Photos

The Great Zimbabwe ruins are a huge complex of stone buildings in southern Zimbabwe, built between the 11th and 15th centuries. Historians and archeologists now agree that this was a major city, inhabited by the local Shona people, and an important trading place with connections probably as far as China.

However, this was a very controversial issue during colonial days, when the racist rulers refused to admit that these marvellous structures could have been created by black Africans. Various theories claimed that the Phoenicians or Arabs had been here. Anyone, really, but Africans.

Even after Zimbabwe's African origins had been scientifically proved in the late 1920's, it was virtually forbidden in "Rhodesia" to speak openly about this. Guidebooks, school books, radio programmes etc describing the Zimbabwe ruins were censored.

Great Zimbabwe consists of three sections, a temple complex on a hillside, an area in the valley where the inhabitants lived, and the Great Enclosure that was used by the king.

This picture is from the Great Enclosure. I visited the ruins on a rainy day in March 1984 and I was virtually the only visitor. Just me and a lot of monkeys. I am glad I didn't meet a baboon in this narrow space. It would have enlivened the picture, but they tend to get quite large and act aggressively.

There's another view of the Great Enclosure in a workshop. Both pictures were scanned from Kodachrome slides.