Mapungubwe National Park is in the heart of the baobab belt, the most northern part of the country, where these upside down trees dominate the landscape.
Baobabs can live for thousands of years, and in northern Limpopo, they do. Old and gnarled, their spongy interiors bloat and bulge as time passes, the environment changing around them. In this northernmost region of South Africa, baobabs stand sentry over the landscape.
If these mighty trees had memories, what would they recall of their infancy? Would they remember seeing vast herds of game, elephants in unimaginable numbers, buffalo by the thousands moving across the Limpopo Shashe basin? And if these giants could cast their minds back a millennium, would they recall the people? Caravans of traders laden with ivory, potters, servants, hunters, kings.
The baobabs would have seen a great empire rise and fall, a sophisticated people who farmed and crafted and traded and lived and died on this hill, in this basin. While people had moved through this valley for thousands of years, in the late 12th century these trees witnessed the birth of a kingdom.
A hundred years ago, shards of clay pottery, cattle bones and beads lay forgotten on a hill near South Africa’s modern-day borders with Botswana and Zimbabwe. Beneath the surface lay glass beads and gold. And the bones of kings and queens, the physical remains of a great African Iron Age kingdom, where the mighty Limpopo and Shashe rivers meet.
The relics of Mapungubwe society lay as they had for more than 600 years, untouched even
