Discovering the Khami Ruins

While at Victoria Falls, David and I took a quick picture of a display showing some interesting sites to visit across Zimbabwe, and what a treat it was to discover this gem.

Starting our journey at the site museum, we were able to learn more about this remarkable place. We were grateful to have met Knowledge who spent many hours with us as our guide. We greatly appreciated his patience, gentle nature, enthusiasm, and storytelling abilities; this is where our love affair with Zimbabwe was further fuelled.

These Ruins are an extensive complex of stonewalled sites that lies just west of Bulawayo. The stonewalls were symbols of prestige, wealth, and power as opposed to defence or protection as I originally thought. The largest of the ruins was the home of the King and his family.

The walls are not bonded and the individual blocks are balanced on each other without cement. The stones used to build the walls were quarried from the local granite using fire to heat the rock followed by rapid cooling. The blocks were then shaped using cobble hammers to create standardised small stone “bricks”.

Yet another complex that was fascinating to me was the “passage platform”, which was built less linearly, with walls that were curvaceous and rounded. This area was dedicated to the women who would gather in this space to give birth, menstruate, and perform rites of passage ceremonies together. There were also midwives, medicine women, and elders who spent most of their time there ensuring that women who needed support could go there and be helped. WOW! Needless to say, the men continued, while I spent some time in the passage platform feeling deeply grateful for how magnificent it is for me to be woman!Read more