33^ ORIGIN' OF ZIMIIAr.WE-CULTURE. 



Zimbabwe is not Rhodesia's most ancient monument by 

 many centuries. Such a statement, when first put forward some 

 twelve years ago, was at best but a reasonable conjecture on the 

 balance of probabilities. To-day we occupy far surer ground, 

 for we now know on positive irrefutable evidences that when the 

 earliest exploitations of the gold from our rock mines took place, 

 and when Zimbabwe was not standing, the Bantu races had not 

 arrived south of tlie Zambesi on to the rock mine area. Bantu 

 labourers no doubt assisted to l)uild Zimbabwe Temple as 

 labourers, and as lal^ourers oul}-. but under whose direction, and 

 whose influence, and for whose purpose? The Temple, with 

 its special arrangement and symbols of worsh'p, so completely 

 foreign to anything suggested by the study of the negroid from 

 the time of I'tolemy to the present day, was not the outcome of 

 any natural inspiration of the unaided Bantu then freshly arrived 

 from northern regions. 



The only aboriginal negroid on this area prior to the Bantu 

 was the lUishman, who of a suret\- never extracted 150 million 

 pounds sterling w(_)rth of gold from our rock mines. The 

 Hottentots were never here. 



[t will l)e remembered that in 1894, four years after the 

 C)ccupation of Alashonaland, and only one year after the Occu- 

 pation of -Matebeleland, Mr. John Hays Hammond, a consulting 

 mining engineer, experienced in mining, ancient and inodern, in 

 all ]:)arts of the world, and also consulting engineer to tlie Char- 

 tered Com])any, reported, when less than a quarter of our present 

 gold-mining areas had been discovered, as follows: — 



1 . Tliat manv of the rock mines in this country were 

 undi uibtedly ancient. 



2. That the oldest rock mines showed by far the greatest 

 skill in mining, and were the largest and deepest. 



3. That there liad been periods in mining, marked hx lapses 

 and sudden cessations in operations, each successive period 

 .showing a falling off in skill, in depth reached, in nature of the 

 rock worked, and in extent of reef extracted. 



_[. That the skill in mining displayed on the oldest mines was 

 beyond the ca])acitv of an}- negroid or Bantu people to evolve or 

 carrv on, and was exactly paralleled in ancient mines in Asia. , 



5. That from the oldest mines not onh' had many scores of 

 millions of pounds worth in modern value of gold been ex- 

 tracted, but the gold so won had been exported from the countrv 

 and never used locally. 



(k That Bantu people had for some centuries back down to 

 relativelv recent times mined not for gold but for iron and copper 

 only ; but this was confined to outcrops of reefs and shallow 

 scratchings on the surface, and showed a most crude, careless 

 method of securing and treating the ores. 



This re])ort was published in 1896, when less than a quarter 

 of our ]:)resent gold areas, and far less than a quarter of our 

 ancient workings, had been discovered. 



