The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba by Robin Brown-Lowe

Author:Robin Brown-Lowe
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780752494906
Publisher: The History Press

SEVEN

The Debunkers

If, 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

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