Home UpFour Other Zimbabwes (4)

Mapungubwe, Khami, Danangombe, and Naletale

For a discussion of the places shown in this file, find the podcast called The Itinerant Geographer, available on Spotify and elsewhere.

Here we are on Highway R521 about 30 miles north of Polokwane (alias Pietersburg). Still lost? No problem: we’re about 220 miles north of Johannesburg. We’re also about 80 air miles short of the Zimbabwe border. We’re heading to Mapungubwe, which lies just short of the border and in “perhaps the wildest and most desolate [part] of the Transvaal.” Well, that last word has to be changed, too, because the Transvaal is no more. Instead, we’re in the Limpopo Province. The sign is a reminder that the Trump Organization is everywhere.

The quotation comes from Leo Fouché, Mapungubwe: Ancient Bantu Civilization on the Limpopo, Cambridge University Press, 1937, p. 1.

We’ve gone those 80 miles and now are close to the Limpopo, which is the border for a while between South Africa and Botswana and then, downstream a bit, between South Africa and Zimbabwe. “Wild and desolate” enough for you? But this is winter, and the trees are mostly mopanes, which look dead because they’re deciduous. A lone baobab stands at the right edge like a shepherd watching his flock.

Perhaps this baobab looks faintly threatening, but on the ground it stands sentinel, not surprising for a tree that can live for thousands of years. I wonder how the species struck Michel Adanson, a botanist who spent five years in Senegal about 1750 and whose name is embedded in the baobab’s scientific name Adansonia digitata. I imagine him coming upon one of these babies somewhere in the Sahara, stopping, and exclaiming whatever was the 18th century French equivalent of “WTF?”

And here, seen from the top of a sandstone kopje or hill, is the great, green, not-so-greasy Limpopo. The wider swath behind it is the dry course of the sand-choked Shashe River, only rarely with surface water. I don’t know why people are intrigued by such things, but there are three countries in this image, with South Africa on this side of the Limpopo, Botswana in the wedge between the Limpopo and the Shashe, and Zimbabwe on the far side of the Shashe. These boundaries, after all, are purely arbitrary. Recent, too.

We’re two miles downstream, at a place called Poacher’s Corner. South Africa is on this side, Zimbabwe on the other, but the river is very little impediment to man or beast, which may or may not explain the name Poacher’s Corner. Certainly people and animals migrated back and forth across this river in centuries past, often in response to climate change or economic opportunities. (Caution: it is also true that the Limpopo’s flow would be greater if not for the dams and pumps supplying irrigation water to upstream center-pivot sprinklers.)

Climate change a thousand years ago was a big deal here, with a warmer and/or wetter climate attracting farmers to this region between about A.D. 350 and 600. The climate then cooled and/or dried, and the farmers left. People returned after 900, but for a while the climate was still unsuitable for agriculture. It was fine for elephants, however, and the people who came here about 900 were looking for elephant ivory which even then found its way to the east coast and, from there, to Arabia and points east. I’m not a vegetarian, but the idea of killing elephants for their ivory, like sperm whales for their oil, is inexpressibly sad.

These early ivory hunters were the Zhizo. A century later, the climate had improved. The Zhizo moved back north to make way for the Leopard’s Kopje people, whose settlement, less than a miles from here and at a place known to archaeologists as K2, had 1,500 people in 1200. The Leopard’s Kopje people raised both cattle and crops such as sorghum, millet, and cowpeas. Elephants were still around, however, which is why archaeologists report finding “huge quantities” of ivory objects at K2. The transition from Zhizo to the Leopard’s Kopje culture was not a happy one, because (as at so many other places) with farming a class structure emerged, with commoners working in the fields to support an elite benefiting from their control of ivory exports. Gold, too. (This summary is based on Thomas N. Huffman, Mapungubwe, Ancient African Civilization on the Limpopo, Wits University Press, 2005)

The K2 settlement survived from 1000 to about 1220, when it was superceded by a people whose leaders lived atop this kopje, Mapungubwe, “the hill of the jackals.” Here, but lasting hardly more than a lifetime (1220-1330), “for the first time in the prehistory of Southern Africa… a senior leader was so physically separated from his followers… [The hill] had been a rainmaking hill. By living on top, the leader acquired the power of the place.. [which] “emphasized the link between himself, his ancestors and rainmaking.” (See Huffman, cited above, p. 32)

Elsewhere, Huffman contrasts rainmaking among the Zulu, whose rainmakers are “doctors” using “medicines,” and rainmaking here at Mapungubwe and at the successor Zimbabwe culture, where rainmaking was the province of a “sacred leader” claiming that “his ancestors could intercede directly with God to insure the fertility of the land and his people.” (Thomas N. Huffman, Handbook to the Iron Age:* The Archaeology of Pre-Colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa*, University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2007, p. 366.)

Notice the curved green roof on the left?

The lid slides back to reveal a midden excavated in the 1930s, when archaeologists discovered Mapungubwe and realized that they had found the predecessor not only of Great Zimbabwe but of the other prehistoric settlements found in Zimbabwe today.

By 1250, Mapungumbe had 5,000 people and was the “largest known settlement in its day in Southern Africa…. The economic base of Mapungubwe included the Indian Ocean gold and ivory trade, as it had before with K2.” Additionally, clay spindle whorls prove that “Mapungubwe people were making their own cloth.” The cotton was grown locally, but knowledge of weaving had come from Arabs on the coast.

This is what visitors are shown in the midden. Warning: you can only get to Mapungubwe Hill on guided tours, and the tours show only a tiny part of what archaeologists have found atop the kopje. Maybe you can sweet talk a park manager into showing you something more. As for looking around on your own? In your dreams.

There’s a nicely demarcated path up to the base of the hill. It’s so easy! Compare it to the experience of Professor Fouché, who learned of this place early in the 1930s and who wrote a few years later that the hill “had always been taboo—a place of dread—They [the natives] would not so much as point at it, and when it was discussed with them they kept their backs turned carefully towards it. To climb it meant certain death. It was sacred to the Great Ones among their ancestors, who had buried secret treasures there.” (Leo Fouché, Mapunguwe, Ancient Bantu Civilization on the Limpopo, Cambridge University Press, 1937, p. 1)

Fouché goes on to explain that Mr. E.S. J. van Graan, “a farmer and prospector, who lived 50 miles away to the south-east, had heard from a very old Native the strange story of a white man gone wild, who had lived a hermit’s life in a cave on the banks of the Limpopo. This was a well-known character, Lottering (or Lotrie), who in the last decades of the nineteenth century had established himself in that remote wilderness, half a mile from Mapungubwe Hill. He had apparently climbed the sacred hill….”

“Following up this story, van Graan made enquiries until at last he located the sacred hill. On 31 December 1932, he set out with his son to investigate. On the way they were joined by three other adventurers. Everything had to be done secretly, as the land on which Mapungubwe is situated was private property, and owner unknown, An old Native, Mowena, had promised to point out the hill, but when the whites appeared, his courage failed. He refused to help them. They would never find the place, nor the secret way up, he declared. And if they did, they would not return alive. Eventually a son of Mowena was persuaded to point out the hill…The Native, who was literally shivering with fright and had to be forcibly detained, at last pointed out the secret stairway to the top.” (Fouche, p. 1)

That “forcibly detained,” is nice, don’t you think? Reminds me of the no-holds-barred South African Police before that organization was neutered (sorry, “reformed”) in 1994 to become the South African Police Service. But now we’re on the no-longer-secret stairway, with one of its wooden treads muscling into the top of the image. Notice the two round holes in the rock on the right.

At the top of the stairs is a modest wall, unfortunately all we’ll see of walls here, though “the people at Mapungubwe pioneered the famous walling later used at Great Zimbabwe.” (Huffman, Mapungubwe, Ancient African Civilisation on the Limpopo, p. 39.)

Back to those two holes. Fouche writes, “it was found that the ancients had cut small holes on opposite sides of the cleft, into which cross-bars could be slotted, like the rungs of a ladder. Since the site had been abandoned, a wild fig-tree had sprung up some way up in the cleft, and had attained to a girth of 4 ft, an indication of the length of time elapsed since the abandonment…. On reaching the top, the explorers found breastworks of stone and great boulders balanced on smaller stones, ready to be pushed over on intruders. It was a veritable fortress they had entered.”

A grave. The Gang of Five dug it up. OK: “gang” is too harsh. The “group.”

Here’s Fouché’s account: “K.C.P van Graan saw a piece of yellow metal plate exposed. When van Graan, Senior, examined this, he pronounced it to be gold. An excited search now started…Presently they came upon the remains of a skeleton… masses of bangles were round the arms and legs…Under the left arm or, as it seemed to the searchers, on the left hand, a beautiful black bowl, exquisitely made and polished, was found….The five fossickers had realized the schoolboy’s dream—they had found hidden treasure… Eventually the two van Graans were forced to agree to a division of the spoils on the spot. The gold was roughly divided into five equal portions and each took his share…This was a most critical moment in the history of Mapungubwe. The site was so remote and lonely that unscrupulous treasure hunters could easily have ransacked it completely….”

Think we’re going to get farther than this plank walkway to the grave? No dice, even though the remains of palaces are up there.

Back to Fouché. “Fortunately, the van Graans were men of education, and young van Graan, when a student at the University of Pretoria, had become interested in the story of Zimbabwe… He realized the scientific importance of the discovery and resolved to consult his old professor. Thus it came about that the writer, some weeks later, received from Mr J.C.O. van Graan specimens of the gold plate, bangles and beads found with the skeleton.

“The discoverers were traced and persuaded to hand over all their finds at a valuation and further to make over their discoverer’s rights to the University. Sub-Inspector Kruger was not required to intervene officially; his presence and moral authority sufficed… Through the kind co-operation of the police, adequate protection of the site was secured. This was urgently required, since the discovery of the gold ornaments had produced a fever of excitement in the surrounding country and sent hundreds of treasure hunters into the field.”

Visitors who pay their money (credit cards only, please; cash not accepted) get a pathetically abbreviated introduction to the site but are permitted to enjoy this power line. It’s not an ordinary power line. It runs to the Venetia Mine, about 15 miles to the south and presently the most productive DeBeers diamond mine in the world.

The modern world is an impatient world. (Where’s that phrase coming from?) Here we are at the western boundary of the Mapungubwe National Park, not far from the border station of Pont Drift. On one park side of the fence there’s mopane forest; outside the park, there’s a field ready for planting.

What lies ahead? Perhaps tomatoes.

More likely, oranges to be marketed in Europe or Canada. Yes, the fence is electrified, although this isn’t much of a deterrent to an elephant. Yes, there are plenty of them still around.

The water for the tomatoes and oranges comes from Kipling’s great, green, not-so-greasy Limpopo. Keep an eye out for crocodiles.

This picture was taken from the Maloutswa Hide, a viewing structure in the national park and only a few miles from the boundary fence we saw a moment ago. We’re also at the edge of the seasonally dry Maloutswa River. So where’s the water coming from?

Purists will shake their heads in disgust to see this elephant’s trunk curled around the pipe that keeps these pools wet in the dry season. “Fake!” they will cry. They’re right, and I can even show you the tank supplying the pipe. It’s fed by a pipe from the nearby Limpopo.

On the other hand, the elephant doesn’t have to worry about ivory hunters. Looking at the elephant’s wrinkles and their hint of sadness, I’m reminded of the Zhizo and the K2 and the Mapungubwe ivory hunters. I can more or less tolerate people digging for gold and diamonds, but killing elephants for ivory?

The climate at Mapungubwe grew colder and/or drier around 1300 and the Mapungubwe people scattered. Huffman writes that “some Mapungubwe royalty may have participated in the growth of Great Zimbabwe, but, as the ceramic evidence shows, the people at Great Zimbabwe were a different group… [that] would have witnessed the rise of Mapungubwe… [and] adopted the new elite settlement pattern, as well as class distinction and sacred leadership.” (Thomas N. Huffman,* Mapungubwe, Ancient African Civilisation on the Limpopo*, Wits University Press, 2005, p. 55)

Great Zimbabwe (see the separate file for that place) declined in the 1400s with the simultaneous rise of the Torwa people, whose kingdom, called Butua, flourished from 1450 to about 1650 and whose capital was here at Khami, near modern Bulawayo. The Torwa king was overthrown in 1844 by his own brother, with a little help from a Portuguese army. After an interregnum of about 50 years a new polity arose, the Rozvi Empire, which adopted much of the Torwa’s material culture but made its own capital at Danangombe, about 50 miles to the east (and shown later in this file). The Rozvi Empire survived until the 1830s, when the Ndebele horde “completely smashed the Rozwi [sic] power in Southern Rhodesia… and converted the Rozwi settlements into the ruins we see today.” Ndebele rule came to an and in 1890 with the arrival of the British South Africa Company. (Roger Summers and K.R. Robinson, Zimbabwe Excavations, 1958, Occasional Papers of the National Museums of Southern Rhodesia, 3: 23A, 1958, p. 323.)

Khami takes its name from the Khami River, which was dammed in 1928 to form a municipal water supply for Bulawayo. The city’s periphery is now less than three miles to the east, and the reservoir is too polluted for domestic use. The dam is still intact, however, and I show it because some of the most impressive Torwa structures are underwater.

These include the Precipice Ruins, which include a wall 200 feet long and at least 20 feet high overlooking a precipice that no longer exists.

Consolation: there’s a nice sign. The term “platform” will become very familiar in the rest of this file, because the Torwa and Rozvi ruins generally consist of walls wrapping areas on which thatched huts were built with walls of poles and* daga*, a cement of mud and dung. The huts are almost entirely gone, but the platforms survive.

Here’s a nice example: the Passage Platform, which takes its name from… well, you can figure it out. Several courses of the platform on the left are of black diorite. The Torwa decorated their masonry much more elaborately than did the builders of Great Zimbabwe.

I don’t know the name of the first European to see this place, but participants in the Pioneer Column that entered Matabeleland in 1890 were each granted title to 3,000 acres, and the Khami Ruins were included in the Hyde Park Farm, property of Johannes Colenbrander, who also ran an outfit called the Matabeleland Development Company. I don’t know what, if anything, it developed. Richard Nicklin Hall, with W.G. Neal, wrote in 1904 that the Khami Ruins “were most picturesque” but I don’t know if Colenbrander, who survived until 1918, ever saw them. (R. N. Hall and W.G. Neal, The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia (Monomotapae Imperium), Methuen, 1904, p. 192)

You can walk through the passage, negotiate the corner and get a good view of the platform’s plain top I’ll bet you’re assuming that these walls were built by the Torwa, but a lot of this place has been reconstructed in the last century. Often, it’s hard to tell whether a wall is old or new.

Here’s a bigger platform. Why is it called the Cross Platform?

Well, silly, it’s because there’s a cross on the top, presumably dating to 1644, when the Portuguese helped the Torwa king’s brother stage a revolt. The Portuguese came, of course, with missionaries.

The granite blocks of the cross were mortared in 1938, a year after Southern Rhodesia’s National Museums and Monuments Act designated the Khami Ruins as a national monument.

Here’s another platform, the North Platform, with a chessboard pattern near the top of the wall on the right

Here’s the grandest of the platforms. “Wow,” the visitor thinks, but David Randall-Maciver, a British archaeologist invited here in 1905 by the Rhodes Trustees, wrote that this platform was “terribly dilapidated”—so dilapidated that’s he wasn’t sure how many terraces it contained: “it would seem that there were originally either six or seven.” (David Randall-McIver, Medieval Rhodesia, 1906, p.55)

For a view of the terraces before restoration, see K.R. Robinson,* Khami Ruins: Report on Excavations Undertaken for the Commission for the Preservation of Natural and Historical Monuments and Relics, Southern Rhodesia, 1947-1955, *Cambridge, 1959, p. VII. That photo shows that the surviving walls at that time had chessboard ornamentation missing from the reconstruction.

Outsiders may be glad that the authorities stepped in to rebuild the terraces, but some Zimbabwean archaeologists disagree and write that this was “actually desecrating the sacred places…. because such actions disturbed the resting ancestors….” Restoration, they write, is “only permitted when the living are specifically instructed by the spirits to do so.…” (See Shadreck Chirikure, Tawanda Mulwende, and Pascall Taruvinga, “Post-Colonial Heritage Conservation in Africa: Perspectives from Drystone Wall Restorations at Khami World Heritage Site, Zimbabwe” in International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2015, pp. 3, 6, and 7. See also Webber Ndoro, Your Monument Our Shrine, a dissertation published by the Uppsala University Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, 2001.)

Here’s the rough staircase that appears in the previous image. (A grander entrance is on the other side of the hill; we’ll see it momentarily.) For now, I only want to compare the stones flanking the stairs here.

Here’s one side.

Here’s the other. Well, Sherlock? You got it: old walls have lichen; new ones don’t. I’m not saying this is an acid test, but it’s a first cut at trying to tell new from old.

We’re at the top of the stairs and at the top of what the archaeologists call the Hill Platform. (You can’t accuse these guys of cutting loose with wild and crazy place-names.) I know: the summit is a little disappointing if you were hoping for a Taj Mahal or Parthenon.

Does have a nice view, which is westward. The sign says “King’s Platform,” indicating the site of huts once constituting the king’s palace.

Here’s a U-shaped wall of daga. Purpose? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe better.

And here’s the so-called “upper passage,” the formal entrance leading to the summit of the Hill Platform. For a photo of what it looked like before restoration, see K.R. Robinson,* Khami Ruins: Report on Excavations Undertaken for the Commission for the Preservation of Natural and Historical Monuments and Relics, Southern Rhodesia, 1947-1955, *Cambridge, 1959, p. XIX. Robinson was Chief Inspector of the Historical Monument Commission of Southern Rhodesia.

The rebuilt Middle Passage. (Facing p. 16 of Robinson’s book, there’s a detailed map of the Hill and Cross Ruins.)

We’ve jumped 50 miles to the east. “Dhlodhlo” is the name of a local Ndebele leader in the 1880s. The actual name used by the Rozvi is unknown, and the name in official use now (despite the sign) is Danangombe. (This is derived from Danag’ombe, danga meaning cattle and *ng’ombe *meaning byre, both words from Kalanga, the local language.) I prefer the seemingly unpronounceable Dhlodhlo, but Danangobe has been adopted by the government of Zimbabwe, as well as by Google Maps and Wikipedia, which means I’m outvoted.

Don’t you wish the road to Yosemite was like this? Yep, this is the only road in.

The gate was hooked shut with a loop of barbed, so either we opened it or turned around. We opened it. Now we just have to find a stick to prop the gate open some more.

We’re in. Hills? Not so much. We do have a bit of elevation, partly because we’re on a platform but also… wait for it…

…because we’re on a gentle but dramatic granite swell. There’s something up top, too.

It’s the Rozvi capital, running from the late 1600s to the arrival in the 1830s of the Ndebele. David Randall-Maciver wrote that “the natural disadvantages of the ground have been in a great measure remedied by the resourcefulness of the builders, who have introduced a novel feature into the architecture of the citadel on its exposed northern and northwestern sides. In place of a single rampart they have made a formidable front of three walls…” (Medieval Rhodesia, 1906, p. 39)

Skeptics may argue that we’re looking at a budget version of the Hill Platform at Khami, but this one seems especially well-suited to il duce haranguing a crowd. Am I being disrespectful? I think it’s a pretty fair interpretation of how the platform was used. Granted, the platform was also the Rozvi king’s palace, but it’s also a lot better for speechifying than Khami’s Hill Platform, which was too high for people down below to hear what the boss up top was saying.

Here, from the top, is the kraal or enclosure where commoners listened to the big man.

The big man’s entrance was there on the left, near the sharp corner in shade.

Here it is again, up closer.

We’re going to stand on the platform at the left, which is said to have been the royal kitchen. Notice the chessboard trim on the right. Below it there’s a line of herringbone and, lower still, a course of diorite or ironstone in the pattern known as “cord.”

A little farther, please.

Same entrance passage seen from the other end.

Now we can see from the kitchen over to the main platform. Trust me: walk over there and you won’t see much.

You don’t trust me, so I’ve tramped over to the main platform and am looking over an archaeologist’s trench toward the east, away from the passage. Richard Nicklin Hall reminds us of “Messrs. Neal and Johnson, who spent three months in 1895 exploring these ruins (and who) sank a shaft fifteen feet down through the centre of this platform, and came on the walls and floors of the original ancients…. The floor was made of granite-powder cement a foot thick. On the lowest and original floor gold jewellery, consisting of beads, bangles, etc. was discovered.” If I understand this correctly, Neal and Johnson dug a way below that original floor. (R. N. Hall and W. G. Neal, The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia, 1902, p. 276.)

The drama today is all in the terrace walls, but they have been recently repaired, as at the Khami Ruins. The lichen-test suggests that this bit is new.

Here’s an unrepaired part of the wall in ruins on the left; I don’t know if the part on the right has been rebuilt or simply has not fallen epart, but once again there’s a stack of chessboard, herringbone, and cord ornament.

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Franklin White, a mining engineer wrote of these ruins in 1901 that “so little is accurately known about them that it is not possible to say definitely with what object they were built….” White’s paper, by the way, contains a map that has been copied by most subsequent visitors to the site. (“On the Ruins of Dhlo-Dhlo, in Rhodesia,” in *The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, *1901, pp. 21-28.)

Other writers have been less cautious. Hall and Neal write that “the ornamentation is far superior to and more interesting than that at Zimbabwe. The principal building is literally covered with astronomical ornamentation, having no less that twenty-three different ornaments of best workmanship still existing.” They’re building on the work of Dr. Heinrich Schlichter, who believed that the builders of Danangombe were Semitic sun worshippers. (Hall and Neal, *The Ancient Ruins of Rhodesia, *p. 275.)

Schlichter declared that Semitic cult members had built here a structure that is “from an architectural and astronomical point of view, the most interesting ruin south of the equator” with “not less than twenty-three different ornamentations of the best workmanship.” The wall here displays what Schlichter was perhaps the first to call the chess pattern, the herringbone pattern, and the double herringbone pattern. He does not explain how these were used in astronomical calculations. (See his “Travels and Researches in Rhodesia” in The Geographical Journal, 1899, pp. 382 and 388.)

Here, from a separate and probably rebuilt platform is a clear display of Danongombe’s chessboard and herringbone patterns.

Just to the east of the main platform there’s a cluster of trees.

They surround a cluster of boulders between which a wall has been built.

The view from behind the wall.

The view looking outward from that wall. Some maps identify the spot with the word “worship.” (Huffman, 2007, p. 27) It certainly feels like a place where oracles might speak.

Time to wash the car. We’re on our way to what Randall-Maciver calls “a beautiful little ruin.” A recent author, Paul Hubbard, echoes that assessment and calls the place we’re heading to “easily the prettiest ruin in the country, made so by its fabulous setting, copious and intricate decoration and spectacular surrounding scenery.” The place is Naletale or, earlier, N’Natali or Nanetale. (David Randall-Maciver,* Medieval Rhodesia,* 1906, p. 50, and Paul Hubbard,* Land of Strangers,: A visitors Guide to Danag’omber, Naletale, Zinujanja, and Bhila Heritage Sites, Insize District, Zimbabw*e, Pigeon Press, 2021, p. 21)

If you’re a foreigner, it’s time to cough up another ten bucks. U.S. cash dollars only.

Like Danangombe, we face another granite dome, in this case a much bigger one.

The countryside looks pretty empty, but in the 17th century Naletale was surrounded by farmers raising cattle and growing sorghum, millet, and peanuts. They also mined iron ore for tools and gold for export.

Pretty or not (I incline to “not”), Naletale was built by either the Torwa or the Rozvi and was used either by a sub-chief or as a retreat for the kings at Khami and, later, Danangombe. Flourishing about 1680, it certainly succumbed in the 1830s to the Matabele horde. If you imagine a clock face, we’re at about nine o’clock. Noon’s up there, around the corner.

An early visitor, J. Leybourne Popham, described the wall as “more or less round, roughly 200 feet in diameter…. The main entrance is on the north side, and there is another on the southeast. On the north side of the enclosure is a nearly circular platform on the same level as the top of the wall, and on this platform is a circular cement floor, and on this the remains of a hut.” (J. Leybourne Popham, “Notes on the “N’Natali Ruins,” in Proceedings of the Rhodesia Scientific Association, 1904, p. 67.)

The main wall varies in its complexity, with maximum ornamentation here, near the main entrance, approximately at eleven o’clock and just to the left of this picture. Here’s a fine display of chevrons, double herringbones, chessboards, along with a cord of a dark ironstone imported from a quarry about ten miles away. Randall-Maciver has a photograph of the same spot, and it shows the two monoliths. Originally there were nine of them, seven on this side of the main entrance and two on the other.

We’ve skipped past the main entrance for a moment and have come around to about one o’clock to show a crude change in the wall. About 16 meters of the wall on the right side of the photo were rebuilt in 2012 with funds supplied by the U.S. government.

The same side but looking towards four o’clock.

Double herringbones and a bit of chessboard, almost certainly rebuilt.

Simpler still. East side restoration work was undertaken after 1982 by students from Gweru’s Chaplin High School working under direction from the National Monuments and Museums of Zimbabwe. (No, the Chaplin school takes its name not from Charlie but from Drummond Chaplin, the last man to hold the title of Administrator of Southern Rhodesia for the British South Africa Company.)

Here, at about four o’clock, in the rear or east entrance. It was rebuilt in 2003-4.

Now we’re back at the main entrance, at about 11 o’clock. It had collapsed when Randall-Maciver saw it but has been rebuilt with chevrons and chessboards and occasional bits of ironstone cording. What appears to be chunks of large rock straight ahead are actually the partly reconstructed wall of the ruler’s hut.

Randall-Maciver writes the “the central hut is like the hub of a wheel, with side walls radiating out from it like spokes to the edge of the platform.” (p. 42) The stone-floored hut was over 20 meters in diameter. None of that floor is visible, nor are most of the walls.

Randall-Maciver writes: “I drove trenches into the platform on the north and south sides in order to study the construction, and excavated the central room of the chief’s hut to a depth of 2 metres below the floor, but did not find any objects whatsoever.” (p. 54)

There’s not much left for casual visitors, but we can climb from the chief’s hut up to the outer wall, which is patterned on the inside, too.

In 1937, four monoliths were set in lime cement by the same K.R. Robinson who was working that year at Khami. He was afraid that vandals would otherwise remove them.

Here’s the view from the chief’s platform back to the east entrance. Yes, the interior is the kind of place only an archaeologist could love.

Another view from the central platform and looking over the pit left by researchers.

Outside the wall, there’s a bit of bedrock sliced like this. Ideas?

Here it is in context. I vote that this is an old road, scarified for better traction. The nice thing is that nobody has messed with it.