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.