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Roger Summers

Profile – The National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe

Profile – The institution now known as the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe began in 1901 as the Rhodesia Museum in Bulawayo, founded jointly by the Rhodesia Scientific Association and the Rhodesia Chamber of Mines, with geologist F. P. Mennell as its first curator. Its focus was initially economic geology, reflecting the priorities of the mining interests behind its founding, though its collecting scope broadened considerably over the following decades.

Profile – Great Zimbabwe

Profile – Great Zimbabwe is the largest stone structure built in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa, raised between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries by ancestors of the Shona people as the capital of a kingdom that controlled trade routes reaching as far as the East African coast. Archaeologists have recovered Chinese porcelain, Persian glass beads, and Arab coins on the site — evidence of a medieval African economy plugged directly into global trade in gold, ivory, and copper.