Kingdom of Mapungubwe - Re-discovery

Re-discovery

After Mapungubwe's fall, it was forgotten until 1932 (but not to the descendents of the original occupiers of the hill, the Vhangona, the Vhatwanamba and Vhaleya clans among the present day Venda people on the South African side as well as residents of present day Rebublics of Zimbabwe and Botswana). On New Year's Eve 1932, E. S. J. van Graan, a local farmer and prospector and his son, a former student of the University of Pretoria, set out to follow up on a legend he had heard from a very old native about a strange story of a white man gone mad. The mad white man was a character well known at the time called Lottering who in the last decades of the nineteenth century had established himself about half a mile from Mapungubwe. This Lottering had apparently climbed the sacred Mapungubwe hill and found items because he presented to van Graan's informant, a big earthenware pot, beautifully made and unlike anything the natives had at that time. It is unclear what else he found. Following the story, van Graan made inquiries until at last he located the general area where the Mapungubwe hill was supposed to be located. On 31 December 1932, he set out with his son to investigate. Father and son were joined on the way by three other adventurers and had to be very secretive about their search since the land on which the hill is situated was private property, whose owner was unknown, nor had he given permission for exploration on his property.

An old Mungona native called Tshihwana had promised to point out the hill to van Graan but when a party of five whites arrived, he developed cold feet and refused point blank to point out the way and told them that they would never find the place, nor the secret way up and if they do, they would never come back alive! Eventually, the five men persuaded Tshihwana's son to show them the hill which turned out to be a great mass of sandstone, about 31 meters high and 320 meters long with sheer cliff sides, and apparently un-scalable except with the help of ladders and ropes. At this point, Tshihwana's son, who was literally shivering with fright and had to be forcibly detained, at last pointed the secret stairway to the top. Such was his fright that he had to point it out facing the other way to avoid directly looking at the hill. Such was the reverence of the Mapungubwe hill that it was believed that untold misery would be visited upon anyone who not only ascends the hill, but so much as look at it directly! On reaching the top, the five men found breastworks of stone and great boulders balanced on smaller stones, ready to be pushed on intruders. Scattered all over the top were great quantities of potsherds.

A search on the surface which proved to be loose sandy soil brought to light, rusted remains of iron tools and some bits of copper wire and glass beads. Soon, an exposed yellow metal plate was discovered which the senior van Graan pronounced to be gold. An excited search followed and the five men were soon finding gold beads, bangles, broken bits of thin gold plating and human remains adorned with quantities of gold and beads. The next day (1 January 1933), yielded even larger pieces of gold including the remains of the now famous Mapungubwe Rhinoceros. The five men had realised a schoolboy's dream! They had found hidden treasure! In the end, the spoils were divided equally between the five men who went their separate ways. Fortunately, the van Graans were men of education and the junior van Graan, who as fate would have it, was an archeology student, sent some specimens from his share to his old professor, Leo Fouche’.

The five men were finally persuaded (upon compensation and subtle threat from the law) to turn over their loot to the government and the absentee owner of the farm (Greefswald), a Mr. E.E. Collins, was located and persuaded to sell his farm to the then Union (of South Africa) government. The site was turned over to the University of Pretoria for further exploration which continues to this day and it yielded more findings than what the five adventurers found. The find, when it made its way into the public domain stirred a lot of excitement with hundreds of treasure hunters streaming to the area. However, by the time news of the find made its way into public domain, adequate protection from the police had been secured ensuring the preservation of what has come to be one of the most important archeological finds in present day South Africa. Although the University of Pretoria excavated the site ever since 1932, Mapungubwe was not known to the general public until well into the 1990s (though it was well known within the archeological circles). Obviously, the find challenged and made nonsense of the conventional wisdom prevailing in South Africa at the time regarding race relations. Indeed, immediately after the find (and just like with other sites such as Great Zimbabwe), concerted attempts were made to dissociate Mapungubwe from the native people (e.g. the Vhangona, Vhatwanamba and Vhaleya clans within the Venda nation who are the direct descendents of the original occupants of Mapungubwe) and indeed, black South Africans. Just like Great Zimbabwe was associated with Arabs and everything non African (e.g. Mullan,1969), early writings on Mapungubwe sought to associate it with everything but Bantu (e.g. Gardner, 1949 & 1955) albeit there were some authors who avoided falling into the same trap (e.g. Walton, 1956 (a), (b)).

Incidentally, it is only among the Vhangona, Vhatwanamba and Vhaleya clans (of all the black people in present day South Africa) that oral history and folklore making references to Mapungubwe exists to this day. Moreover, when Prof. Lestrade was conducting his ethnological investigations at the time of the first excavations of Mapungubwe, he could not find a single informant from among the Western Venda Kings/Chiefs (Mphephu-Ramabulana, Sinthumule, Kutama, etc.), Eastern Venda Kings/Chiefs (Tshivhase, Mphaphuli, Rammbuda, Makuya, etc.) nor among the Vhalemba, Tsonga-Shangaan and Karanga who was able to recognise the name Mapungubwe or its site albeit these informants had no problem in knowing about Great Zimbabwe (Fouche, 1937). It is important to note that we cannot however, discount the possibility that Prof. Lestrade may simply have been seeking information from the wrong or uninformed informants albeit he had no such problems with the Ngona, Twanamba and Leya informants. However, it should not surprise us that the Kings and Chiefs of the Singo dynasty in Venda may generally have been less informed about Mapungubwe. According to their traditions, they are recent migrants into Venda, having only migrated there in the late 1600s, long after Mapungubwe's abandonment!

According to an article published in 1985: translated from the Afrikaans text: Remains of a Rock Fort located on top of the hill, were under investigation, dated back to the 11th century. The Archeological site is closed to the public, except for supervised visits and tours. However some of the items discovered where on display at the Department of Archeology, at the University of Pretoria. Mapungubwe Hill and K2 were declared national monuments in the 1980s. Until 2002 when the University of Pretoria was undergoing renovations that a large number of the artifacts collected where subsequently found locked away and forgotten in a storage room, the architect contracted to do the renovations at the University of Pretoria, Mr Moorrees Janse van Rensburg came across this room and had to break through the door as the keys were nowhere to be found and no one had any knowledge of what was in the room. It appeared that this was a secret that was purposely withheld from the South African public.

When Mr van Rensburg broke the door open he found a room filled with small boxes, in those boxes were priceless gold artifacts that came from the original site. It is still a mystery how these artifacts ended up at the University and when they arrived, but the fact remains that these were deliberately kept from the public eye.

The artifacts found dated from approximately 1000 AD to 1300 AD and consisted of a variety of materials such as pottery, trade glass beads, Chinese celadon ware, gold ornaments (including the famous golden rhino), ceramic figurines, organic remains, crafted ivory and bone and refined copper and iron.