Why did colonial scholars refuse to believe Africans built Great Zimbabwe?

When Europeans came to Great Zimbabwe in the late 19th century, many refused to believe that Africans had built it. They credited the Queen of Sheba, King Solomon, or Phoenicians. Why? Racial prejudice made African builders seem inconceivable to them, and the myth fitted the way colonial rule justified itself.

The German explorer Karl Mauch recorded the ruins in 1871. He immediately discounted any possibility of native construction, speculated about King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and claimed a wooden lintel must be Lebanese cedar brought by Phoenicians. The Sheba story spread so widely among white settlers that the later scholar J. Theodore Bent said the names Solomon and Sheba had become so distasteful to him that he never expected to hear them again without an involuntary shudder.

Behind the myth was politics. The colonial government pressured archaeologists to deny that Africans had built it, because acknowledging it would have dismantled their civilising mission rationale. When white colonialists like Cecil Rhodes saw the ruins, they read them as a sign of the riches the area would yield to its new masters. Between the 1890s and the 1920s European antiquarians looted the site.

Science came slowly. David Randall-MacIver dug in 1905-1906 and concluded the structures were built by ancestors of the Shona in the medieval period, but his claim was not immediately accepted. Gertrude Caton Thompson confirmed it in 1929. Even so, the myth lived on: in Rhodesia in the 1960s and 1970s the official line was that non-blacks had built it, and archaeologists who disagreed were censored.