Bellville

In the article below, Tony Murray profiles civil engineer and artist Charles Davidson Bell. The town Bellville was named in Bell's honour. The piece first appeared in the publication 'Past Masters: Pioneer Civil Engineers who contributed to the growth and Wealth of South Africa'. Click here to view the stories of other great engineers.

Bell was born in Scotland in 1813 and as a sixteen-year-old emigrated to the Cape, where his uncle, Sir John Bell, was the Colonial Secretary. He was energetic, blessed of an enquiring mind, and possessed a prodigious artistic talent, and he was soon accepted into Cape society. In 1834 he was a member of Sir Andrew Smith's scientific expedition which ventured north beyond the Tropic of Capricorn, and he returned to Cape Town over a year later with a splendid record of the trip in the form of some three hundred sketches and paintings of life in hitherto unexplored Africa.

He joined the Surveyor-General's Department as a clerk and was taught land surveying (and very apparently quite a bit about engineering) by Charles Michell. Very soon he became his chief assistant, spending extended periods in the field surveying the troublesome Eastern Frontier. After Michell retired in 1848, the posts of Surveyor General and Colonial Engineer were split and Bell was promoted to the former. He proved to be an energetic and competent officer who set the standards for the meticulous work carried out by his department from then onwards.

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Tiervlei on the outskirts of Cape Town is my hometown where my great-grandparents moved from Ceres during the 1930s. Six of my grandmother's children, including my mother, were born in Tiervlei, on the Northern Suburbs of Cape Town now known as Ravensmead. Apartheid has shattered our family; my great-grandparents as well as my grandmother lost properties in the process. My grandmother and mother were eventually forced to Belhar.

Initially, I researched my family history and was disappointed with how little of the history of Tiervlei, including the section later renamed Ravensmead, was recorded while a rich history lives in the memory of the seniors. This encouraged me to write about the history of the area from the perspective of the memory of my community, supplemented with other sources. This was my encounter with Hardekraaltjie, where loved ones and friends were laid to rest. The youth mostly went to the forest for wood or recreational activities close to the cemetery in the area where Stellenbosch University's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and Tygerberg Hospital is situated.

The article is dedicated to my Tiervlei and surrounding communities who do not know what happened to their loved ones who were buried in the cemetery. It is emotionally exhausting to realize how successive state institutions have neglected the cemetery and offended those buried here and their families. Our deceased were first placed in the forest, classified as the poorer coloured class and later marked and removed as unknown persons and eventually just removed...