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Zimbabwe

The Karanga people ruled a great inland African empire from about AD1000 to AD1600. The Karanga were traders and sailors who smelted gold and traded it on the shores of the Indian Ocean for glass beads and porcelain from as far away as China. European explorers discovered vast stone ruins of the Karanga in 1867. The site of the ruins was called Zimbabwe, which means “stone dwelling” in the native Bantu language of the region.

The ruins seem to have been the spiritual and religious center of a city of perhaps as many as 20,000 people. The sixty-acre site is situated atop a high plateau. Its builders used granite and other stones to form walls up to thirty-six feet high and twenty feet thick. Evidence suggests that the structure was built in the tenth century and abandoned about five hundred years later.

Many Europeans were unwilling to believe that sub-Saharan Africans could have built anything as grand as Zimbabwe; they theorized that ancient Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, or Hebrews created the structures. British museum director Richard Hall destroyed portions of the site in an unsuccessful attempt to prove that it had been built by a foreign civilization. Later excavations in by archaeologists David Randall-MacIver and Gertrude Caton-Thompson proved that the Africans created the ruins.

The European colonial government of Rhodesia attempted to deny the Great Zimbabwe’s African origin. The leaders of Rhodesia argued the land was empty of people and culture before they arrived. When the government allowed people of all races to vote in 1980, the black majority Rhodesia discarded their colonial name and, looking to the past for nobler origins, chose to rename their nation Zimbabwe.

To cite this page:
Dowling, Mike, "Mr. Dowling's Zimbabwe Page," available from http://www.mrdowling.com/609-zimbabwe.html; Internet; updated Sunday, April 2, 2006 . ©2009, Mike Dowling. All rights reserved.