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Updated: June 12, 2025
In their way these discoveries were rich enough from one tomb alone they took over a hundred and thirty ounces of gold to say nothing of their surpassing archæological interest. Still they were not what they sought: all that gathered wealth of Monomotapa which the fleeing Portuguese had brought with them and buried in this, their last stronghold.
'Well, to make a long story short, Monomotapa disappeared in time, and fresh tribes came down from the north, and pushed right down to Natal and the Cape. That is how the Zulus first appeared. They brought with them the story of Prester John, but by this time it had ceased to be a historical memory, and had become a religious cult.
The Mazimba and the Makaranga had come down from the Lake Nyassa quarter, and there was a strong kingdom in Manicaland. That was the Monomotapa that the Portuguese thought so much of. Wardlaw nodded eagerly. The story was getting into ground that he knew about. 'The thing to remember is that all these little empires thought themselves the successors of Prester John.
He ends his book in a phrase from which I think not a word could be taken nor to which a word could be added without spoiling it. I will quote it in full. The people of Monomotapa, of whom I have written more than once, I have recently revisited; and I confess to an astonishment at the success with which they deal with the various difficulties and problems arising in their social life.
And I also greatly wondered what the fellow could possibly have meant by his mysterious talk of a time before the Mashonas came to the country, when it was inhabited by a people whom he named the Monomotapa, who built great cities of brick and stone, worked the gold mines, and made gold ornaments for their women.
Again in 1602 a horde of people came from the interior called the Cabires, or cannibals. They entered the kingdom of Monomotapa, and the reigning king, being weak, was in great terror. Thus gradually the Monomotapa fell, and its power was scattered until the Kaffir-Zulu raids of our day. The Arab writer, Macoudi, in the tenth century visited the East African coast somewhere north of the equator.
I suppose that an army of negroes come among us like locusts, from the mountains of Cobonas, through the Monomotapa, the Monoemugi, the Nosseguais, the Maracates; that they have traversed Abyssinia, Nubia, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, the whole of our Europe; that they have overthrown everything, ransacked everything; there will still remain a few bakers, a few cobblers, a few tailors, a few carpenters: the necessary arts will survive; only luxury will be annihilated.
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