Boschendal

About a kilometre south of Boschendal, between the estate and Pniel, lies the village of Languedoc. This little-known place was built and paid for by Cecil Rhodes in 1901 as accommodation for his Boschendal farm workers.

The name Languedoc dates to 1694, when a Huguenot named Jean Imbert from Nîmes in France was granted title to a farm by the Dutch East India Company. Nîmes was then situated in the French province of Languedoc, a historical name which has since fallen away.

What follows is largely quoted from Robert Rotberg’s epic ‘The Founder’, a biography of Cecil Rhodes, together with personal observations and conversations with residents.

Rhodes had attempted to solve the question of obtaining adequate labour, primarily Coloured, to work his farms. Characteristically he had decided to build 140 cottages (designed by Herbert Baker) of a model style for the time, create a school and a church. Rhodes would once again be a laird, if largely by proxy. “The cottages are essential” he told Alfred Beit, “so as to enable us to keep good men for the fruit culture.” But the new village of Languedoc cost £25,000 and annoyed the Afrikaner Bond; the coloured men were now all qualified voters, and, Rhodes wrote with some glee, ”their votes would probably change the result of the Paarl constituency at the next General Election.” The village, modernized again only in the 1980’s, was in fact an example of Rhodes’ paternalism. Rhodes did away with the general practice of giving wine in...

Below is a superb article on the history and restoration of the famous wine farm Boschendal. It was written by Gwen and Gawie Fagan and appeared in the August 1979 edition of Restorica, the journal of the Simon van der Stel Foundation (today the Heritage Association of South Africa). Thank you to the University of Pretoria (copyright holders) for giving us permission to publish.

Of all the stately farmsteads in the Drakenstein valley, Boschendal has the finest setting. The dark, towering mass of the Drakenstein mountain enhances the whiteness of the homestead's walls and gables and the long, low, stretching line of its ring wall in the foreground. In a more benign way the cultivated landscape confers an undeniable peace and dignity upon the old buildings. Although these were erected in the early 19th century, the cultivation of the land goes back to a more distant time. The original title deed drawn up in 1713 after the 60 morgen had been measured (by officials of the Dutch East India Company which then occupied the Cape of Good Hope) shows that the first owner, the French Huguenot Jean le Long, farmed there from 1685. Le Long named his farm Bossendaal which means 'wood-and-vale'. The governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, encouraged all the colonists to plant new trees, especially oaks, wherever indigenous forests were cleared and to this day oaks planted down the years are still an integral part of Boschendal's setting, as they are on many other old Cape farms. With untamed country around them, the early farmers grouped their buildings, with innate sensitivity, into an ordered symmetry, binding them to each other and to cultivated land with linking walls and avenues of oaks.

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