Episode 47 – Tales of the Hantam including the bandit van Zijl family and the indefatigable trekboer Elsie Visagie

This is episode 47 and we are concentrating on a mysterious and contradicted part of southern Africa, the Hantam.

We’re also going to meet a German sailor who’d deserted and ran away to the Orange River in the 1780s by the name of Jan Bloem. He worked as an overseer, a Knecht, at Sandfontein farm owned by Petrus Pienaar. Groups of white hunters were also now resident in the area to the south of the Orange by this stage and we’ve already heard about how the Kora, the Griqua and the Oorlams had begun moving into areas dominated by the Great Namaqua.
Now we’re going to drill down into examples of how lives intersected particularly about the important trekboer Adriaan van Jijl of the Hantam. This district derived its name from the solitary mountain at the northwestern edge of the Onder Roggeveld. To the south west lay the Bokkeveld Mountains, to the north west Namaqualand. And between Hantam Mountain and the Orange River which lay due north were miles of Bushmanland. Today’s modern town of Calvinia is just south of Hantams Piek.By 1790 the complaints of white inhabitants in the Bokkeveld became a chorus – alarmingly groups of Khoekhoe were trekking to and from the Orange River with herds and flocks of livestock in search of good grazing. The trekboers in these areas watched with misgiving and it must have been nerve wracking watch these large groups of people appear on the land with their even larger herds.
We'll also hear about Elsie Visagie had trekked from the Orange River to Cape Town with a few Khoe servants as companions in 1791 – it’s almost 900 kilometres - but the folks were tough back in the day. She had some cattle and two wagon loads of products. When Elsie Visagie was ordered to Stellenbosch to give evidence in connection with raids her husband had apparently carried out, she ended up under house arrest.