Lost cities and lost races (usually white) were a common trope in pulp fiction of the early 20th century. It’s a trope I drank deeply of in my youth, thanks to Robert E. Howard. Conan of Cimmeria stumbled upon his share of lost cities in the desert or the jungle, notably in the tales Xuthal of the Dusk and Red Nails.
Howard and his fellow pulpsters weren’t just spinning adventure scenarios out of the spider silk and rye whiskey — real-life adventurers were finding real-deal lost cities in the remaining wild corners of the earth through the late 19th and early 20th century. And archaeologists — whose discipline was in its infancy — were concocting Eurocentric theories to explain their existence.
Take the case of Great Zimbabwe…
Rumors of a great stone city had filtered out of the bush to the Portuguese trading posts on the east coast of southern Africa for a couple of centuries. Portuguese and Arab traders probably visited the site. But it wasn’t until 1867 that a European officially “discovered” Great Zimbabwe.
Jan Adam Render, a German-American hunter who had immigrated to Natal and had essentially become a Boer, stumbled across the great stone city, constructed without the use of mortar, during a hunting expedition north of the Limpopo River, in the land that would in 30 years become Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe.
Render was a hunter, not an explorer or a scholar, and he didn’t make too much out of his discovery. That was left to Karl Mauch, a German geographer whom Render guided to the site in 1871. Mauch made a very big deal out of it, indeed. He declared that he had found the Biblical Land of Ophir and that the stone city was a replica of a palace of the Queen of Sheba.
Mauch believed that a wooden lintel he found at the site was made of Lebanese cedar and resembled ancient Phoenician work — and therefore the builders of Great Zimbabwe must have been a lost race from the Middle East.
Such notions were quite pervasive — and persistent. Victorian-era European explorer-scholars simply could not believe that the sophisticated layout and construction Great Zimbabwe could have been the work of native blacks. Obviously, this assumption is fundamentally racist. The Middle Eastern theory is not totally out of bounds, though. The Lemba people of the region claim the ancient construction — and their cultural memories proclaiming ancient Jewish-Arabian blood are supported by DNA evidence. However, by the time Great Zimbabwe was built, the Lemba were thoroughly African; they weren’t a “lost white tribe.”
Early archaeologists might be forgiven for looking at the condition of the Mashona peoples in the area and dismissing any notion that their ancestors might have been capable of building Great Zimbabwe. The Mashona of the late 19th century were in a sorry state — politically disorganized, economically a shambles and constantly cringing under the threat of rapine and murder under the assegais of the amaNdebele (Matabele).
However, modern archaeological consensus is that it was, indeed, the ancestors of the Shona who built the city, at the pinnacle of an Iron Age Kingdom of Zimbabwe, from around 1100 to around 1450. The complex covers some 7.22 square kilometers and may have been home to as many as 18,000 people, though the stone palaces probably housed just a few hundred.
Peter J. Baxter’s excellent podcast on Rhodesian history explores the history of Great Zimbabwe and explains the decline of the powerful trading culture that supported it and the gradual degeneration of the people as resource scarcity, climate change and the migrations of peoples took their toll.
The matter of who built Great Zimbabwe took on more than academic significance in the political ferment of the 1960s and ’70s as white Rhodesia declared its independence from England and fought for its survival against a Communist insurgency.
The government of Ian Smith invested itself considerably in insisting that Great Zimbabwe could not be — and absolutely was not — the work of blacks. Rhodesian government guidebooks were essentially propaganda pieces, and woe betide any archaeologist who bucked the official line.
In 1980, Robert Mugabe became prime minister and the country was renamed Zimbabwe in honor of the ancient kingdom. Sadly, far from restoring ancient glories, the “liberation” brought an apex kleptocrat to power and brought the nation to ruin.
Great Zimbabwe, however, remains — a lost city that fires the imagination and the passions of men 500 and more years down the river of time from its age of glory.
Hunter Jan Adam Render found several ancient gold mines in his peregrinations around the lands north of the Limpopo. Apparently, he quarreled with his Boer wife continually. I suspect those quarrels were over his incessant rambling. He moved across the river and into the wild lands permanently in 1868, abandoning his pissed off wife and their four children to go native with the daughter of a local village chieftain.
He died in 1881.
You can get your copy of Warriors of the Wild Lands: True Tales of the Frontier Partisans through my favorite trading post — Paulina Springs Books of Sisters, Oregon.