The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (20 page)

Gold in the form of broken bangles, tacks, and pellets were found on the original floors of the ruins ‘as plentifully as nails can be picked up from the floors of a modern carpenter's shop'. Debris heaps of sweepings from the ruins produced gold pellets in profusion. At Khami, Neal, using his small dry-crushing machine on the debris heaps had produced an average of 16 oz of gold per month.

Based on the graves he had examined Hall insisted that the ‘ancients' respected gold far more than the recent African kingdoms like Mombo and Monomatapa: ‘With the exception of the Mombo chief buried in the rudely constructed stone circle at M'telegwa, very few of the Mombo skeletal remains had gold ornaments of any value, the gold generally being in bands at intervals on iron bangles, or gold beads at intervals on copper bangles. In these periods copper and glass beads appear to have been the favourite ornaments.'

Respect him or not (Hall was observably racially prejudiced), the fact remains that he had his hands on the lost city exclusively for more than two years – the longest full-time study ever – and he was both zealous and a good record-keeper. He saw things no one else would or could see. The vociferous condemnation of Hall by the archaeology lobby disguises the fact that even allowing for Hall's destructive housekeeping, modern archaeologists have provided few definite answers to key Zimbabwe riddles, not least what happened to the bodies of what must have been a large elite.

Perhaps Hall's greatest contribution to the debate is the extent to which his discoveries proved clear alien influence in the Zimbabwe culture even though such influence is still essentially denied by the Shona school. Hall alone made enough alien finds to make nonsense of that denial including, near to several furnaces, a lump of bronze ‘slag', as well as melted-down tin for mixing with copper to produce bronze.

A complete ensemble of metal-working tools were found in hut ruins near the entrance to the conical tower including three gold crucibles, six pottery scorifiers, a pair of tongs, two shallow cross-shaped soapstone moulds, a drawplate for gold wire and, nearby, eight smooth river pebbles used to burnish gold sheets. Some 200 oz of gold beaten into metal sheets were found, as was gold wire and devices for drawing the wire. Hundreds of spinning whorls, mostly pottery but some of soapstone, were found in a single trench outside the Elliptical Building. Oral tradition suggests that cotton clothing was worn by the elite of the Zimbabwe culture, some threaded with fine gold wire.

Hall found Posselt's hidden soapstone birds and some new ones. A half-bird he unearthed fits the lower half of a broken bird in a museum in Berlin. And in the so-called Phillips ruin in the valley, Hall found the last whole Zimbabwe bird. Rider Haggard, who would use his experiences in Mashonaland as the basis for his novel
King Solomon's Mines
, coined his own theory about the religion the birds represented: they were ‘sacred birds, figured, however, not as the Cypris, but as the vulture of her Sidonian representative, Astarte'.

Hall also accumulated huge piles of loose stelae, carved and plain, some perhaps door lintels. Many were still precariously decorating crumbling walls and as his job was to make the place safe he simply hauled them out and piled them out of harm's way.

Towards the end of his tenure, Hall called his camp at Great Zimbabwe ‘Havilah' after the land from which, according to the Bible, Ophir's gold came. Here, in 1904, he compiled the second edition of his book which described his finds, his digs and his own, entirely Romantic view of the origins of the Zimbabwe culture. It is a slow, pedantic read but it was an immediate best-seller and is the only book on the Zimbabwe culture which has remained in print for a century. It enjoyed the support of several high academics, including Professor A.H. Keane, FRGS, late Vice-President of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Professor Keane summarised Hall's work in four scholarly articles, collectively entitled
The Gold of Ophir: Whence Brought and by Whom?
that included this condensed theory of the origin of the Zimbabwe culture:

Ophir was not the source, but the distributor of the gold and other costly merchandise brought from abroad to the courts of David and Solomon.

Ophir was the emporium on the south coast of Arabia which has been identified with the Mosha or Portus Nobilis of the Greek and Roman geographers.

Havilah [as named in the Bible] was the auriferous land whence came ‘the gold of Ophir', and Havilah is here identified with the Rhodesias, the mineralised land between the lower Zambesi and the Limpopo – Mashona, Matabili, and Manica lands.

The ancient gold-workings of this region were first opened and the associated monuments erected by the South Arabian Himyarites, who were followed, not before the time of Solomon, by the Phoenicians, and these very much later by the Moslem Arabs and Christian Portuguese.

Tharshish [another Biblical reference] was the outlet for the precious metals and precious stones of Havilah, and stood probably on the site of the present Sofala.

The Himyaritic and Phoenician treasure-seekers reached Havilah through Madagascar, where they had settlements and maintained protracted commercial and social intercourse with the Malagasy natives. With them were associated the Jews, by whom the fleets of Hiram and Solomon were partly manned.

The Queen of Sheba came by the land route and not over the seas, to the court of Solomon. Her kingdom was Yemen, the Arabia Felix of the Ancients, the capital of which was Maraiaba Bahramalakum. Her treasures were partly imported (the precious metals and precious stones) from Havilah and its port of Tharshish to Ophir, and partly (frankincense and myrrh) shipped at Ophir from the neighbouring district of Mount Sephar.

Sephar was confused by the Alexandrian authors of the Septuagint with Ophir, which was the chief emporium of the Sabaean empire.

In a word the ‘gold of Ophir' came from Havilah [Rhodesia], and was worked and brought thence first by the Himyarites [Sabaeans and Minaeans], later by the Phoenicians, the chief ports engaged in the traffic being Ezion-geber in the Red Sea, Tharshish in Havilah, and mid-way between the two, Ophir in South Arabia.

This central position of Ophir explains how it became the intermediate emporium whither the fleets of Hiram and Solomon sailed every three years from Ezion-geber for the gold imported from Havilah and for the spices grown on the slopes of the neighbouring Mount Sephar, not far from the deep inlet of Moascha, round which are thickly strewn the ruins of Ophir.

These and the other Himyaritic ruins of Yemen show striking analogies with those of Rhodesia, while the numerous objects of Semitic worship and the fragments of the Himyaritic script found in Zimbabwe and elsewhere south of the Zambesi leave no reasonable doubt that the old gold workings and associated monuments of this region are to be ascribed to the ancient Sabaeans of South Arabia and their Phoenician successors.

Thus the eminent Professor Keane places Solomon and Sheba firmly back in the ring, this time with a clear Madagascar connection and a further hint of a Jewish involvement.

Need we go further? A Royal Geographical Society report, the Curator of Great Zimbabwe with more time on site than any other person, and a professor of the Royal Anthropological Society have now spoken almost with one voice. Is this not proof enough?

Again, the answer is an emphatic no.

The Rhodes Trust fired Richard Nicklin Hall, his work vilified by the British scientific establishment, after his patron's death. Waves of British university-trained archaeologists descended upon the ruins. They contemptuously discarded virtually everything about the authors of Great Zimbabwe that had been proposed thus far.

I
f, as some Romantics have suggested, there is a Great Zimbabwe curse at work on those who desecrated the lost city in the first decade of the twentieth century, we find it hard at work. What's more, it is strikingly in chronological order. Carl Mauch is dead, having failed to get the scholastic position he felt his discoveries had earned him. He was forced to take a lowly job in a cement works and later ‘fell' from the window of his lodgings.

Rhodes also met an early end and is buried in the Matopos hills in Matabeleland. Ambition finally spent, he insists on the simplest of epitaphs – ‘Here lie the remains of Cecil John Rhodes'.

Lobengula is also dead. No granite tomb for him. He died, it is said, of hypothermia suffered while fleeing into the wilderness after his offers of truce were ignored. To this day the place of his death has never been established, although many have searched because he is known to have been carrying gold to trade for peace.

J. Theodore Bent is dying of a fever caught on another African expedition, still obsessively hunting the authors of the Zimbabwe culture.

Richard Nicklin Hall, once Curator of Great Zimbabwe, is out of work and embittered.

The row between the Romantic and Shona schools of origin theory rages on, not least over Rhodes' blatant use of Romantic images to fund his imperial ambitions and his financing of the Royal Geographical Society expedition. The Trustees of Rhodes' estate decide there is urgent need of damage control to protect their patron's name and they agree to fund a second scientific expedition under the supervision of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Their brief is to lay the ghosts of authorship once and for all and they hand the responsibility to an energetic but unknown junior don from Worcester College, Oxford, David Randall-MacIver, aged thirty. He makes what amounts to a lightning tour of seven grand
zimbabwes
in five months and, in a book produced within the same year, rejects every theory we have heard so far.

His book,
Mediaeval Rhodesia
, rather than resolve matters, pours fuel on a fire that will blaze for the next decade. Randall-MacIver, largely through arrogance, polarises the two main schools of thought on the Zimbabwe culture for ever. Obviously well aware that he is about to stir the hornet's nest, Randall-MacIver admittedly starts in a conciliatory vein. He reminds his readers that he has nine years' experience in Egypt and the Orient and that ‘nothing would have been more attractive to me than the prospect of extending my Oriental studies to South-East Africa'. But the boot is not long in coming: ‘It has been necessary to abandon this dream, because it has proved to be incompatible with any respect for science and the logic of observed facts'.

To ensure there is no misunderstanding of where this boot is aimed, Randall-MacIver affirms that he is happy to have his ‘wholly independent and original' report judged upon its own merits and that no reference has been made to ‘various books which it is impossible to praise and would have been invidious to criticize'. That means all the books on the subject to date with the exception of Dr Theal's
Records of South Eastern Africa
which Rhodes paid for: ‘Apart from the collection of documents embodied in that admirable work, there exists no bibliography with which the student need be troubled.'

If this is not insulting enough to people like Theodore Bent and Richard Nicklin Hall who have published hundreds of pages on the subject under similar scientific patronage to his own (the Rhodes Trust, the Royal Geographical Society and the British Association), Randall-MacIver extends it to all the amateur theorists as well: ‘Before there was sufficient evidence on which to base any suggestions as to origin or date, popular opinion had confidently settled the question to its own satisfaction. It had decided that the Rhodesian ruins must be of immense antiquity, and, following the mediaeval chroniclers with an uncritical credulity that would have been as admirable in their day as it is unworthy in our own, have pronounced Zimbabwe and all similar buildings to be the work of an ancient people from the East. . . . Journalists and popular writers professed, as might be expected, a knowledge of lost ancient history which the most learned Orientalists do not dream of claiming.' If arrogance were not enough he is then more than a little patronising: ‘Still it was possible, of course, that these romanticists might prove to be correct; although only guessing, they might have blundered on the truth.'

As the title of his book indicated, David Randall-MacIver did not believe they had, but I will leave the profound and dismissive extent to which he felt so until we have heard his evidence. In the meantime he has at least supplied us with a label for all those who would disagree so vehemently with him. They were, henceforth, the Romantics. David Randall-MacIver actually used the phrase ‘Romantics' when presenting his medieval theory to a public meeting in Bulawayo, which must have comprised Romantics to the man. It is a tough, pioneer town. David Randall-MacIver cannot possibly have suspected how close he came to being tarred and feathered.

Randall-MacIver's report also marks the moment when the lost city became a political pawn. It was felt by both camps, if covertly at first, that whomsoever could prove ancestors who were the authors of the lost city – White Semites v Black Bantu – had the moral right to rule Zimbabwe. When eventually it came to a bloody fight between these two camps ‘Zimbabwe' would be on every black banner, ZAPU (Zimbabwe African People's Union) for the party which would eventually be led by Joshua Nkomo, and ZANU for the Zimbabwe African National Union led by Robert Mugabe.

Through these years I was the Controller of Rhodesia Television in Bulawayo. My daughter Lisa's maid, Annie Mutesa, was Joshua's niece. She and I, the police told us, were both on ‘blacklists', she on ZANU's, me on both because of my position as a white television ‘propagandist', albeit a rather pro-black one. Annie, who protected my children like a tigress, said it was probably better if ZANU took care of me because otherwise she might have to. Thankfully it never came to that; in fact, she was very upset when we left the country.

Mr Smith's parliament tried to diffuse the issue of the authorship of the lost city via a parliamentary order banning any suggestion that it was of indigenous African origin. I had earlier spent some time in the parliamentary press gallery with Robert Mugabe, he for the
African Daily News
, myself for the
Rhodesia Herald
, when the political row about the colour of the builders of Great Zimbabwe first began to rumble. At about that time, however, the
Daily News
was also banned. Robert, whom I had admired for his fiery commitment to his cause, went off to Mozambique to raise an army of freedom fighters. I, taking the hint from one of Mr Smith's ministers, went into voluntary exile in Britain and raised a family.