Generations of Choosing Africa

There is a plant in the Eastern Cape that does something almost no other plant can do. Push a single cutting of spekboom into broken ground, ground that has been grazed bare, burnt out, given up on, and it roots. It spreads. It pulls carbon from the air and moisture back into the soil, and slowly, without ceremony, the land begins to live again.

It does not need rich earth. It needs only somewhere to begin.

We named our company after this plant because our family has been doing what it does, in our own way, for nearly four hundred years.

Our story begins in 1652, at the foot of Table Mountain, with a young Khoi woman named Krotoa.

She was a niece of the chief Autshumao, of the first people of the Cape, people whose presence in this landscape reaches back beyond any written record. When the Dutch ships arrived, it was Krotoa who stood between the two worlds and carried the words across. Translator, envoy, diplomat. They baptised her Eva, because the name was easier for them. She married a Danish ship’s surgeon, the first marriage of its kind at the Cape, and when he was killed she was banished to Robben Island, where she died in 1674. She was thirty-one. The colony she had served did not keep her.

Her daughter carried the line forward anyway. We are her direct descendants. It has taken South Africa three and a half centuries to honour Krotoa as a founding mother of the nation. In our family, she was never forgotten. Hers is the first cutting in broken ground: a life the record tried to close, and a line that rooted and spread regardless.

Two and a half centuries later, in the Eastern Highlands of what is now Zimbabwe, the story picks up its second thread.

A doctor named George Rose had been sent out from Australia for the Anglo-Boer War, and when it ended he was meant to sail home. He did not. The one district on the map without a doctor was Melsetter, in the mountains of Chimanimani, so he went where he was needed and stayed for the rest of his life. Mary had read literature at Oxford in the years before women could take degrees. The only post available was the little school in Melsetter, so she crossed the Chimanimani mountains on foot to reach it. They married. That, more or less, settled the question of where home was.

Then came the seed. Mary’s brother Arthur farmed at New Year’s Gift in the Chipinge hills, and in 1924 his partner’s wife arrived from Assam carrying a box that was never supposed to leave India: tea seed, smuggled the whole long way. They planted it beside the Tanganda River, among the first irrigated tea in the world, and from that contraband box grew Tanganda Tea, which Zimbabweans still drink today, a century on. A handful of seed in unfamiliar soil. It rooted. It spread. The land around it has lived off it ever since.

Arthur’s legacy passed to his nieces, and one of them, our great-grandmother, married a descendant of Krotoa. The Cape line and the Highlands line became one river. From her it passed to a grandmother, then a mother, and now to us.

When we lay the whole story out, we notice something. Nobody in it did the sensible thing. The interpreter had every reason to despair, and her line endured. The doctor did not go home. The teacher walked over a mountain range for a post nobody else wanted. The seed was never supposed to travel. Four centuries, and at every turning the choice was the same: stay, root, give back more than you take.

We did not invent our purpose. We inherited it.

Why Spekboom Exists

Spekboom is a Southern African travel platform built on the conviction that tourism, done honestly, can be a regenerative act, that a guest can leave a place better than they found it, the way the spekboom leaves the soil.

So we built that promise into the structure itself. Every booking made through Spekboom funds a local conservation, community or education cause, and the guest chooses which one. Not a donation bolted on afterwards. The root system of the company.

This is what we are asking you to be part of. Not a brand with a story attached, but a story, four hundred years long, that has finally built itself a vehicle: a way for every traveller who falls in love with this continent to leave a cutting in the ground.

Africa gave our family everything. Come and see what it gives you. And when you go home, something of you will stay, rooted, spreading, bringing the land back to life.

Find your place in Southern Africa, or see the causes a stay can fund.