It’s a land of giants where one of them has had a tantrum and thrown huge, ancient trees about, turning them upside down, and kicked gigantic boulders around. It’s the land of Mapungubwe in Limpopo, and it’s magical and mysterious.
I spent a few days in December at the Mapungubwe National Park World Heritage Site, on the border with Zimbabwe and Botswana, at the confluence of two mighty rivers — the Limpopo and the Shashe. Several viewpoints on the mountain above the confluence offer a unique view of three countries meeting, with birds calling overhead, elephants grazing in the grasslands far below, thorn and mopane trees dotting the landscape, a breeze blowing up from the rivers below — it’s good to live in Africa.
About 2km south of the rivers lies the sacred Mapungubwe Hill, a freestanding 300m long and 30m high oval mountain in the plains. It holds its secrets under grass and rocks, with sheer cliff faces to ward off intruders.
Though much archaeological research has been done on the hilltop since the 1930s, there are still many unanswered questions, such as the meaning of Mapungubwe. In the 13th century it was the fortress of kings who lived on the hilltop, lording over their subjects below, who planted millet, sorghum and cotton, kept cattle, sheep and goats, and worked iron, copper and gold. A daily ritual was to take food and water to the royalty above, through a stepped crevice in the cliff.
Most will know of the palm-sized gold rhino that was found on the summit in 1933, with a gold bowl and gold sceptre, now exhibited in the University of Pretoria Museums. The rhino consists of thin gold foil tacked onto a wooden mould. About 26,000 gold beads and 100,000 glass beads were found, in addition to gold foil and wire, tacks and pins. About 27 graves were uncovered, three on the hilltop with the gold jewellery.
Trade took place between Mapungubwe and Arab, Indian and Chinese traders via Sofala (now Beira) in Mozambique, with glass beads, cotton and glazed ceramics exchanged for ivory, rhino horn, leopard skins and iron. The population moved to Zimbabwe in about 1290 CE when conditions became drier at Mapungubwe, and Great Zimbabwe arose.
“Other potential reasons for the decline could have been the potential shift in trading opportunities, which lessened the economic significance of the Mapungubwe area,” says Dr Ndukuyakhe Ndlovu, SANparks manager of archaeology.
As I stand on the summit, I gaze north to the glistening rivers and walk the boardwalks gently, trying to imagine life on the hilltop 800 years ago. Holes in the boulders indicate frameworks for huts; large basins chiselled out of boulders were used for water storage or baths. Rows of smaller holes in rocks were carved for the two-player game morabaraba, a game popular throughout Africa, with origins in ancient Egypt. Middens below revealed patterned potsherds, human and animal figurines, spindle whorls, and slag.
The wealth from the trade led to the first Southern African kingdom emerging, with a class-based society. Its nearby sister sites of Schroda and K2 were occupied from 900 CE, before the king decamped to Mapungubwe. A sophisticated economy based on iron, copper, gold mining, ceramics, textile and jewellery manufacturing existed.
Excavations have continued over the decades, but once the site was proclaimed a Unesco World Heritage Landscape Site in 2003, a moratorium halted diggings. “There have never been complete excavations,” says Dr Sian Tiley-Nel, head of University of Pretoria Museums and curator of the Mapungubwe Collection.
“Archaeologists suggest there is evidence of over 400 related Mapungubwe sites in the wider Limpopo region,” adds Tiley-Nel.
As I drive around the reserve, herds of elephants appear around every other turn, silent custodians of this landscape. Impalas, zebras, blesbok, kudus, giraffes and eland keep them company. Back at the comfortable chalet, I had to walk mindfully — elephants appeared 10m from the stoep.
As a place was needed to house parts of the collection, the Mapungubwe Interpretation Centre rose from the side of a rocky koppie at the park entrance. Completed in 2009, the same year in which it won the World Building of the Year award, its earth tiles and rock roofs rise out of the earth dramatically.
A distinctive feature of the building is its round, cave-shaped timbrel vaults, a construction method first seen in Valencia, Spain, in 1382. Architect Antoni Gaudi was inspired by this principle in designing his Sagrada Familia. The four vaults — one open and sheltering a restaurant and curio shop, the others enclosed to form the centre — consist of five layers of clay tiles and 5% cement, with a 14m span, with no supporting columns, covered with local rocks, as is the whole building. Locals were trained to create the fired earth tiles and build the structures.
“It’s nature distributing its natural forces to the ground with no steel, so it’s low-embodied energy, and it’s entirely compatible. It’s an ancient pre-industrial revolution technique that was taken to Spain from North Africa, we don’t know quite when, by the Moors,” says the architect Peter Rich.
“The building [has a carbon footprint] 80% [smaller] … than a normal building, built of earth tiles. It’s an ancient pre-industrial building technique that has been revived.”
A ramp leads into the centre, with three interleading rooms, where the walls are lined with displays of beads, pottery, stone implements, bone tools and a replica golden rhino, sceptre and bowl.
While the San roamed this land, leaving behind their paintings in nearby caves, three groups — Venda, Pedi and Tsonga — claim links to the heritage, but there is “no direct scientific evidence of the link between those who lived within the Mapungubwe landscape and any living populations in the country”, stresses Ndlovu.
I canvassed views at the centre, from tannies and schoolkids to staff. All marvelled at the building, all could identify with the building in some unexplained way, though it was something they had never seen before. “So we’ve actually achieved our objective,” says Rich.
And its influence is far-reaching.
“It’s been a very influential building because it started a ripple effect of a whole relook in India and China of timbrel vaulting, and how younger generations could re-engage with this technique, which is labour intensive but, more importantly, it’s an iconic building that young African architects in training have an affinity [for] and identity with — they identify it as having implicit DNA that resonates with them,” explains Rich.
He says that the SANparks executive at the time chose his competition design over others because there was “something embedded in it that is about being African, and embedded in the land. They couldn’t quite quantify it, and because I was exploring for an architecture that is about nature and nature’s forces and how you can make the soil of the ground vault through the air, we’ve been salvaged by an ancient technique that’s believed to have its origins in Africa.”
In The Architecture of Peter Rich: Conversations with Africa, Jonathan Noble writes: “This building is built from the soil, it carries the rocks of the earth, in a sense it is the landscape.”
Perhaps it is the soil, the rocks, the landscape that visitors feel deeply in their souls.
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