Few know why the old diamond town of Kolmanskop bears the name ‘Coleman’s Hill’, but the Coleman family began to make their mark in the country when William Coleman crossed the Gariep River and set foot in Great Namaqualand in the mid-1800s.
John Coleman was the first Coleman to arrive on the shores of southern Africa when he disembarked in Algoa Bay with the Cook party from England in the 1820s. He was 28 years old. Initially a seaman, he later became a teacher in Simons Town and married three times during the course of his life.
His son, William, would set the wheels of destiny rolling when he became a trader and crossed into what is southern Namibia today with commissioner Palgrave and settled there. He married Annie Rickert, a woman of mixed descent, and the couple had three children: Thomas James (born in 1866), John Brunning (born in 1868) and Elizabeth (1876), who died at the tender age of three-years old and was buried on the farm Voigstgrund between Mariental and Maltahöhe.
The two Coleman sons, Thomas James and John Brunning, left quite a legacy although their paths diverged, and whenever I travel in southern Namibia, I come across the name Coleman. That may be in an old drawing in one of the houses at Kolmanskop, on gravestones in the town cemeteries, on the Coleman transport vehicles, on the farms between Aus and Helmeringhausen or on a billboard in Keetmanshoop, which for a time flaunted the larger-than-life Namibian national football player, Zenatha Coleman, in action.
Thomas James, the older of the Coleman brothers, was a farmer and married a Nama woman. An old photograph shows him with his family in front of a matjieshuis. John Brunning farmed on the Khubub farm near Aus, married Lydia Klinghardt of German descent and became a transport driver, using Khubub as a base for his transport business and driving his ox-wagon through the desert to the coast. On one of these occasions, he was stranded on a hill not far from the ocean. His oxen vanished and his wagon remained there for some time, long enough for the spot to start being referred to as ‘Coleman’s Hill’. The Germans would later call the place ‘Kolmanskuppe’ when at the onset of the diamond rush in the early 1900s they established a diamond town on the outskirts of Lüderitzbucht. Today, a century later, the lucrative diamond days of Kolmanskop are long past and sand whistles through the old houses, creating scenes to delight visitors as they learn about the old diamond history.
I searched through the archives to try and find more information about Thomas James and learned that he applied to the German government to be classified as white so he could qualify to purchase land, but was refused. Lydia, John Brunning’s wife, came to an untimely end when she was murdered at Khubub in 1922 (a story we will still share). A century later, the name Coleman still flies high in the South, especially at Kolmanskop and at Rosh Pinah, where Ronnie Coleman has followed in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, John Brunning, and has built Coleman’s Transport to be one of the biggest transport companies in Namibia.
It’s interesting to trace the journey of the Colemans over the centuries from the time when William Coleman first crossed into Great Namaqualand and made it his home. Lives have since been lived, babies born and died, and ox-wagons stranded on desolate desert hills, leaving their mark in the annals of history as we ride the rollercoaster of life.