Northern Cape

When you read the book ‘Letters of Stone’ by South African author Steven Robins, which tracks the lives and fates of the Robinsky family in Southern Africa, Berlin, Riga and ultimately Auschwitz, you may be tempted to visit Williston to experience first-hand where one of the principal figures of this poignant story lived. Here you will find Robinsky Street, commemorating Robins’ great uncle Eugen Robinski who fled Konigsberg, East Prussia to become a successful businessman, hotel owner and one-time mayor of this small Karoo town.

But even if your interests are more mundane, Williston will not disappoint. Situated on the Karoo Highlands Route, the town and surrounding areas offer, amongst others, beautiful clear night skies, rock paintings, corbelled houses, remnants of the Anglo Boer War, artisanal cheeses, succulent Karoo lamb and the possible sighting of that rarest and most endangered of all South African animals, the Riverine rabbit. But for this author the main attraction lay in the Williston Cemetery.

Stuurmansfontein Corbelled House (South African Panorama)

The older and smaller Karoo towns offer the cemetery enthusiast some of the most historical and interesting tombstones in South Africa. Unfortunately, all historical cemeteries are facing similar problems; slow deterioration of tombstones due to prolonged exposure to harsh climatic conditions and then the more immediate and hazardous one, malicious damage...

When I picked up a tourist brochure in the Northern Cape and read something about German war graves at Kakamas, my interest was piqued. The existence of German war graves implies that there must have been German troops in South Africa. I do possess a fair knowledge of German and South African history and just couldn't think what the historical event was. What were some of my countrymen doing in South Africa fighting a war and why?

The site is at the north side of the Orange River across from Kakamas, near a small town called Lutzburg, about 85 km west of Upington along the N14. The coordinates are: 28.7436ºS, 20.6363ºE and altitude 682m.

Information board (Horst Müller)

Some internet research and a visit to the gravesite revealed what had happened here. 

At the beginning of the First World War, when the Union of South Africa was drawn into the war against Germany through being part of the British Empire, it was expected of the South African forces to move into German South West Africa. Whilst the South African army was mobilising, some of the Schutztruppe (territorial troops) did not wait and attack being the best form of defence moved towards the Orange river in order to block the crossing point at Kakamas.

A battle ensued on the 4...

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...

Established during 1786, Graaff-Reinet is the fourth oldest magistrate district in South Africa. At the time, this town was also the most important Eastern Cape based interior centre of trade in South Africa in that it was on the route of many travellers, mainly to and from the Algoa Bay harbour.

Photographic history of the Cape is older compared to that of the other provinces. Following the invention of photography during 1827, Jules Léger is recorded as the first photographer active in South Africa, initially based in Port Elizabeth during 1846 and later Grahamstown and Cape Town.

In a recent article on the Pretoria based photographer JC Munro (click here to read), it was pointed out that Munro practiced the art of photography for some 50 years whilst based in Pretoria. There is at least one other South African based photographer that exceeds this, namely the Graaff-Reinet based photographer William Roe.

Roe resided in Graaff-Reinet for almost 57 years (1859 to 1916). During this period, he documented the growth and development of Graaff-Reinet by photographing a broad spectrum of topics and in doing so captured the social context as well as the history of the town - extensively so.

Roe also captured immensely valuable landscape images. Few photographers were willing to commit to taking landscape photographs due to the heavy photographic equipment that had to be carted around. Roe’s landscape photographs have been described as his best work. This article however only includes images originating from Roe’s studio work...

Since South Africa’s first professional photographer, Julius Leger, established himself in Port Elizabeth during 1846, both local and international photographers who foresaw commercial opportunities in this newly established art form, as well as missionaries, anthropologists, soldiers, explorers and traders have contributed to the spread of photography into the interior of South Africa.

It is unknown as to how many missionary photographers have been active in South Africa since the commercialisation of photography around the 1850’s. Unlike commercial photographers that made a living from photography and made their work identifiable by applying their names to the carte-de-visite or cabinet card format images, photographic work produced by missionary photographers has largely gone unnoticed as most of their work cannot always be linked to a particular photographer with certainty.

What is certain, is that missionaries who were natural visual recorders of their surroundings, contributed vastly to the visual history of South Africa.

Occasionally images produced by missionaries still surface today. The author, for example, acquired two separate accumulations of such photographic images. These acquisitions led to this article.

Of particular interest amongst these photographic images are magic lantern slides produced by a missionary based in the Kamiesberg area in the Namaqualand, Northern Cape around late 1910, early 1920’s. This missionary was seemingly attached to the Methodist Church. It has been suggested that Methodism was introduced into South Africa as early as 1806.

A magic lantern slide is a small rectangular piece of glass which contains an image with either art work, such as etchings, or...

Below are edited excerpts from an article titled 'Stone Beehive Dwellings of the North-Western Cape'. The piece was written by James Walton and appeared in a 1961 edition of South African Panorama.

The road from Carnarvon to Williston in the north-western Cape winds across the semi-desert sheep country stretching up to the Karee Range. Dusty tracks through rocky outcrops of black basalt, weathered into gaunt, fantastic shapes and polished by the wind, lead to the scattered farmsteads. It is a hard, relentless country and one which promises little of interest; but in the homes of its early settlers it still retains one of the most fascinating architectural features in the whole of Southern Africa.

Schuinshoogte Corbelled House (South African Panorama)

In this stony, treeless, semi-desert country the first settlers built themselves giant stone beehive-shaped dwellings. And to look down for the first time on a farmstead such as Stuurmansfontein (see main image), with its glistening white beehives standing out sharply against the black basalt amphitheatre in which they nestle, is almost as remarkable as first seeing the famous beehive villages of Alberobello in Southern Italy or Gordes in the Maritime Alps.

The huts are usually circular in plan,  having an internal diameter of up to 18 feet, although a few are rectangular. The walls rise vertically to...

The Grange was a majestic farm in Griqualand West that became well known as the first stop after the Orange River on the journey from the Cape to Kimberley. The Fincham Family owned it for many years and welcomed many famous visitors making their way to the diamond fields and beyond including Winston Churchill, Charles Warren and Cecil Rhodes. Below are a few powerful passages from the diary of Allister Thornton Fincham that tell the story of the transformation and ultimate tragedy of the Grange. Thank you to Spencer Fincham for sending the diary through.

It was at Hopetown on the third day of February, 1871, that I was ushered into this world. My parents resided on the farm named Witteputs, which after it had been surveyed, was renamed The Grange.

My parents settled on this farm whilst Griqualand West belonged to the Griqua Tribe under Captain Waterboer who resided firstly near Douglas but had moved to live on a farm on the banks of the Orange River about twenty miles from Hopetown.

The Griquas were wealthy. They owned their own land and many horses, cattle, sheep and goats. The Bo-landers, as the Traders were known, came from the Western Province with long tent wagons and carts of various kinds which were loaded with hogsheads of cheap brandy, known by the name of Cape Smoke, and wine. The wagons, brandy and wine were exchanged for cattle, sheep and goats and, in many instances, for farms which they got at very low...

Port Nolloth is a sleepy town located on South Africa's north western coast. Today it is a great spot for a relaxing seaside holiday but life in the town was not always so easy. In the book A History of Copper Mining in Namaqualand John M Smalberger digs into the early history of the town and describes the incredibly tough conditions experienced by those brave enough to live there.

Before the commencement of copper mining, Robbe Bay, as Port Nolloth was then known, was important in so far as it provided the Namaqua with a source of income from the sale of seal skins, and as a source of food, since the seal meat was dried and could annually support some 300 persons. With the advent of mining it assumed, for a short time, a greater significance as one of two harbours used for the export of copper ore and, more importantly, for the import of food and capital equipment. Despite its advantages over Hondeklip Bay, mainly in that it possessed an inner anchorage which was safe ‘in any weather whatsoever’, Hondeklip Bay came to assume the position of port for Namaqualand to the exclusion of Port Nolloth. This was the result of a number of factors; the early closing of the northern ‘mines’ after the copper mania of 1854/55; the fact that the Port Nolloth route was badly circumstanced for water; and that the Hondeklip Bay route was closer to the homes of the majority of transport riders. It must...

Thank you to the Heritage Association of South Africa (HASA) and the University of Pretoria for allowing us to publish this powerful piece on the restoration of Dunluce in 1976. The article was first published in the 1978 edition of Restorica, the old journal of the Simon van der Stel Foundation.

When Dunluce came onto the market in mid-1975 the only interest shown came from a speculator who wished to demolish the house and build a block of flats on the site. In their concern to save the house the owners, Mrs Rosemary Kempen and Mrs June Fannin offered the house and its contents to the Director of the McGregor Museum at a more favourable price. The Museum was in no position to purchase the property but we realized that the case for preservation would be strengthened if we could make a proposal for its ultimate use. To this end we suggested that firms which had been recently established in Kimberley should be approached to buy the house as a manager's residence. At this time our sole purpose was to save Dunluce and not to acquire further property but Barlows Rand Ltd offered to buy the house and its contents for the museum on condition that their manager could live there for ten years with the option to stay on for a further five years. The Trustees of the McGregor Museum accepted this magnificent offer in November, 1975 as well as the funds and the responsibility for restoration.

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Cutting edge 3D laser scanning technology was used to create highly accurate digital models of the historic corbelled houses of the Northern Cape. The corbelled houses are excellent examples of the ingenuity of the early pioneers who moved into the Karoo semi-desert landscape from about 1820 through to the end of the nineteenth century. They discovered that trees were sparse and set about building their dwellings using the only available material, stone. As there could be no wooden trusses to support the roof, they made use of an ancient method of construction known as corbelling. This technique was implemented by placing successive courses of flat stone, each one extending a little further inward than the layer beneath, until the walls almost met at the apex. The remaining hole over the roof could then be closed with a single slab.

The project team - left to right - Francois Stroh, Michelle Dye, Kira Macdougall, Carl Grossmann, Steve Moseley

The corbelled buildings of the Northern Cape are the only examples in Southern Africa that still stand today and represent a special phase in the history of vernacular architecture in South Africa. However, many of these unique structures have been lost...