Reclaiming Great Zimbabwe: progressive or regressive decoloniality?

Abstract

Someone once commented (I don’t remember who) that they were amazed that there were still new books to write about Great Zimbabwe, given how much was already published. At the time, as I was writing The Silence of Great Zimbabwe (Fontein 2006), what amazed me was that no one had written that book already. As Terence Ranger commented at its launch, it was such a simple idea to research ‘local’ contested histories of Great Zimbabwe from the perspectives of people living around the site along with the long processes through which they had been marginalised from its historiography and its management: from the ‘Zimbabwe Controversy’ of the early twentieth century through the professionalisation of archaeology that followed and, still later, of heritage practices after independence in 1980. Why hadn’t these histories been researched years or even decades before? And why hadn’t Zimbabwean scholars written it? This is not to say that there was not excellent archaeological and historical work being written by Zimbabwean scholars. Far from it, in fact. Books by Pikirayi (2001), Pwiti (1996a) and Matenga (1998) shone out as examples of archaeological and heritage publications at the time that illustrated the sophistication of Zimbabwean archaeology and its emerging focus on these issues. I read these books intensively and their authors were tremendously helpful to me, then a fledging PhD student, as I got to grips with fieldwork. And yet, with the exception of Sinamai (1998), Pwiti (1996b; Pwiti and Ndoro 1999) and Ndoro (2001, although much of that doctoral thesis derived from others’ unpublished work) far too little had been published, at that stage, about Great Zimbabwe’s significance for the communities living around it, its place in contested ‘local’ histories, meanings, practices and values, the complex historical and archaeological processes that had excluded these stories from its historiography and management or, for that matter, about its place in anti-colonial nationalist and post-colonial ideologies, discourses and imaginaries. Not anymore. Since the early 2000s Zimbabwean archaeology and heritage studies, as well as studies of pre-colonial history, have continued to expand, now rightly dominated by Zimbabwean scholars. As a result, archaeological and historical debates have moved