|
|
South Africa: Search for Heritage At Mystical Mapungubwe
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Business Day (Johannesburg)
15 May 2008
Posted to the web 15 May 2008
Sue Blaine
Johannesburg
MAPUNGUBWE, the Limpopo hill that was home to the largest kingdom in sub-Saharan Africa before it was abandoned in the 1300s, has been swathed in controversy since its re-discovery by the University of Pretoria (UP) in 1933. That controversy seems set to continue.
In the past the sophistication of Mapungubwe society was played down by white supremacists but now several communities from the area, near the Zimbabwean border, claim to be direct descendents of those who lived there when it was a bustling trading hub, exporting gold to Egypt, India and China.
"The want, the need, to own is very human. A number of these communities have competing land claims and they will emphasise certain things to defend those claims, but none of them is necessarily directly descended from the Mapungubwe people. It's more messy than that," says Dr Alex Schoeman, senior researcher in the university's anthropology and a rchaeology department.
Laying claim to Mapungubwe heritage has no practical use, because to make a legal land claim the community had to have been removed from the place they claim after June 1913 -- but still the communities tell their stories when land ownership is brought into question, she says.
When researchers from UP started digging at Mapungubwe in 1934 they were baffled by what they found.
"They found rock art that was very well preserved, but they thought the San and farmer groups did not live in the same area and they did not think that there was intermarriage between the San and blacks.
"There was great fluidity in that society and that disturbed the researchers more than it made them happy. Their research didn't yield much because they didn't understand what they got," she says.
The political climate did not help, and the first archaeologist to excavate the site, Prof Leo Fouché, left the university in 1934 in protest against the Afrikaner nationalism that had overtaken the institution.
What followed was 50 years of almost nothing, and then, when work was again published on what was found at Mapungubwe it was poorly executed and stymied by the ideology of the apartheid state.
On the downside, the university has to deal with a history of poor science and ill-founded ideology that prevented SA, and the world, from knowing what was found at Mapungubwe. On the upside, the early researchers left careful records of what they had found (but failed to understand) and the university is now steadily working through these records.
It is also gathering more research, and last month a team travelled to the area to speak to representatives of the Lemba, the Vhangona and the Leshiba communities, and the Tshivula royal family, to hear their traditional beliefs about Mapungubwe and their links to the area.
These stories have been used by the university's drama department to create a series of multimedia "events" that will be performed at the university from May 19-25, says the drama department's Dr Marie-Heleen Coetzee.
"They've been silenced for a long time and have a fragmented identity. We are using the stories to draw Mapungubwe into a new cultural context, making it contemporary."
The show will also commemorate the university's centenary.
Meanwhile, Schoeman's team will continue its work. They have yet to speak to the Machete, the community whose claim to the Mapungubwe land, according to University of the Witwatersrand historian Prof Philip Bonner, has most credence as they are known to have lived in the area 70- 80 years ago.
The stories collected do not always match the scientific evidence found at the Mapungubwe site, but it is surprising how much is known -- the communities' history is kept alive by praise poets who repeat almost verbatim what they have learnt from their elders, says Schoeman.
|
"The old history goes back to the 1600s. That's mostly royal history, but the more recent oral history is about families and there are pockets of amazing oral history that are archived. This was collected by government ethnologists and there are reams of notes. They had an apartheid philosophy, but the data they recorded is incredibly valuable. There's a lot of work for history students in that," she says.
The university's archaeology and anthropology department is comparing this oral history with objects found at Mapungubwe, and while there is clear evidence that the communities that claim to be descendents of the city's residents were all in the area at some time, it is also probable that no one will be able to make an exclusive claim to Mapungubwe heritage.
Schoeman said it was good aca-demically to compare oral history with scientific evidence, and to do so at Mapungubwe would help in the writing of a part of SA's history that had been under-researched. It was also important to give people a voice, especially those who lost out under apartheid.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
