Please check your email and enter your one time pin below:   Open in Gmail Sorry there was an error loading the audio meaning “above the waterfall,” also known as Emgwenya the “place of the crocodile.” Get too distracted as you drive along the N4 from Gauteng to Nelspruit and you could drive by the town in three minutes But turn right at the sign just before the NZASM tunnel, and you’ll find a run-down old dorpie with potholes, muddy tap water, and businesses including two butchers, a petrol station, spaza shops, a technical college and a historic inn. advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads Iron brackets on the top right are used by rock climbers Among other things, Emgwenya is also known as South Africa’s premier rock-climbing destination on an 18-month exchange programme from Pennsylvania told family and friends we wanted to live there for at least a third of our South African sojourn crime-ridden and depressing,” my father said But the two of us are what you might call rust belt aficionados So we ended up falling in love with Boven, just as we suspected we would.  My relatives came around, too: something about the mountain air and hidden waterfalls, the Bokoni stone circles, the friendly locals, and then the charming melancholia of all those rusty-roofed railway houses.  advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads The decline of small towns is, of course, old news. Local municipalities are known for lethargy and corruption every week three million people — a little short of the population of Cape Town — move to cities Yet Waterval Boven’s slow crumbling also seems tied to much more specific that road has been so cratered and damaged by overloaded freight lorries that ordinary vehicles have to travel a two-hour roundabout loop provide the reason for Boven’s existence: when Paul Kruger opened the Delagoa Bay Railway Line in 1895 the main interchange and control office was located just above where the tracks descended to the Lowveld Today, as a recent report by the Brenthurst Foundation outlines Beginning with the deregulation of road freight in 1977 the railways’ share of both passenger and freight traffic the Botha and De Klerk governments abolished the apartheid mandate for the railway network to act as “employer of last resort” for indigent white men The view from Glen Retief’s back door during the five months he lived in Waterval-Boven as a senior train control officer in the centralised traffic control office (an establishment moved last year to Kaapmuiden He recalls both the stress and the vibrancy of that era with as many as 140 trains a day passing through the Boven interchange Proteas grow high in the mountains surrounding Emgwenya sitting on his stoep in front of Emgwenya’s main drag It was all a matter of pressing the right buttons Today rail traffic is down to six trains a day — a decline of more than 95% my parents caught the train from their Nelspruit home to Belfast the train between Emgwenya and Nelspruit takes six hours instead of two and a half and no passengers travel between Pretoria and Maputo However, in the democratic era, some gloomy alchemy of municipal mismanagement, changed priorities and urbanisation has meant that instead of serving a broader community, these facilities have instead fallen into tragic disrepair and disuse.advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads is community liaison for an ambitious local revitalisation effort called the Heritage Centre she showed me around the old Reformed Church building that will be re-opening in November as a museum and tourism office dedicated to showcasing the town’s legacy and helping tourists enjoy its attractions now to serve as a Heritage Centre for Emgwenya and its surroundings “Beyond the hiking and climbing, this area’s a treasure trove,” Brown told me. “Ancient African history. Archaean geology. South African wars, Bokoni structures and the railways.” The centre will host displays on all of these, plus a café and, possibly, a Regional Tourism Organisation office.  advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads Vivienne and her colleagues have timed the opening to coincide with the 72nd anniversary of the Mozambique Train Disaster sending 63 returning miners to their deaths Bridge from where a train derailed in 1949 killing 63 miners on their way home to Mozambique fenced-off plaque at the bottom end of town But what are Emgwenya’s economic and cultural prospects for rejuvenation The Brenthurst Report lays out what can only be called an excruciating recovery path for the railways that could begin enforcing the regulations on freight lorries so they stop ruining the roads while train tracks gleam and Willard Batteries all collaborated to clean up a corner of town that was being used as an illegal rubbish dump customers buy frozen samosas along with their hardware and used furniture two Indian mynahs flutter around the customers waiting at the cash register — the owner apparently nursed them when they were chicks One of the most interesting endorsements of the Heritage Centre and its work comes from a man named Joseph Mandla Maseko they call Maseko the “king”; he apparently descends from a line of deposed Swazi royals He also writes academic papers about Christianity The old sign pointing to the Elands River Falls The Heritage Centre aims to rejuvenate the spectacular waterfall as a tourist attraction in a township with a shisa nyama on the street corner and a shebeen blasting Gqom Maseko’s refusal to give up his title mirrors Boven’s own resistance to obsolescence Such perseverance will be essential in South Africa’s many beautiful small towns that dream of becoming the next Dullstroom or Montagu the group working to rejuvenate the town.(Photo: Supplied) as the Boven revitalisation group has done Clear up the rubbish at the upper end of town Lovely story and good luck to those trying to make this work Such a beautiful area should attract tourists but they need facilities Waterval Boven township provided tables and chairs for us to hold a party on a wooden deck overlooking the falls at the far end of that old railway tunnel That was about 20 years ago when the town was already looking neglected Waterval Boven is in such a beautiful setting: it could be another Dullstroom We went a ride on it about 30 years ago as part of our daughter’s 9th birthday celebrations The railway system disintegration is scandalous ' + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.webview_notification_text + ' " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_title + " " + scriptOptions._localizedStrings.redirect_overlay_text + " this means fridge-cooled milk tarts and paper bags of fresh-sliced biltong It signifies hadedahs cawing in the sunset, bulbuls playing in the birdbath, and grasshoppers waiting on my bedroom pillow, here in Emgwenya, Mpumalanga.advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads The past comes to life in all its specific details as miraculously as dinosaurs in Jurassic Park But perhaps my favourite part about returning home is suddenly noticing whole new seams of richness in my childhood landscape Take Mpumalanga’s ruins. How often, in my youth, did I drive past the 500-year-old Koni agricultural terraces around Machadodorp Today I see a landscape engineering marvel reminiscent of the rice steps of the Philippines As for the old homesteads, the so-called “stone circles” and walled cattle roads that interlace an area stretching from Carolina to Ohrigstad – it’s hard to go for a hill stroll around here without stumbling over an archaeological site that would be both a tourist attraction and the subject of a National Geographic special in most places arriving on his motorbike at a deserted Machu Picchu in the 1950s Today’s Emgwenya does, to be fair, have a Stone Circle Museum and internationally acclaimed author” Michael Tellinger clearly seems focused on drawing tourists’ overdue attention to this area’s world-class archaeological sites guide at the Stone Circle Museum in Mpumalanga On a recent Friday we took a museum tour there with a friendly enthusiastic and clearly well-studied guide about two hours from that nation’s medieval stone capital Our museum visit with Chitapi began innocuously enough. He invited us into a small, rectangular display room featuring photographs of Koni roads and homesteads, and glass-covered displays of Iron Age tools and carvings, with labels like “Geological Formations” (containing colourful quartz stones), “cone-shaped tools,” and “egg shapes”.advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads “These artefacts have been donated,” Chitapi informed us.  By way of introducing the importance of the stone circles, he added that stone structures of various kinds are known to cover half a million square kilometres of sub-Saharan Africa, with 200,000km2 in South Africa alone – about 10% of the country’s area.advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads began to veer off the tracks when Chitapi got on to the topic of dolerite: according to him a rock type with unusual electromagnetic properties He also claimed it as the source material for many of the world’s great stone structures Now I’m no geologist. But I’m aware that lightning isn’t affected by magnetic fields, but rather tends to strike any high and pointy objects I also learned Machu Picchu is mostly built from granite while Babylon was constructed from mud bricks According to both Chitapi and Tellinger, the original circles weren’t cities or homesteads at all, but rather “energy generating machine[s] creating powerful sound frequencies and electromagnetic fields”. advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads Evidence for this radical hypothesis seems A plaque on the museum wall mentions “studies of the erosion patterns on the stone monoliths” at Adam’s Calendar Michaeltellinger.com references the “patina growth” on the well-known engravings of the stone circle designs on rocks at Boomplaats Farm Chitapi showed us a side by side comparison of stone ruins and the modern magnetron the tube in your microwave oven that transforms electricity into electromagnetic waves About all I could say was that yes, indeed the two shapes looked similar.  A thatched doorway seems visually reminiscent of an arrowhead, too, but no one takes the entrance of a thatched cottage in the Cotswolds to be evidence of a Khoisan influence on English vernacular architecture. advertisementDon't want to see this? Remove ads no specific experimental evidence was offered for the claim of a pre-human energy grid the possibility that Mpumalanga’s stone circles might hold the secret to an ancient carbon-free energy source appears to be one of the founding principles of Tellinger’s Ubuntu Party On its website, the Ubuntu Party confirms: “There have been numerous discoveries made by inventors and scientists in South Africa… that can provide extremely cost effective energy.” a man who has found a reason both to take pride in his region’s prehistoric prominence at the centre of a global gold mining operation orchestrated by a reason to hope for freedom from fossil fuels we’re going to demonstrate this power source when we can,” he assured me “It’s only the banks and the energy companies that are currently blocking us.” Decades of teaching undergraduates how to tell the difference between reliable and dodgy sources has given me a sixth sense for when someone is selling me a beautiful fairy tale As I left the gracious hospitality of the Stone Circle museum talking about Phoenicians sailing up the Limpopo River before the birth of Jesus to construct Great Zimbabwe talking about Arabs and Indians supervising ancient gold mining in the Rift Valley The Stone Circle Museum certainly did not seem consciously invested in denying pre-colonial African skill and leadership Yet the museum’s thesis seemed at least a cousin of those theories sharing with them a preference for flamboyant explanations for our heritage over the mundane but vital reality of black Africans’ architectural They lodge themselves in our psychic geographies they still can block our view of the real world Footnote: I introduced myself to them as a writer when I visited and they cooperated with all my queries about the article I told them I was writing until it became clear I did not buy their global pre-human energy grid hypothesis there are many examples of various cultures using the available local materials (Stones lying about on the ground) to construct the walls of their homes and to create protective structures for their livestock Unless there is compelling scientifically provable evidence of there having existed some other purpose for these ‘dry-packed I will prefer to believe that they are simply what they appear to be I would not be so dismissive of your guide’s stories I am not so arrogant as to think we know it all The more I see of prehistoric activity the more I realise how much we DON’T know Why do you find these stone structures and associated elements and fascinatingly