The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (21 page)

David Randall-MacIver gave the Zimbabwe nationalists their first secure political plank.

Richard Hall's writings had by then been comprehensively derided by a number of David Randall-MacIver's academic peers. Theodore Bent's work was also judged to be essentially Romantic. He was certainly guilty of quoting ‘mediaeval chroniclers with uncritical credulity'. Randall-MacIver judged, in this climate of opinion, that he could afford, without unduly damaging his reputation at home, to displace Bent as well. I can understand his motivation. David Randall-MacIver was the first representative of the new school of British archaeology, founded by Sir William Flinders Petrie, to be given open access to the Zimbabwe ruins. The chance to be the first to reveal the true origins of what had to be perhaps the last essentially unexplored ancient culture on earth was a breathtaking opportunity and certainly not one to be missed. The temptation to produce an entirely new theory of its origins must have been irresistible.

By 1905 the railway line had been built to Beira along the route that Theodore Bent and others had scouted. David Randall-MacIver travelled up it to a huge fruit farm Rhodes had established in the rich Inyanga mountains. Four
zimbabwes
commanded the local peaks. Three of these were very roughly constructed – ‘temporary refuges in times of great need. David Randall-MacIver went immediately to work and after a cursory examination labelled these ‘forts' after noting that the southern building had ‘loopholes' and entrances roofed with stone slabs. The fort, commanding the northeast of the estate, occupied a formidable defensive position on a sheer cliff above the Inyanga river. In his final thesis, one of his most dubious statements is: ‘In the architecture [of the ruins], whether military or domestic, there is not a trace of Oriental or European style of any period whatsoever.' Yet here he is on Day One describing ‘loopholes' which are, of course, a very common feature of forts everywhere, indeed the most common feature distinguishing a fort from a domestic building. Loopholes are, moreover, quite rare in the Zimbabwe ruins, so the existence of them in these Inyanga
zimbabwes
was of special significance, which Randall-MacIver would have to address, and correct, later.

Examples such as this, of emphatic labelling even when comments elsewhere contradict the labels, are common, especially when the labels are employed to support his thesis. The opposite is equally true. When unique features cannot be exactly fitted into his medieval timeframe or contradict his affirmation that there is no European architectural precedent, they are ignored or marginalised. An intriguing architectural feature of the grand walls of Great Zimbabwe is, for example, large well-made drains. Randall-MacIver does not address the enigma of so advanced a building technique and he does not choose to acknowledge that they are common to most grand monolithic buildings of Europe and Asia, for without them few of these monuments would still be standing. They are, however, very rare in the Zimbabwe ruins. Even more paradoxical is the comment he makes about the largest of the Inyanga forts: ‘It much resembles that which Romans and ancient British marked out for their hill forts in our land.' How can this possibly square with ‘There is not a trace of Oriental or European style of any period whatsoever'?

Fortunately we do not need to get bogged down with his inconsistencies at this stage because, faced with a truly extraordinary complex of stone works in these beautiful Inyanga mountains, Randall-MacIver's archaeological training and his sense of wonder reassert themselves. His youthful stamina allows him to make the first extended tour of a great number of stone walls, stepped as terraces, which had been reported in the region but because of their extent and inaccessibility had never been properly explored. Clambering up and over hundreds of walls only a few feet apart, David Randall-MacIver, led by a Major van Niekerk, after whom he named these terrace ruins, eventually achieved the summit of a stepped central peak 4,000 feet above sea level. All around him, for at least fifty miles, the plateaux and the hills were covered with walls. It was not, as he first thought, a formless labyrinth, but a walled ring of nine or ten hills, each constituting a separate unit complete with its own buildings and faced at the bottom from its neighbour by a boundary wall.

David Randall-MacIver was, quite understandably, awe-struck: ‘There is scarcely a stone, out of all the unimaginable millions in a tract more than eight miles long and six wide [subsequent exploration would show it to be vastly larger], that has not been handled by a builder.'

Follow-up work by Rhodesian archaeologists would show that this massive complex was a conurbation covering a much larger area than Great Zimbabwe, embodying one of the largest ancient canal irrigation systems on earth. It is still all but unknown to the outside world and in spite of its tourist potential is neglected and, in places, vanishing.

To give him his due, David Randall-MacIver did see the true wonder of the complex, indeed lowered his academic guard enough to record in his monograph, albeit ‘as told to me by a visitor': ‘There has been as much labour expended here as on the building of the Pyramids, or even more.'

The labyrinth of walls lead uphill to even more intriguing, finely executed ‘pit-dwellings'. Randall-MacIver finds both quartz and iron arrow heads in these buildings, sherds of patterned clay pots and a number of what he decides are ‘altars'. Most of the hill complexes boasting a pit-dwelling also featured the remains of some six circular walls which he judged to be the wall foundations of once-thatched rondavels. Not a single building in this vast network of residences is in any state of repair, or occupied.

He inspects all this with great care. A typical pit is stone-paved and serviced by an awkward, stone-roofed passage, awkward that is for a full grown male adult of today. The one he measured was just 1.2 metre high and less than ½ metre wide – ‘just wide enough for a man to creep though, crouching all the way'.

As previously mentioned the whole of southern Africa prior to the Bantu migration across the Zambesi was thinly populated by what are called ‘Boskop-types', the Bushmen and Hottentots, some of whom still hang on in the Kalahari desert fringes. These tough little people would have been quite comfortable with these low, narrow passages; indeed, for hunters who originally used bows and stone-headed arrows, they would have been just about the right height.

David Randall-MacIver proudly records his finds – ‘Armlets of heavy bronze, pot sherds, iron arrow heads, and Stone Age implements' – but nowhere does he suggest that these strange households might have been occupied by two races, an elite in the huts above, their subjects below. Was this oversight deliberate, because he knows that the best-loved theory of the Romantics was that the Zimbabwe culture was an elite race who enslaved the locals, working them in the narrow-shafted mines and as builders' labourers? The Romantics refer to these cellars as ‘slave pits'.

Randall-MacIver then goes on to find timbers apparently used to bar the passages. These could only be inserted or removed from the outside, however! His own explanation of these enigmatic, portcullised, dungeons verges on the whimsical: ‘The pit is distinguished from any of the other areas . . . by the special care and attention bestowed upon the [subterranean] stonework [it has been hardened]. This fact should be enough to prove that it was intended for the owners themselves.' This is surely dubious, as he has previously observed that no provision for light is made in the main pit-room although there is sometimes a light-well into the roofed access corridor.

Did the elite of this obviously affluent mountain kingdom really choose to dwell, or perhaps take refuge, in unlit dungeons after scrambling down passages built deliberately too low for people of their size? It is as ridiculous as the myth that ostriches, confronted by danger, bury their heads in the sand. Surely a more plausible explanation for these strengthened holts is as strongrooms for valuable goods in transit: ivory, slaves, or gold, especially as the Inyanga conurbations appear to span the trade route from the hinterland to the coast.

In the pit-dwellings David Randall-MacIver finds more Stone Age implements alongside Iron Age tools. ‘We are confronted,' he records, ‘with the curious, but by no means anomalous spectacle of a people who were perfectly familiar with metals and possessing admirably made tools but yet retaining the use of stone implements for the same purpose. It is quite evident that they belong to the same period and [the stone implements] are not more ancient.'

It may not be entirely anomalous but it is entirely possible, and surely more likely, that the different tools were made and used by two groups of people at different stages of social evolution. There is absolutely no viable reason for the advanced people who built this masterly irrigation system to use old-fashioned and less effective tools and weapons, any more than a hunter today would set aside a modern rifle in favour of a blunderbuss.

If Randall-MacIver found Iron Age and Stone Age tools in the same domestic strata I suggest his scientific integrity should have required him to propose a multicultural community for the Inyanga conurbations. And as ‘primitive' races are almost invariably subservient to ‘advanced' races (especially if they have been invaded and conquered) he should further have suggested that a master and servant, possibly a master and slave, relationship prevailed here. He does not. Archaeologists were not in his day allowed to have opinions on anything as intangible as relationships.

David Randall-MacIver undertakes a carefully stratified excavation of one of the better pit-forts, then makes a quite extraordinary announcement about the evolution of the Inyanga communities. The stratification indicates, he decides, that the most secure, well-built forts are
earlier
than later structures where less attention has been paid to defence. The Inyanga culture, he concludes, grew ever more secure and eventually abandoned its fortress mentality. Loose-knit hut complexes progressively replaced the hilltop pit-forts, firstly without corridors and eventually without cellars.

This seems the wrong progression for a naturally evolving indigenous race. Ancient Britons, for example, first lived in a variety of ‘rude' dwellings or, if you prefer, ‘loose-knit hut complexes' then, under threat of invasion, enclosed them in high, defensive palisades. In time, successful invaders integrated with the locals and this increasingly indigenous elite built castles with a portcullis and loopholes. The bulk of the peasants – the workforce – still lived rough under the castle walls.

Here in Africa, with no tradition of building in stone, Randall-MacIver would have us believe that medieval Karanga suddenly and spontaneously built castles, regressed to unprotected stone villages and ended up with uninhabited ruins. A model of that scenario which springs to mind is the Roman presence in Britain. Up went the defensive forts and citadels and down they came when the Romans left, leaving the locals to a centuries-long Dark Age. Randall-MacIver cannot afford, of course, to recognise that lesson of history in this context, however, because that is how the Romantics say it happened. So it remains a paradox.

Another paradox he is obliged to sidestep is generated by a question of his own: ‘What purpose did the pit itself serve? The only answer that seems to fit the circumstances is that the pit was a refuge whenever the defenders were hard-pressed in siege. The fighting men, of course, would not go there – it would have been a veritable death-trap – but, like some of the modern kaffirs, they thought at once to keep their women in safety. Here in the fort they would be out of reach of flying missiles, and the narrow corridor could be defended by the last man.' This is almost laughable. Is he seriously suggesting that under attack from savage marauders you would force your women to crawl down a narrow passage into an unlit room, then lock them in with a latch that only the marauders can open? If you fail you have literally boxed in your women for delivery to the enemy; indeed, it is exactly the rationale he has advanced for the fighting men not to so trap themselves.

Nonetheless, he labels all this ‘of African origin, and evidently akin to the race from which the present inhabitants sprang, for their dwellings show the same fundamental ideas of construction, and many of their implements and articles of daily use are identical with those among the modern inhabitants of the country'. Where he summons all this from is puzzling. Modern Zimbabwe dwellings bear no resemblance, say, to Great Zimbabwe's conical tower. It is in every sense unique.

Thankfully, David Randall-MacIver's sense of wonder now takes over. He trudges up hill upon hill, climbing walls in places just a couple of feet apart: ‘Every hill that can be seen from the farthest point here is ringed with walls. Southwards . . . forts and pit-dwellings extend over the whole of the Inyanga for a considerable distance, and the forts at least are found down the road to Rusapi, and in the other direction almost as far as Penhalonga.' He decides that the whole complex was inhabited by a people who must have lived in perpetual apprehension of attack, ‘and therefore protected themselves behind one of the vastest series of entrenchment lines to be found anywhere in the world'. Attack from whom?

The fortifications begin to peter out as he goes south. At Umtali no fortifications of any kind are found: ‘So there seems to be a regular progression. The northern region nearest the Zambesi is fortified with the most extraordinary minuteness. A little further south, at Inyanga, the rigour of the defensive scheme is a little relaxed; then, at Umtali, the need for fortification seems to have been no longer felt. So it looks as if the enemy against whom these people were defending themselves was in the north, not in the east and south, and the distribution of their buildings suggest the probability that they themselves first settled in the north.'

Here, in fact, he is sharing ground with Romantics, a number of whom have proposed that the Zimbabwe culture evolved from a diffusion of old gold and stone cultures originating in the far northeast. He is, of course, breaking his own rules here because he has found nothing to physically confirm any such northerners. Randall-MacIver has obviously read the eminent Mr Theal's reports – it is the only book he allows as an acceptable reference to the history of these parts – so he also knows that ‘old Moors' have reportedly been coming this way for at least a thousand years. Nevertheless, he affirms: ‘No single object which can be recognized as foreign, of any period, whether early or late, has been found in the Inyanga ruins; and a chip of glazed stoneware traded there in the Middle Ages is the only foreign object that has been found at Umtali.'
Ergo
– no old Moors were here either.