Hey all, I randomly remembered that in one of my world history classes in high school we were discussing pre-European contact African societies and Great Zimbabwe naturally came up. While going over this topic, my teacher offhandedly mentions that British anthropologists couldn't accept an African society had built something like that due to prevailing racist notions at the time, so they concocted a theory that it was some wayward Persians that had developed the site, or that they had local Africans build it.
Is there any truth to this myth? Did British scholars make up false explanations for sites that indicated a level of African development that contradicted their prevailing beliefs on the Africans' lack of reasoning and ability to create civilization?
It wasn't unique to Britons, and it wasn't down to deliberate dishonesty so much as to disbelief that the cultures over which European powers had lately established ascendancy might have built such magnificent constructions. Such is the power of prejudice: once you think you must know the answer, that's it.
It's not that scholars "made up" explanations, rather that the contemporary prevailing worldview of African civilisations precluded the blindingly obvious. It takes a lot to confront such a view, and most of these decent, respectable men just weren't cut out to take on a globally dominant intellectual hegemony - nor did they see that as their mission.
Dismantling the whole facade of some imagined Trojan emigre Zimbabwe would fall to later archaeology and understanding of regional history. But those who got it badly wrong made a start. It was horrifically wrong, but for the most part they weren't lying: they just couldn't see the truth, such were the times.