Chapter 44Cape Town — KimberleyKAPSTADT — KIMBERLEY
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
Off Cape Town it grew so hideously stormy that I already believed we were going down. But it is said to be almost always similarly rough there. That is why the Cape was formerly called the “Cape of Storms” — Capo tormentoso.
Herr von Oppel, a German in the English administration, to whom I had been recommended from Berlin, fetched me from the roadstead, brought me to a beautifully situated hotel in the upper town and then took me straight along to his mother. With this kind old lady I found a true home during my stay there. I also painted a great deal at her uniquely beautifully situated villa at the foot of Table Mountain, and took extensive rambles with her son into the magnificent surroundings. Up Table Mountain itself, too, with its wonder-view. What interested me most was my introduction to the South African flora, in which Herr von Oppel was thoroughly versed. The silver-shimmering silk tree stood gleaming in the haze-blue landscape. — Very strange to me was the complete displacement of the seasons. On the whole it is rather cooler than with us. But the grape harvest falls in our spring, in April.
From the Dutch period wonderfully beautiful relics of culture still survive. The finest is surely “Groote Schuur,” the former residence of Cecil Rhodes, in which General Botha1 now lives. I read Rhodes's biography and only here learned to understand, admire and love the founder of Rhodesia. What new interests met me at every step. Wildly romantic, yet almost Riviera-like, are the nature and the shores here, with their many bathing resorts, broken by the wildest rocky crags.
From Cape Town I travelled to Kimberley, the city Rhodes founded, with its diamond washings. Thanks to the recommendation of Consul General von Humboldt I was shown everything most thoroughly. Most interesting of all I found the huge workers' “compounds2,” in which all the many-coloured peoples sleep, live and eat.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑General Botha — Louis Botha (1862–1919), Boer commander in the war against Britain, then first prime minister of the Union of South Africa. Rhodes left Groote Schuur, his Cape Dutch estate below Devil's Peak, as a residence for the premiers of the federated South Africa he foresaw. That his old enemy Botha is living in it quietly dates the visit: the Union was formed on 31 May 1910, and she reached the Cape late in 1911, on the outward leg of the journey she began after the Moon Festival of 3 September.
- ↑compounds — The closed compounds of De Beers: fenced barracks in which African mineworkers were confined for the whole term of their contracts. Introduced in the 1880s, ostensibly against diamond theft, the closed-compound system made the workforce a captive one and became a model for labour control across southern Africa. What she records as a colourful lodging of the “many-coloured peoples” was among the harshest labour institutions of the age — and the tour, arranged through the consul general, was of course the company's own.