Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili Coast
Bantu expansion, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe's stone architecture and gold economy, colonial-era denial of its African builders, the Swahili city-states (Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi, Zanzibar, Mogadishu), Swahili language and Islam, Indian Ocean trade with Arabia, Persia, India and China, Ibn Battuta at Kilwa, and the Portuguese arrival from 1498.
Stone cities and ocean trade
When Europeans encountered Great Zimbabwe in the 1870s, colonial writers attributed it to Phoenicians or the Queen of Sheba rather than to Africans; the Rhodesian government later pressured researchers to support such claims. Archaeologists from David Randall-MacIver (1905) and Gertrude Caton-Thompson (1929) onwards showed it was built by the ancestors of the Shona. The modern country of Zimbabwe takes its name from the site, and its national emblem is the Zimbabwe Bird, carved soapstone birds found there.
Peter Garlake, Great Zimbabwe (1973); Innocent Pikirayi, The Zimbabwe Culture (2001); Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili (2000); Ibn Battuta, Rihla (on Kilwa, 1331).