Travels Back: Trekking with the Moodies

September 17, 2022September 17, 2022 / stidyatkusane / 11 Comments

I grew up in the dying days of Empire, that now fast receding period in history when the British nation spread out across the globe and ended up laying claim to and governing a substantial portion of it. Their motives for doing so were numerous, their impact (both good and bad) enormous. In terms of size and influence, it was the greatest empire of all time. As the historian, Niall Ferguson put it, in his critically acclaimed book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World: “No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants…The Britannic exodus changed the world.”

For better or worse, I am a product of this mass exodus. My father’s grandfather, Harold Edward Stidolph, a musician, organist, composer and writer of verse, was among the countless many who decided to try their luck in the colonies arriving in Cape Town around 1884, ship unknown. Patriotic and devout (if his verses are anything to go by) and very much a man of his time, he took to South Africa with enthusiasm – among other things, touring the Cape Colony with Ede Remenyi, a popular Hungarian violinist who had worked with Franz Liszt.

There are Scots and Irish in my ancestry on my father’s mother’s side and their connection to this country goes back even further. In 1817, Benjamin Moodie, the last Laird of Melsetter in the Orkney Islands, facing ruin and a drastic decline in social status, led a party of indentured Scotsmen out to South Africa, on the ship Brilliant, with the intention of establishing a settlement in the Cape where he hoped to recoup his position and fortune. For various reasons – a separate story in itself – Benjamin’s feudal visions were never fully realised but he did end up buying land at Groot Vader’s Bosch near Swellendam which his descendants still farm to this day.

Not my side of the family though. For reasons unclear, Benjamin disinherited his firstborn son, James – from whom I am descended – which meant Groot Vader’s Bosch was left to his second son. It was a decision I had good cause to regret the moment I first laid eyes on the farm with its magnificent old house sheltering on the slopes of the beautiful Langeberg.

What is known is that James equipped with a wagon and a load of either timber or of saleable mixed goods decided, to head inland towards the Orange river to seek his fortune. He fell ill near the northern borders of the Cape Colony, got taken in by a Boer family, and was then nursed back to health by Sara Van Zyl (whose South African family tree dates back to the days of Van Riebeek) who he subsequently married.

She bore him eleven children one of whom, Thomas – or Groot Tom as they called him because of his size and amazing strength – would also uproot his extended family and take them off in search of pastures new.

The trek that he would lead – the Moodie Trek – was an experiment, in that it marked the first organised attempt to establish a European settlement from the south in Gazaland. The inspiration for it had come from George Benjamin Dunbar Moodie, a young adventurer from Natal who, having explored the area and realised its potential, put the idea to his uncle Thomas, then a wheat and maize farmer in the Bethlehem district of South Africa. Taken in by Dunbar’s glowing descriptions (”the prettiest country I have ever seen”) Thomas agreed to lead the trek. Hoping, like his grandfather before him, to create a new Melsetter in the wilds, he led a small delegation of interested farmers, in January 1892, to see Cecil John Rhodes.

It must have been a relatively easy sell. Rhodes’s interest in the area was well known and had, over the years, grown even greater (to say nothing of his grand plan to attach the whole of the continent to Britain). Realising the importance of establishing a European settlement in Manicaland to act as a buffer against the Portuguese who were actively seeking to resuscitate their ancient claims to “Monomatapa”, as well as outflank the Boers of the ZAR by claiming the territory north of the Limpopo, he readily agreed to the proposal once suitable terms had been arranged.

Having obtained the necessary backing Groot Tom returned home. There was much to be done before they could set off. Most important, he needed people. To this end, Groot Tom set about recruiting a group of mostly Afrikaans-speaking farmers to join him. In the end, the party that set off on this long, arduous journey was made up of 29 families consisting of 37 men and 31 women, with 17 wagons and 350 horses and cattle. Where they paved the way, others would follow.

Dunbar Moodie did not join the trek party but instead sailed up to the port of Beira, in Mozambique, and then travelled via Umtali to Salisbury before linking up with the trek in Fort Victoria.

On the 8^th May 1892, cheered on by a crowd, the trek rumbled out of Bethlehem “with a great lowing of cattle, whipping and whooping”. They were joined by an ox wagon in which rode John Warren Nesbitt (the Nesbitts were of Irish extraction), his wife, Sara, and their very young daughter, Josephine – my grandmother – who had been born on the farm of White Hills near the old gold-rush town of Barberton (in present-day Mpumalanga).

The seeds of my future life in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe had been laid.

The wagon train struck out into the interior, heading across the open high plateau until they reached Zeerust. From there, they followed the route taken by the old hunters, missionaries, transport riders and, more recently, the Pioneer Column. For much of its length, it skirted the north-western border of South Africa, leading them across the dusty, flat plains until eventually, they sighted the waters of the Limpopo, glimmering in the distance. It is likely they crossed the river at a point, now known as Rhodes Drift, just west of its confluence with the Shashe River. From here they headed up into the Tati Concession area (now Botswana).

*The Limpopo. The trek most likely crossed several kilometres upstream*.

This is a harsh, arid country. In summer the sun hammers down relentlessly, and water is often hard to come by. Coming in fast, huge thunderstorms sweep across it, the lightning illuminating the landscape below in jagged flashes. There were other perils to be faced. Awareness of animals must have bought an awareness of details. One can imagine their senses growing attuned to lions, hyaenas and elephants, all of whom were common in these parts.

As often happened in these emigration stories, all did not go quite according to the script either. Groot Tom had hoped to complete the trek in four months but such were the hazards and hardships they encountered along the way it took them that amount of time just to reach Limpopo and then another four months to get to their final destination.

At Macloutsie, just over the border, there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease amongst their cattle, many of whom grew so weak they were eaten alive by the hyena that prowled around their camp. This delayed them for another month. There were also attacks by lions and shortages of water. Snakes proved an ongoing problem with several of their dogs being killed by the fearsome, deadly, Black Mamba. Undeterred the party struggled on. Ahead of them lay more hills, more flatness.

They reached Fort Tuli on 12^th September, Occupation Day where they were able to replenish their diminished supplies. They also organised a dance (“the jolliest I have ever attended” according to one of the trek members). One of their concerns for the next leg of the trek was the possible hostility of the Ndebele raiding parties who were active in the area. Apart from one or two small incidents, they got through unscathed.

They were to face more drama, however. Upon reaching the small settlement of Fort Victoria (modern-day Masvingo) a major falling-out occurred amongst the trek members when it was discovered in which direction their true destination lay. It would appear that a large number of the party had not been paying close attention when the objectives of the trek had originally been spelt out. Now they could not understand why, instead of following the wagon wheel marks up to Salisbury and the more healthy highveld, they were branching off into what looked like wild, untamed, malaria-ridden country. Or maybe they were just exhausted after months of trekking under the hot African sun and this caused some confusion in the mind…

Looming large amongst the group of dissidents was John Warren Nesbitt who, having been appointed correspondent of the trek, proceeded to pen an angry letter to the Tuli Chronicle, a newspaper, I must confess, I did not even know existed (considering that Tuli is in one of the most remote and isolated parts of modern-day Zimbabwe one wonders what its circulation figures were).

Unable to reach an agreement the party split up into two groups with one half continuing on to Salisbury while the other trekked on to their original goal, Gazaland and the Chimanimani Mountains.

Having written an equally indignant letter refuting John Nesbitt’s allegations, Dunbar Moodie decided to take advantage of the impasse by getting married to his cousin, Sarah Moodie. For their honeymoon, they chose the nearby, mysterious Zimbabwe Ruins, which were to become the subject of much contentious debate. They were, in all likelihood, the first European couple to choose this site to celebrate their nuptials…

The Gazaland-bound group set off on the last leg of their journey. It proved every bit as challenging an ordeal as what they had already been through. Before them stretched yet more miles of wilderness, the initial terrain was rough and broken, then flat but extremely hot. The party was afflicted with malaria, and their animals succumbed to horse sickness and other ailments. Reaching the Sabie River, with the Eastern Highlands now in plain sight, Groot Tom decided to stop and celebrate. The party gathered together under a large baobab and a demijohn of brandy was produced. The ragged survivors beneath it must have seemed like some ghostly apparition. As one account, now in the National Archives in Harare, put it “Our stricken folk and wagons presented a pitiful sight. The enthusiasm of the men under the circumstances brought tears to the eyes of the owner of the demijohn of brandy (Mrs Dunbar Moodie). The demijohn was brought to the light of day and added considerably to the zest of celebrations.” Dunbar put it more pithily. In his diary, he simply recorded: “Got squiffy – all of us.”

Some photos showing location of Moodies drift taken at a later date.

They crossed the river at what would subsequently become known as Moodie’s Drift, just south of the present-day Birchenough Bridge, then headed up the final steep stretch. Eight months after they had set off, the loyal remnants of Tom Moodie’s original group finally reached the rolling green hills and mountains of what would become the new “Melsetter”, still full of high hopes and ideas about how they were going to create an ideal rural society on the land. For the Moses-like figure who had guided them, there was to be no happy ending of rippling crops and pasture lands full of fat sheep and contented cattle. Within a year of pegging his farm, Waterfall, Groot Tom had succumbed to malaria and blackwater fever and was dead. You can see his grave still there to this day, by the side of the main tar road. Above his name is inscribed the dedication “For Queen and Empire”.

The inscription is hardly surprising. The Moodies lived in an era when many of those who had gone out to the colonies were conservative by nature and loyal to the crown. They saw themselves as emissaries of established imperial power, the bearers of a universal, unquestioned, order, part of a civilising force whose duty was to uplift the rest of mankind. The fact that the people they subjugated in the process did not always see it in quite such heroically romantic terms did not occur to them or else was conveniently overlooked.

Memorial to the Moodie Trek in Melsetter (since demolished)

A memorial to the trek was later put up in the centre of Melsetter. Because of its unwanted associations with colonialism, it was dismantled after Robert Mugabe came to power. The village was renamed Chimanimani, after the nearby range of mountains.

After Tom’s death, his wife Cecilia Moodie, returned to her relatives in South Africa where she died in 1905, She was buried on the farm of Rietvlei, today known as the Rietvlei Nature Reserve, south of Pretoria.

For many of the other emigrants, it would prove an equally, fragile, brief interlude. More died, others moved and moved on again leaving behind them an ominous hole. Soon there would be very few of the original trek members, or their descendants left.

For their part, the breakaway group had, in the interim, continued trundling their way towards Salisbury which, at that stage, consisted of little more than a village of tents, pole and dagga huts and a few brick homes sprawled around The Kopje. Bit by bit the town would spread out from this hill slowly engulfing the surrounding veld, vleis and acres of long, pale grass until eventually, it became the modern city of today with its concrete skyscrapers and buildings, just like metropolises all over the world.

The arrival of the dazed and travel-stained home-seekers amongst the bare scatter of buildings caused something of a stir. As was so often the case in frontier towns, the majority of the early white settler population was young and male, so this unexpected infusion of more women was a cause for great celebration (according to Sarah Susannah Nesbitt, who later wrote an account of her experiences, there were only eight women and a few children in the town when they arrived, not counting the Roman Catholic nuns and sisters).

Sarah’s daughter, Josephine Nesbitt, would go on to marry Alan Stidolph, the son of Harold, mentioned above. They had five children together, one of whom was my father, Reginald Neville Stidolph. Another piece in the family jigsaw had slotted into place.

During my youth, none of this meant much to me. It is only that I have reached an age when I am only too aware I am living on borrowed time and have started doing some serious stocktaking of my life it has assumed a much greater significance. Each generation passes something on to the other. If you want to understand the present, the best place to start is usually looking back.

I met none of the folk here described, not even my grandmother who died at a relatively young age, but – like my father before me (another adventurous spirit) – I think I have inherited a few of their traits. I possess something of their wanderlust, curiosity and desire to seek out new frontiers. I, too, like to test myself against nature by periodically returning to a harsher – and more simple – mode of existence than the more safe and sedentary one I live on a daily basis. I have never, admittedly, subjected myself to such an exhausting physical ordeal as they did on their long trek (in my case a hike in the Berg or along the Wild Coast usually suffices). For this reason, if no other, I find their achievements awe-inspiring.

I am aware, however, that not everyone views my ancestors’ achievements – their ‘opening up of the continent’ – in such a heroic light. I am equally aware that the legacy they left behind brings its own political, spiritual and psychological baggage. Through no particular fault of mine, I was born on the wrong side of history, under a now-defunct set of ideas and beliefs; a political system which denied basic political rights to others and led to an ever-widening turmoil in the sub-continent. A certain amount of guilt attaches itself to this, an awareness that British rule was not quite as enlightened as it often tried to present itself to be. It is not something that can be easily wished away; the best thing one can do is acknowledge, understand and learn from it.

History, as we know, abounds with ironies and this story has its little postscript too. The collapse of the former Rhodesia triggered a massive reverse trek as many whites, fearful of their future under Robert Mugabe’s hard-line, Marxist-style, regime, packed their bags and became part of a new diaspora. Many of their concerns appeared justified, too, when his government launched its chaotic and violent land grab which sent the economy into freefall.

I was part of this general exodus, swept along, by the turning tide from the country of my birth. In a sense, I had returned to the starting point, and the journey had gone full circle…

REFERENCES:

Many Treks Made Rhodesia by C.P. Olivier (Published by Howard B. Timmins)

The Scots in South Africa: Ethnicity, Identity, Gender and Race, 1772-1914 by John M. Mackenzie with Nigel R. Dalziel (published by Wits University Press)

Overberg Outspan by Edmund H. Burrows (published by Swellendam Trust)

Experiences of Rhodesia’s Pioneer Women by Jeannie M. Boggie (published by Philpot& Collins)

Many thanks to my eldest brother Patrick Stidolph whose research into our family tree I have also drawn on here.

Sleuthing the Backwaters of the Great Fish River

January 22, 2022 / stidyatkusane / 6 Comments

*The Great Fish River Valley near Committees Drift*.

It is already early afternoon when I pull over on the top of the Nico Malan Pass, which drops a massive 673 vertical metres over 13,8 kilometres, into 1820 Settler Country. Taking a sip of the now lukewarm coffee in my Thermos, I look at the raw landscape around me. To my right, capped by a bluff of rock, are the Katberg which, in turn, become the Winterberg. To my left, the rest of the mountain chain stretches away toward the Hogsback and the Amatola.

Above me, I can see the pale puff of rain clouds receding over the mountain tops. The very air looks grey and dampness seems to rise up off the tarred road like mist. The road ahead tapers away through miles of dry East Cape thicket, sprinkled with aloes, euphorbia, succulents, sweet thorn, and spekboom..

Although I was not born here, I am, in a sense, back where it began, my home patch. It was here that many of my ancestors settled when they came to South Africa, way back in the early 1800s.

The first was Benjamin Moodie, the Seventh and last Laird of Melsetter in the Orkney Islands whose family fell upon hard times and who sailed from London on the brig Brilliant in March 1817, arriving at the Cape in June. From there he trekked up to Grootvadersbosch in the Overberg where he hoped to recreate his bit of feudal Scotland in the shadows of the Langeberg. It was his grandson, Thomas (Groot Tom) Moodie who led the Moodie Trek into the then Southern Rhodesia which explains how I came to be born and raised up there, among the beautiful Nyanga mountains.

And why I am driving down this road today.

Then there were the Nesbitts (my father’s mother’s side of the family), from Ireland, whose history I have only recently discovered, but whose story I am now trying to follow. Other ancestors too – the Colemans, the Arnotts, the Stirks as well as my immediate kin, the Stidolphs. All spent time in the Eastern Cape area.

As I descend the winding road that leads, through Seymour and Fort Beaufort, into the vast Great Fish River Valley, I feel my senses heightening, flaring. I look and listen, feel the air, try to see the country as they did, all those years ago. Coming from the lush, green pastures of Scotland and Ireland, it certainly must have seemed very different from anything they were used to.

There is an old military blockhouse at Fort Brown, where the modern bridge crosses over the Great Fish River, a reminder of the days when this was all disputed territory. It formed part of a chain of similar forts, strung along the banks of the river, which the British soldiers, garrisoned in them, used to pass messages to one other.

It is here I establish my first connection. An ancestor of mine, on my father’s mother’s side, Lt Col Richard Athol Nesbitt CB, was posted to Fort Brown, as an inspector, in 1875. Later he would go on to form Nesbitt’s Horse which fought with distinction in both the Frontier and Anglo-Boer War. There is a memorial honouring their contribution, among others, to the war effort standing in Church Square, Grahamstown.

*Monument honouring, amongst others, members of Nesbitt’s Horse.*

Having stopped to snap an obligatory photo of the place, for record purposes, I continue on my way, still taking in the country as I go. Hill leads to hill leads to hill and in between is nothing but space and distance. The oceans my ancestors crossed to get here could hardly have been more solitary than this empty country still is.

It gets me thinking about the 1820 Settlers who settled in this region. Innocent of the reality of Africa, they must have been shocked to discover the arid country, with its harsh climate, they were about to settle on was nothing like the rich farm and pasture land that they had been promised by the propagandists back home. Although the land was theirs to do what they would with, there was another aspect the pamphlet writers had chosen to gloss over in their colourful descriptions– the fact that the settlers were to form part of a Government-approved military buffer zone, aimed at keeping the Xhosa on the other side of the Great Fish River. Inevitably they found themselves caught up in an escalating conflict for which they were mostly ill-prepared.

Perhaps not too surprisingly then, many found it too lonely and too harsh a life and, their faith shaken, put the country behind them to return to the comforts of town life. Others persevered; in some cases, their descendants are still on the same farms. For yet others, Africa proved to be a temporary aberration. Anxious to escape the heat, sweat, and weariness of it all, they packed up and sailed back to England.

For my part, I am bound for Grahamstown where my one sister, Sally, lives. It was here that the settlers decided to build their capital and – because the town never grew at the rate envisaged – you can still see many fine examples of colonial architecture and of their early houses (see Picture Library below). It is also now home to Rhodes University, as well as one of the most dysfunctional and corrupt municipalities in modern South Africa.

The military life seems to have run deep in the Nesbitt blood. Richard’s father, Alexander Nesbitt, had enlisted, at the age 19, in the 67^th Regiment (South Hampshire) and was stationed for many years in Mauritius before being sent with the Reserve Battalion, in August 1851, to the Eastern Cape on HMS Hermes to participate in the 8^th Xhosa War.

Not much is known about him but his wife occupies her own special spot in history, for she was a passenger on the HMS Birkenhead, which was conveying troops of ten different regiments from Ireland to participate in the Border War when it struck a rock near Danger Point on the Cape Coast and sank with a loss of 450 lives.

The sinking of the HMS Birkenhead is, of course, famous in the annals of maritime history because it was here the order “Women and children first…” originated. Safe in a lifeboat, Elizabeth Anne “Annie” Nesbitt and her third child, the self-same Richard Athol, were two of the only 193 survivors.

Many of the places the various Nesbitts (and there were many of them) had lived in while in the East Cape I have visited myself so I feel I have both set and principal actors. What I now need to do is write a few scenes. For a moment I think of going to the military cemetery in King William’s Town where Alexander Nesbitt lies buried but my time is short and I am not even sure where it is, so, instead I elect to explore the Great Fish River basin from where it crosses the N3 and then take the dirt road that backtracks all the way to Fort Brown – a part of the world that had changed little over time.

*Frontier Country*. *The dirt road back to Fort Brown with Great Fish River in the mid-distance.*

With its turbulent, blood-stained, history, the Great Fish has always loomed large in my imagination. Like the Zambezi and Limpopo, it is one of those rivers which has acquired almost mythical status.

The first section of the journey takes you along the crest of a ridge with extensive views on both sides. Although you probably won’t see it mentioned in any tourist brochure, I think it is one of the best drives in all of South Africa because of its wildness, its freedom, it’s feeling of immensity, the land sweeping back in great folds all the way to the distant range of mountains on the one side and the deep blue of Indian Ocean on the other.

Not far from Fraser’s Camp, we turn left off the tar onto a gravel road that runs roughly parallel with the looping river. Many of the place names around here carry echoes of their frontier past. Dropping down into the valley, the first settlement to come into view is Trumpeter’s Drift, one of the many strategically sited forts the British built along the Great Fish in an effort to secure the land south of the river. Unlike most of the others, which stand crumbling and neglected, this solid, block-like structure still forms part of a working farm and is in relatively good nick.

*Trumpeter’s Drift – old fort on left of buildings*.

We drive on. Alongside us, the river continues to follow the most circuitous of routes as it twists and turns its way through the landscape. Countless thorn trees swarm together along its banks creating a dense, impenetrable mass. Swollen by the recent unexpectedly good rains, its soup brown water gushes copiously along. Broken branches, old logs, chunks of floating vegetation, and mud sweep past. In places, driftwood is piled high along the banks.

*Great Fish River – flowing fast*. Note thorns.

Our next stop is Committees Drift, another military outpost established by the British during the Frontier war of 1819 (the name “committees” is pronounced by locals as “kommetjies” indicating that the origins may be Khoisan or Dutch).

A steel girder bridge, erected in 1887, spans the river at this point. On the other side of it lies former Ciskei, one of the Apartheid government’s grandiose, if ill-conceived, “homeland republics” where the National Party tried to entrench the principle of racial separation. Granted “independence” (but never internationally recognised as such) in 1980 after a rigged election, the idea that it could function as a separate state was, of course, a fantasy that could never work as the South African economy remained dependent on the black workers who lived in remote corners like this. Among the poorest and most neglected areas in South Africa, it was also too small and lacked the resources to ever manage its own affairs and govern itself. It would always be obliged to live in the pocket of its giant neighbour.

We drive on again, passing a group of smartly attired church-goers as we do. I am not particularly religious myself but I rather approve of the fact that there are people who are still prepared to dress up to please their God. A solitary donkey walks along the side of the road with an air of utmost purposefulness as if it has a fixed destination in mind. A herd of goats scurries off as we approach them and force their way through a farm fence. Because of its large size, the ram is unable to get through and is obliged to reverse out. Mustering all the regal dignity he can he strides off, acting like this was all part of the plan.

Ahead, more hills, more flatness while the sun spreads a dry ruddiness everywhere. Occasionally we pass the empty shells of deserted farmhouses, rotting from the top downwards. Eventually, there will be little left to remind you that somebody lived there. Once they stood for Hope in the Future. Now they stand neglected and forlorn, a lonely reminder of the essential sadness and transience of life.

Our plan is to lunch at Double Drift, in the Great Fish River Nature Reserve, another old fort that once housed British troops sent out to Africa to defend the Empire. Completed in 1837, it protected the important route to Fort Willshire and the interior. Although in a rather dilapidated state of repair it, once again, serves as a memorial to a particular moment in South African history.

At the entrance gate to the reserve, we change our mind when we hear how much it will cost us for such a short visit (a substantial increase from when I visited last) so we decide to strike it off our list of Historic Places to Visit and have a tailgate lunch on the side of the road that leads to Kwandwe Private Game Reserve instead.

I don’t need to remind myself what the fort looks like anyway because Sally has done a beautiful painting of it (for more examples of her work see Sally Scott)

*Double Drift fort. Chalk pastel. Painting by Sally Scott*.

Entering Kwandwe, a little later on, I get a glimpse of another challenge the English settlers had to face – elephant. Although long shot out in most parts of the East Cape, they have been reintroduced into some of the larger local reserves, such as Kwandwe. We haven’t gone too far when we see one browsing in the dense thicket, his back stained a dusty yellow ochre from the local soil. A few kilometres on we see another, similarly camouflaged.

Elephants are awesome creatures. There is a mystery, a sense of enchantment, behind their wrinkled grey visage and massive bulk. I can watch them for hours. As intriguing as they are, they do, however, make difficult neighbours to live with, showing scant regard for fences or planted crops or humans for that matter. It is not wise to antagonize them.

On the crest of another ridge, we stop for a final look over the Great Fish River Basin. Below us roll plains, speckled with bush, patterned with cloud shadows, receding into the blue haze of the far mountains, indifferent to man. Once again, I feel overawed by the age and might of this old continent. In such a primaeval wilderness, is very easy to believe here is where all life originated.

By sleuthing around in these backwaters, I also feel I am beginning to get somewhere in establishing a link with my past. My discoveries may not be earth-shattering but they are a start. They provide the building blocks upon which my own life had been constructed.

PHOTO LIBRARY

More pics of forts:

More Fish River Valley scenes:

Grahamstown scenes:

Roughing it in the Bush in South Africa and Canada

October 27, 2019 / stidyatkusane / 7 Comments

*Sunset over the Langeberg. Looking towards Swellendam.*

The sun was slanting away behind me sending long thin shadows down the slopes of the Langeberg as I drove past the sign post to Groot Vader’s Bosch.

I had jetted in to Cape Town from Durban that morning on a return pilgrimage to the farm, near Swellendam, where my ancestors, the Moodies, had first settled after their departure from the Orkney Islands, way back in the early 1800s. Ostensibly the purpose of my visit was to celebrate an important milestone birthday in my life with family and friends.

This was not, however, the only object of my journey.

I wanted to know more about the Moodies. I wanted to get a glimpse in to their lives and their thoughts and their feelings. I wanted to experience the sublime landscape they had settled in and try and see it through their eyes as well as my own.

The older I get the more fascinated I become with this stuff. It gives me a link, however tenuous, with my past and a society in some ways like ours, in other respects manifestly different.

*On the trail of the Moodies – various family members and friend*s. Picture courtesy of Craig Scott.

I suspect there was another motive too. Maybe it was because, when the whole world seems under threat, it feels comforting to escape backwards.

Of course, things were not necessarily any safer or better back in those days. You only have to read any contemporary account of life in nineteenth century South Africa to realise they, too, faced their own peculiar set of challenges.

There were, for example, none of the comforts of modern travel. The sea voyage from Britain to Cape Town was a stomach-churning, gruelling, ordeal in those leaky, old, wooden, wave-tossed, sail boats, especially for those of a delicate constitution. In a letter home, dated August 1775, the Hon. Sophia Pigot (whose daughter would go on to marry an ancestor of mine) wrote “Lud! How weary one grows of salted meat. And of the Ocean too, I swear I am enamoured even of this monstrous queer-shaped Mountain flat as a Board after near four months of nothing but Water on every side”.

And if you were travelling on to India, like Sophia was, you still faced many more exhausting months at sea. The possibility of getting shipwrecked was something else you had to factor in to your calculations…

India was not, however, my area of concern. On this trip I wanted to follow up on a story which I had just scratched the surface of and which involved another ancestor of mine: John Wedderburn Moodie whose arrival in South Africa, exactly 200-years ago, I wanted to celebrate along with my own birthday. Even though I am descended from his elder brother, Benjamin, I have always felt a strange emotional bond with John Wedderburn.

Reading his book, Ten Years in South Africa I kept seeing bits of his character in myself. We even looked vaguely alike. In his struggle to create a new life on the African frontier, I also saw echoes of my parent’s attempts to tame their own wilderness back home in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Ten Years in South Africa is a delight to read. It is one of those books that appear as fresh and vivid now as on the day it was published. John was a gifted, observant, writer; intelligence and kindness go hand in hand with a keen sense of humour and a sharp – even satirical – eye.The book is full of interesting vignettes and insights in to the South Africa of the time.

*Illustration from Ten Years in South Africa. Falling foul of an elephant*.

While he obviously shared some of the prejudices of his class and era, he seems to have also possessed an instinctive feeling for the other side, displaying an almost anthropological interest in the country and its people which further endeared him to me.

John had originally joined his brother at Groot Vader’s Bosch in 1819. He was clearly taken with his new home among the mountains.

In front of the old, thatched, Dutch-style house, beyond a trim garden shaded by some towering trees, several fields of lush, green pasture-land shelved gently down to a small spruit concealed behind a wild tangle of briers, shrubbery and trees. Upstream the country grew increasingly hilly until, through a narrow cleft, the jagged blue outline of the Langeberg suddenly soared in to view.

Standing there, the day before my own birthday, I could easily see why the countryside had appealed to a man of John’s romantic sensibilities:

“As may be supposed, amid scenes of such novelty and attraction to a young mind, many weeks elapsed before I felt much disposed to apply myself to any serious occupation. My brother, whose zest for the amusements of the country was renewed from sympathy, and not a little from the pleasure of showing his own proficiency in the language and manners of the colony, cordially entered in to my feelings, and scarcely a day passed that we did not ride out on some shooting excursion among the hills...”

They also paid courtesy calls on some of their Dutch neighbours, including one old Afrikaner towards whom John adapts a teasing, ironic tone:

“Among the neighbours who we visited in the course of our rides in the vicinity of Groot Vader’s Bosch was an old man of the name of Botha. His house stood in a plain surrounded on all sides by high hills; and in front, towards the mountains, a scene met the eye which for wild and savage magnificence could hardly be exceeded in nature…Never was a man less live to the enjoyment of such scenery than Martinus Botha; nor could he conceive what pleasure we experienced in our contemplation. All that he knew or cared for was, that he had a constant run of water for his mill; but whether it came from a romantic chasm, or from a muddy lake, was to him a matter of the greatest indifference.”

” *A scene met they eye which for wild and savage magnificence could hardly be exceeded in nature…*” *View from Groot Vader’s Bosch, looking in opposite direction to Swellendam*.

Always on the look out for new opportunities, Benjamin and his two brothers would later trek up to the Eastern Frontier. Sir Rufane Donkin, who was Acting-Governor of the Cape in the absence of Lord Charles Somerset, had granted them land in the ceded territory between the Beka and Fish rivers, as well as a stake in the proposed new settlement of Fredericksburg which was to be situated just north of the present day Peddie.

When Somerset returned he took umbrage to these plans which had been made without his blessing and conflicted with his own ideas for the region. He immediately scuppered them.

By way of compensation the Moodie brothers were granted three farms in the Zuurveld, just south of the Bushmen’s River, namely: Long Hope (Benjamin), Kaba and Groot Vlei (John and Donald).

Kaba, the southernmost-property, is situated in a long, cigar-shaped valley which runs diagonally down to the sea. Standing on the apron of land between two hills, the turf as thick and spongy as a tended lawn, the two brothers could not believe their luck at having stumbled on this happy patch of ground. They were quick to appreciate its agricultural worth:

“I have never met with any soil bearing such indisputable tokens of fertility as that of the Kaba, as this alluvial valley is called…” John enthused, “The level bottom was everywhere covered with rich vegetable mould, from one to three feet thick, containing land and sea shells in considerable quantities…Highly delighted with the appearance of this rich but lonely spot, we returned through the wood the same way we came, guiding ourselves by the tracks of our horses.”

Groot Vlei, their other property, lies just to the north of this valley. Running parallel to the coastline between a sheltering ridge of hills on the one side and the large, active, Alexandria dune field on the seaward side, it consists of a series of wave-cut platforms which form a staircase-like feature down to the sea. As the sea-level has dropped relative to the land so the water table has dropped with it, leaving the whole valley dry except during rain.

Because of this problem John and Donald elected to build their home at Kaba which they nostalgically renamed Hoy after the island in the Orkney’s they had come from (it has since reverted to its original name) where there was a more plentiful supply of running water.

For a while the two brothers farmed together but then Donald began to spend more and more time away. The reason for his continued absences soon became apparent. While on a trip inland he had met and fallen in love with Eliza Sophia Pigot, daughter of one of the principal 1820 settlers. The two were married in 1824.

Thereafter Donald gave up farming, making use of his new family connections to secure the position of magistrate and Government Resident at the mouth of the Cowie river. In 1842 he and his family moved to Natal where he entered a career in politics eventually rising to the position of Colonial Secretary under Martin West, Natal’s first Lieutenant-Governor.

With Donald gone, John soldiered on alone first at Kaba and then Groot Vlei, to which he moved because he considered it a healthier spot.

Here he lived what he described as “a kind of Robinson Crusoe-life”. Separated by many miles from his nearest English-speaking neighbours, his farming operations limited by a lack of capital and the distance from the markets, the loneliness eventually got to him. Hungering for companionship he decided to return to England to look for a wife.

In England he met and married Susanna Strickland, one of six daughters in a close-knit, genteel, literary, if not very well-off Suffolk family who could have stepped out of the pages of a Jane Austen novel. With no career prospects in England, John was keen to return to Africa but his new bride had been put off by all his tales of lions, elephants and snakes and so the two eventually opted to settle in Canada, a place where the ever-optimistic John hoped “my exertions will meet with greater success”.

The reality was altogether different.

The most ‘English’ land had already been taken and so they were forced to head further north. The Canada they encountered here, in 1832, was a land of vast, gloomy, almost impenetrable forests broken up by swamps, rocky outcrops and clearings created by forest fires. In its own way it was every bit as wild and lonely as the African bush he had left behind.

The winters were bitterly cold and often the only sound they could hear in the icy dead of night was the howling of wolves. From the start their life was one long, exhausting struggle to survive in a harsh, unforgiving climate.

Susanna’s background, in particular, had hardly prepared her for such a life. She was painfully aware of her own inexperience, she made countless mistakes. Watching her trying to make the best of it, there must have been times when John longingly recalled the magnificent scenery and more agreeable climate of Groot Vader’s Bosch.

Eventually, like other rainbow-chasers before them, the Moodies would abandon the farming life and return to the comparative comforts of the streets.

Susanna Moodie would go on to become a Canadian literary icon. Her book Roughing it in the Bush, which described her experiences in the bleak north, is considered a classic. She and her sister, Catherine, are also the subject of author Charlotte Grey’s double biography Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail which won the 2000 Libris award and became a national best-seller.

Among Susanna Moodie’s other admirers is Margaret Atwood, the author of a Handmaid’s Tale, who contributed an introduction to the 1986 edition of the book. Placing her with three other women writers, who were the first to produce much of anything resembling literature in Upper Canada, Attwood shrewedly observes that:“If Catherine Par Traill with her imperturbable practicality is what we would like to think we would be under the circumstances, Susanna Moodie is what we secretly suspect we would have been instead.”

Atwood also published a book of poetry, in 1970, titled The Journals of Susanna Moodie in which she adopted the voice of Moodie and attempted to imagine and convey Moodie’s feelings about life in the Canada of her era. It is regarded by many as her most fully realised volume of poetry and one of the great Canadian and feminist epics.

Back in the present, I decided I would pay my own little homage to John and his kin by immersing myself in the water – stained to the colour of a dark, red wine by all the fynbos it had passed through – of the same spruit he had described so lovingly in his book. It was icy cold. One dip and I felt my skin goosepimpling riotously.

*Me – trying to purify my soul. Picture courtesy of Craig Scott*.

I didn’t mind. There was something quite magical about the experience. I felt like I was being baptised in some sort of purifying, healing, sacred pool.

Standing there, shivering, in that hallowed spot, under the lowering majesty of the Langeberg range I felt a special linking of the spirits – that of the land, John Wedderburn’s and mine….

GALLERY:

Some more scenes from Groot Vader’s Bosch:

The Chicken Whisperer calls up the hens of GVB. Pic by Nicky Rosselli.

Below are some pics of us celebrating my birthday, as well as the 200th anniversary of the arrival of John Wedderburn Moodie in South Africa. The party was held at Honeywood Farm which adjoins Groot Vader’s Bosch and also belongs to the Moodies. While I was there I managed to spot some unusual birds as well (the theme of the celebration was Birds of a Feather):

Thinking about the road less travelled. Pic by Craig Scott.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Burrows, Edmund H – Overberg Outspan.

Burrows, Edmund H – The Moodies of Melsetter.

Miller, Maskew – Dark Bright Land.

Moodie, John Wedderburn – Ten Years in South Africa.

Looking for Connections at Groot Vader’s Bosch

September 21, 2019 / stidyatkusane / 7 Comments

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 9^th 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.

The ancestral seat of the Moodies at Melsetter, Isle of Hoy, Orkney Islands. Picture courtesy of Penny Bernard.

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.

Captain Benjamin Moodie, 9th Laird of Melsetter, Orkney Islands.

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.

The Langeberg at Groot Vader’s Bosch. The indigenous forest is in the valley below.

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.

The stream which caught JW Moodie’s fancy…

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 18^th 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.

Stidy's Eye

The artwork and writings of award-winning cartoonist, Anthony Stidolph

Benjamin Moodie

Travels Back: Trekking with the Moodies

Sleuthing the Backwaters of the Great Fish River

Roughing it in the Bush in South Africa and Canada

Looking for Connections at Groot Vader’s Bosch