BITTERSWEET KARAS HOME - 6

Set in southern Namibia, Great Namaqualand, ‘Bittersweet Karas Home’ is the story of three families, the Hills, Walsers & Hartungs, whose lives merge and intertwine in a semi-arid land that presents both hardship and blessings. Over the next few months, we would like to share this bittersweet saga with you from the (as yet) unpublished book.

CHAPTER ONE
Migrations, Missions and Marriages:
The Hills’ Journey from Regent’s Park to Groendoorn

The huge leap from London’s neatly laid out garden beds and the squalor of European city suburbs to the veld of southern Africa, allowed families like the Hills, with meagre prospects for the future, a chance to begin anew. Long and arduous sea journeys took them to the far shores of a new continent. Even though the hardships of a grey London were replaced, the families had new challenges ahead – to survive on the African land and amongst the indigenous groups already living there.

Whereas the vast majority of British emigrants sailed to North America and Australia, places in which previous immigrants had already paved the way, South Africa was more challenging. The British were a tiny minority, knowledge about the country was scarce, and the organisers of the settlement scheme kept essential information from the settlers.

Charles Hill belonged to the large horticultural workforce in London’s royal gardens - Hampton Court Palace Gardens and Regent’s Park. They or their parents had been pushed into the cities in the eighteenth century when traditional communal land on which the peasants depended for survival had been enclosed and acquired by commercial farmers, usually for sheep-farming.

Charles, his wife Elizabeth Anne and their five children, James and Jane (born in 1805), Charles (1806), Elizabeth (1808) and Henry (1814), lived in Primrose Hill and then Marylebone, London boroughs, where pomp met poverty and grandeur, grime. Their life was poor, nasty and noisy. Feeding and raising five children was a formidable task. The Napoleonic wars of 1799 to 1815 had negatively affected everyday life, as had the early Industrial Revolution. Living alongside royal opulence only accentuated their deprivation. A new beginning on a different continent seemed like a promising solution.

At the request of the Cape Colony, the British Government invested £50 000 of taxpayers’ money in a settlement scheme in the Eastern Cape and invited applications nationwide. This scheme had a hidden agenda. Britain’s occupation of the Dutch-controlled Cape in 1806 was a pre-emptive strike against Napoleon who, as Holland’s new ruler, could have expelled the British from their halfway stop on the voyage to their Crown colony, India. Having seized the Cape, the authorities felt that it was necessary to make the population more British. The Cape’s eastern boundaries were advancing steadily from one river to the next and further extension by population pressure and military means was envisaged, for which settler input was essential.

The Hills were among the 90 000 applicants for a piece of land on the southern tip of Africa, and they were among the 5000 families that were finally selected. They sold their possessions and embarked on the Sir George Osborn in Deptford, London, in freezing temperatures, sailing from Gravesend Downs on 16 March 1820 as members of the Daniel Mills party. They reached Simon’s Bay four months later, having lived under deck in cramped, uncomfortable and unsanitary conditions, and sailed to Algoa Bay (part of present-day Gqeberha/Port Elizabeth) a few weeks later. There was no pier for the Sir George Osborn to moor in at Algoa Bay. Passengers and luggage were transferred to flat-bottomed boats, which had been nicknamed ‘Government Flats’, and were hauled on ropes between the ship and the shore. Possessions were stored in rough sheds.

After some days in canvas town, Boers and their indigenous Khoi servants transported the families to their allotted plots in ox-wagons, charging fares which the settlers deemed exorbitant. After long and bumpy journeys they were dumped quite unceremoniously in the middle of nowhere to the mild amusement of their guides, who mocked as well as pitied their lack of bush sense and expertise. Their transporters also knew that the frontier wars that had started in 1779 were far from over. The British settlers on the Zuurveld would be farming on AmaXhosa grazing territory, once land on which the San - regarded as the first indigenous people of southern Africa - freely roamed, and clashes would therefore be inevitable.

Provisional homes were constructed in the AmaXhosa fashion. Men and boys chopped down trees. Women and girls gathered reeds and grasses for thatching and saplings to build wattle walls, which they then plastered with clay. Cattle provided meat, milk, butter and cheese, and the dung that they mixed with water and clay for their floors. They built cooking sheds with chimneys in the front of their houses and used abandoned anthills as ovens.

The Eastern Cape population was diverse. Dutch-speaking Trekboers had been the first wave of European settlers before the British arrival. In addition to the local AmaXhosa there were Khoi people with western skills and lifestyles. There were also slaves from Africa and Asia in Boer employment. Although there were attempts to establish forms of coexistence between the groups, they weren’t successful; all parties clashed sooner or later. The Boer settlers felt that British rule debilitated them and started the Groot Trek - the Great Journey - to the north away from the Cape to seek their own land and autonomy. In a complex web of offensive and defensive actions everybody was victimised. The AmaXhosa, however, felt they had been wronged.

 

In a speech delivered on 16 May 1996, after the 1820 Settler Monument had been restored, Nelson Mandela, the recently elected leader of a democratic South Africa, reflected on the 1820 settler past from his perspective as a Xhosa and rededicated the monument in a gesture of reconciliation, national unity and forgiveness:

“Pawns in a larger game, the 1820 Settlers came to this part of Africa at the behest of an imperial power seeking to use its own poor and unemployed in a bid to advance conquest and imperial ambitions. Though their own impulse to freedom rendered them largely unsuitable for that task, they were nevertheless caught up on the wrong side of history, unable or unwilling to acknowledge as equals those into whose homeland they had been implanted ...

“National unity and reconciliation live in the hearts of our people rather than in law. The New Patriotism is a force that propels us towards a vital and unifying national culture which respects, promotes and celebrates our diversity ...

“We are reaffirming the purpose for which [the 1820 Settler Monument] was built: ‘that all might have life and have it more abundantly.’”

Mandela found common ground with yesterday’s foes.

Charles Hill (36), his wife Elizabeth (45) and their children, ranging from six to fifteen years, fared better than most. They settled on Grape Vale close to the Kariega River. With an average annual rainfall of 600 millimetres and access to a river, farming conditions were good. Charles’s gardening skills translated well into farming expertise. Grape Vale was also relatively far from the territory most densely populated by AmaXhosa. Even though raids did not pose a problem for them, they lived through troubled times. His eldest son, James, was Charles’s greatest help on the farm and would become his sole heir.


(Join us every Sunday to take a step back in time and follow the interesting, sometimes sweet, sometimes heart-wrenching tale.)