This is a guest post by Sipho…

In my Grade Eight IsiZulu class, our set book was a novel set in the early 1800s. It was a fictionalised account of what the Iron Age existence of a tribe living in KwaZulu Natal would have been like – before the white man arrived in his ships; even before Shaka Zulu’s fearsome warriors began their raiding expeditions.

It was a well-written book and within its pages I was transported back to those simple years when the greatest challenge of the day was finding a cave where iron ore could be mined. But the book was horribly flawed in one respect. When the lead character’s daughter asks her grandmother where her people came from, she replies, “from the north”. When she enquires as to when this event took place, she is told that nobody really knows.

In other IsiZulu classes, when we were made to recount the history of the Zulu nation, the lineage of kings would never extend further than uZulu kaMalandela, Shaka’s fifth ancestor. Nobody seems to know who came before Malandela. There is a gigantic cut that simply sweeps away the history and collective memory of South Africa’s most populous nation before that point in the historic narrative. Whether this was deliberately caused, or whether history simply had fallen victim to this part of Africa’s lack of an indigenous script, we may never know.

What we do know is that this lost history fell neatly into the apartheid government’s narrative of an unpopulated South Africa prior to the 1600s. If the land was unoccupied before Jan van Riebeeck arrived with his three ships in 1652, the story went, it would stand to reason that nobody really had a firm historic claim to the land. First come would literally be first served (unless of course “first come” happened to be of the San people – then you just poisoned his watering hole).

In this particular narrative, there would be no moral high ground for the indigenous population, since they had actually arrived on the land only a few decades before the Dutch East India Company.

However, this story had gotten history very wrong in one important area.

Have you ever visited the ruins at Mapungubwe in Limpopo, or Mmamagwa in Botswana, or Great Zimbabwe in Zimbabwe?

Mapungubwe was discovered by an archaeological expedition from the University of Pretoria in 1933. It is thought that the kingdom of Mapungubwe thrived between 1075 and 1220, while Great Zimbabwe achieved glory between 1100 and 1450. Many fascinating historical artefacts have been found at both sites, including evidence of metal smelting, a complex society and trade with Arabia and China. The site where Great Zimbabwe stands was discovered long before Mapungubwe, but both ruins quickly became pawns in the political games of the day. The government of Rhodesia pressured archaeologists to deny that Africans could have built Great Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent, South African scientists faced similar pressure from the apartheid government.

Excavation work on Mapungubwe was largely completed at the turn of the new millennium, yet my classmates and I were still being taught this flawed version of our history, even after the political pressure on science was eradicated.

I’ve personally had the privilege of spending a few days at Maropeng, and have visited historical sites dotted around South Africa like Kaditshwene in the North West.

It really is a moment of catharsis when you stand among these ancient ruins, and you suddenly get a sense of just how fleeting our stay on this land is, and how pathetic our fights for dominance over each other are.

I wish I could know the full history of my people, in the same way that the various Asian, European and North African groups can draw almost a direct historical line across millennia.

I really wish that the little that remains of my people’s history had been left intact.