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The remains of terraces and walls covering a large area of north-eastern South Africa have always been known, but no one took any notice of them. Arrogant whites dismissed them as ruins of primitive blacks not worthy of closer inspection. This has changed and today they are the subject of archaeological research under the name "Bakoni or Bokoni Ruins". These testimonies from a distant past stretch for hundreds of kilometres across the country, but still no one really knows how old they are and who their builders were.

What I like most about the Bakoni walls is their floral pattern. Large settlements, with their access roads, look like flowers and leaves on stems. According to oral tradition, a "people from the north" laid out these cities long ago. The uniformity of the structures, over a vast area of some 10,000 square kilometres, testifies to an established, highly developed civilisation that must have existed here for a long time. Stories circulating on the web that these artefacts are over 200,000 years old, however, belong to the realm of esoteric fairy tales.

Images courtesy of Google Earth™

 


 
 

 

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