10. A Long History
In 2013, I received a call from a Mrs. de Waal with an unusual request. She told me that she was the daughter–in-law of old man de Waal who had grown up on our farm. He was turning eighty, and the family thought it would be a treat for him to visit the farm. We were thrilled and offered them a lunch on the farmhouse veranda.
The day of the visit arrived and a sprightly Mr. de Waal entered the farmhouse and immediately set off for a walk around the house. “This was my parents room, and I was born on the bed that stood here,” and “This was the room I shared with my two brothers. We had airplanes hanging on the wall.” Of the dining room, he said it had wall paper showing scenes from the Anglo-Boer war, and of the living room, “It had heavy gold drapes on the windows, and no children were allowed here.” He showed us where the animals were slaughtered (our current pantry), and in the kitchen oven, he told us, his mother would bake bread daily for both the family and all the workers. “Oh, and this long passage!” he exclaimed. “The children would run up and down it with my mother scolding my father for encouraging them”. This made me think of the children of visitors we had watched do exactly the same thing.
Of the garden, his memory was of Italian prisoners of war during the First World War, set to work sanding the window shutters on trestles, and he remembered an earlier house which still stood in the werf. He also told us that when he went to school, he had to board with a family in Malmesbury during the week, because it took half a day to ride from the farm to his school in the small town. It now takes twenty minutes for us to drive to Malmesbury.
We worked out that the de Waal family would have occupied the farm from about 1890, and they would have ordered the current farmhouse on spec from a Victorian English catalogue. Everything save the bricks was then brought out by ship, including teak beams and iron roof sheets. It seems the de Waal’s then sold the farm to an unknown family, followed by yet another unknown family. In 1963 it was then sold to the Loubsers, our immediate predecessors.
But the farm’s history doesn’t, of course, begin with the de Waals. Before them there stretches a two hundred year period to be accounted for. Sadly, all records of the farm’s history, together with photographs, were burned by the old lady de Waal, but we do know that the area was settled in the late 1600s, when early Dutch settlers were given land to produce food to provision the sailing ships that rounded the Cape of Good Hope. From the castle in Cape Town, signal canons would be fired in code, asking for specific produce, which would be heard on the Paardeberg, where three further canons existed. These canons would then be fired, relaying the message up the West Coast, to Paarl, and to Moorreesburg. The farmers then took two weeks to get the produce to Cape Town.
Originally our farm, together with our neighbors Uitvlug, Vruchtbaar, and De Hoop, formed the first settled farm under the name De Hoop with an initial deed of eleven hundred morgen (nine hundred and thirty hectares). It was given, we think, to the Joubert family (hence the Joubertskloof Valley). Thereafter, De Hoop was sold on to various other families and eventually separated into the existing four farms of the Joubertskloof valley. Our farm was then named Weltevrede.
Of the farmhouse, we know that there was an original farmhouse a little up the valley, where there still remnants of a wall and a row of oaks marking an entrance road. A second house, remembered by Mr. de Waal, was built in the present werf but demolished by the de Waals after they built the present farmhouse.
Even with the sketchy history I have outlined, the visit by the de Waals and our research into the early history of the farm have greatly enriched our experience living here. Most striking for me, the recognition of previous inhabitants on the farm has made everything seem so relative, and all our lives so fleeting.
