Moving back into the park, four months after resettlement

Starting all over again in the forest, back in the park (2010)

The organisation of the new fields along the river was similar to the fields in their original village. (map credit: Jessica Milgroom 2011)

Nanguene was the first village resettled from the Limpopo National Park. The village had been resettled before the compensation fields prepared by the park authority were ready for cultivation. With the onset of the rainy season, the residents of Nanguene attempted to gain access to other fields to plant on as quickly as possible but they were unable to secure the fields that they needed.  Less than four months after the village had been moved to a planned resettlement site outside the park’s boundaries, complete with new brick houses and tap water, half of the resettled households secured new lands back inside the park.   

They paid a token amount of money to claim cropping land next to the river and began to cut it down for fields.  They repeated the same pattern of land distribution in the new village Machete Tchirivika as they had in their original village Nanguene.  

Many of these claimed fields remained unopened and unused. Most of the families who decided to move back to the park did not stay more than intermittently. Eventually the effort to establish a new village was abandoned all together.