Between the Shashe and the Limpopo rivers, South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe come together to form a special place filled with history and wildlife memories — the Tuli Block.
Tuli is not known as the Land of Giants for nothing. Animal giants such as the Tuli elephants, eland and the largest cat, lion, all call Tuli home. The baobab tree and of course the bird kingdom’s own goliath, the ostrich, complete Tuli’s giant collection.
Husband and wife team Roger and Pat de la Harpe studied and photographed the region in detail and the result is a 152-page feast with all the information one needs about the region. The book is equally appropriate as a bedside read or a beautiful coffee-table book because the photographs and the narrative complement each other so well.
Tuli – Land of Giants reveals the spirit of this relatively unknown part of Southern Africa. The couple lived there for a year, researching its history and unique mythology, while Roger captured the beautiful scenery and wildlife of the region, including its abundance of elephants, on camera.
The Northern Tuli Reserve has become a haven for elephants in an area that over the past decades was constantly under siege from humans. As a result, their numbers have soared, and this has created ecological problems for the landowners and conservationists of the area.
An ecologist from one of the lodges in Tuli, Jeanetta Seliers, is monitoring the elephants to determine their impact on the environment and also how far they travel out of the reserve. She says that a management plan for the elephants can only be implemented once more information about the elephants is collected.
Apart from the gentle giants, a not-so-gentle human giant left his footprint in Tuli. Cecil John Rhodes thought that Tuli was the key to building his Cape-to-Cairo railway. It was also the entry point for his pioneers to occupy Mashonaland, near present-day Harare in Zimbabwe.
Pontdrif, a border post between Botswana and South Africa, was an important stop-over on the old coach route between the then Salisbury (Harare) and South Africa. At the time, the region served as the royal hunting grounds for the old Matabele chief, Lobengula, who was outsmarted by Rhodes in the end. One of the big baobabs, at the top of an ancient hill, still bears the initials of the Englishman who forever changed the face of Southern Africa.
When Rhodes and his entourage came to Tuli in the late nineteenth century, most of the game was already extinct in the area because white hunters had shot indiscriminately at anything that moved. Most importantly, no elephants remained in the area.
But in the twentieth century, Tuli became a haven for wildlife, as hunters moved to other stomping grounds and animals fled back into Tuli. Today it is estimated that there might be more than 1 000 elephants in Tuli.
Standing on Rhodes’s baobab koppie in the Tuli, one can almost spot Mapungubwe, the newly declared World Heritage Site and national park, in the distance. The baobab koppie used to be a satellite city for Mapungubwe and the remains of the ancient people who lived there are still to be found on the hillside.
The scenery is spectacular. For most of the year, Tuli is almost desert-like, but at the end of the rainy season, devil’s thorn springs up to colour the bare ground with yellow flowers.
The Tuli Block is set to become part of a transfrontier park spanning the Limpopo river and will merge with Mapungubwe to the south. As the De la Harps point out in their book, ‘it is a place where the present echoes with footsteps of the past and stirs the imagination, making it difficult to leave and impelling one to return”.
Sunbird Publishing and Earthyear are offering five readers a free copy of Tuli – Land of Giants.
Giveaway:
The first five names drawn on January 15 2005 will receive a copy of this beautiful book. Email your details to: earthyear.co.za