Bantu trading network part 1

You can see the whole series from link bellow

http://www.youtube.com/user/bfq3000

Piles of boulders were nestled at the summit, to be rolled down upon visitors. Here Van Graan's party found the typical remains of daily life: broken pieces of pottery, bone fragments, spindles for weaving, pieces of iron and copper. But they also found a tantalizing wealth of gold objects: a scepter covered with gold plates expertly hammered to within a five-thousandth of an inch in thickness, free from holes. A magnificent rhinoceros fashioned from gold plate tacked down with gold pins onto a core material that had long since disintegrated. There were graves bearing skeletons adorned with gold and glass beads, and wooden headdresses that had been covered with gold sheathing, as well as a superbly crafted golden bowl....

Mapunguebe quickly became the most excavated site in South Africa, but the results of these efforts went virtually unpublished since the existence of the oldest urban settlement discovered in southern Africa flatly disproved the Afrikanner myth of origins.... It's as if these rare artifacts were left so scandalously unprotected in order to facilitate their decay and disintegration, thereby relieving apartheid South Africa of the embarrassment of Mapungubwe's achievement....

After Mapunguebe, we drove to another stone settlement, this one only recently discovered: Thulamela (which means "place of giving birth"), located in the Kruger National Park. Established by the ancestors of the Shangaan, Tsonga, and Venda peoples, this settlement thrived between AD 1350 and AD 1650 and was in regular contact with traders from the great Swahili states along the coast. Today the stone-walled hilltop site is covered with ancient, sprawling baobab trees.

Thulamela is clearly a part of the larger trading and Metalworking Empire associated with Great Zimbabwe and related to similar settlements found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, and Mozambique.

The contrast between the governments's handling of Thulamela and Mapunguebe could not be greater: First excavated in 1996, this site has been reconstructed from the original stones found by archaeologists from the University of Pretoria, in the atmosphere of openness created by the ANC government. People living near the site have been actively engaged in the excavation, sharing oral history with the scholars. Thulamela proves that black South Africans had evolved sophisticated mining skills long before Europeans arrived. Their metalworkers succeeded in converting iron ore into carbon steel for use in tools and weapons.

-"Wonders of the African World" by Henry Louis Gates 1999

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[zippedydoo1]

Hello Jacob

[zippedydoo1]

Hello!!!!!!!!

[blacklion105]

@maaruz1979 Well you may look like somebody from Australia for example but you don't have the same language. What i think they was trying to say is that the language followed a root an the people only change it up a lil bit which would be the equation of slang which really is just a lil bit of changes in a language. Plus everybody comes from africa so if human beings started in lets say kenya they spread out from bottom...top and left and right how much would the language change frm those area

[maaruz1979]

@blacklion105 what i am saying is that a word meaning "human being" in certain languages can not be used as a means of linking all those people ethnically. if 30 million people in europe use a word similar to "gente" which means "human beings" one can not then label those people as an ethnic group called "gentes" simply because they all use a similar word to say "human being"..it is a flawed logic

[blacklion105]

@miraegye Interesting i shall look into him....

[miraegye]

@blacklion105 Africans lost their history because they usually refuse to look into it. If you still have doubt on the origin of the word bantu because you don't trust whites scholars then look at the wonderful work of the professor THEOPHILE OBENGA;He is considered as one of the foremost students and followers of the late Cheikh Anta Diop;a polyvalent scholar with a threefold training as a philosopher, historian and linguist . His book;The Bantu: Languages,Peoples and Civilizations.

[blacklion105]

@miraegye Hmmmm don't know what you our. But I think what Maaruzi1979 is saying that Africans lost there history. Or not the ones looking into it. What i mean by that is it takes a white man to look into finding hidden treasures of the land...if they find a Golden city in the dirt...they get to deictic what its history shall be...not you...do you understand?

[miraegye]

@maaruz1979 hamite was created by racists european scholars . a way to denied that blacks could be responsible of Kemet, meroe ,axum, garamantes civilisations. I understand your disdain for the word bantu. it might be link to your somalia origin. The word means slaves and is basically pejoratif in your country. But for most of us, the more than 1000 tribes with an inter-comprehensive languages and culture similarities its means simply HUMAN BEING and No whites people created for us.

[miraegye]

@maaruz1979 When I say bantu, WE from the more than 1200 tribal languages inter-comprehensive from south nigeria to kenya and from kenya to south africa(included comores and east madagascar) knows exactly who we are. Mwenemutapa-actual zimbabwe(which probably your books called Monomotapa;derived from portuguese) Mwene means Lord in ost of the Bantu languages, like Mwne Kongo(manikongo;portugues), mweneditu -actuall Kongo-kinshasa. Nfumu ,Nkumu or mwami are all nobles bantu titles for ex...