Storytellers That Hold the Light | Entry No. 1

It feels exactly right to begin Storytellers That Hold the Light here, with the woman who first understood that this place was worth recording. In our hundredth year, as we look back across a century of stories, I find myself grateful to her in a way I struggle to put into words. Grateful that she picked up a pen in 1942 and didn’t put it down for decades. Grateful that she kept Sparta. Grateful for the reminder that the most important stories are sometimes told by the people who never expected anyone to be reading.

If you spend enough time at Londolozi, you start to feel the presence of the women who came before. Not loudly. Not obviously. But in the way a place carries its history, in the grain of the wood, in the names spoken around fires, in the things that were kept.

Maidie is the one I keep coming back to.

She Gave Londolozi Its Foundation, And So Much More

Maidie Hellier Varty, mother of Dave and John Varty, the brothers who would go on to build Londolozi as the world knows it today. Wife, farmer’s companion, keeper of the Game Book. The woman who, without grand ambition or public recognition, quietly bore witness to the beginning of something; a life and a land that neither she, nor anyone else yet knew, would one day become Londolozi.

In 1942, she began what would become one of the most quietly significant acts in Londolozi’s history: the Sparta Game Book. In it, she recorded the names of guests, observations on the state of the bushveld, her love for aloes, notes on the game, the land, the life of that extraordinary place she had come to love so fiercely.

The iconic and original Sparta Game Book

What she couldn’t have known, what nobody could have known, was that those careful, faithful observations would one day become an ecological record. That when John and Dave returned to Sparta decades later and tried to understand why the land had changed, why the animals had disappeared, it would be their mother’s handwriting that helped them make sense of it all. Her notes. Her seasons. Her steady, loving attention to a place she never stopped showing up for.

She was, in the truest sense, a citizen scientist before anyone called her one. A conservationist, before that word had found its way into the world.

And yet, if you had asked Maidie what she was doing, I suspect she would have said she was “simply paying attention“. Writing down what she saw. Keeping something, just in case.

Maidie Varty (centre) with friends at Sparta

She Was Young. She Was in Love.

There is a photograph of Maidie that I keep coming back to. She is behind the wheel of an old Land Rover, laughing, completely at ease, Boyd standing beside her with the bush stretching out behind them both. She looks like someone exactly where she is supposed to be. No performance, no pretence. Just a woman who belonged to a place, and knew it.

Maidie And Boyd Varty Late 1960s

Their honeymoon, delayed by the war, was spent at Sparta. Three small rondavels above the Sand River, no luxuries to speak of, dining and showering in the great outdoors, cooking over a wood stove or an open fire, snakes and spiders as housemates and insects impossible to avoid.

And she took everything in her stride.

She was young. She was in love. And she was, by all accounts, made of something remarkable.

Dave describes his mother as “like the rock of Gibraltar”, a woman whose principles never wavered across the second half of the twentieth century, no matter what the world threw at her. She was gentle and kind, unselfish and thoughtful. Feminine and loving. But she was also strong, quietly and immovably strong, in the way that the women who built this place always have been. And it was that strength that held everything together when Boyd tragically died in 1969, and Maidie faced the choice of selling Sparta and living comfortably, or keeping the game farm for her sons, knowing it might mean years of financial struggle.

Boyd Varty Snr’s ashes were scattered at Plaque Rock, where this plaque still stands today

In 1999, this Plaque Rock Painting was gifted to the Varty Family

She kept it. And more than that, she backed her boys. Dave and John were just 15 and 17 years old when they began dreaming of turning Sparta into a safari company, and Maidie, a widow navigating the weight of that decision alone, said yes. She believed in them, in the land, in something she perhaps couldn’t fully articulate but felt deeply enough to stake everything on.

Without that decision, there is no Londolozi. It really is as simple as that. The golden thread would have ended there, on a page of a solicitor’s document, and none of what followed would have existed. She chose the harder path, for her children, for the land, for a future she would never fully see.

Dave, Shan, Maidie & John Varty

A Writer in Her Own Right

What moves me most, having spent time with Maidie’s writing, is discovering that she wasn’t just a record-keeper. She was a storyteller. Her account of the Sabi Sand Wildtuin, written in 1976 to mark the reserve’s golden anniversary, is full of quiet wit, warmth and an eye for the telling detail that feels entirely at home around a Londolozi campfire.

She writes about those earliest camps with an almost cinematic precision, the bearer boys who mutinied halfway to Sparta, threatening to abandon the whole expedition in the bush, Charles Varty navigating by compass and a rough sketch map, the whole extraordinary party finally emerging onto the banks of the Sand River, where, as she puts it:

“The water runs clear over granite rocks and where Sparta camp stands to this day.”

She wasn’t writing history. She was writing life as she lived it. And in doing so, she created history anyway.

Her account of the campfire tradition is particularly dear to me. She describes the early days at Sparta ending each evening with:

“A campfire, a drink and gun-cleaning and in succeeding years a swapping of hunters’ yarns which would fill another book.”

That phrase, which would fill another book, feels one hundred years later like something of a prophecy. Those yarns did fill another book. And another. And another. They are still being told, every single evening, around the fires at Londolozi’s five camps.

And then there is the dedication at the front of her manuscript, which stops me every time I read it.

“For Boyd, who taught me to love the bush as he did.”

That’s it. No flourish. No explanation needed. Just a woman, writing down the story of a place, and dedicating it to the man who first showed her why it mattered. I find it one of the most quietly beautiful sentences I have ever read.

Boyd Varty and his children, a polaroid taken by Maidie Varty

The First Stitch in the Golden Thread

There is a thread that runs through Londolozi’s story, golden and unbroken, and it is the thread of its women. The women who arrived by buckboard wagon, who cooked over open fires with lions circling in the darkness beyond the camp, who raised children in the bush and watched them fall in love with it, who held things together quietly and faithfully when the world asked too much. Every thread has a starting point. And ours begins with Maidie.

She is referenced, rightly, as the Mother of Londolozi. But I think there’s another title she deserves: our original storyteller. Because before there was a blog, before there were rangers sharing tales at the campfire, before there were books and films and documentaries about this extraordinary place, there was a woman in the lowveld, writing things down. Bearing witness. Making sure the story survived.

Maidie and her son, Dave Varty

In a small way, what I’m doing with this blog, sitting down to write about a place I love, noting the things I don’t want to forget, is something Maidie was doing long before I arrived. Long before any of us thought to call it a story series, or a centenary tribute, or anything at all. She didn’t call it storytelling. She didn’t call it anything at all. She simply picked up a pen and started writing, not for posterity, not for an audience, but because she loved it too much to let it go unwritten.

Maidie Varty and Spook Sithole at Londolozi in the Varty Camp car park

She ends her own account of the Sabi Sand with words that have stayed with me:

“I have been a long time telling my story and the camp fire has burned low.”

The golden thread she stitched into the fabric of this place is still running. Maidie closed her own story with a hope that the founders, looking back, would say “Well done” to their descendants and successors. I’d like to think that in writing this, in making sure her name is spoken in our hundredth year, we are doing exactly that.

Maidie, this one is for you.

1999 – Maidie, Shan & Bronwyn Varty at Plaque Rock

2026 – The Varty Family at Plaque Rock

More stories to come. Watch this space.