I am particularly pleased to bring you the etymology of the word Zimbabwe today.  Paul Quarrington gave me a thrill when I met him at a writer’s conference.

He had been on one of the panels and since I’m a fan of his I approached the dais after his presentation to see if I could get him to give me a word for podictionary.  Before I even got 20 feet from him he burst out “I’m a fan” and whipped out his MP3 player to show me that he had a bunch of podictionary episodes on it.

That made my week.

Paul Quarrington is a Canadian author and musician and film maker.  Last winter he won the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Canada Reads” competition with his book King Leary.  It’s a book about hockey that isn’t actually about hockey and it deserved to win—although there was another candidate, Brown Girl in the Ring that I liked too.

Paul’s band is called The Porkbelly Futures and he has a new book out called The Ravine.

So check out Paul’s work and I’ll get on to his word.

I don’t know why Zimbabwe popped into Paul’s mind.

Maybe it’s because one of the band members of Porkbelly Futures, Rebecca Campbell—of who I’m also a fan—had just come back from Africa (though I don’t know if she was in Zimbabwe).

In any case, the Oxford English Dictionary has its first citation for the name of this African nation dated to 1902, which is a little odd, since the place didn’t take on its name until 1980.

But like so many other countries it didn’t pull its name out of nowhere, there was already a history to the word Zimbabwe and when the country truly gained its independence it was the desire of its leaders to make use of that history to inspire a little extra pride into their newly recognized nationhood.

Before Old English even got started some people living in this part of Africa got it into their heads that they would start up a great trading empire.

Or something.

All we have to go on are the 1700 year old ruins of a great city.

Great cities don’t spring up out of nowhere either and so we have to assume that some of these long dead Africans built it up based on some kind of economic activity.

In any case Europeans and English speakers had no idea of its existence until the 1800s when the ruins of this city were “discovered.”

Europeans at the time being rather Eurocentric they couldn’t believe that Africans had built this obviously ancient structure and so spun all kinds of theories that included involvements by ancient Greeks and even that the walled city was the site of the legendary King Solomon’s Mines.

It was well into the 1900s before archeologists began to agree that no, in fact the place was a pretty major sign of African empire building that seemed to finally collapse about 500 years ago.

So the word Zimbabwe had two things going for it when Rhodesia, the country that would be called Zimbabwe went looking for a name.  One, it symbolized ancient glory and two, the word itself wasn’t English—and it was England that Zimbabwe was finally getting its independence from.

The reason for this must be because when the first Europeans saw the place they were with local African guides who already had a name for the ruins.  The OED reports this to be in the Bantu language, Wikipedia reports it to be Shona which I’m told is in the Bantu family.

The name of the ancient ruins appears to mean “house of stone” or “houses of stone.”   This is appropriate since the ruins consist of hundreds of stone walls and stone walled structures.

So here’s to the long-suffering people of Zimbabwe whose leader of 28 years now, Robert Mugabe appears to be a bit of a stone wall himself.