The Suppressed History of South Africas Ancient Dravidian Goldminers

Picture source: topdesktop-no1.blogspot.com

A number of older posting on this blog, published in October last year, promised to be a prelude to more detailed information related to the ancient Indian (Dravidian) goldminers and their influence in southern Africa.

The titles of these postings are as follows:

Shut up Malema, and read THIS! The posting was a written rebuke aimed at one of South Africas most infamous ANC madmen, who at the time was publicly expressing the view that bloodshed will help get South Africa's land and mineral resources (into the hands of Blacks). He said the youths in South Africa were calling for whites to surrender land and minerals resources they hold because "when they came from Europe they did not carry any land into South Africa". (See news report here)

Planet of the Apes The posting dealt briefly with the rubbish weve been fed about the missing links in human evolution, and how weve been conned into believing that evidence of fossil remains are human, when in fact they are merely extinct species of ape.

South Africa is not Azania! It was while I was delving into the history of the ancient Indian (Dravidian) goldminers that I stumbled upon some interesting facts about the name Azania - facts which I found so amazing that I simply had to share it with others. The posting also introduces a fascinating 1st century manuscript called the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

Regular readers may also recall that the above-mentioned postings drew some attention to research done by Dr. Cyril Hromnk, a Historian/Researcher, who has presented compelling evidence of southern Africas ancient Indian influence. The following works by Dr. Hromnk were also introduced: Hromnk, C.A. 1981. Indo-Africa: Towards a New Understanding of the History of Sub-Saharan Africa. Cape Town: Juta. Hromnk, Cyril.Andrew. 2003. Hromnks explorations in Indo-African and other history: An anthology of writings (Published, censored, suppressed, editorially distorted and unpublished). Ves Mir: C de Skyth.

Hromnks research substantiates the fact that much of what we accept today as truth about the indigenous hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa is nowhere near the truth. The same applies to the true origins of numerous place names in South Africa. For many years these truths have been distorted and suppressed - largely due to political reasons.

Fortunately, truth has the habit of revealing itself.

As previously stated, the topic is not an easy one to present in a single condensed posting, but Ill try anyway. The many modern-day names associated with the hunter-gatherer peoples of the region do not make it any easier either. Terms such as Bushmen, Quena, Khwe, San, Hottentot, iKung, Khoisan, Khoi-Khoi, etcetera (with many variations in spelling) have only made matters more confusing.

The familiar terms Bushmen and San are also now widely considered to be derogatory and politically incorrect, yet the mainstream media still use these terms. When the rules related to the characteristic style or manner of expressing yourself, whether orally or in written form, keep changing like this - it not only bamboozles the mind of the ordinary layman somewhat, but it also makes it near impossible to draft a suitable article about this issue without attracting criticism and controversy of some sort.

Okay, now that Ive made the necessary excuses for taking so long to present a follow-up posting on this contentious and complicated topic, which is clearly fraught with many problems, lets get on with it

(Please note that the facts presented in this posting are not based solely on the research conducted by Dr. Hromnk, but have also been derived from other sources.)

Mapungubwe's famous gold foil rhinoceros Mapungubwe's famous gold foil one-horned Indian rhinoceros (African species have two horns) Picture sourced from: Mapungubwe: SA's lost city of gold (SA Info) One does not have to dig too deep to discover that we have been appallingly misled by contemporary historians, archaeologists, and other professionals in their various fields (all liberals, no doubt) into believing, among other things, that some kind of Bantu Iron Age existed in Southern Africa before the arrival of English, Portuguese and the Dutch. Dr. Hromnks works are not the only research that corroborates this!

Another prominent peculiarity I noticed while reading up on this topic, is that terms such as controversial, contentious, derogatory, offensive, oppressive, politically undesirable and so forth, only pop up whenever theres an inclination to conceal or distort the truth. The word Bantu is one example of this peculiarity, as will later be revealed in this posting.

Even the many stories we hear about the Bushmen and their rock paintings in South Africa are myths, which according to Hromnk were perpetuated years ago by academics at the universities of Stellenbosch and Cape Town. Rock art has never been a part of the Bushmen culture As Hromnk states: "This is simply not true. The Quena people (Indo-Africans) painted the rocks in Southern Africa. We don't know of a single Bushman who ever painted a rock in Southern Africa."

The fact is -- there is no record of Bushmen living in the southern parts of the

country in colonial times. Historical documents by colonists and early travellers refer only to Bosjesman Hottentotten, translated as Bushmen. However, these were not the true Kung hunter-gatherers, but either Quena who had lost their cattle and had to revert to living off the veld, or Soaqua, a mixture of Quena/Kung who were of smaller stature than the Quena, and who often followed Quena groups as servants. I know, I know it all sounds rather complicated, but this is what happens to history when attempts are made to conceal and distort the truth!

The people encountered at Table Bay and in its hinterland by Jan van Riebeeck and his men in 1652, in the first instance referred to themselves in terms of their own clan (of which about sixteen have been noted for example: Chainoqua, Hessequa, Gouriqua, and Attaqua, to mention a few). In broader terms, these people called themselves the Quena (the term used in van Riebeecks diaries) or Otentottu, meaning Mixed or Related. The question is: With whom did they mix before the arrival of Europeans, and with who are they related?

When the earliest Dutch settlers called the Namaqua people, Chinese Hottentots, they were obviously referring to their Mongoloid features such as, their copper brown skin, and epicanthic eye folds. The term Mongoloid is now also considered derogatory in scientific circles -- yet, not too long ago Mongoloid was a common term used by anthropologists to refer to populations that share certain phenotypic traits. Sub-races of the Mongoloid include, among a few other places, the vast majority of people in Southeast Asia.

The Real History of Southern Africa Historical Timeline: Southern Africa The real history of Southern Africa began 1200 years before the arrival of the Bantu-speakers (Sotho, Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu, etc.); and it wasnt a primitive history either. The Gold of Africa attracted to Africas shores ancient Dravidian (Indian) gold-seekers, who arrived on East African shores from the Asian continent with the help of monsoon winds.

Sailing west from India was relatively easy as the annual monsoon winds carried the sailboats from Kutch to the Gulf and then south to East Africa. The

seafarers were also able to return quite easily again a few months later when the winds changed into the opposite direction.

The Indian influence further southwards along the east coast of Africa, which they called Ajan-bar or Azania, was so prominent that the earliest Portuguese maps show eastern Africa as part of India. Incidentally, the Indian Ocean is also the only ocean named after a country.

An interesting and relatively unknown fact pointed out by Dr. Hromnk is that the name Mozambique is derived from the Dravidian name for monsoon boats mussambi-baza. Reaching present-day Mozambique, Hromnik contents, the Dravidians encountered alluvial gold along the Zambezi, Pungue and Save Rivers and went further inland to look for the source.

The trek up the rivers led the Indians to what is now called MaShonaland in Zimbabwe, site of the Great Ruins (sona is the name for gold in Pli, the sacred language of the South Indian Buddhists; the ma- is a later Bantu prefix indicating foreign people).

During a period of well over 2000 years the Indian sonars (gold-miners) established more than 1200 mines going as deep as 38,4 metres and up to 85,3 metres on incline. The site now known as Great Zimbabwe was probably called Sonakota, located in Sonabar = gold-mining area.

(Herodotus referred to deep gold mines in India in 500 BC, but the mines may have been established in 6000 BC. Indian Buddhist literature refers to Africas gold trade in pre-Buddhist times around at least 600 BC. Mining experts, who later - at the end of the nineteenth century, investigated the deep-stope mines in Zimbabwe, South India, Sumatra and Java, were convinced that they had been made by the same people using the same techniques.)

It was during this period, spanning well over 2000 years, that a new race of people were created when these ancient goldminers from Asia mixed with the indigenous inhabitants of southern Africa producing the mixed Otentottu (Hottentots) or Quena, whose Coloured descendants today form the major

part of the Cape Population.

It was mainly these people, a people of mixed Indian and African heritage and not the Kung (Bushman) nor the dark-skinned Bantu people, who the first Portuguese, English, and Dutch European explorers later encountered at Africas most southern point, in the region which later became known as the Cape Colony.

In other words, the early European explorers and later colonialists of the Cape Colony where thus possibly not dealing with truly indigenous Africans after all!

The Indian goldminers established mines as far south as Phalaborwa and the Komati River in Mpumalanga. The name Phalaborwa is derived from an Indian word phallu, meaning a bar of iron or other metal, and borwa, the Tswana word designating land to the south. The word Komati is also of Indian origin (derived from komates) meaning trader or money-lender.

Besides the Komati River, the legacy of the ancient Dravidian traders is still reflected in many other local place names that embrace the word Komati in the Mpumalanga province of South Africa, for example: Komati Gorge, Komati Drift, Komatiland, and the town Komatipoort - situated at the confluence of the Crocodile and Komati Rivers.

The Portuguese later named the Komati Rivers lower reaches the Rio des Reijs, or "river of rice" -- boiled rice (bnagam) being the primary staple food of the Dravidian-elite, which earned them the nickname, Bongar (Bongares).

The first of the Quena race was born, probably in the second half of the first millennium BC, when the Indians of Sonabar required labour. They evidently brought Bugi workers from their other existing mines in Indonesia Sumatra, Java and Borneo, and over time the Indian and Indonesian men would naturally have interbred with local Kung women. The first Quena born south of the Limpopo most probably date to about the first century AD.

At a much later stage around 900 AD Negroid Limi from the northwest were brought by Indian caravans to the mines of MaShonaland, where they were employed as labourers. This is reflected in the Dravidian name Limi, which describes them as dark-skinned people and as dependant followers of Indian caravans. By the 12th century AD these people, also known by the Indian name Bantu, eventually moved into the northern and eastern parts of southern Africa south of the Limpopo.

In 1857, the German linguist W H Bleek adopted the term baNtu as a collective name for the entire group of closely related languages spoken by the Negroid people whom the Indian caravan trade brought from the tropical forests of western Africa. This family of African languages was later, for political reasons, renamed the Niger-Congo group, but its speakers continue to be called Bantu, except in South Africa were the name became politically undesirable.

The following paragraph was sourced from a document titled, Gitlane: Where the Moon Sickle Strikes - On the Edge of Time at Elandsdoorn - kindly provided by Dr. Cyril Hromnk:

The Traders "The area of Elandsdoorn lies on a natural access route from the coast via Pumbe on the Lebombo to the Highveld, which generated a considerable trade traffic between the tin and gold producing Highveld and Escarpment (KaHlamba Drakensberg) in the interior and the harbour of the Indian monsoon ships in Delagoa Bay. Remnants of this caravan-route can still be seen passing through the area from Ohrigstad to Voortrekkerbad. Indian traders involved in this trade were known as viypri (LTTED 1978: 642), which name spread with them to all parts of the world where they traded. In the Malay world (todays Malaysia and Indonesia) it changed into Biapri and in southern Africa into Baperi and, eventually, into BaPedi (Wilkinson 1908: 25; Winstedt 1934: 44). Their leaders, who practised a republican type of elected government as we know it from the 16th century Zambezia, ate boiled rice (bnagam) as their staple food, which earned them a nickname Bongar (Bongares) and Mongar (Mongares) (LTTED 1978: 517; Monclaro 1569: 550). They became masters of the land in many parts of the gold-producing southern Africa and their name survives until today in the Sotho monghali

and mong for a master and in the seTswana Mo and Mu with the same meaning (Casalis 1977: 66; Kriel 1976: 316; Brown 1977: 470). Elsewhere they figure under the names Pfumbi, Gova (Govha), etc., all hailing originally from the main gold-trade route on the Zambezi, down- and upstream from the ancient Sena (the Indian town Siouna of the early Arab reports, see alIdrisi 1150: 225; Hromnk 1981: 44; Von Sicard 1952: 54). These men were not only masters and rulers of their lands but also their owners, which was a new concept in olden Africa. Naturally, such leaders surrounded themselves with regiments of army, adding a new dimension to their socio-political function. Their title of office survived among the later Sotho-Pedi in the form of Mongatane (Mnning 1967: 16), meaning Master of the Army (from Monga- + tnai = army in Tamil), which is assigned in the surviving traditions to the de facto masters of the land between the Mseshlarur or Moschlabjoe (Watervalsrivier) and the Maepa (Ohrigstadrivier) at the time of arrival of the first Bantu-speakers (Hunt 1931: 282). This happened by about the 12th to 13th century AD, when Indian trade caravans (called karabane in N. Sotho) brought into the area a new source of labour in the form of the black Bantuspeaking people (Hromnk 1989: 13-29)."

The above extract was sourced from: "Gitlane: Where the Moon Sickle Strikes - On the Edge of Time at Elandsdoorn" Cyril A. Hromnk. (The complete document is available online for download, here - (PDF 120 KB).

(The above-cited document also provides convincing linguistic evidence related to the Bantu-speaking BaPedi, their association with gold production and trade, and how they absorbed and retained some of the beliefs of the ancient Indian viypri (traders). This is reflected in the Pedi ancestral worship and in their word for religion borapedi. Combined with the name Pedi, the term borapedi means the worship or devoutness of the traders, in other words the religion of traders.)

The Karoo The Quena spread their Indian heritage even further south into the semidesert natural region of South Africa, known as the Karoo. Incidentally, the very first sentence on the Wikipedia page dealing with Karoo states: The Karoo is a Khoisan word of uncertain etymology, and references the Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1989, as the source.

Several online dictionaries incorrectly attribute the name exclusively to the Khoikhoi. The online Merriam Webster Dictionary, for example, describes the origin of the word as follows: Afrikaans karo, from Khoikhoi karo, karro hard, dry - First Known Use: 1789 -- (There is no such word as karo in the Afrikaans language not to my knowledge!)

The real meaning of Karoo is derived from the Quena/Dravidian name: karu, meaning arid country. On the farm Geelbek (yellow mouth), which is a name that some Dutch people in the region gave the Quena due to their yellowish brown skin tone, situated in the Moordenaars Karoo near Laingsburg there are summer and winter solstice temples, which were disregarded by locals as remnants of kraals or game traps. They stretch over a distance of 51 km and the largest among them consists of two parallel, 530 m long solid walls. The principles of architecture and spatial distribution of the stone temples leave no doubt that they were built by learned men educated in schools of ancient Indian theology and cosmology.

A more than half a kilometre long stone-walled corridor that served as a school of astronomy for the ancient Indo-Quena people. Moordnaars Karoo. Foto Cyril Hromnik 10 Sept 2012. Note: This photograph remains the intelectual property of Dr. Cyril Hromnk Sourced from: Laingsburg Tourism Website

The highpoint of the 530 m long stone-wall. Foto Cyril Hromnik, 21 Sept 2006. Note: This photograph remains the intelectual property of Dr. Cyril Hromnk Sourced from: Laingsburg Tourism Website

Besides their cosmological religion which called for stone shrines and temples, there is also evidence that the ancient Asian visitors (at least as far back as 600 BC) brought to this land domestic animals and cultivated plants. However, for purposes of this posting and to keep things simple, we will for now focus only on cattle:

The Nguni cattle breed of today have been shaped by natural selection in the African environment for many years and are thus commonly accepted as a sub-type of the African Sanga cattle. However, protein analyses indicate that they have characteristics of both Bos Taurus and Bos Indicus (zebu) cattle. This is where it gets rather interesting, because the zebu originated in South Asia, particularly the Indian subcontinent. In fact, even the Bos Taurus according to new clues provided by genetic studies, have a common origin in the Near East.

Cattle, incidentally, is the one single factor that distinguishes the Quena from the Kung (Bushmen). The true hunter-gatherers (Kung) never relied on cattle for their survival, but obtained their food exclusively from wild plants and animals, hence the term hunter-gatherer.

Another hidden historical truth is the fact that black herding people of southern Africa looked down on the stockless Bushmen and considered them as vagrant riff-raff and good-for-nothings. This attitude is also reflected in the Tswana peoples term for the Bushmen, Basarwa, which Alice Mogwe, a human rights advocate in Botswana, describes as those who have not acquired any cattle. The earlier term Masarwa also indicates social inferiority. Its prefix ma denotes subservience, and its presumed root tua means despised neighbouring tribe Source: The Bushmen of Southern Africa: A Foraging Society in Transition, by Andrew Brown Smith

Even now, in our sophisticated modern-day democratic era, the Bushmen peoples still face continued attacks from government authorities who seek to drive them from the Kalahari Desert into resettlement camps. In 2006, the High Court confirmed the Bushmen's right to live and hunt on their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR), but not a single hunting license has been issued since. Latest news reports on this issue mention that these people now risk starvation, or will be forced to rely on government handouts only available in the resettlement camps outside the reserve, which the Bushmen call, places of death (See news report here).

Ive mentioned this latest news about the plight of the modern-day Bushmen to highlight the fact that they are being oppressed by the government

authorities of Botswana, a member state of the Commonwealth of Nations. The UN's top official on indigenous rights, Prof. James Anaya, has condemned Botswana's persecution of the Bushmen in a report released in February 2010. If this kind of oppression took place during the apartheid era the entire world would have been up in arms screaming, you racist fascists at the top of their voices!

The world, it seems, has also gone blind and deaf to the many other human rights atrocities committed in modern-day South Africa and neighbouring states such as Zimbabwe perplexed by the propaganda dished up by the mainstream media and in our ever-changing history books.

As with all fascinating and controversial topics of this nature, it is never easy to come to an appropriate conclusion, and neither is it possible to present all the facts - even in a condensed form. The inclination to divert ones attention to other related subjects is always a blogging hazard. When this happens it leaves one with two choices: Either end the posting, or contemplate a 2nd or perhaps 3rd follow-up. However, it would be rather improper and tasteless to simply terminate this specific article without leaving readers with some food for thought.

Its all good-and-well to share some of this knowledge of ancient Indian influence with readers, but after absorbing this information a few crucial questions come to mind. They are questions that nobody seems to have an answer for, thereby forcing speculative answers based on knowledge we already possess and the personal experiences weve gained from living and working with people who constantly remind us how white colonialists have oppressed and exploited them. This dangerous rhetoric has triggered civil wars and genocides in many developing countries in Africa, yet the current rulers of the country dont seem too perturbed about it.

Unanswered Questions: What happened to these ancient Indian Goldminers? Their mining activities and superior knowledge made them masters over the masses and also the

owners of land. Why then did they leave while there was still plenty of gold to be mined in the land? What was the real reason behind the abandoning of large Kingdoms such as Mapungubwe and Zimbabwe, which ceased to exist sometime in the late-13th and mid-15th centuries respectively?

Did those local labourers of old also pitch up for work one day only to find that operations had been closed down, and that their bosses had packed their bags and fled with the monsoon winds, back to India? Did thousands of labourers perhaps die of starvation due to the closure of mines, or was it the other way around - perhaps a major revolt a mass slaughter of Dravidian goldminers a total extermination?

Do the recent events going on in South Africa related to the closure of mines, due to violent labour disputes, intimidation, illegal strikes, unreasonable demands, a break down in relationships, and so forth, perhaps provide some clues to these questions?