Khami

Just outside the city, about 22 km west of the centre, beside the Khami River. · From 15th century

Also known as Khami Ruins, Kame, Khami National Monument.

Stone-walled capital of the Torwa state from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, successor to Great Zimbabwe in the south-west; a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986.

Long before Lobengula’s Bulawayo, and centuries before the colonial town, the most important place in this part of the country stood beside the Khami River, just west of where the city is now. Khami was a royal town of the Torwa state, built in stone from the fifteenth century. Its terraces and decorated walls still stand above the river, about twenty-two kilometres from the city centre.

Before the walls

People lived around Khami long before the stone town. Stone Age hunter-gatherers came first. By the end of the first millennium AD, a farming village using iron and pottery had grown up on a rocky outcrop north of the river, known today as Leopard’s Kopje. Glass beads found there are early signs of trade with the East African coast.

The Torwa capital

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, power in the region was centred on Great Zimbabwe, some 250 km to the south-east. As Great Zimbabwe declined, the Torwa state rose in the south-west, and Khami became its capital.

Khami belongs to the same building tradition as Great Zimbabwe but looks different. Great Zimbabwe’s walls mostly enclose space. Khami’s are mostly retaining walls: stone faces holding up terraced platforms of stone and gravel, on which the important families built their daga huts. Khami also has more decoration than Great Zimbabwe, especially a chequer pattern and bands of darker dolerite stones set into the granite. As at Great Zimbabwe, the stone was for the powerful. Most people lived in huts outside the walls.

The largest group of platforms rises in three tiers around a hill above the river. It was almost certainly the home of the mambo, the king, and probably a ritual centre too. Excavations there found a hoard of bronze and iron weapons, carved ivory divining dice and an ivory figurine, now in the Natural History Museum in Bulawayo. A small hut held a pot decorated with animal figures, which may have been used in rain-making.

Imported goods found in excavations by K. R. Robinson between 1947 and 1956 show that Khami’s trade with the coast, and with the Portuguese, continued through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Khami was abandoned in the later seventeenth century, and power passed to the Rozvi, whose stone towns included Naletale and Danamombe (Dhlo Dhlo) near Gweru.

Small wonders

The trail guide used by visitors points out details easy to miss. There are tsoro boards (the old counting game, still played) cut into the granite. A rock gong, a balanced boulder near the dam wall, rings like a bell when struck. A long wall built of huge untrimmed boulders stands among the finished masonry. On one platform a stone cross is “said to have been placed there by a Portuguese missionary,” the guide notes, “although there is little supporting evidence.”

What the photographs show

The photographs in this set follow the visitor’s route: the Khami signs, the site museum, the steps up the hill complex, the passages, the decorated walls, the stone circles and the terraces seen from above. Like most of the place photographs in this collection, they are undated and the photographer is not named.

What we don’t know yet

If you grew up near Khami, swam or fished in the dam, or remember school trips there, tell us. We would especially like to hear from families who lived in the area before it became a national monument.

34 photographs of Khami →