Northern Cape

The Kimberley City Hall is one of the city's major attractions and a declared heritage site. It may be hard for current visitors to imagine a time when the future of the building was in doubt. Below is an article describing heroic efforts to save the landmark building in the mid 1970s. It was published in 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.

Like old soldiers, it seems, old buildings don’t die, they just fade away. But unlike old soldiers buildings can be restored to their former glory. Just such an example is Kimberley’s City Hall. Since the completion of new municipal offices in the city, the old hall had been unused and uncared for, its shell crumbling and cracking. This is the story of the saving of this historic structure by the use of complex drilling and pinning techniques.

A campaign was mounted to save the building and, when restored, to have it declared a national monument. But structural damage was severe and the materials dry and powdery. Using a dry diamond drilling technique and a method of pinning common in mining, the structural damage has been halted and the remainder of the renovation programme can be completed.

Kimberley began in 1871 with the discovery of the first diamond on Colesburg Kopjie which eventually become the Big Hole. A tented town mushroomed around the deposits, at...

The railway line that connects South Africa to Namibia is now 100 years old and owes its origin to the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The cross border stretch between Prieska, Northern Cape and Karasburg (formerly Kalkfontein), Namibia was hastily built as a military railway to give logistical support to General Louis Botha’s troops in his 1915 invasion of what was then German South West Africa (a colony twice the size of the Fatherland).

The German presence in Africa stemmed from the “Scramble for Africa” and the Berlin Conference of 1884, convened by the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck.  The conference was ostensibly summoned to address the humanitarian concerns brought about by the Arab slave trade however it engaged itself instead in the issues of possession and occupation of land for the purpose of exploiting the natural resources of the continent. Thus Africa was carved up by the European powers with no consideration of the native people already inhabiting the land. Spheres of influence were created in order to reduce conflict between the European nations when certain land claims were in dispute. The German Empire in Africa, as of 1914, included Togoland, Cameroon, Tanganyika and South West Africa (S.W.A.), colonies that were on the coastline, however the Germans had envious eyes on the interior (the Congo and Zambesi basins) and would have taken those territories had they won the First World War (1914 -1918).

Europe was at war as of the 1st August 1914 and Britain...