Makalanga walls within ancient ruins at Zimbabwe.—It would be preposterous to expect anyone who visited the ruins to believe that every single wall one saw at Zimbabwe, whether at the Elliptical Temple or on the Acropolis, was necessarily ancient.
Some of the slighter-built walls within the ruins, which are of poor construction, and were once thought to be ancient, can now be shown to have been built by the Makalanga, the evidences of whose long and successive periods of occupation of these ruins are not only most obvious to all explorers and are confirmed by finds and conditions generally, but are a matter both of actual history as well as of tradition among the local natives themselves. Some of the ruins have been used by them for kraals, others—the smaller ones—were converted into cattle kraals with the huts outside the walls, while some have served both purposes. It is highly probable, judging by the state of the wall-débris, that the natives, in converting an ancient enclosure into a cattle kraal, have found portions of the divisional walls to be so dilapidated that they have rebuilt those portions after their own peculiar and recognisable fashion in order to keep in the cattle, at the same time building up gaps and entrances.
While, according to statements of natives and judging also from the state of the ruins, there has been no occupation of the Elliptical Temple as a place of residence for the last three generations, still there are Makalanga walls to be seen, both here and in the Acropolis, at which latter ruins was the kraal, till four years ago, of the present Mogabe; and on the Acropolis are walls of Makalanga construction, both old and comparatively recent. The western enclosures of the Elliptical Temple have been used as cattle kraals up to the early seventies.
The following are some of the evidences of Makalanga construction of walls within the ruins:—
(a) The definite and circumstantial claim of the Makalanga to have built certain walls, and their ability to assign particular generations for the erection of other walls.
(b) The construction of such walls is identified with obvious Makalanga buildings in their kraals, where there are no ancient ruins. The purpose of the later walls is in many instances patent, especially when the smell of the modern byres still lingers in the soil of the areas used by natives as cattle kraals enclosed by such walls.
(c) Stones once part of the faces of ancient walls are used in the construction of those walls, the weather-stained, lichen-covered, and decomposed faces of the blocks being turned inside the walls either sideways or backwards, while the walls show no sign of age, and have a comparatively fresh appearance. Slate and granite monoliths, as well as ordinary slate beams which had once been lintels, have been used as building material.
(d) Débris heaps of ancient blocks have been used as foundations, and sometimes these heaps acted as sections in the length of wall.
(e) Frequently such walls are built in a very irregular line along the almost buried summits of ancient walls, and across filled-in entrances and even passages, the foundations of such walls projecting from underneath the Makalanga walls on either side.
(f) Some of the Makalanga walls are built over damp, black leaf mould containing undecayed vegetable matter and also ordinary Kafir articles, the mould being over a stratum of red clay foundations of Makalanga huts, and with two or three feet of soil and stones between the clay and any floor below for which antiquity could be claimed. Makalanga pottery has been used to support and wedge up uneven ends of blocks.