The Lost City of Solomon and Sheba by Robin Brown-Lowe

first Portuguese missionary to actually live with the Karanga 500 years ago, for example, left an account of a rural Shona society all but identical to the one I found there in 1947. So if there were people living on the Zimbabwe acropolis in what appeared to be settled communities, who were they? Packed into this question, however, there is so much political dynamite no one appears to have dared to answer it.
    Dr Peter Garlake, whose book
Great Zimbabwe
(Thames & Hudson, London, 1973) remains the bible of the Shona school, goes no further than to propose that ‘early iron age groups must once have lived or camped in the vicinity . . . infiltrating country previously occupied only by late Stone Age hunters . . . able to coexist in some areas without competition or conflict for many centuries’. Dr Garlake does not specify that by ‘early iron age groups’ he means Bantu, whereas his ‘late Stone Age hunters’ were people of a different race – itinerant bushmen (San People). Admittedly he does support, albeit unwittingly, that the San People once occupied the Zimbabwe countryside alone but he begs the question: for how long? If, however, we accept my proposal that people who collected and traded gold were the true originators of the Zimbabwe culture then this is not a question that may be begged; indeed, it is the fundamental question.
    Nowadays, archaeologists admit that they can rarely, if ever, pick up on and employ their skills other than to reasonably well-established ancient sites. There simply is no sufficient build-up of evidence from anything but settlements of some antiquity. Layers of traceable materials at the so-called lowest levels of the Zimbabwe acropolis site are therefore a good indication that there was an old settlement or the regular gathering of Stone Age people here.
    Recent research has also indicated that pastoralists did not quickly take over from hunter-gatherers because theirs was the easier life. The opposite is true. When pastoralists first infiltrated the bush areas of hunter-gatherers, keeping their cattle alive and properly grazed was much the harder work. The reason that the pastoralists, like the Bantu, eventually won out is that cattle grazing drives out the hunter-gatherer and then expands exponentially as the cattle multiply. Eventually, as exemplified by today’s Kalahari bushmen, the hunter-gatherers end up scratching a living from neo-desert land that won’t support livestock or agriculture.
    You can see the process still at work and seriously threatening wildlife in modern Tanzania. The local Bantu, the Masai, have lived as a cattle-dependent society for thousands of years and have only been stopped from covering the entire country with their livestock by wildlife protection laws. A Masai man genuinely believes that he has been put on earth to protect the world’s cattle (which made for some very interesting defences against charges of cattle-theft in colonial times). Not surprisingly, full-time hunter-gatherers in Tanzania have become extinct.
    The point is that this process takes a lot of time. Did it take the amount of time we require for San People to have met Solomon’s priests and Phoenician gold traders, the ‘ancient Moors’ who are the shadows in the background of every ancient record of trade in southern Africa?
    It is time to take a proper look at those ‘late Stone Age hunters’ cum gold traders, the mysterious San People, but that is no easy task because if Great Zimbabwe is the lost city of Africa, the San are most certainly the lost tribe. Their origins will be traced later. Here, for a moment, let us think that which has previously been unthinkable – that the San People were the
original
gold traders of south-central Africa and created the first settlement, albeit transitory, at Great Zimbabwe. Did they then, over a period of about a thousand years, slowly intermingle with the early Bantu immigrants until