Joost Fontein's book revisits the intensely debated history of Great Zimbabwe, a settlement and trading center that dates back to the twelfth century and whose standing remains mark one of the most politically charged world heritage sites in southern Africa today. The book is the product of several years of research in the Masivingo district of Zimbabwe, during which Fontein conducted archival research and interviews with various stakeholders, including masvikiro (spirit-mediums) and prominent members of the Nemanwa, Charumbira and Mugabe clans – most of whom express some sort of pre-eminent claim to the history of Great Zimbabwe. Through a revisit of the orientalist colonial-era debates over the origins of Great Zimbabwe, and through careful unpacking of his interviews with local informants, Fontein illustrates his argument for the enormous extent to which Sherry Ortner's ‘ethnographic refusal’ has always operated to silence such local claims in the pursuit of ‘objective’ historical and archeological knowledge. In contrast, Fontein's work dwells on the complexity of all the jostling and contrasting ‘history-scapes’ painted by those he terms ‘traditional connoisseurs’ of the past.

Fontein imbues a good deal of emancipatory potential into the fleshing out of these narratives, which, following Partha Chatterjee's account of postcolonial nationalism, he conceptualizes as a source of authentic spiritual history: that is, a history that is not doomed to endlessly mimic Western and Enlightenment-derived notions of history-making. Fontein suggests that it is these sorts of historical narratives that show us the way out of what Chatterjee terms the ‘postcolonial misery’ of the modern state.

Fontein reads the silence of Great Zimbabwe as evincing a certain anger on the part of the ancestors and those who act as their mediums and interlocutors – this anger emerges in the wake of the marginalization and mistreatment of traditional forms of practice at Great Zimbabwe. Thus, in raising what might be called a certain ‘hermeneutics of anger’, Fontein's work illuminates the intense moral force that is invested in the production of historical narratives. This force must be understood to contrast with state and colonially derived historical narratives, and it is this force that comes to define the sorts of historical narrative that stakeholders feel to have productive or transformative force.

It is at this point that Fontein's research touches upon a much broader issue in the matter of heritage and history discourse in the postcolony. Ultimately, this work raises an anxiety about history-making and what do to with the inevitability of a certain exclusionary force in nationally or even internationally derived discourse on heritage sites. Nor is this exclusionary effect limited to the methods or approach of any one professional discipline or set of political commitments. Rather, the exclusionary function of heritage discourse proves to be a shadowy and evasive thing, constantly producing ressentiment at discursive levels that fall outside the scope of national or international heritage discourse. In contrast, Fontein's careful attention to multivocality offers the reader an unprecedented appreciation for the personal and political motivations of each and every stakeholder, and, ultimately, for the fact that the silence of Great Zimbabwe represents a broader problematic that looms over the contemporary horizon of historical discourse as it enters into the field of tourism-driven heritage.

How, finally, does the failure of heritage discourse to provide an equally shared history for all bear on academics and professional heritage workers? Fontein's conclusion seems optimistic, suggesting that historical discourse should not be defeated by these conflicts and inadequacies. He suggests the goal is to refashion ‘a means of discussing the past, and what to do with it, … which can embrace its contested and dynamic nature, and the multiplicity of changing histories, attachments and meanings inevitably associated with any one place or landscape’ (p. 225). This book illustrates the possibility of just such a progressive historiography, one that reminds us of the tremendous capacity for marginalization that history-making always entails.