The Earliest Settlements of Bukalanga South of the Zambezi and the Establishment of the Zimbabgwe Civilization

One of the most interesting conclusions to emerge from the identification of the Leopard’s Kopje tradition and the discovery of its relationship to the subsequent states of Togwa, the Tjangamire Lozwi, the Ndebele in Rhodesia, is that the language spoken by the peasantry in the south-west of the country, namely Kalanga, must also date from the tenth century - Professor Gerald Fortune 1973. “Who is Mwari?” In Roberts, R. S. and Warhurst, P.R. Rhodesian History. The Journal of the Central Africa Historical Association

It has been determined by means of archaeology that the peoples of Bukalanga were already settled Africa South of the Zambezi by the year 900 A.D., with a margin of error of +/-110 years. The actual date of this settlement may indeed have been earlier. According to a sixth century document by Cosmas Indicopleustes of Alexandria, there was gold trade that was taking place with south-east Africa at that time, and it has been determined that the same people of the 900 AD settlements had been involved in gold mining and trade for a very long time. Cosmas’ statement is attested to by El Mas’udi and Ibn Al Wardy who in the tenth century too wrote of the gold trade which was taking place from the trading post of Sofala, which centuries later we still find located within the borders of the Monomotapa Kingdom (McNaughton 1987, Online).

Whilst the archeologically established date that we know anything of with certainty is 900 A.D., we will argue that this date was earlier than 500 A.D., perhaps actually earlier than 100 AD. We certainly will never know when the Kalanga first crossed the Zambezi and settled in the Zimbabgwean Plateau. The reason we are pushing back this date is that, first, the Carbon 14 date of 900 A.D. has a margin of error of +/-110 years. It is very unlikely that the date of settlement could have been later than 900 A.D., for that would be too late for the gold trade that is mentioned by Cosmas Indicopleustes, El Mas’udi and Ibn al Wardy which they say was taking place by 500 A.D. There has to have been a people long settled in the land that the Abyssinian and Phoenician gold traders mentioned by Cosmas were trading with. These early settlers, who archaeologists have termed the Leopard’s Kopje Culture people, were the Kalanga, or Bukalanga as shall be seen later.

It is not likely that the gold miners and traders mentioned by Cosmas could have been the Khoisan communities who are known to have been the earliest inhabitants of Southern Africa to cross the Zambezi. Had it been them, it would be perfectly logical to expect them to have been found working in gold by the Europeans in the sixteenth century who first started making written records of life in Southern Africa in 1506. It also could not have been the Lekgoya, who some archaeologists think preceded the Kalanga in crossing the Zambezi, for like in the case of the Khoisan, they are not known to have been involved in gold mining and trade. No mediaeval sites of gold workings were found in the areas where they were settled (that is, the modern-day Gauteng), despite there being an abundance of gold in that area, as opposed to Bukalanga occupied areas were thousands of such gold workings have been found.

The second reason we are pushing back the date of Bukalanga settlements back to 100 A.D. or earlier has to do with the fact that we know that south-east Africa had already been touched by peoples from the north by 100 AD. For example, there is record of the sea-faring Phoenicians circumnavigating Africa in about 600 BC. Arab traders are also known to have been visiting east Africa before the beginning of the Christian era, and around 60 AD, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea was compiled in Greek as a guide to East African, Arab and Indian sailors. Again, there should there have been a people with which these traders were trading, and Bukalanga are the ones known to have been involved in such trade. Gayre of Gayre suggests that much of the gold that found its way into northern Africa in Phoenician ships originated in Zimbabgwe (Gayre 1972, 24-29).

With the above said, let us now turn to the known settlements of Bukalanga as determined by archaeology and ethnography. In the following we will look at the most well-known, that is, the Leopard’s Kopje Culture, Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabgwe and Khami. We limit ourselves to these because archaeologists have established that the cultures of Leopard’s Kopje, Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabgwe, and Khami are closely related to those of Bambadyanalo, Zhilo, Gokomere, Mabveni, Mambo, Luswingo, Dzata, Domboshaba and many others which were some of the earliest to be established.

All these cultures have been conclusively proven by archaeology that they are the work of the same people group that settled and spread across the Zimbabgwean Tableland by 900 AD. Let us now turn our attention to the cultures, starting with Leopard’s Kopje.

1. The Leopard’s Kopje Culture

Our number one source of information for this culture is Professor Thomas Huffman of the University of the Witwatersrand in his book, The Leopard’s Kopje Tradition. Further sources of information are the works of archaeologists Roger Summers and Keith R. Robinson. According to Huffman, Leopard’s Kopje is an archaeological culture in the Iron Age sequence of Southern Africa, which first description appeared in a monograph on the Khami Ruins by Professor Keith Robinson in 1959. The culture included all Iron Age occupation prior to the Zimbabgwe Ruins Period which is thought to have begun about 1000 A.D.

The people of the Leopard’s Kopje Culture were the first in Southern Africa to mine and smelt gold, copper and iron, to make pottery and to practise mixed farming. This culture was concentrated in the region that is today roughly identified as Matebeleland, Midlands, and Maswingo Provinces of Zimbabgwe (the south and southwest of the country); Venda country (both north and south of the Limpopo); and the North-east and North-Central Districts of Botswana as shown in the map on the cover page. It would seem that the north-east of the Zimbabgwean plateau was too humid for agriculture, and thus settlement, for a people who relied heavily on cattle-raising and crop agriculture for their livelihoods (Huffman 1974, 2; Summers 1971, 177, 180).

There is general agreement among leading archaeologists that the language of the Leopard’s Kopje Culture was TjiKalanga or iKalanga. Professor Huffman notes that the majority of Africans living today in the Leopard’s Kopje area speak either isiNdebele, Kalanga or Venda, isiNdebele being a dialect of the Zulu cluster of the Nguni Group, whilst Kalanga, so-called western Shona, includes TjiKalanga, Lilima, Thwamamba, Nambya, Lozwi/Rozwi and Nyayi. Huffman further notes that at least one dialect of Kalanga is spoken in both the Northern and Southern Areas of Leopard’s Kopje. Venda, one of the languages, presents classificatory problems since it has affinities with the Kalanga and the Sotho Groups. As a result, it is normally put into a group of its own. The language is spoken in the southern areas of the Leopard’s Kopje culture.

There are also people who speak Tswana in the southwest of the Leopard's Kopie area, that is, the southwestern part of the district of Bulilima-Mangwe. The Ndebele are known to be recent arrivals in the region, arriving around 1830, taking the land from the Kalanga. In the Southern Area of the Culture, particularly around Maphungubgwe, the Sotho there displaced the Kalanga/Venda of that area about three hundred years ago. The earliest people remembered in oral traditions as occupying the area are the Kalanga group peoples the Leya and Thwamamba (or Xwamamba/Hwamamba).

In conclusion as to the people group associated with the Leopard’s Kopje Culture, Professor Huffman writes that only the Kalanga today have a great time depth in both the Northern and Southern Areas of Leopard’s Kopje as to be the only people who would have been settled in the land before 900 AD. The correlation of the distribution of Leopard’s Kopje and the 19th century Kalanga, the continuity from Bambadyanalo to the 19th Kalanga ceramics and the time depth of Kalanga implied in oral traditions, he states, suggest that the Leopard’s Kopje people were ancestral Kalanga. Of course the hypothesis does not mean that all ancestral Kalanga necessarily spoke TjiKalanga, but it does mean that some form of Kalanga was spoken by the majority of the Leopard’s Kopje communities (Huffman 1974, 123). This is indeed as it should be, for the Kalanga Group is comprised of at least sixteen different tribes speaking a varied assortment of related languages from Tjikalanga, TjiNambya, Tshivenda, KiLobedu, and so on.

Further testimony to the above is provided by Professor Gerald Fortune who, in studying the Mwali Religion, of which TjiKalanga is a liturgical language, noted that the Kalanga language must date back to at least 900 A.D. Professor Fortune observed that “one of the most interesting conclusions to emerge from the identification of the Leopard’s Kopje tradition and the discovery of its relationship to the subsequent states of Togwa, the Tjangamire Lozwi, the Ndebele in Rhodesia, is that the language spoken by the peasantry in the south-west of the country, namely Kalanga, must also date from the tenth century” (1973: 1-2).

There is general consensus in historical circles that Kalanga is the oldest Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa, and as we shall see later, the Kalanga Group is made up of many different but interelated languages. Commenting on the time depth of Leopard’s Kopje settlements south of the Zambezi, particularly in the so-called Matebeleland, archaeologist Keith R. Robinson wrote:

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With regard to the Leopard’s Kopje Culture I think it may cover a long period, because it was associated with gold mining [which had been taking place since the earliest centuries of the Christian era], and the late occupation, as pointed out by Summers, began about A.D.900. I believe that this culture was practiced by the bulk of the people in Matebeleland and south of this area during the greatest expansion of the Empire of Monomotapa [a Kalanga polity as we shall see later, contrary to the common teaching that this was a Shona polity] (Robinson 1958, 108-121).

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Commenting on the pottery found in ruins around Matebeleland, Robinson observed in a later work in 1959: “In Matebeleland pottery of Leopard’s Kopje type has been recovered from ancient workings. This is hardly surprising as the Leopard’s Kopje Culture seems to have monopolized much of Matebeleland over a long period, and may have supplied the labor required by a succession of rulers“ (Robinson 1959, 13).

What comes out clearly from the Leopard’s Kopje Tradition is that indeed, the earliest Bantu inhabitants of the so-called Matebeleland, as well as North-east and North-Central Districts of Botswana and Venda country of South Africa from the earliest centuries of the Christian era, were ancestral Kalanga, whose descendants are still occupying the same region today. This obviously has serious ramifications for the Shona claims that they were once settled across Matebeleland, and that the Ndebele took the land from them. If the Kalanga have been settled for so long in Matebeleland, at what point in history has the region been ‘Shona land’ as generally believed and taught in schools? We shall come to these questions later, for now let us proceed and take a look at the Kingdom of Maphungubgwe.

2. The Kingdom of Maphungubgwe

Maphungubgwe was the first major phase of city-state development of the Kalanga peoples, and indeed of all African peoples south of the Sahara. Located on the banks of the Limpopo on the confluence of that river and the Shashe, the Kingdom of Maphungubgwe controlled a vast network of trade that extended some 30,000 km2 either side of the Shashe and Limpopo Rivers and traded with people as far away as East Africa, Egypt, Persia, Arabia, East Asia, India and China. The Kingdom traded in gold, copper, iron, ostrich eggs and eggshell beads, bone, textiles, elephant ivory, hippo ivory, leopard skins, furs and exotic hides like crocodile. The famous golden rhino, which now forms part of the Order of Maphungubgwe, South Africa’s highest honor, was found at this site.

In a 1937 report prepared for the Archaeological Committee of the University of Pretoria, Professor G. P. Lestrade, who conducted extensive ethnological investigations between 1933 and 1934 among groups that surrounded the Maphungubgwe area, concluded that the people connected with that city-state were the following:

1. The Bakalanga;

2. The Venda;

3. The BaLeya;

4. The Lemba;

5. The Thwamamba (Lestrade 1937, 119-124, in Fouche 1937).

The conclusion of the Archaeological Committee, sitting under the chairmanship by Professor Leo Fouche, was that the people groups listed above were indeed responsible for the Kingdom of Maphungubgwe Culture, which was contemporaneous with or immediately succeeded the Leopard’s Kopje Culture. A detailed description of Maphungubgwe is given in a South African History and Heritage article titled Mapungubwe: SA’s Lost City of Gold. The article states the following:

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One thousand years ago, Maphungubgwe in Limpopo was the centre of the largest kingdom in the subcontinent, where a highly sophisticated people traded gold and ivory with China, India and Egypt. The Iron Age site, discovered in 1932 but hidden from the public attention until only recently, has been declared a World Heritage site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Maphungubgwe is an area of open savannah at the confluence of the Limpopo and Shashe Rivers and abutting the northern border of South Africa and the borders of Zimbabwe and Botswana. It thrived as a sophisticated trading center from around 1200 to 1300. In its statement on the listing, UNESCO describes Maphungubgwe as the center of the largest kingdom in the sub-continent before it was abandoned in the 14th century.

Maphungubgwe was home to an advanced culture of people for the time - the ancestors of the Kalanga people of Zimbabgwe . They traded with China and India, had a flourishing agricultural industry, and grew to a population of around 5,000. Maphungubgwe is probably the earliest known site in southern Africa where evidence of a class-based society existed.

The site was discovered in 1932 and has been excavated by the University of Pretoria ever since. The findings were kept quiet at the time since they provided contrary evidence to the racist ideology of black inferiority underpinning apartheid. Nevertheless, the university now has a rich collection of artifacts made of gold and other materials, as well as human remains, discovered there. According to the University of Pretoria’s Maphungubgwe website, “Subsequent excavations revealed a court sheltered in a natural amphitheater at the bottom of the hill, and an elite graveyard at the top – with a spectacular view of the region.

“Twenty-three graves have been excavated from this hilltop site“, the website continues. “The bodies in three of these graves were buried in the upright seated position associated with royalty, with a variety of gold and copper items, exotic glass beads, and other prestigious objects. These findings provide evidence not only of the early smithing of gold in southern Africa, but of the extensive wealth and social differentiation of the people of Maphungubgwe.”

The most spectacular of the gold discoveries is a little gold rhinoceros, made of gold foil and tacked with minute pins around the wooden core. The rhino, featured in one of South Africa’s new national orders – the Order of Maphungubgwe – has come to symbolize the high culture of Maphungubgwe. Other artifacts made in similar fashion include the Golden Scepter and the Golden Bowl, found in the same grave on Maphungubgwe Hill.

What is so fascinating about Maphungubgwe is that it is testi¬mony to the existence of an African civilization that flourished before colonization. According to Professor Thomas Huffman of the archaeology department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Maphungubgwe represents “the most complex society in southern Africa and is the root of the origins of [the] Zimbabgwean culture”.

Between 1200 and 1300 AD, the Maphungubgwe region was the centre of trade in Southern Africa. Wealth came to the region from ivory and later from gold deposits that were found in Zimbabgwe. The area was also agriculturally rich because of large-scale flooding in the area. The wealth in the area led to differences between the rich and poor.

In the village neighboring Maphungubgwe, called K2, an ancient refuse site has provided archaeologists with plenty of information about the lifestyles of the people of Maphungubgwe. According to the University of Pretoria website: “People were prosperous, and kept domesticated cattle, sheep, goats and dogs. The charred remains of storage huts have also been found, showing that millet, sorghum and cotton were cultivated. “Findings in the area are typical of the Iron Age. Smiths created the objects of iron, copper and gold for practical and decorative purposes – both for local use and for trade. Pottery, wood, ivory, bone, ostrich eggshells, and the shells of snails and freshwater mussels, indicated that many other materials were used and traded with cultures as far away as East Africa, Persia, Egypt, India and China.”

Maphungubgwe’s fortune only lasted until about 1300, after which time climate changes, resulting in the area becoming colder and drier, led to migrations further north to Great Zimbabgwe (the preceeding information was obtained from http://www.southafrica.info and used with permission).

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It is indeed of great interest to note that of the eight UNESCO world heritage sites in Southern Africa, that is, Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabgwe, Khami, Robben Island, the Vredefort Dome, the Cradle of Humankind, the uKhahlamba Drakensburg Park, the Great St Lucia Wetlands Park and the Cape Floral Region - only four are man-made. Three of those four world heritage sites are the historic work of Bukalanga!

The next major phase of Bukalanga growth and development after Maphungubgwe was Great Zimbabgwe, later followed by Khami. To those sites we now turn our attention.

3. Great Zimbabgwe and Khami

The earliest written reference that we have concerning Great Zimbabgwe is from a letter written on 20th November 1506 by the Portuguese officer Diogo de Alcacova writing to the King in Portugal. The sea-faring Portuguese were the first Europeans to touch Southern Africa and to make written records about the region. In that letter, describing conditions in the interior of Southern Africa, de Alcacova wrote:

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The kingdom, Sir, in which there is the gold that comes to Sofala is called Ucalanga [Bukalanga], and the kingdom is very large, in which there are many large towns, besides many other villages, and Sofala itself is in this kingdom if not the whole land along the sea … And, Sir, a man might go from Sofala to a city which is called Zumubany [Zimbabgwe] which is large, in which the king always resides, in ten or twelve days, if you travel as in Portugal; … and in the whole kingdom of Ucalanga gold in extracted; and in this way: they dig out the earth and make a kind of tunnel, through which they go under the ground a long stone’s throw, and keep on taking out from the veins with the ground mixed with the gold, and, when collected, they put it in a pot, and cook it much in fire; and after cooking they take it out, and put it to cool, and when cold, the earth remains, and the gold all fine gold … (in Duffy 1964, 149)

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It is generally agreed among archaeologists that Great Zimbabgwe was a place of a large and thriving gold-trade business just like Maphungubgwe. Judging from the fact that de Alcacova reports this place as being a place of gold production and trade, where the King lives, to which ten or twelve days were required to get to from Sofala, there can be no doubt that the Portuguese were describing Great Zimbabgwe.

The German explorer, Herr Karl Mauch, was the first European to see the ruins and bring them to the attention of the world. He reached Great Zimbabgwe on 5th September 1871, and would be the first European to give a detailed eyewitness description of the edifice. It is possible that another European, who had lived in the area, Adam Renders, might possibly have seen the Ruins before Karl Mauch. Nonetheless, it was Mauch who first brought the attention of the world to the ruins.

From that time a flurry of theories was sparked about the possible origins of the ruins, with some thinking they might have been the palace of the biblical Queen of Sheba, to others saying they were a work of Arabs and so on. Archaeologist Roger Summers observed concerning the theories that arose out of the discovery of the Ruins of Great Zimbabgwe that:

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In 1872 the civilized world was surprised to learn that there were ruins of stone buildings in the interior of Southern Africa and from then on the Zimbabwe Ruins became an objective for romantic travelers enthralled by Mauch’s wild assertion that the Queen of Sheba was somehow connected to them. To be strictly accurate, Mauch did not make an explicit claim, but he implied it and others took it up as a fact (Summers 1971, xvi).

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In short, the claims that followed were to the effect that at some unknown point in history, a people more civilized than the Bantu had settled in the Zimbabgwean tableland and built the zimbabgwes, and for some reason or the other the civilization collapsed, and the people were overrun by the Bantu. Well, over the years archaeology has produced a lot of evidence to disprove these theories, and the common position agreed on now is that indeed, the Zimbabgwe Ruins are the work of African peoples. And those African people are none other than the Kalanga – the Leopard’s Kopje Culture people and the builders of Maphungubgwe. Contrary to what is generally taught in Zimbabgwean schools, a number of leading archaeologists who worked on the subject of the Zimbabgwe Ruins - Dr David Randall-MacIver, Dr Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Professor Keith R. Robinson, Professor Thomas Huffman, Roger Summers and Peter Garlake - have all linked the Zimbabgwe Ruins to Bukalanga. We shall come to this in Chapter Nine.

The above flies in the face of what has been taught in Zimbabgwe for the last thirty years that the Zimbabgwe Civilization was a work of the Shona. To try and substantiate that belief, the Shona have stated that the word Zimbabgwe comes from the Shona phrase dzimba dza mabgwe, meaning “houses of stone”. But the truth is that these edifices were never houses, but royal enclosures, and the origin of the word Zimbabgwe is the Kalanga phrase nzi mabgwe, meaning royal court enclosed with stone. The people built their huts within the enclosures of stone, but never lived in the stone buildings as houses. A visit to Khami or Great Zimbabgwe should confirm this fact with ease. Even Portuguese records attest to the fact that the Zimbabgwe Ruins were royal courts, not houses of stone!

In a description of Great Zimbabgwe as part of its nomination of the edifice as a world heritage site, UNESCO wrote that the ruins of Great Zimbabgwe are:

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A unique artistic achievement, this great city has struck the imagination of African and European travelers since the Middle Ages, as evidenced by the persistent legends which attribute it to a biblical origin. The entire Zimbabgwe nation has identified with this historically symbolic ensemble and has adopted as its emblem the steatite bird, which may have been a royal totem. In the 14th century, it was the principal city of a major state extending over the gold-rich plateaux; its population exceeded 10,000 inhabitants. In about 1450, the capital was abandoned, not as a result of war, but because the hinterland could no longer furnish food for the overpopulated city, and deforestation made necessary to go father to find firewood. The resulting migration benefited Khami, which became the most influential city in the region, but signaled waning political power.

When in 1505 the Portuguese settled in Sofala, the region was divided between the rival powers of the kingdoms of Togwa and Monomotapa. From the 11th to the 15th centuries, the wealth of Great Zimbabgwe was associated with gold trading, controlled by the Arabs, and extensive trade activities on the east coast of Africa where Kilwa was the main trading center. In addition to jewellery that had escaped greedy European gold hunters at the end of the 19th century, archaeological excavations in Great Zimbabgwe unearthed glass beads and fragments of porcelain and pottery of Chinese and Persian origin which testify to the extent of trade within the continent. A 14th century Arab coin from Kilwa was also found; it was reissued in 1972 (UNESCO, Online).

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Khami, the successor city-state to Great Zimbabgwe, was the capital of the south-western Togwa and Lozwi kingdoms. The site is located twenty-two kilometers west of the modern city of Bulawayo. Like Maphungubgwe and Great Zimbabgwe, Khami is also a UNESCO world heritage site. In its description of Khami, UNESCO noted:

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Khami, which developed after the capital of Great Zimbabgwe had been abandoned in the mid-16th century, is of great archaeological interest. The discovery of objects from Europe and China shows that Khami was a major center for trade over a long period of time. Khami, which still has considerable archaeological potential, is a site of great interest and provides a testimony to that of Great Zimbabgwe, developing immediately afterward to the abandonment of this capital.

According to radiocarbon dating methods the city grew between around 1450 and 1650, which fully confirms the study carried out on built-up structures and small archaeological artifacts. As is the case in Great Zimbabgwe, here several sectors can be clearly differentiated in terms of use. The chief’s residence (mambo) was located towards the north, on the Hill Ruins site, which is a hill created largely of alluvial land used to level the terraces, contained by bearing walls. In this sector some highly significant imported goods were found: 16th century Rhineland stoneware, Ming porcelain pieces which date back to the reign of Wan-Li (1573-1691), Portuguese imitations of 17th century Chinese porcelain, 17th century Spanish silverware, etc. There is a possibility that Khami was visited by Portuguese merchants and even missionaries, because a monumental cross consisting of small blocks of granite can still be seen traced on the rocky ground of Cross Hill, a small hillock immediately north of the mambo residence.

The population of Khami was spread over several hectares and lived in huts made from cob surrounded by a series of granite walls. The typology of the fences and walls is similar to that of the latest constructions at Great Zimbabgwe. Worthy of note are the many decorative friezes, having chevron and checkered patterns, and the great number of narrow passageways and deambulatory galleries, not all of which are covered (UNESCO, Online).

Briefly these were the great material civilizations of Bukalanga. But there are many more of them that are little known, for wherever Bukalanga peoples were settled, such stone wallings as those of Maphungubgwe, Great Zimbabgwe and Khami were found, the other examples being Domboshaba, Dangaleng’ombe (Dlodlo), Nnalatale, Luswingo, Dzata, Ziwa, Bumbusi and many others scattered all the way from Hwange to the Makhado Mountains in Venda. Many of these ruins were concentrated in the south and southwestern end of the Zimbabgwean plateau in the areas still occupied by Bukalanga to this day, though a few are also found in modern-day Mashonaland where the land was sparsely settled at that time due to the highly humid conditions which was not favorable for agriculture, mainly cattle raising.

Such is the heritage of Bukalanga, and it is hardly surprising that they should have built such a great civilization if we look at how the Kalanga have been described over the centuries. Let us look at that in the next chapter.