The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage (review)

The Silence of Great Zimbabwe examines the politics of landscape and heritage around the internationally renowned site of Great Zimbabwe. Fontein claims that his work is merely another addition to the ever-expanding literature on Great Zimbabwe, but I disagree. Emphasis in writings on Great Zimbabwe in the past has been on origins, economics, religion, and more recently on symbolism. But Fontein adds a new and interesting perspective, exploring how both knowledge of the past at Great Zimbabwe and the management of the site itself have continued to be dominated by what he calls "disembedding mechanisms" in postcolonial Zimbabwe: "The continued alienation of Great Zimbabwe from local communities has resulted in both a silence of unheard voices and untold stories—the unrepresented past of local communities—and the silence of anger—the alienation, and indeed the desecration of Great Zimbabwe" (12–13).

The Silence of Great Zimbabwe is based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork among communities who live around Great Zimbabwe, archival research at the National Archives of Zimbabwe and in National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ), and interviews with war veterans, masvikiro (spirit mediums), and members of NMMZ and also members of the World Heritage Center at UNESCO in Paris. Although professional archaeology eventually triumphed over the earlier amateur approaches of Rhodesian settlers, and established its own authority to represent the past through claims to scientific objectivity and "professionalism," African voices remained almost completely silenced. Most studies of Great Zimbabwe were based on archaeological excavations alone: the site remained a "primarily archaeological problem" which ignores oral history.

Lack of local representation extends to exhibitions as well: the site museum contains very few local perspectives on Great Zimbabwe's past; displays are still largely based on an archaeological view of Great Zimbabwe's past. Drawing on Sherry Ortner's concept of "ethnographic refusal," Fontein demonstrates how local claims have been silenced in the pursuit of "objective" historical and archaeological knowledge in both the literature and new exhibitions. Therefore, the first part of the book seeks to amplify those missing local voices, to fill the apparent silence.

But filling the silence is not sufficient. Fontein goes beyond the "Zimbabwe controversy" over origins to focus on local contests between the Nemanwa, Charumbira, and Mugabe clans over land, power, and custodianship over Great Zimbabwe. The Nemanwa claims to Great Zimbabwe are based on that group's having "germinated" there; the Mugabe clan claims the site as its last precolonial residents; Chief Charumbira's claims are based on his superiority as Chief over Nemanwa: to justify their claims, representatives of each clan emphasize different aspects of the past. Given these competing claims, it might have served a useful purpose to have clarified the relationship between the Mugabe chieftainship and President Robert Mugabe, and to relate this to the contestation over Great Zimbabwe. Similarly, the incumbent Chief Charumbira serves as the president of the Council of Chiefs as well as a senator in the Upper House of Parliament. Could this ultimately give him an advantage over his rivals in the competition for the control of Great Zimbabwe?

The second part of the book focuses on the loss of control of Great Zimbabwe, stemming from the colonial closing of the site from the local communities and from the spirit world that ultimately owns it. The "things that used to happen there that no longer occur" (87). Local narratives describe the desecration resulting from looting by early "amateur" antiquarians; but even more significantly these voices note the strict control of ceremonies at the site, which effectively closes communication between the world of people and that of spirits, and produces a deep sense of anger on the part of the ancestors and their interlocutors. Such a disjuncture continues to this day through the processes by which Great Zimbabwe has become a national and world heritage site...