As a child growing up in the late fifties and early sixties, I remember being told stories about my Scottish ancestors, the Moodies. At the time they didn’t have much meaning for me. My youthful eyes and mind were saturated with the world I saw immediately around me. The family tree could wait until later.
Later came, sooner than expected. Suddenly those stories began to gain resonance. I guess it is an age thing. When you are a child knowing who fits in where or how you got from there to here is of no real consequence.
That changes as you grow older. Suddenly aware that time is breathing down your neck, you start feeling this urge to go back and delve in to the past, to rediscover your roots and to explore your ancestry in all its intricate twists and turns.
It is certainly a subject which appears to have occupied my sister Penny’s mind, perhaps because she is a Social Anthropologist with an interest in ancestor belief. While lecturing at Rhodes University, in Grahamstown, she did some research in to our family line and discovered the location of the farm where the Moodies had first settled when they arrived in the Western Cape.
How they got to be there happened like this. In 1815 Benjamin Moodie, the eldest son of James, the 9th Laird of Melsetter on the Orkney Islands, had inherited the family manor house and estate and, with it, all the accumulated family debts. There seemed no way of extricating himself from this financial mess other than by selling off the ancestral seat. This he reluctantly decided to do.
Having performed this sorrowful duty he felt the need to make a fresh start. Casting his his eyes around for a new country to light out to he settled on the Cape of Good Hope because it seemed “the most likely colony in which he could attain an independent livelihood with a less violent alteration in his habits than might be expected of most persons.”
Benjamin arrived in the Cape full of ideas on how to create a new society on the empty land. In his mind he seems to have imagined a reborn feudal Scotland rising out of the dry African veld with himself restored to his rightful role of Lord of the Manor.
It didn’t turn out quite like that.
No sooner had he landed then all his grandiose plans began to unravel. Most of the 200-odd artisans he had bought over with him to form the nucleus of his new community promptly deserted him, the help he had countered on receiving from the government was not forthcoming and his business partner let him down. For their part local Cape community greeted his whole emigration scheme with bemused scepticism.
There was something rather romantic and audacious and wildly impractical about Benjamin Moodie’s dream, so when Penny announced that she intended to make a journey to the farm on which he settled in the Overberg and asked if I would like to join her I signed up on the dot.
On one level my pilgrimage – if it can be called that – was undertaken for my parents, two pioneering individualists in their own right. I wanted to go where they had been unable to go, stand where they had never stood and then bring back some sort of relic or memento to prove that I had honoured their memory (in the end, I settled for a bottle of farm honey).
Tumbled cloud occupied much of the sky as we set out from Cape Town, with rain threatening. For much of our journey we found ourselves chasing a large rainbow which arched over the road like some sort of welcoming celestial escort. Penny was quick to see the significance: “It’s the ancestral spirits come to guide us home!”. Even I, a man of no fixed faith or conviction, wanted to believe this was true.
Back in 1817 the journey from Cape Town to the farm had been a long, hot, dusty, arduous, one, taking many days and involved scaling, on horseback, the ragged peaks of the Hottentot’s Holland mountain range. Today it take three-hours on the N3.
Groot Vader’s Bosch (literally “Grandfather’s Wood”. It was named in honour of Roelof Oelofse who owned the land in 1723), where Benjamin Moodie first settled, is situated about 25 kilometres east of Swellendam on the slopes of the Langeberg. John Wedderburn Moodie, who followed his elder brother out to South Africa, described this last leg of the journey in his book Ten Years in South Africa
Our course skirted the base of these mountains which in height, as well as beauty of form, exceeded anything we had yet witnessed in African scenery. I had already noticed the progressive improvement in the verdure of the country the further we advanced eastwards. The tract between Swellendam and Groot Vader’s Bosch suddenly assumed a new character; and the grass that clothed the narrow valley between the mountains and the lower range of hills to the right of the road, though far inferior to that of our English pastures, was of a fresher green and a more succulent description than any we had yet seen.
As we crossed over the farm boundary I could feel a sudden heightening of my own emotions. An emigrant to South Africa myself, I had often felt short of roots and reasons. Coming to Groot Vader’s Bosch was my way of trying to find a point of connection. I hoped to lay a few old ghosts to rest – and perhaps stir up a few new ones – and come to terms with my own belated movement south.
Benjamin Moodies’ farm originally consisted of over 20 000 acres of land and stretched clear to the top of the Langeberg. Over the years it has, however, been subdivided and parcelled off among his descendants while other parts have been sold off to stave off the creditors.
Through a peculiar accident of geology, the upper portions are covered by a thick pelt of indigenous forest, a characteristic which renders it quite distinct from the rest of the range which is mostly treeless. The ready supply of timber made it a very attractive destination for the early Trek Boers. If you hunt around you can still find the remains of their simple, sun-baked clay brick houses, some dating back to the 1720s.
Now protected, this forest – the largest west of Knysna – forms part of the Groot Vader’s Bosch Reserve and Wilderness Area and is, among other things, a popular destination for birders. The Knysna Woodpecker, Victorin’s Warbler, Cape Siskin and Orange-bellied Sunbird all occur here.
Penny had arranged for us to stay on Honeywood Farm – a sub-division of the original estate – whose present owner, John Moodie, keeps bees and cattle, as well as renting out holiday cottages. She had put in a special request to him that we be allowed to stay in Quince Cottage because its name reminded her of our mother, Monica.
John, himself, turned out to be the most obliging of hosts, taking time off to show us around the farm and arranging for us to visit the original Groot Vader’s Bisch homestead on the next door farm which belonged to his cousin, Keith.
His father, then a remarkably sprightly 92-year old who everybody simply referred to as “The General”, still lived on the farm at that stage.
An interesting person in his own right, he had once served as SA Army Chief of Staff and as a military attaché in Switzerland. The treasured family heirlooms had been entrusted to his care.
These included a “silver headed double gilt and richly ornamented Turkish scimitar, stiletto and a Field Marshall’s baton of some quality and style” (Burrows) presented to James, Seventh Laird of Melsetter, by a grateful King Charles of Spain for his role in relieving the siege of Diena during the Spanish War of Succession. There is also the original letter of commendation which King Charles sent to Queen Anne telling her of James services.
Another treasured possession was a large studio portrait of the venerable James, executed on orders of the Queen herself by the royal court painter. With his this, aquiline features, I could see a strong family resemblance between him and “The General”.
The gathering clouds eventually disgorged themselves during the night bringing much needed relief after a long, dry, spell, in the district. I rose early the next morning and went for a walk. On my right the mountains stretched off in to the blue distance. Above them ragged slivers of light cut through the clouds; below them the whole Swellendam Valley was laid out like a relief map in brilliant acrylic colours.
When John Wedderburn Moodie came riding up this valley he had also been enraptured by the scenes that greeted him, describing, in poetic detail, how he had encountered numerous groups of Khoikhoi maidens bathing in the tree-lined pools along the river.
There were no such scenes to greet us when we followed the same river but our first view of the house in which Benjamin lived was, however, no less exciting for that.
Built in the latter half of the 18th century by Jacobus Steyn, Groot Vader’s Bosch is reputed to be the oldest original farmhouse still standing in tthe Overberg. In a departure from the norm it was built without the usual elaborate end-gables, so typical of the period and so beloved by generations of South African landscape painters. It is a distinction it shares with only two other buildings in the district – the famous Drostdy in Swellendam and Westfield, Benjamin Moodie’s other property near Port Beaufort which he built in 1820 and which he modelled on Groot Vader’s Bosch..
Constructed largely from local materials, it was a house built to last; to be handed down to grandchildren to grow up in and farm in turn. Its posts, beams and floorboards came from the hardwood forests in the nearby hills, its roof was shaggily thatched with local grass, the mud bricks for its walls manufactured on site.
Despite its strictly utilitarian character design, it is still an imposing building, one which must have seemed a worthy successor to the old manor house the Moodie’s left behind in Scotland.
Inside the old co-existed convivially with the new. Although there were plenty of reminders of its history there was none of that self-conscious reverence for the past you get in some stately old homes. This was still a working house on a working farm and exuded a warm, comfortable, unassuming, lived-in feel.
In the front of the house, beyond a trim garden shaded by some towering trees, several fields of lush pasture-land shelved gently down to a small spruit concealed behind a wild tangle of briers. Upstream the country grew increasing broken and hilly until, through a narrow cleft, the mountains soared in to view.
Only a few metres from the house is a long, low-roofed sprawling where they milk their herd of dairy cows. As we rounded the building we were met by a scurry of wings: swallows had built their mud nests under the eaves. Some of them looked like they had been there as long as the dairy which is even older than the main house.
In Benjamin Moodie’s time there had evidently been been an orchard and a vineyard which yielded “seven or eight leaguers of indifferent wine, and about a leaguer of tolerable brandy”. Above the house there is a little hilltop cemetery in which generations of Moodies lie buried.
Later, back at Quince Cottage, I wandered outside under the clear night sky and thought about the happy impulse which had brought me here. Although this was my first visit there was a familiarity about the surroundings I found slightly disconcerting. Perhaps it was because the mountains seemed to echo the ones I had grown up amongst in Nyanga; perhaps it had something to do with a deeper, collective, memory. I wasn’t quite clear myself.
Whatever the answer was to this conundrum I was glad I had come. It was good to be able to add a bit of flesh to the bare bones of family history; to have gone back and seen where our African adventure started…
Footnote: my family is descended, on my father’s mother’s side, from Benjamin’s first-born son, James. For some reason, lost in the mists of time, he was disinherited which meant Groot Vader’s Bosch was inherited by the second son and was passed down to his descendants.
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