Zimbabwe’s Rulers Use a Monument’s Walls to Build a Legacy

The Great Zimbabwe, a Unesco World Heritage site near Masvingo in southern Zimbabwe, is a ruined city founded in the 11th century. Believed to have been the capital of the Shona people, it gave the nation its name. One of the few surviving precolonial monuments in sub-Saharan Africa, the site

has long been the continent’s fiercest archaeological battleground. Europeans used its supposed foreign origins to justify their domination. Liberation fighters used it as a rallying cry for their cause, eventually naming their newly independent nation after it. But the fight over the Great Zimbabwe did not end with independence. As President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party have clung to power through violence, they have increasingly turned to the Great Zimbabwe for vindication.  In the monument’s elegantly curved stone walls — at the center of a ruined city where thousands lived centuries ago — Zimbabwe’s current leaders have also found a rationale for their party’s 37 uninterrupted years in power.  [...]  But the Great Zimbabwe [remains] off limits to any opposition events [...] Analysts say it was around 2000 — when Mr. Mugabe faced serious challenges to his authority — that he saw the value in forging ties between his party and the Great Zimbabwe. The party began holding events at the site, including celebrations for National Unity Day and Mr. Mugabe’s birthday parties. “Zimbabwe is supposed to unite around that monument, and, in identifying with the Great Zimbabwe, ZANU-PF is an organization that is intricately linked with that glorious past and should be permanently in power because of that claimed linkage with the past,” said Innocent Pikirayi, a Zimbabwean archaeologist and professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, explaining the government’s logic. “It’s manipulation of the highest order when it comes to the past,” he said. . 

   Despite the monument’s importance to Zimbabwe and Africa, little has been invested in its upkeep.
(For more read the source article: Norimitsu Onishi, "Zimbabwe’s Rulers Use a Monument’s Walls to Build a Legacy" Feb. 21, 2017). Here see see how once again, compliant archeologists are complicit in misrepresentations of the past to serve the interests of the ruling elites in the countries they work in.