Edition: U.S. / Global

The Marketing of an Ancient Capital's Mysteries

Published: January 18, 1997

Great Zimbabwe is one of the shining mysteries of Africa.

It is the continent's largest stone structure south of the Pyramids, and gives this country, the former Rhodesia, its name. But no one is sure who built it in the 12th century, what they did there or why it was suddenly abandoned 300 years later.

Nor does anyone sell it in miniature with snowflakes swirling around it. But, tourism officials hope, that's coming.

Some believe that ''zimbabwe'' is a contraction of the local words for ''great stone houses.'' By the 15th century, Great Zimbabwe may have had 20,000 inhabitants and was the capital of a far-flung network of 150 villages built by people who traded gold and ivory and took slaves out of the interior of Africa and exported them to Arab-run ports.

Its walls are up to 35 feet tall and 15 feet thick, and held together with nothing but their own weight.

The mystery is that when European explorers reached the area, the walls were a deserted ruin, and there was no civilization around that built with stone. It became almost an obsession with later white governments to insist that some mysterious visitors -- Phoenicians, Jews or Greeks -- must have constructed the narrow alleys and conical towers.

They did not believe that black Africans had, because that would destroy the colonial notion that they were untutored savages who were lucky to have the British and Portuguese for their new overlords.

Unbiased modern scholarship indicates otherwise. Phainos Makwarimba, a local tour guide, said that excavation of round huts in and around the walls suggests that Bantu people from central Africa built the city, and later left it, perhaps because of overgrazing and the fierce droughts that periodically sap the water table of this arid plateau. It's not clear what the towers were for or what the mammal-footed stone birds that topped the walls, and are now on the national seal, represented.

It also isn't known why the local Shona people weren't living in cities when the hunter-explorer Adam Renders arrived in 1868, although this slice of Africa was in turmoil from droughts, disease, slavers and invasions by whites and by rival tribes fleeing the fierce empire-building of Shaka, the Attila of Zululand, hundreds of miles to the south. The word Shona, in Ndebele, an offshoot of Zulu, means ''People who run for cover.''

Though this is one of Africa's defining monuments, only about 100,000 tourists came by last year. It is a long way from an airport, and there is not much to do in the area except check out the stones. In Rome, at least, one can get a three-course meal only a block from the Colosseum.

Tourism authorities hope to triple the number of visitors. There is talk of a bigger airport at nearby Masvingo, of casinos and even of chairlifts over the ruins.

That worries people like Edward Matenga, curator of the complex, who says tourists, though useful, are also the biggest threat. The ubiquitous baboons and monkeys do some damage, but it's humans who clamber on the ancient walls to take pictures or snitch stones as souvenirs.

Until recently, helping limit the influx, there was only one real hotel in the area, the Great Zimbabwe, a bit of English nostalgia with Tudor architecture and a rose garden.

In September that changed. Now the ruins have a modern echo half a mile away -- The Lodge of the Ancient City, a hotel that dares to imitate them, right down to the detritus scattered in the dirt. The spirals of copper wire once used as currency called ndoro reappear as a motif on the hotel's barstools and as the weights that keep guests from pocketing their room keys.

But the hotel is more authentic than it sounds.

''Just before it opened, the building team was almost 2,000 people. It was just like ants all over the place. And it was all done by hand, with local materials.''

Those words from Gareth I. Foster, the manager, could just as easily have been spoken 800 years ago.

The lodge was built by a company headed by Alan Elliot, one of three whites in Zimbabwe's Parliament, a safari guide who speaks fluent Ndebele, dances Zulu-style well enough to hoedown with his constituents without embarrassing himself and had the chutzpah to get President Robert Mugabe to grant presidential protection to a herd of elephants that hang around one of his game lodges.

Mr. Elliot wanted the hotel built in much the same way people the builders of Great Zimbabwe worked. A cement mixer and a drill were the only machinery used. The stones were gathered by building fires on nearby granite domes, then pouring water on the hot rock till layers peeled off like an onion skin.

As at the monument, the walls decorated with dog-tooth and chevron patterns twist haphazardly, following the boulder-strewn natural landscape. The hotel's dining area is actually the top of a hill, roofed over with thatch, the bar carefully tucked under a huge rock that a musician perches upon on Saturday nights to play a thumb-piano, the traditional Shona instrument.

The hotel even has its own echo of the ''Who Built Great Zimbabwe?'' mystery.

In the first local articles about its opening, the construction superintendent took most of the credit, even though the owners insist it was their design, arrived at without an architect through a long process of ''walking, arguing and sometimes sulking,'' said Ian McDonald, the marketing manager.

In any case, as interest in the mysteries of Great Zimbabwe rises, the academic expertise to tackle them is finally arriving.

''Our first booking,'' Mr. Foster said, ''was a group of American archeologists.''

Photo: Great Zimbabwe was built in the 12th century and gave its name to the nation. Tourists wander among the ruins of its massive stone walls. (Fiona McDougall for The New York Times) Map of Zimbabwe showing the location of the Great Zimbabwe National Monument.