The Karanga people ruled a great inland African empire from about AD1000 to 1600. the Karanga were traders and sailors who smelted gold and traded it on the shores of the Indian Ocean for glass beads and porcelain from as far away as China. European explorers discovered vast stone ruins of the Karanga in 1867. The site of the ruins was called Zimbabwe, which means "stone dwelling" in the native Bantu language.
The ruins seem to have been the spiritual and religious center of the city of perhaps as many as 20,000 people. The sixty-acre site is situated atop a high plateau. Its builders used granite and other stones to form walls up to thirty-six feet high and twenty feet thick. Evidence suggests that the structure was built in the tenth century and abandoned about five hundred years later.
The Europeans were unwilling to believe that sub-Saharan Africans could have built anything as grand as Zimbabwe; they theorized that ancient Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, or Hebrews created the structures. British curator Richard Hall, who destroyed portions of the site in an unsuccessful attempt to prove that it had been built by foreign civilization. Later excavations in by archaeologists David Randall-Maciver and Gertrude Caton-Thompson proved that the Africans created the ruins.
The white colonial government of Rhodesia attempted to deny the Great Zimbabwe's African origin. The leaders of Rhodesia argued the land was empty of people and culture before they arrived. When the government allowed people of all races to vote in 1980, the black majority Rhodesia discarded their colonial name and, looking to the past for nobler origins, chose to rename their nation Zimbabwe. |
