Mapungubwe

Secrets of the Sacred Hill

19 June 2000

We had arrived at the gate of the reserve just as the sun set. We used the key we had to collect in Messina – "wait for me at the Nando’s at two o’clock", several hours later we did meet up with the Tourism Department representative – and let ourselves into another world. Wally and I made our way down the narrow sandstone ravines, which eventually lead to an amphitheatre of a valley with a lone hill perched in the middle of the valley floor.

The moon was shining and we decided to drive up to the hill itself. As we climbed out of the now quiet vehicle the silence enveloped us. The hill loomed large in front of us with a deep, black moon shadow like a gaping hole reaching out to us. The rasping cough of a leopard’s roar made us jump, it was almost like a voice from the past reminding us of the frailty of man’s existence; long ago the leopard roared here when there was a bustling civilisation and today he still roars here a thousand years after.

I came across the Mapungubwe story for the first time by accident whilst reading Basil Davidson’s "Lost Cities of Africa" in the late eighties. I was fascinated and wanted to know more, but more was not known – or rather some was known, but it was purposefully hidden from public scrutiny! Here was a deeper story, not just a story from the ancient past, but a modern story of why this history should be hidden. It reflects deeply upon the psyche of Afrikaner political power and its ultimate expression, Apartheid.

Based upon a concept I originally wrote in 1996, Lance Gewer and his company Icon Entertainment undertook the task of producing the documentary. It was to be more than three years of hard work by Lance and his partner Cassim Shariff, before the documentary was shown on SABC 1 in March 2000. Several large organisations, including the SABC, The Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology (South Africa), the Ford Foundation, and SASOL, partly sponsored the project and whilst the powers that be are extremely interested in the further dissemination of this information, I feel the need to expose a wider audience to this history. I feel it is important because it is stories like these that will be part of the greater African Renaissance President Mbeki is working towards. To this end we are selling the videos and the proceeds will be used to develop a web site -as well as to use more traditional media - which will help to disseminate this history to as wide an audience as possible.

In 1932 a farmer-prospector called Van Graan decided to find the "sacred hill". White men, of the then still uncharted Limpopo valley, mostly of Boer stock, had long heard tales of a "sacred hill" where unknown forerunners of the Shona people (or possibly Venda) were said to have buried their treasure.

He knew this would be difficult, for the people of the country had always thought of the hill of Mapangubwe as taboo. For them it was "a place of fear": even after whites had found it - as Fouche would record - Africans "would not so much as point to it, and when it was discussed with them they kept their backs carefully turned to it. To climb it meant certain death. It was sacred to the Great Ones among their ancestors, who had buried secret treasures there."

Van Graan, his son and other three men, "persuaded" one of the local Black people to show them the hill. This person pointed out a hill - a low hill about forty meters high and almost four hundred meters long - with sheer cliffs all around. At a point the cliff-face gave way to create a "chimney" of which the sides had holes cut in, probably for rungs of a ladder. At the top of the "chimney" large boulders were poised, ready to be dropped on would-be invaders.

The flat summit had a low stone wall and was littered with broken pottery. One of the first objects to catch Van Graan’s attention was a piece of gold foil! Upon this discovery all present started to dig and soon collected an amazing two kilograms of gold; as foil, beads and other ornaments! The foil came from long perished wooden rhinos, elephants and such that were covered - meticulously tacked with tiny golden nails - with the foil.

At first the Van Graans decided to say nothing, but later decided to inform L. Fouche. Fouche was an academic at University of Pretoria and in fact Van Graan’s son had studied under him! Fouche then established that it was pure gold, the first wrought gold objects to be found in South Africa. As Fouche and others have noted, this was site of major importance. Not only in its own right as the remnants of vanished civilisation, but also as an unplundered archaeological site with intact graves, etc. This is no minor point since the obvious example of the "Stone Cultures" of ancient South Africa, namely the Zimbabwe ruins, was plundered by Rhodes’ "The Ancient Ruins Company Limited". They were given the concession by the British Government to "exploit all the ancient ruins south of Zambesi"! Thus a great deal of knowledge was lost as to the details of life in Great Zimbabwe.

The Union government acquired the farm of Greefswald on which Mapangubwe was located and entrusted it to the University of Pretoria. A publication of research appeared in 1937 by Fouche, but thereafter a "strange silence appears to have fallen on the whole question of Mapangubwe, site of Black achievement in a land that is ruled by whites" as Basil Davidson would put it in his book "Lost Cities of Africa".

That the site of Mapungubwe is strategically located at the confluence of the Limpopo and Sashi rivers did not help with the dissemination of this information / history and it was used for most of the Apartheid era as a military base from which neighbours Botswana and Zimbabwe were closely watched – and harassed on occasion. In one of the many ironies in this story did not only the Apartheid government have many of its secret "bosberade" (bush conferences) there, but ex-cabinet ministers from the Apartheid era, such as Pik Botha, have a special reverence for the place and its history.

The crux of the problem from Apartheid sensibilities was the blatant lie that Mapungubwe gave to a long cherished White myth that Bantu-speaking peoples arrived as immigrants on the highveld of the former Transvaal at about the same time as Europeans were settling at the Cape. The fact that Bantu-speaking peoples have a rich history reaching back about 2000 years, more than a millennium and a half before European adventurism, was too much to bear!

The scale of construction at Mapangubwe is appreciated from the following fact. The summit of the hill had an even surface due to no less than ten thousand tons of soil which had been transported from the surrounding countryside!

At the time of Mapangubwe (about tenth to twelfth centuries, before Great Zimbabwe [twelfth to fifteenth centuries]) the region had become politically complex with the distribution of communities largely dependent on the location of minerals - gold, copper and especially iron - and on the directions followed by new trade routes between Mozambique and the highveld. Phalaborwa and Great Zimbabwe were important centres for this trade; but it now seems that the settlements at Mapangubwe and Bambanyanalo in the Limpopo valley, which were once thought to be tributary to Great Zimbabwe, existed in their own right as trading centres before Great Zimbabwe came into its own. Persian pottery, Indian cotton, Chinese porcelain (Sung Dynasty 1127 - 1279) and Islamic glass demonstrate external trade links via the coast of Mozambique.

The east coast of Africa had a long history of trans-Indian ocean trade, Swahili and Zanzibar being the most enduring relicts of this time. There were Arabian traders trading from the Arabian Peninsula southwards, even as far south as the Umzimvubu river mouth there was a place of trade between peoples of Pondoland and sea-merchants from the Swahili coast. Other trading ports include the now long-gone Kilwa and Sofala.

This trade connected the interior civilisations with the rest of the civilised world. There is evidence of raw materials (e.g. iron ore) leaving the highveld as well as evidence for artefacts produced in as far off places such as China returning via trade to these highveld civilisations. This Indian ocean trade had enjoyed almost a thousand years of peaceful trade when the Portuguese arrived. The Portuguese initiated a half millennium of European adventurism in Africa and the East. The civilisations on the shores of the Indian Ocean were ill equipped to deal with European aggression and soon this complex network of international trade collapsed in the face of Portuguese pressure.

This is a story of civilisations clashing. Western civilisation prevailed and the others either succumbed or disappeared almost without trace. As in the adage "history is written by the victor", many people still have a biased understanding of Africa’s history.

In modern, post-apartheid South Africa it is important that all people understand our past, not only because we learn from history, but also because of the White myth stated above. Many Whites maintain a lob-sided version of this country’s history. This is directly relevant to the present day issue of white land-ownership and the re-distribution of land, not just in South Africa, but in all of southern Africa – including the present Zimbabwe.

Finally, only once all Black people embrace the history of Black southern Africa will we feel pride for Bantu achievement. Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe are but two highlights in a rich and varied, but largely unknown history of Bantu people in southern Africa.

The golden rhino, an exquisite gold plated statue, found at Mapungubwe. Note the tiny golden nails that hold it all together.

A golden ceremonial bowl and ... with the golden rhino.

The documentary captures the spirit of life in ancient Mapungubwe with reconstructions of aspects of the civilization.