Palms with fronds 10 ft. long, tree-ferns 8 ft. high, and large areas of Osmunda regalis (royal fern) are to be seen in most of the glens and gorges of this locality. The blue lotus lily (Nymphæa stellata) grows in most pools of water, while the yellow everlasting flower (Helipterum incanum) is plentiful, and the bright red sealing-wax-coloured flower (Erythrina kaffra) shots the veld grass as daisies do an English meadow. The sugar bush (Protea mellifera) though present is not found in quantity. Bamboos grow in the neighbourhood, also sugar-cane, and wild cotton. The mahobohobo is not indigenous to the country, but is the most usual tree found here. Its area covers many square miles of this district. Like the wild fig, the mahobohobo fruit ripens in the spring only.
CHAPTER V
ZIMBABWE NATIVES
Natives and the Ruins—Natives (general)
1. NATIVES AND RUINS
IT may easily be imagined that researches as to the origin of the ruins cannot be furthered by inquiries instituted among the present native peoples as to any history or tradition concerning these structures. The chief value, however, of such inquiries is that they enable us to realise in what conditions both the ruins and the district have existed during the last few centuries. But such inquiries only take us back to a period of two hundred years short of that time when Portuguese writers referred to these buildings.
The migratory character of the South African natives is well known. Not only whole nations move, but the tribes among themselves move also, thus making it exceedingly difficult to trace their migrations except for a few generations back. The Portuguese historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries referred to the Makalanga nation as occupying this country with their centre at “the Great Zimbabwe,” where resided the Monomotapa, or supreme chief, and where was “the mightie wall of five and twenty spans thick.” Three hundred years after this was written we find a dense population of Makalanga (“the People of the Sun”) still occupying Southern Mashonaland and forming the great bulk of its inhabitants.[27] In this respect, though their various tribes have frequently changed localities, the Makalanga as a general rule have not followed the migratory custom of South African peoples. Makalanga are to be found in both Matabeleland and Mashonaland, but mainly in the latter province, where the Chicaranga language, which Dos Santos in 1602 described as “the best and most polished of all Kafir languages which I have seen in this Ethiopia,” is still the language of the nation. Makalanga are also to be found in Barotseland, whither the Barotse[28] and their dependents the Makalanga migrated, in 1836–8, just previously to, and at the time of, the Matabele invasion of what is now known as Matabeleland.
A MAKALANGA, ZIMBABWE
