Wonders of Ancient Africa: A Grand Tour the Guidebooks Got Wrong

One should begin, as all tours of antiquity eventually must, at Giza, where the Great Pyramid of Khufu has been receiving visitors for roughly 4,500 years and has yet to look remotely tired of it. Completed around 2560 BCE and originally about 146 metres tall, it remained the tallest structure made by human hands for more than 3,800 years, a record it surrendered only to the spire of a cathedral in medieval England. Few buildings, and fewer architects, can claim to have held a title for quite so long.

To put its age in some perspective: Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. When she gazed upon it, it was already an antique, and very possibly something of a tourist trap.

The ancient Greeks, who were nothing if not enthusiastic visitors, made it the senior entry on their list of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is the only one still standing, the other six having been toppled, burned, shaken down or simply mislaid. Herodotus, the historian with a reporter’s weakness for a good line, wrote that an inscription recorded the sums spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the builders. He may have been misinformed on the details, but he was right about the essential point, one later archaeologists confirmed when they found the workers’ town and their tombs: this was the work not of slaves under the lash but of organised, fed and honoured Egyptian labourers. It is, among other things, the world’s most durable monument to catering.

Some three and a half thousand miles to the south, on a granite plateau near present-day Masvingo, stands the most magnificent case of mistaken identity in architectural history. Between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, the ancestors of the Shona people built here the capital of a kingdom that traded gold and ivory down to the Indian Ocean coast. Chinese porcelain and Persian glass have been found among its ruins, which tells you all you need to know about the reach of its merchants.

Its crowning achievement is the Great Enclosure: a curving wall of finely fitted granite blocks, in places some eleven metres high, raised without a single dab of mortar, with a solid conical tower inside that has puzzled visitors ever since. It is, quite simply, the largest ancient structure in sub-Saharan Africa.

When European adventurers stumbled upon it in the late nineteenth century, they set about explaining it with an inventiveness they rarely applied to anything else. It was the Queen of Sheba’s palace, they decided. Or the work of the Phoenicians. Or of almost anybody, frankly, so long as they were not the people who actually lived there. Archaeologists, beginning with Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929, demonstrated patiently and repeatedly that the city was African through and through. The white-minority government of Rhodesia responded in the 1970s by leaning on the official guidebooks, a rare instance of a state attempting to edit a wall.

History has a sense of humour, if not always a quick one. When Rhodesia became independent in 1980, it took its new name from the very ruins its rulers had tried to explain away: Zimbabwe, “houses of stone”. The soapstone birds found at the site now fly on the national flag.

Most architects build up. The masons of Lalibela, in the highlands of northern Ethiopia, preferred to build down, which is a good deal harder to do and considerably less forgiving of a change of mind. Around the reign of King Gebre Mesqel Lalibela, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, eleven churches were carved out of the living volcanic rock, each one freed from the mountain by cutting away everything that was not church.

Tradition holds that the king meant to build a new Jerusalem in Africa, a place of pilgrimage for Christians who could no longer safely reach the old one. The local stream is called the Jordan. Another tradition, cherished by the faithful and irresistible to everyone else, holds that the masons worked by day and angels took over the night shift.

The most celebrated of the eleven, Bete Giyorgis, the Church of St George, stands in its own pit like a vast cross-shaped seal pressed into the earth. Seen from the rim, it looks less like a building than a sacrament. And, unlike most wonders of the medieval world, Lalibela is not a museum. Priests still keep its ancient manuscripts, and each January tens of thousands of white-robed pilgrims gather there for Genna, the Ethiopian Christmas. Few buildings on Earth have been in continuous use for so long, and fewer still with such conviction.

No grand tour is complete without a little conspicuous consumption, and for that one must travel west, to the Mali Empire of the fourteenth century, and to its ruler, Musa I, better known as Mansa Musa. Mali sat on some of the richest goldfields in the world and on the trade routes that carried that gold across the Sahara, which is to say that its emperor was, by any reasonable measure, absurdly rich. Modern attempts to rank him the wealthiest man who ever lived are impossible to verify and impossible to resist.

In 1324 he set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca with a caravan that, by the accounts of awestruck chroniclers, ran into the thousands, with camels laden with gold. Passing through Cairo, he gave away so much of it, in gifts and alms and purchases, that the price of gold in the city was said to have stayed depressed for years. It is the only recorded instance of a financial crisis caused entirely by good manners.

He brought home something more lasting than headlines: scholars, books and an Andalusian poet-architect, and set about building, most famously the Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu, a city that would become one of the great centres of learning in the Islamic world. Europe, meanwhile, was so impressed that when the cartographer Abraham Cresques drew the Catalan Atlas in 1375, he placed Mansa Musa in the middle of West Africa, crowned, enthroned and holding up a nugget of gold. It remains one of the most famous early images of an African ruler on a European map. We would like to think he would approve of his stamp.

Four wonders, three thousand years, one continent. The pyramid builders, the masons of Great Zimbabwe, the church carvers of Lalibela and the scholars of Timbuktu never met, and would have had little to say to one another. But together they make a rather devastating reply to the gentleman in the sun helmet.

It is perhaps the oldest lesson in travel, and the most frequently ignored: before deciding that nothing has happened somewhere, it is worth looking up. Or, in the case of Lalibela, down.