Sarah Susannah Nesbitt

Travels Back: Trekking with the Moodies

/ stidyatkusane / 11 Comments

I grew up in the dying days of Empire, that now fast receding period in history when the British nation spread out across the globe and ended up laying claim to and governing a substantial portion of it. Their motives for doing so were numerous, their impact (both good and bad) enormous. In terms of size and influence, it was the greatest empire of all time. As the historian, Niall Ferguson put it, in his critically acclaimed book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World: “No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants…The Britannic exodus changed the world.”

For better or worse, I am a product of this mass exodus. My father’s grandfather, Harold Edward Stidolph, a musician, organist, composer and writer of verse, was among the countless many who decided to try their luck in the colonies arriving in Cape Town around 1884, ship unknown. Patriotic and devout (if his verses are anything to go by) and very much a man of his time, he took to South Africa with enthusiasm – among other things, touring the Cape Colony with Ede Remenyi, a popular Hungarian violinist who had worked with Franz Liszt.

Harold Stidolph.

There are Scots and Irish in my ancestry on my father’s mother’s side and their connection to this country goes back even further. In 1817, Benjamin Moodie, the last Laird of Melsetter in the Orkney Islands, facing ruin and a drastic decline in social status, led a party of indentured Scotsmen out to South Africa, on the ship Brilliant, with the intention of establishing a settlement in the Cape where he hoped to recoup his position and fortune. For various reasons – a separate story in itself – Benjamin’s feudal visions were never fully realised but he did end up buying land at Groot Vader’s Bosch near Swellendam which his descendants still farm to this day.

Not my side of the family though. For reasons unclear, Benjamin disinherited his firstborn son, James – from whom I am descended – which meant Groot Vader’s Bosch was left to his second son. It was a decision I had good cause to regret the moment I first laid eyes on the farm with its magnificent old house sheltering on the slopes of the beautiful Langeberg.

What is known is that James equipped with a wagon and a load of either timber or of saleable mixed goods decided, to head inland towards the Orange river to seek his fortune. He fell ill near the northern borders of the Cape Colony, got taken in by a Boer family, and was then nursed back to health by Sara Van Zyl (whose South African family tree dates back to the days of Van Riebeek) who he subsequently married.

She bore him eleven children one of whom, Thomas – or Groot Tom as they called him because of his size and amazing strength – would also uproot his extended family and take them off in search of pastures new.

The trek that he would lead – the Moodie Trek – was an experiment, in that it marked the first organised attempt to establish a European settlement from the south in Gazaland. The inspiration for it had come from George Benjamin Dunbar Moodie, a young adventurer from Natal who, having explored the area and realised its potential, put the idea to his uncle Thomas, then a wheat and maize farmer in the Bethlehem district of South Africa. Taken in by Dunbar’s glowing descriptions (”the prettiest country I have ever seen”) Thomas agreed to lead the trek. Hoping, like his grandfather before him, to create a new Melsetter in the wilds, he led a small delegation of interested farmers, in January 1892, to see Cecil John Rhodes.

It must have been a relatively easy sell. Rhodes’s interest in the area was well known and had, over the years, grown even greater (to say nothing of his grand plan to attach the whole of the continent to Britain). Realising the importance of establishing a European settlement in Manicaland to act as a buffer against the Portuguese who were actively seeking to resuscitate their ancient claims to “Monomatapa”, as well as outflank the Boers of the ZAR by claiming the territory north of the Limpopo, he readily agreed to the proposal once suitable terms had been arranged.

Having obtained the necessary backing Groot Tom returned home. There was much to be done before they could set off. Most important, he needed people. To this end, Groot Tom set about recruiting a group of mostly Afrikaans-speaking farmers to join him. In the end, the party that set off on this long, arduous journey was made up of 29 families consisting of 37 men and 31 women, with 17 wagons and 350 horses and cattle. Where they paved the way, others would follow.

Dunbar Moodie did not join the trek party but instead sailed up to the port of Beira, in Mozambique, and then travelled via Umtali to Salisbury before linking up with the trek in Fort Victoria.

On the 8th May 1892, cheered on by a crowd, the trek rumbled out of Bethlehem “with a great lowing of cattle, whipping and whooping”. They were joined by an ox wagon in which rode John Warren Nesbitt (the Nesbitts were of Irish extraction), his wife, Sara, and their very young daughter, Josephine – my grandmother – who had been born on the farm of White Hills near the old gold-rush town of Barberton (in present-day Mpumalanga).

The seeds of my future life in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe had been laid.

Route taken by the Moodie Trek.

The wagon train struck out into the interior, heading across the open high plateau until they reached Zeerust. From there, they followed the route taken by the old hunters, missionaries, transport riders and, more recently, the Pioneer Column. For much of its length, it skirted the north-western border of South Africa, leading them across the dusty, flat plains until eventually, they sighted the waters of the Limpopo, glimmering in the distance. It is likely they crossed the river at a point, now known as Rhodes Drift, just west of its confluence with the Shashe River. From here they headed up into the Tati Concession area (now Botswana).

The Limpopo. The trek most likely crossed several kilometres upstream.

This is a harsh, arid country. In summer the sun hammers down relentlessly, and water is often hard to come by. Coming in fast, huge thunderstorms sweep across it, the lightning illuminating the landscape below in jagged flashes. There were other perils to be faced. Awareness of animals must have bought an awareness of details. One can imagine their senses growing attuned to lions, hyaenas and elephants, all of whom were common in these parts.

As often happened in these emigration stories, all did not go quite according to the script either. Groot Tom had hoped to complete the trek in four months but such were the hazards and hardships they encountered along the way it took them that amount of time just to reach Limpopo and then another four months to get to their final destination.

At Macloutsie, just over the border, there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease amongst their cattle, many of whom grew so weak they were eaten alive by the hyena that prowled around their camp. This delayed them for another month. There were also attacks by lions and shortages of water. Snakes proved an ongoing problem with several of their dogs being killed by the fearsome, deadly, Black Mamba. Undeterred the party struggled on. Ahead of them lay more hills, more flatness.

They reached Fort Tuli on 12th September, Occupation Day where they were able to replenish their diminished supplies. They also organised a dance (“the jolliest I have ever attended” according to one of the trek members). One of their concerns for the next leg of the trek was the possible hostility of the Ndebele raiding parties who were active in the area. Apart from one or two small incidents, they got through unscathed.

They were to face more drama, however. Upon reaching the small settlement of Fort Victoria (modern-day Masvingo) a major falling-out occurred amongst the trek members when it was discovered in which direction their true destination lay. It would appear that a large number of the party had not been paying close attention when the objectives of the trek had originally been spelt out. Now they could not understand why, instead of following the wagon wheel marks up to Salisbury and the more healthy highveld, they were branching off into what looked like wild, untamed, malaria-ridden country. Or maybe they were just exhausted after months of trekking under the hot African sun and this caused some confusion in the mind…

Looming large amongst the group of dissidents was John Warren Nesbitt who, having been appointed correspondent of the trek, proceeded to pen an angry letter to the Tuli Chronicle, a newspaper, I must confess, I did not even know existed (considering that Tuli is in one of the most remote and isolated parts of modern-day Zimbabwe one wonders what its circulation figures were).

Unable to reach an agreement the party split up into two groups with one half continuing on to Salisbury while the other trekked on to their original goal, Gazaland and the Chimanimani Mountains.

Having written an equally indignant letter refuting John Nesbitt’s allegations, Dunbar Moodie decided to take advantage of the impasse by getting married to his cousin, Sarah Moodie. For their honeymoon, they chose the nearby, mysterious Zimbabwe Ruins, which were to become the subject of much contentious debate. They were, in all likelihood, the first European couple to choose this site to celebrate their nuptials…

Zimbabwe Ruins.

The Gazaland-bound group set off on the last leg of their journey. It proved every bit as challenging an ordeal as what they had already been through. Before them stretched yet more miles of wilderness, the initial terrain was rough and broken, then flat but extremely hot. The party was afflicted with malaria, and their animals succumbed to horse sickness and other ailments. Reaching the Sabie River, with the Eastern Highlands now in plain sight, Groot Tom decided to stop and celebrate. The party gathered together under a large baobab and a demijohn of brandy was produced. The ragged survivors beneath it must have seemed like some ghostly apparition. As one account, now in the National Archives in Harare, put it “Our stricken folk and wagons presented a pitiful sight. The enthusiasm of the men under the circumstances brought tears to the eyes of the owner of the demijohn of brandy (Mrs Dunbar Moodie). The demijohn was brought to the light of day and added considerably to the zest of celebrations.” Dunbar put it more pithily. In his diary, he simply recorded: “Got squiffy – all of us.”

Some photos showing location of Moodies drift taken at a later date.

They crossed the river at what would subsequently become known as Moodie’s Drift, just south of the present-day Birchenough Bridge, then headed up the final steep stretch. Eight months after they had set off, the loyal remnants of Tom Moodie’s original group finally reached the rolling green hills and mountains of what would become the new “Melsetter”, still full of high hopes and ideas about how they were going to create an ideal rural society on the land. For the Moses-like figure who had guided them, there was to be no happy ending of rippling crops and pasture lands full of fat sheep and contented cattle. Within a year of pegging his farm, Waterfall, Groot Tom had succumbed to malaria and blackwater fever and was dead. You can see his grave still there to this day, by the side of the main tar road. Above his name is inscribed the dedication “For Queen and Empire”.

The inscription is hardly surprising. The Moodies lived in an era when many of those who had gone out to the colonies were conservative by nature and loyal to the crown. They saw themselves as emissaries of established imperial power, the bearers of a universal, unquestioned, order, part of a civilising force whose duty was to uplift the rest of mankind. The fact that the people they subjugated in the process did not always see it in quite such heroically romantic terms did not occur to them or else was conveniently overlooked.

Memorial to the Moodie Trek in Melsetter (since demolished)

A memorial to the trek was later put up in the centre of Melsetter. Because of its unwanted associations with colonialism, it was dismantled after Robert Mugabe came to power. The village was renamed Chimanimani, after the nearby range of mountains.

Chimanimani Mountains

After Tom’s death, his wife Cecilia Moodie, returned to her relatives in South Africa where she died in 1905, She was buried on the farm of Rietvlei, today known as the Rietvlei Nature Reserve, south of Pretoria.

For many of the other emigrants, it would prove an equally, fragile, brief interlude. More died, others moved and moved on again leaving behind them an ominous hole. Soon there would be very few of the original trek members, or their descendants left.

For their part, the breakaway group had, in the interim, continued trundling their way towards Salisbury which, at that stage, consisted of little more than a village of tents, pole and dagga huts and a few brick homes sprawled around The Kopje. Bit by bit the town would spread out from this hill slowly engulfing the surrounding veld, vleis and acres of long, pale grass until eventually, it became the modern city of today with its concrete skyscrapers and buildings, just like metropolises all over the world.

Salisbury in the 1890s
Saliasbury 1890s

The arrival of the dazed and travel-stained home-seekers amongst the bare scatter of buildings caused something of a stir. As was so often the case in frontier towns, the majority of the early white settler population was young and male, so this unexpected infusion of more women was a cause for great celebration (according to Sarah Susannah Nesbitt, who later wrote an account of her experiences, there were only eight women and a few children in the town when they arrived, not counting the Roman Catholic nuns and sisters).

Sarah’s daughter, Josephine Nesbitt, would go on to marry Alan Stidolph, the son of Harold, mentioned above. They had five children together, one of whom was my father, Reginald Neville Stidolph. Another piece in the family jigsaw had slotted into place.

During my youth, none of this meant much to me. It is only that I have reached an age when I am only too aware I am living on borrowed time and have started doing some serious stocktaking of my life it has assumed a much greater significance. Each generation passes something on to the other. If you want to understand the present, the best place to start is usually looking back.

I met none of the folk here described, not even my grandmother who died at a relatively young age, but – like my father before me (another adventurous spirit) – I think I have inherited a few of their traits. I possess something of their wanderlust, curiosity and desire to seek out new frontiers. I, too, like to test myself against nature by periodically returning to a harsher – and more simple – mode of existence than the more safe and sedentary one I live on a daily basis. I have never, admittedly, subjected myself to such an exhausting physical ordeal as they did on their long trek (in my case a hike in the Berg or along the Wild Coast usually suffices). For this reason, if no other, I find their achievements awe-inspiring.

I am aware, however, that not everyone views my ancestors’ achievements – their ‘opening up of the continent’ – in such a heroic light. I am equally aware that the legacy they left behind brings its own political, spiritual and psychological baggage. Through no particular fault of mine, I was born on the wrong side of history, under a now-defunct set of ideas and beliefs; a political system which denied basic political rights to others and led to an ever-widening turmoil in the sub-continent. A certain amount of guilt attaches itself to this, an awareness that British rule was not quite as enlightened as it often tried to present itself to be. It is not something that can be easily wished away; the best thing one can do is acknowledge, understand and learn from it.

History, as we know, abounds with ironies and this story has its little postscript too. The collapse of the former Rhodesia triggered a massive reverse trek as many whites, fearful of their future under Robert Mugabe’s hard-line, Marxist-style, regime, packed their bags and became part of a new diaspora. Many of their concerns appeared justified, too, when his government launched its chaotic and violent land grab which sent the economy into freefall.

I was part of this general exodus, swept along, by the turning tide from the country of my birth. In a sense, I had returned to the starting point, and the journey had gone full circle…

REFERENCES:

Many Treks Made Rhodesia by C.P. Olivier (Published by Howard B. Timmins)

The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772-1914 by John M. Mackenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel (published by Wits University Press)

Overberg Outspan by Edmund H. Burrows (published by Swellendam Trust)

Experiences of Rhodesia’s Pioneer Women by Jeannie M. Boggie (published by Philpot& Collins)

Many thanks to my eldest brother Patrick Stidolph whose research into our family tree I have also drawn on here.

A Tale of Two Rivers. Part Two – The Limpopo

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The Limpopo at Mapungubwe.

My love affair with the Limpopo began relatively late in life.

Although it forms the southern boundary of the country I grew up in, until I moved to South Africa in 1984, my sole acquaintance with the river had been crossing over it at the Beit Bridge border post.

In the back of my mind, though, I always had this strange feeling that it was waiting for me, beckoning me, and that I was duty bound to answer its call.

And so I did.

All rivers have their own personalities and the Limpopo is no exception. In his “Just So” stories, Rudyard Kipling famously characterised it as the “great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees”.

Fever trees at Pafuri, Limpopo.

It is an apt description. There is something rather wild and romantic about the Limpopo; it is both a purveyor of adventure and a river which seems to have its origins in the realms of legend and folk lore.

Even the name sounds made up.

Approximately 1600 kilometres long, it flows in a huge arc after leaving its headwaters in the Krokodil (Crocodile) River in the Witwatersrand. Skirting the edges of the Kalahari it passes through some of the driest, least populated areas in South Africa before making a dog leg in to Mozambique and then disgorging itself in to the ocean near the port town of Xai Xai.

In its own way, it is the embodiment of both the sheer size and the mystery of Africa. The sky above it is huge, the horizon stretches out forever. Travelling towards that horizon you are always conscious of the distance between it and you.

Despite being the second largest river in Africa – next to the Zambezi – that flows in to the Indian Ocean, for a substantial part of the year it contains very little actual water. In dry years its upper reaches flow for 40 days or less.

This can change very rapidly. The one time I visited, a heavy rain storm somewhere up near its source had seduced the river in to breaking loose. Standing on the bank the raging torrent whooshed past us, the colour of caramel, swirling around rocks and eddying over tree roots.

It was a brute demonstration that the Limpopo was not to be messed with when aroused. The next day it had dwindled back to almost nothing…

For my first foray up to the drier western section of the river, I arranged to stay at Ratho, a large agricultural estate, just upstream from the Pontdrift Border Post with Botswana, which has camping facilities on its banks.

To get there you travel north from Jo’burg on the N1, branching off at Polokwane and heading towards Vivo. Beyond this tiny settlement, the road runs through open, rather lonely country. About 100 kilometres further on you reach the oddly named Alldays, a straggling, dusty town only a few streets deep from front to back.

Here you veer left.

As the horribly pot-holed road drops down to the border post at Pontdrift, a change suddenly takes place: at this point of its long journey to the sea, the Limpopo opens in to an immense valley hemmed in by sandstone cliffs, mesas and buttes that glow as if they were red hot. In places they have been honeycombed by erosion and blackened by fires. Out of the sides of the cliffs and the rocky outcrops grow fig trees with long, trailing, ghost-white roots. These are Large-leaved Rock Figs or Ficus abutilifolia.

There is something both wonderful and tantalising about this strange, eroded scenery.

The road to Ratho.

There was no water flowing in the river when we arrived at Ratho although, on our walk the next day, we did find a long, rather greasy-looking pool further upstream, concealed in a grove of tall, thorn trees. There was something a little scarifying about this shadowy section of the river.

I found myself wondering what dangers lurked beneath its placid surface. It looked like the sort of place where an elephant could have easily got his trunk, courtesy of an enormous crocodile.

There was plenty of evidence of elephant being about as well, which also made me a bit nervous…

Back in camp, dangerously untroubled by doubts, my birding colleague decided to take advantage of this absence of a liquid barrier in front of us and sallied forth across the dry river bed, disappearing in to foreign territory. More circumspect by nature, I declined to join him.

In the end I was rather glad he didn’t get trampled on by an elephant or eaten by a lion or carted off in irons because if he hadn’t made it back safely he would not have been able to find me the elusive Pel’s Fishing Owl, that evening. We heard it before we saw it, a strange, pig-like grunt which was then followed by a deep, booming ‘hoo-huuuum‘. Grabbing his binoculars and powerful spotlight my birding colleague eventually located it sitting in a tall thorn tree.

It was a bird I had long wanted to tick off my “Lifer” list. What made it all the more exciting was that we hadn’t needed a guide to find it for us which is usually the case with this bird, which Roberts describes as: “Vulnerable… largely confined to to protected areas, threatened by disturbance…” We were also lucky to find it because we were on the western-most extreme of its range.

From Ratho, we returned to the main tar road and then struck eastwards towards one of South Africa’s most important Stone Age archaeological sites – Mapungubwe.

I have a tenuous family link with this area. Somewhere between Pontdrift and Mapugubwe a bunch of my ancestors forded the Limpopo on the 1892 Moodie Trek to Gazaland. In the diary she kept of the journey, my great-grandmother, Sarah Susannah Nesbitt, describes the river as being “very rough and stormy” and says they crossed at a point called “Selika’s Wegdraii” (this could possibly be the old crossing which is today known as “Rhodes’ Drift”).

Every night they heard lion, sometimes close by, sometimes further off across the river. The sound sent chills through my great-grandmother because she had her two infant daughters (who included my grandmother, Josephine) with her and was worried for their safety as they lay there in their wagon.

This was not their only concern. Having crossed the river the trek-party found themselves faced with another problem when they got delayed at Macloutsie, in Bechuanand (now Botswana), by an outbreak of foot and mouth disease with many of their animals becoming so weak they fell easy prey to hyena.

Travel was a lot more difficult in those days.

Mapungubwe is one of those places I find myself drawn to like a pin to a magnet. Once a thriving city and important trade centre with links as far afield as China, India and Egypt, it was abandoned in the 14th Century for reasons largely unknown.


There is still a rather eerie feel to it. This is a place of secrets and questions…

Mapungubwe. A strangely puckered landscape…

Driving through its strangely puckered landscape, I found myself wondering why its original inhabitants had chosen to settle here. It seemed to me this wasn’t a country to live in at all with the heat and the desolation but – who know? – maybe the climate was different back then?

It is good country for birds, however, including yet more varieties of owl. At night you can regularly hear Wood Owl, Pearl-spotted Owl and African Scops Owl. Pel’s occurs here too although I haven’t seen it.

On the one occasion, driving out from camp, just before dark, we hadn’t got very far when we spotted a Giant Eagle Owl squatting on the ground, next to an old termite mound. It was so close I felt I could lean out and touch it. Perhaps suspecting I might actually attempt something so impertinent the huge bird suddenly rose in the air and flapped off to a nearby tree.

Giant Eagle-Owl, Mapungubwe.

In the half light of the forest it sat and regarded us from this perch. Relaxed, enormous, extraordinary with formidable talons, curved black beak, deep, luminous, saucer- like eyes and finely barred grey overalls it seemed quite unconcerned by our presence.

Every now and again it would blink at us, like a camera shutter going off, and tilt its head sideways as if trying to get a better angle to observe us from. Or maybe it was just sizing up my birding colleague as a potential meal.

It was difficult to tell.

Watching it, I could not help but reflect on what a marvellously well adapted creature it was. Shaped by millions of years of evolution everything about it is tuned to hunt and kill at night. In the dark it can see with precision things which for you and I are just a generalised blur.

Perhaps because it is such harsh and difficult country, the park is always a scene of restless, unremitting activity devoted to the purpose of staying alive. There is always something to see.

The Maroutswa Pan in the Western section of the Park is usually well worth a visit as there are invariably herds of animals and flocks of birds coming down to drink, especially in the dry season.

One of my special memories of the pan, is returning at dusk as the sun was touching the leaves of the tall Lala palms in the rectangular-shaped clearing nearby and golden sheets of silken light came pouring down. It was an extraordinarily beautiful scene.

Lala Palms. Western section, Mapungubwe.

The Eastern section is more broken country but is also full of scurrying, browsing and fluttering life. From a raised walkway that leads through the canopy you can view the river in both directions. There are usually elephant here. It is also a good place to get Meyer’s Parrot and Broad-billed Roller too.

A kilometre or so downstream from here there is hill top view point which once served as an old SANDF army base during Apartheid day because of the immense view it gave over the surrounding bush.

It has become a place of pilgrimage for me. It is here, at the confluence of the Shashe and Limpopo rivers, that the borders of the three countries – Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa – that have played such a pivotal role in shaping my life converge.

Confluence of Shashe and Limpopo rivers.

It is difficult to exaggerate the wild, romantic beauty of this spot with its great baobabs and fig trees growing out of a chaos of rocks. Standing on the edge of the cliff face I sometimes feel like I have been magicked into some parallel world. This is the ancient Africa of myth which the old writers and cartographers had heard about but weren’t too certain how to depict in their books and their maps.

Mapungubwe. Limpopo in mid-ground.

From Mapungubwe the Limpopo continues its long, leisurely loop along the border with Zimbabwe before crossing in to Mozambique at Pafuri. When I do this route I normally stop off at the town Musina to stock up with provisions.

The quickest way to get from Musina to Pafuri is probably to take the tar road that goes via the hot springs at Tschipise – but by using this route you miss out on seeing the Limpopo so we usually go on the old SANDF dirt road that runs alongside where the old minefield once was. In the past we have seen taxis parked here, picking up the Zimbabwean refugees fleeing across the river.

The Limpopo, east of Musina. View from old SANDF dirt road.

The road is in fairly good condition although, on the one trip, my birding colleague did manage to crack his car’s sump. Somehow we managed to get back to the tar and then limp all the to Tschipise without the engine seizing. At the local garage we gummed up the leak with soap and topped up the oil. That got us back to Musina where we were obliged to stay over while it got repaired.

Musina is an armpit of a place and not somewhere I would normally choose to stop for a night’s sleep on account of its perspiring proximity to the Limpopo river. It is definitely not the sort of town you want to get stuck in for any length of time especially in summer.

Apparently not everyone agrees with me. The copper mine which provided it with its reason for being might have closed but it is still a bustling, clamorous hub full of all the usual transients who ebb and flow around border towns – in this case mostly Zimbabweans come down to shop or escape that country’s collapsing economy and hoping to find employment in South Africa (the bush mechanic who fixed our car was one such refugee).

We checked in to a hotel on the main road. Towering cumulonimbus clouds were massing all around us and it looked like we were about to be inundated as fractious gusts of rain kept splattering against the windows of my room. The storm surge held back, however, as if it had had a sudden rethink, and then veered off to the West.

It had been a long day. Neither the sweltering heat, the music from the nearby bar nor the constant rumbling of trucks along the Great North Road, could disturb me. I fell instantly asleep.

Next morning, the car repaired, we resumed our journey along the Limpopo to Kruger.

Covering a huge swathe of the country Kruger is undoubtedly South Africa’s best known and most visited game park. Although most people are attracted by its animals – which includes the Big Five – it is also a Mecca for birders with over 500 recoded species.

One of the most popular of its birding spots, Pafuri, benefits from its proximity to the Mocambique coast and the Limpopo river that acts as a migration corridor to birds normally found further east and north. It was here, that I obtained my first sighting of the elusive Bohm’s Spinetail, a localised and uncommon species that favours riparian forest and is usually linked to baobab trees which this area has in abundance.

It is also where I saw my first Ayres Hawk Eagle, perched in a massive Jackalberry tree alongside the Luvuvhu River.

To get to Crooks Corner, another place I get a little sentimental about because it demarcates the meeting point of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, you drive along the muddy Luvuvhu River, a tributary of the Limpopo. In the foreground the riverbank rises two to three metres and is capped by a flat plain whose edges are packed dense with tall Nyala, Jackalberry, Ana and Fever trees. Behind them, stretching away forever lies a sea of Mopani trees.

Luvuvhu river from bridge. Elephant below

I like to stop for lunch at the picnic site on the Luvuvhu where the sunlight is subdued and dappled by the trees, and the place is alive with birds.

Crook’s Corner – which is where the Luvuvhu (strangely enough I have never seen this river without water) and Limpopo meet – is another spot where it would be quite easy to slip across the border by just strolling over the often dry, river. In fact, this is how it actually got its odd moniker – because in the early days fugitives from the law used to do just that.

  • Crooks’ Corner, looking upstream. Dry season.
  • Crooks’ Corner, looking upstream. After rain.
  • Crooks’ Corner. Looking downstream. Normal flow.
  • Crooks’ Corner, looking downstream. After rain.

Here is another odd fact about it: in July 1950 a Zambezi Shark (Carcharinus lucas) was caught at the confluence of the Luvuvhu and Limpopo, hundreds of miles from the sea. Why it had decided to swim so far inland is a mystery.

Maybe, like me, it just responded to the river’s call…