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THE STONE-WALLED SETTLEMENTOF THE MPUMALANGA ESCARPMENT

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THE STONE-WALLED SETTLEMENOF THE MPUMALANGA ESCARPMEN

Peter Delius, Tim Maggs and Alex Schoeman

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Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg 2001

www.witspress.co.za

First published in South Africa in 2014

ISBN 978-1-86814-774-8 (print)

ISBN 978-1-86814-775-5 (digital)

Text © Peter Delius, Tim Maggs, Alex Schoeman 2014Images © Individual copyright holders 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher,except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefullyacknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in the captions.Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the imagesreproduced. Please contact Wits University Press at the address above in case of anyomissions or errors.

Project managed by Monica Seeber

Design and typesetting by Quba Design and Motion

Printed and bound by Interpak Books

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PREFACE ............. ............ ............. ............. ............ ............. ............ ............. ............. ............ ... xii

INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 1Con icting readings of the rocks .................................................................................................................................2

The ‘exotic’ narrative .....................................................................................................................................................2The indigenous interpretation ....................................................................................................................................... 4Twenty- rst century perspectives ..................................................................................................................................6

CHAPTER ONE NEW IDEAS ABOUT OLD DATA: HOW WE ARE LEARNING ABOUT BOKONI ................. ... 9Buildings in stone ............................................................................................................................................................10Engravings .......................................................................................................................................................................12Material culture ...............................................................................................................................................................18Ceramics ..........................................................................................................................................................................18Iron and steel ................................................................................................................................................................... 22Historical sources ............................................................................................................................................................28

CHAPTER TWO

THE ARRIVAL OF FARMING, THE GROWTH OF TRADE AND LINKS TO THE INDIAN OCEAN WORLD ...................................................................... 33Expanding regional trade networks and the start of Indian Ocean trade ...............................................................37From wood to stone, and the emergence of new political systems ........................................................................42Political dynamics ............................................................................................................................................................45

CHAPTER THREE

MAKING OF A WALLED WORLD: CONTEXT AND EMERGENCE OF BOKONI ............ ....... 49Settling the grasslands ...................................................................................................................................................61

Stone walls in the landscape ..........................................................................................................................................64The homesteads .............................................................................................................................................................. 68

CHAPTER FOUR

A NEW WAY TO MANAGE FIELDS, CATTLE AND PEOPLE .................................................. 83Terrace agriculture ..........................................................................................................................................................86Households, homesteads and elds .............................................................................................................................90Hoes and bored stones – a puzzle resolved ...............................................................................................................93The giant bored stone ....................................................................................................................................................96Islands of agricultural intensi cation .............................................................................................................................100Channelling people and cattle ......................................................................................................................................104Animal management ......................................................................................................................................................108

CHAPTER FIVE

NEIGHBOURS AND RAIDERS ............ ............. ............ ............. ............. ............ ............. ......... 115Fear, famine and capture in Bokoni ..............................................................................................................................120Capture and ‘cannibalism’ .............................................................................................................................................122Marangrang .....................................................................................................................................................................1231830s onwards .................................................................................................................................................................126

CHAPTER SIX

THE OLD IN THE NEW: LEGACIES IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES ...129

Fortresses .........................................................................................................................................................................130Mission stations ...............................................................................................................................................................132‘The Land Belongs to Us’: Dinkwanyanwe, Mafolofolo and Boomplaats ................................................................. 136

CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................... 143

A select bibliography ......................................................................................................................................................152

Additional readings for the curious............................................................................................................................... 152 Books, articles and theses ..............................................................................................................................................152 Index .................................................................................................................................................................................156

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Photograph: Graeme Williams

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Photographs: Graeme Williams

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Photographs: Riaan de Villiers

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he had taken from the air of sites in Bokoni.He also gave me some inkling of the extent andtenacity of the ‘exotic’ interpretation of these sites,

which is challenged in the body of this book. I wasat once simultaneously intrigued by the questionof what history had played out amid these wallsand irritated by the racist interpretations of themthat gained a good deal of popular traction, andas a result I decided to undertake further researchon Bokoni.

This objective led me into further conversationwith Amanda and increasing cooperation withanother archaeologist trained at the Universityof the Witwatersrand, Alex Schoeman. Myenthusiasm for the project was given a furtherboost when I met Tim Maggs at a history andarchaeology conference at Wits in 2006. Tim had

for many years been a lone voice stressing theimportance of these sites and publishing importantarticles about them. The three-way conversationand cooperation that developed between Tim, Alexand me led to a series of interdisciplinary researchprojects on Bokoni which, over time, drew inmany other researchers from a range of countries

and disciplines and which provided much of thematerial on which this book is based. Another person fundamental to the genesis of this

book was Riaan de Villiers. He did a magnicent job of editing and designing the books that owedfrom the Mpumalanga project. He also became apassionate proponent of producing a book which

would give Bokoni the recognition it deservedfor a non-specialist audience and bring it to theattention of the people who were responsible forsafeguarding our heritage. Many of the beautifulpictures that you will encounter in this bookwere taken by Riaan, and he commissioned andorganised most of the rest. Especially fortunatefor this book was that his enthusiasm infected

Graeme Williams, a vastly experienced andtalented photographer. Despite working for a song,Graeme clambered over boulders, waded through

long grass and thorn bushes, and took to the airin precarious planes to secure the stunning imageswith which this book is blessed.

Tim Maggs

From a childhood association with and interest

in the escarpment country of what was then theEastern Transvaal, I later became fascinated withthe archaeological potential of this beautifulregion. During my student years in the 1960s I metfellow student Ludy von Bezing, the discoverer ofthe now famous Lydenburg heads, and worked onpublishing these remarkable nds with Ray Inskeep.

Even more intriguing were the still mysterious andunder-researched terraced settlements scatteredalong the escarpment. My doctoral research, basedon an aerial survey of pre-colonial stone-walledsettlements in the Free State, failed to reveal(despite my efforts at air photo interpretation)anything resembling cultivated eld systems in

that province. Hoping to provide an example of anearly African cultivated landscape, I tried to surveya patch of terracing on a site near Lydenburg, butmy efforts came to nought. The next two decadeskept me busy as the rst professional archaeologistappointed to work in KwaZulu-Natal.

Many years later, in the early 1990s, while

researching rock engravings made by pre-colonial African farming communities, I had the opportunityto visit Boomplaats near Lydenburg and was struckby how closely the images engraved on bouldersreected the pattern of the ruined stone-walledhomesteads linked by cattle roads. By this time,archaeologists had done a fair amount of work onthe homesteads but they had virtually neglected

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the unique system of agricultural terracing. Allred up, I spent a week at the TrigonometricalSurvey (now the Chief Directorate: National Geo-

Spatial Information) mapping the distribution ofthese settlements from air photographs. I also readup on the exciting new work coming from similarsystems of specialised agriculture further north in

Africa. This in turn led to a paper: ‘From Maratengto Marakwet: Islands of agricultural intensicationin Eastern and Southern Africa’, which I read at

the 1995 congress of the Pan-African Associationfor Archaeology and Related Studies in Harare.

Although this was only published in summaryform it did mark the rst time that the terracedsettlements were placed in a wider African contextwhich recognised pockets of specialised and moreintensive agricultural development scattered in

several regions of the continent. It also arousedthe interest of several colleagues, including RobertSoper, then completing his major work on theNyanga terraced settlements of eastern Zimbabwe,and Mats Widgren of Stockholm Universitywith his interest in pre-industrial agriculturalsystems worldwide. Newly retired to the Cape,

I didn’t foresee being part of a major project inMpumalanga, but that was to change with thecoming of the Five Hundred Year Initiative.

Alex Schoeman

Many of my ancestors were farmers in Mpumalanga

province. This fact shaped my personal history, andprobably still inuences my understanding of theregion’s past. For example, my mental navigationof parts of the province is still entangled withstories told by my grandfather about the regionand its history, as well as memories of childhoodvisits to ‘places where people lived in the old days’.Some of these people were my ancestors. Others, I

have more recently discovered, were refugees fromBokoni.

The archaeology of people from and in Bokoni

forms a substantial part of my current researchagenda, but my initial encounter with the Bokonipast was accidental. While doing research formy Master’s dissertation on Ndzundza Ndebelearchaeology, I tried to understand the world theNdzundza formed part of. This included identifyingtheir neighbours. I soon realised that there was a

disjuncture between the oral traditions about theNdzundza’s neighbours to the east – the Koni –and interpretations of the archaeology of this area,with archaeologists previously identifying the sitesas Pedi. This had important implications for myMaster’s research, since people in the Ndzundza-and Koni-controlled regions made the same

ceramics – which implied strong linkages betweenthe two groups.

After I completed my Master’s my researchshifted to other regions, but my research gazereturned to Bokoni through interaction with PeterDelius. The scientic dating programme of the FiveHundred Year Initiative soon followed. The dating

programme is still to yield concrete results, butcollaboration with Peter and, more recently, TimMaggs, has yielded important new understandings,some of which are reected in this book.

Collaboration with Mats Widgren, funded by theSwedish-South Africa Research Links programme,allowed for the establishment of a systematic

archaeological excavation and research programmein 2010. This programme is ongoing and has thusfar produced two Master’s dissertations and fourHonours projects. The authors of dissertationsand projects – Tobias Coetzee, Cieron Fearch,Tanya Hattingh, Tiffany Henshall, Jenny Sjöströmand Lauren Solomon – have helped to deepenour insights into the archaeology of Bokoni.

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Some of these students have benetted from ourparticipation in the African Farming Network, andthe scholarship of future Wits archaeology students

will continue to benet from collaboration withour partners in the African Farming Network.

The Five Hundred Year Initiative

Early in the new millennium and in a newlydemocratic South Africa, a number of researchers,

particularly historians and archaeologistsconcerned with the early colonial and pre-colonialcenturies, began to feel the need for renewedand more multidisciplinary emphasis on thiscrucial period in southern Africa’s past. An initialmeeting in 2006 established the Five Hundred

Year Initiative (FYI) with the following mission

statement:

The FYI will foster working relationshipsacross related disciplines in order to re-integrate and generate a more comprehensiveunderstanding of the last 500 years.

During the May 2007 conference we gave twopapers which were published in the volume FiveHundred Years Rediscovered, while the Mpumalangaescarpment was recognised as one of the four mainregions of focus for the FYI.

Funds from the FYI also enabled us to start aseries of eldwork projects, to translate recordsfrom early German missionaries in the regionand to pay for low-level air photographs, some ofwhich appear in this book.

In 2008, while on sabbatical, Peter Deliusmade contact with UK-based researchers workingon areas of specialised agriculture in eastern

Africa. This led to the 2009 conference at Wits,‘History and Archaeology in Conversation – South

Africa meets East Africa’, which was precededby an excursion to key stone-walled sites inMpumalanga. This international meeting provided

valuable suggestions and criticisms of our researchat that stage.

In 2011 we enjoyed the reciprocal visit to East Africa hosted by the British Institute in Eastern Africa. We were impressed by the details of the long-abandoned eld system of Engaruka in Tanzania,excavated by John Sutton and Daryl Stump, as well

as our introduction by Henrietta Moore and MattDavies to the still vibrant Marakwet community inKenya with their ancient and highly effective canalirrigation. Collaboration with the East Africanistsis ongoing, and Bokoni forms part of the AfricanFarming Network that links East, West and South

African researchers, which was ‘… established

to share knowledge, ideas and methods acrossdisciplines and regions with the aim of developingnovel insights into the history and development of

African farming systems’.4

Further international cooperation developedout of the ongoing interest of Mats Widgren inthe terraced settlements. He and Alex Schoeman

raised a joint research grant from the Swedish-South Africa Research Links programme whichenabled us to carry out more intensive workfrom 2010. This included more nely grainedeld surveys and analysis of soils and botanicalresidues. Mats and his colleagues from StockholmUniversity, with their wide experience of ancientagricultural systems, made valuable contributionsto the project including deciphering the terraceconstruction technique and the identication ofthe footpath network at Rietvlei.

We have incurred far too many debts of gratitudein researching and writing this book to list them all.But to name a few not mentioned thus far: WilliamBeinart and Shula Marks have provided consistent

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intellectual support; Eric and Heidi Johnson’scompanionship, hospitality and enthusiasm havehelped to sustain us over many years, and we also

thank many of the staff at Verlorenkloof including Joseph Motupi, Zacharia Letswalo, ShadrackMokwena, Jakkals Ntswane and Karl Letswalo.

In the Bokoni region of Mpumalanga Provincewe thank Mr Ahlers of Welgedacht, Mr Middletonof Cranes Nest, Mr and Mrs Coetzee for theirhospitality at Lydenburg, Mr Wevell of Nelspruit,

Mr Motaung from the Mpumalanga Departmentof Rural Development, and the many landownerswho have given us permission to visit sites ontheir land. In Swaziland, Bob Forrester and PeterGeorge took us to stone-walled sites. Museumstaff and collections have enriched this research,including JP Cilliers of Lydenburg, Johnny van

Schalkwyk of the Ditsong: National CulturalHistory Museum, Pretoria, and Janie Grobler of theBarberton Museum. For their contribution to theeldwork we thank our colleagues Mats Widgren,

Jan Risberg, Lars-Ove Westerberg, Abigail Moffett,Nicholas Zachariou and, for their valued advice,

Jan Boeyens and Francois Coetzee. For their help

with technical problems and illustrations thanksare due to Nick Wiltshire, Charles Maggs, TobyMaggs and Judy Sealy. Harriet Perlman read variousdrafts and provided valuable edits and comments;Linell Chewins assisted with picture research and

has been generous with her own research material;the National Research Fund provided the materialfoundations for much of the work.

This research could not have been achievedwithout the photographs of Riaan de Villiers andGraeme Williams and most of the settlements wouldnot have been found and mapped without theremote sensing images from the Chief DirectorateSurveys and Mapping of the Department of RuralDevelopment and Land Reform as well as Google

Earth. And last, but by no means least, funds provided

by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fundhave made the publication of this book possibleand have funded a complementary documentaryby the same name made by Quizzical Pictureswhich will help to take this material to an even

wider audience.

Endnotes

1. Beinart W, 2010, FYI Workshop: Some comparativecomments, African Studies, 69:2, 219-227.

2. Wright J, 2010. Putting Bokoni on the historian’sMap, African Studies, 69:2, 229-233.

3. Delius P (ed.), 2007. Mpumalanga, History andHeritage. Scottsville: UKZN Press; and Delius P andM Hay, 2009. Mpumalanga: An Illustrated History.

Johannesburg: Highveld Press.4. http://farminginafrica.wordpress.com/about/

Photograph: Riaan de Villiers

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 1

INTRODUCTION

Photograph: Graeme Williams

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CONFLICTING READINGS OF THE R OCKS

If you drive through Mpumalanga – perhaps on your way to Nelspruit or the Kruger

National Park – and look carefully out at the land, you could see something remarkable.Once you leave the vast expanses of the highveld you descend into the rolling hills andopen valleys of the escarpment. The changing seasonal hues of the mountain slopes aredotted with clusters of evergreen trees and darkly forested kloofs. If you keep a close eyeon the landscape ashing by you will see fragments – large and small – of building instone, near the sides of the road and further away on the hills above you and the valleysbelow. Once your curiosity is pricked you may nd that wherever you look you will see

sections of stone walling breaking the grass cover, and kilometre after kilometre of stoneridging traversing the hillsides. If you were to y over the area in a small plane you wouldbe amazed by the endless stone circles, set in bewildering mazes and linked by long stonepassages, that cover the landscape below. In some places the coverage is quite sparse andintermittent but in others it is dense, continuous and intricate. If you study the viewsprovided by Google Earth and focus on the ghostly circles that cover the landscape youmay get a sense of the extent of the heartland of this world, which stretched from Ohrigstad

to Carolina and connected over 10 000 square kilometres of the Mpumalanga escarpmentinto a complex web of stone-walled structures. 1

Although travellers may have wondered what these structures represent, few will haveknown – which is remarkable because they were looking at elements of one of the mostextraordinary archaeological and historical phenomena in southern Africa. But it is alsounderstandable, because these structures have remained the exclusive preserve of a smallband of scholars and a somewhat wider, but still restricted, coterie of amateur interpreters.

Not one of the structures enjoys ofcial recognition as a heritage site. One of South Africa’smost extensive and remarkable legacies of the past is little known by the public and largelyignored by heritage authorities.

The ‘exotic’ narrative

In recent decades there has been a buzz of speculation about the nature and history ofthese sites. It has resulted in a spate of books (often self-published), websites, and even abistro and bookshop in Waterval Boven where curious tourists and seasoned acolytes of theesoteric mingle. This hubbub has sometimes reached a volume which has almost drownedout other explanatory voices.

The best known and most substantial of the exotic explanations has been offered byCyril Hromník. 2 He has long maintained that most of the signicant innovations and socialsystems in Africa are the result of Indian inuences – a perspective which has led himto argue that the Mpumalanga stone-walled sites are Hindu temples and that the Indian

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I N T R O D U C T I O N 3

settlers who worshipped in them lived in nearby shelters or caves. They interacted with

local San people and gave rise to the Quena (KhoeKhoe), who continued to live in thearea until they were displaced by African farming communities in the last millennium. Hisresponse to excavations of the stonewalled sites – which have yielded substantial amountsof clearly African material culture such as ceramics and the remains of dakha (mud andclay) houses – is that they were the work of the BaPedi, a Quena-black mixture, and adegraded version of the earlier noble BaPedi/pirir. He further claims that the rst Bantuspeakers came to Mpumalanga as slaves of the Indian or Quena gold traders and that

the BaPedi were the descendants of mixing between the Indian traders and these slaves,who acquired their technological knowledge of metalworking from their Indian lineagebut were not as culturally advanced in it their Indian ancestors. Gold and metalworkingform another important part of Hromník’s argument. According to him, Indians introducedmetalworking to southern Africa some time before AD 1200 or 1300.

The exotic explanations of the Mpumalanga stone-walled sites also stress that they datefrom ancient and biblical times, and most subsequent exotic accounts take their lead from

Hromnik’s work though they often provide their own twist to the tale. A good exampleof this tendency is the recently self-published book Adam’s Calendar by Johan Heine andMichael Tellinger. This colourful volume is distinguished by the claim that a cluster ofstones near Kaapsehoop is an ancient ‘calendar’ and the ‘oldest man-made structure onearth’. It was dated for them by an amateur astronomer as ‘around 75 000 years old’, anding that they reinforce with the supportive opinions of three mystics who visited thesite. They further link ‘Adam’s Calendar’ with Great Zimbabwe because it is built along thesame longitudinal line and they proffer the thought that the ‘site is an active portal for off-worldly beings to come and go’. 3

A slightly different path is followed by Richard Wade, who argues that the ‘ruin elds’were built by a culture that predated Mapungubwe (thus pre AD 1200) and shared areverence for the vast resources of the sky with both Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe.He argues that the sites are ancient observatories. 4

These interpretations have proliferated and diversied but most of them are based onspeculation rather than credible evidence and share the key assumption that African societywas incapable of innovation without decisive external inuences. This idea often goes handin hand with the belief that Africans did not build with stone and lived semi-nomadic livespractising slash and burn farming – which was antithetical to the enduring structures andsettlements which blanketed the Mpumalanga escarpment. It is a belief that forms a recentaddition to a much older and wider literature which has invoked outsiders, and evenaliens, to explain the existence of dramatic sites in Africa, including Great Zimbabwe andthe pyramids.

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state, collected from the 1860s onwards, and the voluminous archival records generated byneighbouring Trekker society from the 1840s, had acted as magnets to researchers.

The main themes historians had pursued included the emergence of Pedi dominance in

the eighteenth century, the early struggles around mission Christianity, and its central rolein resistance to Boer and British attempts to control the Transvaal between 1840 and1880.

As is so often the case in historical narratives, the groups who ultimately were vanquishedexcited little interest. But fortunately – as we shall see – this neglect did not erase all tracesof another society which had once dominated the escarpment.

Twenty-rst century perspectives

Thus far this brief introduction has outlined the approaches that prevailed at the end ofthe twentieth century. In the last decade a new research thrust has gathered momentum.It provides the basis for this publication and for our resolution to the debates which haveswirled around the sites. It builds on, rather than breaks with, some of the earlier accountsbut is distinguished by its increasingly interdisciplinary nature. At long last historians andarchaeologists – in this area at least – have started systematically to share sources and ideas,

and have found their insights immeasurably enriched as a result. This collaboration hasalso provided an incentive to a much wider interaction and cooperation with geologists,soil scientists, botanists and geographers in Africa and in Europe.

What follows is intended to provide the reader with a taste of the fruits that we haveharvested thus far. We shall give the best answer we can, based on evidence and notconjecture, as to who lived in these remarkable sites, what the nature of the world was thatthey created, how their history unfolded, and why, by the 1830s, the walls stood empty.

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