For thousands of years, copper, meteoric iron, and gold were collected and used simply as another stone, only brighter and more beautiful. The development of true metallurgy, as opposed to the lithic use of naturally occurring metals, followed from several discoveries. Unlike other stones, metals were malleable and did not chip or flake when struck. The first discovery was that when heated they became more workable. Copper, for example, when cold-hammered quickly becomes brittle, but if it is heated and then hammered (a process called annealing) it can be shaped and hardened without cracking. The second discovery was that metal could be recovered from ore by smelting …

Copper and Trade in Southern Africa

Written by James Kipling BA (Hons) Archaeology

Miners, Smelters, and Metalsmiths

The history of metallurgy in southern Arica dates back at least 1800 years. The practice of mining for metal ores (and prospecting for stones like yellow chalcopyrite, green malachite, red cuprite, blue azurite, and black magnetite) and familiarity with the technologies of smelting and smithing spread rapidly through sub-Saharan farming communities. While the art of working metals (smithing) was practiced by many people south of the Kunene and Zambezi Rivers, the recovery of metal from ore (smelting) remained a specialized craft. Smelting work, practiced by a few skilled men, was guarded by the initiated and governed by taboos.

It can be said that the smelting of metal involved a series of consecutive stages. Ore was collected from surface outcrops and shallow open-cast pits or was extracted from below the ground through mineshafts dug with iron hoes and digging sticks. Underground tunnels were excavated using crowbars, with pieces of iron attached to the ends of heavy sticks, and metal ore was brought to the surface in sacks made from the skins of impala, buffalo, and wildebeest. It was then cleaned and concentrated using dolerite hammerstones to crush the parent rock. Slow-burning charcoal was made using suitable hardwoods (camel thorn, umbrella thorn, or knob thorn acacia trees, and where available mopane, or protea trees). A flat bowl or low shaft furnace was constructed using clay and soil from white ant hills. Without the height needed to generate sufficient natural draft, these small furnaces were built with clay pipes (tuyeres) through which air was blown to increase the temperature during the smelt. This was achieved using bag bellows made of animal hides and drum bellows carved from wood, with nozzles oftentimes made of animal horn. The clay tuyeres were flared at the ends and the nozzles of the bellows were held in place with wooden pegs or large stones. Occasionally, taller natural draft furnaces were constructed with many more tuyeres that were larger in diameter. With the necessary heat achieved, the prepared copper and iron ore melted. After smelting, crude copper nodules were recovered from the dust and slag and were hammered into bangles or were resmelted in potsherd crucibles placed inside refining furnaces with the resulting liquid copper being poured into clay moulds lined with powdered ash. Various ingots were cast including the famous Katanga crosses of the Zambezi Valley and the less well-known Marale and Musuku copper ingots of the Limpopo Valley. In the case of smelted iron, the metal bloom was refined in smithing hearths and beaten on stone anvils into usable metal. Iron tools were fashioned and copper ingots were drawn into wire.

The mining of metal ores by early southern African farming communities had far reaching social and economic implications. Mining was labour intensive. Specialised centers of production formed around the best mineral deposits. Some of these deposits (such as the copper and iron deposits at Phalaborwa mined from 700 CE and the copper deposits at Musina mined from 900 CE) lay in unhealthy regions. People and animals were plagued by mosquitoes, ticks, and tsetse flies; the transmitters of malaria, tick fever, and sleeping sickness. Trade networks developed around isolated mines allowing for the exchange of product for produce. Iron, important for making farming implements and hunting weapons like arrowheads and assegai (spear) tips, and copper for making objects of adornment, art, and ritual, could be exchanged for cattle, sorghum, and millet, produce that was limited by fly and fever. Commerce connected people. Interregional trade in copper, iron, mined pigments (including ochres and dark manganese oxides), farmed grains, dried fish, animal hides, salt, and honey linked neighbouring communities, bringing together hunters, herders, foragers, farmers, and miners.

With the rise of centralised states and empires in southern Africa, trade networks based on bartering were replaced with state-sponsored, tribute-based exchange systems. Political authority within growing urban settlements was largely founded on livestock wealth (who had the most cattle to loan out to loyal followers) and on the ability of the powerful to control rain-making rituals (important for avoiding famine). Members of the ruling elite sought to expand their power by opening up ever more extensive trading networks in the African interior. By the early centuries of the second millenium CE, a number of these inland trade routes had spread to the East African coast and had stretched across the Indian Ocean. Southern African centers of commerce like Mapungubwe and Great Zimbabwe exported gold, ivory, leopard skins, and rhinoceros horn in exchange for luxury goods like Near and Far Eastern glazed ceramics, glass beads, and brightly coloured cloth, funding the local building of monumental stone architecture that created legitimacy for an ever-more exclusionary political elite and provided justification for hereditary privilege and royal succession.

Arab Dhows, Chinese Junks, and Monsoon Trade Winds

For millennia, long-distance trade routes in East Africa united distant peoples. Collaborative partnerships within marketplaces created wider social alliances. The seasonal monsoon winds that blew up and down the coastline and back and forth across the warm Indian Ocean opened up larger markets. The reversing monsoons allowed traders to travel freely between the coasts of East Africa, Arabia, Persia, and India. In the months from December to March, the gentler northeast trade winds transported Arabian, Persian, and Indian merchant-adventurers to African shores in large wooden dhows with matted lateen (triangular) sails and frayed rigging made of plaited palm leaves and coconut fiber, and the more violent southwest trade winds that built up in April and tailed off in September returned them.

East Africa’s bone-white sand beaches and palm-covered islands were home to a number of coastal trading centers. Whitewashed walls and brightly painted, intricately carved hardwood doors welcomed travellers and traders from afar. Port cities like Kilwa, Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa, Pate, Pemba, Sofala, and Zanzibar competed with one another to provide the best merchandise and trading terms to visiting merchants sailing over emerald waters from far-flung shores. These trading hubs also offered accommodation for those who missed the early winds of the reversing monsoon and postponed their returns northward and eastward until the southwest trade winds again eased in September.

“To get lost is to learn the way.”

African proverb

It was through East Africa’s vibrant market-towns and coastal trading ports that the people of southern Africa were brought into contact with merchant sailors from Arabia, Persia, India, and China. Soon Hindu brides were draping themselves with intricately carved southern African ivory, and Chinese court officials were traveling in ivory palanquins carved from long, straight tusks. African ivory was easier to carve than Asian ivory and so was highly valued in workshops throughout Asia. African iron too quickly gained international favour, thanks to the skill of the African smelters who worked bloomery furnaces in the interior. Writing from twelfth century Sicily, al-Idrisi noted that while the best steel came from India, the best iron came from southeast Africa, superior in both its quality and malleability.

East African City States and Southern African Empires

By the second millennia CE, the coastal bazaars of East Africa’s Swahili city-states spread southwards from what is now Somalia to Mozambique, offering trading opportunities for visiting buyers and sellers from different nations. Marketplaces on the Swahili Coast and adjacent islands were crowded with coffee-coloured Abyssinians, dark Zanjians, pale Circassians, black Nubians, and Banyan merchants dressed in ivory-white dhotis; Africans, turbaned Arabs, Persians, and Indians with long beards and braided hair.

Surrounded by palaces, mosques, and bath houses built of carved coral and cut stone and plastered with bright white coral lime, traders met under the shade of coconut palms and mango trees, on verandahs and terraced courtyards, and in walled pleasure gardens filled with tamarind trees, peacocks, and wildly spotted guinea fowl. Seated together on stone baraza benches that lined the narrow winding streets of coastal entrepots like Kilwa and Zanzibar, adventurers, explorers, travellers, and traders shared stories and exchanged products from distant places.

Double-ended East African dhows, built entirely of local materials, with hulls made of wooden boards stitched and sewn together and with sails made of woven raffia, were laden with trade goods to be sent up and down the coast in search of ivory and gold, and in search of ambergris for perfumeries in the East. Smaller than ocean-faring dhows with a more flexible hull, African dhows were well suited to local coastal conditions. They were able to withstand frequent strandings on coral reefs and repeated moorings on sandy beaches where shallow waters and receding tides allowed cargos to be loaded and offloaded with ease.

The regional networks that underpinned this coastal traffic were focused on three main centers of commerce in the African interior, each one a couple of hundred kilometers from the next. These were Mapungubwe (at the confluence of the Sashe and Limpopo rivers in the far north of what is today South Africa), Great Zimbabwe (in modern Zimbabwe), and Ingombe Ilede (situated on the southern extremity of the Zambian copper belt at the confluence of the Zambezi and Lusitu rivers). Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, and Ingombe Ilede all traded copper internally, the first sourced from Musina, the second its own and possibly also that from surrounding deposits, and the third from the mines at Urungwe. Forged in the crucible of this African copper trade, all three were to play important roles in the extended trade routes that transported exotic goods back and forth across the Indian Ocean.

The arrival of Barbarian Ships from the West

Spices, Galleons, and Trade Winds

For centuries, spices from the Indies (most notably cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, and cloves) were shipped to the west below the wooden decks of boats and on top the backs of grumbling camels. Many of the spices that arrived in Europe had been loaded onto dhows along India’s Malabar coast and then shipped to ports on the shores of the Red Sea. Once landed, they were packed onto camels (that grumbled when they reached their carrying capacity) and transported to Cairo, where they were loaded onto barges and sailed down the Nile to Alexandria. They were then transferred onto Venetian boats and sailed across the Mediterranean Sea. Prices asked on European markets had to factor in the costs of this transportation. Alternative routes from Mughal India included camel caravans that, avoiding Mameluke Egypt, drove through the lands of Safavid Persia and the Ottoman Empire. Whatever the path taken, taxes were levied at every step of the long journey to the west.

Heavy taxes presented an opportunity for considerable profits to be made by those who could find a more direct route to the East. Iberian seafarers set sail down the West African coast, encouraged by Maghribi traders’ accounts of camel caravans that carried West African gold, ivory, kola nuts, and grains of paradise (a spice with a warm pepper-like flavour) across the Saharan Desert. In an effort to protect the old land routes, camel drivers warned that the sun’s heat in the south was so fierce that the seas boiled sending thick clouds of vapour into the southern skies. Undeterred, Portuguese navigators sailed into the unknown, hopeful of finding a direct passage to the spice Islands of South and Southeast Asia.

In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape and opened the ocean route east. Other Western European nations followed (the French being the first) and soon Barbarian galleons were trading Asian spices across the wide Indian Ocean. Competition between merchant ships, combined with the many risks posed by long-distance ocean voyages, led to the amalgamation of trading fleets and the formation of joint-stock companies, the English (British) East India Company in 1600 and the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC) in 1602. The VOC was the first company in history to offer shares to the public.

Galleons were ships designed for carrying large cargos, not for speed. Journeys were long and governed by the strength of the trade winds. Under favourable conditions, fleets made quick way and at night the moon would turn the wakes of the boats into glimmering “rivers of light”, but when the winds failed, marooning sailors aboard galleons adrift on ocean currents and with dwindling food rations, disease could take the lives of those less fortunate. It was discovered that a regular supply of fresh produce could prevent sailors dying from scurvy while out at sea. The Dutch East India Company needed an outpost between its headquarters in Amsterdam and its factories in the East that could resupply its spice trading fleets with fresh meat, fruit, vegetables, and clean drinking water. In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape to establish a refreshment station at the southern tip of Africa. It was here that the cold waters of the South Atlantic and the warm waters of the Indian Oceans met, halfway between Amsterdam and Batavia.

“Patience attracts happiness; it brings near that which is far.”

African proverb

black-headed sheep, Ostrich Eggs, and Stone Walled Gardens

Jutting out at the southern tip of the African continent is a chain of sandstone mountains that reach into the ocean forming a rocky peninsula. Its coastline is broken with secluded fine white-sand beaches and large weather-worn granite boulders. In the coastal shallows, bamboo kelp forests sway beneath the tides. The cold, salty waters, churn with large shoals of fish that support colonies of Cape fur seals and African penguins. In the deeper waters, pods of dolphins, great white sharks, and southern right whales splash and slap their fins. Carved into the sides of the mountains, dark gorges and sheltering ravines protect ancient Afromontane forests with striking trees like the bright orange barked Forest Saffronwood (Elaeodendron croceum). Seasonal streams tumble down the sides of the mountains draining into rivers that flow through sunny valleys covered with aromatic bushes, sweet grasses, tufts of thatching reeds, and wild orchids – geraniums, pelargoniums, proteas, watsonias, restios, ericas, and disas.

The Cape Peninsula is joined to the African mainland by a narrow strip of flat land stretching out between two natural bays. Seasonal wetlands covered large parts of this flat, sandy bridge. Scattered between the waters and sand dunes, windswept protea shrubs and Rhonocerous-bush grew in patches. Wide-spreading mats of succulent sour figs (vygies) covered the shifting white sands with bright-green triangular leaves, and with iridescent pink and yellow flowers that opened under the September sun. Slow-flowing rivers, seasonal marshes, and shallow lakes (vleis) on the Cape Flats attracted flocks of large birds including white pelicans, wading spoonbills, and flamingos with long red legs and downturned beaks. When Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape, hippopotamuses waded through the waters, and black-maned cape lion and black rhinoceros drank at the lakeshores.

The Company’s Cape gardens were first laid out in a bowl-shaped valley at the foot of Table Mountain. Seasonal fruit and vegetable crops were planted along the banks of a shallow river (the Varsche or Fresh River). Seldom more than knee deep, this river flowed strongly through Table Valley from a deep gorge cutting into the north face of the flat-topped mountain. Land was also cleared for gardens behind Devil’s Peak. Runnels of water and gushing mountain streams carved deep waterfall ravines into the eastern cliffs of Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak. Runoff water, both channeled through gorges and ravines and bubbling up from fountains in the foothills, fed the Amsterdam (Liesbeek) River which wound its way toward the Black River before emptying into the Salt River and into Table Bay. Growing on the rolling hills under the mountains’ eastern cliffs, vineyards, grain fields, and herbaceous tobacco plants were protected from the worst of the Cape’s wild southeasterly winds.

With water for irrigation sourced from natural springs and fountains and diverted in canals from the fresh rivers, root vegetables like turnips, radishes, sweet potatoes, and yellow carrots all grew well, as did leafy vegetables like mustard cress, spinach, white cabbages, and crisp green lettuce “with leaves as firm as the cabbages”. Local plants and seeds were collected and were sown – water onions (waterblommetjies / “water flowers” / Aponogeton distachyos), wild asparagus (veldkool / “field cabbage” / Trachyandra falcata), wild onions (wildeknoffel / “wild garlic” / Tulbaghia alliacea), wild spinach (duinespinasie / “dune spinach” / Tetragonia decumbens), and wild sorrel (suuring / “souring” / oxalis pes-caprae). Herb gardens were laid out, and flower gardens were planted to attract pollinators.

In 1685, the King of France (Louis XIV) sent a Jesuit mission to the Kingdom of Siam. Travelling with the diplomatic envoy, Father Guy Tachard stopped over at the Cape and wrote of walking through the Company's gardens and seeing fruits and vegetables from Europe, Persia, Arabia, India, China, and Japan. In an account of his travels first printed in English in 1688, he recalled the "delicious cabbage-like lettuces" he tasted while at the Cape and the "rivers of light" that he had seen from the deck of his galleon sailing east. Some plants struggled to fruit at the Cape (cherry trees did not flower in Table Valley as they did in Japan and Brazilian pineapples, while perfectly adapted for a climate like that of Batavia, would only fruit in hothouses on the peninsula). Father Tachard reported that many others were growing well. Orchards of apricot, almond, apple, orange, pear, quince, Persian pomegranate, and both Dutch and Japanese plum trees were sheltered from seasonal winds by limewashed stone walls and by hedges of bitter wild almond (wilde amandelboom / Brabejum stellatifolium) and wild peach (wilde perskeboom / Kiggelaria africana).

All of the Dutch East India Company’s trading fleets sailed under instruction to stop over at the Cape. Galleons returning from the Indies laid anchor in late February and early March and awaited the arrival of the outbound fleet from Europe. In April, after news had been exchanged and supplies had been replenished, the combined return fleet set sail for Amsterdam, and the outbound fleets pressed on for Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Batavia (Java), and then to the Moluccas (the Spice Islands of Indonesia) and to Japan. Men sailing the trade winds arrived in Table Bay often to see the flat-topped mountain covered with a tablecloth of thin white cloud, neatly tucked over the tops of its north-facing cliffs and set flat by the dry southeasterly winds that blew during the Cape’s late summers. The view was made all the more welcoming by the white-limewashed, thatch-roofed buildings at the foot of the mountain and well-tended gardens in the valley. Fresh meat from indigenous black-headed, fat-tailed sheep and indigenous long-horned cattle with hides ranging from tan to deep cherry added to the revitalizing menus that comforted weary sailors accustomed to diets of hard biscuits, fish, and turtle meat from galley kitchens.

From the earliest days of settlement at the Cape, ostriches were tamed to be sent to the Indies as gifts for the menageries of sultans, rajahs, and shahs. Wild birds were caught and eggs were collected and sent to the South Asian courts of the VOC’s most important trading partners. Ostriches were valuable diplomatic gifts distinguishing Dutch embassies from other Indian Ocean traders. Large birds with long necks and startled eyes were sent to the Shoguns of Japan in exchange for permission to export copper and brass from the land of the rising sun. Birds were transported in large wooden cages to the Mughal gardens of Hindostan for concessions to trade Far Eastern copper for Indian textiles which were shipped to the Indonesian Archipelago where they could be exchanged for spices. Birds were sent to the Kings of Kandy in return for permission to peel golden-yellow bark off cinnamon tress that grew in the rainforests of Ceylon.

Cape wines were bottled, and brandy was distilled to compliment the coconut flavoured arrack imported from the East and drunk in great quantities. Thick bars of copper were traded with Khoikhoi pastoralists for their long-horned cattle and lengths of Japanese brass wire for their fat-tailed sheep (with lengths measured as long as the sheep, tails included to prevent them from being lopped off prior to the exchange). Half-drunk and peppered with information obtained from Khoikhoi and Namaqua herders, accounts translated by Khoikhoi strandlopers (beachwalkers) who had become attached to the settlement, the prospects of fabulous copper mines in the African interior inspired several expeditions of discovery.

Wild Flowers and Copper Mountains

Jan van Riebeeck sent out nine expeditions during his term as commander of the Cape (1652 to 1662). They went in search of lost cities and fabled empires, and in search of cannibals and kingdoms that were said to tame lions and to use them in warfare. Expeditions were provisioned with copper bars to trade for cattle. The first explorers who set out from the wooden fort in Table Valley led pack-oxen over rhinoceroses’ paths that crossed the Cape Flats to avoid sinking knee-deep into soft white sands undermined by giant Cape Dune Mole-Rats’ tunnels. They then followed rivers and valleys into the distant interior, hopeful of finding a direct road to the lands of Munhumutapa and Butwa. Butwan cattle were so big that, according to at least one missionary account written in 1648, people had to stand upright to milk them. Those who took over commanding the settlement continued the search.

The earliest traveller-traders who set out from the Cape met long-haired, dark-skinned Namaqua herders wearing large ivory plates over well-dressed leather skins, with copper bangles on their arms and copper beads braided into their hair. These adornments were made of red African copper that came from old mines deep in the interior where the sounds of beating drums and roaring lions (the dogs of the kings) heralded royal proclamations. The first farmers’ market was established at the Cape in 1665. Game meat was sold alongside farm produce; hippopotamus bacon (zeekoespec), hartebeest fillets, eland steaks, and rhinoceros meat whetted the appetites of many more would-be adventurers.

Simon van der Stel, commander and governor of the Cape from 1679 to 1699, undertook one of the more eye-catching early expeditions of discovery. The proud owner of two Japanese goldfish that he kept in a bowl at his white-washed town house overlooking the Company’s gardens, van der Stel is often fondly remembered today as the founder of Groot Constantia. He laid out its famous vineyards in 1685 on lands abandoned by farmers who had elected to build their homesteads around the fledgling town of Stellenbosch, established earlier in 1679 in the Wildebosch Valley on the far side of the sandy Cape Flats. The soil in the new valley was ideal for vineyards. Vines were watered by amber-coloured streams fed by runoff water tumbling down the sides of tall mountains over rockfaces that turned orange in the late afternoon sun. The town was named in honour of its founder, the commander of the Cape settlement (the title of governor would be awarded to him in 1691).

In August 1685, accompanied by over one hundred people including soldiers, miners, cattle drivers, Khoikhoi interpreters, and an artist armed with a box of pigments to record any exotic fauna and flora encountered along the way, the commander left the shores of Table Bay in search of a copper mountain in the far-off interior. It was flower season in Namaqualand and spring rains had carpeted the veld with orange, white, and purple wildflowers that dusted both hoof and heel with bright yellow pollen. The departing expedition consisted of fifteen wagons drawn by one hundred and twenty long-horned trek oxen, eight rust-red oxen to each wagon, eight carts, and a six-horse drawn black coach for the governor. Loaded on the wagons were two small cannons, a boat for exploring any navigable rivers or coastal bays, and a number of musical instruments including two trumpets, several oboes, and six violins, for meet-and-greet events, camp concerts, and evening dances. Completing the procession were three hundred sheep and two hundred more cattle, some trained as draft and others as pack oxen to pull and carry provisions.

The first section of the journey north was well known. Leaving Table Valley, members of the expedition headed for the Tygerberg (Leopard Mountain) and for the Berg River that lay beyond it. They followed this river to Riebeeck Kasteel, and then followed the Little Berg River to the isolated Picketberg Mountains. Passing around these mountains, they made their way toward a long kloof (todays Piekenierskloof) where the rockfaces (krantze) echoed back sounds so remarkably that a member of the band blew his trumpet. Marching eastward through the kloof the expedition crossed over the Olifantsrivier mountains and entered the beautiful Olifants River Valley. They followed this river until it swung west toward the sea. Pressing on further northward, the only water to then be had was found in small pools at springs and brackish fountains below the mountains and hills scattered throughout Little Namaqualand.

After a total of 58 days trekking over deep sand tracks and through vast landscapes where shallow caves and rocky overhangs covered in rock art offered respite from the scorching sun, seven wagons reached their intended destination. Prospectors dug several mineshafts into the sides of a hard mountain that was stained with verdigris, surrounded by hills covered with spiky aloes poking up between naked rocks. The copper mountain was claimed by Captain Oedesen of the Little Namaqua who had joined the expedition. The deepest shaft was dug to a depth of twice a man’s length. Rich samples of ore were collected. Without a sufficient quantity of wood to make enough charcoal to smelt the recoverable ore on site, at least not on a viable scale, and without a nearby coastal harbour that would allow the copper ore to be moved to a better equipped factory, these deposits were to remain largely unworked although never forgotten for years to come.

“Not everyone who chased the zebra caught it, but he who caught it chased it.”

African proverb

The sunburnt expedition party returned to the Cape in 1686, led by a governor who, having come uncomfortably close to losing his life diving out the way of a rampaging black rhinoceros that narrowly missed his black coach in Namaqualand, was in no anxious mood to mount another great jaunt north. A year later a boat sailed into Table Bay carrying twenty men, twenty goats, one-hundred-and-fifty pumpkins, and three tons of ivory. The men were survivors from ships that had been wrecked along the southeast African coast. They had built the boat from the keel of an ivory trading ship, the Good Hope, that had run aground near Rio de Natal (now Durban) in 1685, with planks cut from forests growing near the bay, using nails and tools fashioned from metal salvaged from another ship, the Stavenisse, lost in 1686 on the same coast, assisted by local people who had been remunerated for their help with copper bangles. The twenty men brought with them firsthand accounts of lands where large herds of elephant roamed and where friendly people were keen to trade, and they turned the focus of exploration from the north to the east.

The VOC bought the boat the men had built and had named the Centaurus and sent it back to map the wild southeast African coastline. Following several successful search and rescue expeditions that first pressed eastward, hugging the coast, and then ever further northward, a galiot named the Noord (the North) was assigned the route. In October 1688, the Noord sailed into Delagoa Bay (Maputo Bay, Mozambique). Here, on a small island infested with malarial mosquitoes (an island then known as the Island of the Elephants, close to present day Inhaka Island) the crew discovered an English factory making copper bangles. These bangles were being exchanged for ivory with giTonga speaking people living along the shores of the bay. The elephant and hippopotamus tusks traded with the English came from isiNguni speaking hunter-traders who carried them over the magnificently forested Lebombo Mountains on winding paths that meandered between rock-splitting fig trees and tall cycads. These mountain paths and trails stopped shy of the waters of the bay ensuring the vaTsonga retained their positions as middlemen.

Late in 1688, Governor van der Stel appointed a man who had accompanied him on his overland expedition in search of copper in Namaqualand to lead an overland expedition east. The purpose of this next expedition was to search for other shipwreck survivors along the coast and also to make contact with a distant kingdom that was rumoured to be very wealthy in cattle. Twenty-eight years earlier, the founding commander of the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck, had learned of a powerful eastern Khoikhoi clan, receiving reports of a people whose lands lay between the two seas and who were said to cultivate daccha (wild hemp) which he had written in his journal "stupifies the brain like opium, ginger, strong tobacco, (or) brandy". This far-off Kingdom of the Inqua (!khukwa) commanded several valleys and ravines that cut through the Cape Fold Mountains. It was through their lands that red copper was traded into the western and eastern Cape via seSotho speaking farmers in the Caledon Valley and from tshiVenda, Setswana, and chiKaranga speaking copper miners and metalsmiths in the more distant African interior. As well-established copper traders, the Inqua were looking to secure relations with the new suppliers of yellow copper (Japanese brass) in the south. Late in 1688, the King of the Inqua, a man by the name of Hijkon (Gei!khub), sent a delegation to the Cape with instructions to guide a diplomatic envoy back to his country. On the 4th of January 1689, the first expedition party to travel to the kingdom set off from the castle. They travelled in two wagons loaded with tobacco, trade beads, bottles of arrack, bundles of assegais, and long lengths of brass wire to barter for cattle; and they also carried with them a copper crown, a gift for the Inqua King from the governor of the Cape. 

South and East Africa’s Cultural Diversity

Copper, Cattle and, Click Consonants

The coastal plains of the Cape that sweep in a wide arc around the southern tip of Africa (between the mouth of the Orange River in the northwest down through the south Peninsula and up to the Great Fish River in the east) are separated from the dry Karoo interior by the rocky walls and rugged peaks of the Cape Fold Mountain Belt. The Cape’s coastal lowlands were originally inhabited by short statured hunter-gatherers dressed in wild antelope skins – foraging bands of Bushmen speaking languages with implosive click consonants wearing ostrich eggshell beaded necklaces. Often overnighting in rock shelters, they made windbreaks with branches when setting up camp on the open veld and built stone cairns on old paths to mark the boundaries of territories protecting hunting grounds and freshwater springs. They fashioned long leather thongs (ropes) and drove wooden pegs into the sides of cliffs to build ladders that allowed them to reach wild honey-nests. Using tools chipped from stone, they lived off the fruits of the veld and the plunder of the chase.

Old African folklore cautioned that it was polite for a traveller who met a Bushman unexpectedly to say, "I saw you from miles away". This was considered sensible etiquette as it was understood that Bushmen were sensitive about their height (the tallest man stood no more than 5ft), and, being offended by a surprised meeting, might otherwise shoot you with a poisoned arrow "straight through the armpit". 

Some hunters acquired cattle and sheep from Ntu-speaking agro-pastoralists in the north and became herders. Over generations, they grew taller on a diet of fermented milk and, with the use of cattle as beasts of burden, developed a rich material culture. The herders referred to themselves as Khoikhoi, meaning “the real people” or “men of men”, and they melted copper in crucible furnaces built on the slopes of mountains. They wore soft leather skins and copper bangles and kept flocks of fat-tailed sheep. Training their red cattle for riding and for use as moving shields in warfare, they told fearful stories of others who trained lions to do the same. Men often shaved half their heads, leaving the hair on one side to grow long and curly. They cut one testicle off so that they might run faster, a practice that became a rite of passage into adulthood, and hunted elephants armed with harpoons poisoned with snake venom.

The climate of the western Cape, with its cold wet winters and hot dry summers, made the southern lowland soils inarable for staple African crops like sorghum and millet. The southernmost limit of the summer rains fell in the eastern Cape, and it was here that another people, the amaNguni, planted these African grains and seeds. Although isiNguni speaking farmers and their Khoisan speaking neighbours spoke different languages, they shared a great love for copper bangles, for handsome cattle, and for smoking daccha (the only crop the herding Khoikhoi cultivated). After generations of trade and intermarriage, the farmers of the eastern Cape incorporated a number of clicks into their language and became known as the amaXhosa. They wore magnificently beaded leather garments, dyed white with clay and red with ochre, and wore bangles of twisted copper wire.

IsiNguni is a branch of the Ntu family of languages. Ntu-speakers, or more properly isiNtu speakers, make up the largest language family in sub–Saharan Africa (the prefix "isi-" refers to the language). South of the Limpopo, isiNtu speakers include isiNguni speakers (isiZulu, isiXhosa, siSwati, and related spoken languages), seSotho and Setswana speakers, and the smaller Xitsonga and Tshivenda speaking groups. The prefixes "se-", "xi-", and "tshi-" refer to the languages, "ama-", "ba-", and "vha-" to the people. The name "Bantu" means Ntu(-speaking) people.

IsiNguni speaking agro-pastoralists lived in scattered homesteads on the lowlands between the Drakensberg Escarpment and the shores of the Indian Ocean (stretching from the eastern Cape to present day KwaZulu-Natal). Other farmers speaking seSotho and Setswana lived in more compact settlements on the Southern African highveld, many in the fertile Caledon and Vaal River valleys, the two main tributaries of the great Orange River. The first explorers who set out from the Cape met isiNguni, seSotho, and Setswana speaking people cultivating cloud-watered gardens around the Fish and Orange Rivers. Settlements on the highveld were dotted all the way up to the great Limpopo River with its many pools, pythons, and hippopotamus. Coastal settlements covered undulating hills that were separated by forested valleys formed by rivers flowing down from the escarpment. Waters from these rivers were lost in brackish coastal lagoons and estuaries that flowed sluggishly into the sea over sandy beaches patrolled by scavenging plough snails in search of stranded bluebottles and jellyfish.

Southern African homesteads were built around cattle kraals. Thatched beehive huts, corbelled stone huts, walled courtyards, and wooden fences protected the central cattle byres. The importance of cattle discouraged people from settling in large towns. Homesteads were clustered together to form small villages (oftentimes of between five and ten families, but some being comprised of as many as fifty families). Settlements were surrounded by pasture lands, cultivated garden plots of pumpkins, melons, and beans, and fields of sorghum and millet.

Polygamy prevailed in villages. Most men had two wives, others had three, four, or five, each with her own hut and her own separate storehouse for preserving grains. Cereal crops were stored in these granaries and used to make porridge and beer. Vegetable relishes added flavour to ground grains. Recipes for sauces included ingredients like wild cucumbers, spiked melons, cowpeas, and groundnuts, as well as other indigenous fruits and tree nuts including Kei apples, baobab and marula nuts, monkey oranges, and different kinds of wild figs and plums.

"The great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees", was known locally as the "great river with the pools". It was also called the Copper River by early Indian Ocean traders because of the vast amount of copper jewellery worn by people living along its floodplains. Fed by several large rivers on the South African highveld, the silty waters of the Limpopo carved sluggishly through the lowveld toward the warm Indian ocean.

Clans, Chiefdoms, Kingdoms, and States

South of the Limpopo, political governance was characterised by alliances and overlapping affiliations; political leaders established defensive associations in the form of clans. On the seSotho and Setswana speaking southern African highveld, clans were organised under totem animals; the Batao or “men of the lion”, Batlou “men of the elephant”, Banarene “men of the buffalo, Bakwena “men of the crocodile”, Batlaru “men of the python”, and so on. Along the coast, isiNguni speakers formed clans like the Ndlovu, Dlamini, Nkosi, Khumalo, and Radebe, named in commemoration of important ancestors. Clans were headed by chiefs and ultimately by paramount chiefs who were believed to be the direct descendants of the original founding ancestors and were understood to be the very embodiment of clan unity.

Paramount chiefs were custodians of the land. Territories were defined by allegiances rather than by topography. Land owned by political leaders was loaned to loyal followers. The size of a kingdom was measured by the number of people who professed subservience to its rulers rather than by its geographical borders. Land was allocated by kings, chiefs, and headmen to those who were willing to pay tribute for it; or was ceded to others who were prepared to fight for it.

Inasmuch as power was concentrated in the hands of hereditary male rulers, women exerted considerable political influence through marriage, binding men together in kinship and familial duty. Women also acted as regents in the event of their husbands’ death, exercising power to maintain political authority and unity until their sons’ reached maturity. Famous examples of these female gatekeepers and guardians included the Rain Queens of the BaLovedu. Descended from an exiled princess of Munhumutapa, the first Modjaji or Rain Queen established a custom of taking wives and having daughters who then became her successors. In so doing BaLovedu Queens were able to remain regents as the first Modjaji or Rain Queen was understood to live on in the bodies of her descendants through the practice of ritual suicide and rebirth. Another famous example of a powerful female regent was the formidable warrior Queen Mmanthatisi of the BaTlokwa. In her lifetime, she was widely rumoured to have one single eye in her forehead and to have fed her followers with her own breastmilk. Queen Mmanthatisi acted as a regent for her son, Sekonyela, during the bloody years of the Difaqane or Mfecane; the great “crushing” or “scattering”, a period of political upheaval, forced migrations, and state formation in southern Africa that occurred during the 1820s and 1830s. Sparked by the formation of the Zulu military state under Shaka and his fight to control the trade routes south of Delagoa Bay, King Shaka famously forbid his army from attacking the BaLovedu fearing that Queen Modjaji would prevent rain from falling on his lands.

For centuries, a balance of power was maintained between neighbouring chieftainships through the widespread practice of cattle rustling and counterraiding. Cattle were an important store of value. They were used in rainmaking rituals, were exchanged to settle fines, and were offered as bridewealth (lobola), a custom that ensured that widows and their children would be provided for in the event of their husband’s untimely death. Cattle hides were tanned and made into war shields with various colours and shapes differentiating regiments that fought in pitched battles for the control of grazing lands and profitable trading routes. Regiments were age-graded and oftentimes comprised of men from the same circumcision lodges. Battle fields were governed over by fearsome wardoctors whose medicines (made from plants like the blue and white flowering plumbago) protected painted warriors from all manner of projectiles (arrows, spears, and bullets).

North of the Limpopo, on lands that stretched as far as the Zambezi Valley, a number of chiShona speaking clans organised themselves under totem animals like the lion (Shumba), eland (Shava), elephant (Nzou), and civet cat (Bonga). These clans were feudatory to African Imperial States that grew wealthy by taxing the long-distance trade routes through which goods and products were moved across the grasslands of the gold rich central highveld. By the 17th century, the legendary Empire of Munhumutapa was one of the most powerful of these precolonial African states. This empire (appearing as ‘ M O N O M O T A P A ‘ on old engraved copperplate maps) controlled much of the trade to and from the lands of the Manyika where gold dust was washed from ant-heap soil and panned from rivers using wooden bowls, and taxed the trade to and from the fabulously wealthy lands of the Kingdom of Butwa where mineshafts were dug with underground galleries that followed veins of gold-bearing quarts.

Highveld gold (together with a considerable amount of ivory) was exported through coastal markets where Arabian, Persian, and Indian traders competed to offer the best trade goods in return. Items imported included brightly dyed cloth and coloured glass beads that were used by the people of the interior for personal adornment. They were strung into waistbands and necklaces and were sewn into aprons and skirts. In the south, imported beads and exotic shells formed part of the tool kits of African sangomas (trance healers) who were tasked with ensuring the wellbeing of all.

Trade, Tribute, and Mapmaking

The varied landscape of the central highveld north of the Limpopo created attractive opportunities for early African farmers. Flat grasslands in the west gave way to rolling hills and beautiful musasa (zebra tree) and munondo wooded valleys in the east. Streams draining the highveld fed rivers that snaked through tall savannah grasslands scattered with baobabs and granite outcrops, home to lions and huge herds of buffalo. Fertile valleys covered in zebra trees with copper-coloured spring leaves that turned green during the summer months were replaced by arid savannah forests frequented by heavily tusked elephant, low-lying woodlands of mopane trees with bright green butterfly-shaped leaves that turned flame orange and yellow in autumn.

The fertility of the soils of the highveld’s floodplains and grazing lands made them ideal for farming. Populations grew rapidly and soon the manpower was created for undertaking monumental construction projects. From the 8th century onwards, farming communities began to organize themselves into hierarchical states. In the centuries that followed, zimbabwe or great “houses of stone” spread across the African interior, from the dry Kalahari sandveld and salt pans in the west to the narrow belt of coastal rainforest that hugged the warm Indian Ocean in the east, and between the grey-green Limpopo and the crocodile-infested Zambezi Rivers on opposite ends of the highveld watershed.

Stone walled platforms with dhaka floors supported thatched huts and grain stores in the west, and defensive walls of mortarless granite with high linteled doorways and winding secret passages protected vast courtyards and great enclosures in the east. Whether exposed on platforms or obscured by walls, political power steadily concentrated into the hands of a few. Early African market towns in the southern interior like Bambandyanalo and Ntabazingwe established trade links with East Africa’s coastal bazaars. They imported glass beads and brightly coloured cloth in exchange for carved ivory bangles, elephant tusks, and tanned skins; and they laid the foundations for the kingdoms that would rise to power after them. The largest of these kingdoms would be Mapungubwe (12th – 13th c), Mapela (12th – 14th c), Great Zimbabwe (13th – 15th c), Butwa (14th – 17th c), Munhumutapa (15th – 18th c) and Rozvi (17th – 19th c). The highveld’s grazing lands, gold mines, and profitable trading routes were all administered from within the courts of these old kingdoms; the imposing granite walls of their palaces and citadels in some places over ten meters tall. Hereditary rulers were honoured with titles like the Mambos of the Butwan Torwa dynasty, the Mutapas of the Kingdom of Munhumutapa, and the Changamires of the Rozvi Empire.

From atop and behind dry stone walling constructed on hilltops associated with rainmaking rituals and sacred leadership, the regional exchange of copper, iron, ivory, and gold was taxed through the levying of tribute, paid in labour service, cattle, and grain. Kings controlled the distribution and redistribution of land and were entitled to tax both the production that came from its surface cultivation and the proceeds that came from its mining. Hunters paid special taxes to local chiefs; the ground tusk (meaning the heavier tusk of an elephant) belonged to the chief in whose lands it had been brought down, as did parts of other animals hunted (often a hind leg) and the meat and skins of royal game (animals like the pangolin and leopard). The walls of storerooms at royal courts were lined with ivory tusks.

“To climb a mountain successfully, you need to meander up it.”

African proverb

Neighbouring chiefdoms were connected to one another through pathways of exchange and were brought together under the leadership of kings to whom tribute accrued and from whom it was again dispensed. Gift giving secured allegiances and political alliances opened up trade networks. In this way, trade reinforced power, and power was ultimately centralised in the personae of venerated rulers who were honoured with exaggerated respect, both in ritual practice and in custom. The consolidation of power on the highveld led to rivalries and to contested successions that splintered political control, creating new loyalties, shifting capitals, and warring kingdoms.

Munhumutapa was one of the most powerful of Africa's great southern empires. The language spoken in the kingdom was chiKaranga. Much of the land that the Mutapa State occupied was covered with savannah vegetation and its grasses (one type called tsinde in chiKaranga) supported large herds of Sanga cattle.  These grasslands also fed herds of zebra (mbizi), wildebeest (mvumba) and antelope that, in turn, supported large numbers of leopard (mbada) coveted for their spotted skins. The people of the kingdom grew their hair long and elaborate hairstyles were fashionable. Men sculpted their hair into horn-like projections. Women wove copper beads into their hair and dyed it ochre-red with a mixture of clay and mupfuta seed oil. In the south, women braided their hair and decorated the plaits with ostrich plumes. It is these shapes, styles, patterns, and places that have inspired the designs of our copper trade bangles.

FATHERS AND SONS

Simon van der Stel retired as governor of the Cape in 1699 to spend the remainder of his years on his farm in Constantia improving the wines in his cellar. The Dutch East India Company’s board of directors in Amsterdam appointed Simons eldest son to take over as head of the refreshment station at the southern tip of Africa. In what was to be a short, eventful term in office, Willem Adriaan van der Stel expanded the settlement both northward and eastward. Facing charges of corruption and dereliction of duty levied against him by Cape famers in a case successfully presented in Amsterdam, he would be removed from his post by the same board some eight years later.

While Simon was widely held in high regard by the inhabitants of the Cape, his son was not. Adriaan had become a free burger in 1684 and had been granted land in full title under the Hottentots Holland mountains. He had also received several privileges which caused great dissatisfaction amongst his neighbours. He was afforded the right to hunt game at any time of year and in any quantity that he chose, and he was permitted to fish in False Bay without having to pay a tax. He was allowed to set fowling nets around which no one else was to fire off a shot or to set other nets. These concessions had been given to him at a time when burgers were limited to shooting one rhinoceros, one hippopotamus, an eland, and a single hartebeest annually.

In 1699, soon after Adriaan took over as governor of the Cape, he decreed that farmers along the Berg River would henceforth be allowed to graze their cattle around Riebeek-Kasteel, a lonely mountain that stood some eighty kilometers north of the gates of the castle. In November of the same year, the new governor embarked on a tour of the furthest farms and frontier lands. It was late in the Cape’s flower season and the last of the spring flowers added splashes of colour to his journey. Crossing over the Obiqua Mountains, a long mountain range to the east of Riebeek-Kasteel and the haunts of marauding bands of Bushmen armed with poisoned arrows, he entered an enclosed valley basin drained by a small river (the Little Berg River). A few months earlier, brightly-coloured wildflowers had covered the red sands of the valley. Although less colourful in November, the valley was still lush, and he renamed it the Land of Waveren (it had been previously known as Roodesand and today is called the Tulbagh Valley). The governor instructed that a military outpost be built and that troops be stationed on the new frontier to protect against the attacks of wild men. He then invited farmers on the slopes of the Hottentots Holland and the Helderberg Mountains to move to this fertile, well-defended valley.

Having granted those who had moved titles to their new farms in the Land van Waveren, he expanded his own farmlands overlooking False Bay (not entirely unlike what his father had done in Constantia Valley after founding Stellenbosch). Adriaan named his farm Vergelegen and enlisted company servants and slaves to build what would soon become an impressive estate with opulent gardens, a great number of vineyards, and cattle-runs in the Overberg where some of the best grazing land stretched behind the Hottentots Holland Mountains. His farmhouse grew to be so ostentatious that the company would order it to be demolished soon after his dismissal and that Vergelegen be divided into four parts, each to be sold off separately.

The new Governor’s interests in ranching grew more focused after his appointment. Adriaan used his position to import “fine-wooled sheep’ to replace the fat-tailed sheep that were widely farmed for mutton. His efforts to establish a wool industry at the Cape faced much opposition from farmers who found wool growing to be a considerably more labour intensive and less profitable prospect than was raising sheep for meat. While his father had focused on viticulture, using his time in office and access to overseas vineyards to better the quality of the wines produced at the Cape, these experiments with new cultivars benefited local producers who happily shared in his successes. Adriaan’s attempts to monopolize the Company’s meat trade and profiteer from supplying beef and mutton to passing company ships led to opposition from wealthy farmers like Henning Huisen and Adam Tas – concerted opposition that ultimately led to his removal from office in 1707.

By 1860, the copper of Namaqualand would be the Cape's second most important export commodity. Wool would be its largest.

During his short stint as governor, Adriaan expanded the company’s gardens in Rondebosch. He successfully established a nursery and a plantation in Newlands. Harvests from privately owned market gardens and farms were augmenting the fresh produce available for passing ships and so the governor ordered that the vegetables in the Company’s kitchen garden in Table Valley be replaced with flowering plants and umbrageous trees to create a botanical garden-of-delight for the people of bay. He established a menagerie at the top of the new pleasure gardens, filling it with wild animals from the country, and built a museum to display the skeletons and stuffed animals that had been stored at the Castle of Good Hope. The foundations for this castle, the great stone fortress built to replace van Riebeeck’s wooden fort, had been laid in 1666, and its construction was finally completed under his governorship.

Timber was needed for construction projects on the peninsula. The Cape’s small indigenous forests had been severely depleted during the first fifty years of settlement. Officials from the company were always on the lookout for alternative sources of timber. Late in 1689, the crew of the Noord explored the wild forests around a small natural harbour on the southeastern coast (Rio de Natal). After successfully concluding the purchase of the inlet and surrounding lands from a prominent local chief (the deed of sale was written in duplicate and one copy was left with the seller), the crew hoisted the sails for the return journey. In January 1690, the Noord was wrecked on stormy seas and with her too was lost the Company’s copy of the deed of sale. In 1705, fifteen years after the Noord’s sinking, Adriaan resolved to send another ship back to resurvey the old-growth forests of Natal (from which it was still remembered that the boards of the Centaurus had been cut by stranded sailors in 1686) and to make contact with the chief with whom the purchase of the inlet and surrounding forests had been signed. A notary was sent to make a certified copy of the document. Soon after returning to the bay, the crew learned that the old chief had died and his son, the new chief, informed them that the deed of sale had been buried with his father.

Orange River Copper and leopard-spotted camels

In 1752, one hundred years after Jan van Riebeeck planted the first yellow carrot in Table Valley, Ryk Tulbagh (governor of the Cape from 1751 – 1771, builder of the settlements first library and the man whose name would later be given to the Land of Waveren) appointed an expedition “to learn the composition and extent of the interior lands and people”. Members of the expedition were to travel east “via the usual and known routes” to the Outeniqua Mountains. They were to traverse a winding mountain pass called Attaquas Kloof which was the best route over the Outeniqua and one which was frequented by herds of elephant. Having led their wagons through the kloof, they were to explore the valleys of the Little Karoo before entering the almost impenetrably dense Tsitsikamma forest that closed in before them. The expedition was to turn into the arid interior and was to return, if possible, by way of Namaqualand’s copper mountains, trundling eleven wagons over blistering hot stones scorched black and scattered between the Northern Cape’s bald granite outcrops.

The touring party consisted of seventy-one men including thirty soldiers, twenty-five wagon drivers, a botanist, a smith, a surgeon, and a surveyor-cartographer who was also tasked with making “decent drawings of all strange animals encountered on the journey”. On the 29th of February, with all the necessary provisions and weapons of war loaded onto ten wagons, and with a small boat for crossing any unfordable rivers loaded onto an eleventh, each wagon spanned with ten draft oxen, the expedition set off from the Castle of Good Hope. A drummer marched beside the wagons to deter attacks from predators along the way, and at night soldiers were ordered to fire off random shots with the same protective aim.

Although the interior was officially unknown at the time, it had already been perambulated by a great many cattle-rustlers and elephant hunters. Ever since the earliest days of settlement at the Cape, explorers had left the shores of Table Bay in search of adventure in the interior, accompanied by a somewhat disagreeable assortment of rebels, reprobates, renegades, and runaways. The frontier was patrolled by outlaws and outcasts; raiding bands of men from mixed origins, armed with guns, bows, and knobkieries (fighting sticks). Travelling through wild, unchartered lands, explorers reached the ‘Gariep (the great Orange River) and the ‘Nu ‘Gariep (the Upper Orange, also known as the Senqu, or Black River). Along the banks of this large southern African river, Bushmen hunted with poisoned arrows and fire-hardened assegais, and dug pitfalls on game trails to trap hippopotamus, elephant, and rhinoceros.

Entrusted with investigating the interior, Governor Tulbagh had mandated that the 1752 expedition be conducted at a leisurely pace so as “not to fatigue the people by strenuous marches”. The expedition returned to the castle on the 6th of November with all souls accounted for and in reasonable health, having been away for two hundred and fifty-two days. Whilst not generally considered to have been a great success (drought in the interior had cut the journey short and had prevented the party from returning via the copper mountains as had been hoped), the expedition did set the stage for what was to become southern Africa’s golden age of exploration (1750 – 1800).

In October 1760, an elephant hunter named Jacobus Coetse presented himself at the Castle to share an account (a relaas or narrative) of a journey he had undertaken north of the Orange River. Coetse spoke of a land where a great many lions and rhinoceros were to be found and where an unusually tall animal roamed. It was an animal then still unknown at the Cape, as heavy as an elephant with long legs, a short back, and a long neck. His account spread through the settlement and inspired a number of farmers under the leadership of Hendrik Hop, a captain in the citizen cavalry of Stellenbosch, to propose another expedition north for the benefit of the Company. The farmers were to provide the bulk of the equipment and twelve wagons for the expedition if the Company would supply the arms, powder, and shot. The Council of Policy agreed and on the 16th of July 1761, three company wagons loaded with powder, lead, trade goods, and a boat left the gates of the Castle. Carel Brink, a Company surveyor, and Johan Aug, a Company gardener, were appointed to lead the wagons to the Oliphants River where they were to join the farmers who had volunteered for the trip. Acting as the expedition’s doctor, a burgher-surgeon named Carel Rijkvoet was assigned the additional role of minerologist and was asked to examine any ores that might be found on the journey.

Hop had been provided with a copy of Simon van der Stel’s Journal from 1685 and a copy of Coetse’s relaas, and was instructed to take command of the expedition. On the 16th of August, fifteen wagons, each drawn by ten draft oxen, crossed the Oliphants and entered into the land of the Little Namaqua. They drove the wagons over sandy tracks that wound their way past stunted proteas (kreupelbos) and through dry riverbeds lined with stubborn thorn trees. Seasonal rains falling on the high mountains in the east drained over these rapidly drying watercourses. As rains had fallen on the 13th and 16th of August the riverbeds still had a little water left in scattered pools, enough to supply the draft oxen. No large game was found save for a few elephants eking out an existence close to the coast. The expedition visited Captain Oedesen’s copper mountain on the 13th of September where Rijkvoet collected samples but found the ores to be of poor concentration. Travelling further, the party arrived at the Groot Rivier (the Great River or Orange River), the boundary between the Little and Great Namaqua.

Around the Groot Rivier (also named the Charie, the Ein, and the K’i, spelled Tyen in van der Stel’s diary, a river the governor had heard spoken of but had not visited) the veld was covered with grasses and renosterbos (rhinoceros bush), and the river’s banks were lined with tall thorn-trees. Rock-figs clung to the sides of granite outcrops and sandstone cliffs. The expedition reported seeing many rhinoceros, buffalo, black wildebeest (witte wilde paarden), quagga, kudu, gemsbok, hartebeest, zebra (streep-ezels or “striped horses”), large eland, and a few tall giraffes. Rijkvoet discovered ore in the mountains while camped around the Groot Rivier. Some rocks he found contained as much as a third part copper with some found to contain veins of pure copper spreading through them.

Members of the expedition were told of metalworking Berg Damara people (a nation called the Damrocquas or Tamaquas) who lived on a mountain in the north that stretched westward to the sea. Scouts were sent to see if a viable route to the mountain could be found. They returned with the news that they had reached the Fish River, having ridden for three days, but that there was very little water to be had. They had found a Namaqua kraal near the Fish River who had offered them guides to travel north but had warned them that travelling to the Damrocquas would be unwise owing to the present drought in the region. On the 6th of December, faced with the great scarcity water, Hop and his men resolved to turn their wagons back.

The northern Cape's copper ore deposits would not be profitably mined until the latter half of the 19th century. Between 1870 and 1876, the Cape Copper Mining Company built a railway line between the Namaqualand copper fields and Port Nolloth. Before the construction of the companies narrow-gaged line and stone jetty at Port Nolloth, ox wagons and mule trains dragged quarried yellow, green, and red ores over rugged roads to the closer port of Hondeklip Bay. The route to Port Nolloth, although a little longer, was flatter than the undulating roads to Hondeklip Bay, making its construction and maintenance less costly. From 1864 to 1888, the Cape Copper Company's mine at O'Kiep and The Namaqua Copper Company's mine at Concordia were the two most profitable copper mines in the world.

During southern Africa’s golden age of exploration, expeditions were undertaken by Carl Peter Thunberg, the Swedish father of South African botany (between 1772 and 1778), Anders Sparrman (his first in 1772 and then from 1775 to 1776), Robert Gordon (in 1772 and from 1777 to 1786), and by William Paterson (between 1777 and 1780). From 1781 to 1784, an eccentric Surinamese (Dutch Guianese) born Frenchman, Francois le Vaillant, remembered today as the founder of South African ornithology, explored the interior with an ostrich feather plumed hat and a cock that acted as an alarm clock for his camp. All these men, together with a great many others whose names have been lost to history, continued to render the “hitherto unknown interior” knowable and opened the way for missionaries equipped with umbrellas and Bibles and faith in their ideas.

The first half of the nineteenth century (1800 – 1850) saw an increasing number of evermore determined explorers escaping from gardens at the southern tip of Africa. Filled with wanderlust and a deep desire for personal freedom, adventurers, traders, oddballs, and trekboers slipped and struggled over the Cape Fold Mountains. They travelled on paths that meandered through green valleys, narrow kloofs, and dark gorges and led up onto the hard, high central plateau of South Africa. Venturing deep into Bushmanland, they found that the dry Karoo air reverberated with the sounds of bird song and with the spoken clicks of the |xam dialect (the language of the Cape Bushmen). The veld was strewn with black dolerite boulders, many of them covered in hand-carved engravings (petroglyphs of large herbivores like elephant and eland) – chipped, ochre-coloured figures similar to those that had been painted onto the walls of rock shelters in the folded mountains. In the dryest parts, they found that bushmen had carved small footprints into the rocks to indicate the direction to the nearest spring or fountain and had carved long engraved snakes to show the paths to wild bees’ nests.

Driven by frequent droughts in the hot Karoo, endless herds of red hartebeest and springbok that could number in the hundreds-of-thousands of animals migrated in search of rain. Horned snakes hid under rocks and cobras spat venom at passers-by. Male ostriches danced seductively beside quiver trees courting tawny females and then danced distractingly to lure predators away from clutches of bright-white eggs laid in shallow nests scratched into parched earth. On the far side of the Great Karoo Thirstlands, fields of golden-yellow grasses were studded with black thorn, camel thorn, and wide-spreading umbrella thorn acacia trees. In these savannah grasslands, pythons grew to immense lengths, rhinoceros charged at the slightest provocation, and giraffe stood tall chewing on old bones (a common behaviour that naturalists would later term osteophagia).

Into this land of horns, thorns, and dried bones rode an array of dusty characters wearing broad brimmed sun hats. Copper miners and transport riders joined the foragers, farmers, hunters, herders, and bands of marauders already on the Cape’s ragtag frontier. So too also a motley cast of prospectors, plant collectors, ivory and feather traders, artists, surveyors, linguists, misfits, mapmakers, and gunrunners travelling in ox drawn wagons loaded with flintlock firearms and kegs of black powder under awnings of sailcloth. Many wandering adventurers, dressed in hard-wearing cotton trousers, durable flannel shirts, and thick moleskin jackets, learned how to roast white ants’ eggs called “Bushman rice” and how to fashion fish traps from wood, river-reeds, and stone.

Some intrepid explorers ran out of lead for making ammunition and used African copper to cast bullets instead. Others met refugees who taught them that the gum of thorn trees could be eaten in times of hunger (thorn trees like the Vachellia karroo mimosa with its nutritious gum that tasted sweet as sugar). Travelers crossed paths with itinerant metalsmiths and diviners; high-temperature specialists and rain-callers who hunted the great cloud animals that walked across the veld on long legs of rain. Explorers traded copper bangles with metalworking Damara hunter-gatherers and Namaqua herders and listened to tales of lost copper mines told in old click languages. Tales of rich copper deposits in the wild interior were retold on the streets of Cape Town until a prospectus was published in 1843 calling for the formation The Orange River Copper Company. Investors were sort and money was finally raised for the founding of The Namaqua Mining Company in 1853 and The Cape Copper Mining Company in 1862.

Listening to stories from afar, which float 
along from other places ... watching for a 
story, waiting for it, that it may float into 
the ear ... a story is like the wind ... it 
wants to float to another place ... our names 
pass through these people ... fellow men 
who walking meet their like. 

The words of ||kabbo, a great |xam storyteller
written down in Cape Town in August 1873.

The wind does thus when we die ... our own
wind blows, for we who are human beings we
possess wind, we make clouds when we die ...

the wind does thus when we die ... the wind
makes dust because it intends to blow away 
our footprints with which we had walked about 
while we still had nothing the matter with us ...

the wind does thus when we die ... for our
footprints which the wind intends to blow away,
would otherwise lie plainly visible ...

for the thing would seem as if we still lived ...
therefore the wind intends to blow, taking away
our footprints.
 
An old |xam story, retold by Dai!kwain of the Cape Bushmen, 
recorded during the winter of 1875.

References and Selected Sources

Andersson, Charles J. 1856 “Lake Ngami; or, Explorations and Discoveries, during Four Years’ Wanderings in the Wilds of South Western Africa“

Alberti, L. 1810. The Xhosa of the South Coast of Africa. Translated by Fehr, W. 1968. “Alberti’s Account of the Xhosa in 1807“

Bleek, Dorothea (ed). 1923. “The Mantis and His Friends“

Bleek, Wilhelm and Lloyd, Lucy. 1911. “Specimens of Bushman Folklore“

Fairbridge, Dorothea. 1922. “Historic Houses of South Africa“

Freeman-Grenville, Greville S.P. 1962. “The East African Coast (Select Documents from the first to the early nineteenth century)“

Hamutyinei, Mordikai and Planger, Albert. 1974. “Tsumo-Shumo (Shona Proverbial Lore and Wisdom)”

Haupt, C.A. 1752. “Into the Hitherto Unknown“. Translated by van Hove, Wilson, et al. 2013. The journal from the Beutler expedition.

Hondius, J. 1652. “A Clear Description of the Cape of Good Hope“. Translated by Van Oordt, L.C. 1952. Text compiled by Jodocus Hondius and published by him in Amsterdam in 1652

Junod, H.P. 1978. “Tsonga Proverbs” (3rd edition)

Kipling, Rudyard. 1902. The Elephants Child in “Just So Stories“

Krige, E. and Krige, J.D. 1943. “The Realm of a Rain Queen“

Mossop, E.E. (ed) 1947. “The Journals of Brink and Rhenius; being the Journal of Carel Frederik Brink of the journey into Great Namaqualand (1761-2) made by Captain Hendrik Hop and the Journal of Ensign Johannes Tobias Rhenius (1724)“

Nyembezi, C. L. Sibusiso. 1963. “Zulu Proverbs“

Paterson, W. 1789. “A Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffraria in the years one thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven, eight, and nine.”

Raven-Hart, R. 1971. “Cape Good Hope, 1652 – 1702 / The first 50 years of Dutch Colonisation as seen by callers” (2 vols)

Stayt, Hugh A. 1931. “The Bavenda“

Stow, George. 1905. “The Native Races of South Africa“

Stow, George and Bleek, Dorothea. 1930. “Rock Paintings in South Africa“

Tachard, Guy. 1688. “A Relation of the Voyage to Siam“

Taylor, William E. 1891. “African Aphorisms; or, Saws from Swahili Land“

Theal, George. 1883. “Basutoland Records” (4 vols)

Theal, George. 1898 – 1903. “Records of South East Africa” (9 vols)

Theal, George. 1913. “Willem Adriaan Van Der Stel and Other Historical Sketches“

Van der Stel, Simon. 1686. “Journey to Namaqualand in 1685“

Van Riebeek, Jan. 1660. In Moodie, Donald. 1838. “The Record”

Van Warmelo, Nicholas J. 1940. “The Copper Miners of Musina”

Van Warmelo, Nicholas J. 1938. “History of the Matiwane and the Amangwane Tribe as told by Msebenzi to his kinsman Albert Hlongwane“

Van Warmelo, Nicholas J. 1944. “Ethnological Publications No 10 – 16″

Van Warmelo, Nicholas J. 1944. “Ethnological Publications No 17 – 22″

Wilman, Maria. 1933. “The Rock-Engravings of Griqualand and Bechuanaland South Africa“

Africae Trade Ventures © 1998-2025

Want a bit of Africa on your arm?