Eastern Cape

About four years ago I popped into the premises of Cannon & Cannon (auctioneers in Hilton) and, whilst looking around for nothing in particular, came upon a rather battered, leather covered box on which was embossed, if you looked very carefully, ‘His Excellency The Governor’. I asked the attendant if they had a key to the box and was told that they did but were having difficulty in opening it but duly handed it over. After several attempts, I found that if you pushed the key, turned it and then turned it back on itself again, the lock opened.

Inside were about thirty documents which obviously had some age to them and included a couple which had what appeared to bear the signature of Paul Kruger and I decided to take a chance, attend the auction and try to purchase the box.

At this stage, I must say that all of my schooling had been in London and South African history was not a strong point.

I attended the auction and after bidding against two other gentlemen, managed to secure the box for R2 800 – more than I had intended to spend.

Once I got the box home and started to unload its contents, it became clear that I had the deed box of a family named Stockenstrom from the Eastern Cape. The name Stockenstrom meant absolutely nothing to me. The first thing I did was to Google and establish that the Stockenstroms were an extremely important family in the...

Once, a train ran from Port Alfred station every day: the 11.10 to Grahamstown, 68km away. In the early 1900s the train used to steam up through the valleys towards Bathurst and Grahamstown taking farmers, farm workers, holidaymakers and commercial travellers, especially on stock-fair days, when the atmosphere was festive and the coaches were full. It is no longer possible to go on the train. One must walk the line or take the road that loops and meets, strays from and returns to it. 

The railway runs truer than the road: there are fewer meanderings and distractions. In the old days, prospective passengers could signal to the train driver if they wanted to board, running up from a farm or waving from the veranda of a homestead for him to wait. Train drivers were obliging in those days. 

Mr. Robinson, driver of the 11.10 on Saturday April 22 1911, was aware of potential passengers as he steamed along. By the time he reached Martindale, he had 52 on board. The line was built in 1883, tracing a wide curve across the farms of lower Albany, ancient in the history of the indigenous people long before the first white colonists settled there in 1820. The names of the small stations and sidings are testament to the provenance of those Settlers: Hayes, Bathurst, Clumber, Trappes Valley, Martindale, Manley Flats, Oak Valley, with the occasional gesture to other origins: Blaauwkrantz. The older, Xhosa names for the rivers that cross those grass and copse-scattered hills...

A few years ago, Bev Young compiled this article on the spectacular Cock's Castle in Port Alfred. The piece was originally published in the newpaper Eastern Cape Today on 21 January 2010. Bev is one of the Eastern Cape's most prolific and passionate researchers. 

Established in about 1840, the nearly 30,000 m² Richmond House property, formerly known as "The Castle", hangs tenaciously on the east face of Wesley Hill. It is an impressive estate, were yesteryear still lingers like an untouchable perfume fragrance, so familiar, yet so titillating. Situated in dense indigenous virgin bush, the historical property stands guard over the Kowie River mouth, where it all started with the arrival of the intrepid 1820 settlers. Among them was the Honourable William Cock, a wealthy Cornish printer and man of great ability and strength of character, who brought the Industrial Revolution to the Eastern Cape in the 19th century.

Old view of Cock's Castle (source unknown)

A distant view of Cock's Castle with newer buildings on the right (Bev Young)

Sue and Neville Gordon, who own the property...

Enoch Mankayi Sontonga was born in Uitenhage, Eastern Province (now Eastern Cape) around 1873 as a member of the Xhosa-speaking Mpinga clan of the Tembu tribe. He trained as a teacher at the Lovedale Mission Training College, after which he was sent to a Methodist mission school (unnamed) in Nancefield, near Johannesburg in 1896. He taught here for nearly eight years.

Sontonga was the choirmaster at his school, as well as an amateur photographer. Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika was composed by him in 1897. He based the melody on the hymn tune 'Aberystwyth', by Joseph Parry. Sontonga originally composed the hymn in B-flat major with a four-part harmony supporting a repetitive melody characteristic of both Western hymn composition and indigenous South African melodies. The words of the first stanza and chorus were originally written in Xhosa as a hymn.

Enoch Sontonga (via City of Johannesburg)

It was one of many songs he composed, and he was apparently a keen singer who even wrote songs for his pupils. Most of Sontonga’s compositions were sad, witnessing the suffering of African people in Johannesburg, but they were popular and, after his death in 1905, choirs used to borrow them from his wife.

In 1927, Samuel Mqhayi, the famous Xhosa poet, added seven additional Xhosa stanzas to Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. 

In 1901 it was taken up by the choir of the Methodist-founded...

Morley House is an exquisite historic home. I first went there in the late 1980s, when it was a home and antique shop. Oh my... the yellowwood woodwork, red baked floor tiles, crooked passages, low doorways. It was all just so perfect! There is an oldish rondavel in the backyard, which I am convinced might have been the original kitchen. Since there are no known plans, it is difficult to be sure. The bathrooms, would have been added, possibly in place of the old pantry. 

Rondavel in the backyard of Morley House (Bev Young)

Morley House is one of the oldest buildings in Bathurst and dates from the time when the 1820s settlers arrived from England. The house was built in 1828 for the blacksmith Thomas Hartley from Mansfield, England by William Forward. Hartley had already built a smithy in Bathurst which he later turned into an ‘accommodation house’ he called ‘Hartley’s Hotel’, now the present day 'Pig and Whistle' pub. The stone cottage is one of the few buildings that survived the Sixth Frontier War in 1834-1835 which makes it a unique place to stay.

Old photo of Morley House...

In the vale of Clumber in the Eastern Cape, 5 km from Bathurst just off the Shaw Park road, lies Clumber Church. Situated on a knoll, this is the third Church to be built on this spot by the Nottingham Party and descendants of the 1820 Settlers. This knoll was given the name of Mount Mercy by the Nottingham Party in thanksgiving for their safe arrival here on a journey which had taken them over 6 months to complete. The wagons and carts that had transported them from "Tent Town" on the dunes of Algoa Bay to their final destination were offloaded at the base of Mount Mercy close to the Torrens River. A Service of Thanksgiving was held on Mount Mercy on the day of their arrival on July 23 1820.

Clumber Church from a distance

The Nottingham Party was one of the few Parties of 1820 Settlers that consisted of the poor as Nottingham was a cottage industry hub of lace and hosiery making. With the Industrial Revolution under way most of these family run cottage industries had to shut down. It was also the end of the Napoleonic Wars so demand for goods had slackened off and soldiers had returned from war with no prospect of employment...

On a recent journey through the Karoo, the author obtained more than 1500 unusual photographic glass plates – just imagine the total weight of all these photographs.

This find is exceptional in every way, in that many years ago people destroyed these glass plates due to lack of appreciation in the historical value or simply due to them being damaged due to incorrect storage. To discover more than 1500 of these plates therefore creates huge excitement amongst researchers, especially because they seem to originate from a single photographic studio operating in South Africa between 1901 and 1910.

Local Karoo lads

Photographic studio activity of the Victorian and Edwardian eras makes for an interesting social and cultural study. Such studies are mainly enabled by obtaining original photographic material such as the original Carte-de-Visite or Cabinet format photographs or better still, the original glass plate (glass negative) from which these paper-based images were produced.

Glass plates were used in photography from 1850 onwards. Glass, because of its transparency, was used as a support for light-sensitive materials producing either a photographic positive image, such as in the Ambrotype, or photographic negatives such as Albumen, Collodion and Gelatin processes. These glass plates were coated with light-sensitive Silver Salts.

Glass plates were commercially available in standard sizes. During the twentieth century these glass plates were known as dry plates carrying gelatin emulsions...

We South Africans live in a polyglot society, which under our Constitution, has 11 official languages that “must enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated equitably”. Mother tongues range from Afrikaans to IsiZulu, from isiXhosa to Setswana, however to stop us being a modern Tower of Babel we largely use one language to communicate between each other and that is English. In doing so we are reflecting a world wide trend. In today’s world English has become the “Lingua Franca” replacing French as the language of diplomacy and German in the field of science. It has also become one of the essential languages for global trade.

In 21st century South Africa, English is used in many walks of life, in media and advertising, in education, law, commerce and government. English is the language of the big city especially Johannesburg, South Africa’s financial capital. Although should one drive 50 miles (80 km) in any direction out of “Egoli”, you are more likely to hear Afrikaans or an African language being spoken. How is it then that a European colonial language has managed to become so influential?

To answer this question a look at South African history from the beginning of the 19th century is needed.

The English language first came to the southern tip of Africa 1795 when the British occupied the Cape of Good Hope in order to protect their trade with India and the Orient. They left in 1803 as part of the terms of the Treaty of Amiens, but in January 1806 they returned for good, after...

The Africa Media Online team was on site at Kingswood College in Grahamstown for two weeks in June 2016 to capture over 4,700 photographic prints, paintings and building plans. A significant number of the photographic prints were framed prints hanging on the walls of the school. Kingswood provided a team of assistants to remove the pictures from the walls all around the school and transport them to the museum where they were captured using our Alpa 12 FPS technical camera together with the Phase One IQ3 100 digital sensor.

Kingswood College suffered a fire in one of its main buildings some years ago and so are highly aware of the risk of losing the irreplaceable historic record contained in the historic photographs spread around the school and gathered in the school Museum. If you lose such history, a significant element of the perceived value of such an institution is lost which has significant implications for the marketability of the school to say nothing of the intrinsic value of preserving the record of the thousands of scholars and staff that have passed through the school gates since its founding in 1894. With this in mind, Kingswood College’s Business Manager, Steve Gardner insisted on digitising many the school’s priceless records.

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In the article below, first published in the Gold Fields Review 1992-1993, Eris Malan tells the story of the discovery of a remarkable set of documents that filled a significant gap in the priceless Gold Fields Collection. She also traces some of the history behind the Collection including the process that led to the Cory Library at Rhodes University becoming the custodian. The article has been shortened by The Heritage Portal Team.

The Cory Library for Historical Research at Rhodes University, and the Gold Fields Collection in particular, owe their very existence to the right combination of "what ifs".

What if Sir George Cory had dedicated all of his research time to chemistry and none to history? What if the University of the Witwatersrand had accepted the offer of the Gold Fields papers and artefacts? What if environmental conditions at Luipaards Vlei Estates store had led to the destruction of an historical chain - the vital documents which eventually filled 192 packing cases?

The net result would have been no Cory Library, today one of the most important and varied sources of southern African history. The Cory would also have been denied one of the most complete collections of documents, books, photographs and memorabilia reflecting the mining, financial and economic history of the past hundred years.

Masses of material representing the empire-building phantasmagoria of Cecil John Rhodes is contained within the walls of the Cory Library. It is all there, from the signing of the concession with Lobengula to the minutes of...