Lost Kingdoms of Africa

Africa - where the human race began.

Nearly a billion people live here.

It's a continent with an incredible diversity of communities and cultures.

Yet we know less of its history than almost anywhere else on Earth.

But that's beginning to change.

In the last few decades, researchers and archaeologists have begun to uncover a range of histories

as impressive and extraordinary as anywhere else on Earth.

It's a history that has been neglected for years and it's largely without written records.

But it is preserved for us in the gold and the statues.

In the culture, art and legends of the people.

My name is Gus Casely-Hayford.

Over many years I've studied the history and culture of Africa.

As an art historian, I'm used to drawing stories out of mute objects from the past.

I'm going to discover the history and find out what really happened to the lost kingdoms of Africa.

In 1871, a German geologist exploring southern Africa stumbled across these extraordinary ruins.

He was astonished by what he found -

a vast stone city stranded in the empty savannah.

Great Zimbabwe.

He had no idea who was responsible for this astounding feat of architecture.

But he was sure of one thing -

it was too sophisticated to have been built by Africans.

Thankfully, these assumptions have been discredited today.

But only now are we piecing together the fragments

we know about this lost civilisation and its connections to other kingdoms of pre-colonial Southern Africa.

Could Great Zimbabwe really have been an African El Dorado, a city built on gold?

In this film I'm going in search of the story

of one of the most mysterious cities and societies in Africa.

I don't think we can understand this kingdom without understanding the civilisations and kingdoms

that grew up around it.

It was part of a rich and fascinating history, largely unknown.

A history of trade, wealth, and gold.

My journey to find out about Great Zimbabwe will take me from the Swahili coast in modern-day Tanzania,

to Mozambique, South Africa and hopefully, to modern Zimbabwe itself,

where no BBC crew has been allowed to film for eight years.

My first stop is right here at the edge of the continent, where Africa meets the Indian Ocean.

This is the ancient Swahili Coast.

For centuries, people have been drawn here from as far away as China, India, and the Middle East.

And they've been drawn here by trade.

Trade in goods, but particularly trade in gold.

For many years, western scholars paid little attention to the history of this coast.

They didn't think it fitted into the wider trade patterns of the ancient world,

to Arabia in the north and India in the east.

But recent research now suggests that this coast was central to an international trade in gold,

gold which originated at Great Zimbabwe, 1,500 kilometres inland.

And I think this ancient trade route may lead to a better understanding

of what Great Zimbabwe actually represents in the untold history of this continent.

There's evidence to suggest that traders

were already coming to this coast from far afield, as long ago as the first century AD.

I've got my holiday reading.

Well, it's more than holiday reading.

It's the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,

which is a 1st-century guide to the Indian Ocean.

It talks about all sorts of wonderful places

that merchants and sailors could have travelled to in that time to ply their trade,

and it talks about this place called Rhapta,

which is supposed to the most southerly port in Africa that you could then travel to.

The Periplus is an Ancient Greek text which describes the ports and cities

which dot this coast all the way up to Arabia.

According to the Periplus, Rhapta was the place where traders from India and Arabia came

to buy ivory, fine tortoiseshell and rhinoceros horn.

In return, the people of Rhapta imported spears, daggers and glass.

But unfortunately, the Periplus is vague on the exact whereabouts of Rhapta.

And the stories of this trading city have been dismissed as legend.

Now, however, Professor Felix Chami, of the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania,

thinks he might have found it.

Are you Felix? Hi!

Hi, I've heard a lot about you!

I've been reading my Periplus in preparation for this.

And I know you're the man to show me around. You're welcome!

The legendary Rhapta. If you've found it, this is quite something! I'm expecting a lot.

Felix Chami is a world-renowned archaeologist whose work has been

instrumental is piecing together the ancient history of the Swahili Coast.

If he has indeed found Rhapta, this will rank as his greatest discovery yet.

It will also prove that this region was a vibrant part of the ancient world.

Did you see a crocodile? Seriously? Yeah.

FELIX SPEAKS IN HIS LANGUAGE

It's a lizard, isn't it, a monitor lizard.

It's just amazing.

Felix and I are on the Rufiji River,

which flows to the Indian Ocean from deep within the African interior.

You managed to do it and not get any mud on your shoes.

Other side was better, I told you.

Felix believes Rhapta once stood near the banks of this river.

But Felix's idea of "near"

is a little different from mine.

I'm not really a fan of snakes, Felix.

Pythons!

'The Periplus talks of Rhapta as a great trading centre, a cosmopolitan metropolis where traders

'from all over the ancient world would meet and barter and try to make a quick buck.

'But it is difficult to imagine such a vibrant place existing here,

'in this riverside wilderness, with crocodiles and snakes.

'I'm beginning to wonder if the charming Felix Chami has made a mistake.

'Then, one hour later, in the dirt beneath our feet,

'fragments of an ancient world emerge.'

Once you get your eye in, they are everywhere, aren't they?

'Buried beneath the dirt and foliage of this isolated wilderness,

'Felix thinks he has found something remarkable.

'Shards of pottery, tantalizing evidence of an ancient settlement.'

So somewhere under here may well be the remains of Rhapta? Exactly.

Felix thinks he's found Rhapta because of the age and variety

of the pottery which lies hidden beneath the surface.

I promise you that I will show you some potsherds.

Are these imported or are they made...?

Have you found pottery that has come from beyond these shores?

It is incredibly fine and light.

'It feels like we are in the middle of nowhere.

'But the evidence from the pottery, its age, its varied provenance

'and the sheer amount of shards, suggests Felix might be right.

'That, in this empty place, a trading centre once thrived,

'playing host to merchants from as far afield as ancient Egypt and India.

'Evidence that, from the earliest times,

'this part of Africa had established trade routes with the wider world.'

Talking to Felix, he has opened up

a whole raft of possibilities about where to explore next.

More than anything, is the idea that this was the hub

of a whole network of ports that ran down this bit of the coast.

According to the Periplus, Rhapta traded in goods from

the African interior like ivory and rhinoceros horn.

But there's no sign yet of the trade in gold which I'm looking for.

But as I head back into town the next morning,

towards the markets that bustle here today, I can hear the evidence of a legacy

of trade, exchange, and contact with a world beyond this coast, in the language that people speak.

Swahili is an African language, but one which has incorporated

many words from around the world, like a linguistic melting pot.

The word Swahili itself actually comes from the Arabic word for "coast".

And there are traces of Indian and even Portuguese too.

In fact, Portuguese traders first passed through here in 1498,

and described a spectacularly wealthy city on an island just off the coast.

And that's where I'm heading next.

The Portuguese produced these absolutely

beautiful maps and illustrations of this gorgeous place and it just looks so deeply impressive.

And if the place lives up to this, it's just going to be magnificent.

The city was Kilwa Kisiwani, a city whose streets the Portuguese

describe as overflowing with gold, and filled with black moors, the old European term for Africans.

Colonial historians assumed that Kilwa was an Arab outpost because of its Muslim heritage.

But now we think that Kilwa was African, that these were black, African Muslims -

an interpretation backed up by the observations

of the famous Arab traveller Ibn Battuta,

who came to Kilwa in 1331.

He talks about Kilwa as one of the most beautiful cities.

And he talks about the local population as being

of very dark complexion,

and he describes their ethnic scarifications.

This really was an African city.

And it was also a very profitable one.

The reason I'm here is that a copper coin like this,

from 14th-century Kilwa,

has been found at Great Zimbabwe, 1,500 kilometres inland.

Evidence perhaps that Great Zimbabwe and Kilwa are two ends of what was a lucrative trade in goods.

Those early Portuguese travellers described a city of fine coral-built houses,

and the ruler's 100-room palace full of gold, silver and precious stones.

The site is still spectacular today.

Among the ruins are the houses which would have accommodated the travelling foreign traders

who regularly descended on Kilwa from across the ocean.

Local guide Athmani Abdullah has agreed to show me around.

So why particularly Kilwa? Why was it such an important post in terms of the trading network along the coast?

The direction of the prevailing wind on the Swahili Coast changes twice a year,

allowing ships to cross the Indian Ocean and return again within 12 months.

And that's why Kilwa was ideally placed to serve as East Africa's gateway

to the trading networks of the ancient world.

Hi, Stephanie, lovely to meet you. Hi. Nice to meet you.

Welcome to Kilwa. Thank you!

British archaeologist Stephanie Wynne-Jones of Bristol University

is an expert on Kilwa's history, and has studied how its fortunes have ebbed and flowed through the ages.

One of the things that has been demonstrated through the archaeology is that

there's been a settlement here since at least the ninth century AD.

They were really integrated into the Indian Ocean system

and there are a lot of imports brought to the site from the Persian Gulf, also from India,

reaching this island at that date.

So what was being traded here, exported, what sort of goods?

In general, from the Swahili Coast, the products of the African hinterland

were traded, often in the form of raw materials.

Kilwa was particularly famous for gold, and the source of Kilwa's wealth

was based on the gold trade from the south, from the Zimbabwe plateau.

This was an island state made rich by gold.

These merchants knew the international value of the precious metal and bargained hard.

And as gold flowed through Kilwa, by the 14th century the city had

become one of the most important, and richest, ports in Africa.

And if you look closely enough, some of that wealth is still visible.

Well, this is the Great Mosque of Kilwa,

the congregational mosque which would have served for the Friday prayer,

when the whole community would come together.

One of the things that's wonderful about this structure

are the domes and vaults you can see in the roof, and this is a particularly Kilwa phenomenon

to have the quantity of domes and arches you see here.

And finding this incredible material, this is coral, isn't it?

It is, and this is the defining characteristic of Swahili architecture.

We talk about stone houses, but actually there is no

particularly good natural sources of stone on the coast, and instead

this architectural style developed where they used coral, which is found in abundance here.

And the entire structures are built of coral.

The blocks like the one you're looking at were actually cut from the living coral and

because it was soft, they were able to use it for these carved features.

How would it have been finished? What would it have looked like?

Well, the entire thing would have been plastered with lime plaster which also comes from coral.