Empires of the Monsoon

The map was probably assembled from the records of Zheng’s commanders.6 However, there is no way of knowing from it exactly where all the flotillas sailed, or how many of them never returned. There are hints that some may have swept in a great arc through the southern seas, looking in vain for land, and that others could have followed the African coastline past Sofala. The Mao Kun map says that storms stopped fleets going beyond ‘Habuer’, which appears to be a small island south of Africa.

Momentarily, the cloak of Chinese power was spread across the world, almost touching the borders of Europe. The merchants who went as far as Cairo stimulated the demand in Europe for oriental silks and porcelains. In China itself a cosmopolitan atmosphere was created as crowds of envoys from remote countries were brought back in the treasure ships. Processions of men speaking unknown languages and wearing strange costumes were seen in the streets of Nanjing and Beijing. They brought jewels, pearls, gold and ivory, and scores of animals. The keepers of the imperial zoological gardens were much occupied with the unfamiliar tribute being offered to the Sacred Emperor.

The place to ponder on the forgotten achievements of Zheng He is Dondra in Ceylon; it is the southernmost point of the Indian subcontinent. Close by the headland is a rocky beach, where the crumbling graves of shipwrecked mariners are shaded by coconut palms. Once Dondra had a great temple for a recumbent Buddha made entirely of gold, with two great rubies as eyes, and every night 500 maidens sang and danced before it. A short distance to the west is where Zheng’s tablet in three languages was set up. When the Chinese fleets, sailing west, sighted the gilded temple roof at Dondra Head they knew it soon would be time to turn north, towards Calicut and the Arabian Sea.

From here the Indian Ocean stretches away southwards, beyond countless horizons, to the bottom of the world. South-east lies the route back to Sumatra and China; far to the south-west is Madagascar. Beyond that is the cape where Africa makes its sudden turn into a more hostile ocean, so long unconquered by ships from either East or West.

ELEVEN

The King of the African Castle

Mombaza, Quiloa and Melind,

And Sofala (thought Ophir) to the realm

Of Congo and Angola farthest south.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II

IF THE REST OF AFRICA can put forward any rivals to the pyramids of Egypt in monumental building, Great Zimbabwe must rank high among them. The grey granite outlines of this African capital, 1,200 miles south of the equator, are strewn on the edge of the high plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers; the names of the men who ruled here, 700 years ago, are long forgotten. (So is the original name of the place itself. Zimbabwe comes from the title given it by later inhabitants of the region: dzimbahwe, house of stone.) Yet even in a state of ruin, when first sighted by European colonizers in the nineteenth century, the place was so impressive that credit for its construction was given to Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, anyone but Africans.1 This revived the ancient legend that the gold-producing regions of southern Africa were Ophir, the destination of King Solomon’s ships.

Gold had certainly been a stimulus in the surge of activity which created Zimbabwe.2 The Indian Ocean port of Sofala was reached by a twenty-day journey, down from the plateau and due east across the coastal lowlands. At the coast the merchants waited with Syrian glassware, Persian and Chinese bowls, beads, cowrie shells, spoons and bells.3 The dhows, arriving on the monsoon, also brought cargoes of bright-coloured cloth, known as kambaya, from the great Indian port of Cambay. For centuries such goods had been an irresistible lure for the people of the interior.

Great Zimbabwe was occupied continuously for 400 years, and during much of this time it controlled the gold trade with Sofala. The rulers grew rich. They wore garments of imported silk (traditionally, coloured blue and yellow), but also had long capes of stiff cloth, woven locally from cotton grown in the Zambezi valley. When they gave judgement in disputes they sat on carved, three-legged stools, and were often hidden, speaking from behind a curtain. Gongs were sounded to announce their arrival, and petitioners had to crawl forwards on the ground, clapping their hands as they spoke, and never looking at the king. It was expected of a ruler, because of his divine powers, to keep a vast number of wives – perhaps as many as 300. He was also the custodian of all the nation’s herds, and ordinary people had use of the cattle as an act of royal patronage. Animals were slaughtered on the orders of the king to meet the needs of his subjects.

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Great Zimbabwe was the most powerful capital in southern Africa, but there were dozens more stone-built settlements on the eastern side of the plateau, from which cattle were taken down to the lowlands to graze. Near the Limpopo river the earlier dzimbahwe of Mapungubwe was surrounded by terraced farmland, its rulers ate off celadon dishes from China, and relics found in graves include a sculpture of a rhinoceros, six inches long, completely sheathed in gold leaf. Only in Great Zimbabwe’s maturity did its rulers develop a similar interest in making ornaments out of the metal, rather than simply selling it as dust or nuggets.

What distinguished Great Zimbabwe, from about A.D. 1200, was an ability to plan and carry through construction work on a massive scale, with a steady advance in techniques. Blocks used for building were fitted together without the use of mortar, and as skills progressed, walls became adorned with various patterns; most pervasive was the chevron, a symbol of fertility.4

The origin of Great Zimbabwe lay in the building of a stone acropolis amid granite boulders on a hilltop surveying the countryside in all directions. This acropolis with its towers and turrets was, in effect, the palace, and meant that the king’s subjects knew that he was literally looking down on diem. At night they could see the glow of his fires. The climb to the royal presence was steep and exhausting. Entry was controlled by spear-carrying warriors; the doors in walls mounted on the natural rock were so small that a man could go in only by crouching low.

In the valley below were many enclosures, probably occupied by the king’s wives and powerful retainers. The walls of the biggest were six times the height of a man and had drainage channels from the interior floor levels. To make them, a million pieces of dressed granite had been shaped and carried to the site. Inside were circular thatched houses built in the typical African style, with walls of daga, a cement-like earth often taken from anthills. It was customary to paint these walls with bright geometric patterns. Clustered round the enclosures were the huts of the lowly subjects and the slaves, captive survivors from raids on neighbours. The population of the capital grew to as much as 20,000.

The Zimbabwe gold trade was to set off a chain reaction far across the continent. Elephant tusks, dried salt, and iron weapons and implements were carried along forest paths from one market to the next, until they gained a maximum barter value in the more densely-populated districts. Even 1,000 miles away, north of the Zambezi watershed, copper deposits which had been neglected for 300 years were again worked intensively.

The king of Great Zimbabwe ruled a warlike people known as the Karanga. He and the subject chieftains, who lived round the plateau in less imposing settlements, held sway over an area almost the size of France. Their territories spread into what today is Botswana on one side, into Mozambique on the other, and across the Limpopo into what is now South Africa; the granite ruins are their monuments.

The growth of Great Zimbabwe had happened in total isolation from the formation of city-states at much the same time far away on the western side of Africa. The empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay which rose and fell beside the Niger river might as well have been on another continent. They were almost as far to the north of the equator as Great Zimbabwe was to the south, and much of the 3,000 miles separating them was almost impenetrable tropical forest. Beside central Africa’s inland seas, from which the Nile takes its source east of the Ruwenzori (‘Mountains of the Moon’), lay cultures far more closely allied to Great Zimbabwe. Settlements almost on the same scale seem to have developed there concurrently, to gauge from massive earthworks and irrigation systems; but since their buildings were of wood and thatch, almost all the evidence has vanished in the intervening centuries. The people who lived in them seem, moreover, to have had no connection at all with the trade of the Indian Ocean.

However, one link is clear. In the great lakes region, as was the case 1,500 miles further south, iron-mining and smelting were central to the economy. Great Zimbabwe had grown rich from gold – there were more than 4,000 small gold-mines on the high plateau – but iron ruled the lives of ordinary people. Whereas most of the world first smelted copper, then progressed over many centuries to the making and hardening of iron, Africa took a single leap straight out of the stone age. This new ability spelled power, for wrought-iron weapons transformed the ways in which wars were fought and wild animals hunted; with iron axes men could chop down forests and with hoes dig more land to grow crops.

How iron-age technology developed in the interior of Africa, whether invented independently or acquired from outside, is much debated. It seems to have been used there at least as early as in Egypt or much of Europe. The first known iron-makers in sub-Saharan Africa lived to the west of what is now called Lake Victoria, just below the equator. Others were settled amid the hills of Rwanda and Burundi, in a fastness of extinct volcanoes capped with snow, of deep lakes and heavily-forested hills rich in red, haematite ore. The first traces of smelting in that remote region may date back to 1000 B.C.5

The identity of the smelters remains a mystery. They certainly did not come from among the bushman or pygmy communities, the ‘hunting and gathering’ aborigines, since they kept humpbacked zebu cattle (an Asiatic breed) and knew how to grow simple crops. Each clay iron furnace was small but elaborate, with access points all round the base for hand-worked bellows to drive up the heat of the charcoal fire. Swathes of primeval forest were brought down to keep the furnaces fed with hardwood, because the demand for iron tools was unending. It was a pattern which would be repeated in many parts of Africa.

The mastery of smelting may have spread southwards from the Nile valley, from the Nubian city of Meroë, mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in 450 B.C. On the outskirts of Meroë are huge mounds of iron-slag – the city has been called the ‘Birmingham of ancient Africa’. However, the earliest evidence of iron at Meroë is dated at about 500 B.C. Another possibility is that the pioneer iron-workers may have migrated to Rwanda and Burundi from the Red Sea, herding their cattle for as much as 2,000 miles until they halted in the fertile heart of the continent. Iron-hardening methods had been ‘discovered’ in Assyria in about 2000 B.C., and the secret spread southwards from there to Arabia.

Once the skill was established at the equator, it advanced steadily southwards along the rocky backbone of Africa. By A.D. 300 iron was being smelted almost at the Cape. In some areas, the remains of hundreds of furnaces are discernible, proving the existence of highly-organized village industries. Iron hoes, like cattle, could be used to buy a bride. The metal-workers formed themselves into guilds, being regarded as men apart. It was the rule that they must practise sexual abstinence before the ores were smelted, and goats were sacrificed when a deposit was discovered. The spirit of the clay furnaces was always female; some were built with protuberances on the outside representing breasts.

At Great Zimbabwe, teams of metal-workers were constantly at their tasks. Those not making iron tools or spears were busy casting the capital’s distinctive H-shaped copper ingots, which served as a form of currency. Smoke from many furnaces hung in the air. Like most other daily activities, smelting was closely concerned with magic. It could well be imagined that restless spirits had been active inside the furnace if the metal proved impure. Rituals must be performed to set them at peace.

The king and his close advisers took divine guidance on such matters at their religious shrines in the acropolis, where the spirits of royal ancestors were worshipped.6 The time of the new moon was most auspicious. The senior sister of the king played a main role, for like the king she was regarded as being in direct contact with the ancestors. At Great Zimbabwe the shrines were adorned with green soapstone carvings of mysterious creatures, part bird, part beast, adorned with beads and tautly stylized. Since each is different they may represent the spirits of former kings. These carvings were set on tall monoliths round the shrines and below one of the birds a lifelike crocodile crawls up the pillar. The beaks of the birds are like those of eagles: in Karanga belief, the eagle carries messages between the earth and Murenga, the deity.

Other artistic remnants of the religious rituals are contorted sculptures of men and women, made in soapstone brought from a hundred miles away. The stone was also carved to form circular bowls, twenty inches across, with hieroglyphic-like designs of animals, such as zebra, baboons and dogs, on their vertical sides.

The stone-working skills of the Great Zimbabwean craftsmen, and their ability to make ornaments in gold and copper, had grown out of the traditions of wood-carving and moulding in terracotta. Wooden artefacts have been lost to time and the African climate, but proof of the depth of artistic tradition in southern Africa is to be found in the fired earthenware sculptures discovered on the edge of South Africa’s Drakensberg mountains. Made in or before A.D. 600, what are called the ‘Lydenberg Heads’ were elaborately moulded masks, big enough to be worn completely over the head. The biggest is fifteen inches tall and still bears traces of painted decoration on the terracotta. These heads, dating to at least seven centuries before Great Zimbabwe’s maturity, show an aesthetic sophistication which must have even earlier roots.

Most puzzling of the stone structures at Great Zimbabwe is a conical tower, dominating the largest enclosure. Built of granite blocks, with a core of rubble, it hides no treasure, nor does it guard a royal grave. Meaningless today, the tower was so carefully constructed that it must have carried a precise message to all who saw it in the capital’s time of greatness. Perhaps this represented an African grain store, to assure the people that the king cared about their welfare and would never let them starve. Legend says that this enclosure, more than 800 feet in circumference, within which the tower stands, was built for the ruler’s senior wife. So this might have been yet another symbol proclaiming the virility of the royal line. Two entrances to the enclosure were marked with male and female symbols: a horn and a groove.

For the king’s humbler subjects, in their clusters of huts below the acropolis, life was little different from that in any village on the plateau. Water still had to be carried by the women from the nearest stream, firewood collected, grain pounded and cooked, the dark red earth of the gardens hoed; children looked after the goats and chickens; menfolk herded cattle, hunted game, moulded clay cooking pots, and prepared for war with their spears and clubs when orders came down from the acropolis. Much beer was drunk, especially on feast days such as the new year, when the king’s fire was rekindled and all other fires lit from it.

Existence was governed by fantasy and superstition. When the rainy season did not start on time the people took part in sacrifices at shrines where unseen ‘owners of the land’ had to be appeased. If such sacrifices failed to induce enough rain, women spirit mediums were consulted.

It was a mark of their spirit power – and, without doubt, their ruthlessness – that Great Zimbabwe’s monarchs held their subjects together for centuries around the nucleus of a city-state. But there was a fatal limitation: the ability to keep records was never mastered, nor was any form of writing borrowed from the Indian Ocean cultures with whom the gold trade had put its rulers in touch. In the course of more than three hundred years, coundess trade caravans were sent to the coast, where the leaders would have seen accounts being recorded in Arabic. Emissaries must likewise have travelled inland, bearing written messages to be read out to the king of what the Arabs called ‘Zabnawi, the land of gold’. More than any other sub-Saharan society, Great Zimbabwe had the opportunity and the need to start keeping written records, yet failed to take the decisive step to literacy.7

Instead, it was stultified by clinging to the oral culture of African rural life. When a ruler felt the need to send tidings or commands to an outlying village he would choose a courier who could be relied upon to memorize his words. During a long journey the courier would tie knots in a string to record how many days it had taken, and on his return the string was saved for future reference. Various methods of arithmetic were used and bundles of sticks tied with cords or marked with notches were used as tallies in trade.

Religious practices remained simple: there was no scholarly priesthood dedicated to setting down the precise form of rituals and the days in the calendar when they must be performed. The lunar months were divided into three weeks, made up of nine or ten days. Law-giving was not based upon written statutes, but on social customs, and the interpretation of signs. Above all, the spirits of the ancestors permeated everything in life: the spirit world was indivisible from reality and existence was as repetitive as the seasons. The keeping of records would have meant a linear progression in time, a rejection of the past, but the presence of the spirits weighed heavily against that.

A civilization could not be built on the shifting sands of memory alone, and black Africa’s only literate people, apart from the Muslim converts of West Africa and the Zanj coast, remained the Ethiopians, far away in the north-east, using their ancient Ge’ez language. All the wealth of the gold trade had failed in the end to transmute the fundamental nature of Great Zimbabwe’s society.8

As Al-Mas’udi had discovered in the tenth century, wealth in cattle was what always mattered most in southern Africa: from early times, figurines of oxen had been revered and cattle were ceremonially buried. The king ruled the herd as he ruled the people; he was, in reality, just the most powerful pastoralist. So when some insoluble problems confronted the state, shortly after 1400, Great Zimbabwe was simply abandoned. With his cattle and his people, the king moved on.

What tolled the knell of Great Zimbabwe can only be guessed at. It may have been a conflict among the rulers over the succession, or a long drought and the exhaustion of the soil. Equally possible, there was a sudden advance of the lethal tsetse fly from the lowlands, attacking both the cattle and the people.

The king who ordered the abandonment of Great Zimbabwe after almost four centuries is said to have been called Nyatsimba Mutota. He went north, nearer to the Zambezi river and the gold-mines of the high plateau, and founded the empire of the Mwene Mutapa. This became translated as Monomotapa, and was to appear on maps for many centuries as a mighty state of the African interior. Yet Monomotapa was never as powerful as Great Zimbabwe, whose flecked grey stones leave so many questions unanswered.

The acropolis and the enclosures may have been an almost chance response to economic prosperity: there merely happened to be more stone available than wood, since so many trees had been cut down to make charcoal for smelting. Alternatively, Great Zimbabwe could be seen as the unfulfilled prelude to the development of a distinctly African civilization; in their new home the Karanga people might have gone on to adapt to literacy and organize a fully-fledged state based upon it. History did not grant time for such possibilities to be resolved, because Africa south of the equator was about to enter a new era.

PART TWO

TWELVE

Prince Henry’s Far Horizons

Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back,

When gold and silver becks me to come on.

—Shakespeare, King John, III, iii

THE YEAR 1415 was memorable for the kings of Portugal and England, for each had a feat of arms to celebrate. In August an armada of small ships from Lisbon had captured the Moorish town of Ceuta, on the North African coast, and in October the bowmen of England routed the French at Agincourt. For Henry V, victory had been hard won, whereas John of Portugal’s losses – only eight men killed – were almost absurdly light. This was because the governor of Ceuta, having summoned a Berber force to help defend the town, sent it home too soon; he had decided that the attack was never going to materialize because of reports that the 240 Portuguese craft sailing towards him were too tiny and ill-manned to contend with the winds and currents in the Strait of Gibraltar. (The ships were a motley assortment, some being hired from England for the occasion against a promise of payment in consignments of salt.)

In the event, a good number of Muslims were slaughtered, their houses and stores were thoroughly looted, and the Pope declared the undertaking to be a holy crusade. The main mosque was turned into a church. King John proudly declared that he had ‘washed his hands in infidel blood’, to make amends for any offences he might have committed against God in his daily life, and set about celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his reign.1

It was certainly spectacular to capture and keep a town in North Africa, especially one so strategically placed only fifteen miles across the water from Gibraltar. Ceuta, just east of Tangier, boasted a history going back to Roman times, and the Arabs had used it in the past to control shipping in the western Mediterranean. The Portuguese were also happy to outshine their rivals the Castilians, who sixteen years earlier had raided Tetuan, a town not far from Ceuta; half of Tetuan’s citizens were massacred and the rest enslaved, but then the Castilians withdrew. The aims of the new masters of Ceuta were less fleeting.

Portugal was small, poor and ignorant, but its pride was formidable. The ruling dynasty had won the loyalty of the people, shortly after coming to power, for having fought off Castile’s attempt to conquer them in the final decades of the previous century. Confidence had also been raised by the king’s marriage ties with England: his queen was Philippa of Lancaster, and among courtiers in Lisbon the legends of Camelot and its knights were favourite reading. The eldest of the Portuguese princes, Duarte, Pedro and Henry, took part in the fighting at Ceuta and immediately after its capture they were dubbed knights by their father. Queen Philippa had encouraged them in feats of arms (not for nothing was she the daughter of John of Gaunt) but was denied the pleasure of welcoming them home from their triumph at Ceuta; as they were returning she died of the plague.

In their plundering of Ceuta’s well-built houses the Portuguese were astounded by the silks from China, the silver-embroidered muslins from India and many other luxuries. ‘Our poor homes look like pigsties in comparison,’ admitted one Portuguese chronicler. The curiosity of the royal princes was aroused by the stories they heard from their captives about the interior of Africa, beyond the peaks of the Rif mountains overlooking Ceuta. They learnt about the Sahara desert to the south, across which the camel caravans journeyed to a ‘River of Gold’.2 One account said that on the river bank there were ants the size of cats, digging up gold and leaving it in heaps for humans to collect. This ancient myth of gold-digging ants was readily believed. Like everyone else in Europe, the Portuguese knew virtually nothing about Africa and assumed it to be populated by monsters and cannibals.