Today's trip is going to take us to a place where much of Zimbabwe's history has been written: the Matobo Hills. This 3000 sq. kilometers area in the Matabeleland South Province is filled with smooth granite masses forming whalebacked hills and crenellated castle kopjes, beautifully sculptured by time and weather. Already forty thousand years ago the caves and crevices formed out of these rocks where inhabited by Zimbabwe's earliest inhabitants, the San. In a more recent period the Matobo Hills where the last stronghold of Lobengula's Ndebele in their resistance to Cecil Rhode's British South Africa Company.

Once a place of war between white "pioneers" and black indunas and impis it's now a national park with an abundance of wildlife. Matobo Hills National Park is especially known for it's population of white rhino's but it has quite a number of leopards, sable antelopes, impala, wildebeest, klipspringer and a lot of other game within it's boundaries as well. To our surprise we were allowed to walk towards two rhino's lying in the shade of a nearby bush. Accompanied by our guide and in small groups we were able to approach these magnificent animals to within 15 meters. Although we approached them upwind and very silently they must have noticed us as they stood up and walked away slowly.

After this unexpected and impressive experience we continued our trip in the park hoping to see one of the park's leopards. Unfortunately we didn't see one of those elusive animals but on our way out of the park and close to the park's boundary we suddenly came across a single Giraffe looking stately from the bushes along the road. When we stopped to have a better look at the graceful animal it started running away in it's typical slow motion kind of running.

Apart from the wildlife, Matobo Hills National Park and its surroundings form a spectacular landscape of granite towers, turrets, cliffs and ridges. Formed by molten masses thrust upward deep beneath the earth, the hills are geologically extremely ancient, having lain covered by softer material for millions of years. Aeons of rain, wind and other forms of erosion gradually have worn down this softer material leaving the previously buried granite hills unexposed. An unorderly collection of granite masses, split, seamed, sculpted and shaped are left forming sometimes enigmatic figurines like Mother and Child (below left) and The Chinese (below right).

All over Zimbabwe where granite outcrops are found, but especially in the Matobo area, rockpaintings are found. Dated from somewhere as old as thirty thousand years to as recent as about a thousand years, San artists have depicted animals, figures, landscapes and religious themes using a variety of pigments and natural minerals. Some are of outstanding beauty like those inside Nswatugi Cave, Silozwane Cave and White Rhino Shelter. But all are remarkable reminders of people and times long gone. More than two thousand sites have been identified in the Hills, probably many more still awaiting discovery.

Known to the Ndebele as Malindidzimu, or 'place of spirits' the resting-place of Cecil Rhodes is a great granite whaleback outcrop with a collection of massive rounded granite boulders on top of it. The immensity of the environment and the 360 degrees viewpoint it offers truly matches Cecil Rhodes' megalomania and the name World's View he gave to it. In his last will Rhodes directed that this place should be reserved for those who had done special service to Rhodesia and the British Empire. Apart from Rhodes' grave and those of Dr. Leander Starr Jameson and Sir Charles Patrick John Coghlan, Malindidzimu also contains a massive granite memorial remembering the death of Major Allan Wilson and his thirty-three men of the so-called Shangani Patrol. Pursuing Lobengula after the king has fled Bulawayo, they where killed by Ndebele troops when they were separated by a suddenly flooded Shangani River.

Sunk in solid granite a copper plaque on the grave simply reads Here lie the remains of Cecil John Rhodes. Rhodes died after a long and painful illness in Cape Town on March 26, 1902. Vast crowds lined the Cape Town streets as his body was brought to the station for his last journey to Bulawayo. Similar crowds paid their homage to him before the last leg of the journey to the foot of the Matobo Hills. On April 10, his coffin was lowered into its final resting place on top of Malindidzimu. Spontaneously the Ndebele chiefs and their warriors gave Rhodes the traditional salute normally reserved for Zulu Kings only:
Bayete! Bayete! Bayete!