The Shona Peoples – From Leopard’s Kopje to Great Zimbabwe – Episode 1

Hi everyone, Tundeleye here and welcome to the Africa History Channel. If you're new here and you love content like this, now is the time to subscribe and turn on notifications for the channel so you don't miss our new videos. Most of the videos we've done so far on the channel have stayed in West Africa and the Sahel. Today, we start a new two-part series that will take us to the southern part of the African continent. Let's get started. Much of the popular pre-colonial history from Southern Africa usually focuses on the emergence of the Zulu Empire under Shaka and then the Boers trekking through the area and founding their states. Much of what is told of the areas of Southern Africa to the north of these Zulu-Boer areas which will correspond to modern Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana are told in relation to the impact of these two peoples, the Mfekani that Shaka triggered and the migrations it caused and then it skips the Zimbabwe-Botswana area and goes to the more central areas that have the Congo Empire with the surrounding polities like Ndongo which is popular queen, Queen Nzinga. Yet, Shaka's Zulu Empire only emerged in 1816. Many important polities existed in this area hundreds of years before Shaka arose. Of these, the most well-known is the Kingdom of Zimbabwe from which the modern country of Zimbabwe derives its name. It is popular due to the remarkable stone structures left in its capital of Great Zimbabwe. This kingdom lasted from 1220 to about 1450, around 230 years as a contemporary of the great Sahelian empires like Mali and Songhe and predating the founding of the Ottoman Empire and only 14 years after Genghis Khan founded the Valuable gold, ivory as well as Arab, Indian and Chinese coins have been found in its ruins, indicating its connection to the global trade systems at its height. Yet, Great Zimbabwe was only one in a succession of states founded in the area from the 900s until the mid-1800s that is encompassed by modern Zimbabwe and parts of Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique. Founded by the Shona or Karanga people that dominated the area and filled a specific trade niche that the key resources that the area possessed, gold from an area known as Mayinka and ivory from its huge elephant and rhino population within the global trade of the times. They would dominate the area until a new people, a subset of the Nguni people who became known as the Udebele led by Mzili Kalzi migrated from the south, fleeing from Shaka and bringing his brutal war tactics to Bia in their conquest of the Shona who had been weakened themselves by infighting and Portuguese interference. This series will provide an overview of these successive Shona states until Mzili Kalzi came in the mid-1820s. The earliest culture that has been studied flourishing in this area was recorded as emerging 300 years before Great Zimbabwe in 900 and it has been named Leopard Culture in the southwestern portion of modern-day Zimbabwe. This was around the time the Ghana Empire was established in the Sahel further up north. It was a cattle-owning culture with villages built with cattle in the center of the village as opposed to the edges of the village However, in addition, crops such as millet, ground beans, sorghum and cow peas were also grown. The culture had iron smelting technology as well and very early versions of the mortarless stone buildings that successor states including the famous Great Zimbabwe were already present in sites associated with this culture. From the 10th century, the herds of cattle began to grow indicating that the settlement became larger and more complex social structures began to emerge. A lot of the work to bring this culture to our knowledge was done by South African professor Thomas Hoffman. This complexity was further increased by the emergence of long-distance trade in the area. From the 1000s, Arab merchants from the Swahili coast began to arrive in search of a commodity that is abundant in that area, gold. The emergence of this long-distance trade contributed to the stratification of the nascent Shona societies and in the fertile confluence of the Shashi and Limpopo rivers on the border between modern Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, a kingdom began to form. Emerging from around 1075, the Kingdom of Mapungubwe was the first major state not just of the Shona people but in the Southern African area. The state first clustered around a settlement which is currently called K2 from the Leopold Kopjes culture until around the early 1200s. The population outgrew this area and it moved the capital to the Mapungubwe hill from which the kingdom derives its name. Mapungubwe would go on to become a key supplier of ivory and gold into the Indian Ocean trade of the Swahili coast through the port of Sofala in present-day Mozambique. As the wealth increased, the complexity of the stone structures they built grew to protect the wealth. In fact, it was the discovery of one such world of gold stash in 1930 that brought about the interest in researching the area and discovering the kingdom. However, for decades during the apartheid regime in South Africa, the knowledge of the Kingdom of Mapungubwe was suppressed as it did not fit the state narrative of an absence of major states in the area before the arrival of Europeans. As time went on, the class division between the leaders of the kingdom and the people widened, creating the first distinct social structures that separated the nobility from commoners. Even the way the capital was constructed shows this. Commoners lived in the plains surrounding the hills while nobility lived at the top of the hills around the area. The royal family lived at the top of the largest and most sacred of these hills, Mapungubwe itself. The elites were buried inside hills with lavish burial items of gold, exotic animals like elephants and rhinos, and items from the international trade like beads and glassware. These class distinctions were legitimized by the concept of sacred leadership, something most states in the medieval times used as justification for the roles of kings and nobility. As with other medieval cultures, marriage was within the class a person belonged to, and marriage was more political amongst the nobility. Mapungubwe would last until 1290 when it would experience a population loss and its more famous successor to the north, the Kingdom of Zimbabwe, with Great Zimbabwe as its capital, would finally become the pre-eminent state amongst the Shona peoples. Zimbabwe would take the stone masonry that began from Leopold Kobje times to its pinnacle. While the most famous site is in the capital of Great Zimbabwe, there were many other locations where the local nobility lived, spread across the kingdom with impressive stone structures. During the colonial days, the Europeans initially touted a theory of ancient migrant foreigners being responsible for these great structures. However, contemporary records from renowned Arab merchants and explorers like Ibn Battuta in 1331 and Ibn Khaldun in 1375 debunk this theory as they recorded as contemporaries of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe that the kingdom was built and ruled by Shona people. In addition, Portuguese explorers in the 1500s and 1600s said the same thing, such as in the Mozambique called Jasper Veloso, made to the Portuguese king in 1518. The entry of the Portuguese into the area in the mid-1400s in search of gold in Africa and the beginnings of the Little Ice Age that lasted from the late 1300s until the early 1500s saw the area struggle to support its large population, and splinters in the nobility began to emerge. It was one such splinter that would lead to the end of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe and the rise of its successor Shona state, the Kingdom of Mutapa, established in the first two decades of the 1400s. Join us in the next episode as we explore the next set of Shona states and the arrival of the first Europeans in the area. Don't forget to like, share and subscribe to grow the channel. We are on a journey to 10,000 subscribers. Thank you.