The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
powerful super-communities or states wherever they went.
The Kalanga also moved southwards through today’s North West province and Free State, down to the Kai !Gariep river territory. The Kai !Gariep and the Vaal rivers became another of the ||amma (water) areas where the peopling of South Africa evolved. The ancestors of the Eastern Cape Khoe, Xhosa and Thembu followed the same trajectories from the northwest and northeast down in a southeasterly direction to the Eastern Cape, where again three ||amma areas – the Kei, Keiskamma and Cumissa (Fish River) – played a further role as important sites in the peopling of South Africa.
Movements in southern Africa were dynamic and not only occurred from north to south, as some academic diagrams may depict these today. Instead, migrations were in multiple directions and even circular over time, with much departures and returns too.
Hall123 argues for and emphasises this different way of viewing our past in saying that the spread of a farming lifestyle to South Africa during the Early Iron Age occurred gradually and may not necessarily be attributable to any large-scale migration of Bantu-speaking people into southern Africa. He further argues, using the term ‘migratory drifts’, that there is unlikely to have been an importation into the region of the full Iron Age culture, but rather that this developed locally over time with incremental transfers of culture and technology. The slow natural migratory drifts as argued by Martin Hall dismiss any ‘sudden arrival’ by an advanced invader people labelled ‘Bantu’.124
Giliomee and Mbenga125 also show us that the Kwale-Nkope farmer culture was settled along the eastern parts of the Limpopo by 280 CE and through to KwaZulu Natal by 400 CE. From about 550 CE the Kalundu farmer culture had settled across the western regions from the Shashe-Limpopo area downwards towards the Kai !Gariep River region. Evidence of both Kwale and Kalundu farmer cultures dated to about 650 CE have been found as far south as East London.
During the first millennium much of South Africa was well populated by societies evolved from the micro-societies that first evolved rapidly from small micro-groups in the early centuries to quite complex societies on both sides of the Limpopo by 800 CE. Giliomee and Mbenga126 also highlight the cultural symbols that were left by these proto-South African societies, such as the Lydenburg Heads dated 800 CE. These are seven terracotta heads that were discovered in association with other pottery artefacts in Lydenburg, Mpumalanga.
The Ndondondwane ceramic head found in the Tugela Valley has also been dated to about 800 CE, and the ceramic representations of young women from the Mpofuma Valley in KwaZulu-Natal are from about 700 CE. According to Giliomee and Mbenga, at the Schroda archaeological site in the Limpopo Valley thousands of fragments of these fertility dolls were found along with an array of other creations from the Zhizo period dating back to about 900 CE. Southern African fertility dolls have a wide range of meanings and uses from one society to another and are handed down over generations from mother to daughter. They are companions to children and act as a charm or talisman to ensure fertility in women.
The artefacts from this period of 700 CE to 900 CE represent just one facet of the evidence of the evolving civilisations that existed in the run-up to the formation of the advanced South African kingdom of Mapangubwe in the 11th century and its successors. The period 100 BCE through to 700 CE also has sites with equally important human cultural deposits that assist us in uncovering the early African civilisations that arose in the first millennium.
Fleminger,127 Huffman,128 Calabrese129 and others elaborate on various epochs that should be considered in a progression that starts with the first Tshua and Khwe San mixing with the herder-hunter descendants of the migrants from East Africa with Nilotic roots. The first of the archaeological sites in this progression is the Bambata Cave in the west part of the Matobo National Park in Zimbabwe. The findings at the Bambata cave indicate this as one of the earliest sites associated with the ancestors of the Khoe that go back to 100 BCE. Archaeological deposits from about 200 CE expose what is called the Gokomere culture, indicating Nkope and Kwale farmer cultures that flourished in the area of Masvingo in Zimbabwe. The area is known for its rock art dating from 300 to 650 CE. Also closely related to these is the Ziwa ruins archaeological site in the Zambezi Valley that connects San, Khoe and early East African farmers.
The progression of human cultural deposits that inform our understanding of the peopling of the region also includes the many rich archaeological deposits found at sites in the Tswapong Hills in Botswana. All these cultures mesh with three more cultures linked to archaeological sites in the Soutspanberg in Limpopo known as Happy Rest culture, Silver Leaves culture and Eiland culture, which can be traced back to 300–700 CE. Near Mapungubwe are the Bambadyanalo (K2) culture site, the Gumanye culture site and the Schroda archaeological site that reveals the advanced Zhizo/Leokwe settlement in the Limpopo Valley. All these together and more offer up rich deposits that are all part of a jigsaw puzzle informing us about the early civilisations that laid the foundations for the peopling of South Africa. The culmination of this coming together saw the emergence of another strong enduring local culture such as that of the Khoe: the Kalanga culture.
The Zhizo society at the Bambadyanalo site saw further advancement at the Schroda and Leokwe sites between 900 and 1220 CE. By this time the Mapungubwe kingdom was flourishing, which it did until 1300 when, due to climatic changes, the epicentre for further advancement shifted to Great Zimbabwe and later to Thulamela. Thulamela, which is situated in the Pafuri area of the Kruger National Park, lasted into the 18th century.
The complex path briefly outlined above led to a locally developed Kalanga society and the formation of the Mapungubwe state (900–1290 CE) of about 5 000 people that was situated close to the confluence of the Limpopo and the Shashe rivers in what is today the Limpopo Province. It became the epicentre of a civilisation covering a huge area of southern Africa. While most know of the Great Zimbabwe state that developed after Mapungubwe, there are scores more little Zimbabwe stone-walled towns. There is also evidence of advanced stone-terrace farming in Bokoniland in Mpumalanga. These mentioned sites are just a few of more than 200 stone settlements in the vast area stretching across South Africa and Zimbabwe up to western Mozambique. The name ‘Zimbabwe’ derives from the Kalanga/Karanga dialect of Shona – dzimba dza mabwe meaning ‘houses of stones’.
The full studies of these archaeologists’ works are a fascinating eye-opener that assists us to build a social development history of Africans in South Africa. Of course, within this framework there are continuous differences of opinions and robust debates. My perspectives just represent one man’s exploration of this past in broad strokes. It is my recommendation that people read the many fascinating papers on these subjects to really get to understand the process of the ‘peopling of South Africa’ and the roots of all Africans in South Africa today. The one thing we can be sure of is that what became South Africa was not a land without an African population and without a developed civilisation made up of many societies across its length and breadth when the Europeans arrived.
A southern African multi-ethnic society trading with the world from 800 CE
These periods show not just the settlements around Mapungubwe but also the movement of people backwards and forwards between what are now Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Mozambique, with plenty of evidence of trade linkages through the Mozambique ports of Kilwa and Sofala, and with Malawi, Tanzania and the Zambezi Delta.
Already by 700 CE pre-Mapungubwe communities were linked economically via Mozambique ports to South Asia, Southeast Asia, North Africa, Arabia and China, but from 900 CE this trade became highly advanced. Some Arab traders were coming inland by boats on the Zambezi. There is no evidence that at this time people from the far-off global reaches had any direct contact with the region. Instead there was a chain of trading moving through to the east coast of Africa with African intermediaries.
What we also have here are clear and irrefutably African societies or civilisations, which were multi-ethnic and included hunter-gatherers, herders, crop farmers and those with mixed modes of sustenance. These societies had further become stratified and were made up of different classes. Schoeman and Pikirayi state:130
Recent research about the formation of the Mapungubwe state reveals complex interactions beyond racial and ethnic homogenous societies. During K2 period (1000 to 1220 CE), a period that preceded Mapungubwe (1220 to 1290 CE),