In the heart of southern Africa
stands the remains of a once mighty city,
Great Zimbabwe.
For hundreds of years
a mysterious civilization reigned supreme here
in the Zimbabwe plateau.
Then suddenly in the 16th century it crumbled,
leaving behind only a riddle: Who had built these massive walls?
Obsessed with legends of a lost white civilization,
a German explorer stumbled upon the ruins.
Was this the legendary city of Sheba, he thought,
whose queen captured the heart of King Solomon?
Fifty years later,
an archeologist in her quest for the truth
unearthed an even more remarkable past.
Had Great Zimbabwe been the center of a powerful black culture,
one of the greatest cities of its time?
This idea sparked furious debate
and threatened to overturn centuries of bias
about Africans and their history.
1871. The German explorer Karl Mauch searches for a legendary city
he's convinced lies hidden in wildest Africa.
Mauch has spent six years in Africa overcoming poverty, sickness
and numerous scrapes with death in pursuit of his obsession.
Against all odds,
Mauch discovers immense stone walls that cover hundreds of acres.
He is over awed.
What he has found are the ruins of an ancient civilization,
the only one of its kind in sub Saharan Africa.
Mauch believes this discovery will be his crowning achievement.
Mauch's obsession with Africa began as a child.
At that time, Africa was a land of mystery.
Fantastic stories hinted at wondrous landscapes,
populated by exotic animals and wild natives.
At age 10, while gazing at a map of Africa,
Mauch vowed to one day explore its unchartered lands.
Like many Europeans,
Mauch's understanding of Africa was based on legends
that grew out of the Bible.
"And she gave the King 120 talents of gold.
Never again gave such an abundance as these
that the Queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon."
Solomon, the wisest and richest Hebrew king from the Bible
inspired many later legends.
One told of Solomon's gold mines at a place in Africa
called 'Ophir'.
Others spoke of the enigmatic Queen of Sheba.
She was a beautiful seductress who appeared in Jerusalem,
paid homage to King Solomon, became his lover,
and just as suddenly disappeared back to her mysterious land
which lay hidden somewhere in Africa.
Arab traders pried the east African coast
in search of the lands of Sheba and Ophir.
The Africans who traded with these Arabs
came to believe that Solomon's mines and Sheba's lost city
were somewhere in the interior.
Mauch burned to be the man who would discover these legendary lands.
But Mauch was poor, his options limited.
Living in very modest circumstances.
I was bound by my parents to become a teacher; and I was,
unfortunately, denied the opportunity for further studies at a university.
I've endeavored to obtain knowledge of medicine
by talking to doctors and reading medical journals.
I have studied the practice collecting insects,
birds and minerals.
Karl Mauch did not come from a privileged background whatsoever.
Karl Mauch was a self made man.
What he did was he taught himself cartography, geology,
all the sciences that were needed for him to be a great explorer
in Africa like Livingston, Burton, Speak.
That's what Karl March came from, that's what he wanted to be.
The dream of African exploration consumed Mauch.
By practicing gymnastics and walking six miles a day
in every season, over any ground, often without food or drink,
I've tried to steel my body.
Mauch wrote to the German Geographical Institute
in hope of gaining their support for an expedition to unexplored Africa.
The response was harshly negative.
It warned that African exploration should be left to the professionals.
It went without saying
this meant people of higher social standing.
He carried this letter with him for years.
Karl Much was not accepted by the German Geographical Institute
because really he wasn't a member of the club.
He was self taught, he had never been to university,
he had no titles, he had not connections.
He had no hope, really.
The German Geographic Institute had good reason to reject Mauch.
African exploration was a dangerous and expensive affair.
By the time Mauch dreamed of Africa,
hundreds of European adventurers and missionaries
had already died there.
Most explorers were independently wealthy or well connected.
In Africa, they could afford to hire scores of natives
who became their laborers, porters, guides and translators.
Mauch, however, had nothing. Not even ship fare to Africa.
Determined to explore wildest Africa, Mauch, age 27,
enlisted as a crew member on a ship sailing for Durban,
South Africa in 1864.
At last the ship reached Africa.
How I wished for the time when, for the first occasion,
I would be able to set foot on this strange soil.
But the reality of Durban
and the many other European settlements
in South Africa clashed with Mauch's dream of an untamed land.
South Africa, in 1865, was inhabited by,
of course, a great number of tribes: The Xhosa, the Zulu, the Sotho.
By this time, quite a few white, about a quarter million whites,
had come settled, immigrated, whatever you like.
And, in fact, conquered a bit.
Mauch wanted to be at the frontier,
at the edge of the excitement, the adventure.
But even in a small forest near civilized Durban,
he felt lost in an alien world.
It struck him all at once
That Africa might pose a greater challenge than he could handle.
I got into denser bush.
The high trees were somber crowns growing close to one another.
Even the small sound could be heard.
In all honesty, a feeling of fear got hold of me.
I felt so terribly deserted amid the surrounding strange nature.
He overcame this panic and struck out on foot for the frontier
in what is now northern South Africa.
Mauch walked for three weeks doing odd jobs at farms
in exchange for food and shelter.
He joined one of the wagon trains
hat carried supplies to frontier settlements.
In his spare time, he took notes, sketched and collected specimens.
He fell in love with the country, but not the settlers,
most especially the Boar, the Dutch colonists.
He thought they were uncivilized,
and their treatment of blacks a disgrace.
A 'kafir' or native colored is in the opinion of the Boar,
not a man.
Mauch's trip to the frontier took months,
but it carried him to the threshold of his goal:
Unchartered Africa.
Scattered African villages and European farming towns
dotted the vast tracks of open land along the frontier.
You have now, I could tell myself, passed the prepatory class
and entered the high school of traveling.
You have become the top of the fall.
Over the next year,
Mauch tentatively ventured from the frontier towns and villages
to explore what lay beyond.
Many of the Africans he encountered were unfriendly.
White settlers were pushing from the south,
and the Africans resisted further intrusions.
They were especially suspicious of anyone making maps
or surveying the land.
To disguise his intentions, Mauch developed a novel plan.
He feigned a sort of madness.
It succeeded.
The Africans pronounced him insane and left him free to do as he pleased.
With just a simple compass and a pen and ink set,
Mauch created the first maps and sketches of the South African interior.
He sent his journals to the Geographical Institute in Germany,
the same group that had rejected him.
They began to publish Mauch's accounts.
And, to his great satisfaction,
portrayed him as a model German explorer.
German sponsors even began to send small sums to support his efforts.
Mauch's status grew even further
when he made the first gold discovery in southern Africa.
Word quickly spread.
Prospectors filtered into the area,
but Mauch never staked a claim to the field.
I have before me a choice
between my gold discoveries and my explorations.
Without hesitation he chose exploration,
and so gave up the chance to make a fortune.
Adventure and respect were what Mauch had desperately sought
and was finally achieving.
He wanted more.
In 1968, at the age of 31,
Karl Mauch set off on an expedition into unexplored Africa.
I may, without exaggeration,
call this journey a long fight against hunger.
Game were scarce.
Bands of hostile warriors stalked Mauch.
He lived in constant fear.
While mapping swampy coastlines, Mauch contracted malaria.
He went without food for 8 days and fell into a coma.
Fevers and ill health would torment him for the rest of his life.
Mauch revived when local Africans told him
of an abandoned stone city past the Lompopo River.
Though still weak,
Mauch resolved to find the fabled city
and in January of 1871 six years after arriving in Africa
he set forth on the adventure he believed was his destiny.
When Mauch crossed the Lompopo River, he entered a land unknown
to Europeans.
It was also an alien world
in which Mauch offered an easy target for chiefs who demanded gifts.
His trade goods quickly dwindled.
In these circumstances one has to exert patience.
One has to assume the right expression on one's face
when handing out presents.
As Mauch pushed into the interior,
villagers who did not own firearms demanded he hunt for them.
At one point he was feeding 40 people a day
who did no work in return.
While other explorers bullied and slashed their way across Africa,
Mauch tried negotiation and generosity with his porters.
A cold wind blew during the night between the mountains.
I took pity on their naked skinny figures shivering in the cold,
and gave them my own woolen blankets.
His efforts to win their good will failed.
Eight months into the trip, they disappeared.
They had sliced open his bags and stolen much of his goods.
He felt trapped.
I could not flee.
As the second night followed the first, my position was desperate
and it was, therefore, not surprising that the thought occurred to me
to take my own life before I succumb to slow torture.
But Mauch must have known that his goal was near.
The next day he snapped out of his despair and headed to a local village.
There he hired guides who led him to a distant mountaintop.
Mauch beheld ancient walls in the valley below.
God be praised! That is what I have been seeking.
Only a few days before I was occupied with great thoughts of death,
and today I stand before the most brilliant success of my travels.
After six hard years of exploration,
Karl Mauch discovered Great Zimbabwe.
He was amazed by what he saw.
Stone walls spread over a square mile of the valley floor,
bounded on one end by ruins on a hill.
At the center of its all stood an enormous enclosure
30 feet high and hundreds of feet around.
Mauch realized he stood within the remains of a sprawling city.
It had been a culture unique in sub Saharan Africa.
Thousands had lived in the city, and remarkably they built in stone.
Mauch dismissed the possibility of local Africans having created it.
Mauch was not immune to European prejudices about Africa,
and they guided his thinking.
In Mauch's mind Africans built grass huts and lived off the land.
It was inconceivable to him that
they could construct such a magnificent city.
The local Africans seemed to share Mauch's views.
All are absolutely convinced that white people once inhabited the region.
Overlooking clear signs of African occupation
and ignorant of archeology,
Mauch turned to the Bible and legend for his answers.
The whole fantastic site, Mauch believed,
was the Queen of Sheba's palaces and temples.
The center of the legendary 'Golden Realm' of Ophir.
Mauch searched for evidence to support his theory.
He cut splinters from a wooden beam.
The smell which it exudes is of great similarity
to that of cedar wood used in pencils.
The color too is the same.
Mauch believed Sheba had imported the cedar from Lebanon,
a land to the north of ancient Israel.
The local Africans tribes provided further evidence for Mauch.
He thought their customs of circumcision and ritual butchering
had been learned from Sheba generations before,
and passed down through the years.
Mauch was ecstatic.
He believed he had just made one of the greatest discoveries of all time,
a legendary lost city rescued from oblivion in Africa.
Mauch's frenzy of excitement crashed when he again fell sick.
Desperate and alone,
he knew that to stay alive he would have to return home.
After seven years of adventure and hardship,
Mauch dragged himself to the coast and left Africa forever.
Germany had changed radically during Mauch's time in Africa.
War and politics preoccupied his countrymen.
And Mauch's earlier exploits had largely been forgotten.
But the greatest blow fell when the people Mauch most admired,
scientists and historians, dismissed his theories about Sheba.
A chemist determined that the wood Mauch had cut
from the Zimbabwe ruins was indigenous to Africa
it wasn't cedar brought there from Lebanon.
Others pointed out that
Mauch's sketches of Great Zimbabwe's walls
looked nothing like the buildings of ancient Jerusalem.
And they ridiculed the idea of black Africans
practicing Jewish rituals.
In his furious attempts to make sense of Great Zimbabwe,
Mauch became more disoriented than he had ever been
in the wilds of Africa.
Racked by fevers, he grew increasingly irrational and unpredictable.
In early 1875,
Mauch fell to his death from the window of his garret.
The circumstances surrounding his death are still unclear.
Karl Mauch died at the age of 38.
Despite all that Mauch accomplished
and all that he overcome to reach Great Zimbabwe,
the only memorial to him
stands in Germany at a teacher's training college.
His theories about a lost white settlement did, however,
find an eager audience,
especially in the British colonies of Rhodesia and South Africa.
The imperial mission in Africa was really one of racial superiority.
To have it thought that Africans had constructed
such enormous buildings as these
on such a vast scale was really unthinkable.
No one could have imagined it
no one could have believed it.
Therefore, for imperialism it was very important
that these building were thought to be built, by outsiders,
people other than Africans.
Almost anyone would do.
South African and Rhodesian settlers would fight to the last
for their vision of a white Great Zimbabwe.
They countered any challenge to the myth of white superiority
with a storm of vitriol and ridicule.
Only a formidable character would withstand this onslaught.
Fifty years later in 1929
one of the worlds foremost archeologists,
Gertrude Caton Thompson,
scoured the ruins of Great Zimbabwe for clues to its origins.
Years of hard work and struggle
had won Gertrude grudging respect in a male dominated field,
but Great Zimbabwe posed her greatest challenge yet.
All evidence of the identity of the city's builders
appeared to have been erased.
But failure was not an option for Gertrude.
Tireless in her pursuit of the truth,
Gertrude would search until she found what she needed:
The key to unlock the mystery of Great Zimbabwe's origins.
Few would have predicted such a life for Gertrude.
She was born in 1888 into a privileged English family.
But it was also unstable.
Her father died when she was young; her mother was sickly.
From an early age, Gertrude learned to rely only on herself.
Travel was one of the few constants in her life.
Something of value had been gained from the travels of my early childhood.
Pompeii and Rome stand out in memory
because I felt the first stirrings of interest in past civilizations.
But it would take time for these stirrings to become passion.
In her twenties, Gertrude's existence was a nameless one.
Life at home was pleasant for a well
to do family during that pampered pre war period.
Visits to relatives and friends were leisurely things,
constant amusement at games, parties, dances and theaters
followed each other endlessly.
She became attracted to a young solider, Carlion McFarland.
In 1914, just after the outbreak of the first world war,
Carlion received a short leave from the fighting in France.
He visited Gertrude.
Time flew.
And apart from the war we talked nostalgically of the carefree past.
I faced the fact that I loved him with my whole being.
For the next two years as Carlion fought in the trenches,
Gertrude threw herself into the war effort.
In 1916, news arrived that turned Gertrude's life upside down.
On September 16th Carlion was killed in an ambush.
Gertrude never recovered from his death.
Almost 25 years later, she visited McFarland's mother.
When I left to say good bye she was in bed.
After a parting embrace,
I noticed for the first time Carlion's swords and medals.
She said in a tone of assertion, not of query, "You loved him.
"I replied,"He was loved by everyone who knew him."
For Gertrude the option of marriage and a family of her own
died with Carlion McFarland.
And it wasn't a subject that she talked about much,
or hardly at all.
But it must have had a huge influence on her career.
If she had become being married, probably been an ambitious
soldier's wife,
she might never have gone in for the things she did.
Gertrude withdrew from almost all personal relationships.
In the later years,
one of the few deep friendships she formed
was with the de Navarro family.
Gertrude helped raise their son Michael.
His memories are of a woman
whose strong character intimidated others.
But to him she was warm and devoted.
She was a formidable person.
Somebody of the type that you don't have now, I think.
Very much somebody of her age.
Passionate in support of the things she believed in.
Obstinate.
No lover of fools, and certainly no patience with them.
Yet very loving and affectionate to those very close to her,
to those lucky enough to have been.
In 1920, Gertrude sought to escape the easy trappings
of her earlier life.
She volunteered at an archeological dig
in the South of France.
During the visit I made a new interest: Pre history.
With the determination that marked the rest of her life,
Gertrude, now 32, pursued her new passion: Archeology.
Archeology was still a new and rapidly expanding field.
Demand for specialists created opportunities for professionals.
The discipline and precision of modern archeology
suited Gertrude's exacting perfectionist nature.
Her dedication brought her to the dedication
of one of the world's top Egyptologists, Sir Flinders Petrie.
He asked her to assist him on a dig in Egypt.
Sir Fliders Petrie was a demanding and often difficult teacher,
but Gertrude excelled.
In 1924,
Sir Fliders Petrie helped her obtain a small grant
for her own dig in Egypt.
It was a great success.
Her conclusions pushed back the date
for the origin of Egyptian civilization 5,000 years.
Although they have since proved correct,
they contradicted Sir Petrie's own theories.
He severed all support.
Gertrude raised the funds herself and continued.
She would never relent to threats or bullying.
An Anglo Rhodesian foundation approached Gertrude
about conducting a dig at Great Zimbabwe.
The hoped to uncover clues about the mysterious civilization
that once flourished there.
Gertrude Caton Thompson was a formidable woman.
She had worked under the most impossible conditions
and under the most impossible archeologists in Egypt,
and in the end running large scale excavations of her own.
She was carefully chosen to undertake the work at Great Zimbabwe.
She was ideally suited to it.
The Foundation set one condition that Gertrude present her conclusion
about Great Zimbabwe's origins
to the British Association for the Advancement of Science
in only eight months time.
This was a tight deadline under the best of circumstances.
Undaunted, Gertrude accepted.
Gertrude arrived in Bera just ahead of a raging cyclone.
The noise of the collapsing town,
the many ships in harbor dragging their chains
and crashing into each other hooting wildly was dramatic.
Mercifully, I am not easily alarmed.
She rode out the storm with typical calm,
but found that the cyclone had destroyed the rail lines.
Gertrude drove towards Rhodesia,
but the rain season turned the roads to mud
and the rivers to churning torrents.
After weeks of delay,
she finally reached Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia.
Rhodesia was named for the great industrialist
and imperialist, Cecil Rhodes.
Rhodes master minded British expansion throughout southern Africa,
personally controlling thousands of square miles of land
as he created one of the world's greatest fortunes.
In the capital of Salisbury, Gertrude paused to gather supplies.
In just 40 years
white settlers had created a bustling farm community in Salisbury,
but it had been built at the expense of black Africans.
Whites lived well, overseeing farms and mines,
while blacks were relegated to menial jobs
with subsistence wages, poor housing and no education.
The white mindset of racial superiority
was pervasive, poisoning every aspect of life.
When one prominent white woman asked if her sons might help with
the upcoming excavation,
Gertrude said they could if they would dig alongside the native workers.
Just as Gertrude expected, the request was promptly withdraw.
At dinner one night
the governor promoted the idea that Great Zimbabwe's ruins
were of ancient and thereby white origin.
Gertrude countered that her job required objectivity.
I replied that I had no idea one way or the other,
and only hoped I might get an answer.
The team Gertrude brought to Great Zimbabwe
reflected her willingness to flaunt convention.
It was an all women team.
I think very deliberately she always worked with women
and was one of the first feminists in archeology.
It was one of the first all female archeological teams in all history.
Gertrude and the others examined miles of ruins
in their first days there.
Normally, a site this size offers numerous options
for an archeologist,
but many others have been there before Gertrude.
She was stunned by what they had done.
Generations of treasure hunters and previous archeologists
had laid bare practically all that had remained.
In brief, fulfillment of my task seemed dubious.
For Gertrude Caton Thompson
the site at Great Zimbabwe had changed enormously
since Mauch's time.
What had happened in fact was a whole bunch of people
had decided they could would find gold here at Great Zimbabwe,
and they had literally pillaged, plundered,
pulled the walls down, done everything.
Prospectors formed the Rhodesian Ancient Ruins Company
to extract gold.
They dug numerous trenches and undermined walls,
but found little gold.
What they did loot was of great archeological value.
They'd melted it down and sold it as bullion.
Priceless artifacts were lost forever.
Early treasure seekers also uncovered stone birds.
Cecil Rhodes bought two to mark the entrance to his estate,
and hired men to search Great Zimbabwe for evidence
that it had been built by a white civilization.
In their rush to prove that Zimbabwe was of white origin,
excavators moved tons of topsoil, destroying artifacts
of African origin.
The damage was irreparable.
As for evidence of white occupation or construction,
nothing was ever unearthed.
The devastated condition of the ruins left Gertrude
at an apparent dead end.
She and her team dug at several sites,
and she paid the laborers bonuses for their hard work.
Still, she found nothing conclusive.
Time was running out.
The British Association meeting loomed.
Gertrude arranged for a plane
so that she could inspect the ruins from a new perspective.
She became one of the first archeologists
to use aerial observation.
As she swept past the hill ruins,
Gertrude spotted a path that from the ground was obscured by vegetation.
It led to terraces beneath the hill walls,
and had clearly not been used in hundreds of years.
Treasure seekers had overlooked the seemingly inaccessible terraces.
The next day, Gertrude moved her team onto the hill terraces.
There they uncovered a wealth of objects
untouched by anyone but the original inhabitants.
Everything that Gertrude Caton Thompson found was clearly African.
There were changes in the pottery and the pottery designs,
but always African.
The only foreign material she found were glass beads
and Far Eastern ceramics,
Near Eastern ceramics,
but these were firmly dated to about the 13th century.
So they, in fact, reinforced the African material
that this was a 13th century local culture
that had trade connections overseas.
Gertrude determined that Great Zimbabwe had been a black African city
from the 9th to the 14th centuries,
a major hub in a huge sophisticated trade system.
Great Zimbabwe had straddled the trade route Africans followed
as they carried ivory and gold from the interior to the coast.
Their trade partners were Arab merchants,
who were the great middlemen,
dealing in goods from as far away as India and China.
Gertrude compiled her findings just in time
for the British Association meeting.
She expected a hostile reaction to the idea of a black Great Zimbabwe,
but headed into the controversy with her usual poise.
Gertrude presented her findings to an overflow crowd
in Johannesburg on August 2nd, 1923.
Her presentation was meticulous.
Her conclusions, crystal clear.
Instead of a degenerate offshoot of another civilization,
you have here a native civilization
showing national organization of a high kind
originality and amazing industry.
She portrayed a living, vibrant, black African city
in which the walls formed a series of interlocking courtyards
where women cooked, children played, men worked.
In one extraordinary paper,
Gertrude killed the myth of a lost white civilization.
In its place, she described a thriving black metropolis.
It was estimated to house ten to fifteen thousand people,
a city as large as many in Europe at the time.
Many were scandalized.
They remained convinced that
Africans were simply incapable of creating such a civilization.
Several stormed from the room.
Even the normally calm Gertrude was shaken
by the fury her conclusions triggered.
Gertrude Caton Thompson's work gave her the highest reputation
among the academics and scientists.
It did nothing to persuade the settler to overcome his prejudices.
And nothing that anyone could do either Caton Thompson
or in the fifty years subsequent to her were going to convince people
with such strong racial prejudices that Great Zimbabwe was not exotic.
She bade farewell to her African work.
Her sense of irony surfaced when she recalled
how the foreman asked to come with her.
I explained that he would not be happy in our cold country
with no one to talk to in his Bantu language.
'Are there no black men in England? ' He asked.
I replied, 'No, we are all white.
'After a puzzled reflection he said, 'No blacks?
Then who does the work? '
Gertrude left for England in late 1929,
but the controversy surrounding Great Zimbabwe followed her.
In 1930, Gertrude's findings from Great Zimbabwe
were exhibited at the British Museum in London.
I undertook to be present three days a week
to answer questions and be long suffering to the many
who continued to believe in the Queen of Sheba.
In the exhibit's wake came letters in the press
and lively correspondence from strangers.
I refrained from being drawn into these.
But she kept a special file.
Caton Thompson was a very professional scientist.
She could be quite cold and quite clinical in the things she did.
She put the quality of her work above all else,
and she could not tolerate fools.
And to her,
many of those who speculated on Great Zimbabwe were nothing but fools.
Gertrude's combative nature worked against her in 1938
on her last major dig.
She traveled to South Arabia with another all female team,
but she fought constantly with an associate over everything
from the food to the expedition's purpose.
Gertrude hoped to find connections
between South Arabia and Great Zimbabwe.
Perhaps the Arab traders
who had brought goods to the African coast from India and China
had influenced Great Zimbabwe's builders.
Gertrude looked for common architecture, art, stone masonry,
anything that might link the two place.
She encountered Arab's
who still practiced traditional stone building techniques,
but their ties to Great Zimbabwe were unclear.
Towards the end of the expedition, she became gravely ill.
Sick and exhausted, she returned to England.
She began to suffer from spells of lightheadedness
that plagued her for the rest of her life.
A doctor diagnosed a distended heart.
Now 50 years old, Gertrude settled into a quiet life with her friends
the deNavarros and their young son, Michael.
They became the stable family she'd never had.
But in the end she moved in with us, and that was a very happy arrangement.
It was like having an extra and honorary aunt
living as part of the family.
Gertrude's greatest legacy was to reveal that
high civilization arose in sub Saharan Africa.
White settlers could no longer claim Great Zimbabwe as their own.
When the black majority in Rhodesia gained control in 1979,
they renamed their country 'Zimbabwe'
to identify themselves with Africa's glorious past.
The ruins which once illustrated the folly of prejudice and bias
not stand for an independent, dynamic Africa.
As Gertrude Caton Thompson said,
"Great Zimbabwe lies in the still pulsating heart of Africa."