Which people built Great Zimbabwe?

The Shona, between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries - a city of dry-stone walls up to eleven metres high and five metres thick, built without mortar, housing perhaps 18,000 people at its height and controlling gold and ivory trade that reached the Swahili coast and, by trade goods found on site, China and Persia.

Colonial-era archaeology spent decades insisting Africans could not have built it. Phoenicians, Arabs, the Queen of Sheba and lost Israelite tribes were all proposed, and when Randall-MacIver in 1905 and Gertrude Caton-Thompson in 1929 concluded from stratigraphy that it was unambiguously African and medieval, their findings were resisted. Under Rhodesia the government actively censored the archaeological record - museum guides were instructed not to say it was built by Africans, and archaeologists who said so publicly lost their jobs.

The country took its name from the site at independence in 1980, and the soapstone birds excavated there are on the flag and the currency. Most were removed in the colonial period and have been slowly repatriated; one was cut in half, with the upper portion ending up in Germany and reunited with its base only in 2003 - which is a fairly exact physical metaphor for the whole episode.