These observations by François-Xavier Fauvelle appear in the introduction to his history of medieval Africa, The Golden Rhinoceros. He notes that one of the challenges of writing such a history is the lack of any such continuity of memory among many of the great cities of sub-Saharan Africa in the period. An example of this is the extraordinary remains of the city known as Great Zimbabwe, which flourished in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the other ‘Zimbabwe-type’ settlements distributed on the Zimbabwe Plateau.2 The first European explorer to closely examine the site of Great Zimbabwe in 1871, Karl Mauch, was awed by what he found, but frustrated by the lack of knowledge or interest in the remains shown by the local Shona people.3Later scholars interested in the history of these remains have attempted to employ oral sources from the Shona, with some success, but the results are controversial.4Something of the difficulty is revealed by the name given to the city, commonly translated as ‘houses of stone’, suggesting a relationship to the site predicated largely on the most obvious physical remains rather than an enduring link to the inhabitants of the city.