The Suppressed History of South Africa’s Ancient Dravidian Goldminers

7/27/2019 The Suppressed History of South Africas Ancient Dravidian Goldminers

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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.


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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distorted and unpublished).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 isnowhere 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 ofexpressing 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.


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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 thatterms 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 issimply 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


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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 rathercomplicated, 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. Thequestion 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 Mongoloidinclude, 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


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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 to85,3 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


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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, KomatiDrift, 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.


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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 followersof 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 continueto 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


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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 al-

Idrisi 1150: 225; Hromnk 1981: 44; Von Sicard 1952: 54). These men werenot 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 Bantu-

speaking 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 evidencerelated 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 semi-

desert 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.


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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 ofancient 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:


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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 SouthernAfrica: 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 governmenthandouts 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


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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 currentrulers 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


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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?

Documents

The Suppressed History of South Africa’s Ancient Dravidian Goldminers