Melville Koppies Nature Reserve

Mining, Trade, and Industry

In 1989 Professor R J Mason published a "Guide to Archaeology Sites: Johannesburg". It was intended to inform and educate about the archaeological riches of the Witwatersrand, and to protest about public indifference. Mason put Melville Koppies on the map when he excavated the iron smelting furnace in 1963.

Our iron ore would have come from the Brixton shales or the contorted beds which you can see when you drive up Jan Smuts Avenue past Wits.

Mason describes a culture which existed from about five hundred years ago. There were people living at Klipriviersberg, Lone Hill. Linksfield, Northcliff, and Melville Koppies.

They had ties with one another and communities in the Magaliesberg area. People traded iron, cattle, copper and "sebilo" - specularite, a glittering mineral used as a cosmetic. Mason describes an Iron Age burial of a teenage girl at Klipriviersberg. She was adorned with copper bangles and iron beads which came from other places. You have to be prosperous to buy jewellery.

Melville Koppies lies near the centre of this trade network. We know that iron was smelted here. The kloof through which Beyers Naude drive now runs is a thoroughfare through the Witwatersrand ridges. If you pass Melville Koppies on Beyers Naude, know for certain that only two hundred years ago people were passing through this kloof with goods for sale: products of mining, farming and industry. Things are different now, but the basic principles are the same.

[R J Mason (1989) Guide to Archaeology Sites : Johannesburg, Occasional Paper 23, Archaeological Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]

2 June 2009

No-one from Alaska

Eight months ago the Melville Koppies created a website. It was technically and aesthetically a little embarrassing.

On 2 May 2009 we replaced it with an overhaul which we hope is better. Vanity publishing makes me say that all the "Nature Boy" columns are now on the site (with quite a few illustrations; Jacques Clifford has been generous in illustrating the columns in print when possible, but the website has more).

Since the beginning we have had a map on the site showing how many "hits" we have had, and from where. The distribution of hits is interesting -it shows something about where in the world there are computer literate people comfortable with English. It is hardly surprising that we have had no visits from Siberia, Cuba, the Amazon basin, the central deserts of Australia, most of China, and certainly not the Sahara.

The map also illustrates the strangeness of projecting a spherical world as a rectangle. If you choose that format Greenland appears huge. It is not huge, but appears as large as Africa in the standard "Mercator Projection". There is a "Peter Projection" which also portrays the globe as a rectangle but gets the proportions rather more correct.

The USA is quite well represented on our site - except for Alaska. True, the Mercator projection makes Alaska look quite large, which it isn't - but still, don't they use English? Have they no computers? Perhaps they just don't care for Nature Reserves. It can't be political can it?

[Refer to: www.mk.org.za en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gall-peters2.jpg

9 June 2009

Which Koppies?

In my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the word "koppie" is not defined. "Kopje" is: "in S. Africa: a small hill". This is unfair to "koppie", since "aardvark", a very Afrikaans word, has long been on the first page of the OED. "Kopje" is recorded as entering the language in 1881. This was a significant year for the British, since it was then that the Imperial army was embarrassed at Amajuba, and the Empire hastily reached an accord with Paul Kruger and others at O'Neil's cottage at the foot of that hill.

The word became more common after 1899 when the Empire, in a more aggressive mood, again took on the Boer republics, and suffered various mishaps and embarrassments at several kopjes and other places all over the "veld" - another word which entered the language - before blundering their way to a dubious victory.

These Imperial histories haunt us. Today the Pakistani army is advancing on the Malakand Valley, as the British Army did in 1895. That Malakand campaign was one of the Empire's more brutal successes, and Winston Churchill, an opportunistic participant, wrote a book to celebrate it.

We hardly give it a thought, but "Koppie" is just a wrong description of our Nature Reserve. These are ridges, stretching from Linksfield to Mogale City. Whoever named them "Melville Koppies" was not paying attention. Pay attention to the Malakand Valley.

16 June 2009

Raiders of the Lost Pollen

We all know what archaeologists are like - Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark for example, with his bullwhip, and Tomb Raider Lara Croft who began life as a video game character, and was later given corporeal form by Angelina Jolie.

The other day we saw the documents and the artifacts from the Melville Koppies excavations in the 1960s, now kept in the Bernard Price Institute at Wits. There are pieces of pottery, arrow heads, bone fragments - Blesbok and other animals hunted here - and stone tools from the Early, Middle, and Late Stone Ages. There are also containers of ancient pollen.

Ancient pollen came as a slight surprise to us. I have since looked it up. Pollen studies (Palynology) have been part of archaeology since 1916, and 137 scholars attended the first Palynology conference in Tucson in 1962. From pollen archaeologists learn about vegetation and climate. It is a crucial scientific tool.

Two graduate students unpacked all this for us. Justin du Pisanie is studying the remains of the Khami culture in Limpopo province for his PhD. Myra Mashimbye is studying ancient cow dung in the same area for evidence of population shifts and trends for an M.Sc. This study is technically called Coprology, and Palynology is obviously part of it.

It is rather a pity that "raiding" has entered popular culture as associated with archaeology. Neither Justin nor Myra is raiding anything; there is no evidence of a bullwhip. What they are doing is real science.

23 June 2009

Road to Nowhere.

Flying - the airline type - is an awful experience, with plastic food, plastic plates and plastic cutlery, and being shown how to fasten your seatbelt. Flying to Cape Town has some consolations if the weather is clear and you have a window seat. There are brown roads in the Karoo which run straight for ages, and then turn abruptly and pass a tiny cluster of buildings which must be a farm. I get jealous, wanting to be down on those roads. There is a moment when you see the observatories at Sutherland just as the descent to Cape Town begins. I once drove through Sutherland on a cold day watching the vapour trails of the jets going back and forth on the Joburg Cape Town route.

On the Melville Koppies we have a road. It is the old Muldersdrift road, about 500 metres of crumbling tar, left over from 1960 when the new road was built. The new road was named D F Malan, a distasteful memory best brushed over.

In those days the Muldersdrift road, as far as we know, curved around the base of the Koppies and then turned sharply left, crossed the spruit, and continued along the line where Beyers Naude - thankfully renamed -now runs.

It is part of our heritage, slowly being destroyed by intruding grasses and encroaching bush, and undermined by the Westdene Spruit. Until now we have never given much thought to whether we should try to preserve it, or just let it crumble away.

30 June 2009

Displaced Person

A couple of weeks ago it took 12 people - four Melville Koppies workers and eight from City Parks - five hours to clear up a collection of litter made by a single squatter. The things he was collecting seemed quite improbable and useless - broken appliances, asbestos, paper which he could have recycled but didn't, and on and on.

In 1993 there were about 70 squatter settlements on MK West, some occupied, some abandoned. I took part in many of the work parties which cleared them out. It was heartbreaking work, and sometimes we did not behave well. I do not always feel comfortable with some of the things we did.

We found very strange things. Why would you bring broken vacuum cleaner parts onto the Koppies? Why would you lug an old geyser to the top of the ridge?

One of the people in the Melville Koppies community observes that people with no support or relationship network do have this kind of seemingly meaningless collecting fixation - a Social Work problem she says. And it turns out that the man I mentioned is from Burundi.

The world is awash with displaced persons. Right now two million people in Pakistan are waiting to return to the Swat valley. In South Africa there are thousands who have fled Zimbabwe.

On the Koppies we are working for conservation and a kind of idyllic peace. But often the awfulness of the real world washes up on our shores.

7 July 2009

Dying in Palestine

It does not rank high in our national memory that men of 1st Battalion Cape Corps died at Nablus in Palestine in 1918. They also died in East Africa at Kilimanjaro, Beho-Beho, and Nyangao. In 1922 the Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg established what is their only memorial in South Africa. It was "St Joseph's Home for Coloured Children" and indeed some of the first children to live there were orphans of the men of the Cape Corps.

Today the Home stands empty below the far Western ridge of the Melville Koppies. Its roof is not in the best condition, paint on windows and doors is peeling, but the structure is sturdy. It is a red brick building of elegant simplicity. There are no cracks. They built to last in those days.

If its builders meant it to last, they built better than they knew, for this is one of few buildings which survived the destruction of Sophiatown in the mid-1950s. It survived due to a legal quirk: it lies on land then zoned as agricultural.

Another old Sophiatown building is Dr A B Xuma's house - from which on a November night in 1949 the angry ANC president ejected an upstart N R Mandela. And of course there is the church of Christ the King. Bitterly the Anglicans deconsecrated it and in anger the presiding priest then lit a cigarette.

Its incomparable murals were soon whitewashed over by careless men. So much loss, so much bitterness still to be repaired.

14 July 2009

Fire, Arson, and Nudity

There is a grey, or perhaps blackened, area between pyromania and arson. One is a rare personality quirk, the other is a crime. So setting fire to our grasslands on the Melville Koppies is probably just eccentric, but setting fire to our lecture hut would be a crime.

For the last six years we have had a regular pyromaniac practising on the Central section. This is regrettable because we would like to have control of an orderly burning programme. We know that grasslands require fairly regular burning, but not every year. This winter we had a very good set of fire-breaks cut - but a fire-break is not very effective if someone lights a fire on each side of it. So last week a large part of the Koppies burned, and although three fire brigades turned out, there was not much to be done about it.

We have a fairly clear idea of who the man is - not his name, but how he looks. We are also fairly sure that in summer - not a good time for setting fires - he indulges in nude sun bathing. Indeed we have pictures, which will not be published with this column.

We have a plan to set fire to part of the Koppies bounded by Judith and Orange Roads, because this grassland is degraded, weed infested, and needs a good burn. But we would prefer to do it ourselves in late August. Anyone is welcome to attend - but for aesthetic reasons please wear clothes.

21 July 2009

Ruins, Goats, and Our AGM

The fire which our pyromaniac set recently has scoured the high grasslands on Melville Koppies Central. These grasslands are on a small high plateau where the soil is a little deeper than elsewhere on the crests, so they consist of thatching grass rather than the tough sparse grasses of the ridges.

We have always known that there is Iron Age walling on this plateau, but mostly it is concealed by the dense high grass. This year's burn has revealed a lot of it. The walling is not spectacular - if you didn't know what you were looking for you would walk past the modest lines of tumbled stone and not notice them.

But we think there are two fairly large kraals and one quite small round enclosure. This is unlikely to be a the remains of a hut. It is more probably an enclosure for small stock. The Iron Age people four or five hundred years ago kept sheep, goats, and cattle. The little enclosure is probably a goat pen - only goats would put up with the unfriendly conditions at the top of the Koppies.

This walling is not mapped on the survey Professor Revil Mason did of the Koppies in the early 1960s. But we will be able to check with him at 14:00 on Saturday 15 August, when he speaks at our 50th Anniversary AGM. If you would like to hear Revil Mason speak, just call us on 011 482 4797 or email fomk@mk.org.za, because we need to know for catering purposes.

28 July 2009