The Colonial Myths Behind Great Zimbabwe

Clip: Season 23 Episode 5 | 2m 32sVideo has Closed Captions

Racist colonial reports denied that Africans built Great Zimbabwe.

10/14/2026 | Expires 10/14/2030

The Colonial Myths Behind Great Zimbabwe

Clip: Season 23 Episode 5 | 2m 32sVideo has Closed Captions

Racist colonial reports denied that Africans built Great Zimbabwe.

Discover how colonial archaeologists used racist theories to deny that Africans built Great Zimbabwe. From claims that the site was built by Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba, to deeply racist writings by archaeologist Theodore Bent, these myths reveal how colonial attitudes distorted the history of this remarkable African civilization.

10/14/2026 | Expires 10/14/2030

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[Narrator] The epic structures of Great Zimbabwe bore witness to a sophisticated ancient culture.

In order to justify their occupation, the colonists declared Africans hadn't built Great Zimbabwe at all.

[Shadreck Chirikure] "It was the Phoenicians.

"It was the people from the Bible "who had built Great Zimbabwe.

"Great Zimbabwe was actually "the remains of the Queen of Sheba."

[Narrator] The British claimed the site's grandeur proved it must have been built by ancient visitors from the Mediterranean or the Middle East.

To support their claims, they sent their own archeologist to Great Zimbabwe.

Theodore Bent arrived in 1891.

At the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, curator Ashley Coutu reads from Bent's original report.

It explains why Africans couldn't have built Great Zimbabwe, and reveals the racist attitudes that lay behind Europe's colonial expansion into Africa.

So this text is the report of Theodore Bent.

"From this mass of fresh evidence, "we may safely consider that the builders "of these mysterious structures were well versed "in geometry and studied carefully the heavens.

"It quite excludes the possibility of any negroid race "having had more to do with their construction "than as the slaves of a race of higher cultivation.

"For it is a well-accepted fact that the negroid brain "never could be capable of taking the initiative "in work of such intricate nature."

It's very shocking, especially as an archeologist, reading it.

This passage is shockingly racist.

It really shows the real blindness that Bent and others would have had towards the possibility that local people could have made Great Zimbabwe.

And they have to find another explanation, because it can't be that local people have built the site.

[Genius Tevera] The first white explorers to come to Great Zimbabwe, they have their own preconceived notions about the local population.

They feel these are barbaric, these are backward, and it's unimaginable to them that these people that they look down upon can have anything to do with a structure that's as amazing and magnificent as Great Zimbabwe.