Great Zimbabwe – by Ellen

We spent a few days in a house (Aah! A house, an actual house! All to ourselves, with beds and a sofa and a kitchen and a dining table and lights and a fridge! Well, due to a lack of ZESA neither the lights nor the fridge worked, but hey, minor details) overlooking Lake Kyle just by Great Zimbabwe.

By this point we’d made the – difficult - decision that it was time to head home. But as we ate our sadza by candlelight and listened to the BBC World Service on our wind-up wireless (no ZESA remember), getting home seemed a fairly remote possibility. The news was filled with reports of the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcano that had forced the closure of European airspace. Thousands of passengers were stranded all over the world, and businesses were losing billions. Reporters latched on to the idea that this may be a practice run for not only the inevitable, larger, secondary eruption, but also a world without oil and international transport links. Questions were being raised about the future of global trading, particularly the African dependence on exports to the West.
The next morning we headed into Masvingo to re-stock. Outside every bank were enormous queues of people, all obviously waiting to withdraw their money. The logical conclusion for Evan (the ex banker) and me (the one who reads too many crap books) to draw was that the country – and quite possibly the whole world – had collapsed financially.

Turns out it was just teachers’ pay day. How terribly boring.

Great Zimbabwe was, well, great! Despite the best efforts of Western historians and archaeologists to attribute Great Zimbabwe to anyone other than the Africans, it was actually built by...the Africans. Founded in 1200 AD, this great empire of ‘Zimbabwes’ (stone houses) soon became the biggest pre-colonial empire in Sub-Saharan Africa. It met its end in the 1500s, probably due to becoming overly successful and unable to sustain its population. Many of the buildings looked like an extension of the rocks around which they were built. The stone walls of hand-cut bricks curved round between the massive boulders. Steps had been hewn into the steep sides of the kopjie, leading through narrow gaps between smooth boulders. Around a million handmade bricks, made by heating the granite with fire then tipping cold water over the stone to make it crack, were used just for the Great Enclosure alone.
The small museum contains a surprising amount of information. You can only read it once your eyes have adjusted to the flickering of the lights; the small diesel generator does its best - and actually makes the place much more atmospheric. It’s also in here that the famous Stone Birds (like the one on the Zim flag) are housed.

As Evan had done his dissertation on Great Zimbabwe, I had my own very knowledgeable (and handsone), guide, who was not only an expert of the archaeology of the area, but was also a trained Field Guide. The latter meant that he only screamed a little bit when his flip-flopped foot nearly stood on a snake.