Have you ever felt tired of people telling you that there was no great Black civilization? that there was nothing in “sub-saharan” Africa? Well,… I have heard of a great African kingdom in the southernmost part of Africa: Great Zimbabwe which stands for “great house of stone” in the Shona language! Houses upon houses made of stone, and today some of them still stand tall in Zimbabwe. When a German geologist ‘stumbled’ (you know what I mean… like christopher Columbus discovered America at a time when it was already full of people) upon it, he was convinced that it could not be the work of Africans! Well, then… let me present to you Great Zimbabwe, a kingdom located between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers! It is a civilization which flourished from the 11-15th centuries. Just like the Maya, Aztec, incas, we also have our own!

UNESCO made it a world site heritage in 1986. (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/364/)

Check out http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/zimb/hd_zimb.htm

There are great documentaries about Great Zimbabwe, but I decided to choose a short doc made by school children (please don’t be distracted by the masks shown in these video which are not from southern Africa but from West and Central Africa), since all the others mostly focused on the European researchers rather than Great Zimbabwe itself. If you are curious, feel free to go check all the other documentaries on youtube or dailymotion (such as Zimbabwe’s Ancient Ruins Part 1-3, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kdhyj2kc6c).