Locusts, drought, and devastation in the Graaff-Reinet district
The Cape passed into British hands in September, 1795, yet, by 1797 when Lord McCartney, became governor, there was still scant interest in the hinterland. Their only concern was that the Cape’s meat supply came mainly from Graaff-Reinet and some lesser interior districts. In journals reporting on his journeys to the Eastern Frontier, William Somerville…
Read MoreCaptain Hicks’s ghost still patrols a Middelburg farm
During the Anglo-Boer War, a Captain Hicks was placed in charge of a group of fearfully inefficient “poor whites”. It was said they were only in the war for the money and so inefficient that poor Hicks was at a loss as to what to do with them. The locals jokingly called them DMTs “Delirium…
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