Latest / Great Zimbabwe: The Lost African Kingdom of Stone — Fexingo History / The Soapstone Birds of Great Zimbabwe: A Lost Art Revealed
Transcript
- Lucas: So in earlier episodes we've talked a lot about the big stone walls of Great Zimbabwe, the Hill Complex, the Great Enclosure, all that architecture. But there's one set of objects that's almost as iconic as the walls themselves — the soapstone birds. You've probably seen the one on the flag of Zimbabwe. Luna: Right, the bird with the lips like a bird but not quite — it's pretty stylized. Lucas: Exactly. They're carved from soapstone, which is a soft, easily worked stone, but they're not delicate little trinkets. Some of them are over a meter tall. Archaeologists have found at least eight complete or partial birds at Great Zimbabwe, mostly on the Hill Complex, which is significant because that's the spiritual and political heart of the site. Lucas: The birds are perched on top of carved columns, and each one has a different posture. Some look like they're standing, others are more perched. They all have that distinctive hooked beak, which led some early European visitors to think they were representations of eagles or hawks. But Shona oral tradition and later scholarship suggest they might be based on the bateleur eagle, which is a sacred bird in Shona culture. Luna: Wait, I thought the Zimbabwe bird was a symbol of a specific totem or clan? Lucas: That's actually one of the debates. Some scholars think the birds represented the totems of the ruling dynasty, like the Shoko or Mhofu. But others argue they were more abstract symbols of royal power or messengers of Mwari, the supreme creator. The truth is, we don't know for sure. But what we can say is they were carved with incredible skill, and they were placed in prominent positions, likely on altars or on top of walls, where they would have been visible to the community. Lucas: The carving process itself is pretty fascinating. Soapstone is soft when it's quarried, but it hardens as it dries. The artisans would have used iron tools — chisels, knives, maybe even abrasive sand to polish it. Some of the birds have details like feathers and eyes that are remarkably fine. You can still see tool marks if you look closely. Luna: So these birds were like the pinnacle of Shona art, but we don't even know who carved them or what they were called. Lucas: Right. We have no names, no individual artists. They were probably guilds of carvers associated with the court, but their identities are lost. And that's one of the tragedies of colonialism — when European explorers like Karl Mauch and later archaeologists arrived, they didn't ask the local Shona what these birds meant. They just dug them up and shipped them off to museums. Mauch actually took one to Germany, and it ended up in a museum in Berlin. Lucas: Now, the most famous bird — the one on the flag — was actually taken by Cecil Rhodes' men in the 1890s and sold to a collector in South Africa. For decades it sat in a private collection, and it wasn't until 2003 that the Zimbabwean government got it back. It's now in the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences in Harare. Luna: It's wild to think about how many of these artifacts are scattered around the world because of colonial looting. Lucas: Yeah, and there's an ongoing conversation about repatriation. Britain has one, Germany has one, South Africa has one — they're slowly being returned, but it's a complex process. Anyway, let me tell you about what the birds might have actually been used for, because that's the part that fascinates me. Lucas: Some historians think they were perched on top of the walls of the Great Enclosure, the largest structure at Great Zimbabwe, where they would have served as protective emblems. Others think they were kept inside the Hill Complex, which is more likely given where they were found. The Hill Complex was the royal and ritual center, so the birds were probably involved in ceremonies — maybe they were used to invoke the ancestors or to legitimize the king's rule. Lucas: And here's a detail I love: some of the birds have a small hole drilled at the base of the column. Nobody knows what that was for. Maybe for a pole to carry them in processions, or maybe for some kind of attachment. It's a small mystery that reminds us how much we don't know. Luna: That's a nice way to put it. A lot of what we think we know about Great Zimbabwe is really just educated guesswork. Lucas: Exactly. And that brings up a broader point about how archaeology has treated African civilizations. For a long time, the assumption was that Africans couldn't have built something as sophisticated as Great Zimbabwe, so the birds were attributed to Phoenicians or Egyptians or whatever. It was racist nonsense, but it took decades for scholars like Gertrude Caton-Thompson and, later, Peter Garlake to set the record straight. Lucas: Caton-Thompson in the 1920s and 30s did a systematic excavation and proved beyond doubt that the site was built by indigenous Africans. And Garlake, who worked in the 1970s, did even more detailed studies of the architecture and the artifacts, including the birds. His work showed that the birds were carved locally, from soapstone quarried in the nearby hills. Luna: It's like the birds themselves are a symbol of the resilience of Shona culture and history. Lucas: That's a beautiful way to say it. And speaking of resilience, you know what's been on my mind lately? We've been doing this show for a while now, and we've never once run an ad. Not a single sponsor read. And that's a choice we've made because we believe these stories deserve to be told without being interrupted by commercials. Luna: It's true. We rely on listeners like you who appreciate that and who support us if they can. Lucas: So if you find value in what we do, and you want to keep it that way, you can support us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small gesture, but it goes a long way. Lucas: Okay, back to the birds. I want to talk about the repatriation efforts more, because it's a real movement now. In 2023, the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe formally requested the return of a bird from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. That's a slow process — negotiations, legal agreements, sometimes it takes years. Luna: So some of those birds might still be sitting in European museums, even now. Lucas: Right. There's one in the British Museum in London, one in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and another in the South African Museum in Cape Town. They're all on display, but they're away from home. And that's a sensitive issue, because for the Shona people, these birds are not just art — they're part of their heritage, their identity. Lucas: There's also a deeper spiritual dimension. In Shona culture, some objects are believed to have their own 'ngazi', or spirit, and taking them from their original context disrupts that. So the repatriation isn't just about putting artifacts in a museum — it's about restoring a kind of balance. Lucas: I've also been thinking about how these birds connect to the concept of 'dzimbabwe' itself, which means 'houses of stone' in Shona. The birds were an integral part of that stone world, and their imagery carried into later states like the Rozvi and Mutapa empires. Luna: So the birds weren't just a Great Zimbabwe thing — their influence spread. Lucas: Yes, and that's a good reminder that Great Zimbabwe didn't just vanish into thin air. Its culture, its art, its political ideas — they all evolved and influenced the region for centuries. The birds are a tangible link to that continuity. Lucas: I want to leave you with a specific image. Picture a skilled Shona carver, maybe in the 14th century, sitting in the shade near the Mutirikwe River, working on a block of soapstone. He's using a iron chisel, shaping the beak, the wings, the base. He's not just making a decoration — he's creating a vessel for something sacred. And a few hundred years later, we're still trying to understand what he knew. Luna: That's a great image to end on. Thanks, Lucas.