Greg Laden's Blog

A kopje is a manadnock. Which, in turn, is an inselberg. Indeed, it may sometimes be called a Kakba, but that is the most obscure of all the terms for a very large lump sticking out of the earth all by itself. Like this:

In South Africa, this is called a "kopje" (pronounced "Cop eee" a lot like the English word "Copy" like "I am going to the Xerox machine to make nine copies of this thing"). The term Kopje is actually used across a wider range of English speaking Africa. Monadnock is a North American term and this phrase comes from a Native American (I think an Algonquian language, probably Abenaki) for a particular mountainin southwestern New Hampshire called ... wait for it .... Mount Manadnock. Inselberg is, of course, the more commonly used European term.

This particular kopje is located on a reserve called "Leopard Kopje" ... but the kopje named Leopard Kopje is not what you see here. Leopard Kopje is a strange hill with a hidden dale within it. To get to the dale you pass through a very narrow and heavily vegetated pass. When you do that, you find animal bones strewn all around, because there is inded a leopard that lives here (and this has probably alwasy been true) and you are walking through its ambush site. Best to do this in the heat of the afternoon when the leopard is sleeping.

In this region, which is the Northern Cape of South Africa, the kopjes are usually some sort of extra hard granite-like rock sticking up among a bunch of softer, and thus flattened out granite-like rock. But in this region, the kopjes are often made of quartz and quartzite. So if you see a kopje, unless you get up close to really inspect it, don't take it for granite.