Empire of the South: Early Kingdoms

Early Kingdoms


In Credo Mutwa's Book 'Indaba, My Children' : he narrates the coming of the strange ones on a great canoe. The strange ones were greek/phoenicians who brought their bronze weapons around villages in nearby the Zambezi river. The strange ones arrival caused wars among the natives of the land, and gave them methods of melting metals into instruments.

A hundred generates after the arrival of the strange ones, a man who had heard of the phoenicians wanted to face them in battle. This man, Munumutaba(Man of the mountain) decided to instead revive the empire of the strange ones but as the ruler himself.


People of the turban 'Lemba' descent from Semitic people who came from Middle East in particular areas around modern Yemen. Lemba were Muslim traders with possible Jewish ancestry who gradually Africanised. Most academics believe that the construction of the enclosure at Great Zimbabwe was of a mixed effort from the Lemba and Mashona.

Munumutaba raided many lands Batswana & Mambo which the many refugees went to the Drakensbergs, land of the Vhavenda & Swazi. The successors of Munumutaba were in some way involved in wars against other tribes, further the Munumutabas allied with some Batswana clans, Khwe(Bushmen) & Arab merchants within the region. The "Arabi" Lemba found themselves in a civil war were their candidate lost the Butua (Bushmen/Barwa/Batwa) war in 1644.

The names of Mapungubwe's rulers are unknow. It was seemingly at the height of its wealth when much of its population abandoned the area in about 1220 AD, a development that experts attribute to a temporary drying up of the region due to global climate cooling.

It is believed that much of the core of Mapungubwe's population migrated to the northeast, founding the earliest Vakaranga/Bakalanga Kingdom (c.1250-1450); whose centre became Great Zimbabwe. Some of Great Zimbabwe’s population moved then north to find the Mutapa (Mwenemutapa, Munumutapa) state known to the Portuguese who settled along the Mozambique coast thereafter as the "Monomotapa". At about the same time some Ikalanga traditions trace the formation of the Butwa state under Bakalanga Kingdom to the south-west migration of people from Mutapa during a period of strife fuelled by the Portuguese-sponsored expansion of ivory, gold and slave trading into eastern Zimbabwe.


In the past Ikalanga/Karanga, like Setswana speaking communities have been distinguished by their ability to peacefully incorporate outsiders into their ranks. The Bakwena royal names "Sechele" and "Sebele", for example, are the convergence of names does suggest more than casual contact, which in Sekwena tradition can be traced at least as far back to the mid-18th century reign of Kgosi Motswasele I & Morena Mohlomi'a Matsie from Bamonaheng/Bamonageng a tributary state under Bakwena, who are both remembered as renowned travellers. The glory of Bakalanga kingdom, moreover, whose power was witnessed and undoubtedly to some extent inspired the Bakwena young prince Sechele and as well as a generation of Bangwato royals.

The early history of Bakalanga of north-eastern Botswana and south-western Zimbabwe, along with other historically and linguistically associated VaShona & VhaVenda groups is contentious. Most linguists regard Ikalanga as a separate language, as opposed to a dialect, from Chishona, which itself has been standardised in modern times from a variety of existing dialects, such as Karanga, Lemba, Zezuru, Korekore, Ndau, and Manyika. It has been suggested by some linguists, however, that early Ikalanga may have been the root language of Karanga and other Chishona dialects.

One can further trace the emergence of the Bakalanga and other modern groups to the flowering of late Iron Age civilisation in the region, more especially in the Shashe-Limpopo Basin from the tenth century AD, which scholars believe was accompanied by a significant increase in both human and livestock populations. This is prominently evidenced by the survival of stone-walled ruins like Madzimbabwe whose settlements were distributed by the thirteenth century as far as the Mozambique coast on the east and Sowa pan on the west. While the largest and best known of these is the Great Zimbabwe site, which between 1250 and 1450 is estimated to have at any given time housed 11-18,000 people, numerous smaller early Madzimbabwe are located throughout north-eastern Botswana.

Here it may be noted that Malay merchant ships of the period were able to sail directly from Southeast Asia to the African coast in about a month using the equatorial trade winds. Beyond the archaeological evidence, the intensity of this early Indonesian connection to the continent is reflected in the Malay colonization of Madagascar.

Pages:  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9.

*Video: Empire of the South: Mutapa.

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