When the archaeologists examined those ruins, however, they discovered that they were NOT part of any ancient civilization at all - but the remains of a 1200 year old islamic_slave fort.
Don’t know why that underscore is there, but you’re half right. Some archaeologists did conclude that Great Zimbabwe was built by Arabs… but that was back when scientific racism was at its height, when it was commonly believed that black people weren’t smart enough to build such things, so many people simply couldn’t conceive of the fact that it was built by blacks. To them, it would’ve been like suggesting the city was built by chimpanzees. Other theories said that it was built by Phoenician traders, or Egyptian miners, or one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Starting in the 1950s, thanks to radiocarbon dating, the consensus was that Great Zimbabwe had been built by black people… except in the parts of Africa under white minority rule, especially Southern Rhodesia, later just Rhodesia. The fact that “inferior” blacks could build a city so ahead of its time that Moorish and Portuguese merchants thought it was literally the work of angels… it really undermined the justification for treating Rhodesian blacks as second-class citizens. So the official line of Rhodesia’s government was that the city wasn’t built by black people, and archaeologists who disagreed were censored.
Robert Mugabe was a black supremacist scumbag. But that doesn’t mean he was wrong about Great Zimbabwe.