The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (15 page)

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.

A
ncient 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.

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.