The first thing I did when researching this piece of writing was to look at a modern physical map of South Africa and envision that the urban areas and the modern road network shown thereupon were on a thin film that could be peeled away. What remained on the under layer were the physical features such as the coastline, rivers, escarpments and mountain ranges. It was a clean canvas on which I could put settlements on, but before I could do this I had to determine a date in history. I chose the year of 1841 as that was when the young David Livingstone, 28 years of age, first set foot on African soil.
Young David Livingstone
Livingstone is best remembered as the intrepid explorer who mapped out vast tracts of central Africa and who was thought lost in 'Darkest Africa' and then found on the shore of Lake Tanganyika at Ijiji (on 10th November 1871) by Henry Morton Stanley; his greeting to Livingstone of “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” has become one of most hackneyed (done to death) sayings in the English language.
When Dr. Livingstone came to Africa it was to be as a medical missionary, recruited by the London Missionary Society (LMS) and sent to join Robert Moffat at the Kuruman Mission, to preach the Gospel to...
In 1884, before Johannesburg ever existed and when herds of game still roamed free across the savannah, a young man left his home in the Eastern Cape in search of adventure in what was then the Eastern Transvaal (now known as Mpumalanga). His name was Percy Fitzpatrick (1862-1931) and he went hoping to find his fortune on the newly proclaimed goldfields. He, like so many others found nothing but disappointment but far from being downhearted he responded by making a living as a transport rider carrying supplies in an ox-wagon from Delagoa Bay (present day Maputo) to the goldfields of Barberton and Pilgrims Rest. It was tough going as the journey to and from the goldfields was through fever ridden bushveld, along rough trails on which the ox-wagons, travelling in convoy, rumbled along at the pace of the Ox. Each wagon had a team of 12 to 16 oxen and because of the heat during the day they travelled in two four hour shifts, the first before sunrise and the second after sunset. Seldom would they travel more than 20 miles (32 km) in a day and at the end of each shift the wagons were out-spanned, when men and oxen rested before it was time for the next shift.
In 2014 the monthly magazine “Civil Engineering” (published by the South African Institute of Civil Engineers) ran a series of articles entitled “A brief history of transport infrastructure in South Africa up to the end of the 20th century” (comprising ten chapters issued from January/February to November 2014), which gave an interesting account of the history of our roads, railways, harbours and airports. The author of the articles was Dr. Malcolm Mitchell, Senior Fellow of the SAICE, and in “Chapter 1: Setting the Scene”, he encouraged his readers to participate and add additional value to the topic. This is what I hope to do in a series of articles that will appear on the “Heritage Portal” in the coming months. To get the ball rolling I shall give an overview of today’s road infrastructure and then go back in time to when there were no roads only trails.
Road Map of South Africa (Durban 2012)
A three week summer holiday trip to the Cape, from Johannesburg, which entailed a round trip of 4000 km, opened my eyes to the splendour of our beautiful land. It would have been an easy option to hop on an aeroplane and arrive in Cape Town two hours later but to do so would have meant missing all that was in...
