I was the archaeologist stationed at Great Zimbabwe. I was told by the then-director of the Museums and Monuments organization to be extremely careful about talking to the press about the origins of the Zimbabwe state. I was told that the museum service was in a difficult situation, that the government was pressurizing them to withhold the correct information. Censorship of guidebooks, museum displays, school textbooks, radio programmes, newspapers and films was a daily occurrence. Once a member of the Museum Board of Trustees threatened me with losing my job if I said publicly that blacks had built Zimbabwe. He said it was okay to say the yellow people had built it, but I wasn't allowed to mention radio carbon dates... It was the first time since Germany in the thirties that archaeology has been so directly censored.

Khame (also written as Kame or Kami) was the capital of the Torwa State that emerged as a strong power in south-western Zimbabwe after the decline of Great Zimbabwe in the 15th Century. In the late 17th Century the site was burned and levelled by the Rozwi, who then took it over. In the 1830s Nguni speaking Ndebele raiders displaced them from Khame and many of the other sites they had established.