An Africanis in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, showing the dog’s typical long snout, elegant medium-sized build, short coat, pointed ears and springy, upturned tail. (Johan Gallant, © Africanis Society)

You’ll see them in the villages and on the dirt roads of rural South Africa, and in the country’s townships. They’re ordinary-looking medium-sized dogs, sometimes scrawny, with long snouts, pointed ears, short brownish coats and springy upcurled tails.

They’ve been dismissed as mongrels, strays, curs and street dogs. Racists have euphemistically labelled them “township” dogs and, without euphemism, “k*****” dogs.

But the dogs are a distinct breed, endemic to southern Africa. And they have a proven lineage going back at least 7,000 years.

They are the Africanis, the original dog of Africa.

Africanis are clever and attentive to people, as shown in the face of this dog photographed in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. (Johan Gallant, © Africanis Society)

Africanis dogs were long valued in precolonial South Africa for their hardiness, intelligence, loyalty and hunting ability. But it was only in the 21st century that they began to lose the Western stigma of “mongrel”, thanks to the work of two men: dog experts Johan Gallant and Joseph Sithole.

For years Gallant and Sithole roamed rural KwaZulu-Natal, studying and photographing the dogs they came across in kraals and homesteads. They concluded that these animals were not a mess of mongrels but members of coherent breed of dog, with a distinct behaviour and appearance.

Gallant came up with a name for the breed: “canis” (Latin for dog) and “Africa” – the Africanis. He later wrote up his and Sithole’s work in The Story of the African Dog, published by the University of KwaZulu-Natal Press in 2002.

“The Africanis is the real African dog – shaped in Africa, for Africa,” Gallant and Sithole say in the book. “It is part of the cultural and biological heritage of Africa.”

The Africanis is descended from dogs pictured in ancient cave art and on Egyptian murals. The earliest remains of the domesticated dog in Africa was found in the Nile delta and dated to 4,700 BC.

Today, Africanis dogs are found all over southern Africa.

Rock art in Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer plateau has been dated at 7,000 to 10,000 years before present. The dog at the top right of this hunting scene shows typical Africanis traits – long snout, pointed ears, elegant build and curled-up tail. (Alberto Bertelli)

A carved limestone mural of a dog from Giza, Egypt, dated to about 4,400 years ago. Again, the dog has the snout, ears, build and tail seen in today’s Africanis. (Wikimedia Commons, via the Walters Art Museum)

An 1805 aquatint by Samuel Daniell shows Kora Khoekhoe pastoralists in the southern Cape region of South Africa, breaking camp to move to new pastures. Note the dog at lower left. (Museum Africa, via Wikimedia Commons)

Natural – not human – selection

What makes the Africanis unique is that the dog is a mainly a result of natural, not human, selection. Unlike Western dog breeds, whose bodies have been artificially shaped by the arbitrary and sometimes cruel standards of the Kennel Clubs, Africanis dogs are healthy and valued only for their usefulness and loyalty.

As Gallant and Sithole point out:

The Africanis is the result of natural selection and physical and mental adaptation to environmental conditions. It has not been “selected” or “bred” for appearance.

For centuries, the fittest and cleverest dogs survived to give us one of the rare remaining natural dog races in the world.

Also unlike Western breeds, the Africanis does not have a rigidly uniform appearance, although Gallant and Sithole have identified the common traits that define the breed.

Africanis dog and puppies in Limpopo, South Africa. (Johan Gallant, © Africanis Society)

“The beauty of this dog is embodied in the simplicity and functionality of its build,” they say.

The Africanis is of medium size and well muscled. It is agile and supple and can run at great speed. The coat is generally short, in a range of colours and with or without markings. A ridge of hair is sometimes be seen on the back – one of the Africanis’s genetic contributions to the Rhodesian Ridgeback.

The head is wedge-shaped, and the face expressive. Its slender build is sometimes wrongly attributed to starvation. When in good condition, the animal’s ribs are just visible.

Because the Africanis has roamed freely in and around rural settlements for centuries, it has a need both for space and for human companionship.

Gallant and Sithole:

Traditionally it is always close to humans, other dogs, livestock and domestic animals.

Africanis is well disposed without being obtrusive: a friendly dog, showing watchful territorial behaviour. The dog displays unspoiled social canine behaviour with a high level of facial expressions and body language. Its nervous constitution is steady, but the dog is always cautious in approaching new situations.

In other words: it displays a high survival instinct.

Africanis are crafty. Watch:

How did the Africanis get here?

Genetic evidence has shown that dogs are descended from an ancient species of wolf, the ancestor of both today’s dogs and wolves. Dog evolution was slow and uneven, but generally determined by one thing: their association with people. Over millennia they evolved from wild hunters to scavengers looking for scraps around human settlements until, finally, they became our domesticated best friend.

More Africanis-like hunting dogs shown in the rock art of Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer plateau in North Africa, art dated at 7,000 to 10,000 years ago. (Alberto Bertelli)

But how did the Africanis land up on the southern tip of the continent?

It is known that the domestic dog migrated with Mongol people to the Americas, arrived in Japan with early Jomo immigrants, later making its way with Eastern seafarers all along the archipelagos in the Pacific and finally reaching Australia, where these dogs became the feral dingo – making the Africanis a distant dingo relation.

Dogs arrived in Africa via a similar route, according to Gallant’s research. The earliest record of domestic dogs – Canis familiaris – on the African continent are fossils found in the Nile estuary and dated to 4 500 BCE. The animals, descended from wild wolf packs of Arabia and India, probably arrived from the East with Stone Age traders exchanging goods with the people of the Nile valley.

Even before the time of the Egyptian dynasties, domestic dogs spread quickly along the Nile River. Seasonal migrations and trade also took them into the Sahara and Sahel. Iron-using people brought their domestic dogs along when they left the grasslands of Cameroon in a massive migration which eventually led to their settlement in southern Africa.

Dogs presumably accompanied these Bantu-speaking people in their long migration from West Africa down south to South Africa, an expansion that started in about 3,000 BCE and continued to around 1,000 CE. Once here, the dogs were acquired by San hunter-gatherers and Khoekhoe pastoralists.

Africanis and owner in rural Namibia. While rural dogs roam freely through the community during the day, they always return to a single home for food, care and sleep at night. (Johan Gallant, © Africanis Society)

The earliest evidence of domestic dogs in South Africa is remains found near the Botswana border and dated at 570 CE. By 650 CE the dog is found in the lower Tugela valley, and by 800 CE in a Khoesan settlement at Cape St Francis, indicating that contact between the Bantu and Khoesan had been established.

The evidence that the Africanis is a distinct breed, and not a mongrel of Western types, is increasingly clear. A good thousand years before any possible serious Western influence, the people of southern Africa were hunting with dogs that had become endemic to the region.

The Africanis Society

Africanis dogs in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. (Johan Gallant, © Africanis Society)

Foreign influence on the breed came only with the colonisation of Trankei and Zululand in the 19th century. Later, migrant labourers brought Western dogs back from the cities, where they bred with local dogs.

Particularly favoured was the Greyhound, which migrants would have come across at the dog races popular at the time. Their speed would have made them ideal hunting dogs. In Zululand, crosses between Greyhound and Africanis are called Ibhanzi. They are not considered to be traditional dogs.

Today, the true Africanis is mostly found in rural areas. A fast-changing South Africa, urbanisation and disdain for the traditional dog poses a threat to the breed’s survival.

The Africanis Society was established to conserve this ancient and valuable canine gene pool. The society is strictly a conservation body, launched in 1998 by Gallant and Dr Udo Küsel, director of the National Cultural History Museum.

Africanis dog in Botswana. Note the similarity in colour and shape to the dogs’ distant feral relative, the Australian dingo. (Johan Gallant, © Africanis Society)

Gallant said:

The Africanis is part of Africa’s unique heritage and biodiversity, and deserves recognition and protection.

Unique in the world, the society’s purpose is to conserve a natural dog – not to “develop” the breed, or artificially breed dogs for selective characteristics.

It maintains a code of ethics, guidelines for breeding, regulations and a procedure for registration, and a register of inspected and approved Africanis dogs. Advanced DNA testing is standard.

The society also helps members obtain true Africanis puppies. So if you’re looking for a dog, this hardy and intelligent breed may be for you.

Visit the Africanis Society website.

Researched and written by Mary Alexander.
Updated 10 September 2024.
Questions? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com.

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MARY ALEXANDER • 30 APRIL 2024
Published by Africa Check on 3 May 2024

“On the same day of the Solar Eclipse ( 8th of Apr 2024), The powers that be have chosen to re – activate the CERN hydron collider,” reads a post on a Facebook group page in Uganda.*

It adds: “This hydron collider does not only collide atomic particles but it also opens portals to the demonic realm.”

As proof of its claim, the post links to a TikTok clip from footage of a performance that includes dancers, a military band and a huge video display.

The clip is headed “GOTHARD TUNNEL OPENING CEREMONY”. Text below reads: “OPENING THE GATES OF HELL?”

Under that is the logo of Cern, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, with an equal sign connecting it to 666. This is the “number of the beast”, taken from the Christian bible’s book of Revelation and associated with the antichrist and the devil.

The performance is peculiar, but a voiceover tries to explain. It says the display shows the “opening of some kind of portal”. A dancer wearing what looks like a goat’s head with long curved horns is “the goat man, or Satan”.

This and other videos of the performance have been circulating on social media in South Africa, Nigeria and elsewhere in April 2024, with similar claims. They include:

• CERN is where Science meets magic meets religion meets satanism.
• Just so you can see the satanic agenda … with them planning on switching CERN on this April 8th …
• CERN is owned and controlled by Zionist Jews.
• Why would they perform a “bride of Baphomet” séance while opening a scientific lab machine that tries to recreate the “God particle”?

The claim can also be seen here, here, here and here.

What is Cern?

Cern is a multinational physics organisation that straddles the border of France and Switzerland in Meyrin near Geneva, the Swiss capital. It was set up in 1954 to look into the fundamental particles that make up the universe. Its focus is pure science, research that looks into the reasons for things without any immediate real-world application.

One of its projects is the Large Hadron (not hydron) Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator. Inside this 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets, two beams of particles travelling in opposite directions are brought close to the speed of light. They then collide, releasing other particles for scientists to study.

Cern’s most famous achievement is the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the mass-giving field that allowed stars and planets to form in the early universe. It’s known as the “god particle”.

This has made Cern a target of religious conspiracy theorists. And the huge collider is by necessity underground. This has led some to conclude it’s an entrance to hell.

But is the performance in the viral clips really proof that Cern is “satanic” and a way to hell?

Opening ceremony for railway tunnel through Swiss Alps

A reverse image search of frames from the footage reveals it has nothing to do with Cern.

Instead, it shows the opening ceremony for the Gotthard Base Tunnel through the Swiss Alps mountain range on 1 June 2016. The tunnel cuts through the base of the Gotthard massif chain of mountains in the Alps.

At the time, the US$12-billion, 57-kilometre tunnel was said to be the longest conventional railway tunnel in the world.

The opening ceremony was held at the Rynaecht fairground near the northern entrance to the tunnel in Erstfeld, a town in central Switzerland. Erstfeld is about 207 kilometres in a straight line and 308 kilometres by road from Cern’s headquarters in Meyrin.

The 30-minute performance – seen here, here and here – was created by German theatre director Volker Hesse. Media reports have described it as odd, bizarre, creepy and absolutely insane.

But it was only intended as a celebration of the Gotthard tunnel and the Alps above. The “goat man, or Satan”, for example, was meant to represent the alpine ibex, a wild mountain goat native to the region.

And Cern did not “reactivate” the LHC on 8 April 2024, the day of the total solar eclipse over parts of North America.

Instead, the collider’s 2024 science season started in mid-February after a winter maintenance break. On 8 March, a month before the eclipse, it achieved its first stable particle beams.

* Some claims posted on Facebook and Instagram may have been deleted by users after being rated via Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program.

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MARY ALEXANDER • 8 DECEMBER 2018

An artist’s impression of the earth’s surface billions of years ago. The planet had almost zero oxygen in its atmosphere, but there was still life: microorganisms living in the globe-spanning ocean, long before today’s continents were formed.  (National Geographic – The Story of Earth)

Life on earth needs oxygen to survive, right? Maybe not. A South African scientist and his colleagues have discovered the remains of giant bacteria that flourished on our planet billions of years ago – breathing sulphur.

Fossils of the bacteria were found in a thick layer of extremely hard and ancient black rock in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. They have been dated as 2.52-billion years old. Earth itself is 4.5-billion years old.

At the time these bacteria lived, there was just a trace of oxygen in our planet’s atmosphere – less than one-thousandth of one percent of what there is now. The air we breathe today is about 21% oxygen.

The fossils were discovered and analysed by a research team that included Professor Nicolas Beukes, a geologist at Cimera. He and his colleague Andrew Czaja of the University of Cincinnati published their research in the December 2016 issue of the journal Geology.

The ancient bacteria were exceptionally large – much larger than most modern bacteria – sphere-shaped, and smooth-walled. They were similar to modern single-celled creatures that live in the sulphur-rich waters of the deep oceans, where even now there is almost no oxygen.

ABOVE: A 3-D digital image showing the wrinkled surface of the compressed fossil, which was originally round. With a diameter of about 200 microns – 0.2 millimetres – these creatures were massive for bacteria.

Deep and dark waters

“These fossils represent the oldest known organisms that lived in a very dark, deep-water environment,” says Czaja. “These bacteria existed 2-billion years before plants and trees, which evolved about 450-million years ago. We discovered these microfossils preserved in a layer of hard silica-rich rock called chert located within the Kaapvaal craton of South Africa.”

The first half of our 4.5-billion-year-old planet’s history was an important time for the development and evolution of ancient bacteria. But there is little evidence of these life forms, or of how they survived with virtually no oxygen.

The bacteria thrived in deep areas of the ocean in a geologic time, 2.8- to 2.5-billion years ago, known as the Neoarchean Eon.

Because the atmosphere then had only traces of oxygen, scientists thought there could have been creatures that didn’t need sunlight or oxygen, living in the mud at the depths of the ocean. But there was no evidence, until now.

What makes these ancient South African fossil bacteria even more remarkable was not only that they breathed sulphur gas, but they also lived 2.5-billion years ago – more than 2.2-billion years before the dinosaurs first put in an appearance. (Andrew Czaja, University of Cincinnati)

The oxygen revolution

While the giant bacteria were thriving in the deep ocean, other species of micro-organism were living in shallower waters, closer to sunlight. These survived with photosynthesis, converting the sun’s energy into chemical energy – and releasing oxygen as a by-product. As these bacteria multiplied, so the oxygen levels in the earth’s atmosphere increased.

“We refer to this period as the Great Oxidation Event of 2.4- to 2.2-billion years ago,” says Czaja. This, he says, was “a time of major atmospheric evolution”.

Ancient rocks such as those containing the giant fossil bacteria are extremely rare today. So scientists’ understanding of the Neoarchean Eon is based on samples found in a handful of geographic areas, including South Africa’s Northern Cape.

Scientists theorise that South Africa and Western Australia were once part of an ancient supercontinent called Vaalbara. Then a shifting and upending of tectonic plates during a major change in the Earth’s surface split them apart.

In search of ancient bacteria … The scientists on a 2014 excursion to collect fossils near the town of Kuruman in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. From left: Clark Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Aaron Satkoski, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Nicolas Beukes, University of Johannesburg, South Africa; Breana Hashman, University of Wisconsin, Madison; and Kira Lorber, University of Cincinnati. (Andrew Czaja, University of Cincinnati)

‘Doing something remarkable’

According to the research by Beukes and Czaja, the Neoarchean bacteria, living deep in muddy sediment on the ocean floor, were processing hydrogen sulphide, the gas that gives off a rotten egg smell. They then emitted sulphate, a gas with no smell. He says this is the same process that goes on today as modern bacteria recycle decaying organic matter into minerals and gases.

“While I can’t claim that these early bacteria are the same ones we have today, we surmise that they may have been doing the same thing as some of our current bacteria,” says Czaja. The bacteria probably consumed dissolved sulphur-rich minerals from land rocks that had eroded and washed out to sea, or from old volcanic lava on the ocean floor.

There is an ongoing debate about when sulphur-oxidising bacteria arose and how that fits into the earth’s evolution of life.

“But these fossils tell us that sulphur-oxidising bacteria were there 2.52-billion years ago,” Czaja says, “and they were doing something remarkable.”

Comments? Email mary1alexander@gmail.com

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