Father of Bethelsdorp
Mike Oettle
PICTURE for yourself the countryside around Algoa Bay 190 years
ago, in 1801 when Dr Johannes van der Kemp, James Read and their 80 Khoikhoi (Hottentot)[1] followers arrived to settle here. The Khoikhoi hordes which had once roamed the veld with their cattle (the Gamtoos, Damasqua, Gonaqua and Hoengeyqua) had been broken up, and Boer farmers had taken their place, at least to the west of the Sundays River. Few, if any, bands of Bushmen[2] (also called Strandlopers)[3]
were still to be found, but perhaps one or two eked out an existence in the
dunefields of Algoa Bay and St Francis Bay – the rest had been hunted down or
chased to the north. The beacon which Ensign Beutler had erected at the mouth
of the Kabega[4] River some four
decades before still stood; the Boers named the river after it: Baakens. Above
the Baakens River lagoon stood Fort Frederick, erected just two years before
following an unsuccessful French landing in aid of the Graaff-Reinet rebels.
Van der Kemp and his
followers had permission to settle on an abandoned farm, Bothas Plaats, on the
way to Kragga Kamma[5] some 20km from Fort Frederick. They stayed for about a year until the Third Frontier War erupted and a Xhosa and Khoikhoi war party descended on them. Van der Kemp’s Khoikhoi fired just two shots at the raiders, and by chance mortally wounded their leader. But after that Van der Kemp moved them to Fort Frederick, recently abandoned by the British Army because the war with France was easing and the Cape was to be handed back to the Dutch.
After Bothas Plaats had been
burned by colonists, the party stayed at the fort until the visit in 1803 of
the Batavian Republic’s[6] governor, General Jan Willem Janssens, who gave Van der Kemp permission to settle at a new site which they agreed to call Bethelsdorp (from the Hebrew Beth-El [House of God], the site of Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28).[7]
The colonists derided
Bethelsdorp as a refuge for thieves and vagrants, and travellers confirmed that
it was “a disorderly conglomeration of tumbledown huts” where “the
missionaries were too busy teaching religious truths to pay attention to
temporal matters”.
From 1805 to the end of ’07 Van der Kemp was joined by missionary enthusiast
Machtelt Schmidt, who taught the children handicrafts at Bethelsdorp’s school.
But Van der Kemp quarrelled with her because she was a slave owner, and she
returned to her home in Cape Town, leaving Bethelsdorp with nobody who would
encourage industry.[8]
Mrs Schmidt ran Bethelsdorp
during Van der Kemp’s absence, as he had been summoned to Cape Town by the
Batavian authorities in April 1805. Here he worked among the slave community
until the British recaptured the Cape in January 1806. He purchased the
freedom of several slaves, and in July ’06 he married Sara, 17-year-old
daughter of a Malagasy slave woman. She was not a Christian at the time, but
was baptised three years later. Of their four children the eldest, Cornelius,
was educated in England and worked for the London Missionary Society at
Bethelsdorp until his death in 1859.
Back in Bethelsdorp, Van der
Kemp and Read gathered evidence from Khoikhoi who reported farmers for
exacting forced labour, for cruelty and even for murder. The Cape Colony’s
first circuit court, known as the Black Circuit, examined a large number of
these claims in 1812-13 but, most likely because of a lack of sworn evidence,[9]
made no convictions for murder and only seven for ill-treatment.
While in Cape Town to give
evidence to the hearings that led to the Black Circuit, Van der Kemp admitted
that his approach at Bethelsdorp had been wrong. But before he could return
to Algoa Bay and make amends, he took ill and died at Machtelt Schmidt’s house
on 15 December 1811.
Mistaken and misguided he
clearly was, but Bethelsdorp stands to this day, long since incorporated into
the city of Port Elizabeth. The Van der Kemp Memorial Congregational Church,
which he founded, recalls his name, and the various books, letters and pamphlets
he wrote on a variety of subjects – on theological, philosophical and
philological as well as practical topics – record the wide range of his
intellect.
And at last, in the
21st century, his insistence on the equality of Khoikhoi (today we would
say coloured)[10] and white
people is being recognised.
[1] The word Hottentot was, until late in the
20th century, normally used to indicate the Khoikhoi people who (together with the Bushmen) were the
indigenous people of the Cape coastal regions west of the Fish River and of the
Orange River areas of the Cape Colony (now Northern Cape) and South West Africa
(Namibia).
It is derived from the lyric of a religious
dance performed by the Khoikhoi. Seventeenth-century Dutch colonists were in
the habit of plying Khoikhoi individuals with drink to induce them to perform
the dance. The meaning of the expression “hot-ten-tot” is now lost.
The term Khoikhoi (meaning “men of men”) was
the name used by the Khoikhoi to refer to themselves.
[2] The term San is often used nowadays to
describe the Bushmen. However, the word was used by the Khoikhoi to refer
disparagingly to the Bushmen as being “almost animals”. The surviving Bushmen
bands (who speak a variety of related languages and use different names for
themselves) now refer to their ethnic group as Bushmen, because the live in
and of the bush.
[3] The Strandlopers of Table Bay in Jan van
Riebeeck’s time, led by Autshumato (or Harry), were not authentic Bushmen, but
rather outcasts from the Peninsular Khoikhoi bands. The term Strandloper has,
however, been applied to those Bushman bands that lived close to the sea and
made extensive use of marine resources, and whose cultural remains have been
recovered in dunefields and caves.
[4] The Khoikhoi pronunciation of this river’s
name was in all likelihood closer to the present-day Xhosa form – Gqeberha,
with a hard click made against the front palate – than the watered-down Dutch
form Kabega.
Nowadays the name (in the form Kabega) is used only in the western suburbs of Port Elizabeth for the river. The Xhosa name is used for the former Walmer Township or location (in the form eGqeberha, or often incorrectly as eGqebera).
[5] Kragga Kamma, which means “sweet water”, is
the name given by the Khoikhoi to a group of springs, as well as the streams
leading from them to a nearby lake, and to the lake itself, some 20km west of
Port Elizabeth.
The name is used, in confused fashion, for the
housing developments on either side of the Kragga Kamma Road (which still
follows the route of the wagon road along which Bothas Plaats lay).
The lake is nowadays most often called Lake
Farm (from the name of a nearby property), and was for some years almost dried
out, thanks to the depredations of a company engaged in cutting turf for
suburban lawns.
In the 18th century, the name most often found on maps for the landward areas around Algoa Bay was Kragga Kamma, because it was greatly valued by both Khoikhoi and Boer farmers for watering their cattle.
[6] The name Batavian was used by the revolutionary French in a
revival of names used by the Romans. Lombardy was called the Cisalpine Republic
(recalling Cisalpine Gaul), and Switzerland was called the Helvetic Republic
(recalling the Celtic Helvetii who lived there in Roman times). The land we now
call the Netherlands was not part of the Roman Empire, but its tribesmen were
known in Latin as Batavi.
[7] Van der Kemp credited Janssens with
originating the name Bethelsdorp. It is known, however, that he had preached to
his flock in Graaff-Reinet of his dream of finding a Beth El for them.
[8] Quoted from The Dictionary of South African Biography.
[9] Employers were able by various means to
intimidate or otherwise persuade their employees so as to avoid having to face
them as witnesses in court. Although such action was illegal, it was virtually
impossible to prove.
[10] The question as to whether or not the term
Coloured is acceptable is fraught with difficulty. There is a politically
correct attitude that it is racist and antiquated, but on the other hand a
large proportion of the population group formerly classified as Coloured (or
one of its sub-categories) are proud to be Coloured.
The term originates in a statistical category
used in the Cape Colony to indicate people of colour who spoke a “European
language” – officially Dutch or English, although Afrikaans was counted under
the heading Dutch.
Brown-skinned people who still spoke Khoikhoi
or a Bushman language were not regarded as being “civilised”, consequently a
great many individuals abandoned their mother tongue and instead spoke
Afrikaans or English.
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This article was originally published in Western Light, monthly magazine of All Saints’ Parish, Kabega Park,
Port Elizabeth, in June 1991. Written shortly before the end of the apartheid era, it ended on a hopeful note that equality would be recognised. This is now
the law of the land, enshrined in the Constitution.
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