believed that whites were their originators. In the south of the African
continent, stone-walled structures in Zimbabwe tradition, as well as ruined
stone-walled settlements in the Free State and North West Province, were
found by the explorer Andrew Anderson in the 1860s and 1870s. He main-
tained that they had been built by a white race, for, as he put it, ‘kaYrs (sic)
have never been known to build in this way’. In his opinion, the ruins were too
beautiful to have been built by African natives. He also argued that ‘the
present natives’ had no knowledge of them, despite knowing that at least
some of the ruined ‘stone kraals’ had until recently been inhabited by local
people (Mitchell 2001: 49–50).
The site of Great Zimbabwe was subjected to a similar interpretation for
the high-quality building made it impossible for scholars to accept African
authorship. Anderson was not theWrst one to think in this way. In 1871 the
German Karl Mauch (1837–75), theWrst nineteenth-century explorer to
describe the ruins, had argued that:
I believe that I do not err when I suppose that the ruin on the mountain is an
imitation of the Solomonic Temple on Mount Moria, the ruin on the plain a copy
of that palace in which the Queen of Sheba dwelled during her visit to Solomon.
(Stiebing 1993: 213).Another explorer maintained in 1898 that the Shona in the area could not
possibly have been the builders of Great Zimbabwe as it was ‘a well accepted
fact that the negroid brain could never be capable of taking the initiative in
work of such intricate nature’ (in Kuklick 1991: 140). Some claimed that the
ruins had been built by Semites. The Semite Phoenicians were described as
‘this crafty, heartless and adventurous race, who were the English of the
ancient world without the English honour’ (in Kuklick 1991: 142). The
ruins, however, were also seen as a source of gold. ForWve years from 1895
the Ancient Ruins Company obtained a concession from the British South
Africa Company to ‘exploit’ monuments, which apparently includedWnding
gold objects to be melted down. Great Zimbabwe was only protected from
1902, after the new Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia passed a law to
safeguard it. Against all evidence, however, hypothesis regarding its Phoen-
ician origin—as well as, at the turn of the century, theories of South Arabian
involvement—persisted. In 1905, when theWrst dissonant voice, that of the
British-born American archaeologist and anthropologist David Randall-
MacIver (1873–1945), claimed that the ruins had been built in the fourteenth
orWfteenth century by black Africans, his opinions were received with
protests by white Rhodesians and rebuVed by a local expert.
The refusal to give credence to local authorship was also expressed
regarding the Benin bronzes brought to England after the British punitive
306 Colonial Archaeology