Western Cape

The Lipizzaner’s survival was secured by several rescues that bridged the collapse of war-torn Europe with the birth of a new tradition in the Southern Hemisphere. In April 1945, the breed’s future was famously defended during Operation Cowboy, when American and German forces formed an unlikely alliance to shield imperial bloodlines from the advancing Red Army. While this military intervention protected the foundation of the Spanish Riding School, a similar commitment drove Count Elemer Jancovich-Besan to spirit a private herd from Hungary to the sanctuary of South Africa. As detailed in the article below, these efforts laid the groundwork for a classical school that continues to flourish today.

On April 28th 1945, in the final days of World War 2, American troops from the 42nd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron teamed up with German Wehrmacht soldiers in a rare moment of cooperation to rescue Lipizzaner horses from a stud farm in Hostau, Czechoslovakia.

Renowned for their e!egance and lineage dating back some 400 years, these prized horses had been relocated by the Nazis to breed an "Aryan" horse. As the Soviet Red Army advanced, fears grew that the horses would be slaughtered for food, as had happened in Hungary.

The operation liberated over 300 horses held at the farm. The mission was sanctioned by General George S Patton, himself a horse lover.

'Operation Cowboy' was a rare moment when enemies united to preserve heritage amid the chaos of war.

In 1948, the Pietermaritzburg Royal Agricultural Show became the unlikely stage for a moment that would...

A City Hall concert and a community centre workshop expose the fault lines in who gets to experience and own the city's cultural soul.

Havana is in Cape Town - The Demography of a Concert Hall

On 29 January 2026, the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra (CPO) performed a programme including Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and Respighi. The music spoke of Afro-Cuban rhythms and Roman soundscapes. The audience, however, told a different story: approximately 98% white and 90% over 65. This pattern raises an uncomfortable question: when programming "global" heritage, who is the intended beneficiary?

This demographic reality frames a critical investigation into two models this February: the institutional presentation in the colonial-era City Hall and the community-based exchange in Athlone's Belthorne Recreation Centre.

City Hall: Monument, Museum or Market?

Cape Town City Hall’s architecture declares colonial authority. Its balcony witnessed Mandela's first free speech. Its stage hosts both the Western standard of the Philharmonic and the Cape Malay Choir competitions. It is, theoretically, everyone's hall.

Inside Cape Town City Hall (The Heritage Portal)

Yet, its primary orchestral audience remains demographically narrow - a direct legacy of apartheid's spatial engineering. The hall's traditional subscriber base is still largely drawn from the affluent, historically white suburbs.

The reasons are a brutal tangle of legacy and...

The multinational naval exercise WILL FOR PEACE, hosted by the South African Navy in Simon’s Town, brought the navies of China, Russia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates to Cape waters in January 2026. The Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN) was represented by three vessels, the Bayandor-class corvette IRIS Naghdi (F82), the forward base ship IRIS Makran (K441) and the converted oil tanker, IRIS Shahid Mahdavi (L110-3) of the Navy of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran. 

The focus of this article is not on the exercise or current political affairs, but rather to shed light on previous naval interactions, between Iran and South Africa during the 1970s – more than fifty years ago.

‘In the 1970s the governments of South Africa and Iran, neither democratically legitimated, embarked on a policy of cooperation, aimed at furthering national interest and maintaining the domestic political status quo.’ (Chehabi, 2016, 707). The South African government, led by JB Vorster, was an apartheid state characterised by growing militarisation and international pressure, with internal mass resistance developing rapidly. In turn, the Iranian government of the 1970s was an autocratic monarchy led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, characterised by swift modernisation, economic growth, westernisation, and increased internal political repression. Growing opposition eventually culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew the Pahlavi monarchy to establish an Islamic Republic under the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Imperial Iranian Navy (IIN) of the Pahlavi era subsequently became the Islamic Republic of Iran Navy (IRIN), of the present day...

Saaliegah Zardad writes in her capacity as a researcher and writer whose work focuses on heritage, cultural landscapes and post-apartheid spatial justice. Her research engages with heritage impact assessment processes and questions of intangible cultural heritage, living heritage, community meaning and public decision-making in relation to the Oude Molen Precinct and other redevelopment plans.

Whose heritage counts and who gets to decide

The ongoing redevelopment proposals for the Oude Molen Precinct in Cape Town have exposed a deeper fault line in South Africa’s heritage governance: the uneasy relationship between formal heritage impact assessment processes and the lived, intangible meanings communities attach to place. While statutory frameworks tend to privilege tangible fabric, architectural significance, and expert-led assessments, the Oude Molen case highlights how intangible cultural heritage and living heritage are frequently marginalised, contested or rendered invisible within decision-making processes. This article examines Oude Molen as a contemporary heritage battleground, asking what heritage protection and safeguarding means in practice in a post-apartheid context shaped by unequal power, memory and spatial injustice.

Oude Molen entrance indicating the inhabitants of various spaces at the Oude Molen Eco Village

Redevelopment Proposal at Oude Molen

As the Western Cape Government (WCG)...

The coastal village of Pringle Bay, situated at approximately 34°22′ South and 18°49′ East, is defined by the dominant presence of Hangklip Mountain. Located roughly 30 nautical miles across the water from Cape Point, this landmark has functioned as a central reference point for human activity spanning hundreds of millennia. While the modern settlement was formally laid out in the 1930s by the Hangklip Beach Estates consortium, the landscape holds deep-seated roots reaching back to the Middle and Later Stone Age. Archaeological traces indicate the region was a vital node in early human settlement and migration routes long before the first colonial surveys.

Pringle Bay (Wiki Commons)

For these early inhabitants, the Hangklip region offered a practical combination of survival essentials: fresh water, stone tool resources, and a wealth of marine and terrestrial food sources. The mountain provided a natural vantage point and shelter from the elements and predators. This pattern of subsistence continued for thousands of years, transitioning with the arrival of domesticated livestock approximately 2,000 years ago. As Dutch colonial expansion began to limit grazing lands in the 1700s, indigenous Khoisan communities utilised the freshwater valleys and coastal resources of Hangklip to maintain their nomadic pastoralist and hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Landmarks such as Dawidskraal, named after a local Khoisan leader, and the presence of stonewalled fish traps and...

In this paper we will take a closer look at banks and businesses that issued their own banknotes during Victorian times in the Boland, Swartland and Overberg regions of the Western Cape.

Although past numismatists like Shaw (1956), Esterhuysen (1980) and Engelbrecht (1987) have written about South African paper money issues, their books touched upon South African numismatics in a broader sense. Very few books have been written exclusively about our early banknotes with publications like Walter Bergman’s “A History of Regular and Emergency Paper Money Issues of South Africa” (1968) and Brian Hern’s “South African Banknotes & Papermoney Pre-Reserve Bank” (2010) exceptions to the rule.

These two numismatists have identified ten banks and one other business that issued their own banknotes. The towns involved will all be found on this old map dating from the late Victorian period.

Map of the Cape from the late Victorian period

The notes were issued by the following businesses:

1. Barry and Nephews
2. Caledon Agricultural Bank 
3. Malmesbury Agricultural and Commercial Bank
4. Montagu Bank
5. Paarl Bank
6. Stellenbosch Bank
7. Stellenbosch District Bank
8. Swellendam Bank
9. Wellington Bank
10. Western Province Bank 
11. Worcester Commercial Bank

1. Barry and Nephews

Entrepreneur Joseph Barry was born in 1796 in England and at the age of 21 years was commissioned...

Beaufort West is the largest town in the arid Karoo region of the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Although it is not the oldest town in South Africa, it was the first town to achieve municipal status. Founded in 1818, the then governor of the Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, named the town and district ‘Beaufort’ in honour of his father, the 5th Duke of Beaufort. To avoid confusion with two other similarly named towns, Fort Beaufort and Port Beaufort, the name ‘Beaufort’ was changed to Beaufort West in the 1860s. 

One of South Africa’s most famous sons, the pioneering heart surgeon Christiaan Barnard, was born in Beaufort West in 1922.

In 1969, a book on the history of Beaufort West was published, written by W.G.H. Vivier entitled Hooy-Vlakte, Die verhaal van Beaufort-Wes. The book gives a short biographical description of the author and mentions that after his retirement he used to spend much of his time on charity work and municipal affairs but also found time for his two hobbies: recording of history and coin collecting.

Book Cover

Quite coincidentally, about 20 years ago, I visited the town of Sutherland in the Karoo with my family and at a local second-hand shop, bought a small collection of coin books. All carried a purple hand stamp of the owner, W.G. Vivier of Beaufort West. 

On the inside of one of the books (Notes...

As a 93-year-old retired archaeologist with enough time on my hands to continue some family history research, I have restarted looking into my part-Dutch ancestry in Cape Town, especially during the VOC era. It is a work in progress, mainly for our family's interest, and it is simply aimed at building on our family's collection of memorabilia and hearsay, tempered with the valuable and scholarly assistance from my two very experienced researchers, Richard Ball and Maureen Rall. Membership of "Ancestry" with its linked DNA "Throughlines" facility has also been extremely valuable.

Overview

I have chosen to focus on the surnames Danielsz and Pool because they have traditionally been recognised as belonging to the ancestral line from which our Brine/Edwards families here in Australia have developed. Both Dutch surnames can be seen in the VOC mid-17th century shipping records of sailors and passengers, as well as among the surnames of the early part-Dutch Cape Town residents. If slaves, they had been brought mainly from ports along the sea route which was used by the Dutch ships travelling from the Netherlands to their major VOC trading settlement at Batavia in the "Indies." It is acknowledged, however, that some slaves who were resident in Cape Town in the very early days had come from West Africa.

In our family line, the Danielsz surname itself appears to go back among the very early settlement records of 1654, whereas the surname Pool first appears in 1808 when J.J. Pool is recorded as the acknowledged father...

In the letter below, Oscar Norwich, Johannesburg historian and collector, provides fascinating insights into a rare lithograph of Cape Town from 1818 by Russian artist Ludwig Choris. Norwich's detective work in tracing the provenance of this artwork reveals connections to the historic Kotzebue expedition and adds valuable context to the early visual documentation of the Cape. The piece is a response to an article written by Eric Rosenthal for the June 1982 edition of the Quarterly Bulletin. Thank you to the Norwich family for permission to publish this letter.

I was particularly interested in the article "The Cape in 1818" by Eric Rosenthal.

I wish to indicate, in answer to the author's question in the first paragraph, that this important visitor to the Cape, Chamisso, has been known to me as such for the past two years. My knowledge of his visit and his stay at the Cape originated with an unusual and finely coloured lithograph of the Cape of Good Hope which I acquired from an Amsterdam book and print dealer on a visit to Holland over two years ago.

This lithograph is entitled Vue de la Ville du Cap de Bonne Espérance and has the name of an artist L. Choris in the left hand lower border and the name of the publisher on the right lower border. The vendor was unable to provide any information concerning its provenance or any details concerning the artist.

Since acquiring this fine view of the Cape I have researched the artist. I was rewarded...

It is probably fair to assume that the majority of the visitors to The Heritage Portal, except the lawyers, have had little inclination, or even the necessity, to read a “law report”, which is the technical name for the full text of a decision delivered by a judicial officer when it is published.

It is our intention to rectify this lacuna by unpacking some of the major legal decisions that have shaped the course of South African history. Hopefully we’ll do this in manner which is both enlightening and entertaining, and which will inspire one or two readers to dig even deeper and read the full judgment.

We recently read an article on The Heritage Portal dealing with the notorious Foster Gang (click here to view). This triggered a recollection that the activities of the Foster gang had precipitated the events which led to the decisions of the Cape Supreme Court in Bloom v The American Swiss Watch Co 1913 CPD 673 and the Appellate Division in Lee v American Swiss Watch Co 1914 AD 121.

Even though we were mistaken about the involvement of the Foster Gang, the factual background to the case did occur contemporaneously with the activities of the Foster Gang and a theft was involved!

Distilled to its essence:

• A theft had occurred at the premises of City Jewellers in Cape Town;
• A director of American Swiss (which owned City Jewellers) placed an advertisement in the Cape Argus offering a reward of £500 to any person who gave information...