Dynastic History | Khami — The Capital Built After Great Zimbabwe, on Terraces

Khami is what came next. When the centre at Great Zimbabwe was given up in the fifteenth century, the Torwa dynasty built a new capital here on the Khami river, west of present-day Bulawayo — the kingdom that Portuguese traders on the coast called Butua and treated as the source of their gold.

The building method changed. Great Zimbabwe's walls stand free; Khami's are retaining walls, holding up terraced platforms cut into the slope, their faces worked in chevron and chequer, with clay-and-timber houses set on the levelled tops. Excavation has produced Chinese porcelain, glass beads, imported European goods and a monumental granite cross: the return leg of a trade in gold and ivory that somebody had to mine, hunt and carry several hundred kilometres to the Indian Ocean ports.

The kingdom left no written account of itself. What exists is Portuguese commercial correspondence and Shona oral tradition recorded much later, and both describe a succession fight in the 1640s in which a Portuguese estate-holder's soldiers intervened and the mambo was restored in 1644. Tradition dates the end to about 1683, when Changamire Dombo's Rozvi took Butua and moved the capital to Danamombe. The hill complex at Khami shows burning, and excavators have found no occupation after that. Ndebele arrivals displaced the settlements that remained in the 1830s.

Between 1895 and 1900 the Ancient Ruins Company Ltd worked over the stone sites of Matabeleland for gold and threw away the pottery; the Ancient Monuments Protection Ordinance of 1902 stopped it. Khami covers about 108 hectares, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1986, and is open to visitors 22 km west of Bulawayo.

📸 Cover: Dry-stone walling and steps at Khami, Digr, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons