Limpopo is a province in the northernmost part of South Africa. It shares country borders with Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique and provincial borders with North West, Gauteng, and Mpumalanga. It covers an area of 48,554 square miles (125,754 square kilometers). The province came into being on April 27, 1994, as Northern Transvaal. In 1995, it changed its name to Northern Province. In 2002, it changed its name to Limpopo. The province’s capital is Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg).
The most commonly spoken languages in Limpopo are Sepedi, Venda (Tshivenda), Tsonga (Xitsonga), and Afrikaans. Nearly all the people of the province are of African descent. The province includes the former Black African homelands of Gazankulu and Venda and nearly all of the former homeland of Lebowa.
Economy.
The economy of Limpopo is based largely on agriculture and mining. The province is one of the poorest in South Africa. Many people lack proper housing, running water, and electric power. Health and education services are limited, and many people are unable to find employment.
About one third of the province’s farmers are subsistence farmers, growing food to meet their own needs. The main commercial farm products are citrus fruit, coffee, corn, cotton, grapes, peanuts, sorghum, subtropical fruit, tea, tobacco, tomatoes, and wheat. Forestry is an important activity in the eastern parts of the province.
A number of minerals are mined in Limpopo. They include antimony, asbestos, chrome, coal, copper, diamonds, fluorite, graphite, iron ore, manganese, nickel, phosphates, silver, tin, uranium, and vanadium.
Most manufacturing in Limpopo is linked to mining and agriculture. Metal smelting, cotton ginning, citrus packing, peanut butter making, and tobacco processing are important activities.
Land.
Most of the western and central parts of Limpopo lie on the middleveld (midlands), at an average height of 4,000 feet (1,200 meters). Scrub vegetation called bushveld covers much of the region, with wooded areas and grasslands occurring in some places. The eastern edge of the province lies on the lowveld (lowlands) at an altitude of about 1,640 feet (500 meters).
Limpopo’s main mountain ranges are the Soutpansberg in the north, the Strydpoort and Waterberge in the central and south, and the Transvaal Drakensberg in the southeast. The province is drained by several tributaries of the Limpopo River. Lake Fundudzi in the Soutpansberg is South Africa’s only natural lake.
History.
Experts believe that Iron Age Bantu-speaking people moved south into the region during the A.D. 200’s and are the ancestors of today’s Northern Sotho people. In about 1000, a large state existed just south of the Limpopo River, with its capital on Mapungubwe Hill, not far from present-day Musina (often called Messina). After the decline of this state, the Venda crossed the Limpopo River from the north about 1300 and established stone-walled settlements in the Soutpansberg Mountains. By the late 1700’s, there were a number of chiefdoms in the area, some of which fell under the Ndebele in the late 1820’s and early 1830’s. In the southeast, the Pedi kingdom rose under Sekwati to become one of the most powerful in the region. Its young men obtained guns when they went as migrant laborers to the Cape or the diamond fields at Kimberley.
White Boer farmers and pioneers known as voortrekkers began settling in the area in the 1840’s. The South African Republic (SAR), which came into being in 1858, claimed the entire region, but the republic took many decades to assert its power over all the peoples within its borders. In 1867, the Boers who had settled in the Soutpansberg Mountains in the north were forced to withdraw southward in the face of local resistance. The Venda in the far north did not submit to the Boers until 1898. The Pedi under Sekhukhune successfully resisted Boer raids but were defeated by the British army in 1879 at a time when all the Transvaal had come under British rule.
The far-right parties that broke away from the National Party in 1969 and 1982 gained much of their support among the conservative white farming communities of the region that was to become Limpopo. The Black African majority was forced to live mainly in large reserves, from which many males traveled to Gauteng as migrant laborers. In the 1960’s, these reserves became the bantustans (Black African homelands) of Venda, Lebowa, and Gazankulu. In the 1980’s, large numbers of Mozambicans, fleeing civil war, entered the region from the east through Kruger National Park (now part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park).
Venda, Gazankulu, and most of Lebowa were incorporated into the new province of Northern Transvaal, which came into existence in 1994. The African National Congress (ANC) dominated the provincial legislature, and caused tension by giving new African names to a number of old voortrekker towns. In the early 2000’s, large numbers of people fleeing political and economic problems in Zimbabwe settled in Limpopo.
