This is a history YouTuber's collaboration on Africa.

Be sure to check out the entire playlist in the description below.

Africa, where the human story began.

Yet, for most of us here in the West, we know less of African history than anywhere else on Earth.

Nowhere is this more true than in the South, where spoken history and oral tradition have long reigned supreme.

When Europeans first came here in the 1800s, such was their fixation on the written word

that it was argued this place had no history at all.

One of those men was a German-American big-game hunter named Adam Renda.

Whilst hunting in the highlands of the interior in 1867, he found something astonishing.

1500 kilometres inland on the highland plateau of modern-day Zimbabwe,

surrounded by an endless array of massive rocks in a seemingly

barren landscape, he found the ruins of a magnificent ancient city.

Crafted in expertly worked stone.

The walls here curve and flow along the contours of the ground,

with nothing besides gravity and the extreme architectural precision of those who built them to keep them in place.

The most formidable structure of the city known as the Great Enclosure has walls 11 metres tall

and 6 metres wide at the lowest point that extend for 250 meters, built using millions of bricks.

This is the largest pre-modern structure to the south of the Sahara

desert. Renda wasn't the first European to come upon this place. More than 300 years earlier,

several Portuguese sailors describe the city in detail.

One of them arguing that it must have been built by the devil himself.

Such was the foreboding architecture of the place.

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