The Origins of Bukalanga

But whence are the Kalanga?

The origins of the Kalanga can be traced back to a people that settled in the Zimbabwean plateau immediately after the Christian era, and intermarried with a people of Semitic stock who also settled in the land around that same time, first coming as traders and settling as miners, which explains the Semitic strain of blood in the Kalanga, a claim which has been scientifically proven in two genetic studies in 1996 and 2000.

The Kalanga are also known to have been miners and traders in gold since the earliest centuries of the Christian era. They were also involved in extensive agriculture.

They manufactured iron and copper implements. They were the builders of such archaeological sites as Leopard's Kopje, Mapela, and others; and were the builders of the city-states of Mapungubgwe, Great Zimbabgwe, Khami, and others.

The Kalanga also had distinct forms of government and religion amongst the peoples of Southern and Central Africa which were unknown anywhere else in the region.

The governments of the Kalanga â€" the Mapungubgwe, Monomotapa, Togwa and Lozwi Kingdoms â€" lasted for a combined period of about 1000 years.

Their religion, the Mwali Religion, unique and distinctive amongst the religions of all the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, had its origins in the Semitic world, and is indeed a corrupted form of Judaism according to a number of researchers.

Despite their many years of existence as the greatest Civilization Africa south of the Sahara, the Kalanga have been subjected to merciless treatment and subjugation over the last 200 years by the Ndebele, the Shona and the Tswana, which explains their relative insignificance in recent years.
This has exposed them to an existential threat as an ethno-linguistic and cultural community which might see their languages, and as a result their cultures, disappearing from the face of the earth before the close of this century unless drastic and indeed radical measures are taken to arrest the decline.

Archaeology has determined that the Kalanga peoples were already settled in the Zimbabgwean tableland at by the year 900 A.D., with a margin of error of +/-110 years. That would mean there is a possibility that the settlement could actually have been earlier than 800 A.D.

The actual date of this settlement may indeed have been earlier than 800 because according to a sixth century document by Cosmas Indicopleustes of Alexandria, there was gold trade that was taking place with south-east Africa at that time. Cosmas's statement is attested to by El Mas'udi and Ibn Al Wardy who in the tenth century too wrote of the gold trade which was traded from the trading post of Sofala, which centuries later we still find located within the borders of the Monomotapa Kingdom, according to Portuguese documents (McNaughton 1987: Online).

Whilst the archeologically established date that we can know anything of with certainty is 900 A.D., we will argue that this date could have been actually earlier than 500 A.D. We certainly will never know when the Kalanga first crossed the Zambezi and settled in the Zimbabgwean plateau. The reason we are pushing back this date is that, first, the Carbon 14 date of 900 A.D. has a margin of error of -/+110 years.

It is very unlikely that the date of settlement could have been later than 900 A.D., for that would be too late for the gold trade that is mentioned by Cosmas Indicopleustes, El Mas'udi and Ibn al Wardy which they say was taking place in about 500 A.D. There has to have been a people long settled in the land that the Abyssinian traders who traded with Southern Africa were trading with. It is not likely that these people could have been the Khoisan communities, who are known to have been the earliest inhabitants of Southern Africa to cross the Zambezi. Had it been them, it would be perfectly logical to expect them to have been found working in gold by the Europeans in the sixteenth century who first started making written records of life in Southern Africa in 1506.

Also it could not have been the Lekgoya Sotho, who some archaeologists think preceded the Kalanga in crossing the Zambezi, for like in the case of the Khoisan, they are not known to have been involved in gold mining and trade. Again, no mediaeval sites of gold workings were found in the areas where they were settled in (that is, the modern-day Gauteng, despite there being an abundance of gold there), as opposed to the Kalanga occupied areas were thousands of such gold workings have been found.