Great Zimbabwe bird – one still remains

An auspicious event took place in February, but the world got to know of it sometime last month; the Great Zimbabwe birds returned to their original homes for a brief event.

Wait, that statement is not fully true; only four of the original eight Great Zimbabwe birds returned to nest in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, if only for a brief while.

Dzimba dza mabwe, as the uncorrupted version of the ancient city should be called, is where the people of the former southern Rhodesia turned to as they broke free from the yoke of colonialism. No longer would they settle a name from Cecil Rhodes, an imperial exploiter, but would choose a local name. Gold Coast chose its name from the Kingdom of Ghana, French Sudan chose its name from the Kingdom of Mali; Southern Rhodesia, with its array of kingdoms, sought to build its image from the ”House of Stones.”

The most important artifacts of Great Zimbabwe have been its soapstone figurines. When archaeologists dug up the site, they found eight of these birdlike soapstone figurines, now called the Great Zimbabwe birds.

They are not really birds, but more of a human-bird chimera; one has lips instead of beak, while all have human limbs. It’s thought the bird used as an inspiration for the carvings is the Bateleur eagle, who in traditional Shona belief was regarded as a messenger between the spirit realm and humans.

Whatever their purpose, the bird that was found was spirited away to Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town, and four other figurines went to South Africa. A fragment of another bird was also disappeared into South Africa.

The last two birds remained home.

Zimbabwe adopted the figurines as the national emblem of the nation, which is why you will see the Great Zimbabwe bird on its flag, on currencies on stamps, and everywhere else they can add it.

But it became an independent nation while there were three times as many of its national emblem outside its border as within its territory.

Thus began a campaign to reclaim its heritage, a challenge familiar to all former colonies whose cultural artifacts remain trapped in other nations.

South Africa quickly returned four of the birds, a year after Zimbabwe’s independence.

The nation then had to wait until 2003, before another piece was returned from Germany.

One Great Zimbabwe bird is not yet home; do you want to guess where it is? Is it in some private collection in the Americas? Some public museum in Europe?

No. The last bird is in neighboring South Africa.

The last bird is actually the bird that was first whisked off into the private collection of Cecil Rhodes. It is located in what was his bedroom in the Groote Schuur Estate in Cape Town. Rhodes bequeathed this estate to the South African government, so that it now is a museum on the presidential estate. Which makes it a public facility.

But it seems like this one sculpture, a short flight away, will take longer to retrieve.

But why should that  be the case?