The origin of the Bakalanga is contentious, with some considering early Ikalanga speakers to have been responsible for the region’s oldest known kingdom at Mapungubwe in modern Limpopo Province.
While the Bakalanga are historically and linguistically associated with the Vashona of Zimbabwe and central Mozambique, most linguists regard Ikalanga as a distinct language, rather than a Chishona dialect. It has also been suggested that early Ikalanga is the probable root language of Karanga and other Chishona dialects, e.g. Zezuru, Korekore, Ndau and Manyika.
Cultural antecedents of various Bantu language groups in the region can be linked to the emergence of early Iron Age civilisation by the 2nd century AD. One can more confidently trace the origins of the Bakalanga to the flowering of late Iron Age civilisation in the Shashe-Limpopo basin area from the 10th century.
Evidence of ancestral Ikalanga society can be found in archaeological sites associated with what has been broadly classified as “Zhizo” and subsequent “Leopard’s Kopje” including “Kalundu” pottery styles. These sites incorporate a wealth of material evidence including glass beads, cowrie’s shells and imported cloth fibres, indicating their connection to the Indian Ocean trade, more especially to commercial links with Indonesia and Madagascar.
A shift from Zhizo to Leopards Kopje ceramics in the area coincides with the 11th century emergence of the Mapungubwe polity, which the archaeologist Thomas Huffman suggests was the first Bakalanga Kingdom.
Besides importing glass beads, which were accepted at the time as a currency in the region, Mapungubwe artisans recast glass into larger sphere’s for interior trading. Local mines and smiths also produced a variety of iron and gold objects and implements.
The names of Mapungubwe’s rulers are unknown, our knowledge about the kingdom being based on material evidence rather than oral tradition. It was seemingly at its height of its wealth when much of its population abandoned the area in about 1220 AD, a development which experts attribute to a temporary drying up of the region due to global cooling. The core of Mapungubwe’s population migrated to the northeast, founding the earliest Vakaranga Kingdom (c. 1250-1450); whose centre became Great Zimbabwe.
The emergence of modern Bakalanga as a distinctive community can be more confidently traced to the rise of new polities after Great Zimbabwe’s abandonment in the mid-15th century, an event that remains a mystery notwithstanding the scholarly assumption that it resulted from environmental pressure.
Oral evidence supports the view that some of Great Zimbabwe’s population moved north to found the Mutapa state, known to the Portuguese who settled along the Mozambique coast thereafter as the “Monomotapa”.
At about the same time a number of Ikalanga traditions trace the formation of the Butwa or Bakalanga Kingdom to the south-west migration of people from Mutapa during a period of strife fuelled by the Portuguese sponsored expansion of ivory, gold and slave trading into eastern Zimbabwe. Translated from Masola Kumile:
“Malambodzibwa, also called Munumutapa- It was him who was found by the Portuguese ruling over the Bakalanga. The name Munumutapa means that before he was conquered by the Portuguese, but that now he met them as a friend. It was then that he was attacking other communities, capturing the male and female children, going with them to the villages of his womenfolk and making them his workers, and also some male ones. Other male ones he was taking to the Portuguese. It is thought that slavery started with them, showing them to the Portuguese…Now Munumutapa raided many tribes. At the time he went out with his army, the Portuguese also having their army and they went to attack Mongase. And they killed the people, capturing the things of the people and their families. He raided many places doing his will, capturing the people and giving them to the Portuguese.”
Additional accounts support the suggestion that the existence of slave trading between a Munamutapa ruler remembered as Manuza or Mavula, encouraged a westward exodus of notables who became the rulers of Bukalanga under the leadership of a hero named Madabhale. This migration is further described by Kumile in the following Ikalanga tradition (the use of the term “Matebeleland” is of course modern):
“It happened that the Munamutapa kingdom was torn by internal fighting, civil warfare that destroyed the Bakalanga. It was then that Madabhale broke away with a very big following and went down to the west of the country, into Matebeleland. He went there to build a kingdom, having left with a very large following. It was a big kingdom and he had as his councillors such men as Nimale, Hungwe, Zwikono, Vunamakuni, Nkami, Nigwande, Ninhembwe and many others. Upon his arrival he found that that country belonged to the Bakwa (Kua/Khoe), and so he conquered them. Then he ruled and sounded his war horns. That is where the name Chibundule came from (“bundula” being the sound of a bull or war trumpet).”
The name Chibundule thus became associated with the rulers or mambo of Bukalanga, also referred to as the Butwa or Tolwa Kingdom.
