Schroda
Between 900 and 1000 AD, Bantu-speaking peoples established a trade centre at Schroda, a few kilometres Northeast of Mapungubwe Hill. Islamic trade from North Africa and the Middle East had begun infiltrating communities along Africa’s East Coast and further inland, and it was here that beads were introduced in exchange for ivory. Cattle were very much the measure of wealth, and the village of Schroda was built with the cattle kraal at its centre.
At this time Bambata pottery, decorated with cuneiform-like wedge marks, was produced. It became precious in its own right, and later even broken pieces were used as currency for trade. The majority of pottery, however, was in the Zhizo style, decorated in rainbow-like patterns around the base of the vessels. Schroda is also known for its numerous figurines, one of which was found on Sentinel opposite the Schroda site across the Limpopo River.
K2
Schroda was abandoned when a new centre of trade known as K2, 1km Southwest of Mapungubwe, was established (1000-1220 AD). The new inhabitants, identified with the ancestors of the present day Shona speaking peoples, sent the Schroda people fleeing west and cut off their traditional trade routes. At K2 the inhabitants began manufacturing their own beads, the most striking of which are called Garden Rollers, and iron and copper smelting gained ground. It was a time of abundance, and beautiful decorated pottery, known as Leopard’s Kopje style, distinctive for its “punctuated” (pricked) patterning, was manufactured during this era.
Mapungubwe
Approximately one mile southwest of Sentinel, on a property called Greefswalt in South Africa, rises the famous Mapungubwe Hill (Place of the Jackal), around which grew Africa’s first city. Archaeologists believe that, at its height, Mapungubwe encompassed 3,000-5,000 inhabitants over a 30,000 square kilometres area. In days when national boundaries were neither delineated nor enforced, this civilization spread across the Limpopo River, and associated sites are scattered throughout Sentinel.
With the growth of wealth and status at K2, came the division of its society. Royalty emerged, and it was no longer acceptable for them to live with commoners. In 1220 the royal elite moved to the slopes of Mapungubwe Hill, and the King took residence on top. The Central Cattle Pattern gave way to a new social spatial transformation known as the Zimbabwe Pattern. The King and his royal court became the pivot of Mapungubwe civilization, while, for the first time, cattle were relegated to the periphery of the village. Again, beautiful, highly burnished decorated pottery was produced, this time distinctively marked with incised cross-hatching patterns on its collars, rims or shoulders.
Mapungubwe Hill is approximately 300m long and 50m wide in places. Its steep, forbidding cliffs made access difficult – it was only via two long vertical passages that the summit could be reached, one near the court and the other near the women’s residences. This afforded the King and his wives elevated status and security. His status rose from one of royalty to one of Godliness, a direct line to the ancestors.
The King was responsible for handling disputes arising out of the growing trade and industry of the time. The resolution of these disputes involved complicated procedures that would eventually lead to an audience with the King. At the lower entrance of the Hill was the Messenger’s Court where applications for audience with the King were heard. Soldiers, praise singers and musicians may have lived at the top in front of what is believed to have been a building of prestige, clearly a palace. They were set away from the royal wives’ residences, which were typically on the other side of the King’s palace from the front entrance to the hill.
Gold became wealth during this period. When the hilltop royal graves were found in the l930’s, three of the twenty-three graves excavated yielded gold. The find included wooden-cored gold rhinos (surfaced with 92% pure gold foil held in place with solid gold nails), gold beads, gold wire bangles, a gold-covered wooden bowl, and a gold-covered sceptre (These are now in housed in the Mapungubwe Collection at the University of Pretoria). In fact, in one grave a woman skeleton was found with over one hundred gold bangles on her arms and ankles, and there were over twelve thousand gold beads in the grave. Unfortunately, the wealth of this find attracted looters and non-professionals who stirred up and removed tons of dirt from the site before archaeologists could systematically map and study it. As a result, much valuable information about the site and its inhabitants was destroyed and lost forever.
Gold beads and coiled wire, Dutch, Venetian and Russian trade beads, Garden Rollers, ostrich eggshell beads, copper beads and wire bangles, soapstone pendants, pottery shards, spindle whorls (clay disks used in spinning cotton), soapstone pipes, blistered crucibles and blowpipes (used in smelting copper, gold and iron) and other artefacts similar to those found at Mapungubwe, are found at various sites on Sentinel, indicating unprecedented industry and a widespread economy on the ground.
It is not certain what brought about the demise of the Mapungubwe civilisation. For unknown reasons Mapungubwe was abruptly abandoned in 1300 AD. Some of its people moved North-east to present day Masvingo, Zimbabwe, where Great Zimbabwe was later established, while others moved south to the Venda area in the Soutpansberg of today’s Limpopo Province in South Africa.
Mapungubwe National Park across the river from Sentinel Ranch was declared a National Monument and a World Heritage Site, and its bountiful artefacts are currently being catalogued in one of South African archaeology’s most extensive re-classification exercises.
Sentinel’s archaeological heritage, including Mapungubwe, places it in a category of its own in the Zimbabwean cultural landscape.
Khami
At the western boundary of Sentinel is a hill that shows the typical social arrangement of Mapungubwe, but it dates between 1450 and 1800 and is attributed to the Khami Empire, based outside present day Bulawayo. Again the leader of the settlement was elevated above the commoners, and the cattle kraal was placed at the bottom of the hill. Cut stone walling sets the site apart from others, carefully chiselled and stacked in chequered patterns and chevrons. One stone lying amongst a pile of collapsed walling exhibits two engraved round circles with a dot in the middle, and this is thought to relate to the symbolism of royalty, being that of crocodile eyes. Yellow, blue and red trade beads are plentiful at the site, as are pieces of copper wire bangles, copper ingots, ostrich shell beads and pottery, distinctively decorated in black, red and orange, typical of the Khami style.
The Refuge Period
In the 1823, Mzilikazi, a Zulu general, declared war on King Shaka and his ancestral home, and swore to create a Zulu kingdom far more extensive and greater than any the Zulu nation had ever seen. He and his marauding warriors headed up through Natal, the Transvaal and into Zimbabwe, raping and pillaging as they went. Thus began the Refuge, or Mfecane Period, during which time the local people focused their energies on safeguarding and hiding their livestock and hard-earned crops of millet and sorghum from Mzilikazi. Numerous log-fronted shelters have been found in the upper reaches of the sandstone hills of Limpopo Valley that contain one or many grain bins, where the local people hid their crops. The grain bins, often six feet high and four feet across, were constructed of clay and reed, and when one realizes the time and energy spent in carting the raw materials and water from the Limpopo River to these remote hilltop sites, one gets a pretty good idea of just how important these stores were to the survival of the local people.
The bins were constructed on raised mopani platforms to prevent moisture and insects from getting into the grain stores. They had smallish windows near the top, which, after the bins were filled, were sealed with clay. When the grain was needed, the windows were broken open, and a shallow clay bowl used to scoop the grain out. (The pottery of the time was typically not decorated, or very crudely decorated, a sign of the times). The bins were too large for an adult to reach the bottom, however, so a child would be put through the opening to empty it. The bins are remarkable because they testify to a troubled age, and there is something rather spiritual about seeing the finger and hand-prints in their clay surfaces of the people who made them.
The same people constructed stone cattle and goat stockades on top of hills, too, to hide their livestock from the marauding tribesmen. The walls, constructed of crudely piled stones, are still clearly visible today, and one of the best examples of these paddocks is on the crown of Pimwa, the flat-topped hill in front of the safari camp.
A clay pot filled with strings of glass trade beads numbering in their thousands was discovered in a rock crevasse near Tobwani Gorge, and in a small cavern further in, two old black-powder rifles were discovered – believed to have been left to and hidden by trusted locals to hunt elephants for ivory and trade.
A wonderful resource on the history of human habitation of the Limpopo Valley is Resilient Landscapes: Socio-Environmental Dynamics in the Shashi-Limpopo Basin, Southern Zimbabwe c. AD 800 to the Present, by Munyaradzi Manyanga, Uppsala Universitet, SWEDEN, 2007.
European Settlement
After the British took over control of the Dutch East India Company’s port at Cape Town in the late 1700’s, waves of Dutch-speaking Voortrekkers (pioneers) travelled upwards through South Africa to escape British domination. The discovery of gold on the Johannesburg reef, diamonds in Kimberley and copper in the then Southern Rhodesia, however, attracted more British settlers, and Cecil John Rhodes (founder of Rhodesia) created a supply route between Johannesburg and the copper mines north of the Limpopo. Fort Tuli was established in 1890 to protect that supply route, just 33km west Sentinel’s boundary. Ox wagons carrying tinned foods, imported goods, rifles, furl-iron load and glass bottles made the arduous journey up country, and Sentinel was probably just as attractive a hunting spot then as it is now. Remnants of pioneer camps, wagons and ox carts, glass soda bottles, buttons, cooking utensils, etc., have been found on the Ranch.
Sentinel Limpopo Eco Safaris 