Maramuca: An Exercise in the Combined Use of Portuguese Records and Oral Tradition

Abstract

At the start of the fifteenth century a.d. a group of patrilineal Bantu clans, collectively known as the Vakaranga, occupied in strength the south and south-west of what is now Southern Rhodesia. The population was mainly composed of small-scale peasant cultivators and cattle-breeders, who lived in modest, stockaded villages of thatched mud-huts and granaries, and who practised an ancestor-cult introduced by their forebears from the region of the Great Lakes—perhaps during the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.