Roses Under the Miombo Trees by Amanda Parkyn

Author:Amanda Parkyn [PARKYN, AMANDA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

Cousin John’s photo of young Yvonne shows Great Zimbabwe’s magnificent stonework

Mark and Simon (on an earlier visit) pondering the mysteries of the Ruins

Even more fascinating for me has been learning, decades after our visit, the truth behind the legends – truth emerging from archaeological research through the 20th century. As far back as 1928 an English woman archaeologist, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, was first to state that the ruins were of decidedly African origin. Since then artefacts found, radiocarbon dating and more archaeological research have established that the structures, which extend over 1800 acres, were built over the 11th to 15th centuries, by a people who spoke one of the Shona languages and so were members of the Bantu family of African peoples. Over 300 stone structures have been found on the Great Zimbabwe site itself, from simple to more elaborate; pottery, coins and beads etc. found originated from as far away as China, the Middle East and India, suggesting that it was a great trading centre, with gold from mines in the area at the heart of its wealth.

Not that it was easy for white people to accept these facts. In colonial Rhodesia the ruins’ true origins were hushed up, Ian Smith’s government pressurising the Museum Service to withhold the correct information. The Inspector of Monuments, Peter Garlake, whose research had been first to prove incontrovertibly that it had been constructed by ancestors of the current local population, and who refused to toe the government line, was forced out. Another Museum service official, Paul Sinclair, quoted in ‘ None but Ourselves’ by Julie Frederikse (1990) said: Once a member of the Museum Board of Trustees threatened me with losing my job if I said publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe’.

Great Zimbabwe Ruins became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986.

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