Category Archives: rural areas

Limpopo in a week

Limpopo, rural areas, Travel,

A month or so back, I spent a week in Limpopo, South Africa’s northern-most and possibly most complex province, at least in terms of the number and diversity of languages and cultures, and the diversity of vegetation and environments.

We began the week leaving from Johannesburg (after a much-delayed flight from Durban). We headed north, past Bela-Bela, towards Mokopane. Through Mokopane and, just as we leave town, a sign for Mahwelereng. I’ve visited this province so seldom, but I have a lasting memory of roses in Mawhelereng.

The landscape is dry grassland. More trees than in the Eastern Cape, but still dry and wintery. Rocky hills seem disconnected from the flat land around them. The sweeps of distance are broken by these boulder-like extrusions.

A day or two later, we are driving through that part of the world where the farms give way to plantations. I always think of this as the edge of colonial Africa. It’s a strange and historically inaccurate thought. Colonialism extended right to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope and cattle farming and mining was just as much colonial occupation as anything else. But somehow, in my mind, rows and rows of banana and avocado trees, places to vast and sweeping and green to be the farms of my childhood, are more colonial. Perhaps because I grew up with the ordinariness of modern commercial farming but this, so far, so different, is a world away from my experience.

It is quite beautiful, actually. Mountains rising above sweeping fields of trees. So green, so lush, even in mid-winter. As we drive, I try to guess what each kind of tree is. The bananas are easy. Avocado, I can figure out. Eventually I ask about one I just cannot guess: Litchi. Welcome to the tropics. At some point during the week, we pass a sign indicating that we have now crossed the Tropic of Capricorn.

Further north, beyond Thoyandou, the world is even more foreign. We travel beyond the Red Line – the animal control boundry near the border with Zimbabwe. The soil is rusty red, dusty and bare and scattered with rocks. The chilly wind whirls the dust around us. Dark green trees, taller than people, scatter homesteads. In between, along the roads, in the middle of homesteads, are baobabs. Ancient, giant upside-down trees. The people who live here eat the flesh of the fruit, grinding it to a powder and mixing it with water to make a sweet paste. Some of them eat the fruit raw.

Beyond the village, we drive even further north. We stop at a shop on the edge of a mine and buy lunch. And then we head off to see the Big Tree – not the largest, now a pub, but a wild baobab in a nature park. I didn’t even know there was a big tree in Limpopo. There is another in the Tsitsikama forest that fairly well known. This one lies off a minor road somewhere in the north of Limpopo. We turn off the road into a park area, pay the entrance fee and follow a dirt track through thick vegetation. Around a corner we stop in front of a giant baobab tree. Along the road there have been many large baobabs. They all seem ancient and immense. There don’t seem to be any young trees. What does a baobab sapling look like?

This is a monster of a tree. The trunk is so huge that there is a cave in the middle of it, large enough for two or three people to stand up comfortably. The roots stretch out in all directions, their upper surface visible for metres along the ground. The trunk is carved with graffiti. Some branches are so huge, people could picnic on them. One branch has stretched out and reaches its fingers towards the ground, maybe 10 or 20m away from the trunk. We take pictures in front of the tree. Just the trunk dwarfs two adults standing finger-tip to finger-tip. It is an incredible tree. Some baobabs are thought to be over 3000 years old. Most are only 200 to 500 years old. This must be one of the older trees.

As we travel back south and east, the vegetation becomes more familiar, more like home. I start to see signs of the Highveld vegetation I’m used to. Even the language is more familiar – Tsonga closer to the Xhosa of the Eastern Cape, instead of the Venda further north. I think this is closer to where my maternal grandmother grew up. I am reminded of how little I know about my own history, my personal history, not the history of the country.

We fly home from Johannesburg on a Friday night, exhausted from a week of constant travel and project visits. The province has never been my favourite, perhaps because it is so different to the beauty I have grown up with, but this trip has reminded me of the diversity and difference of Limpopo. So many different places and sights and peoples all in one place. Such strange, foreign worlds.

Snapshot: Rural Eastern Cape

Eastern Cape, rural areas

Drive out of King, towards Peddie, on the road I know so well. The road I used to travel to and from University every holiday for those years. And so often since. The road to Cape Town. The road to Grahamstown.The road home.

Pass the turn off to the Steve Biko Garden of Remembrance and wonder once again whose idea it was and who is supposed to maintain it. Pass the garage where the bus stops. Under the railway bridge and on, to the open road.

It’s late summer and everything is green. The grass is long, ready for winter. The thorn trees are rich, dark, close to the ground. It’s been a good summer.

Past houses and open veld, a graveyard near the road. Past men working to build a fence around a patch of ground.

Around a bend and there, a small settlement beside the national road. Beside a dam. Behind a fence. I can’t remember it clearly from the early days. I think it was smaller. Just one or two huts visible from the road. Now it is more built up. Houses with gardens. Fields. A sign on the main road – turn-off to a Zimbaba. A real place with a real name on an official name-board. How much of a difference does that make?

We turn off, across the grid, onto the dirt road. A couple of hundred metres on, the road T-junctions at a medium-sized dam. The water is calm and blue on a beautiful, sunny day. Rippling across the day. Gum trees line the other side. They’re invader-trees and are technically no longer welcome in SA but they’re still beautiful beside the dam.

The dirt road is not bad, especially considering the recent rains. We pass some rugby fields. A few soccer posts lie, stricken, overturned, obviously unused, but the rugby field is newly mowed and freshly marked. This part of the world is rugby country.

Turn right after the sports fields and follow a poorly-graded road. Just as we leave the first settlement, three horses are grazing in a paddock not far from the road. They look rich and well-kept after the good season of rain and grass. All the animals look healthy and well.

Along the road, driving slowly on the gravel, we pass sheep and goats. A lamb looks back at me before its mother hurries it over a small rise beside a pool of water. We stop while three donkeys take a leisurely (and reluctant) stroll from the middle of the road. One is a young one, with a shaggy coat in many colours and mournful, watching eyes.

At the village, we pass the high school. It looks well-kept – fresh white paint on the walls, a row of new toilets. Someone must have run a school garden project here once but the garden has gone to grass and weeds. The fence around the school is all intact and shiny and the gates are closed and locked during the school morning. A few younger children watch the car pass from the verandas of their homes.

Brick homes, often with several buildings on each property. And glass windows. Such a contrast to the stark desperation of urban poverty. Poverty here is more subtle, less spoken of, carefully hidden away from the prying eyes of a small community. No less deadly. We pass a house with a 4×4 in the driveway. I wonder who lives there.

Most houses have animals of some sort. A sheep or two grazing in the garden. Some chickens wandering the yard. A goat in the vegetable patch. Cattle. Donkeys. Pigs. There is something so real, so normal about it. My heart sings just a little. This is how the world should look.

Beyond the houses and gardens, the chicken hoks and goat-herds with their animals, past the kraals enclosed with poker-red flowering aloes and the full farm dams, the yellow-green hills of the Eastern Cape roll away into the distance and a thunderstorm begins to gather on the horizon.