To the ruins of Great Willem Prinsloo

My mind was swimming in visions from two hundred years ago as I resumed my journey northwards. Around me farms and power lines vanished in a blur of imagination until only the tar road remained like the black umbilical cord that connected me to the unfolding past.

The road follows the banks of the almost always invisible Great Fish River until you reach Cookhouse. Cookhouse obtained its name from the wife of its original owner, who had a “kookhuis” or literally “cooking house” there. The farm still belongs to the original Van Aardt family.

The crossroads where I had to make a choice: the easy road ahead, or a road of unknown adventure towards the right.

Just outside Cookhouse the road skips across the water, at last yielding the traveller a view of its famous grey waters. You can see why once upon a time it marked the boundary between the old Dutch colony and the wilderness that lay beyond. It drains the desperately dry interior, but its the river is substantial because the catchment is enormous. Thus it is that the river flows fast and deep.

In the century of which I’m writing there used to be a succession of military forts built along its 30 foot banks. With just a few exceptions, however, these have all been clawed back into the surrounding landscape by the jealous hands of time and elements. The stone walls of the old military posts were slowly carted away by human hands to be used as building materials, while the sun-baked bricks and earthen plaster simply melted beneath the occasional rains of generations.

Giant wind generators catch the eastern wind to bring the light of civilization to Africa.

I counted the giant wind generators on the banks of hills. Looking like the remains from a crashed spacecraft from some sci-fi movie, I found their blades strangely beautiful as they slowly, gracefully, rotated in the eastern wind. It was going to be a pleasant day today, and already the needle quivered at 28 degrees.

I was following an ancient road which, although it had been modernized, was still serving the same purpose that it had since before the arrival of man. Marking the most gentle passage through the mountain folds, it is still carried travellers from Algoa Bay to Grahamstown, past Cookhouse and Cradock, and then on to Graaff-Reinet. This old town, once used to be the last outpost before the baking wilderness started – stretching for days and weeks into a land that the cartographer had yet to colour with its inks.

The road to Bedfort seems to be leading to a dead end in the mountains.

My plan was to visit the site where the actual battle of Slagtersnek had taken place. I missed the turnoff, however, and by the time I was certain of my mistake, it was already far too late to turn around. I stopped at the crossroad to Bedford and took a few moments to consult my map and GPS. I could have gone northwards to Cradock from here. It would have been a much easier route for the road eastwards leads through a broken wilderness of which the roads had been so bad on all my previous visits that I could never complete the full journey.

I hesitated for a while, but realized that mine is the heart of an adventurer. When given the choice between the familiar way and the road that promised hardship and adventure, I have always been inclined to choose the latter. And so, almost without even deciding upon it, the road simply chose itself for me and drew me eastward to the mountains. As the wilderness began to swallow me, I wondered whether I was making a mistake. I have often had that feeling at the start of some uncertain journey. I’m not sure if the first few miles get any easier even when the feeling becomes familiar. But there I was, feeling strangely increasingly disconnected from the modern world – and delighting in the feeling of it.

Tarkastad by way of Baviaansriver.

A few miles further on, a small road ventures left, spewing the comfortable traveller onto a dusty dirt road. The road sign says “Tarkastad oor Baviaansrivier”, but only those who know what lies ahead would understand the joke. It is like one of those signs you see at tourist traps, with little boards that point to New York, Moscow, Lisbon or Buenos Aires. It signifies a potential destination only, with no assurance that the direction it indicates would actually bring you there.

I smiled at this, however, knowing that I was committed already. You know you’re leaving the familiar world when you reach a security boom where you have to get out and press a button before the boom will lift. A security camera stares at you with one black eye. You’re reminded that the farmers are desperate again to remain safe against farm attacks and stock theft. Nothing much has changed since the frontier days, two centuries ago. Only now, instead of settler sentinels, you are guarded by a lens that came from China. It would be the last vestiges of the modern world that I would see for miles.

The historic farm of De Klerksdal.

The road soon swings right by the ancient farm of De Klerksdal, home of Gideon de Klerk, whose family has lived there for generations. I remember him as a gracious gentleman and passionate guide upon the footprints of the past. I would not have time to visit, though. The day might be too short as it is already.

The road degraded into a corrugation nightmare which rattled your teeth and jarred your brain cells against the suddenly unpleasant confinement of your scull. My father always used to tell me that this was one of the tributes to our government of old. They used to take pride in keeping dirt roads in great order. This road, I could not help but notice, seemed to have been purposely made to present a symbolic experience of the road to hell.

The famous Scottish poet, Thomas Pringle, who wrote so much about the Baviaansriver Valley in the 1820s.

The Scottish settler-poet, Thomas Pringle, described the world I was now travelling through. “The country beyond,” he said, “for a distance of seventy miles…. now lay waste and void, ‘a howling wilderness’ occupied only by wild beasts, and haunted occasionally by wandering banditti of the Busman race (Bosjesmen), who were represented to us as being even more wild and savage than the beasts of prey with whom they shared the dominion of the desert.”[1]

He also left us with a description of the region along the Little Fish River, where he described the vast numbers of wildlife that used to roam the plains. “So numerous were those herds that they literally speckled the face of the country, as far as they eye could reach,” he wrote. “Insomuch that we calculated we had sometimes within view not less than twenty thousand of these beautiful animals.”

In my mind’s eye I could see the multitudes, for this ancient landscape easily lends itself to the palette of the imagination. Following by a an extraordinary long plume of billowing grey dust, the small white speck of my sedan started inching towards the approaching mountain range. It looks as if some crazy surveyor must have built a road that would stop dead in front of the dying hills. Yet, at your approach they open up, as if some unseen hand had swung the door open to a forgotten world.

It is funny how time deceives one’s memory. I had remembered my next stop to be right there, when in actual fact it was a considerable distance into the mountain folds before finally I reached it. It was the old home of one of the giants among the frontier’s men – the elephant hunter whom everyone knew as “Groot Willem Prinsloo” – or Big William Prinsloo.

The homestead of Groot Willem Prinsloo, in a horseshoe of the Baviaans River.

Pringle described him as “a substantial African boor; a gigantic fellow, six feet five inches in height, and corpulent withal.”[2] Nestled in the middle of an impossibly tight horseshoe around which the river wound its way, I found the ruins of his crumbling settler’s home. This is, as far as I could establish, the only one of the region’s settler’s homes which is still standing. Reading Pringle’s account today, it is difficult to reconcile the lonely remnants of his homestead with the pleasing description that the Scotsman gave in 1820.

There was 30 years of war against the Bushmen, always hiding in the mountains, always ready to pounce on easy prey.

“Groot Willem’s house and farm offices,” the settler reminisced, “were constructed in a nook of the glen, with tremendous precipices of naked rock rising above and around, so as barely to leave on the bank of the river sufficient space for the houses and cattle-folds, together with a well-stocked garden and orchard, enclosed with quince and pomegranate hedges, and a small plot of corn land below.”

His house was perched at the lower end of the Baviaans River valley, and I always thought of this big man as a kind of sentinel for the entire region. When you read about his substantial part in the region’s history, you’re left with the impression of a physically big man who nevertheless had a warm and genial nature. A man not to be crossed, but at the same time also a man who did not like to fight more than circumstances demanded.

The wealth of the wilderness - an angora goat stares at me as I'm looking for a place to cross the Baviaans River.

Nature was alive with the sounds of spring when I parked my automobile along the road and waited for the dust to pass. There were echoing bird sounds in the riverine bush, and the diesel-chopper sounds of wasps and heavy duty flying beetles. The engine ticked patiently as I collected cameras and all the paraphernalia that accompanies explorers when they jump into imaginary wormholes that lead to the unremembered past.

The Baviaansrivier does not always flow, but spring had sprung, and the water was clear as crystal. Sweet with life from the Winterberg Mountains in the east. I struggled to find a series of rocks that I could step on to pass the flow. When I did, I was greeted on the other side by a flock of yellow-white angora goats. They stared at me with curious eyes, and the nearest one allowed me to run my fingers through her luxurious tresses. This is where mohair is produced. The expensive export textiles that has become the wealth of the barren wilderness.

The air was sweet with acacia flowers and globs of bees were feasting drunkenly as I passed. You have to stop in this valley if you want to understand why the pioneers found it so delightful. Driving past you’d wonder why anyone would choose to live here. Yet, when the silence greets you, you invariably discover that this is an enchanting world which seems to speak of peace, and always invites you to stay a little longer.

The remains of the homestead of Groot Willem Prinsloo, small for what the big man that he was.

Fighting my way through thorns and shrubs, I finally emerged into the clearing where the old ruins were still standing. Ancient walls of stone, plastered with local clay greeted me indifferently. I paused for a moment to pick up shards of blue and white porcelain from long ago. This, I realized, once belonged to someone who had dreams. A wife, perhaps, to whom they were objects of civilization which she had struggled to protect from Africa’s violence. A struggle that had ultimately been lost. Fragments from the never-ending quest to preserve dignity among the ashes. The porcelain pieces reflected the sun as I held them in my sweaty palms, and slowly lifted my gaze.

The windows of Willem Prinsloo's house appear to have been bricked up to leave only shooting holes.

Looking up through the pleasant heat, I could see that the old stone windows had been bricked up to leave what looked like shooting holes. Those were difficult times, when a settler family could live in a wilderness paradise for a year perhaps, and then suddenly be attacked at night. Firebrands upon the thatch, poison arrows through the window – or a cold iron blade in the long grass while a child was looking for a calf. Life was cheap upon the frontier in those days. If you were not prepared to fight for it, you were seldom permitted to keep it very long.

The interior of the Prinsloo home.

Crawling through the cobwebs and a thorn branch at the entrance, I surveyed the interior of Groot Willem’s house. How could such a big man have lived in such a small home, I wondered? But I forget sometimes. In the frontier years, people lived outdoors. Their homes were mostly used for sleeping, and since they were so often destroyed and plundered, it was seldom worth the trouble of building lasting structures. 

The burning of a settler farm during the time of the frontier wars.

Theirs was a generation that had grown up wild. Thomas Pringle said that the frontiersmen were among the wildest of the colonists. And yet, for all their quarrelsomeness and stubborn dedication to survival, there seems to have been an element of gentleness about them.

Travellers described them as nearly always living in small, unpretentious homes which housed whatever items of civilization they had managed to preserve. Most importantly, it housed guns and powder, a few precious tools, and coffee and sugar that was bartered from distant towns. 

Occasionally there was a treasured heirloom. Something from a life of powdered wigs in Cape Town, or a letter from a relative in Amsterdam. Mostly, though, there was only what nature chose to give – and that was a horizon full of treasures.

Beams such as these could very well be precious yellow wood from the forests of Bosberg in Somerset-East, many miles away as there were no big trees near the Baviaansriver valley.

Some of the pioneers had grown to be immoral and ungovernable, but on the whole, historians noted that they had somehow remained an unusually religious society. Even though there were no schools at all, much care was given to teaching children to read and write. Children were christened and couples were wed, even if it meant having to make a journey lasting weeks or months to the nearest centre of civilization.

The settlers were religious as a people, and even though there were no schools they took great care to see that most of their children should have an effective basic education.

Travellers nearly always described them as among the most welcoming and hospitable people they had ever encountered. Even when language made it impossible to converse, the settler-folk usually treated visitors with the greatest consideration. Lichtenstein said that the settlers had the most beautiful young daughters he had ever known.

At Prinsloo’s home, I thought about all the famous names of history who had enjoyed Groot Willem’s hospitality in this spot. Thomas Pringle’s party of bewildered British settlers were greeted here, and sent along their way with gifts of oranges and pumpkins. Many others – friends and enemies alike – were sheltered and fed by Prinsloo and his family.

General Jacob Gordon was a guest of Willem Prinsloo on several occasions. Source: Wikipedia.

Colonel Gordon painted a picture of his homestead which I found hard to reconcile with the crumbling ruins around me today. Yet, I understand. Africa is jealous for her wilderness. She wipes our footprints from her ancient landscape at every opportunity, always trying to restore it back to the way it used to be. It seems dignified to me if you think about it in the greater scheme of things.

For some reason Willem Prinsloo’s home now housed the biggest collection of wasp’s nests I had ever seen. Each being white like paper, and about the size of a cricket ball, I could not help but draw my collar around my neck as the large black wasps flew nervously to and fro in the half light of the empty chamber.

I wanted to feel the sun again, away from the smell of bats and the reek of a thousand cooking fires in the narrow hearth. It was good to have visited the old Prinsloo farm. It was something I had always wanted to do. He felt like a friend to me now, and however I tried to picture him, I always saw him with a laughing face.

The image made me smile as I carefully crossed the stones towards my car. I was sorry to have to leave this pleasant spot behind. The angora goats stared at me with bobbing beards, looking half-surprised that I was leaving them so soon. But the sun was riding high now, and I knew the road ahead was long. I get trapped by the shadows of the past so easily. It takes willpower to pry their fingers from my shoulders, hungry as they always are for any kind of living company.

* Next blog entry: How I met The Oracle at Glen Lynden.

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[1] Narrative of a Residence in South Africa., Thomas Pringle., Edward Moxon., London., 1835., p. 29.

[2] Narrative of a Residence in South Africa., Thomas Pringle., Edward Moxon., London., 1835., p. 30.