Fort Beaufort, St Johns Anglican Church

Geography and politics.  Both play important roles in economics. To illustrate the obvious, the town of Fort Beaufort was established for this very reason.  Dutch speaking farmers of the late 1700's spent much effort moving away from the impositions of the "Company".  Finding good grazing lands was not always easy and for this reason they ventured further and further away from centres of administration and jurisdiction.


In moving away from the Cape, the dryness of the great Karoo generally forced the trek boers to seek land in the Eastern Cape.  At more or less the same time, in the area we now know as Natal, political machinations of a Zulu nature were afoot.  Waves of tribesmen were to be found fleeing in all directions.  Inevitably the trek boers were to meet the black pastoralists, who too were looking for land.

Meanwhile and in Europe, France was inching towards republicanism.  America had broken from England and the "Company" was in decline.  Fearing French supremacy in the Indies, England started to find value in the Cape.  By the early 1800's the Cape was in English hands and the trek boers were obliged to report to a new administration.

It did not take the English very long to recognize the intractable problems brewing between Boer and Bantu on the Eastern Frontier.  In one of many efforts to solve the dilemma, Lord Charles Somerset introduced the idea of immigration.  In 1820 his plans bore fruit and in that year roughly 4000 English aspirant farmers were disembarked at Algoa Bay.

The town of Fort Beaufort was named in honour of Lord Charles' father, the Earl of Beaufort.  This was a garrison town, established to protect the interests of Boer and Brit alike.  The Anglican church was built for worship and like it's name sake in Wynberg, it too served the military establishment.

John Campbell

John Campbell was a travelling director of the London Missionary Society.  A man short in stature and large in character, he kept on his person, a black umbrella to ward off the sun and a bottle of brandy to subdue a pestering thirst.  He visited South Africa twice, initially in 1813 and then again in 1819.   At that time, there was no mission station between Kuruman in the South West, the Great Fish River in the South East and the equator.  The LMS envisioned big pickings in this vast land.

Campbell's first destination was Dithakong, a collection of rustic dwellings, home to almost eight thousand people.  Through the hard work of Campbell and missionaries from Kuruman, an introduction was secured to Bechuana chief, Mothibi.  With diplomacy and determination, a missionary presence in Dithakong was arranged.  This  post was filled by the as yet not so famous, Robert Moffat.

Dithakong in 1801, a painting by Samuel Daniell.

The Touleier

December 1930, Aegidius Jean Blignaut (pictured below) and John Webb launched a literary magazine named The Touleier.  In the words of Blignaut "We had little experience and hardly any money, but were not scant of optimism and faith in ourselves. The consensus was that our dream was a nightmare"    One of the contributors was Pierre Bosman, an aspirant writer and younger brother of the now more famous Herman.  It was with Pierre's encouragement that Blignaut met Herman Malan.  Some years later that the reading public was to be introduced to Herman Charles Bosman..  In the first issue of The Touleier, Herman Malan contributed two poems and a short story - Makapan's Caves.

Church Parade on Sunday (Part 2)

British member of Parliament and The Times correspondent William Burdett-Coutts inspected the hospital accommodation at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State and published his findings in June 1900. This was during the South African War and a few months after the fall of Bloemfontein.  He described typhoid sufferers lying in bell tents, which were overpoweringly hot at midday, with thick clusters of flies on their faces. ‘In many of these tents,’ he wrote, ‘there were ten typhoid cases lying closely packed together, the dying against the convalescent, the man in his 'crisis'pressed against the man hastening to it.'


Almost twenty years later, Burdett-Coutts commissioned local Wynberg stone mason, Robert Cane, to erect a memorial to British privates who had died at Wynberg Military Hospital during the Anglo-Boer war.   The large granite boulder selected for the memorial weighs some 35 tons and it took 2 months to relocate from Wynberg hill to its present resting place at the St John's Cemetry.  A squad of workmen toiled for three days to manoeuvre the great rock past the brick wall of Highlands House.  Jean St Leger was there at the time and wrote of the boulder's noisy transit in her memoir - "Coming Home to Roost".

Who was Frans David Oerder?

In 1899, Frans Oerder was commissioned by Paul Kruger to be the official war artist of the Transvaal Republic.  Oerder was educated in Rotterdam and emigrated to the Transvaal in 1890.  Like many other Hollanders of that time, Oerder worked on the Delagoa Bay Railway line - his line of work - painting signal poles.

During the Anglo Boer war Oerder painted, and sketched, scenes of life and nature at the battle front.  The image above shows the Apies River, which runs through Pretoria.  Oerder painted this picture whilst a prisoner of war in 1902.  Today most of his paintings and sketches are housed at the Anglo-Boer War museum in Bloemfontein.