The most common understanding is biased towards insufficient, erroneous and biased historical accounts, which date back to around the 19th Century. Many people do not know, for example, that the ancestors of the original Bakalanga people occupied much of the same area that is known as Bukalanga since AD 1000. In this edition I offer a brief chronicle of the origins of the Bakalanga culture, utilising existing archaeological evidence to highlight the evolution of the Bakalanga State of Butua. Since historical accounts blur the history of these people, I turn to the enormous archaeological evidence recovered in prehistoric Bakalanga villages over the last 60 years to demystify this conundrum.
The ancestors of the Bakalanga are linked archaeologically with Leopards Kopje farmers who lived in the Shashe-Limpopo valley. These people led a cattle herding and crop farming lifestyle. They also traded in ivory, furs and feathers with the east coast for glass beads, cotton and other ornaments. The majority of their villages have been recovered in Botswana in areas close to major rivers like the Shashe, Motloutse and the Tati rivers. They built their villages on terraced hilltops such as the ones found at Nyangabwe Hill and Selolwe Hill in Francistown and Ridinpitwe Hills, south-west of Tobane. Research conducted in these ruins shows that they built round houses from red hardened clay, wooden poles and thatch. Their villages had large granaries and a centralised cattle kraal on which Cenchrus ciliaris grass locally known as mosekangwetsi grows. By AD 1000 some of these people had become rich in cattle and had more political control in the area. This led to the formation of a small chiefdom that controlled trade in the Shashe-Limpopo region. This early 'Bakalanga' chiefdom monopolised trade until around AD 1220 when a powerful kingdom developed around Mapungubwe Hill to the east. It is generally believed that some of the Leopards Kopje people living in the Shashe-Limpopo valley moved towards or became part of this newly formed kingdom.
