My parents were very intrepid when they were first married and often went to the Lowveld in their battered old car. They took hundreds of photographs. At some point, my Londoner father decided he wanted to buy a farm in the Lowveld, and after poring over the Farmer’s Weekly magazine for months, managed to find a small farm in the Elands River Valley in the Transvaal Lowveld, now the province of Mpumalanga. He was out of his depth immediately, an Engelsman amongst a very Afrikaner farming community. He tried unsuccessfully to make money from growing vegetables to supply a local canning factory, travelling almost every weekend from Johannesburg. He had to employ a farm manager to handle the actual farming activities and Mr Mostert was surly and unpleasant, but vegetables were actually grown, harvested and sent to the canning factory.
The farm manager, Mr Mostert, inspecting my father crop of peas, circa 1964.
My father eventually sold the farm to Mondi in the late 1960s, and the experiment in an agrarian life was not mentioned again. I recently decided to go through his photographs, about a thousand colour slides, looking for images of the...
