LASTING images of my last visit to OR Tambo International Airport are of Mapungubwe hill.
Mapungubwe inspires cultural nationalism and historical honour in South Africa. The creative industry there has taken notice of this cradle of Ubuntu called Mapungubwe.
South Africa is a country endowed with many world class archaeological treasures. One of these treasures is a curiously named 2,1 million years old hominid fossilised skull, Mrs Ples.
A cast of it watches over me at work daily.
It unsettles, to my amusement, a number of my office visitors.
The fossil came from Sterkfontein, one of South Africa’s celebrated world heritage sites and the cast is a gift from a South African friend.
However, it is Mapungubwe that catches the imagination of most South Africans and Zimbabweans alike.
Perhaps this is so because the site is clearly about modern people and specifically Bantu like most of us.
And for Zimbabweans like me Mapungubwe has for decades been of sacrosanct significance as the umbilical cord for the Zimbabwe cultural civilisation.
In an existence shy of pre-colonial nationalism and very much taken to colonially constructed nationalism, we have seen tensile cultural heritage nationalism in the Mapungubwe-Great Zimbabwe debates between South Africans and Zimbabweans.
Who do we pay homage to; the father or the son (sorry ladies for the biblical relic!)?
This week I had hoped to take our traditional chiefs to task about their colonial regalia and practice.
As I searched the web, looking for befitting images, I stumbled upon online ‘breaking news’ on Zimbabwean archaeology.
A panel of expert archaeologists, from Zimbabwe, South Africa and United Kingdom, that have been carrying out research in south western Zimbabwe since 2013 have, in an online publication PLOS, just arrived at conclusions that will shake global understanding of the Zimbabwe civilisation.
This panel of archaeology dons was led by Shadreck Chirikure of Cape Town University.
The panel includes two eminent Zimbabwean scholars based in South Africa.
The new findings by this panel, backed by extensive analysis and radio carbon dating of Leopard’s Kopje and Zimbabwe material culture at Leopard’s Kopje, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Mapela concludes that it was at Mapela, a hill in south western Zimbabwe closer to our border with Botswana, that the Zimbabwe culture first manifested!
The Zimbabwe culture material remains at Mapungubwe were long dated to the 13th century AD and 14th to 15th century AD at Great Zimbabwe.
Related material at Khami ruins has been dated to the 15th century to 19th century AD.
The latter two tying in well with available historical evidence on the Mutapa and Rozvi states.
The Zimbabwe culture identity, in archaeology, consists of stone walls, dhaka floors, social stratification and sacred leadership.
This has been found in abundance at Mapela hill and dated to the 11th century AD, making Mapela nearly 200 years older as a Zimbabwe site than Mapungubwe. These findings are massive and will surely bring back global archaeology debates on state formation in sub Saharan Africa back to Zimbabwe, a century after the first debates were ignited.
This has been a developing story since 1968 when celebrated local archaeologist, Peter Garlake, first reported on some of these Mapela attributes.
He concluded this had been a stand-alone Leopard’s Kopje capital.
Garlake unfortunately only looked at the Mapela hilltop and missed on the full extent of a site that Chirikure and team have now shown dwarfs Mapungubwe. Based on Garlake’s findings and cultural precedence scholars like Huffman reasoned that the Zimbabwe culture originated from Mapungubwe, which at that time was the only Leopard’s Kopje site exhibiting the full Zimbabwe culture attributes.
These generalised and at times convenient conclusions resulted in not much effort being made to research ‘lesser’ sites like Mapela which dominated the Zimbabwe archaeological landscape.
Common sense should however have pointed that one day a Great Zimbabwe ancestor could emerge from among these Leopard’s Kopje sites.
Enter Chirikure and his team and our Great Zimbabwe knowledge horizons have been extensively broadened; Mapela Hill Zimbabwe culture settlement is bigger and older than that at Mapungubwe!
From Mapela this research has been able to show occupation associated with all the major pottery traditions in the Limpopo Valley; Zhizo, K2, transitional K2 and Mapungubwe.
The glass beads also mirror the same classification sequence.
The large volume of glass beads attest to intense participation in Indian Ocean long distance trade with South and South East Asia.
Clearly Mapungubwe, like Great Zimbabwe, is an offshoot of Mapela.
In 1990 I had a trip to Shashe/Tuli confluence visiting ‘Pioneer Column’ monuments including Fort Tuli in the Tuli circle.
Camping here and later in the Matopos on the same trip left lasting romantic images on me.
I was literally carrying with me trivia from environs so endowed with spirituality and history.
Little did I realise that as I inspected monuments of BSACo conquest and plunder I was only a few kilometres from the cradle of Zimbabwean civilisation, Mapela Hill.
When the Pioneer Column outspanned here in 1890 the founding spirits of the nation, from this Mapela Hill, must have blown winds of tiredness into the limbs of these shameless men, women and animals.
Mapela is a prominent hill near the confluence of the Shashi/Shashani confluence, and almost on the Zimbabwe Botswana border.
Mapela is in a remote part of the country and almost inaccessible in true Dzimbahwe, abode of the spirits, fashion.
Herein lay the Zimbabwe ancestries in eternal peace, undisturbed by modern civilising agencies that pay little regard to our archaeological heritage.
If it had been accessible I bet an EIA permit could easily have been issued for its flooding or destruction.
Time is now for authorities to move in with haste and secure this cultural and historical treasure before criminal-syndicates rampage the site.
This is a potential World Heritage site.
That would be World Heritage Site number four on the Zimbabwe culture after Great Zimbabwe, Khami and Mapungubwe.
We have rich and privileged origins.
To Chirikure and company a big thanks to you for this breath of fresh air!