Mapungubwe and the African kingdoms
Bantu-speaking farmers settle the eastern half of the region, and the gold-working kingdom of Mapungubwe rises on the Limpopo, long before any European arrives.
- Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape (World Heritage List) — UNESCO World Heritage Centre (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
From around the third or fourth century CE, farmers speaking Bantu languages, who grew sorghum and millet, herded cattle and worked iron, settled the better-watered eastern half of what is now South Africa. Over centuries they absorbed and intermarried with Khoe-San peoples; the click sounds in isiXhosa and isiZulu are a lasting sign of that mixing.
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
In the Limpopo valley, a kingdom centred on Mapungubwe Hill grew rich between about 1075 and 1220 by trading gold and ivory to the Indian Ocean coast, in exchange for glass beads and Chinese ceramics. Its rulers lived on the hilltop, separated from commoners below, one of the earliest signs of class-based kingship in southern Africa. Royal graves held objects covered in gold foil, including the famous golden rhinoceros. Mapungubwe’s role passed to Great Zimbabwe to the north.
- Mapungubwe Cultural Landscape (World Heritage List) — UNESCO World Heritage Centre (2003)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
By the eighteenth century the region was home to many chiefdoms and kingdoms: Xhosa chiefdoms in the east, Sotho and Tswana towns on the highveld, Pedi and Venda kingdoms in the north and Nguni chiefdoms in what is now KwaZulu-Natal. Some highveld Tswana towns were as large as Cape Town. They had their own laws, oral histories and praise poetry, and their encounters with expanding colonists from the south would shape the next two centuries.
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
Why it matters today
Apartheid-era textbooks claimed that Black and white settlers arrived at about the same time in an "empty land". Mapungubwe, deliberately downplayed under apartheid, now features on national honours and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a proof that complex African states flourished here centuries before colonialism. The kingdoms and chiefdoms that followed are the roots of today's Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Pedi, Venda and other identities, and traditional leaders still hold real influence.