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The Khame Ruins and Great Zimbabwe

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We are back home now. But I can't leave this blog without including a post on these two excellent archeological sites in Zimbabwe. However, it is going to be a very short post, mostly pictures. There is a lot more information on google if you are interested!      Before we left Britain I knew I wanted to visit Great Zimbabwe. I had heard of it as an enigmatic ruin in Zimbabwe, I thought of it as maybe dating from the middle ages. Peter had visited it as a boy with his brothers. At that time there was a widespread assumption among white people that Africans could not have built such an impressive structure (Peter's father had no doubt that they had, knowing the local Africans better than most whites did). They thought that maybe it had been constructed by the Queen of Sheba. All of that has been completely overturned by more recent historians and archeologists. The ruins date from the 11th century and were occupied until at least the 15th century.   ...
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Things fall apart - but the centre holds

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No problems? (Hamna shida?) Two of our relatives had remarked that the blog was pretty much all positive, and had nothing gone wrong? What had we been hiding? Well, actually, it's been a very lucky journey, and no, nothing much to complain about. We made a list of complaints to see what we could come up with. There was the badly signposted road with the truly terrible surface in the Matopos. We'd both been frightened that we might get stuck all night in a car in the  middle of a game reserve. But we had written about that. And there was the deplorable hotel and chaotic traffic in Harare, neither of which we'd enjoyed. But we'd written about that too. And I think we'd mentioned that getting a 2 a.m. flight from Harare to Dar had not been the best (though it was the only one we could find). We didn't like trying to bend our aged knees in a squat toilet in a swaying, lurching train on the way to Mbeya. What else? 1. Coffee! Sometimes wonderful, but mostl...
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When Mo was small. Part 2 The house in Mbeya

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Finding the house. Another extraordinary meeting - and indeed an extraordinary discovery. I'd chosen a hotel just a few hundred yards from where we thought my family house in Mbeya had been; again judging by google earth, and also by Peter's memory of having stayed near there forty years ago when he was working in Tanzania and had visited the town. The satellite showed a house with a shape like an E but with the middle arm missing. The long side of the E was the front of the house, facing the road. That is what our house had been like. When I was aged about seven we had moved there from Dar. The family lived there until Dad retired, when I was ten. After we had arrived in Mbeya from the Dar train, and changed our clothes we walked along. There the house was, now gated and with high opaque walls. Peering through the gate I suddenly remembered the front verandah, its red tiles, and my mother sitting there crying. She was holding a letter saying that Great Aunt Ethel had...
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