East of the uKhahlamba-Drakensberg, the Kalundu pottery style was replaced around1030 by a noticeably different style called Blackburn. Since Blackburn gives rise several centuries later to the pottery styles made by Nguni speakers, it must mark the settlement of Nguni speakers in South Africa. Anthropological and linguistic evidence shows that their ancestors lived in the Great Lakes region in East Africa during the first millennium AD. Their move from East Africa was possibly driven by too dry a climate there during the Medieval Warm Epoch, between 900 and 1290.
Stone walls built between 1300 and 1650 by Nguni speakers in what was once grasslands, KwaZulu-Natal.
The replacement of Kalundu with Blackburn appears abrupt, but relations between the incoming Nguni and the already established Kalundu farming communities are still unresearched. Linguistic data show that modern Zulu contains a residue of the Kalundu language, which appears to have been an ancestral form of Shona. This independent finding is consistent with the Kalundu ceramic evidence associated with the origins of the Zimbabwe Culture.
Nguni sites are different in character from the earlier Kalundu sites, being generally smaller and containing thinner and more sparsely distributed residues. Many represent small homesteads. The earliest are close to the coast. The archaeology shows that people built beehive huts up to 5.5 metres in diameter, kept cattle, gathered mussels and oysters from rocky outcrops on the seashore, and ate fish, which they possibly trapped in estuaries.
From around 1300, Nguni farmers began to move inland into grassland areas, where they built stonewalled homesteads. Grasslands were not ideal environments for African subsistence farmers, though people must already have been familiar with them through earlier use as a summer grazing resource. Settlement there was not simply a case of expanded resource utilisation.
The move coincided with the onset of the Little Ice Age in the late 1200s. Temperatures dropped worldwide: the annual growth rings of a yellowwood tree felled near Howick in 1916 show that growth in the 1300s was slower for longer than at any other time in the rest of the second millennium AD. Agricultural productivity would have dropped too, causing a crisis that very likely provoked violence as farmers competed for diminished resources. That this was so is indicated by the locations of the earliest grassland sites, in defendable positions on steep-sided hilltops or spurs, and often a good distance from water and arable land. Since one of the principal ways of resolving tension was to move away from it, this social stress was most probably the motor that drove Nguni farmers into the grasslands and forced them to build in less-than-ideal places.
The remains of the floor of a house built in the 1500–1600s by Western Sotho- Tswana people near modern Thabazimbi, Limpopo. In the middle of the floor is a hollow used as a hearth; right behind it is a raised area for storage.
Some farmers crossed the escarpment and settled in the 1400s and 1500s on grasslands deep in the interior, north and south of the Vaal River. These were the Fokeng. Although a Sotho-speaking group in historical times, new archaeological research suggests that they were originally Nguni. Distinct from other Sotho-Tswana groups, the Fokeng have their origin site at Ntsuanatsatsi hill in the northeast of today’s Free State, and their ceramics are related to the Blackburn style of the Nguni. Fokeng distinctiveness is also suggested by the missionary Ellenberger’s claim that the Fokeng dialect, customs and dress were adopted by the Sotho-speaking Kwena, who moved south of the Vaal River perhaps around the mid-1600s.
Kwena oral traditions suggest that they merged with the Fokeng early on at the place of origin, Ntsuanatsatsi, though this is not
These stone walls once made up a set of livestock enclosures in the centre of an Nguni homestead near modern Babanango in KwaZulu-Natal. This homestead was part of a Khumalo chiefdom in the late 1700s.
detectable in the ceramics. These traditions probably represent Kwena efforts to legitimise their occupation of Fokeng lands. By the 1900s, the Free State Fokeng were ‘people of the dew’, scattered and apparently without political ambition, but respected as First People. Archaeological remains in KwaZulu-Natal dating to between 1300 and 1650 include hut floors, granary platforms, grindstones and livestock remains. These remains are consistent with homestead descriptions from Portuguese shipwreck survivors in the 1500s: a few houses around a kraal, in which there were about a hundred cows and a hundred and twenty very large sheep . . . Here lived an old man with his sons and grandsons.’ Among the foods the Portuguese recorded were sour milk, beer, bread and, along the coast, fish.
In the following centuries, social and environmental adversity prompted a series of uncoordinated northwesterly movements by small groups across the escarpment. The Phetla, Polane and Phuti – offshoots of the Zizi of the Thukela basin – crossed the uKhahlamba- Drakensberg from 1600 onwards, in one instance at least, according to tradition, to resolve tension. Nguni-like settlement layouts in the Caledon valley and near modern Winburg in the Free State may be a consequence of these movements. All spoke a form of Sesotho by the 1800s.
North of the Vaal River, Nguni-speakers intruded into areas occupied by Sotho communities, reaching the Waterberg from the early 1600s onwards. Other Nguni communities reached the Mpumalanga escarpment where they became known as Koni (= Nguni in Sotho). Around 1700, the ancestors of the Northern and Southern Ndebele settled north of the Vaal River. This movement coincided with the peak of the Little Ice Age, which caused harsh climatic conditions on a worldwide scale. Differences in the expression of homestead layout and ancestry claims link Northern and Southern Ndebele respectively to origins in northern KwaZulu-Natal and the Thukela basin. As a consequence of movements and interaction, various Nguni communities became ‘Sotho-ised’ or heavily influenced by the Venda. Others retained an Nguni identity.
A close-up of a stone wall at Molokwane in North West Province, still standing from the time it was built by people of a Kwena chiefdom (a Western Sotho-Tswana group) in the late 1700s or early 1800s.
In the 1700s, international trade grew in significance as a social force. Control of trade uenced by the Venda. Others retained an Nguni identity. In the 1700s, international trade grew in significance as a social force. Control of trade wealth was a key factor in the development of large, centralised Northern Nguni polities, just as it had been 800 years earlier in the Limpopo valley.
