It is the year 1700. The Cape Colony is barely fifty years old and the man in charge has just spotted the most beautiful piece of land he has ever seen.
His name was Willem Adriaan van der Stel and he was the Governor of the Cape Colony — a position of enormous power in a place that was still being invented. His father, Simon, had run the colony before him and had quietly helped himself to a grand estate at Constantia. Young Willem had clearly been paying attention.
In January 1700, Willem Adriaan rode his horse out into the foothills of the Hottentots Holland mountains — the same mountains you look at every day from your stoep — and claimed for himself a piece of land so vast it beggars belief. Thirty thousand hectares. Thirty thousand hectares. For those who prefer their measurements in something tangible, one hectare is roughly the size of a rugby field. That is not a farm. That is a small country.
He named it Vergelegen, which in Dutch means “situated far away.” And it was. To reach it from Cape Town you travelled three days by ox-wagon. That kind of distance gave a man a lot of privacy.
What happened next was extraordinary. Using VOC company money, company slaves and company resources — none of which belonged to him personally, Willem Adriaan transformed that wild hillside into something that looked more like a European estate than a colonial outpost. He planted half a million vine stocks. He laid out orange groves and fruit orchards. He built eighteen cattle stations stocked with a thousand cattle and 1,800 sheep. He dug irrigation canals and reservoirs. He built a corn mill, a beautiful Cape Dutch homestead and gardens so elaborate that people who visited described them as if they were describing a dream.
There was just one problem. None of it was his to build with.
The free burghers — the ordinary farmers scratching a living from their small plots nearby, watched all of this with growing fury. By 1705, a full third of all farms (258 farms in total in the Dutch Cape Colony) in the colony belonged to just twenty VOC officials. The governor and his friends had stitched up the market for wine and meat so tightly that independent farmers could barely sell a thing. If you weren’t one of Willem Adriaan’s favourites, you were nobody.
The man was, in the words of those who eventually brought him down, “a very impious, tyrannical and rapacious leader.”
Something was going to have to give.
Between you and me
Adriaan must have been one hell of a rugby fan imagine 30 000 rugby fields next to each other or he was planning to plant a lot of Tulips.
Next week: the men who decided enough was enough and the dangerous letter that changed everything.
