Let me tell you a last mystery which exists in the Cape. It is the mighty stone, a rock called Cathedral Rock.

Cathedral is a tall rock with a hole through it and we are told in our folklore that the great gods, who once had their dwelling places under Table Mountain, left this great rock with a hole through it, so that human stargazers would be able to see through that hole, the Red Star of Anger which is a star which we are told will signal the coming of cataclysmic events to this planet of ours, when earthquakes, tornadoes and deluges of water, will mark the beginning coming of the great changes that this planet must undergo.

We are told that this red star, which we call the star of Murumutsi – (conqueror provocate or the bleeder) Lilieto la Piri – Lover of our Sun, was originally the lover of our sun.

It is A female star which was once in the heavens next to our sun and which was expelled by God into the outer darkness because it was tormenting the sun, shouting and screaming at it and preventing it from doing its job of shining upon the earth properly. God got angry with the star of Lilieto. He banished the red star Lilieto into outer darkness.

LILIETO is an ardent lover of our sun. Every 36,000 years, we are told, she comes back to make love to our sun and as these two heavenly bodies make love, fire rains down from the sky, comets shoot through the heavens, tidal waves rise in rebellion against the earth and crash over the highest mountains in the land. Earthquakes cause the earth to tremble, to shatter and to scream in pain.

Because Lilieto is an angry star which hates the earth, which is another woman. Lilieto the star is jealous of MUTABA, our earth and she wants to kill her because she believes that she was the sun’s first wife.

This thing has happened before and it will happen again and again and again.

When the world is burdened with pain, when the earth is screaming in anguish because of evil-doings of human beings, LILIETO the star of anger appears and she scourges the earth with fire. She scourges the earth with earthquakes. She scourges the earth with smoke that comes we know not where.

She has done it many times before.

The truth is suppressed in South Africa. I am sorry that we are talking into the empty wind and nobody hears ours words.

All over South Africa you find systems of standing stones and scientists in South Africa always avoid talking about those stones when they can. They don’t want to know about them, because they raise questions about black people which no-one wants to hear the answer of.

There are systems of standing stones in Natal. There are systems of standing stones in the Cape, in the Transvaal and elsewhere. Everybody can see these stones many of which are being undermined, vandalised and damaged as we are talking now.

Very few people know that these stones served an important function in the lives of hundreds of our people.

CELESTIAL PHENOMENA AND KING SHAKA

One of the arts of being a king or a queen in an African country was to keep in touch and close contact with natural phenomena such as lunar eclipses, solar eclipses as well as the changing of the seasons.

There are many people who regard Africans simply as savages, who had no knowledge of the stars and their mysteries, to whom eclipses, whether lunar or solar, were noting but sources of primitive fear.

Let me tell you African kings and queens made great use of these things.

In 1825, two years before he was murdered, King Shaka noticed a terrible thing for himself – that because he was leading the Zulus into constant warfare, many of his best generals, many of his best warriors were defecting.

They were leaving Shaka to join his ailing half-brother Mapande, who was secretly promising to turn the Zulu nation back to what it used to be before; a nation of wealthy traders who traded in snuff, in ivory, in metal weapons and so on.

Shaka knew that he could not use force to bring his warriors to heel. You cannot force people to stay with you when all they do is to pack their goods at night and take long journeys by foot away from your kingdom.

Shaka cast about. What should he do? He did not know. Then one day he received important information from the Zulu astronomers and astrologers who lived in the Babanango area of Natal.

At Babanango there are systems of standing stones known as the stones of the female, because each stone appears to be carrying a baby on its back.

These were stones used both as a fertility shrine as well as a PLACE FOR LOOKING AT THE STARS.

Amongst my people there was no difference between astronomers and astrologers. They were seen as one thing.

Thus the leading astronomers / astrologers of Zululand sent a message to king Shaka that on such and such a day, the sun will disappear from the sky and that he should prepare for the event.

Brilliant leader that he was, Shaka saw a golden opportunity for bringing his people together. He told his Zulu warriors that because many warriors were running away from him, he would use his kingly power to take the sun away from the sky on such and such a day and he called all the people to assemble at his great kraal, WaBulawayo, to come and watch the king use his power.

On that day king Shaka stood in the centre of the crowd and he gestured towards the sky telling the sun to go away and then he stood and on cue the sky darkened and the sun faded away behind a black disc.

The sky grew darker and darker, blacker and blacker. People were seized with fear and a woman screamed to Shaka saying: ‘King of the Zulus! You cannot take away the sun from us. We did nothing wrong to you! We were loyal to you. My husband died in one of your battles. Please call back the sun!’

And King Shaka did that. He ordered that a calabash of milk be brought to him and he drank some of it. Then he sprayed the milk toward the sky three times and after that, as if by magic, the sun slowly came back to life in the sky.

Shaka warned his people not to look at the sky. One man did and was stricken blind by the glare of the sun. It always happens, but on that day it was seen as part of the fearsome power that king Shaka possessed.

After that there were no more defections. Subjects of the king remained loyal to their king until he died two years later.

The appearance of a comet or the coming of a lunar or solar eclipse, the moment of rising of a certain constellation of the sky, these were harnessed and used as part of the power and charisma of the African ruler.

In the fortress of Zimbabwe there were two towers. Of these towers, one was round tipped and phallic but the other was flat – topped. And it was from this tower that the tribal astronomer shouted and announced the coming of a comet in the sky, but he did this only after the king had been informed.

Sometimes the African ruler kept the knowledge to himself and used it as he chose for political purposes, using phenomena such as eclipses and the coming of comets to form alliances with other tribes, or they could create wars knowing that they would win them, because it was said, he who saw a comet first was the one who would win the battle.

All over South Africa there are standing stones, stones that were used until fairly recent times by the tribes people.