From the first footprint to the present day — the people, places and moments that made us.
Personal Preface
Why I Am Writing This
I did not set out to write the history of the Helderberg.
I set out to find my family.
What I found, after years of following names and dates and ships’ manifests across three centuries, was something I had not expected: my family and the history of this place are, in many ways, the very same story. The deeper I dug, the more the Helderberg came up. The more I read about the Helderberg, the more my own family appeared in it. Eventually I stopped being surprised and started writing it down.
This is what I remember and found.
My grandmother was a Faure. She was born on the farm Vergenoegd, that beautiful old estate along the Eerste River between Stellenbosch and the Strand, with its Cape Dutch homestead bearing the date 1773 above the door, its views of Table Mountain to the west and the Helderberg mountains to the east. The Faure family farmed that land for six generations — from 1820 until 2015. Nearly two centuries. The land was first granted to a Dutch free burgher named Pieter de Vos in 1696, who named it Vergenoegd, meaning contentment. He apparently felt he had found exactly what he was looking for. Given the view, you can hardly blame him.
Vergenoegd is now a national monument. And the hamlet you drive through on the N2 between Cape Town and Somerset West, that scattering of farms and smallholdings called Faure, carries my family’s name on the map. It has for a very long time.
The Faures came from France. Antoine Alexandre Faure was born in 1685 in Orange, in the south of France, into a Protestant family in a country that was rapidly running out of patience for Protestants. When King Louis XIV signed the Edict of Fontainebleau that same year, he made Protestantism illegal in France. Overnight, 200,000 Huguenots faced a stark choice: convert to Catholicism, rot in prison or run. Antoine’s father Pierre, a merchant, fled to Holland with his family. Antoine eventually made it even further, boarding a VOC ship called the Kockengen on 25 March 1714 and sailing four months south to the Cape of Good Hope, where he took a job as a clerk at the Orphan Chamber in Cape Town, later became schoolmaster and voorleser at the Stellenbosch Dutch Reformed Church and married a woman named Rachel de Villiers — daughter of Abraham de Villiers, one of three Huguenot brothers who had arrived at the Cape in 1689 and planted the vineyards of Franschhoek, including the farm that became Boschendal.
Antoine Faure is the founding father of every Faure in South Africa. He is my ancestor. My grandmother grew up on the farm that bears his family’s name.
My grandmother’s Faure line married into the Naudé family. The Naudés are a story all of their own.
Jacob ‘Jacques’ Naudé was born in 1696 in Berlin, Germany — not a German, but the child of French Huguenot parents who had also been driven out of France. The Naudés had fled from France to Prussia, as thousands of Huguenots did and raised their children there. On 23 January 1718, Jacob Naudé boarded a VOC ship called the Abbekerk in Texel, Holland and arrived at the Cape on 19 May 1718 at the age of twenty-two.
He came with a VOC contract and a testimonial from Hanover. For four years, he was hired out as a schoolmaster to Huguenot farming families in Drakenstein — ten guilders a month plus half a pound of tobacco. His first employer was Pierre Joubert the Elder. That name will appear throughout this book. The Joubert family’s descendants still have their names on streets and farms all across the Helderberg today.
His third posting, from May 1720 to May 1722, was to a widow named Susanne Taillefert, on her farm called Versailles, where he taught her children. He stayed for two years. In May 1722, he married her.
Now here is where it gets interesting.
Susanne Taillefert was the daughter of Isaac Taillefert and Suzanne Briet — refugees from Château-Thierry in the Champagne district of France, who had arrived at the Cape in 1688 aboard the ship Oosterland with their children, when Susanne was just two and a half years old. The Briet family had owned vineyards back home in Monneaux, in the Champagne region. Isaac Taillefert knew grapes. When the VOC granted him a farm at the foot of Paarl Mountain in 1691, he put Champagne knowledge into Cape soil. The farm was called La Brie — after the French district they had left behind. Within seven years they were producing wine. A French traveller named François Leguat visited in 1698 and tasted it. He said it was “the best in the colony, not unlike our little wines of Champagne.” Over time, La Brie became Laborie. It is still there today, still producing wine under that name, still carrying the echo of a refugee family from the Champagne district of France.
Jacob Naudé my ancestor and progenitor of the South African Naudé, married the daughter of the man who founded Laborie.
After their marriage, Jacob applied to be released from the VOC’s employ and became a free burgher. In July 1722 their only child was born — a son, also named Jacob. He was the first Naudé born on South African soil.
And then there is Adam Tas.
You will read about Adam Tas in the very first story of this book. He is one of the most celebrated figures in early Cape Colony history — the farmer who had the courage to stand up to a corrupt governor, who was arrested and thrown into a lightless dungeon (“Die Donker Gat”) and who ultimately helped bring that governor down. His diary, which he kept secretly while the world closed in around him, is one of the earliest firsthand accounts of life in the Western Cape.
My genealogical research revealed that Adam Tas is connected to my family by a thread I would rather had not existed.
His grandson — also named Adam Tas, born around 1779 — married a woman named Charlotta Susanna Naudé. She was the daughter of Phillip Jacob Naudé, a descendant of that same Naudé line. She was my relative.
In 1804, in Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape, Adam Tas the grandson murdered Charlotta Susanna Naudé. A few days later, he took his own life.
I found this in a genealogical record, quietly, the way these things surface — a name, a date, a cause of death and then the slow cold realisation of what you are looking at. The celebrated champion of justice had a grandson who committed an act of terrible private violence against a woman from my family.
History is never as clean as the statues suggest.
My family also worked, at some point, on Vergelegen itself, that grand estate at the heart of this book’s opening stories, built by a corrupt governor with borrowed money and slave labour, carved into four farms in 1709 and today one of the most beautiful wine estates in the country.
The same soil. Different centuries. Different circumstances.
I am not a historian. I am a Helderberger. My roots run into this ground through the Faures, the Naudés, the Tailleferts, the de Villiers, the Jouberts and the Tas family, the Huguenots, the free burghers, the schoolmasters, missionaries and the farmers who built this corner of the Western Cape from scratch.
That is why I wrote this. Not to produce an academic record, but to tell these stories the way they deserve to be told, as human stories, full of ambition and failure and love and shame and extraordinary persistence.
The Helderberg has long memories.
So, it turns out, does a family tree.
Many choose to ignore history, deny it or wish it could be forgotten. However, history is an inseparable part of our identity. It has shaped who we are, influenced what we have become and determined the path that has led us to the present. It cannot be erased without diminishing our understanding of ourselves. To remove history would be like trying to separate a person from their shadow, an impossible task, for both are enduring reflections of what has come before.
