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    Zimbabwe, A Simple History
    Zimbabwe, A Simple History
    Zimbabwe, A Simple History
    Ebook92 pages1 hour

    Zimbabwe, A Simple History

    By Mark Igoe

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    About this ebook

    This is the story of Zimbabwe from the Stone Age to the present, told in a light but entertaining way by the country’s first guide writer and its first archaeologist guide.

    Illustrated by both photos and line drawings it also describes the location of all the major historical and archaeological sites. This is an update of a highly successful hard copy guide first published over 20 years ago.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMark Igoe
    Release dateMay 23, 2013
    ISBN9781301072149
    Zimbabwe, A Simple History
    Author

    Mark Igoe

    Marco Books are written and published by Mark Igoe. Mark has written widely on travel, history and sport over thirty years in a half dozen different countries in Europe and Africa. He has published a dozen books, often co-authored by his wife Hazel, including a best selling guide to Zimbabwe and a popular guide to buying French property, published by Cadogan and branded by the Sunday Times. He has three grown up children and now lives in Norfolk, England with his wife and two bicycles, all better looking than he is.

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      Book preview

      Zimbabwe, A Simple History - Mark Igoe

      Zimbabwe, A Simple History

      Mark Igoe & Paul Hubbard

      MARCO BOOKS

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright Mark Igoe 2013

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Contents

      Introduction

      1. The Garden of Eden

      2. The Granite Citadels

      3.The Rivers of Gold

      4. The Prophecy of Chaminuka

      5. The Bird & The Star

      Are You Here?

      Further Reading

      Maps

      The Authors

      Introduction

      When Paul asked me to re-publish a book I had first written nearly 20 years ago I was quite chuffed; not everybody gets that’s sort of compliment. Paul, you see, is an up and coming young archaeologist in Zimbabwe who infests the lost cities and haunted Matobo Hills of his native Matebeleland. Among his publications is a mammoth bibliography of Zimbabwean archaeology, with just under 5 000 entries and covering 1870 to the present, so obviously he is a guy of phenomenal endeavour. He also manages to make a successful business out of his profession, which is about as usual among this fraternity as it is to find a bishop manning a fish stall.

      Well, you ask, who am I then? I wrote the first guidebook to Zimbabwe nearly thirty years ago. I followed this with a number of regional guides, among them a small book called A Visitors History of Zimbabwe.

      This was aimed at the large number of tourists who were flooding into the country after the end of its protracted civil war, and especially targeted the back-packer, who I saw as young, intelligent and inquisitive but not inclined to bother with anything too heavy, in either sense. So I chose a style that was light, slightly flippant and strove to be easy to read. It was this that Paul wanted to reissue. Trouble was, I had left that beautiful land in which I had spent most of my adult life, and had disengaged from its still-active circles of archaeological and historical research. So I suggested we do a new book together. This is the result. It is no longer just targeted at the visitor but at anybody who has an interest in that most fascinating tale of the African past, one that is so often obscured by modern politics, romantic fiction and plain ignorance. We hope it is still simple and easy to read and thanks to Paul it is now current again.

      Mark Igoe

      1. The Garden of Eden The Stone Age & Rock Art

      Scientists of various shapes and flavours often impress us by comparing the length of our history with a twelve hour clock, the last few seconds of which represent the recorded past. Zimbabwe came into being in 1980; yet the country has a history longer than many and a geology longer than most. So where do we start?

      A good point would be when people started to create things that can be seen today, and that happened in the Stone Age. Homo habilis and Homo erectus, those fellows who looked as though they had a permanent hangover, left their tools in various spots around the country. The first period of the Stone Age archaeologists called the Early Stone Age, that is to say the time from which the earliest recognisable stone tools occurred, about two and half millions years ago, until about 150,000 years ago when the Middle Stone Age begins.

      Homo habilis was responsible for this pioneering work. Then came Homo erectus who learned about fire and may have learned to cook, (although no recipes survive), about two million years ago and during the Middle Stone Age. Finally in the Late Stone Age, by 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, maker of delicate stone, wood and bone tools was firmly established and finally the attraction we can all enjoy today, Rock Art.

      These folk lived in a land that was geologically already very ancient and had seen practically everything from tundra to desert. It had had its fair share of dinosaurs (about 135 million years ago) including a couple that were to be named for their Zimbabwean places of discovery, and the country has one of the longest dinosaur track ways in the world. In the late Stone Age it was nearly as we know it now, its mountains, river and granite plateau all spectacular props for the coming drama of modern man.

      So, this is where we begin, about 10,000 years before the present, in the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo Rivers, between the Manica Mountains and the dry lands of the west. The climate was probably wetter then, the forests more widespread and thicker; the animals were of much the same species as are still familiar, but they were, of course, much more numerous. And they roamed the country in their appropriate habitats.

      And people had the widest choice of habitat. So where were they? What did they eat? Where did they live? How much paid leave did they get and what were their leisure preferences? And how do we know? They what we call a hunter-gatherer people, which is a sort of job description. The chances are they were related to the other aboriginal people of southern Africa, some of whom we know about and very few of whom survive today. These are called the San (or sometimes Bushmen) and together with the other early inhabitants of the region who survived into historical times, the Khoi, they comprised the once widely distributed Khoi-San. The !Kung, a San people of the Kalahari have been studied by contemporary scientists and their material culture, and to some degree their spiritual one, is understood. (No, the ! is not a misprint, it denotes a click sound, approximating to a Scotsman with false teeth eating toffee.)

      Were the Zimbabwean Late Stone Age

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