The Yellow Pygmies of South Africa

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 123, 27 May 1933, Page 18

The Yellow Pygmies of South Africa

Discoveries made by Mr. D. S. Van Her Merwe, assistant registrar of mining titles on tho Band, indicate that a race of yellow pygmy miners lived and had a distinct culture of their own in the Northern Transvaal. Authorities at Witwatersrand University pronounce his discoveries as of rare importance. Sacrificial graves of a new type; ia. sacrificial altar approached by ceremonial causeways; staircases that could have- been used only by pygmies; an irrigation system of great size; remnants of a largo irrigation dam; an authentic mining implement used by the copper miners of Palabora; mine stopes so small that they.; were useless for, men of ordinary size—such are some of the finds Mr. Van der Merwe has photographed. He has placed his budget of' information at the: disposal of tha ethnology department at the university. On a certain farm north of Louis " Trichardt he obtained a record' of a •dam, without any history; situated in the.wilderness close to a warm spring. This considerable engineering work ia of such a type that it is certainly of prehistoric origin (writes.Erie Eosenthal in the "San Francisco Chronicle"). Nearby he traced an irrigation canal three and a half miles long and about eight feet deep, in a fair state of preservation. In some places it runs ;within twenty yards of a main road. From the summit of a hill in the Zoutpansberg bush he discovered a sys- ' tern of irrigation furrows clearly ; marked over a long stretch of country " and used in bygone ages. But the " Acropolis" is the most sur- ; prising of all his finds. On a conical,J shaped butte north of Louis Trichardt, Mr.- Van der Merwe found a series 'of terraces, rising at intervals up to

ninety feet over the plain, and surrounding an altar, consisting of flat stones supported by boulders. It pointed north and south. The walls of the terraces are loosely piled and partly overgrown with prickly pear. Half way up the hill are four smelting furnaces, surrounded by masses of copper, slag. "So much of it is lying here," says Mr. "Van der Merwe, "that as one walks over the hilltop it sounds hollow. "Globular rocks lead from terrace to terrace on the slopes (the average height is about six feet) and form tiny nights of stairs. They are only twenty inches wide, very neatly made, but too narrow for an ordinary man to walk on. "The altar is five feet high and nine feet long. Unfortunately, natives of the neighbourhood saw me there, thought I was seeking treasure, and demolished part of them." Mr. Van der Merwo went into the ancient Palabora mines, whose stopes are so small that he had to crawl in flat on his stomach, a procedure not made more attractive by the presence of numberless snakes. A native chief is in possession of tho implement used by the prehistoric miners. It consists of the pith of a local type of ironwood so hard that it blunts the ordinary knife. One end is sharp and served as a chisel. Here he heard a native tradition, according to which the incoming tribes found a race of small yellow people working the copper deposits. They were enslaved and treated so badly that they died out. All black races bury their dead facing the direction from which they originally immigrated and all human graves discovered by Mr. Van der Merwe had I the bodies facing east.