Mapungubwe National Park

Between about 1075 and 1290 a state centred on this sandstone hill controlled trade between the interior and the Indian Ocean coast, exporting gold and ivory and importing Chinese celadon, Persian glass and glass beads from as far as Egypt. It was the first class-based society in southern Africa, with the king living apart on the hilltop above his people - a spatial arrangement of power that later appears at Great Zimbabwe. Excavations in 1933 found royal burials on the hill containing gold objects, including a small wooden rhinoceros covered in gold foil that has become the site's emblem and, since 2002, the model for the national Order of Mapungubwe. For decades the finds were kept quietly at the University of Pretoria because they contradicted the official story of the country's past; they are now displayed there and at the site's award-winning interpretive centre.

History

Mapungubwe Hill was the capital of the Iron Age Kingdom of Mapungubwe, a prosperous community whose remains included the golden rhinoceros figurine, and the landscape's story reaches much further back, to Plateosauravus, one of the earliest plant-eating dinosaurs, 210 million years ago. At Jan Smuts's request the government set aside nine farms here in 1918 as a preserve, later the Dongola Botanical Reserve, which the botanist Illtyd Buller Pole-Evans enlarged to 27 farms by the early 1940s, including Greefswald, the farm on which the hill stands. A 1944 plan for a Dongola Wild Life Sanctuary of 124 farms ended with a much smaller sanctuary (Wikipedia, Mapungubwe National Park).

What you'll find

• The hill capital - the sandstone hill where the king lived above his people.
• The golden rhino - gold foil over wood, found in a royal grave in 1933.
• The trade evidence - Chinese celadon and Persian glass in an African interior site.
• The suppressed history - finds kept quiet for decades because of what they showed.

When to go

April to September; summer here exceeds forty degrees. Two days.

Before you go

The hill is accessible only on guided heritage tours at set times - book at the centre. The original gold objects are in Pretoria, not on site. Summer heat is extreme. Roads inside the park include gravel and some need clearance.

Nearby

The Limpopo and Shashe confluence marks three borders; Musina is east.