— kaklong — kaklong — kaklong ...

Hold fast! It’s getting a bit bumpy, ladies and gentlemen!
As a matter of fact, these rails saw, from 1964 onwards, a hill moving towards the East coast of Africa. The railway was built only for this purpose, to drag a hill from Africa across the sea to Asia! When the hill had gone, that was some twenty seven years ago, no one needed these rails anymore. Fact is, we are the first ones to use them again.
One of our history-tunnels will take us to that hill in a time when it had not yet vanished to Asia. And, watch it, the hill will tell us his astonishing tale all by itself.

²⁶ With this summit of the Ngwenya Hills, on an altitude of one thousand eight hundred meters, I am the second highest peak of this country.
The people who became known as the Swazis were part of a large migratory mass which moved down the east coast of Africa about 1750. But, the first people I came to know looked differently. They were smaller, and they liked very much what I held for them in store as a gift.
Some forty-three thousand years ago, the leader of a wandering group of San climbed up to my summit; perhaps, he was looking for a cave where he and his big family could hide, perhaps, he wanted to admire the bird’s eye view as stretched before him from below my summit to the horizon — as wavy shades of green, blending far away with the brilliant blue of the firmament and the washed white of drifting clouds.
When he climbed down, beams of sunlight let glimmer some tiny crystals within a dark layer of sediment under a nose of rock. The hand which stroke this glimmer felt a coolness taken by his fingers to the heat of his face.
When he returned to his group they fell into a state of awe. On his dark skin, they seemed to discover the reflection of the nightly firmament.
I had presented the San with the powder of stars.

From the iron-rich bedrock of a cave on Lion Peak they started to extract specularite, the sparkling black iron ore used in ancient rituals and for cosmetics. Haematite, the red iron ore that they used to decorate their bodies with, was also mined. When dissolved in water, they discovered, this mineral would taste like blood, and it became part of their spiritual ceremonies.
This spot on my flank represents the oldest mining operation of the world, started by the San in 26 000 B.C.
Then, some four hundred and fifty years before men invented the modern calendar, Bantu-speaking people came from the South to settle around my feet. Their tools were not anymore of stone but of iron, and they were not interested in the powder of stars.
Behind specularite and haematite, they discovered that element which — first melted in fire and then forged — would ring my passing-bell.
Their early effort to break ore from my side did not cause great damage. The biggest scar measured one hundred by twenty-five metres, being thirteen metres deep.
My death came, in modern times, when an iron horse took me away.
In 1946 the Swaziland Geological Survey proved the large extent of iron-deposits, and the Colonial Development Corporation in association with the Anglo-American Corporation, financed an iron-ore mine and a railway to convey ore from Ngwenya to Lourenço Marques, later called Maputo, at the coast of the Indian Ocean.

Their international merry-go-around had started — spitting me out …
Dynamite tore me to pieces. Gigantic excavators pushed the rubble on conveyor-belts. Turned into dusty, brownish crumbs, I was taken down the two hundred and ten kilometre long railway-line to the Indian Ocean.
They had deepened the port so that giant vessels could land, being built in Norway for that purpose. They arrived from Europe to take me out of Africa to Asia. Each voyage would take two weeks. Arriving in Japan, I vanished — shipload by shipload — in the bellies of huge melting-works.
Resurrected under Japanese lacquered work, the journey was again across the sea. And now, as bits and pieces, I am rolling on roads of every continent.
In 1977, the company decided to pack up — too much rubble, too little iron. I was turned into an open-air museum.
At the bottom of some remaining walls, in the big hole, dug-up somewhere close to my former heart, every week a black man is bending over the dark mirror of remaining ground-water. He brings an empty cola-bottle to take some with him. The water is received by people who are going to be blessed with it.
Ah — they still believe this water would offer some strength to them …
They should climb up the museum’s metal-stairs, sponsored kindly by the European Union, to reach that spot where I had given to the San my powder of stars …

TREASURES OF AFRICAN SOIL
ARE NO TREASURES OF AFRICAN PEOPLE

— kaklong — kaklong — kaklong ...

You want to leave me already? Visitors are so rare!

Well, we have heard this already:

TREASURES OF AFRICAN SOIL
ARE NO TREASURES OF AFRICAN PEOPLE?

We would like to track down an answer to the question why it is that way. For this reason we have to leave …

But, then, you have reached the right spot! Is it always necessary that the mountain has to come to the prophet?

African chiefs sold their subjects to slave traders, first to Arabs, later to Europeans. On far-away plantations these traded people from Africa were forced to help multiplying the wealth of Europeans and of North Americans.
African chiefs bartered ivory and precious metals with alien traders. Those took these natural treasure across the sea to be worked on by artisans and artists in other parts of the world. Instead to allow and to support the creation of value out of own resources by their own people, African chiefs gave concessions away to foreigners.

Ah — from up here, I have seen that king who ignited Africa‘s most crazy scramble for concessions.
²⁶ In 1880 two prospectors, Tom McLachlan and Walter Carter, negotiated a concession with the Swazi king Mbandzeni, giving them exclusive rights to prospect the mountains north of the Komati River. Two other prospectors, James and David Forbes, obtained rights to the area south of the Komati. Both groups struck it rich — and started the crazy free-for-all known as the Swaziland Concession Rush.
As news of the gold strikes spread, a flood of Europeans poured into Swaziland. Mbandzeni’s capital, Mbekelweni, was besieged by fortune-seekers pleading for exclusive rights to various pieces of land.
By the time he died in 1889 Mbandzeni had granted more than five hundred concessions covering practically every activity imaginable, and nearly every hectare of his country. In return for these monopolies, the prospectors paid him an annual rent. But many of the concessions were absurd.
One held by a Mrs. Parr claimed exclusive rights to the running of refreshment rooms on railway stations. Somebody else had, in fact, secured a concession to build a railway. Another ingenious character had a concession covering the generation of steam, which would block any railway construction unless he was bought out, naturally at vast cost. Adventurers, swindlers and a few individuals who genuinely loved the country and wanted it to prosper took part in this scramble …
For a long time, the people in Swaziland lived on borrowed land, almost every piece did belong to a concessionaire.
After the British-Boer-War, a British appointed commission had the nightmarish task of endeavouring to clear up the concession tangle. Some concessionaires had vanished, others reappeared with the coming of peace, and lawyers were having a glorious time lodging claims, seeking damages and compounding the entire fiasco with their own greed.
The mess was partly resolved with expropriation, at considerable cost, of all monopoly concessions interfering in the proper administration of the country.
In 1921, a twenty-one year old was installed as the Swazi king Sobhuza II, and his first major task was to lead a delegation to London to challenge the legality of the concession situation, and especially the allocation of only one third of his country to his people. The petition failed … but, in the following years, the king had some success with the British, and he organized a national fund to raise money by contributions from the Swazi people. This fund purchased land as it became available from concessionaires, and restored it to the Swazi nation.
In 1967 the British granted the country full independence. Sobhuza II led his nation into the new era with a minimum of disturbance, and without the corruption and exploitation common in so many newly independent states.
Swaziland was fortunate in having this kindly, strong and intelligent leader …

Oh yes — I have seen everything from up here, no matter how crumbled my walls became!

Sobhuza II ? There must have been a Sobhuza I then?

I have seen him as well, from up here …
I knew Sobhuza I. Of course, he was only called Sobhuza at his time — no „I“ needed, nobody knew that there would be another king using his name — some one hundred and seventy years later.
²⁶ The people who had come from the north, around 1750, led by a chief named Dlamini, called themselves the Nguni, and became fragmented into separate groups.
One group came to this region. Their leader was Ngwane III. These first few families settled somewhere in the hills overlooking the Pongolo River. There Ngwane died, and I remember the burial-ceremony …
He was buried in a taboo-forest ever since known as eMbilaneni — „The hallowed place“. One family, that of Ngoltsheni, was appointed as guardians of the grave — descendants still carry out this task.
The settlers increased in numbers and called themselves the Ngwane, after their first leader. Ngwane’s grandson, Sobhuza, gradually became ambitious. It was the time of nation-building among the other sections of the original migratory stream. The Zulus, Pondos, Xhosas and other Nguni people were expanding their territories and absorbing weaker neighbours. Sobhuza had no difficulty in securing control of the southern half of Swaziland, if only because there was hardly anybody living in the area. But he was a particularly active nation-builder. His pocket-army steadily brought every independent group in the future Swaziland under the control of their chief.
The developing nation, however, also had troubles. It was frequently attacked by the Zulus. At one stage Sobhuza had to beg support from Portuguese traders in Lourenço Marques. These allies aided him in suppressing a rebellion among his conquered people, they brought with them the power of their guns, but they brought also something else which should change the life of all the indigenous South African peoples.
It came through an early merry-go-around of globalization: from South America it had been taken first by some Portuguese colonizers back to Europe, and now, Portuguese allies of a local ruler brought it to Africa: MAIZE!

— kaklong — kaklong — kaklong ...

We know, Maize, became not only the staple crop of all indigenous South African people — but in the current merry-go-around of globalization — it was turned into a symbol for „creative capitalism“ as well!
That is the catchword for our next guest on our rolling stage.
We really have to bid farewell.
And, while we are being coupled again to the international rail-network, we are welcoming a nutty alarmist from Germany!