LETTER FROM LIMPOPO: How long have children been playing the games of diketo and moruba? Thabiso Sekhula makes a wonderful discovery
I ran a little test this week with my family and friends and my internet friends. The aim of the game was to find out how much they know about the indigenous games we grew up playing.
My first question was to ask if they knew the two games diketo and moruba. All the people I asked said they knew the games and about 60% said they had played the games in childhood. They are really popular, and most of us have quite beautiful memories of a simpler time, when our days were filled with these games.
In Diketo a player throws a stone known as a “mokinto” in the air and tries to take as many stones from a circle before they catch it again with one hand. They then put the stones back in the hole one at a time. Moruba is a mancala game.
My second question, however, received a response of 0%, and it’s not anyone’s fault at all – no one knows the answer. Not even Google. How old are these games?
Wikipedia says the two games originated in Limpopo, which is true as far as I can tell, but the internet has no dates or estimates of how old the games are. One of the articles speculates the early 1900s as the time of origins, but there’s so much more.
I recently went to Mapungubwe national park, and for the first time I took the Mapungubwe Hill tour. Up on the hill, along with the history of the original inhabitants of the Shashe confluence where South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana meet (it’s also the place where the graves of the king and queen of Mapungubwe were discovered with the famous gold rhino, gold staff, ivory and imported beads) lies a bit more context for just how old these games could be.
If you know the story of Mapungubwe, you know the kingdom was at its peak over 1,000 years ago. Imagine my shock and surprise when up on the hill, carved in stone, I found a place where moruba and diketo used to be played.
The stone in Mapungubwe is soft, so to build foundations for their huts, inhabitants cut into the stone. And they did the same for the games they played. And I am grateful, because even time could not erase the evidence of these games.
When I posted about this finding, people from around Africa mentioned how they also play the game of moruba in their countries, even as far away as Tanzania.
One explanation could be that at the end of the Mapungubwe kingdom, when the people moved away for reasons unknown, they took the culture and these games with them as they spread across Africa. What a wonderful find.
Pictured above: Children playing diketo
Credit: Wikimedia
