ZIMBABWE'S ATTRACTIONS

Great Zimbabwe Ruins

Pyramids apart, Great Zimbabwe is Africa’s biggest stone monument. On a continent more used to impermanent buildings of mud, wood and grass, Great Zimbabwe is almost miraculous. For nearly a thousand years, this mysterious city has exercised the imaginations of those who held it, and right up until the nineteenth century it inspired hundreds of other Shona stone places in a unitary sphere of influence from the desertlands of the west to the Indian ocean in the east.

The first Europeans who saw it, took it both as evidence of the rumoured riches of the country and proof that tentacles of classical civilization – Phoenicians, Egyptians, Gulf Arabs: they weren’t sure who – had been here before and built in stone.And for nearly a hundred years, from the time of Rhodes’ incursion to the present day, the struggle for symbolic possession of this central monument, has shadowed the struggle for liberation.

The word “zimbabwe” is derived from Shona phrases used freely to mean either “stone houses” or “venerated houses”; which may have amounted to the same thing – buildings in stone being statements about permanence and power. The Great Zimbabwe is the best known of the country’s several hundred zimbabwes. It was the stone heart of a city of as many as 10,000 people, and the home of its ruler, who lived surrounded by his family, court and tributary rulers.