Again, another source of confusion arises from the fact that Monomatapa—or, as it ought to be written, Muene, or lord of Matapa—is a dynastic name, just as every petty chief in Mashonaland to-day has his dynastic name, which he takes on succeeding to the chiefdom. So did the lords of Matapa. In various Portuguese treaties we have the names of different Monomatapa’s: one is called Manuza, another Lucere, and so forth, right down to the days of Livingstone, when the Monomatapa he mentions was a petty chief near the Zambesi.
When the Portuguese arrived at Sofala they got a lot of information from the Arab traders they found there concerning the wonders of the country, the great chief and the great ruins; and as Zimbabwe was the name of the chief’s residence and the name given by the inhabitants to the ruins, it is not to be wondered at that some confusion arose.
Now these Arab traders were particularly and not unnaturally jealous of the arrival of the Portuguese, perhaps not unlike the Portuguese are now of the British arrival. They made all the mischief they could between the Portuguese and the natives, they represented the Portuguese Jesuit Father Silveira, who [[236]]nearly managed to convert the Monomatapa to Christianity, as a spy, and conduced to his martyrdom in 1561. In fact, one of the great obstacles to the success of the Portuguese was Arab jealousy, which was at the bottom of the failure of all their expeditions up country.
Of all the Portuguese travellers who wrote about this country, Father dos Santos is the most reliable. Though he did not travel far up country, nevertheless he told no lies; and anyone who has been amongst the inhabitants as they are now will recognise in his narrative a faithful and accurate account of the people, proving how little they have altered in the lapse of between three and four centuries. A few extracts will show this: ‘They beat their palms, which is their mode of courtesy.’[2] ‘They smelt iron and make mattocks, arrows, assegai-points, spears, little axes, and they have more iron than is necessary, and of copper they make bracelets, and both men and women use them for their legs and arms.’ He describes their indistinct idea of a Supreme Being, their feasts in honour of their ancestors, their curious pianos, ‘with bars of iron enclosed in a pumpkin,’ their ‘wine of millet, which the Portuguese could not bear, but were obliged to drink and make festivity, for fear of quarrelling.’ ‘They have an infinity of fowls, like those of Portugal;’ and also he describes the days on which they are not to work, appointed by the king, unknown to them, when they make [[237]]feasts and call these days Mozimos, or days of the holy already dead.[3] In fact, this narrative is so truthful in all its details, that we may safely take from it his account of the disintegration of the Monomatapa chiefdom, as it accounts for many things which otherwise would be obscure. He tells us that a Monomatapa sent three sons to govern in three provinces, Quiteve, Sedanda, and Chicanga; on their father’s death they refused to give up to the heir their respective territories, and the country became divided into four. Since then it has been subdivided again and again; each petty chief fought with his neighbour, union was impossible, and in their turn they have fallen an easy prey to the powerful Zulu organisation under Umzilikatze and his successor Lobengulu. This I take to be, in a few words, the history of the country and its people during modern times, and as much probably as will ever be known of them.
Dos Santos calls these people Mocarangas, and in this too, I think, he is right, for the reasons I have previously given.[4] They are now, as we have seen, a miserable race of outcasts, fleeing to the mountain fastnesses on the approach of a Zulu raid, hounded and robbed until there is no more spirit in them. Monteiro mentions a Monomotapa, or emperor of Chidima, very decayed, but respectable, with a territory to the west of the Zambesi, near Zumbo. This is probably the same that Livingstone alludes to. An interesting fact that Monteiro also gives us is the [[238]]number of Zimbabwes north of the Zambesi, as the head kraals of chiefs, showing the northern origin of the name.
Having considered the people in whose country the Great Zimbabwe ruins are, let us now proceed to cull what we can from a Portuguese source concerning the ruins themselves.
De Barros[5] gives us the fullest account of the ruins. Let us take it and see what it is worth: ‘In the midst of the plains in the kingdom of Batua, in the country of Toroe, nearest the oldest gold mines, stands a fortress, square, admirably built, inside and out, of hard stone. The blocks of which the walls consist are put together without mortar and are of marvellous size. The walls are twenty-five spans in thickness; their height is not so considerable compared with their breadth. Over the gate of the building is an inscription, which neither the Moorish traders (the Arabs of the coast) who were there, nor others learned in inscriptions, could read, nor does anyone know in what character it is written. On the heights around the edifice stand others in like manner built of masonry without mortar; among them a tower of more than twelve braças (yards) in height. All those buildings are called by the natives Zimbahe—that is, the royal residence or court, as are all royal dwellings in Monomotapa. Their guardian, a man of noble birth, has here the chief command, and is called Symbacao; under his care are some of the [[239]]wives of Monomotapa, who constantly reside here. When and by whom these buildings were erected is unknown to the natives, who have no written characters. They merely say they are the work of the Devil (supernatural), because they are beyond their powers to execute. Besides these, there is to be found no other mason work, ancient or modern, in that region, seeing that all the dwellings of the barbarians are of wood and rushes.’
De Barros further states that when the Portuguese Governor of Sofala, Captain Vicento Pegado, pointed to the masonry of the fort there, with a view to comparison with the buildings up country, the Moors (Arabs) who had been at the ruins observed that the latter structure was of such absolute perfection that nothing could be compared to it; and they gave their opinion that the buildings were very ancient, and erected for the protection of the neighbouring gold mines. From this, De Barros inferred that the ruins must be the Agizymba of Ptolemy,[6] and founded by some ancient ruler of the gold country, who was unable to hold his ground, as in the case of the city of Axume, in Abyssinia.
In criticising this account, it is at once apparent that it was written by a person who had never seen the ruins; the fortress is round, not square; the blocks of stone are all small and not of ‘marvellous size;’ the [[240]]tower is wrongly placed on the heights above instead of in the ruin on the plain. But at the same time De Barros is candid, and as good as tells us that his account was gathered from ‘the Moorish traders who were there.’ That is to say, all the wonders of the upper country we get second hand from an Arabian source. Legends of inscriptions on stone are common to all mysterious ruins in every country. Possibly the decorated soapstone pillar gave rise to it, as it did to the subsequent account of the ‘Zimbabwe cryptogram,’ which ran through the papers shortly after the visit of the first pioneers of the Chartered Company. At all events, now there is no sign of anything over any gateway or any trace of such a stone having been removed.
Alvarez gives us an account even vaguer than De Barros. The following is Pory’s translation, published in London in 1600: ‘For here in Toroa and in divers places of Monomatapa are till this day remaining manie huge and ancient buildings of timber, lime and stone being singular workmanship, the like whereof are not to be found in all the provinces thereabout. Heere is also a mightie wall of five-and-twenty spannes thick, which the people ascribe to the workmanship of the divell, being accounted from Sofala 510 miles the nearest way.’