Archaeology

In southern Africa, there has been a long-standing but unsubstantiated assumption that
the site of Khami evolved out of Great Zimbabwe’s demise around ad 1450. The study of
local ceramics from the two sites indicate that the respective ceramic traditions are clearly
different across the entire sequence, pointing towards different cultural affiliations in their
origins. Furthermore, there are tangible typological differences between and within their
related dry-stone architecture. Finally, absolute and relative chronologies of the two sites
suggest that Khami flourished as a major centre from the late fourteenth/early fifteenth century,
long before Great Zimbabwe’s decline. Great Zimbabwe also continued to be occupied
into the late seventeenth and perhaps eighteenth centuries, after the decline of Khami. Consequently,
the combined significance of these observations contradicts the parent-offspring
relationship implied in traditional frameworks. Instead, as chronologically overlapping entities,
the relationship between Khami and Great Zimbabwe, was heterarchical. However,
within the individual polities, malleable hierarchies of control and situational heterarchies
were a common feature. This is in tune with historically documented political relations in
related pre-colonial southern Zambezian states, and motivates for contextual approaches to
imagining power relations in pre-colonial African contexts.

The general conviction in the Iron Age archaeology of southern Zambezia is that drylands such as the Shashi region are marginal landscapes that did not host any significant food producing communities in the past. Resultantly, for those communities that occupied these landscapes, their settlement histories have been always portrayed as short-lived, since their existence is mostly understood as by chance and not choice. However, new data recovered from Mananzve and other drylands sites we surveyed and excavated in the Shashi region of south-western Zimbabwe demonstrates that Iron Age communities had a long-term settlement history on the landscape and that, through various strategies, they maintained food security in the face of environmental and climatic adversities. At a broader scale, these findings show that these areas perceived today as drylands are resource rich and that Iron Age communities which occupied these landscapes had the capacity to adapt and utilise these resources to their advantage. This challenges the designation of drylands of southern Zambezia such as the Shashi region as marginal, since that term undermines their resource potential and the adaptive capacity of the communities occupying them consistently through time.

Language is the most important conveyor of meaning and culture, elements which are often lost in translation, especially when such translation is across languages from distant cultural zones. For example, translations of indigenous African languages into English and French, particularly during the colonial period, frequently distorted the meaning of local words and cultural practices. Such a generalisation directly applies to an aspect of Shona religion known as mukwerera/kukumbira mvura (asking for rain), which was-and is still-being carried out by intermediaries through ancestor supplication. Interestingly, the first translations of this category of practice from Shona into English erroneously labelled the ceremony 'rainmaking', presided over by rain-doctors. Amongst the Shona, however, nobody except the Mwari (God), or Musikavanhu (the Creator), has the power to give or withhold rain. As intermediaries, officials who presided over rain-imploring ceremonies never controlled rain, but petitioned God, via the ancestors on behalf of the community. Rain control was a very dangerous act, only practised by witches and magicians (varoyi) to manipulate lightning (mheni) to harm others. This contribution melds strands of evidence from Shona linguistics with ethnographic, religious, historical, and archaeological observations to argue that the term 'rainmaking' is a misnomer which ascribes undue agency and power to masvikiro who presided over rain imploring. The misnomer derives from the 16 original attempts by English-speaking Europeans to translate directly from the superficial meaning without understanding or appreciating the deeper meaning of the symbolism and role playing involved during the ceremony. Consequently, archaeological interpretations that feed off the misnomer of 'rainmaking' are incongruous with Shona practices and require major revision that equates to concept cleansing.