Hungwe tribe
The Hungwe tribe was a south-central African tribe that settled in Zimbabwe.
Hungwe Denialism
George Landow, a Professor of English and Art History at Brown University in the U.S points to a refusal by Europeans and their friends to embrace the fact that the Great Zimbabwe was built by the Karanga in general, and the Hungwe in particular.
"Since Europeans first encountered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe," he writes, "it has been the focus of ideological concern and conflict. Unwilling to believe that sub-Saharan Africans could have built such a structure, adventurers and ideologues long claimed the ruins a mystery, theorising that ancient Phoenicians, Arabs, Romans, or Hebrews created the structures. In fact, since archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson's excavations in 1932, it has been widely known that Great Zimbabwe is truly of Africa and less than 1000 years old.
"Nonetheless, the White Rhodesians, whose ideology proclaimed the land 'empty' of people and culture before they arrived, tried to rewrite history -- even asserting that an African genesis for Great Zimbabwe was tantamount to treason," says Landow.
Historian Tudor Parfitt described the works by some early Great Zimbabwe Historian as intended to "show that black people had never been capable of building in stone or of governing themselves".
