Sorry I accidentally deleted my last post. I appreciate the answers the two people gave.
This is some big larva I found and the head looks centipede-ish but the body is short and fat with less legs.
I went through my images and found an old photo of a beetle that was on my screen door. Maybe it's a larva for one of these?
I had commented on the original post saying I called these cutworms as a kid.
I remember seeing them around the compost piles along with some yellow and brown/orange beetles.
Always assumed these cutworms turned into the beetles because they could be found inside these little hard mud pods and sometimes you'd find them in a larval state.
Just looked it up, yeah... fruit chafer beetle in South Africa ( a few different names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachnoda_sinuata) and they start off as these cutworms.
Interesting, cutworms seems to be a term used for various catipillar type larva, though none of the pictures I saw look to have the front 6 legs from my photo
Not a great photo in the Wikipedia link, I can see 1 leg sticking out only and looks a lot hairier.
Your photo looks very close to how I have seen them.
Looking up African Fruit Beetle grubs gets me this.
That is incredibly similar if not identical!