Lost Trails on the Lowveld

by TV Bulpin Howard Timmins, 1950

Thomas Victor Bulpin (1918 – 1999) is no stranger to readers of this magazine. We’ve featured his books like The Ivory Trail and Storm over the Transvaal on these pages and referenced him in numerous travel features. He’s probably most well known for his classic guidebook Discovering Southern Africa, which was first published in 1980. This book, originally published in 1950 and republished by Protea Book House in 2012, is a celebration of the Lowveld, its history and often eccentric and amusing characters. He sets the scene in the Prelude:

South Africa is like a patchwork quilt. It is divided into segments, each colourful, individual, self- contained, and yet linked to its fellows to make a whole, surprising in its variety, inexhaustible in its fund of human stories. […] In the beginning, the Lowveld was the wild garden of the great god Pan. In its tangle of trees only the animals lived, with the birds, the black death of the mambas, the mosquitoes, and the lurking tsetse. For man, death also dwelt in its secret glades. For centuries he was loath to live there, for even if human hardihood could survive the malaria, livestock wilted before the tsetse and inevitably left ruination as the sole reward for pioneering intrepidity. So for years the Lowveld remained a kingdom of nature where man roamed at his own peril. It was a place where law and order and social inhibitions were unknown. It was a place where the bush seemed boundless, drawing the explorer on with tempting vistas, disclosing some mirage, or some landmark through the jumble of trees.

Gold prospectors, trekkers, chiefs, the Anglo-Boer War… These are just some of the topics that Bulpin writes about. There’s also a chapter about the Kruger Park. This beautiful paragraph, written in 1950, still rings true today:

To enjoy the Park properly the visitor should harmonise his mood with his surroundings. He should forget the helter-skelter of modern life and find once again that there is nothing more exhilarating than an early rise. Nothing more beautiful than a bushveld dawn, an unfolding drama of light and life and colour, when the great lazy giant of the bushveld stretches himself to prepare for a day-long siesta, when a million birds sing a morning hymn of relief. And welcome that another night of dangerous shadows and watching eyes, thank God, is safely over.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Lowveld’s colourful past, its stories and its characters.

R219 at takelalot.com