Gazing Upon Sheba's Breasts

David Price Williams

Description

Swaziland, a small country on the edge of Africa’s Great Escarpment, is a microcosm of African environments. It was the ideal laboratory where Dr David Price Williams and a team of scientists developed a major research project to investigate the evolution of humankind from the dawn of prehistory two million years ago right up to the present. The book charts their ten year journey, along with the fascinating results of their search, and how David designed and built the Swaziland National Museum. It’s full of humour and his love for Africa and its peoples.

Sujets

• Histoire
• South
• History
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Markosia Enterprises Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909276871
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

GAZING UPON SHEBA’S BREASTS
Exploring Our African Origins
by
David Price Williams
Gazing Upon Sheba’s Breasts: Exploring Our African Origins © 2016 David Price Williams & Markosia Enterprises, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of any part of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden. Published by Markosia Enterprises, PO BOX 3477, Barnet, Hertfordshire, EN5 9HN.
FIRST PRINTING, May 2015.
Harry Markos, Director.
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-909276-71-0
Hardback: ISBN 978-1-909276-70-3
eBook: ISBN 978-1-909276-87-1
Book design by: Ian Sharman
FRONT COVER PICTURE:
The twin peaks of Lugogo, known locally as ‘Sheba’s Breasts.’
BACK COVER PICTURE:
DPW at Nkhaba.
www.markosia.com
First Edition
DEDICATION
For Sue, who gave me the gift, and for Alice and David,
who came to share it with me.
OUT OF AFRICA
Every year we read about the discovery of a new specimen of early human found in Africa, a new skull perhaps or a strand of DNA, which is helping us to piece together the story of where we originated. Apparently, as scientists now think, we came from Africa, all of us; beginning four or five million years ago it was in Africa that we emerged onto the world stage. And with the later development of stone tool technology we were eventually able to migrate from Africa and colonize the rest of the globe.
However, one hundred years ago that wasn’t what people believed at all; Africa was not even remotely considered a possible cradle of humankind. That location, we were told in all seriousness, was actually in England, in East Sussex to be precise, where fossils had been found in a gravel pit at Piltdown near Uckfield. ‘Piltdown Man’, as it became known, was ‘discovered’ in 1912 by a local solicitor, Charles Dawson, and was widely acclaimed by the top medical practitioners of the day to be ‘the missing link’, the half-way phase between the apes and modern humans, although contemporary humorous cartoons often depicted this honour being bestowed upon opposing politicians at Westminster!
But in November 1924 something was stirring in South Africa. The new professor of anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, Raymond Dart, was handed a cardboard box containing fossil baboon skulls which had been found at a lime-works at Taung, not far from Kimberley in the Orange Free State. On top of the box was the lime-hardened cast of a small brain as well as a block of travertine from which, when cleaned, emerged the face of a young child. Dart recognised them to belong to a very early form of human and from this he claimed that Africa, not Britain, was the origin of our lineage. Dart named his discovery Australopithecus africanus, the Southern Ape of Africa. That was the beginning.
But it wasn’t until several decades later, after a number of adult Australopithecine specimens had been unearthed from other South African lime-works sites, that Dart’s original idea was taken seriously and the concept of our African genesis began to become fashionable. As a result, the Piltdown specimen was re-examined at the Natural History Museum in London and in1953 it was announced that ‘Piltdown Man’ was a forgery. It turned out to be the biggest hoax ever perpetrated upon the scientific community and so misled popular opinion that it probably held back the proper search for the African emergence of human-kind for half a century.
More recently, many new fragments of evidence have been recovered, both in southern and eastern Africa, so that the whole drama of our introduction into the global theatre has now been carefully mapped out. While debates still rage about the precise order of events, Africa has been firmly established as our birthplace.
And what about the artefactual discoveries? In the nineteen-sixties and seventies new radiometric dating techniques started to demonstrate that major advances in the manufacture of stone tools also began on the African continent. These were the vital technological improvements our ancestors made to their very existence, to the way they made a living in this vast untamed arena, and the way they competed among the elephants and rhinos, leopards and lions and all the rest of the terrifying bestiary which characterized their world.
What impelled them to make these changes? Was their world the same as ours today, or was it very different? Why did human evolution take place at all, physically and, even more significantly, culturally, on the continent of Africa? This memoir is about that very question. It’s the story of a major research project carried out over a period of more than a decade and based in the beautiful Kingdom of Swaziland, home of the AmaSwazi. Their own traditional way of life is focused on the Royal Residence at Lobamba, overlooked by the twin peaks known locally, after Rider Haggard’s description in ‘ King Solomon’s Mines ’, as ‘Sheba’s Breasts’, evoking literary memories of his illustrious visitor, the Queen of Sheba.
Perhaps everyone who visits wild Africa begins to experience a strange sense of recognition, a feeling of belonging in this timeless landscape. It happened to the author forty years ago. It is an overwhelming sensation of coming home, which in a way is only natural. For Africa is where we all began!
PRONUNCIATION
SiSwati is one of the five Nguni languages of south-east Africa, as is siZulu, and they in turn are part of the wider Bantu language group. During protracted exposure to the Khoi/San (Hottentot/Bushman) peoples, these Nguni speakers picked up a small number of the clicks which strongly characterized the indigenous tribal languages. The only one reproduced here is the strong alveolar click, the sound of a popping cork, represented by the symbol ‘!’
SiSwati and siZulu also make use of an aspirated ‘L’ sound formed with the side of the tongue, as in the Welsh ‘Llangollen’, represented in that case by the double ‘Ll’. In the African equivalents the sound is written ‘Hl’ as in Hlatikulu. Generally, Europeans are unable to pronounce this sound and instead use the form ‘Sh’ as in Shlatikulu.
Plurals in siSwati are formed with either the prefix ba - as in bafundzisi, ‘instructors’, the prefix ema - as in emajaha ‘young men’ or the prefix tin- as in tindlovu , ‘elephants’. Dialectically, in siZulu this last plural would be rendered zindlovu .
The siSwati orthography follows David Rycroft’s ‘Concise SiSwati Dictionary’ (J.L. van Schaik 1981), except the word for ‘father’, which Rycroft renders babé with the diacritic, but which would in normal text read ‘babe’. Since ‘Hey babe’ would lead to endless misunderstandings, I wrote it as bahbe, the long ‘ah’ better reproducing the sound used. Also, I have used the Swazi spelling for the ‘Lubombo’ Mountains.
The main ncwala anthem title is taken from Hilda Kuper’s book ‘An African Aristocracy’, Oxford 1947.
For spelling and other details from Zululand I am grateful to the late David Rattray and to the Anglo Zulu War Historical Society.
CHAPTER ONE
STATES OF ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS
Suddenly in the midst of spiritual darkness and oppression, there seem at moments a flash of light in the brain, and with extraordinary impetus all the vital forces suddenly begin working at their highest tension. The sense of life and the consciousness of self are multiplied ten times at these moments which passed like a flash of lightning.
Fyodor Dostoevsky : The Idiot
It was to be my greatest gift, and I began by hating it. Africa, I mean. Initially, at the start of my first visit, I loathed it. Looking back now, across the intervening forty years or so, it is difficult to say why. But then, in a different century, a different millennium even, Africa’s ancient landscapes seemed so strange to me, so far away in time and place. To me, in every respect, Africa was unfamiliar, undefined, incomprehensible - even hostile. Take the appearance of the land to begin with, the tilt and rake of the mountains, the lime green of the maize stalks, the vermilion earths - that startling chromatic contrast of verdant foliage springing from ancient granite. For me it was unrecognisable, beyond the knowable.
And yet I was to become familiar with Africa as though it were my own skin. I was bitten by Africa one tempestuous night that first December, and it got into my blood, like malaria. I fought with Africa and we came to understand each other. Slowly, inexorably, she revealed her secrets. I learnt her ways, profound and ageless. Gradually I began to unlock her deeper mysteries, and, with that, I stumbled upon mankind’s own furthest history. We came from Africa, all of us. Africa has made us and shaped us. This tropical savannah is the land of our own collective beginning. Taking back-bearings, I see now that it was only natural that in the end Africa was where I too would find myself, physically, spiritually and metaphorically. But that was still in the future.
✳ ✳ ✳ ✳
One summer in the mid-seventies I had married. My wife Sue had been brought up on a farm in Swaziland, a tiny country in southeast Africa I had never heard of, bordering the Republic of South Africa to the west and Mozambique to the east. I looked it up in an old school atlas. It was barely visible, an insignificant circle the size of Yorkshire or Delaware in a vast continent more than three times the surface area of the United States. Even the name of its capital, ‘Mbabane,’ printed large enough to be legible, obliterated the shape of its country’s outline. That’s how small it was. That’s where we were to go for our first nuptial Christmas, to meet the ‘in-laws’ who had never encountered an archaeologist before, let alone one married to their much loved daughter.