The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba (18 page)

But we are not there yet. A galaxy of theories is about to rise in these southern African skies, each more cogent than the next, each one with its determined, sometimes fanatical, legion of supporters.

When Theodore Bent's
The Ruined Cities of Mashonaland
was published in 1892, and in spite of Theodore's repugnance for Solomon myths, it actually resurrected the legend of King Solomon's mines and the Queen of Sheba's love nest, perhaps because it was popular with the general public and soon became a best-seller.

Leaving the origin debate wide open made amateur archaeology, combined with treasure hunting, a favourite form of recreation in Rhodesia. Miners spread across the length and breadth of Mashonaland when Bent's book revealed that the ruins of the Zimbabwe culture all promised gold and were much more numerous than had been suspected. Digging in ruins was often more rewarding than mining.

The military staff officer of the Pioneer Column, Sir John Willoughby, who took his pioneers on that first works outing to Great Zimbabwe to introduce them to treasure hunting, led the pack. Willoughby was forever ‘fossicking' in the ruins according to reports of the time. He became a close friend of Rhodes, often staying with him at his holiday cottage in the Cape, and seems to have enjoyed special rights to dig at Great Zimbabwe which Rhodes otherwise kept for himself. In 1892 Willoughby was granted 600,000 acres of land in Mashonaland.

A later Inspector of Rhodesian Monuments, Peter Garlake, would describe Willoughby as ‘an insouciant British Army Officer who gutted three ruins in the valley and rummaged in the deposits just inside the north-east entrance to the Elliptical building'.

In truth, Willoughby obviously shared Rhodes' passion for Great Zimbabwe and while other treasure hunters would move on to smaller ruins producing better loot, Willoughby spent his time preparing the best maps of Great Zimbabwe. He is also the first to present evidence that Great Zimbabwe was much more important than the mining capital of a kingdom based on a gold industry: ‘Though the gold belt, now known to extend for at least eighty miles, with a breadth varying from ten to fifteen miles, has its nearest point within five miles of Zimbabye, there are no traces of old workings anywhere throughout this whole area and its reefs up to their recent discovery were “virgin reefs”.' This singularity has struck several expert visitors to the Great Zimbabwe district: ‘Notwithstanding that gold-winning was the primary object of the ancients,' observes Richard Hall, ‘and that there must have been a large population interested in gold-mining, the reefs in this district are absolutely virgin.' Hall names twenty-two such reefs opened up by Rhodes' miners which show no sign of having been worked earlier, adding ‘[Great Zimbabwe's] distance of between five and twelve miles from the nearest point of any gold reef . . . is the greatest yet known of any ruins, save those of road-protecting forts, from the quartz formation.'

Sir John Willoughby happily admitted that he was not an archaeologist and his searches had been conducted as ‘thoroughly and rapidly as possible and without that caution which the expectation of an expert's report demands'. It also has to be said that treasure-hunting did not, in those days, attract the opprobrium it does today.

Assuming that he declared everything he found, which admittedly would make him unique in this company, his work did not enrich him, although a lot of his finds are very interesting. Like Bent, he dug up soapstone bowl fragments, pieces of china, porcelain beads, a soapstone game board, thirteenth-century painted glass (confirmed by the British Museum), a soapstone miniature bird, a three-pronged spear and an iron hammer 8 feet below the surface, portions of ancient crucibles showing gold and gold in flux, many phalli, and a copper-green enamelled, patterned bodkin. His finds add to the evidence of long-term alien influence at Great Zimbabwe and that this most splendid of
zimbabwes
had special religious significance.

But Rhodes, single-minded as ever, continued to promote Great Zimbabwe as gold-rich Ophir. ‘You will find,' he wrote to a backer, ‘that Zimbabwe is an old Phoenician residence and everything points to Sofala being the place from which Hiram fetched his gold.' Behind the bravura, however, Shona gold was proving very disappointing and Rhodes was facing a financial disaster. Only the reefs around Great Zimbabwe had apparently not been worked. Could it be that the treasure house had been emptied thousands of years ago by Solomon, Hiram and their successors, leaving the place to decay into ruins? Had the golden bird flown, taking all its eggs with it?

The truth was that the British South Africa Company was financially on its last legs a year after the occupation, and the accounts laid before the shareholders at their first meeting in 1891 were frightening. With all but no income, ‘general expenses' already exceeded £402,000, nearly half the total capital of the company.

Much the most poignant description of how desperate things were in the new Rhodesia is to be found in the last chapter of Theodore Bent's book as he attempts to leave the country. He had gone again to Beira, the port on the east coast to which the Rhodesians had been allowed access under the agreement recognising the coastal strip as Portuguese territory, and on the strength of which Rhodes had commissioned two of his most loyal cronies, Heany and Johnson, to open a road.

Bent reveals:

Ours is the only wheeled vehicle which has traversed [the road] in its entirety since the single pioneer coach went up to Umtali, after infinite difficulty and weeks of disaster, with such sorry tales of fever, fly and swamp, that no vehicles have since ventured to repeat the experiment.

Dozens of wagons lie rotting in the veldt . . . everywhere lie the bleached bones of the oxen which dragged them . . . fully £2,000 worth of wagons we calculated, ghostlike as after a battle. Then there are Scotch carts of more or less the same value, and a handsome Cape cart, which Mr Rhodes had to abandon on his way up to Mashonaland, containing in the box seat a bottle labelled ‘Anti-fly mixture', a parody of the situation.

At a Portuguese settlement on the banks of the Pungwe river, Bent saw:

Two handsome coaches, made expressly in New Hampshire, in America . . . they are richly painted with arabesques and pictures on the panels; ‘Pungwe route to Mashonaland' is written thereon in gold. The comfortable cushions inside are being moth-eaten and the approaching rains will complete the ruin of these handsome but ill-fated vehicles. Meanwhile, the Portuguese stand and laugh at the discomfiture of their British rivals in their thirst for gold.

What Rhodes desperately needed was some good news from King Solomon's mines but by now that too was in very short supply. ‘The Directors are extremely anxious about gold news,' Macquire wrote to Rhodes in July 1891; ‘any tangible news would have an excellent effect.'

What they got was the opposite and from a very eminent source. Lord Randolph Churchill had treated himself to a luxurious three-month safari in Mashonaland in 1891, subsidised by articles published in the
Daily Graphic
. Lord Randolph praised the settlers for their energy but poured doom and gloom on their prospects – ‘It occurs to me that there must be upon this great continent some awful curse, some withering blight, and that to delude and to mock at the explorer, the gold-hunter, the merchant, the speculator, and even at ministers and monarchs, is its dark fortune and its desperate fate.' In private letters Lord Randolph's prognosis was even more specific and damning – ‘The B.S.A. Co. funds have all been expended and no gold has been found.'

But if Rhodes was good at anything it was manipulating the assets of his various companies. The London board urged him to return home and ‘smash Randolph with the public' and this he did, displaying Bent's new finds and continuing to stress that Great Zimbabwe was gold-rich Ophir. At the same time he ‘stoked up enthusiasm' at board meetings of his rich companies in South Africa. These ‘curious financial methods' often involved Rhodes ‘wearing one hat, coming to the rescue of Rhodes in another of his hats'. Essentially, until his death of heart disease in March 1902, he kept his dream alive by ensuring that the financial wolves never quite got through Rhodesia's door, even though the exercise probably contributed to his death. In the last weeks he avoided going to his Cape Town club, for example, for fear that his condition would become generally known and depress share prices in his companies, particularly the rocky British South Africa Company.

On the ground in Mashonaland, Rhodes had taken control of gold affairs, reducing the 50 per cent company premium which had been restricting capital investment in gold mining, and licensing the treasure hunters to ensure the company got a percentage of these spoils. Great Zimbabwe was, however, excluded from any of the licences. Initially, an American, F.R. Burnham, who had fought bravely against the Matabele, was granted the rights to dig in the newly discovered Dholo Dholo ruins, fifty miles east of Bulawayo. Burnham lifted everyone's spirits when he recovered 641 oz of ‘gold inlaid work and gold ornaments', some of which were given to Rhodes.

Two mining prospectors, W.G. Neal and G. Johnson, were at the same time desecrating native graves at a small unnamed ruin fifty miles to the south, stripping the bodies of gold necklaces, bangles and bracelets and other gold items ‘strewn around', in all weighing 208 oz, which they sold for £3,000, a fortune at the time. Rhodes also later acquired this treasure and decided it was time he took control of these lucrative operations. The treasure-hunting company he licensed through the Charter Company was called Rhodesian Ancient Ruins Ltd, and it was operated by these same two lucky diggers, Neal and Johnson. Their licence was confined to the right to explore and work for treasure in several ruins in Matabeleland with a first option on other ruins. The British South Africa Company received 20 per cent of all their finds and Rhodes had a first right of purchase on everything. He is said to have accumulated over 200 oz of necklaces and beads. Other artefacts went to the BSAC's offices in London, but the bulk of these have just disappeared. One would have to be very naïve not to conclude that much more than this ‘disappeared' in other ways and into other pockets in the course of a decade of open looting. As previously mentioned, however, Great Zimbabwe was fortunately not included in any of these activities, at Rhodes' ‘express desire'.

Neal and Johnson dug through five Matabeleland ruins in the next six months, including a return trip to Dholo Dholo where they found their best cache of 700 oz of gold beads and wire bracelets. In the following year this industrious pair forked through some fifty other ruins but their luck, as with gold finds elsewhere in the country, had run out. They found a little bit of worked gold, or gold dust, everywhere they looked, but the average from each ruin was less than 10 oz.

If we consider that an estimate of 21,000,000 oz of ancient mined gold (worth in those days some £75,000,000) against a couple of thousand ounces still on or in the ground in 1895, this is surely incontrovertible evidence of a Zimbabwe culture engaged for centuries with alien gold traders. More simply, most of Zimbabwe's gold was exported from the country long before Rhodes or even the Matabele got there.

In 1900 the Rhodesian Ancient Ruins company was wound up and Neal gave all the information he had carefully compiled to a writer, Richard Nicklin Hall, who produced from it
The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia
, a strange book which made Hall's name in the field of popular history. It also made Hall the new self-appointed expert on the authorship of Great Zimbabwe. Hall revealed to the general public for the first time that Great Zimbabwe was not a lone, lost city (albeit the most impressive one south of the Pyramids), but the likely capital of an empire encompassing hundreds of
zimbabwes
across the whole of south-central Africa, including at least half a dozen ‘grand'
zimbabwes
.

Hall's book explores in some detail almost 200
zimbabwes
from which we will consider just a few here, mainly for the extraordinary variety of artefacts which came to light in them. Other grand
zimbabwes
will be described by qualified archaeologists later on. Hall's favourite ruin was the acropolis which overlooked the temple, and his clear, succinct descriptions of these sites is a testimonial to the detail of his record-keeping:

The hill fortress is of labyrinthine character. The kopje on which it is erected is itself of great natural strength, being about 500 feet high, and having on the south side a precipice of smooth rock of 70 to 90 feet.

On the only accessible side there is a wall of massive thickness, being 13 feet high on the summit with a batter of 1 foot in 6 feet, and in height 30 feet in parts, with a flat causeway to the top, decorated on the outer edge by a succession of little round towers 3 feet in diameter, alternating with tall monoliths.

The approach to the fortress is protected at every turn with traverses and ambuscades. A flight of steps leads up from the bottom of the precipice and runs up an exceedingly narrow slit between the boulders. In front of the steps is a section of wall in dentelle pattern. At the summit of the hill are large boulders 50 feet high, with a little plateau approached by narrow passages and steps on either side.

The plateau was adorned with huge monoliths and decorated with pillars of soapstone, the patterns on which were chiefly of a geometric character, one being 11 feet 6 inches in height. The large semicircular area below this plateau contained an altar covered with cement. The labyrinthine character of these buildings baffles description.

Below in the valley he found some of the most spectacular monoliths, or stelae:

There are several large monoliths in the south-east wall of the elliptical Temple, some of which have fallen down. Evidence exists that they were equidistant. One of the largest standing was measured by Sir John Willoughby and found to be 14 feet 3 inches above the accumulated soil and 12 feet 3 inches above the top of the old cement floor. The foundation in which it once stood still remains in good condition.