The Ruins That Could Ruin History
They obscured its origin story, yet they bestowed greatness on it. The local tongue called it Dzimba-dze-mabwe (houses of stone), and colonialists put the qualifier “Great”. That should mean something.
Grab a cup of coffee, tea, or a glass of whisky, sit down and relax. This is going to be a long one. Some months back I was scrolling through clips on Instagram, and one caught my attention. A man enthusiastically described a revolutionary building method: interlocking bricks that required no mortar, promising strength, affordability, and simplicity. The tone was one of innovation, as if the idea had just been born (to him, it was). But for me first it took me to 2018, my last visit to Great Zimbabwe. As I was still trying to decipher the association, my mind raced even farther down memory lane to Form 1 history, The Mutapa Empire! To anyone who has stood before the towering dry-stone walls of Great Zimbabwe, the claim felt not groundbreaking, but amnesic. Because here, in the heart of southern Africa, a city built centuries ago using mortarless stone architecture still stands. No cement. No scaffolding. Just memory, geometry, and genius. While the modern world reinvents what was never forgotten by the land, Great Zimbabwe waits, not for rediscovery, but for reacceptance into a global history that once denied its authorship. These are not merely ruins. They are rebuttals in stone. From that realisation, I took to revising things I knew as a 13-year-old but this time applying research skills complemented by data science skills and systems thinking.
The Portuguese Saw It First
Contrary to the colonial myth that Great Zimbabwe was unknown until European explorers "discovered" it in the 19th century, the city was in fact documented centuries earlier. In 1531, Portuguese captain Vicente Pegado wrote of a grand stone fortress in the interior, called "Symbaoe" by the locals, meaning "court" in the local tongue. He noted the vastness of the walls, the absence of mortar, and a towering structure over 20 meters high. Twenty years later, historian João de Barros included even more detail, describing how the site was still in use by the Mutapa state and guarded by nobles. He added that the locals believed the place to be the work of the devil, a detail with implications far beyond the exoticism in which it was framed.
If the locals regarded the ruins as mysterious or supernatural, does it suggest they were not the descendants of the builders? Would the progeny of such a magnificent city forget their lineage so soon? Or did they choose silence, wrapping memory in taboo to shield it from profanation? Perhaps the city was already ancient by the 1500s, inherited by people who walked among its stones but bore no stories of its origin. Either way, the idea that Great Zimbabwe was a living city in the 16th century directly contradicts claims of its abandonment centuries earlier.
Rethinking Great Zimbabwe’s Timeline
Part of the controversy surrounding Great Zimbabwe lies in the challenge of dating it. Oral traditions place ancestors of the Karanga and Rozvi as the engineers, but African time was not European time, so no tangible dates have been derived from oral tradition. In fact, colonizers ensured that that memory was lost. Thus, we end up with dates that are interpreted to fit or deflect certain narratives. Modern dating methods place the city's peak between the 11th and 14th centuries CE, based largely on radiocarbon analysis of organic remains like charcoal and bone found near the ruins. But this technique does not work on stone. And Great Zimbabwe, unlike many ancient cities, has yielded few biological remains. No royal tombs. No cemeteries. No ossuaries. If the city's grandeur was built on perishable rituals and biodegradable materials, then much of its essence may have already vanished before scientific inquiry began.
Add to this the destructive early excavations by European archaeologists who removed stones, disturbed layers, and imposed their own racial assumptions on the site. The conical tower, one of the most iconic features, was partially dismantled in an effort to "understand how it was built." In doing so, they may have destroyed the very evidence they were seeking.
How Radiocarbon Dating Works
Radiocarbon dating (or C14 dating) measures the decay of carbon-14 in organic material, things that were once living: charcoal, bone, wood, seeds, textiles. As already said, this method does not work on stone or metal, and so dating stone structures like those at Great Zimbabwe requires indirect evidence:
Burnt wood found in or around walls.
Organic residue in pottery.
Charcoal from hearths or ritual sites.
But we have a complication: if few biological remains are preserved, the dating relies on extremely limited and often displaced samples. And in the case of Great Zimbabwe, that’s exactly what we find. The site is almost eerily lacking in biological debris. What we have instead are stones, potsherds, soapstone artifacts, and imported goods like Chinese porcelain and Arab glass.
This means that all proposed dates, from the 11th to 14th century CE are built on associative dating rather than direct analysis of the structures themselves. If those organic fragments were introduced centuries after construction, or from ritual fires unrelated to the main building phases, then the dating could be significantly off. Worse still, colonial-era excavations destroyed much of the stratigraphy needed to make clear conclusions.
While radiocarbon dating is commonly used to estimate the age of organic remains, it cannot date stone structures directly. To construct a broader timeline, archaeologists often rely on stratigraphy, the layering of soil and materials over time, and typology, which compares artifacts like pottery or tools to known styles from other sites. These methods help build a relative chronology, but they are interpretive and can be distorted by site disturbance, incomplete records, or biased frameworks. In the case of Great Zimbabwe, much of the early excavation was conducted without preservation in mind, leaving gaps that science alone cannot fully close. Thus, understanding this, I took the liberty of applying my data science skills to reconstruct a timeline, map similar civilisations and examine similar technologies around the world. But instead of boring you with tables numbers and charts, I find more joy in applying my creative writing skills therefore, in a few words I shall describe my perception of the city.
A City at Its Peak
Imagine the city not as a ruin, but as it once was. A vibrant capital buzzing with trade and ceremony. The scent of cattle and burning wood. Traders from the Swahili coast arriving with beads, cloth, and porcelain from China. Children chasing one another through narrow stone passageways. Courtiers in ochre-dyed garments preparing for ritual. The city walls spoke of status, protection, and sacred alignment. Great Zimbabwe was not a random collection of huts around a fort. I’m not just recalling a scene from a movie. It was an architectural and spiritual landscape engineered with precision.
Its builders, likely proto-Shona peoples or predecessors, possessed a technical and symbolic knowledge that defies the stereotypes of "tribal Africa." Dry-stone masonry without mortar. Urban planning aligned with the terrain. A spiritual cosmology encoded in walls and birds carved from soapstone. The Great Enclosure and its conical tower may have represented fertility, ancestry, or political power—we may never know for sure. But nothing about it suggests randomness. Everything speaks of intention.
What Was Europe Doing?
If we accept the commonly proposed timeline 11th to 14th century then Great Zimbabwe thrived during:
The High to Late Middle Ages in Europe.
The construction of Gothic cathedrals like Notre-Dame.
The founding of Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
The rise of the Hanseatic League and early merchant capitalism.
The Crusades and Christian–Islamic conflict in the Mediterranean.
The early Mongol Empire in Asia.
This was not a primitive age. And yet, when Europeans “discovered” Great Zimbabwe in the 19th century, they treated the site as an anomaly, an ancient ruin inexplicably out of place in Africa. But the supposed “ruin” was only 400–800 years old by then, no older than a medieval cathedral in Europe. Can you imagine if Notre-Dame, by 1850, had become untraceable to the French? If all records, names, and traditions around it had vanished?
That’s the real mystery of Great Zimbabwe.
A Vanishing Without a Trace?
If the city was still functional in 1552, how do we explain the complete disappearance of its oral tradition by the 1800s? Three centuries is not enough time for an entire civilization to vanish from memory, especially in a continent where oral transmission preserves history with remarkable durability. Empires decline, yes. But their echoes usually remain: in stories, in rituals, in place names, in the bones of ancestors. The silence around Great Zimbabwe feels orchestrated. Not merely by time, but by a convergence of factors: ecological shifts, political transitions, and perhaps deliberate forgetting in the face of colonial intrusion.
It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the people living near the site in the 16th century were not its original architects, but later migrants who inherited the ruins with little understanding of their builders' identities. Another possibility is that memory was deliberately suppressed or spiritualized, as many sacred sites in Africa are. To protect knowledge is sometimes to obscure it.
This is not mere speculation, but rather plausible given comments by individuals like Borros who in 1552 said “The locals call it the devil’s work”. It should be considered that Borros framing was of Christian interpretation, not likely the words Africans would use as African culture did not carry the notion of the devils or evil in the way Europe did (but that’s another discussion all together). What people would accredit the devil for building their home? If Barros wrote of noble women in the stone enclosures and locals whispering of the devil’s work, it tells us something, but perhaps not about the city itself. It tells us how outsiders saw Great Zimbabwe: with awe, with confusion, and with the assumption that Africans could not have built it. Whether this was ignorance or imperial strategy is less important than the result: the story of the city was rewritten before it was ever truly understood. What’s important about Borros is the time at which he wrote, in in contrast to archaeology and its timelines. The alignment feels well curated. To me, it feels more like deliberate alignment meant to kill conversations on origins.
If Barros’ quote is true, then the people inhabiting the area in the 16th century likely did not build it. Which suggests that another great civilization—possibly older than recorded—was responsible. By the time the Portuguese arrived, its memory had already been desiccated or displaced.
Does Decline Happen That Fast?
The 14th century isn't distant prehistory. It’s within modern historical range. If Great Zimbabwe was truly abandoned by the 15th century, we must ask: what kind of societal collapse could erase its memory, repurpose its stones, scatter its people, and leave barely a whisper in oral or written form within 300–400 years? To add to this, there is significant technical inconsistency between what carbon dating suggests and Borros writing. If you have been tracking with me, you may have noticed that I quote Borros from 1552 (16th century) yet archaeologists say the city was abandoned by the 15th century. I shall address this later.
Modern speculation, grounded in what we know about cultural decay, suggests that collapse on that scale typically takes far longer, millennia, not centuries. Egypt, Rome, and Mesopotamia declined, yes, but they left dense layers of evidence over thousands of years: documents, religious institutions, art, bodies.
The silence at Great Zimbabwe feels unnatural. Not because its people failed, but because its memory was forcibly muted, buried beneath the twin pressures of:
Colonial denial of African agency.
Historical expectations based on European timelines.
A Timeline That Both Aligns and Contradicts
Curiously, the carbon-dated timeline places Great Zimbabwe’s peak between the 11th and 14th centuries, suggesting its decline by the early 1400s. Yet just a century later, in 1552, João de Barros describes a city still guarded by nobles of the Mutapa kingdom, housing royal wives, and regarded with sacred awe. If the city had collapsed a century earlier, how could such structures of authority still be active?
This isn’t merely a chronological contradiction, it is a philosophical rupture. It suggests either that the city’s decline was far more gradual and culturally complex than archaeological layers can capture, or that the tools used to measure its timeline have missed something: the slow persistence of memory, ritual, and elite presence even in the face of ecological or political shifts.
Moreover, the real puzzle isn’t just the city’s endurance until the 16th century, it’s the disappearance of its memory by the 1800s. Three centuries, a mere handful of generations, are not enough to erase a civilization of such magnitude unless something else intervened: conquest, displacement, forced forgetting, or even intellectual sabotage in the colonial archive.
Barros, writing of a place alive with ritual and guarded by a ruling order, saw a city not yet dead, though perhaps in decline. The dating techniques see what remained buried, but cannot always read what still breathed.
So the silence between 1552 and 1800 is not explained by erosion or decay. It is best explained by historical erasure.
When a Ruin Threatens History
Early colonial archaeologists desiccated the city on assumption that it was the “land of Ophir”, from which the biblical king Solomon received his gold. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But, if Great Zimbabwe predates Solomon, as some speculative theories propose, or even if it simply thrived alongside medieval Europe (which carbon dating says it does), the implications are enormous. It dismantles the colonial timeline that places sub-Saharan Africa outside the flow of global civilization. It asserts that Africa was not late, not lacking, and not silent.
The ruins do not just challenge history, they threaten it. They threaten the lie that Africa had no civilizations. They threaten the comfort of thinking progress flows only westward. They stand as an indictment of how archaeology was used to validate empire, and how stones were made to speak someone else's story.
And perhaps that is the deepest truth the ruins reveal: not just that a great civilization once lived here, but that it was intentionally forgotten. That its memory was inconvenient. That its existence unsettled a world that needed Africa to be a blank slate.
In rediscovering Great Zimbabwe, we do not merely recover the past. We disturb the very foundation on which modern history has been written. These are not ruins of a dead city. They are living evidence of a history that refuses to be buried. So we return to the stone towers, and the unanswered questions they pose. Not because we expect the stones to speak, but because we are finally ready to listen.
Global Echoes of an African Technique
The walls of Great Zimbabwe were raised without mortar, each granite block precisely shaped and stacked to interlock with the next. The technique is known as dry-stone masonry, and while it is most often discussed in relation to Europe or the Inca Andes, its use in Great Zimbabwe reaches a level of refinement and symbolic resonance rarely matched anywhere in the world.
In southern Africa, this architectural tradition was not isolated. Sites like Khami, Danamombe (Dhlo-Dhlo), Naletale, and Zinjanja continued the legacy of stone-building after Great Zimbabwe’s political center waned. These successor sites feature stone terraces, raised platforms, and decorative banding that reveal innovation within continuity. Collectively, they confirm that Great Zimbabwe was not a lone marvel, but the center of a wider architectural and civilizational tradition.
Yet the technique is not exclusive to Africa. Similar engineering feats, though culturally unrelated, can be found across the world. In the high Andes of Peru, the Inca built Machu Picchu and Cusco using ashlar masonry so precise that not even a knife blade can fit between the stones. Like Great Zimbabwe, Inca cities used no mortar and were carefully aligned with cosmological beliefs. On the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, the ancient Nuraghe towers of the Bronze Age (18th–12th century BCE) show dry-stone circular architecture, while the Cyclopean walls of ancient Mycenae in Greece (1400–1200 BCE) rely on massive unbonded boulders. Though these may share structural logic, their scale, intent, and symbolic coherence differ significantly.
Closer to home, megalithic sites such as Tiya in Ethiopia or the Senegambian stone circles indicate that the use of stone in sacred, symbolic spaces was widespread in Africa, even if not expressed through urban walls. But among all these, Great Zimbabwe stands out uniquely: not just as a feat of engineering, but as a spatial expression of political order, spiritual symbolism, and environmental harmony.
What unites these global sites is a shared human instinct: to speak through stone, to build not merely for shelter but for meaning. What separates Great Zimbabwe is that its voice, long ignored, often silenced, is beginning to be heard on its own terms. The city’s construction is a declaration that African civilizations mastered not just survival, but elegance, order, and encoded memory.
Its walls did not merely hold back the elements. They held knowledge.
Stones That Refuse to Be Margins
To walk among the walls of Great Zimbabwe is to confront a story that should have been central but was pushed to the margins. For centuries, it stood in silence while textbooks traced civilization through the stones of Greece, the terraces of Machu Picchu, or the towers of Sardinia. But what happens when we place these stones, Zimbabwe’s stones, on the same timeline?
We discover that Great Zimbabwe flourished alongside the Inca Empire, long after the Nuraghe towers of Bronze Age Europe, and not far removed from the Mycenaean walls of ancient Greece. This does not diminish it. It elevates it. It proves that Africa was not behind, but parallel. Not isolated, but innovative. Not primitive, but precise.
Dry-stone masonry was not a default of lacking mortar. It was a masterstroke of material intelligence. Just as the Inca chose to shape stones with exactitude, so too did the builders of Zimbabwe engineer balance, aesthetics, and durability, without cement, without iron, without imported blueprints. The stones were shaped by knowledge held in memory, passed in rhythm, and laid with an instinct that remembered more than it recorded.
To admit this is not merely to rewrite African history, it is to rewrite world history. To admit that stone speaks in many accents, and the African one has been ignored too long.
Great Zimbabwe stands not as a question mark at the edge of empire but as an exclamation mark at the heart of a forgotten global story. Its walls do not only mark what was built. They mark what has been buried, denied, and now, at last, unearthed.
This is not just a ruin.
It is a rebuttal.
And it stands still.
Why Some Stones Are Remembered
It is no accident that the pyramids of Egypt grace the pages of every world history book, while the towers of Great Zimbabwe barely register a footnote. Egypt’s grandeur is remembered not simply because it is impressive, but because it became useful to the construction of Europe’s historical imagination.
Egypt entered the Western canon through the Bible, through Greek admiration, and through Roman conquest. Its geography placed it in Africa, but its narrative placed it in proximity to Israel, empire, and Christian lineage. It was interpreted as Africa’s exception, a great civilization permitted to exist in African soil only because it could be tied into someone else’s story.
But Great Zimbabwe had no such passport. It spoke no Greek. It was never mentioned in Exodus. It bore no relevance to Europe's salvation or Rome's expansion. So it was sidelined, deemed a mystery, then rebranded as either Arab, Phoenician, or mythic, anything but African. Because to admit that Africans built it, preserved it, and encoded meaning within it, would disrupt the hierarchy that colonial history was built upon.
In this sense, the ruins of Great Zimbabwe do not only threaten history because they are old.
They threaten it because they are independently old.
Because they remind us that Africa had its own timelines, its own peaks, its own philosophies, not derived, not borrowed, not permitted by outside powers.
And so the deeper question is not, why was Great Zimbabwe forgotten?
The real question is:
What kind of history needs it to be?