History
Vasco da Gama and his first expedition, probably the first Europeans to sight the river, anchored off the mouth in 1498. However, there has been human habitation in the region since time immemorial — sites in the Makapans Valley near Mokopane contain Australopithecus fossils from 3.5 million years ago.
The British author Rudyard Kipling popularized the Limpopo in his short story "The Elephant's Child", in the Just So Stories, in which he described "the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever-trees," where the "Bi-Coloured Python Rock-Snake" dwells.
A Zambezi shark (Carcharhinus leucas) was caught hundreds of kilometres upriver at the confluence of the Limpopo and Luvuvhu Rivers in July 1950. Zambezi sharks tolerate fresh water and can travel far up the Limpopo.
Read more about this topic: Limpopo River
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“There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition.”
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“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
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“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
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