much earlier, especially if, as seems probable, the use of iron originated
in Africa. On the other hand the culmination of this culture has been
placed by some as late as the modern middle ages.

What was it that overthrew this civilization? Undoubtedly the same sort of
raids of barbarous warriors that we have known in our day. For instance,
in 1570 there came upon the country of Mozambique, farther up the coast,
"such an inundation of pagans that they could not be numbered. They came
from that part of Monomotapa where is the great lake from which spring
these great rivers. They left no other signs of the towns they passed but
the heaps of ruins and the bones of inhabitants." So, too, it is told how
the Zimbas came, "a strange people never before seen there, who, leaving
their own country, traversed a great part of this Ethiopia like a scourge
of God, destroying every living thing they came across. They were twenty
thousand strong and marched without children or women," just as four
hundred years later the Zulu impi marched. Again in 1602 a horde of people
came from the interior called the Cabires, or cannibals. They entered the
kingdom of Monomotapa, and the reigning king, being weak, was in great
terror. Thus gradually the Monomotapa fell, and its power was scattered
until the Kaffir-Zulu raids of our day.[31]

The Arab writer, Macoudi, in the tenth century visited the East African
coast somewhere north of the equator. He found the Indian Sea at that time
frequented by Arab and Persian vessels, but there were no Asiatic
settlements on the African shore. The Bantu, or as he calls them, Zenji,
inhabited the country as far south as Sofala, where they bordered upon the
Bushmen. These Bantus were under a ruler with the dynastic title of
Waklimi. He was paramount over all the other tribes of the north and could
put three hundred thousand men in the field. They used oxen as beasts of
burden and the country produced gold in abundance, while panther skin was