March 13, 2003
By Lucille Davie
WE'VE heard about the early Boer farmers who settled on the Witwatersrand. We've admired the colonial buildings in suburbs like Parktown and Westcliff. We've read about the Boers and Brits going head to head in the Anglo Boer War, but what about the very first settlers in the region?
The broader Johannesburg area used to house scattered villages of early Bantu peoples (African people whose languages originate in the Niger-Congo region), evident from aerial photographs showing the rings made by the kraals, usually situated on koppies.
Melville Koppies and Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve are the only two remaining areas in the city that preserve evidence of these early settlements.
In the early 1960s an Iron Age furnace was discovered by Professor Revil Mason, former head of archaeology at Wits University, in the fenced central section of Melville Koppies, now a national monument.
"In 1963 I was asked by the Melville Koppies Management Committee to have a look at what was visible on the top ridge - a ring. It wasn't too clear, only a trained eye could see it. We soon discovered iron-smelting debris - fragments of charcoal, slag raw iron and broken blowpipes on the floor of the furnace," says Mason.
He estimates the site to date from around 1060AD. Three other furnaces have been found on the ridge. And further afield in Johannesburg's suburbs, 13 furnaces have been found at Honeydew, about eight kilometres north of Melville. "These were exposed on a dirt road, which has since been covered with tar," says Mason.
Another three furnaces were found at Lonehill in the far northern suburbs, but these were subsequently covered again to protect them. Further east, near Bruma Lake, another furnace was found. A plaster cast of this furnace was made, and it now resides at Wits University's archaeology department. The remains of another furnace are visible at Hearn Drive in Northcliff.
Bushmen and Khoikhoi
The Western Ridge of the Melville Koppies has a cave, visible from Beyers Naude Drive, the road that runs between this Ridge and the central section. Says Mason: "We have found six pieces of broken bow and arrow points, of the kind used in Botswana until recently, in the cave, and a grooved stone which would have been used for shaping the arrow." Mason estimates the findings to be around 1 000 years old. These would have been Bushmen artefacts.
These Bushmen and Khoikhoi predate Bantu peoples in South Africa. The Bushmen or San were hunter-gatherers and were Stone Age people, only using metal for their arrow tips after they made contact with Bantu people. They were nomadic people, carrying their simple shelters along with them. Where available, they made use of caves for shelter, and left behind their most valuable artefact, rock paintings, giving extensive knowledge of their culture and history. They did not make pottery, instead they used ostrich eggshells for storing water.
Their distinctive physical features - shortness, high cheek bones, peppercorn hair, lighter complexion - together with their unique click languages, are different from Bantu peoples and testify to their development in isolation in South Africa for thousands of years, possibly going back 30 000 years.
About 2 000 years ago a breakaway Bushman group, who became known as the Khoikhoi, acquired cattle, possibly from neighbours to the north. The Khoikhoi moved further south into the Cape, in search of grazing, and where in 1652 they met and were finally exterminated by European settlers.
Once the Europeans expanded into South Africa, the Bushmen were squeezed from both sides: the foreigners from the Cape and the Bantu peoples from the south and east. They were forced into the far northern desert areas of South Africa and Botswana, where small groups still exist, in a partially Westernised, marginalised state.
Bantu peoples
It is believed that Bantu peoples settled at the Soutpansberg mountains in Limpopo, 400 kilometres north of Johannesburg, around 350AD. These peoples originated from central Africa, eastern Nigeria and Cameroon in particular, and from about 1000BC they started migrating south to Angola and east to the Great Lakes, in a succession of migratory waves.
Fragments of pottery have been found in the Soutpansberg, and similar pottery has been found in Tzaneen and Lydenburg, both south-east of the Soutpansberg. These people seem to have disappeared during a dry spell in 600AD but not before groups of people had moved further south, settling in KwaZulu-Natal around 500AD, and the Eastern Cape in 700AD.
In a later wave of migration, Bantu peoples crossed the Limpopo again and settled just north of the Soutpansberg about 1 000 years ago.
The Venda are these first black South Africans. They trace their ancestry back to the establishment of the first indigenous capital on two hills, Bambandyanalo and Mapungubwe, near a small town called Pontdrift, almost on the border of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, some 100 kilometres west of Messina in Limpopo.
Bambandyanalo was where the early Shona kingdom settled and experienced its peak, and some 200 years later Mapungubwe was occupied. Sacred rituals developed, particularly related to divine rainmaking powers - precursors to Modjadji, the local rain queen, who traces her ancestry back to a 17th century princess of Zimbabwe.
The Mapungubwe kingdom is directly related to the Shona of Zimbabwe, the Tswana of Botswana and the Venda, Tswana and Sotho in South Africa. These peoples probably moved down from East Africa, and moved further south when that region experienced drier conditions. They would have moved down with cattle and iron.
The people of Mapungubwe became prosperous trading with Arab-Swahili traders in Sofala in Mozambique. They sold gold and ivory in return for Indian glass beads, cloth and Chinese porcelain.
But around 1300AD both Mapungubwe and Bambandyanalo declined, and the settlements disappeared.
Before this decline set in, groups of people started moving south and reached the Soutpansberg again in about 1300AD and spread further into the Magaliesberg, in about 1400AD. These settlements grew southwards to the Witwatersrand.
These people were pastoralists and as pastures in the Magaliesberg were exploited, they moved into the grassland below the Melville Koppies. It is believed they noticed iron deposits in the rock outcrops on the Koppies, and built the iron furnace now excavated. The stone kraal walls just above the furnace were probably built at the same time.
The evidence of dry stone walling at the Koppies suggests permanent settlements in the area. The same walling can be seen at the 600-hectare Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve, just south of the city. "We have found dozens of stone walls, millet seeds and cattle's teeth," says Mason.
Aerial photographs of Klipriviersberg reveal 19 stone-walled Iron Age settlements dating from about 1500AD. A total of 90 sites have been identified in the broader area, suggesting a large, settled pastoral community.
This means that the southern group were pastoralists and agriculturists, whereas the northern group exploited the iron deposits, and kept cattle. "It is likely that the northern and southern groups traded with one another and lived harmoniously," Mason adds.
By 1800AD stone walling was widespread, and cow dung was used as fuel.
These Tswana peoples lived on the koppies, building stone walls to surround their inner kraals and living areas, shaped like a sunflower. Cattle, their most important commodity, were housed in the inner circle, safe from predators. Each petal of the sunflower housed a different household, and between these enclosures were smaller enclosures housing smaller animals like calves, goats and chickens.
The outer walls reached around 1.5 metres in height, but over the years those walls have crumbled.
Excavations of sites reveal that these people grew sorghum, raised cattle, sheep and goats, and hunted wild animals. Two sites in Klipriviersberg large - 150 metres by 50 metres - and would have housed up to 100 people in a single settlement, made up of 10 households.
These early settlements were vulnerable to changes in climate, and population size would have waned and revived over the years. The earlier settlements died out, and it was only in the 1700s that these groups re-established themselves in the Reserve.
Mzilikazi
These Johannesburg settlements that stretched from Northcliff and Lonehill in the north, through Melville in the west, Bruma in the east, to Klipriviersberg in the south, lived and traded peacefully with one another. That is, until 1823, when the warrior Mzilikazi, who was ousted from KwaZulu-Natal by the powerful Zulu king Shaka and his impis, settled in the area. Mzilikazi consolidated his army from defeated tribes, and had his first capital near Heidelberg, around 80 kilometres south of Johannesburg.
His control stretched from Heidelberg westwards, and by 1927, he had established a new capital in the Magaliesberg, 80 kilometres north west of Johannesburg. By 1829, he had an army of between 6 000 and 8 000 men.
But then a combination of factors led to the dispersal of the people. It's possible a drought hit the area, wiping out the settlements. And then the Voortrekkers moved into the area, and as a result, in 1837 Mzilikazi was forced to move further north, into Zimbabwe.
The Voortrekkers took large tracts of land as their farms, farming peacefully alongside the sparse remnants of Mzilikazi's people, the Ndebele, but all that changed in 1886, when gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand.
