Climbing the Hill of Jackals

What makes this place so special? Here in the heat and dust and buzzing quiet of the bushveld, a long rock rises among many other ridges of similar shape and size.

Arriving at the main gate in the cool of the morning, we complete the formalities and transfer to a game-viewing vehicle with our two guides, Moses Baloyi and Cedrick Sethlako. A little way into the park, they stop and point out the southern rockface of Mapungubwe Hill, the place of jackals.

We park in the flattish area near the base of the hill. Once this must have been a bustling little village, where the commoners of Mapungubwe lived. Our guides slide open an ingenious roof over a pit left by archaeologists, to show us the sequence of human occupation here. One can clearly see the lines created by hut floors, interspersed with mud deposited by floods. One layer was clearly a midden or rubbish heap, with plenty of animal bones and shards of pottery.

We proceed up the new path and begin to climb shallow stone steps. These bypass the original ‘gate” to the royal ‘palace” set between two large boulders, through which supplicants would have had to pass. Just beyond them, a round depression is all that marks the hut where the royal chamberlain, the king’s brother, lived. All who sought an audience with the king or queen had to get the chamberlain’s permission first. The chamberlain had total responsibility for the king’s safety. In the event of the king’s natural death, the brother would inherit the throne, but not if there was any suspicion of foul play, especially by poisoning.

The modern stone steps lead to a newly constructed wooden ladder, which rises up a cleft past a rock fig. One can clearly see the holes where the ancient ladder poles were placed. It’s quite a steep climb but not too difficult for the moderately fit.

At the top of the staircase is a cairn of rocks. Some argue that these provided missiles for the guards to use against intruders, but others say it was simply a platform for them to sit or stand on. Not far away, our guide tells us, adjacent to a small mopane tree, is the spot where the golden rhino was found. We are standing above an ancient grave, on sacred ground.

The top of Mapungubwe Hill is surprisingly small. It’s also rather windy. Even more surprising is that all the soil up there was once carried up by women — apparently they did some cultivation on the summit. All their water had to be carried up as well, fetched from the Limpopo about three kilometres away, and stored in two large cisterns carved into the rock. In several places on the rockface are round grinding holes, post holes for huts, and a moruba gameboard, where the guards must have whiled away the long hours.

To the north, towards the river, were the fields where the Mapungubweans cultivated sorghum, millet and cowpeas —oddly, no pumpkin-type vegetables — and, quite possibly, cotton as well, because spindle weights for spinning cotton are among the artefacts that have been excavated at the various sites.

The highest point of the rock is not open to the public as further archaeological research is yet to be done.

Our guide explains that the king lived mostly in seclusion, except for his wives, atop this windy hill. He was rarely seen by his subjects, and if he wanted to make any pronouncements, a horn would be blown to summon the people. If he wished to descend the hill, he would have been carried down that steep, narrow ladder on a stretcher.

This is what makes Mapungubwe so significant in the precolonial history of southern Africa. A brief tour through the evolution of social structures will explain why.

The earliest peoples of southern Africa, the Stone Age hunter-gatherer San or Bushmen, lived in small egalitarian bands or family groups, with no leaders, because they could not afford to compete for scarce resources. Because they were always on the move, they possessed only what they needed and could easily carry. Their technologies were simple: firemaking, stone-shaping and perhaps a little fashioning of metals they obtained by barter-trade.

In the first wave of migration from the north came the Later Stone Age KhoiKhoi people, who were pastoralists, driving their herds of cattle and flocks of fat-tailed sheep and goats from pasture to pasture. They had a notion of ownership and wealth, but their socio-political structure was still quite flat, with a sort of leadership under a senior family member. Their technology extended the San range to include clay pottery. These people migrated seasonally in search of pasture and water.

Next came the Iron Age Bantu-speakers from even further north, who also had herds and flocks but now added the cultivation of crops to their subsistence economy, and whose technology extended to the mining, smelting and forging of metals such as iron, copper and gold. They tended to form permanent settlements and, for the first time, to be able to build a surplus of wealth in the form of stored grains. This combination of factors allows for individuals to specialise in crafts so that a certain kind of social stratification developed. Political structures became more complex, but still centred on a senior family member, who lived in the same manner as the rest of the clan.

What happened at Mapungubwe is that, for the first time in southern Africa, a political leader was literally raised above the people and invested with sacred meaning, became much more than the head of an extended kinship structure, became royal.

Mapungubwe’s economy was also based on long-distance bilateral trade with Arabs plying in dhows along the eastern seaboard of Africa. The Mapungubweans exchanged African ivory, gold, animal skins and possibly even slaves for manufactured goods from faraway lands: glass beads from Egypt, cloth from India, ceramics from China.

This trade and the status of luxury goods must have further broadened the split between commoners and royalty.

The reasons for the abandonment of this area in about 1300AD are complex, among them climatic factors, but quite possibly they moved north-eastwards to be closer to this lucrative coastal trade.

This explanation is unavoidably simplistic but perhaps this brief overview will spark readers to learn more about this fascinating and fabulous era, and to go and explore the magic and mystery of Mapungubwe for themselves.

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