At the Fireside Page 16

  But it was not till 1813 that coins were minted in South Africa instead of overseas. This was the work of the Rev John Campbell of the London Missionary Society when he visited the Griqua community in the remote Northern Cape village of Klaarwater.

  Mr Campbell persuaded the inhabitants to use the clan name of ‘Griqua’ instead of ‘Bastaard-Hottentotten’, which he felt was unseemly, and also talked them into changing Klaarwater’s name to ‘Griquatown’ or ‘Griekwastad’. Griquatown later fell on hard times, but it is still there today, although it consists of little more than the Mary Moffat Museum, a post office, two bottle stores, a bank and a church.

  To mark the occasion – or so he claimed – he had some coins of four mysterious denominations struck in England. Such coins do exist, but modern numismatists regard them as a type of trade token rather than actual coinage. They were only in circulation for about two years, but they occupy a special place in our history because as far as is known they were the only Christian Missionary coinage in the world, and also the very first coins unique to Africa.

  The first real coins with a South African identity were the ‘Burgers pounds’ of the South African Republic or Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek – later the Transvaal and now Gauteng – which President TF Burgers had minted in England from 300 ounces of gold sent over for the purpose.

  The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 brought prosperity to the South African Republic and the need for its own currency. The government of President Paul Kruger authorised the establishment of the National Bank of the ZAR, which opened its doors on Pretoria’s Church Square, and the building of a mint at which the republic could strike its own coinage which followed the sterling system of pounds, shillings and pence.

  Just before Pretoria was occupied by the British in June 1900, the ZAR government retreated into the bushveld, taking the mint and all its precious metals with it – including a number of pound coin blanks that had not yet been turned into coins.

  These kaalponde (naked pounds) were put into circulation, and the government then set up an emergency mint at Pilgrim’s Rest where it struck 986 veldponde (veld pounds) using simple hand-made dies. These pounds looked crude in comparison with the pre-war ones, but they were made of such pure gold that their intrinsic value was actually 22 instead of 20 shillings each.

  Today collectors vie for the few kaalponde and veldponde which come on the market now and then, but if long-standing rumours are to be believed, there are even rarer gold pounds somewhere in South Africa. These are the ‘Kruger Millions’, supposedly a large number of ZAR pounds that were hidden somewhere in the veld before President Kruger was saved from captivity by the Dutch cruiser Gelderland.

  If the vanished millions are ever found – if they exist, of course, which is to be doubted – they will be kaalponde and not veld pounds as most people would assume. This is because the coin blanks were taken from the mint in Pretoria under the personal supervision of General Jan Smuts in the nick of time, so that the train was actually under fire from British artillery pieces as it steamed away with its precious cargo.

  All this is just a fragment of the long and interesting history of South African currency, a little background to lend more spice to the tale told at Clive Dean’s lunch table, and to answer the question of why the sparrow appears on the obverse side of the old farthing and also of the one-cent piece.

  To find that out we have to travel back in time to the terrible concentration camps of the Second Boer War’s ‘scorched-earth’ policy. The suffering of the Boers and blacks – mainly women and children – cooped up in these camps after the destruction of thousands of farms by the British – was almost incomprehensible by modern standards. At least 27 000 Boer women and children died of disease and starvation and, it is thought, at least that many of their black equivalents whose demise went unrecorded.

  The story of the sparrow goes back to one of these concentration camps situated at Bethulie in the old Orange Free State. Bereft of almost everything except their faith, they bolstered their hopes by taking a text from the Bible’s Book of Matthew, Chapter 10, Verse 29, as their survival motto: ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father knowing it?’

  At the end of that disgraceful war some of the Bethulie survivors went to tell their ghastly story to the British authorities who were so moved that a single sparrow was struck on the back of the farthing – and to this very day, the obverse of the old one-cent coin depicts two Cape Sparrows on a Mimosa tree twig.

  Those little sparrows have had a long life: The special golden R5 coin that was struck to mark Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday has seven aspects, and one of them is the sparrow, still commemorating the deaths of all those innocents more than a century after their passing.

  Bondi the Sea Dog

  BONDI THE SEA DOG

  Generations of South Africans have enjoyed the story of Just Nuisance, the gentle Great Dane who became a friend (and often a guide after a good night out) to Royal Navy sailors based at Simon’s Town during World War II, to the point where he was officially taken on the ration strength, rated Able Seaman.

  But very few know that Just Nuisance had a predecessor named ‘Bondi’ who was also an official ship’s dog, was equally beloved and also lies buried in South African soil.

  Bondi’s story starts in 1928 when the Royal Navy sloop HMS Verbena, one of the warships of the Africa Station, visited Lourenço Marques (today’s Maputo). For one reason and another Verbena received a royal welcome – tugs spraying water, foghorns booming, a gun salute and a welcoming band at the quayside.

  It was doubtless an unforgettable experience for the ship’s company since humble naval workhorses such as Verbena do not normally enjoy such a welcome. But Verbena left Lourenço Marques with a more lasting souvenir, a pedigree bulldog, none other than Bondi.

  Bondi was a natural matelot. He was entered on the ship’s lists which entitled him to ‘draw an allowance for victuals from the Admiralty’. Bondi thrived on his sailor’s rations and was in the habit of going on shore leave with his shipmates whenever the sloop docked.

  On 30 January 1931 HMS Verbena paid the first of three visits to Knysna – a lovely little place, as we know (except that most of us probably don’t know that its name is the Khoina word for ‘Place of Ferns’) which was founded by George Rex who was and is widely believed to be the illegitimate son of King George III and his Quaker lover, Hannah Lightfoot.

  Originally it was a timber port on the northern shore of the warm-water estuary fed by the Knysna River which opens into the Indian Ocean between two headlands, or cliffs, popularly known as ‘the Heads’. Many a ship and boat have been lost in the treacherous waters where the estuary meets the ocean, but once within the lagoon the waters are calm and the sailors who get through the Heads into the tranquil bay feel as though it is a bed of feathers – hence the name ‘Feather Bed’ on the south side.

  That evening the ship’s company had arranged to entertain the locals with a variety concert in the town hall, and with the ship suitably snugged down in harbour routine, the entertainers poured onto the quayside to march into the town and decorate the town hall for the evening’s entertainment.

  Along with them marched Bondi. He was not well and was running a temperature, but he refused point-blank to be left behind by his shipmates. Eventually the ship’s doctor relented and Bondi set off. But it was too much for the valiant sea dog. It was a ferociously hot day and Bondi, being a bulldog, was fairly low-slung; before they reached the town hall he collapsed and died of heatstroke.

  Sticking to the ancient performers’ tradition that the show must go on regardless, the Verbena’s matelots stiffened their upper lips and presented their concert. But their hearts weren’t really in it and neither were the audience’s because word of Bondi’s tragic end had spread like wildfire.

  H
is passing noted in a brief but poignant entry in the ship’s log – ‘as at 1600 hours Bondi died ashore’ – the grieving officers and men of HMS Verbena buried him on the wharf on Thesen Island, in front of what is now the South African National Parks Office. A wooden tombstone with a brass plate attached to it was placed at the head of the grassy mound that marked his final resting place.

  But Bondi’s memory did not die. For years afterwards, every British warship that tied up at Knysna would send a party of sailors ashore to visit Bondi’s grave. There they would form up, wait for the plaque to be polished, then fire a salute and return to their ship. As time passed the tradition went even further, with the visitors making sure that the grass was trimmed and the grave generally shipshape and Bristol fashion.

  The tradition was kept up till war broke out in 1939. Then the Thesen company was contracted to build 10 Fairmile motor patrol launches and the wharf was declared a restricted area. Visits to Bondi’s grave still took place – HMS Nereid visited Knysna no fewer than five times, but after her last visit in 1953 the traditional visits faded away as the Royal Navy’s permanent presence diminished.

  But in 2001, almost 50 years later, Knysna resident Chris Henwood single-handedly retrieved Bondi’s story from the ever-darker mists of the past by telling it to Commander Andrew Blake of the South African Navy, captain of SAS Umhloti. On 13 July of that year the tradition was resumed when Commander Blake sent a party of his men to make the grave shipshape again, and for the next three years the local sea cadet unit took over the annual task.

  Then in 2004 the Knysna Animal Welfare Society approached a local sculptor who created a bronze statue of Bondi to place on the grave. And there he sits to this day, looking very bulldoggy, as a bulldog should, with a donations box at his feet where visitors can deposit their change to help the less fortunate four-legged citizens of Knysna. Bondi would have approved. After all, you don’t leave your people in the lurch.

  FOOTNOTE: There is only one other canine sculpture in South Africa apart from Just Nuisance and Bondi – the statue of the most famous of all South Africa’s dogs, the immortal Staffordshire terrier Jock of the Bushveld, at Barberton in Mpumalanga.

  Du Toit’s Kloof Pass

  DU TOIT’S KLOOF PASS

  There is a wonderful paper called the Cape Odyssey that is printed every second month in Cape Town. Those readers who are privileged enough to obtain a copy will be familiar with the wonderful articles written by André E Martingaglia on the construction of Du Toit’s Kloof Pass.

  One of the great privileges I enjoy when I travel far and wide, scouring this country for its true history, is the fact that I am never in a hurry. For me life is a slow journey of experiences, not a station that I arrive at before hurrying off somewhere else, and one place where I have lingered to enjoy its full flavour is Du Toit’s Kloof and its marvellous pass.

  The pass was named after a French Huguenot called Francois du Toit who was granted the farm Kleine Bosch, just below the Hawequa Mountains. It is said that he was the first man to cross the nek above his farm and look down into the valley that bears his name today. Of course this is complete nonsense. He may have been the first white man to do so, but the indigenous Hawequa clan had been roaming that part of the countryside for a millennium or more before Du Toit arrived on the scene.

  Others followed Du Toit and by 1738 farmers were grazing cattle in Du Toit’s Kloof beyond the top of the pass. Gradually the original winding game track up the mountain broadened into a cattle track, but it was too steep and dangerous to be used for anything else. There was now a growing need for a road into the south-western interior, and in 1778 Governor Joachim Ammema, Baron von Plettenberg (whose name, incidentally, replaced the melodious Portuguese ‘Baia de Formosa’ at what is now Plettenberg Bay) decided that a road would be constructed over the top of the pass.

  For one reason or another this did not happen in Von Plettenberg’s time, and farmers had to go on making do with a ghastly track which started from the old farm of Kleine Bosch in the Blouvlei Valley between Wellington and the Hawequa Nek, then took a zigzag course up the slopes and crossed several mountain buttresses before straightening out into Du Toit’s Kloof.

  Years later one of the farmers in the Du Toit’s Kloof area, a German named Detlef Schoenfeld, took an enterprising step. He approached the farming communities in the areas around Worcester, Paarl, Stellenbosch and Franschhoek, suggesting that they all contribute towards raising funds with which he could build a proper road.

  They all agreed and the money was raised. The government now became involved and provided the necessary equipment, and Schoenfeld started construction at a place called Kleigat. This was the most difficult section and by the time he had built a wagon road through the pass the farmers’ money had run out.

  He then asked the government for further funding and as an incentive even stated that he would donate the pass to it on completion of the road. The Cape government appointed Lieutenant Charles Alexander of the Royal Engineers (by now the Cape had been conquered and occupied by the British) to examine the route and the viability of such an undertaking.

  But Alexander – obviously a man of no foresight and the brain of a flea – reported that he could see no purpose in building the road and the government rejected Schoenfeld’s offer; the entire project fell through and Schoenfeld was ruined, and it was not till 1858, decades later, that the concept came under discussion once more after an enterprising civil engineer had surveyed a route through the mountains. But, once again, a lack of funds put the project on the back burner.

  More than 30 years passed. In the 1890s a manganese mine was opened on the mountain above Du Toit’s Kloof, between Mia’s Poort and Old Kleigat. Transportation of the ore was such an insoluble problem, however, that the mine was eventually forced to close down. At the end of World War I in 1918 a certain Jannie le Roux of the farm Verdun built himself a private road in order to get to his grazing camps. It did not solve any problem except his own – the road itself was only four feet wide and extremely dangerous, so that one small slip meant a fatal tumble down the mountainside. In order to get to his lands Le Roux had to use a specially designed donkey cart that was only three feet wide.

  It was not till 1935 that the National Roads Board held a meeting and interest in building a proper road was revised, although the actual decision was not taken till 1940. By now South Africa was at war with Nazi Germany and its allies, and that year the Springbok soldiers started fighting their way through the Italian-ruled colony of Abyssinia. They scored one success after another against the badly equipped and led Italian forces and soon the country was playing host to some 10 000 prisoners of war.

  This might have been a misfortune for the Italians, but it was a stroke of good luck for the South Africans since the Italians were and are renowned builders of railways, roads, tunnels and bridges – not only in their own country but in the wildest and most remote parts of Africa. Since the Geneva Convention stipulates that prisoners of war can be used as labour on non-military tasks, the idea of setting some of the Italians to work on Du Toit’s Kloof was conceived.

  It was a brilliant idea. A total of 1 500 Italian prisoners of war were transferred to a camp at the bottom of the pass, the government provided the necessary machinery, tools and funding, and the Italians set to with a will under the supervision of PA de Villiers, the very able Chief Engineer. They did a magnificent job and by the time the war ended in 1945 a large part of the road through the pass had been completed.

  Now the Italians had to be repatriated to their homeland (although many were allowed to stay behind and became some of South Africa’s most productive citizens), and local labour had to be brought in. Work resumed and by 1949 the pass was complete. It had cost more than £750 000, a large sum by the standards of those times, but this was a fraction of what it would have been without the Italian contribution and a trifling sum if one consider
s its contribution to the economy ever since.

  The meticulous, hard-working Italians who constructed the lion’s share of the pass have never been forgotten, unlike their countrymen who fought for the Boers in the war of 1899–1902. For many years a large wooden cross which had been erected on the summit of Huguenot’s Kop in 1945 commemorated their work. Time and weather took its toll and the cross eventually crumbled away, but on 23 October 1984 a commemorative bronze plaque was unveiled on the side of the road just below Huguenot’s Kop. Present was the Italian ambassador and consul-general – and the leader of the Zonderwater Prisoner of War Association.

  The Du Toit’s Kloof plaque is not the only memorial to the Italians who did sterling service elsewhere in South Africa as well. If you get the chance one day, visit the wonderful Garden of Remembrance just outside Rayton, west of Pretoria, at the old Zonderwater Prison where the Italians were held; there you will also see what magnificent stonemasons they were.

  We were fortunate to have had them and we should never forget the contribution they made to our country – a contribution that still benefits us almost a lifetime after they arrived here. One could say in retrospect that the Du Toit’s Kloof project was a win-win situation, to use a modern expression.

  South Africa scored by acquiring an important addition to its economic infrastructure at a very economical price and the Italian prisoners scored by being given an opportunity that few other prisoners of war enjoyed – to spend their captivity constructively on a project of major importance instead of simply sitting behind barbed wire while the best years of their lives went uselessly by.

  Have We Forgotten Who We Are?

  HAVE WE FORGOTTEN

  WHO WE ARE?

  The machine shop makes me deaf

  My young man’s in the RAF

  … K for Kitty, calling P for Prue