Vedic Dravidian Gold Mining and Trade in Ancient Africa

Dravidian Gold Mining and Trade in Ancient Kmatiland

'South Africa is denied its rich cultural history’
Contemporary history textbooks start the recorded history of Southern Africa with the arrival of explorers and settlers from Europe in the seventeenth century, with a few notes on Portuguese explorers a century earlier; in the more remote areas prehistory lasted into the nineteenth century. Not so, says Cape Town historian Dr Cyril A Hromnik (photo at left), whose vast body of research takes our history back more than 2000 years. Citing pervasive influence from India over the millennia, he also offers compelling explanations for many of the unanswered riddles in the region.
Text by Maré Mouton

 Read article as PDF.

 http://www.villagelife.co.za/NewFiles/15_hromnik.pdf

Were Indians the first colonists in South Africa?

 http://cosmologicaljourneys.com/pdf/Chariot%20for%20cj.pdf 

Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3-4, 283-290 (1991)DOI: 10.1177/002190969102600309© 1991 SAGE Publications

Dravidian Gold Mining and Trade in Ancient Kmatiland

Cyril A. Hromnik Mgwenya College of Education, KaNyamazane, Republic of South Africa
This paper examines the background of the ancient gold miners of the Eastern Transvaal and Swaziland by making systematic use of oral tradition and the early Indian scriptures, Jtaka stories, and Tamil literature. It traces the roots going back to the early Dravidian seafarers and reflects on their navigation skills and lust for gold in distant lands.

> There is one researcher that is unlikely to have been heard of by
> Dahl and her colleagues. He has an extremely indiosyncratic view of
> the region, but I know of no one who has done more extensive
> research, or who has a better command of the languages involved. His
> name is Cyril Hromnik. He lives in Cape Town, and works on a sort of
> full-time amateur basis, altho he has a PhD from Syracuse U on Goan-
> Mozambiquan contact. He speaks/reads Portuguese, Tamil, Swahili,
> English, with some Dutch, German and French, not to mention his
> native Slovak, and a bit of Russian! He can 'sound out' material in
> Hebrew and Arabic scripts as well, although he does not read these
> langauges.
> He has been possessed for the past 15 years with the idea that
> there was a significant Indian presence in southern Africa, people
> who were mainly speakers of Dravidian langauges and early Shivites by
> religion. His 'hypothesis' is that they were a significant enough
> presence to have been responsible for the construction and workings
> of many of the ancient gold mines in SA, Moz. and Zimbabwe retion,
> and that they also were responsible for some of the stone work as
> well. They were traders and miners, primarily, and were responsble
> for the early gold workin in Africa that supplied India and the far
> East, as well as Arabia. When the trade in the Indian Ocean
> collapsed after early European intervention, some stayed in Africa
> and blending in eventuallywith the locals, and some returned, by then
> looking rather more African than Indian. There is a certain cultural
> logic, since he argues that they traded animals and animal products
> from India for gold and ivory from Africa. Since one can not get
> married in India without gold, nor in Africa without cattle, there is
> certainly strong motive on both side. It is clear that there were

> people recognised as 'Indian" in the southern AFrican region when
> Europeans first appeared (1460s-1700s), and it has always been a
> vexed question why they were there, if they were 'really there' or
> just figments of Portuguese imaginings (but Portuguese and Dutch were
> pretty clear about these thinkgs in all other instances we know
> about).
> In any case, Hromnik has 15 years of notes, and has done extensive
> archaeological survey work, but published vbery little. There is one
> book that might be interesting"
> 
> Cyril A. Hromnik, Indo-Africa:towards a new understanding of the
> history of sub-saharan africa. Cape Town: Juta and co. ltd., 1981.

SOURCE 

LOST CIVILISATIONS...
 The most popular 'alternative history' theories contend that Mpumalanga was
settled by an ancient sea-faring Hindu culture 40,000 years ago. The
mysterious colonists are believed to have erected temples and
astronomical observatories on mountain tops and built strong
stonewalled cities from which they hunted for ivory and mined the
region's ample gold, red ochre and iron reserves. 

 Archaeologist Cyril Hromnik, the leading proponent of the
lost civilisation lobby, insists that the region was empty of
indigenous peoples at the time, and that the legacy of the Hindu empire
is still reflected in local place names, a reverence for cattle amongst
African people, and in the ruins of supposed temples, observatories and
cities. Hromnik, who is an academic at the University of Cape Town,conducts 

tours of the most prominent ruins.