Palaces of Stone: Uncovering Ancient Southern African Kingdoms, by Mike Main and Tom Huffman

Palaces of Stone: Uncovering Ancient Southern African Kingdoms, by Mike Main and Tom Huffman. Penguin Random House South Africa. Imprint: Struik Travel & Heritage. Cape Town, South Africa 2021. ISBN 9781775846147 / ISBN 978-1-77-584614-7

Palaces of Stone: Uncovering Ancient Southern African Kingdoms by Mike Main and Tom Huffman, brings to life the history of various early African societies, from AD 900 to approximately 1850.

Mike Main  

ACROSS THE FACE OF southern Africa are more than 566 remarkable stone palaces, once the abode of kings, paramount chiefs, senior chiefs or petty chiefs. Some are small, others rambling, but many are absolutely astonishing: all are the legacy of kingdoms past, and every one, no matter its size, speaks loudly of the authority of ruling elite whose reach embraced a region the size of France. Ranging in age and spanning more than six hundred years, the majority are unknown to the general public, yet they exhibit the most intricate and beautiful stonework at the highest levels of craftsmanship for building in stone without mortar. The purpose of this book is to tell and illustrate the story of some of the most amazing African kingdoms that held sway across southern Africa - some until well into the nineteenth century - and about which, apart from the iconic ruins known as Great Zimbabwe, the general public knows hardly anything. It is an extraordinary tale of impressive feats of architecture, longdistance travel, global trade and complex political and administrative forms of organisation. But, above all, it offers another perspective on what we once assumed were the vast empty spaces of Africa past, revealing instead a hinterland that hummed with activity - mining, commerce, transportation, farming and hunting. But this was also a place of conflict: here rebellions were a regular feature, land was captured by force, boundaries were violated and fiercely defended, and cattle herds were constantly at risk of being stolen. The story begins with the appearance of Bantu-speaking people, who arrived in this part of Africa from the north, spreading southward, over generations, into the west, east and down through the centre of the continent, bringing with them sophisticated technologies that outcompeted those of the largely Stone Age indigenous people, the San (Bushmen) and the cattle-owning Khoe (collectively referred to as the Khoesan), whom they encountered along the way. While perhaps not a full-scale migration, as some like to imagine, it was certainly an exploration of and an expansion into lands suitable for the mixed farming that sustained them. This type of migration most likely involved the relocation of entire chiefdoms. Then, as now, choice agricultural and grazing lands were settled first. We start this story on the fertile floodplain at the junction of two large African rivers, the Shashe and Limpopo, in the modern-day border region shared by Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa. This area had long been occupied by Early Iron Age farmers, but the Limpopo-Shashe confluence itself seems to have been especially heavily populated. Here, settlements and societies evolved and adapted, leaving sufficient evidence for archaeologists to develop a good understanding of the people - what they did for a living; how they developed trade routes to the east coast of Africa; and how, in time, they formed stratified, class-based societies that led to the genesis of the Great Zimbabwe state, a powerful precolonial empire that spawned as its political successors the equally impressive states of Torwa and Mutapa. The ruins of the capitals of these erstwhile states, such as Great Zimbabwe, Khami (the Torwa capital from about 1400 to 1640) and Danangombe (the Rozwi capital from about 1685 to 1830), are stunning exemplars of delicate but precise stonework of breathtaking beauty. [...]

This is an excerpt from Palaces of Stone: Uncovering Ancient Southern African Kingdoms, by Mike Main and Tom Huffman.

Title: Palaces of Stone
Subtitle: Uncovering Ancient Southern African Kingdoms
Authors: Mike Main; Tom Huffman
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Struik Travel & Heritage
Cape Town, South Africa 2021
ISBN 9781775846147 / ISBN 978-1-77-584614-7
Hardcover, 15 x 21 cm, 168 pages, throughout colour photographs, illustrations, maps