Exploring Africa's Mythology: A Journey Through Time and Culture
Welcome to Afrodeities, where we celebrate Africa’s rich mythology and history. Discover vibrant narratives that connect ancient deities, legends, and untold stories, illuminating the cultural wealth of the continent. Join us in reclaiming and honouring Africa’s timeless heritage through engaging poetry and prose.
Chinenye Egbuna Ikwuemesi
11/29/20241 min read
The Great Zimbabwe ruins
The first Europeans to encounter Great Zimbabwe marvelled. We know they marvelled because they marvelled at lesser things everywhere else they went. So the question is not whether they stood before these walls and felt the weight of what had been built. The question is why, having marvelled, they then decided it could not have been African.
The answer is Cecil Rhodes. Not as metaphor. As fact. Rhodes used the legend of Great Zimbabwe to justify seizing the surrounding territory, and when six of the eight sacred Soapstone Birds were removed from the ruins, one ended up in his Cape Town home, where it remains to this day. You do not steal what you do not value. But you also cannot value what you have stolen without admitting what it cost.
The denial ran from the 16th century through to the 1970s. Karl Mauch said Phoenicians. Theodore Bent said Arabs. Someone said a lost Roman legion. Someone said the Queen of Sheba. The Rhodesian government employed propagandists to maintain the lie while archaeologists who told the truth were censored and dismissed. David Randal-MacIver said African in 1905. Gertrude Caton-Thompson confirmed it in 1928. The Rhodesian government accepted the findings in 1978 and immediately moved to downplay their significance.
What was being protected was not historical accuracy. It was the story that made colonial rule feel rational.
Great Zimbabwe was the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe between the 11th and 15th centuries. Its walls were built without mortar, from granite blocks fitted with a precision that has lasted centuries. It traded gold and ivory with Persia, Arabia, and Ming Dynasty China. It was a cosmopolitan, sophisticated, economically powerful civilisation. None of that was hidden. It was simply refused.
The Soapstone Birds are coming home. Most have been returned. The scholarship has been corrected. But correction is not the same as celebration, and acknowledgement is not the same as understanding. Great Zimbabwe is still not in the general story humanity tells about itself. That is what we are here to change.