Imagining Rain-Places: Rain-Control and Changing Ritual Landscapes in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area, South Africa

L'influence des chasseurs-cueilleurs en Afrique du Sud est a l'origine de l'expression artistique des concepts et des rites religieux des fermiers africains, resultant d'un echange de culture et d'ideologie entre les 2 groupes

The main aim of this article is a description of both ancient and nascent ritual-liturgical developments and to ask the question whether these descriptions can assist in identifying possible worship trends in years to come. In order to focus the inquiry the article looks at the presence of crosses within the context of worship settings, but mainly as these rituals are performed outside of the traditional spaces of Sunday morning worship and church buildings. The two settings which form the focus of this article are firstly the early Medieval period in the history of liturgy and secondly the current South African ritual landscape. These descriptions are valuable for liturgical studies in South Africa as an attempt at answering the basic practical theological question, namely “what is going on?” Only after an attempt at answering this first question can the second question be posed, namely “why is this going on?” The article concludes with some preliminary observations with regards to the latter question which could serve as a preliminary attempt at identifying future worship trends.

Rain-control in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area (SLCA) is one sphere in which hunter-gatherer and farmer interaction is archaeologically visible. One avenue of examining this interaction is through faunal analysis. This paper presents an updated taxa list for one of the identified rain-control sites in the SLCA – Ratho Kroonkop. By identifying the taxa accumulated at Ratho Kroonkop and contextualising them using radiocarbon dates and relevant ethnographies, we were able to determine that particular animals were significant to the people who utilised the location as a rain-control site. Additionally, we were able to establish that this significance continued from the K2 period (AD 1000-1220) to the historic period.

Scholarly knowledge of the historical settlements in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area in northern South Africa is fundamentally entangled with narratives told to N. J. Van Warmelo by two women, Sekgobogobo and Mphengwa. The account based on these stories narrated elements of Sekgobogobo’s life history, and pointed to the at times lethal effects of internal political processes combining with regional instability and an approaching colonial frontier. This paper establishes a recursive relationship between this narrative and archaeological excavations to deepen the understanding of the sociopolitical dynamics in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Cognitive archaeological research in South Africa has focused intensively on continuities and discontinuities in religious beliefs and practices within societies. There, however, is a growing body of evidence for continual hybridity in the formation of southern African communities. These communities and processes generally are localized and context specific, but there often are strands of similar beliefs woven across community boundaries. In this paper, I explore the possibility of long-term continuities in belief and symbolism in specific localities, in spite of the rise and fall of polities, and the waxing and waning influence of various centers of power in regions on the periphery. Drawing on Hammond-Tooke’s concept of selective borrowing, I explore elements of the transfer of ideas and resulting continuity in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area, where intense interaction between different communities, population movement between communities, as well as some form of residential continuity of individual persons contributed to the creation, and endurance of place specific beliefs and rituals.

Mutamba is a settlement located on the northern slopes of the Soutpansberg in South Africa. Radiocarbon and material culture suggest contemporaneity with regional developments of social complexity primarily concentrated in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area around the important site of Mapungubwe. The spatial location of Mutamba on the apparent political and economic periphery of Mapungubwe means that it is well suited to investigate patterns of distribution between centres of political influence and their larger hinterlands. It is proposed that trade goods followed variable patterns of distribution and consumption shaped by patterns in taste preference. In addition, this study suggests that, far from being deprived of trade goods, hinterland communities actively participated in regional networks of trade and exchange.

In southern Zambezia, the early second millennium AD witnessed socio-political transformations within local agropastoralist societies. Research continues to unearth evidence of multiple places that likely functioned as the centres of state-based polities. This paper reports on surveys and excavations undertaken at Mtanye, located about 50 km east of Gwanda in southwestern Zimbabwe and approximately 90 km north of the Shashi-Limpopo Confluence Area where Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe meet. Fieldwork identified local expressions of prestige such as stone walling, exotic items such as glass beads and evidence of long-term occupation with a successive layering and mix of K2, TK2 and Mapungubwe facies. Based on this evidence, it is therefore suggested that the similarities in material culture between Mapungubwe, Mtanye and other neighbouring sites like Mapela and Mananzve reflect social networks of shared ideas and practices rather than the existence of a single hegemonic state. Furthermore, the community at Mtanye deployed different strategies to survive and thrive in seemingly inhospitable drylands.

Ratho Kroonkop (RKK) is a hilltop site located in the Shashe-Limpopo Confluence Area (SLCA) of South Africa that was used repeatedly from the K2 to the historic period. Amongst other features, the site contains two rock tanks, which were used for rain control rituals. Faunal remains from rain control sites have not been reported before. A wide variety of animal remains were retrieved from the site, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and molluscs. We use ethnographies from both hunter-gatherers and farmers that have documented evidence that the species found in deposits at RKK were used in rain control rituals. Many of the species identified from RKK had an association with water, rain or potency, appeared burnt black representing rain clouds and have been represented in the region's rock art.