General Chat

When as a child I first went with my family to live in the little Bordertown of Stutterheim not much more than fifty years had passed since thatpart of the country lay in the Crown Colony of British Kaffraria.This land of rolling green hills beneath the end peak of the Amatola Mountains is the home of the Xhosa, the trader, the missionary and the descendants of the soldier-settler. When we first went to live there the Border was not unlike what it must havebeen a century before when it was still part of Kaffirland. The smoothgrassy hills of the countryside, dotted with huts and red-blanketed Xhosa women tilling the mealie lands, had not changed since those days. From thelittle mission station nestling under the oaks at the edge of the town thevoices of the mission Xhosas echoed over the hills when they sang onSundays, just as the voices of their ancestors had done before there wereany white settlers there.Life in the Border was simple and carefree. Children amused themselves bathing in the willow-festooned mountain streams and boys went eeling in the lower reaches of the Kubusie River after heavy rains. Sometimes we gathered mushrooms on the surrounding hills. There were picnics by oxwagon to the Amatola forests.Here the 'Christmas bees' sang with ear-splitting insistence and the soundof water perpetually flowing was like background music to the sounds of theforest - the call of a loerie or a piet-my-vrou, the chattering of theforest monkeys in the tops of the tall knob-wood trees, or the distantbarking of a baboon from above the waterfalls. In his diary the German founder of Bethel Mission Station, Pastor DOHNEdescribed Kaffirland as he knew it between the Sixth and Seventh FrontierWars. "Many flowers which in Germany are cultivated grow wild here", he wrote.

Perhaps Pastor DOHNE once gasped with pleasure, as we did, at thesight of a hillside painted pink with wild watsonias.On a rise between Bethel Mission and the town were the remains of an old building. The ruins lay below the town tennis courts and as children we amused ourselves walking along the old foundations whilst our parents played tennis. We did not know then that these low walls were the remains of Dohne Post, the fort near which Stutterheim had its origins. Dohne Post was built after the Seventh Frontier War when Kaffirland was finally annexed by Britain as British Kaffraria. The fort was manned by a British garrison until the time of the cattle-killing and national suicide of the Xhosa nation, after which it was occupied by the German Legion from whose commander the town of Stutterheim took its name.The Xhosa people of Bethel Mission lived with their families near the mission church. Their homes were traditional thatched huts with a wood fireburning in the centre of the floor. Most of them earned their livings in the town. Amongst their oldest relatives at that time would have been survivorsof the cattle-killing episode of less than seventy years before. As children we were not aware of any difference there may have been between the British and German inhabitants of the town. English and Xhosa were the only languages we heard spoken. The local Convent school was run by a German community through the medium of English, while the principal of the 'Public School' was a graduate of Cambridge University. Brothers who attended the school were differentiated in English fashion by the suffixes 'Max', 'Major' or 'Minor', whether their names were SMITH or STEINHOFEL. Now the national road, the railway and the sawmill have changed the face of that part of the Border. The early-morning creaking of farm wagons on their way to the market square and the shrill noises that once issued from the wagon-works at the edge of the town are sounds that are no longer heard there.

Reference:1. Pastor Dohne's diary.2. "Bethel Mission celebrates its 125th anniversary", by Mrs Eve Jillings,Stutterheim(Daily Dispatch, February 1962) Source:Looking Back - June 1982

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