History of South Africa Episode 6: Mapungubwe, the original Sotho/Tswana & Nguni & Bartolomeu Dias

This is episode 6 and we’re focusing on one of the earliest known empires called the Mapungubwe – and the arrival of Bartolomeu Dias. As we heard last episode Mapungubwe emerged from the increased trade between central south Africa and the East Coast seaboard including ivory, skins and eventually, gold around 1000AD. Unlike areas of Africa further north and north west, slave trade did not impact this region for a number of reasons. The main is distance. Each mile further south from the main Arabian, Asian and European – then American centers of slavery meant was a threat to the survival of those unfortunate souls seized as slaves by intermediaries. So Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe were not crucial in the trade of humans over the centuries, their power lay in goods rather than people. We heard too how by the start of the eleventh century Mapungubwe culture had shifted from the Complex Cattle Pattern where each settlement featured a large cattle kraal in the centre – to something very different. The spatial expression of status and the greater social distance between elite and commoner was expressed through the trade and storage of valuable products that replaced cattle as items regarded as most important. While ivory had been traded for hundreds of years, gold became extremely important to the Mapungubwe people. Gold plated rhino statuettes, a bowl and scepter have been found in the grave or what we think was a royal cemetery on the Mapungubwe main settlement hilltop. In more modern Shona ethnography, the black rhino is a symbol of political power and leadership so there is some speculation that the golden rhino found in the grave pointed to an important burial site. These royal burial sites are also smothered in some thing else … thousands of gold and glass trade beads. In contrast, down below in the flatland below the royal hill, commoners graves have no gold whatsoever. We also know from archaeological finds that exotic trade items like the beads as well as craft activities such as metallurgy and ivory carving were controlled by elites. The spatial distance between these elites on the hill and commoners grew around this period whereas before the large central royal enclosure was surrounded by commoners huts and buildings. At the base of the Mapungubwe hill, commoner homesteads were still being laid out according to the Central Cattle Pattern which we heard about last week. This is a clear example of class differentiation and there’s not too much debate about this historically. Furthermore, the geographical breadth of this empire is significant with the presence of Mapungubwe ceramics and pottery found in eastern Botswana, south towards the Soutpansburg mountain range and deep into Zimbabwe to the north west. As I mentioned last episode, from around 1000 years before the present a distinct identity begins emerging that we can track through ethnography and oral history to the present. Combine this with a continuing trade to the southeast African coastline and particularly Europeans from the 1500s, what Simon Hall calls the historical anonymity that veils much of the first millennium starts to slip. It is now that we can begin tracing the origin of the Sotho/Tswana and Nguni speakers. Cultural remains of people who are regarded as those of ancestral Nguni speakers first appear around 1100AD along the coastal regions of KwaZulu Natal, while Sotho and Tswana speakers are linked to Bushveld habitats north and south of the Soutpansburg from about 1300AD. Further afield, in Europe, moves were afoot that would have a cataclysmic effect on global history – it was the time of Portuguese and Spanish expansion. Soon thereafter to be followed by the Dutch, French and English. ON the third day of February 1488 herdsmen on the shore of Mossel Bay of South Africa underwent an extraordinary and unprecedented experience. Mossel means Mussel, the coast was a veritable treasure trove of that all-important seafood which had sustained ancient people’s for tens of thousands of years. It's fitting I think that the sea-fearers from Europe would come across the original people of South Africa at a bay named after hunter-gatherers’ basic food source – don’t you? The sea which was always unpredictable and dangerous, had produced huge objects that morning – bigger than anything the herders had seen before. And humans were emerging from these structures. These men rowed their boats to the shore and the herders withdrew their cattle to a safe distance away to observe what happened next. After a short while, the observers realized that the men were filling containers with water from the river that flowed into the sea at the bay, so the herders advanced to test who these people were. .