Peter Dickson
Deep in a cave in the Eastern Cape’s forbidding Kouga Mountains lies the body of “Moses”, estimated to be about 2 000 years old. His is the first mummified human remains found in South Africa.
The Egyptians and the Incas mummified the bodies of their god-kings for their journeys through the afterlife, and so, it appears, did the San, the nomadic hunter- gatherer clans who were Southern Africa’s first people.
This mummy could be a boost for tourism in a region otherwise starved of resources. But if it has a curse, it is the slashed subsidy and uncertain future of the Albany Museum of Natural History in Grahamstown, whose renowned archaeologist, Dr Johan Binneman, first stumbled across “Moses”.
Binneman found him under two layers of bushes, sticks and a rare painted gravestone in April. He had been excavating the shelter where the mummy was found and its surrounds – which he now believes hold further remains – for several years as part of an investigation into the way people lived over the past 10 000 years.
“It’s a beautiful place and unique – nowhere else in the world can you walk into the shelters and get a complete record of the past,” he says.
Moses was found in the dust of one of several holes at the back of the shelter. Binneman was following a simple urge to “neaten up” the shelter and the find was a “fluke”. “I decided to begin cleaning out these hollows, bag whatever I found and level the floor of the shelter. I could have chosen any one of about 20 holes.”
What he had found, as important and astounding as the mummy he would only find the next day, was something that had long been in dispute. Amateur archaeologists had reported finding such painted “burial stones” at assumed San burial sites in the 1920s and 1930s.
When he returned to the cave the next day to lift the stone, Binneman found a thick layer of plant material, bulbs and leaves woven into a giant basket that he gingerly began to remove – to reveal the body, lying on its left side in a foetal position, and wrapped in a medicinal leaf known as boophone that is still used as a bandage in Xhosa circumcision rites.
The boophone “clearly has some preservative and insecticide quality as well, which kept the bacteria and flesh-eating organisms away”, Binneman said. “The body has simply dried up.”
Besides the leaves keeping out decomposing bacteria and fungi, the body’s remarkable state of preservation was also enhanced by the dryness of the environment.
Once the boophone was removed, parchment-like skin and toenails showed through. A length of rope-like cord wrapped around the ankles and disappearing up to the upper torso, which Binneman has not yet exposed, was further indication of a San burial. Binneman identified the cord as made from the vleibessie plant that was apparently part of the preparation for burial. Traditionally, a Khoisan body was forced into a foetal position for burial, with the cord to keep the body in position.
Ostrich eggshell beads and bits of pottery were also found around the head. Bulbs found with the remains were so well preserved that the archaeologist could pinpoint burial to August or September.
Binneman had discovered South Africa’s first mummy. But his troubles were just beginning. He still needed to date and sex the body, and carry out other tests requiring specialised input and a lot of money.
Dating costs R1 500, and it is money that the Albany Museum does not have. The museum’s provincial government subsidy was slashed to crisis proportions last year as it squared up to retrenchments and possible sale to Rhodes University that Bisho inexplicably refused to clear.
Compounding matters, the fragile mummy would also have to be moved – requiring proper exhumation, preservation against further deterioration and careful transportation down the wild mountainside and then to Grahamstown.
And Binneman would have to do all this fast, for the mummy had already been partially exposed to the elements and required rapid preservation to stop it crumbling to dust.
And then arrived the deputy director of arts and culture in the Humansdorp area, John Witbooi, representing a local group calling itself the Khoisan Awareness Initiative. It was claiming heritage ties and was dead set against transporting the mummy to the museum.
To remove the remains would be to reduce them to a “scientific freak”, Witbooi said. The use of plant preservation had shown the Khoi and San to be far from being the “primitives” history made them out to be, he said, adding the remains were likely to become entangled in a “tug of war for tourism” instead of the discovery being handled in a dignified and sensitive manner.
It took two nerve-wracking months of negotiation to satisfy the stakeholders that the remains would be handled “in a dignified manner” before Eastern Cape museums director Denver Webb could announce that the mummy would be exhumed and transported to Grahamstown.
The museum will be trying to raise funds for the exercise, and a deal has been worked out with the University of the Witwatersrand for scientific studies to be undertaken and completed within the next two years.
Further consultations and the examination of overseas models will determine the mummy’s final resting place, said Webb, whose department was “not in favour of gratuitous display” of such discoveries. Options include reburial or the building of a “house of memory” near Joubertina.
The museum, meanwhile, is handling the costs for the removal of the mummy, which finally got under way this week. For a brief moment once more, Binneman and “Moses” are reunited in the Kouga Mountains – but this time one step away from an identity and a special place in our hitherto neglected history.