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Venerated Houses of Stone
The state of Zimbabwe has an interesting history behind it and one of the most important reasons why it got its name is the ruins that are found there.
The colonial powers were unable to accept that an African community could have built such an amazing set of structures which in the language is said to mean venerated houses of stone.
Here we look at the story behind the structures and also the history associated with it.
When the Europeans came to Southern Africa they were taken aback to see the beautiful architectural splendor and immediately concluded that this could not be the work of any African tribe and must have been by someone else.
The reason they gave was that Shona farmers who lived in mud and thatched huts couldn’t have built structures of this magnitude.
A 16th century Portuguese explorer opined that these structures were from the land of Ophir a biblical site said to be the source for King Solomon’s gold. Other historians felt it belonged to the age of the Queen of Sheba. They were ready to give any theory as long as it did not in any way attribute the ruins to the African community.
Finally it was left to the process of carbon dating to prove without doubt it belonged to the era of the Shona tribes.
There are great remnants of the farming tribe that had a flourishing trade too. Around 18000 residents controlled trade in gold and ivory.
The structures are in Rhodesia and when the Africans got complete freedom from colonization they renamed the area Zimbabwe. The largest set of ruins, covering more than 1,779 acres, and the society that built it are known as Great Zimbabwe to distinguish them from the country at large and from the dozens of other stone ruins, also called zimbabwes.
Very little is known about the daily life of the great Zimbabwe mainly because of racism and secondly most archeologists of that time were fortune hunters and were not ready to give credit to anyone other than the Europeans. Some of the relics were thrown away and a few soapstone birds were preserved and we can see them on the Zimbabwe flag today.
Debris around the sites shows that people who lived within and around the stone walls grew and ate millet and sorghum, grains that they tilled with hand-held hoes of wood or iron. Peter Garlake, a Zimbabwean expert on the ruins, writes in his book Great Zimbabwe that residents of Great Zimbabwe often ate beef. As in much of Africa before the European conquest, land was plentiful, but labor was relatively scarce. That made polygamy an important part of the social structure. A man with several wives and many children to help could till more soil; harvest more crops and accumulate more wealth.
Scholars believe that the Shonas used an ingenious method to cut granite into rectangular blocks by setting fire near rock faces. One enclosure has a 30 feet tower which historians feel could be the symbolic representation of a basket used to store grain.
The walls were built over several hundred years. The oldest part is atop a hill, and the stone work flowed down onto the plains during the reigns of several chiefs, says William J. Dewey, an art historian at the University of Iowa.
The most imposing structure is the Great Enclosure, which includes the tower and the highest and thickest walls. It is one of the later buildings, probably the residence of chiefs and their families.
The leaders historians feel used marriage and distribution of wealth to remain powerful rather than using violence and power as is usual with other rulers. They were wealthy and had control over trade.
In conclusion in the words of Dewey "Everyone is trying to appropriate" the ruins, "It's in commercial material, and political parties use it in their ads."
To many, the ruins symbolize how much the Zimbabwean people accomplished before Europeans arrived.
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