The Lie of 1652. Patric Tariq Mellet
from where ivory was exported to India and indirectly to China. Imported glass beads found at several Early Iron Age sites show that the trade network had extended to southern Africa by the 8th and 9th centuries. He further cites Al Masudi’s 10th-century record mentioning gold from the land of Sofala.
According to Huffman,136 coastal trading stations at this time were supplying glass beads to the interior. Southeast Asian beads were found at Mapungubwe. He also notes that gold reefs were concentrated on the Zimbabwe plateau in greenstone belts not found in central or southern Mozambique, making the point that gold from Sofala had to come from the deep interior of Africa.
A marked increase in international demand for gold, particularly from the Far East, contributed to an upsurge in gold production in the 13th and 14th centuries.137 Today we can see temples, statues and palatial homes in South Asia dating from that time that are adorned with gold. The selling of gold leaf that is pasted onto Buddhist and Hindu statues by masses of devotees to this day gives some idea of the consumer demand for gold. As a result, gold from Zimbabwe and South Africa helped to support a boom period at Sofala too.
The Chinese138 also created a great demand for ivory and for leopard skins. Among the ruling classes in the East, gold, ivory and leopard skins were associated with the trappings of power and with affluence. The demand for gold and other local products resulted in the initial expansion of the Mapungubwe state northwards to control some of the gold fields in Zimbabwe. In return, Chinese celadon green-glazed stoneware made its way to Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe. African traders navigated the complex competitor network of interlocutor South Asian, Arab and Southeast Asian traders long before the arrival of the Portuguese on the scene.
It was the surplus wealth from this trade and its associated multicultural interactions that presented new opportunities and challenges to people in the Mapungubwe landscape, and the landscape of its successor kingdoms. They clearly met those challenges. Operating from East African ports were a mix of African, Arab and Indian seamen. This was at a time when Europe had flimsy boats, little maritime experience and virtually no trade with much of the world. The Europeans would later use the skills of West African, East African and Arab mariners to gain the breakthroughs they needed to reach the East.
Eastward along the Limpopo on the Mpumalanga escarpment an advanced agricultural and trading society is also evidenced to have emerged from about 1500 CE. According to Delius, Maggs and Schoeman,139 the Bokoni farmers used an innovative farming system that was unique in what is now South Africa and the largest intensive farming system of its kind in southern and eastern Africa. It was based on intensive farming techniques, including massive investment in stone terracing for crops and stone kraals for livestock that allowed for the cultivation of the rich, volcanic soils on the hillsides of the escarpment. Crop cultivation was combined with closely managed livestock production. The Bokoni were linked to trading systems in the Indian Ocean trade with North Africa, Arabia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and China.140
Slavery epochs as an influence on migrations and identity formation
In looking at the role and impacts of slavery systems in our history, the tendency is to see this simply in terms of the Cape slavery system. But the effects of slavery systems on the peopling of South Africa long precedes Cape slavery. They go back to impacts of the Arab-driven slavery era before the rise of the European-driven slave trade from the 15th century as well as to the beginnings of the European-driven slavery system. It is often overlooked that Africa was subjected to two different imperialist eras involving slave trading.
Wood141 notes that Arab slave raiders operated as far south as the southern Mozambique coast and today’s KwaZulu-Natal coast early in the second millennium, if not as early as the mid-10th century. We do not know how many people may have been taken in this period, but it illustrates that as soon as trade in valuable products such as ivory and gold became a norm, conflicts and piracy arose and the capturing and enslaving of people followed.
With the beginning of the European-driven slave trade, trade engagements in the region also produced civil conflicts and the selling of Tsonga, Chopi, Wutonga, Kosse and other prisoners of war as enslaved persons. Portuguese colonialism in Angola and Mozambique had a headstart of more than a century and a half on Dutch colonialism in South Africa.
The capturing and enslaving activity in southern Africa was tapped into by Madagascar-based pirates and included the selling of war captives from among the Ronga, Mfumo, Nyaka, Tembe, and inland Pedi, Bokoni and Swati.142 The enslaved were sold through Mozambique Island, Delagoa Bay and Madagascar as slaves called ‘Mozambiques’. Over time it became very difficult to separate these enslaved people with more direct links to South Africa from the many more enslaved on Mozambique Island who came from over 15 African societies all along the Zambezi into Zambia and Congo, as well as from Tanzania and northern Mozambique, and from Zimbabwe.143 Mozambique Island and Delagoa Bay were turned into melting pots for enslaved people after the Portuguese first developed a relationship with the Arab slave trader Musa Ibn Mbiki.
Parsons144 further informs us that through this slave trade various Ronga societies, such as the Gwambe of the Wutonga and the Kosse and Manyika, became suppliers of enslaved peoples to the Madagascar-based pirates and the Portuguese. The conflict territory extended up to St Lucia. These enslaved people included Nguni speakers from what is today northern KwaZulu-Natal through to the Ronga, Tsonga and Pedi. They would lose their community and societal identities when exported to the Americas.
Many scholars on African social history make the link between land and social history experiences – with slavery being just one of these experiences. Insoll,145 quoting Bollig, and Luig and Von Oppen, says:
Land can have many meanings in Africa that intertwine and are difficult to separate. These can be economic or refer to social relationships or ritual and religious beliefs. Land and landscape can also be constructed as a ‘mnemotope’ in which memory, kinship, and legitimacy of occupation are inscribed or ascribed.
We will see in further chapters just how much the slavery experience meshes as a Pan-African experience and an African-Asian experience with the issues of land, belonging and land beneficiation.
How the culture of kingdoms entered the cultural world of South Africa
Parsons146 shows us that there is also something else that is interesting about the emergence of the Rozvi empire or confederacy out of the Mutapa kingdom in various stages over time.
As was noted earlier, the Rozvi empire was started when Chief Changamire broke away from the northeast Mutapa kingdom and first established the Changamire state, which then gave birth to the Rozvi confederacy or empire. This split occurred as a direct result of internal Mutapa conflict regarding what was considered favourable treatment of the Portuguese by the kingdom and co-operation with Portuguese enslavement of Africans.
It is in these conflicts and similar ones in Angola in the west that negative European engagement with Africans in southern Africa has its roots before the beginnings of colonisation at the Cape. Enslavement was at the core of this negative European engagement. Large cargoes of enslaved people passed through the proto-port at Table Bay for 50 years before the Dutch colony was founded. During this time the Khoe at the Cape would have become well aware of the slave trade and all that it encompassed. Besides the huge numbers passing through the Khoe-administered port, several Khoe had gone abroad with European ships and would have learnt about slavery in detail.
Migrations often occurred as people were put to flight by slave raiding in Angola and Mozambique during the Portuguese colonial period. The same had happened earlier in East Africa during the Arab slave-raiding period. It is for this reason that slavery and dispossession of land in Africa are so closely linked.
The clash with Portuguese colonial slave raiders in their contact with the Mutapa state precipitated a major revolution in southern Africa that dramatically impacted the peopling of the region. With that revolution, the culture of kingdoms entered the cultural world of what is now South Africa, first through the Rozvi empire and later through its dissolution into the Rozvi confederacy of kingdoms.
The culture of the Mutapa state with its Kalanga foundation roots changed to incorporate adherence to a belief that supreme leaders of the state were divinely appointed and were both priest and