A walk with the golden ancients

An Origin Safaris tour to the ancient gold trading city of Thulamela in the Pafuri Triangle in the northern Kruger National Park (KNP) changes the narrative of South Africa’s history. It’s been dubbed South Africa’s ’s best kept archaeological secret and it tells the tale of a magnificent civilization that flourished here for some 400 years between the 13th and 17th centuries.

South African history tends to start in the Cape with the arrival of the settlers, or with the making of the Zulu Kingdom in the 1800s. “But what if the story of South Africa’s history begins instead, here in the Pafuri Triangle in northern Kruger?” asks renowned historian Professor Peter Delius who has been researching nearby Thulamela and its trading system.

It is a late golden afternoon and we stand atop Thulamela hill, overlooking the valley of the ancients. We are deep in the Pafuri Triangle, in the heart of the wild, near to the confluence of the Limpopo and Luvuvhu Rivers. We climb up a steep stony path past a series of reconstructed stone walls to get to these hillside ruins that were once a royal citadel.

There’s great majesty here. It’s not just the extraordinary views of the floodplain below, dotted with baobabs, and herds of browsing elephants. It’s also the powerful sense of history, the contrast between this vast stillness and learning that right here was once a flourishing kingdom. ?

From around 1000AD as gold emerged to outrival the ivory trade, Thulamela was a city of skilled goldsmiths, blacksmiths, ivory carvers and business people, a system more sophisticated than we imagined, and one that lasted for four hundred years before it declined, likely due to drought and war. It wasn’t until as recently as 1983 that Thulamela was rediscovered by a park ranger, and it wasn’t until the 1990s, after apartheid, that the site was excavated on a large scale and restored, funded by Goldfields and led by archaeologist Sidney Miller.

We imagine the soundscape, drums, the clink of stones; feel the history underfoot. A thousand people lived on this hill, and two thousand below. The people here traded ivory, gold, leopard skins and rhino horn along the Indian Ocean Trade Route in exchange for cloth, glass beads, porcelain, copper and bronze. This trade connected Thulamela in turn to Mapungubwe, (roughly A.D. 1075 to 1220) a World Heritage Site on the Limpopo River in South Africa, as well as Great Zimbabwe (roughly A.D. 1100 and 1450) in Zimbabwe. Thulamela outlasted both.

Both Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe initially traded alluvial gold, but later underground shaft mining was used. The rulers of the kingdoms taxed the trade but they didn’t control the mining process. Archaeologists have found more than 300 gold working sites in Zimbabwe, Little Zimbabwes, as they are dubbed. As much as between 5000 to 8000 kilos a year was produced in the 15th century.

Much later, Cecil John Rhodes was said to have been bitterly disappointed that the best gold had been worked out by the ancients.

We walk amongst the hilltop ruins, first together, then scattering, each person taking a moment to disappear into the majesty. What an incredible part of South African history, with still so much to be learned and explored. On the way back to camp, we see a leopard. The ranger turns off the vehicle. The night is studded with fireflies.

Operated by Return Africa, Pafuri Camp is the springboard for Origin Safari’s remarkable Thulamela experience, a combination of archaeology and history plus wonderful wildlife and scenery. Return Africa has just been awarded guiding rights to the Thulamela site, which may only be visited with an armed guide, and Origin Safaris, a tour operator specializing in heritage and archaeology safaris, has just launched this package.

Pafuri Camp overlooks the Luvuvhu River and features a series of elegant tents reached by wooden walkways, a convivial pool and bar area, and a main meeting, greeting and eating area, where guests gather, sitting at night around a fire under the stars, probably one of humanity’s oldest known pleasures.?

We listen to an evocative talk by Dr Tim Forssman, senior lecturer at the University of Mpumalanga in Cultural and Heritage Studies, who gently navigates us through humanity’s emergence from the primordial soup, as it were, through the different stages from hominid to human.

Humanity evolved on the immense card table of the African savanna, wrote South African anthropologist Robert Ardrey, and there is evidence that our hominid ancestors lived in the Pafuri region around about 1.5 million years ago, an early stone tool culture that lasted until about 250?000 years ago before it advanced into the Middle Stone Age. Then advanced again into Late Stone Age hunter gatherers some 30?000 years ago. Forssman has a fantastic mobile museum that shows the different layers of ages - stone tools, beads, pottery and bones pertaining to different eras. We get to hold in our very own hands, some of the knives hewn from the hands of the ancients. They fit so well.

The next morning we visit Crook’s Crook’s Corner, the confluence of the Limpopo and Luvuvhu Rivers, with present day Zimbabwe to the north and Mozambique to the east. It was called Crook’s Corner because it was an easy escape route for outlaws and fugitives in the early 20th century. This is big sky and wide space country. It’s a baking 35 degrees even though the morning is young and we sit in the shade of a nyala berry tree, grateful for good coffee, cold water and the promise of a gin gong at noon.

From 400AD Iron Age Bantu pastoralists moved into the area, settling among the local San hunter-gatherers and it was a critical frontier. From around 650AD a trading system emerged, linking Pafuri to Chibuene ,a site close to modern Vilanculos on the Mozambican coast. From 900 this trading system stimulated the and the other forms of interaction that it stimulated? provide the context for emergence of the emergence of states – most famously at Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe, but including Thulamela which has until recently, remained a secret. ???

Then from around 1000 AD a great cultural civilization and trade network began to emerge in the Limpopo Basin, with this very confluence being a vital point of trade and transport for Thulamela.

“What is exciting”, says Delius “is that the trading system linked to societies 1500kms to the west in Botswana, and 1000kms south to Natal. Beads and chicken bones helped archeologists trace ?key nodes in this trade which included Madagascar, the Persian Gulf, India, Indonesia and China.

Research has shown that the beads – “the DNA of trade routes” – were a prototype currency made of fired glass from Iran and Iraq, finished and polished in South East Asia. The chicken bones found at some of the African sites , specific to this route, were found to be those of the red jungle fowl that originated in South Asia and Persia, and were brought here by Indian traders.

We close our eyes and listen to imaginary ancient sounds: the morning rooster, a call to prayer, women singing, water slapping the sides of dhow boats. Ivory was the main commodity on the Indian Ocean Trade Route, a reminder how long and tumultuous the relationship between elephants and people has been. Indian traders, sophisticated sailors, came via Madagascar and Chibuene in search of ivory, not just tusks but decorated ivory jewellery that was highly sought after in India. Pafuri then was teeming with elephants, the route here was accessible and the Indians had pretty much shot hunted out or domesticated their own (much smaller) elephants. In the distance we hear the call of a fish eagle.

We leave Crook’s Corner and drive slowly through the fever tree forests, past stately hardwoods and surreal baobabs, plains lit yellow by devils’ claw creeper. We pass silvery pans and vleis, stop to see the birds (the Pafuri area has an astonishing diversity of birdlife and 75% of the KNPs biodiversity). We see an elephant scratching its stomach with a stick held in its trunk. ?

That night, fires are lit in the boma, food is enjoyed and stories told. We hear from the staff, the poignant tale of how this land once belonged to the Makuleke people, their people. They were forcibly removed under apartheid but had their land returned to them in a landmark restitution in 1998. Pafuri is part of the Makuleke contractual concession, and Return Africa pays the community a concession, provides employment and invests in community projects. There is singing and dancing, stirring moments and more wine. The buffaloes are resting right outside the boma.

For more information about visiting Thulamela and Return Africa camp, email [email protected].