Heavy Metal

If 29-year-old Dr Shadreck Chirikure has a far-away look in his eyes, it's because he is thinking about how our Stone Age ancestors made a spectacular technological leap. How, when we had skilled iron-workers sweating over roaring flames in smelters across southern Africa, we joined the valuable global trade in metal.
Shadreck, you see, is a special kind of historian. He's an archaeo-metallurgist ... and regardless of whether you spell that with a hyphen or not, it's a word that doesn't crop up very often in blogs!
Shadreck will be one of the speakers during African Origins Month, being celebrated in September 2007 at the MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town and elsewhere in the country.
Shadreck, a specialised archaeologist at the University of Cape Town, will be giving a talk on ''Then and now: how metals were worked before industrialisation in South Africa.''
Although now resident in the Cape Town suburb of Parklands, Shadreck was raised in Zimbabwe and has worked in many interesting parts of southern Africa which were the prehistoric equivalent of Canal Walk Shopping Mall - busy sites for commerce, manufacture and trade.
One of Shadreck's favourite spots is a pre-historic tin mine in Rooiberg near Thabazimbi in what is now known as the Limpopo province.
''Tin from this mine has been found 600 kilometres north in the ruins of Great Zimbabwe,'' the archaeo-metallurgist explained. ''Some appears to have been exported to the Indian Ocean coast. It is thought that some of the Rooiberg tin may have been used as far afield as India and China.''
This is not far-fetched. Think of the famous Mapungubwe cliffs where the northern border of present-day South Africa reaches our neighbours in Botswana and Zimbabwe. This pre-Shona city flourished for two centuries, starting at around the same time as Charlemagne ruled the Holy Roman Empire in what is now Cologne in Germany.
Mapungubwe is best known for its skilled metal craftsmen, who designed a delicate gold rhino which could not be made by modern methods. But Shadreck points out, Chinese porcelain has also been found on site. Globalisation started here a loooong time ago!
In an article Shadreck wrote recently for The Cape Times newspaper, he wrote about how sex is interlinked with science. The technical elements of indigenous iron smelting were accompanied by rituals, taboos and beliefs.
Indigenous iron smelting was linked in people's minds to that other miracle of transformation: human birth. ''The furnace was viewed as a womb which was impregnated to give birth to a child – iron,'' he wrote. These ideas explain why many furnaces across African are created in human - specifically female - form. Breasts and female genitalia form part of the structure.
And there were other restrictions: ''smelters were supposed to abstain from sexual intercourse with their real wives when smelting ... only men could smelt while menstruating women were forbidden near smelting places.''
Imagine trying to argue that particular taboo before South Africa's much-vaunted Bill of Rights!
* Dr Shadreck Chirikure's talk is on Wednesday 19 September @ 19:00 Shadreck can be reached on 021 650 2351 or email shadreck.chirikure@uct.ac.za. His cellphone is 072 2 42 12 70
* For more details on African Origins Month, visit www.mtnsciencentre.org.za or phone 021 529 8100. African Origins Month is sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology, whose deputy minister is Derek Hanekom and whose minister is Modibudi Mangena. It is implemented by the South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement (SAASTA), led by Beverley Damonse.