Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

The last part of the ruins is the Valley Complex: a series of living
ensembles made up of daga (earth and mud-brick) houses, scattered
throughout the valley and occupied from the 14th to 16th centuries.
Here lived about 2,000 goldsmiths and equally numerous potters,
weavers, blacksmiths and stonemasons – who would heat large granite
rocks in a fire before tossing water on the red-hot rock. The shock of cold
water cracked the granite along fracture planes into brick-shaped pieces
that could be stacked without the need for mortar to secure them. Millions
upon millions of these pieces were produced in the plains below and
hauled up the hill, as the city constantly expanded.
The function of its massive, non-supportive walls have various
interpretations: some believe they were martial and defensive, or that
they were a symbolic show of authority, designed to preserve the privacy
of royal families and set them apart from commoners.
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Unfortunately, the ruins have been damaged over the last two centuries
– not least due to the British journalist Richard Nicklin Hall, who in
1902 was appointed curator of Great Zimbabwe by the British South
Africa Company for the purposes “not [of] scientific research, but the
preservation of the building.”
Hall destroyed a significant part of the site, claiming he was removing
the “filth and decadence of the Kaffir [ie African] occupation”. In his
search for signs that the city had been created by white builders, layers of
archeological deposits up to four metres deep were lost.
SEPTEMBER 2016