe them to Father dos Santos, why not earlier ones of the building of the most impressive stone monuments in the whole of southern Africa? Surely these would have endured more than tales of family feuds? A great many civilisations have come and gone; indeed, cycles are the dynamic of civilisations, but it is almost impossible for them to vanish without trace if the descendants of the architects, builders, and artisans remain living on the site, which is what is being claimed for Great Zimbabwe.

  The Portuguese did possess a description of Great Zimbabwe which the author, Jaoa de Barros, in his monograph of 1552, De Asia, claimed to have obtained from ‘Moorish’ traders. The fact that it is hearsay has always caused it to be questioned but it is intrinsically interesting in the sense that it came, allegedly, from Arabian sources:

  There stands a fortress, square, admirably built, inside and out of hard stone. The blocks of which the walls consist are put together without mortar and are marvellously thick. The walls are twenty-five spans in thickness; their height is not so considerable compared with their breadth. Over the gate of the building is an inscription, which neither the Moorish traders who were there, nor others learned in inscriptions, could read. On the heights around the edifice stand others in like manner built of masonry without mortar; among them a tower of more than 12 braces [yards] in height. All these buildings are called zimbahe, as are all royal dwellings in Monomotapa.

  There are no towers of this size other than at Great Zimbabwe. Sadly, however, nothing has been heard of that inscription, even though it remains the artefact everyone most wants to find. Theodore Bent came closest, with the cryptic etching he found on a large bowl and was later compared with the proto-Arabian alphabet. There is a reasonable correspondence but Bent admitted that the evidence was ‘provokingly fragmentary’ and nothing further has been adduced to the find.

  Without exception, however, all the Portuguese and Arab accounts of the Indian ocean coast and its trade with the hinterland take for granted that the gold trade had been conducted by ancient Moors, with Swahili cohorts. As early as 1502, the Portuguese geographer Thomas Lopez, on a visit to Sofala province, reported being told ‘there is a wonderfully rich mine to which, as they find in their books, King Solomon used to send every three years to draw an infinite quantity of gold.’

  Father dos Santos says he was told of the remains of old walls and some ruins and that ‘old Moors who have maintained a tradition of their ancestors claimed these to be in olden times the trading depots of the Queen of Saba [Sheba] from which were bought much gold’. Some Arabs actually called the region behind Sofala, Saba, and there is of course a major river through the region called the Sabi.

  After two centuries of exploration and resident missionary activity, the Portuguese also come to the conclusion that the Zimbabwe culture and its gold-rich empire predated the Monomatapas and, indeed, might not be of central African origin at all.

  On 17 April 1721, the Governor of Goa (East Africa was then administratively a part of the Portuguese–Indian Empire), Antonio Rodrigue da Costa, wrote to his King:

  (1) There is a report that in the interior of these countries many affirm there is in the court of the Monomatapa a tower or edifice of worked masonry which appears evidently not to be the work of black natives of the country, but of some powerful and political nations such as the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Egyptians, or Hebrews; and they say that the tower or edifice is called by the natives Simbaboe and that in it is an inscription of unknown letters, and because there is much foundation for the belief that the land is Ophir, and that Solomon sent his fleets in company with the Phoenicians; and this opinion could be indubitably established if this inscription could be cleared up, and there is no one there who can read it. If it were in Greek, Persian or Hebrew, it would be necessary to command that an impression be made in wax or some other material which retains letters or figures, commanding that the original inscription be well cleaned.

  (2) At the same time it would be suitable to examine whether in that land is a range of mountains called Ofura, what distance it is from the coast or seaport, and whether it contains mines of gold or silver.

  (3) In the same way it would be as well to inquire into the most notable names of these parts, mountains, chiefdoms and rivers.

  (4) To learn if the lands of Sofala are high or low, or marshy, or if they have any mountain ranges.

  Thus, almost three centuries ago, the enigmas provoked by the lost city were posted for official investi
gation and the first list made of likely authors – Greeks, Romans, Egyptians or Hebrews.

  Sadly, no Portuguese expedition complete with wax copying equipment for the cryptogram was ever mounted. The Portuguese never lost their interest in central Africa however – even though they were finally pipped at the post by Rhodes.

  The Karanga attitude to the value of gold has been dealt with at some length because it appears to cast doubt on the seminal question of whether this ancient gold-based empire was Bantu at all. Others have proposed that the Zimbabwe culture was perhaps so aesthetically advanced it had no need to value objects for their (western) monetary worth, but for their beauty. Gold, an attractive metal but intrinsically no more attractive than copper, brass or silver if a monetary value is of no concern, was instead valued as an art material.

  The best evidence in support of such a singular ideal is from a zimbabwe, Mapungubwe, just south of the Limpopo in what is now South Africa. In one of the first graves excavated was found a beautiful objet d’art, a gold rhino. In fact, as a piece of art craftsmanship the Mapungubwe rhino is unique. It is actually a fine example of wooden sculpture which has been plated with thin gold attached to the wood by tiny gold tacks. From the same grave came a beautifully executed gold bowl.

  But as keeps happening with this story, one avenue of clarity usually leads to an even more enigmatic labyrinth. We cannot be sure that the inhabitants of these southern zimbabwes were an integral part of the Zimbabwe culture under the sway of Great Zimbabwe, nor can we be sure they were of the same race. I earlier questioned the idea that the first gold miners were not the Bantu Karanga.

  Before the Bantu migrated here, southern Africa was roamed by Hottentots and bushmen and there is now little doubt that the Hottentots were the first southern Africans to recognise the attraction gold had for Europeans. They carried alluvial gold dust to the coast stored in vultures’ quills.