9.5: The Spread of Agriculture and Great Zimbabwe
Most of the African indigenous languages belong to one of the major language groups shown in Map \(\PageIndex{1}\). Over the past several decades, historians have used comparisons of core vocabulary words in related languages to examine the spread of ancient technologies and the interaction between peoples. Using linguistics (the study of languages), information found in other sources, like oral traditions of dynastic origins and archaeological findings, can be corroborated.
During European colonization 150 years ago, anthropologists grouped Africans into “tribes” based on presumed physical, cultural, and linguistic similarities. As result of this study, they found that people in most of Sub-Saharan Africa spoke languages that used the root – ntu to refer to person, with the prefix ba - added in the plural. Combining the root and the plural prefix, 19th Century colonial anthropologists referred to people in these communities as Bantu and later traced Bantu languages back to a root, a mother language spoken in parts of Cameroon and Nigeria.
European scholars hypothesized that about 2,000 years ago there was a Bantu Migration , a massive departure of thousands of Bantu speakers from the Bantu homeland. These Bantu-speakers imposed iron technology and traditions of agriculture on the peoples they encountered in eastern and southern Africa. Influenced by their own conceptions of colonization, nineteenth-century anthropologists portrayed the Bantu Migration as a rapid conquest of Sub-Saharan hunter-gatherer societies by the technologically advanced, Iron Age Bantu speakers.
Since the 1990s, some historians have agreed that the movement of Bantu speakers was more of a slow diffusion of languages and technologies that lasted about 4500 years, from roughly 3000 BCE to 1500 CE. Bantu speakers took multiple routes, and traveled sometimes as a single-family as opposed to a mass of thousands. From the linguistic evidence, historians also suspect there was mutual “teaching and learning from one another” and between groups. 14
The current view of the Bantu expansions is much more complex as it recognizes the give and take between Bantu newcomers and indigenous populations. For example, some indigenous populations rejected Bantu languages, while others repackaged Bantu technologies incorporating their own innovations. There was no Bantu migratory conquest of indigenous communities. Instead, the study of linguistics seems to confirm that Bantu languages, iron-working, and agriculture slowly spread through eastern and southern Africa in the early centuries CE.
In the colonial era, European scholars sometimes jumped to misleading conclusions when they encountered evidence of early African states. For example, in 1871, German geographer Carl Maunch concluded that the ruins of Great Zimbabwe came from the people of Yemen. Biased by nineteenth-century racism, he assumed that Africans were incapable of statehood and skilled masonry techniques. Subsequent Europeans reached similar conclusions upon viewing the site, attributing the civilization to Phoenicians and Arabs.
In the meantime, a number of scholars had confirmed the African origins of Great Zimbabwe. Archaeologists showed that Great Zimbabwe had features, like stone masonry and rituals involving cattle, found in nearby African kingdoms. Historians used oral tradition and linguistics to track African state formation in the region and show that Great Zimbabwe was a Bantu civilization. From approximately 1200 to 1450 CE, Great Zimbabwe was the thriving commercial and political center of a rich southern African state.
During the Middle Ages, a prosperous elite based in Great Zimbabwe ruled over about 300 settlements on the Zimbabwe Plateau. Great Zimbabwe and the linked settlements had similarly constructed walled enclosures, practiced mixed farming (they grew crops and kept livestock), and used iron, copper, and bronze. The settlements paid tribute in the form of ivory, gold, cattle, and crops to the rulers in Great Zimbabwe. Gold and ivory were exported to cities like Sofala and Kilwa Kisanwani on the East African coast. From the coast, these goods were carried to the Persian Gulf, India, and China. In exchange, the city's elite imported luxury items like stoneware, colored glass beads, and cotton. Out of these imports, artisans made jewelry, ornaments, and cloth for elite consumption.
Great Zimbabwe’s social hierarchies is one of the most dramatic elements of the site’s ruins. Covering three square miles, the ruins consist of many clusters of stone buildings constructed with local granite and stacked without mortar. The most famous structures are the Hill Complex (Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\)) and the Great Enclosure (Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\)). Scholars hypothesize that the ruling elite resided and performed ceremonies on the Hill Complex, symbolically demonstrating their authority with the height and separation of the complex. From about 1300 CE, more than 15,000 people lived in the valley below in small, circular homes with thatched roofs and walls made of clay and gravel.
The Hill Complex overlooked a number of other structures. With its stone walls up to thirty-five feet tall, the Great Enclosure was the largest structure in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa. It was a ceremonial site, perhaps used by religious leaders or as a site for the initiation of youth. Scholars disagree about its exact function, but suggest that the Great Enclosure further demonstrated the status and wealth of the capital city and the ruling classes.
In the 15th Century, Great Zimbabwe declined and was abandoned by 1450 CE. Some scholars suggest that the site supporting up to 30,000 people became too crowded, deforested, and stripped bare of resources through overuse. Surrounding gold mines may have also been depleted. In any case, trade shifted to support the rise of two new kingdoms, Batua to the west and Mutapa to the east. Both kingdoms built stone walls like those seen in Great Zimbabwe and practiced mixed agriculture, using cattle for ceremonies and as symbols of the ruling elite’s power. From the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the kingdoms also faced the Portuguese and the influx of other African populations. The Mutapa Kingdom lasted the longest, enduring until 1760.
Overall, this rewritten history of southern African statehood acknowledges the significance of the Bantu expansions that brought agriculture and iron to many regions. It also celebrates the African origins of great civilizations and demonstrates how Africans shared technologies and cultural practices across the Zimbabwean plateau.
14 As quoted in Brizuela-Garcia, Esperanza and Trevor Getz, African Histories: New Sources and New Techniques for Studying African Pasts . Boston: Prentice Hall, 2012: 43.