The Great Zimbabwe Ruins, Historic and Political Impacts

It's already that day of the week, the last day to post a few blogs. Six days of procrastination and here I am again, at the edge of another deadline. Well, time to get to work I guess.

The Ruins of Great Zimbabwe have been an area of controversy ever since the empire that built it collapsed. Tribes from all over the area claim to be the descendants of the people that built the ruins. Europeans argue amongst themselves about the identity and race of the people that constructed Great Zimbabwe. It has been used in the political agendas of the people in charge and has been the rallying point of both racists and minorities. It is often in the center of conflicting ideas, so it would be best to know the facts about this ancient ruin.

The empire that first raised the walls of Great Zimbabwe reached its height between 1100 to 1450 CE and encompassed an area slightly larger than its modern descendant, Zimbabwe. It was a trading center that had ties quite far from its location in inland Africa, including Chinese artifacts. Near the end of the 1400's, the empire collapsed. The reason is unclear, but the common theories of drought, disease, famine, and poverty have been thrown around. For a time, the Shona people lived inside the ruins and continued its legacy as a trade hub until the Portuguese conquered them in the early 1600's and Great Zimbabwe sank into obscurity.

In 1867, a European hunter rediscovered the ruins and in 1871, a German geologist named Carl Mauch surveyed the ruins and proclaimed them to be connected to a biblical city of riches led by a Queen Sheba or the site of King Solomon's gold mines. Subsequent archaeologists deemed the site to have been a colony by white settlers, because they believed that the African population were too primitive to construct such a permanent structure. Some of these first archaeologists also caused damage to the site in their quest to prove that white settlers constructed the ruins. The white settler belief was not discredited until David Randall-Maciver came in 1905 and suggested that locals had built Great Zimbabwe and Gertrude Caton-Thompson's expedition supported that idea.

Up until that point, Great Zimbabwe was being used by the white colonists to cement their dominance over the African populace, by saying that Whites were there before the Africans, and that the Whites were superior to them. These discoveries were covered up until 1980, when these discoveries weakened the racist stranglehold of power, and would cause Africans rally behind this new symbol of African legitimacy over their own lands.

The Great Zimbabwe ruins have shown that the African populace was far more advanced than they were given credit for and have given the Africans their freedom back. The African citizens of Rhodesia changed their country's name to Zimbabwe in honor of the ruins that granted them their lands and freedom. Today, the Great Zimbabwe ruins are still part of a political agenda, but now, it is a symbol that unites people, instead of proving one's superiority over another.

More information can be found at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A21025513