As the marketing spiel goes, Limpopo Province is the land of legend. I’ve seen and heard more marketing rhetoric about Limpopo on radio spots and billboards than any other province over the past year or so. Still, it’d take a substantial chunk of holiday to become familiar with the layers of local heritage – natural and cultural. I’d made acquaintances a few years ago in Sibasa and spent some time at ‘prime tourism spots’: The sculptor Noria Mabasa’s house, the Sacred Forest, Lake Funduzi and the ‘potholes’ on the Muswodi road. We’d wrestled the donga-strewn village roads to get to Mukumbani, the official royal ‘palace’ of the Tshivase clan, constructed by the Vhavenda who’d originally migrated south after the collapse of Great Zimbabwe. Walking the permimeter of the mildewy walls whett enough of an appetite for another visit that would take in more of this part of the country’s heritage. The more you listen to the oral history of the region – emotive and engaging, unlike the antiseptic thesis of some academic papers – the more you find yourself lured into its vast controversies, tribal conflicts, magic, linguistic heritage and ancestry.
Take, for example the appellations: ‘Shangaan’ and Tshivase (Sibasa). The first is rooted in the fallout that occurred between two leaders within the Tsonga community a hundred or so years ago. One group beat a retreat towards Mozambique, subsequently absorbing some Portuguese into its lexicon while in exile. They were labelled ‘the ones who left their babies (‘Ma-shiya-ngani’), a term that is still pejorative compared with the one (Tsonga) used in ID books. Then there is the Tshivase clan, whose origins are rooted in the legendary pioneering chief ‘Tshivase midi ya Vathu’ (the one who burns down the houses of the people), who’d come from North of the Limpopo, and whose conquest hints at the violent overthrow of previous occupants of the local region.
Thulamela, accessible from the the Kruger Park’s Pafuri or Punda Maria gates, hasn’t enjoyed the kind of press that has accumulated around the World Heritage Site of Mapungubwe, but it is also only one of many archeological sites in the region that mark the ancient foundations of a society related to the Northern Vhenda and Shona groups. (Other sites include Mukumbani, referred to by the king as a living cultural centre, rather than a defunct ‘heritage site’, Dzata and the Dhlo Dhlo ruins).
The isolation of the royal family within the confines of a walled palace was first developed at Mapungubwe, continued at Great Zimbabwe (and Khami – nearby in Bulawayo) and later at Thulamela, before groups moved further south, carrying with them the legacy of the earlier social hierarchy and palace design.
Land rights become a tenuous issue - at least one reason for the denial of ancient settlements by the previous National government. It couldn’t have been politically expedient to talk of cultural heritage on this scale. My school history books covering matters this far north involved the heroism of the Boer nation, rather then the sovereignty of previous indigenous kingdoms which had settled here over 1000 years ago, not to mention the San presence which goes back 100 000 years.
I’m at the Pafuri gate at the Kruger Park by seven am. At eight there is still no sign of the guide I’d arranged to meet me. A series of conversations rally back and forth between the receptionist here and the one at Punda Maria. Today’s shift knows nothing of the arrangement. Eventually I’m told a guide will meet me at the picnic site 25km’s inside the park, once a 4x4 is organised. At the picnic site, I wait for another hour for a guide who has just finished a morning game drive. A panelled historical overview helps to pass the time constructively. It has been sponsored by the same beneficiaries involved in the site project: The Goldfields Foundation, NORAD, the Department of Environmental affairs and tourism, the Wits University archaeological department, the department of Anatomy Pretoria University and a Thulamela Trust.
As with the other sites, an elite ruling class and ‘divinely appointed’ king had grown with the affluence that accrued to the society as a result of trade with Arab merchants from the east coast. This site marked the stone wall headquarters of one of the groups that had moved across the Limpopo from the Zimbabwe region. (Oral tradition suggests that Thulamela and Makahane – 15km west – were Shona capitals. Later, by the 1500’s, Portuguese traders began to utilize the same trade routes. Their records verify some of the oral history.)
The site was discovered by a ranger who noticed the unusual arrangement of stones on the perimeter of the hill. A group of archaeologists from the University of Pretoria was invited to examine the area Erik, my guide, tells me as we park the Landy. He shoulders an elephant gun and we make our way through the thorn scrub towards the top of the hill. Erik is joined by another ranger, Frank, who sweeps the landscape with a twitcher’s eye, his Robert’s stowed under his belt and a pair of ranger’s binoculars dangling from his neck. Erik was one of about six men who joined the project to re-construct the walls of Thulamela. ‘I’m a stone mason, so I know how a wall would have been constructed’, he says, matter of factly. The group of masons, he tells me, only used the stones lying next to the foundations of the wall in order to get a true perspective of what the possible height and dimensions were. ‘This granite stone here had never collapsed…it’s what you call a monolith’. He gestures towards a dark meter long rock protruding from the earth on the inside of the wall near one of the openings. ‘In Venda they call them ‘Mafaru’, and in Shona: ‘Gandzelo’.
According to tradition, the monoliths would be placed near the entrances to ward off evil, and would have been erected on top of magical ingredients. ‘Even people who’ve lived nearby quite recently, talk of hearing drums being played here in the middle of the night, and would be too afraid to come near.’
We sit under the shade of a baobab as he speaks. There is evidence of previous social life here: two big squares had been cut out of one of the flatter sides of the tree. Roofing for a hut may have been cut here – or, because the bark is really fibrous - it would have been a useful source for rope or whips.
It was at the discovery of the burial sites that an anatomist from Pretoria University was called in. Two skeletons were recovered: one was of a woman who’d been buried in the Losha position (lying on the left side facing the rising sun, towards the west, where it is believed her tribe may have originated, with the hands in a ‘prayer’ position under the left cheek. In Venda culture, the position of supplication still signifies great respect. She was 1.73m tall, strong boned, and was most likely one of the king’s wives since she was buried with jewellery from her time. Carbon dating indicates that she must have lived in the 1600’s, at least two hundred years after the person found within the confines of the walled enclosure further up the hill. (Carbon dating of charcoal from ancient fireplaces has put the occupation period between 1550 and 1650.)
In contrast, the male skeleton is fragile and shows signs of a handicap in one of the legs. Its fragility suggests that the man probably never needed to exert himself with any laborious tasks, and that he may never have had to leave his sacred enclosure. This may have related to his role as a shaman. The age of the skeleton probably fits with the notion of a second burial: he had lived around 1450, which means that Thulamela might never have been his home either - one theory is that the body was brought across from Great Zimbabwe. The guides refer to a traditional expression that ‘a crocodile never leaves his pool’. They also make some attempt to explain the relevance of ‘the king’s stone’, a token of bone fide inheritance of the throne. A successor would have to swallow the stone vomited up by the previous king. In the case of the man found here, the guides say, the stone was still inside his body when he died, suggesting that he’d been stabbed. At this point the vagaries of translation and superstition veil the story. Both skeletons were reburied in 1996 during an official opening of the site and ritual ceremony.
We meander along the outline of the site, along the ledge which drops towards the elephant trail below that leads 350km north, we pass the midden dump and a whetting stone for hunting spears, and then move down through the lower enclosures that possibly belonged to the king’s brother.
Back at the Pafuri River Camp where I stay for the night, just outside the Pafuri gate, manager Dave tells me about some of the evidence he has seen of the old Muslim trade routes into the interior from the east coast. ‘You look across the Zambezi valley, for instance, and there are strings of Ilala palms where they would have used as their resting points. They aren’t indigenous: they were planted along the way. Slaves would need to be watered here too. I’ve even seen Ilala palms along the highlands in Zimbabwe in Nyange. Go to the Google Earth site and you can see them in the satellite images’ The conversation turns to a conjectural riff: ‘In fact, there are even slave pits which pre-date the Arab presence (after they’d forcibly taken the port at Beira around 800ad). The terracing effects you see in Nyange are Indian – and there are shrines too that look Indian…’ It’s all too overwhelming for one trip, but Limpopo province has a habit of doing this to you. You just have to keep coming back for more!
