Of all the stories in this book, this is the one I find hardest to tell at a proper distance. You will understand why by the end of it.
Imagine you are a farmer in the Helderberg in 1705. You have worked your land for years. You grow grapes, you raise cattle, you try to sell your produce. But the governor controls who buys what, at what price and from whom. And somehow, it is always his friends who win the contracts.
Before we actually begin, (this is just for the people who love brandy) historical evidence suggests that Olof Bergh was closely associated with the Cape administration and the Van der Stel faction. He served as a senior VOC official, held positions on the Political Council and Council of Justice and remained influential during the period when Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel was accused of abusing his office through farming monopolies and preferential trading arrangements.
That was the reality facing the free burghers of the Cape Colony and two men in particular had had enough.
But before we get to them, let us tell you exactly what kind of man they were dealing with.
In 1706, before the fleet of returning VOC ships sailed for Amsterdam, Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel summoned every male inhabitant of Cape Town to his official residence at the Castle of Good Hope. Not just the settlers. Everyone. Whites, freed slaves, ex-convicts, artisans, labourers, fishermen and farmhands — every man who could walk was required to present himself at the castle courtyard, that handsome space overlooked by Table Mountain, to meet with the governor.
They came, presumably, with a degree of apprehension. This was not a governor known for good news.
Imagine their surprise when, instead of the trouble they had come to expect, they were plied with wine, beer and coffee. Pipes were stoked with the finest tobacco — at the governor’s expense. The courtyard was festive. The governor was generous. The mood lifted. Men who had spent years resenting Willem Adriaan van der Stel found themselves unexpectedly comfortable in his courtyard, a cup in one hand and a pipe in the other, wondering what on earth was happening.
They should have known there is no such thing as a free lunch. Not even in 1706.
Once sufficiently loosened up, the men were presented with a certificate and required to sign it. A clerk read from it, in what witnesses later described as “an extremely indistinct voice” while the governor’s heavies stood nearby encouraging everyone to put pen to paper. The document they were signing, had they been able to properly hear it, described the governor as a person of all honour and virtue, modest, zealous for the public welfare, affable towards everyone and of a very kind and gentle nature. It went on in this vein for some considerable time. A man who had stolen company resources, rigged every market in the colony, thrown opponents into dungeons and run the Cape as his personal estate was having himself described, in a legal document, as everything he was not.
The men signed. Most had no idea what they were signing. The clerk had made quite sure of that.
The certificate was duly loaded onto the fleet and sent to Amsterdam — Willem Adriaan’s insurance policy, his character reference from the people he governed, ready to be produced if the VOC ever came asking questions.
It did not work. And here is why.
Adam Tas was a farmer from Stellenbosch — sharp, educated and quietly furious. His diary, which he kept daily from June 1705, is one of the earliest firsthand accounts of life in this part of the world and it reads like a man struggling to keep his temper on the page. His uncle by marriage, Henning Hüsing, was one of the wealthiest independent farmers in the colony. Together, they decided to do something almost unthinkably bold.
They wrote a petition.
It accused Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel of corruption, nepotism, abuse of trading monopolies and generally behaving as though the entire colony was his personal property. They passed it around quietly, carefully, farmer to farmer. Eventually 63 men signed it — out of 550 free burghers in the whole colony. It wasn’t a majority, but it was enough.
The trick was getting it to Amsterdam without the governor finding out.
They handed the petition to a ship’s doctor named Abraham Bogaert, who was sailing home to the Netherlands via the Cape. He tucked it aboard and sailed away. The petition was addressed directly to the VOC headquarters — over the governor’s head, around his spies, past his reach.
Almost.
Van der Stel found out. On 28 February 1706, Adam Tas was arrested, chained and marched to Cape Town. The governor had Tas’s diary seized and sections of it copied out to use as evidence against him. Tas was tried, convicted and thrown into the Black Hole (“Die donker gat”) — a lightless, damp dungeon deep inside the Castle of Good Hope. The very same castle where, just weeks earlier, the wine had flowed freely and the tobacco had been distributed at the governor’s expense.
The petition reached Amsterdam and was rejected. It seemed like it was over.
But then, a twist.
Thirty-one of the men who had signed the petition were French Huguenots. And at that particular moment, the Netherlands was at war with France. Suddenly the VOC directors in Amsterdam were nervous. What if these disgruntled Huguenot farmers switched sides? What if they fed information to the French?
It was politics, not justice, that finally moved the needle. The VOC reversed its decision, dismissed Willem Adriaan van der Stel and ordered him back to the Netherlands on 23 April 1707. Adam Tas walked out of his dungeon into the sunlight. His diary survived. The governor boarded a ship and never came back.
The men who had signed that character certificate in the castle courtyard, wine-loosened and tobacco-stoked, never heard another word about it. The document disappeared into an Amsterdam archive. Some things write themselves.
As for Oom Olof Bergh, he had previously been convicted in the 1680s for concealing valuables recovered from a shipwreck and was imprisoned before later returning to favour within the VOC administration.
Between You and Me:
Adam Tas the grandfather continued producing his Oom Tas for a certain style of market and Tassenberg for the Matie students. Uncle Olof is going strong with the brandy production — all three of which you can still find in any local TOPs. Some legacies are more useful than others.
A Personal Note
Adam Tas is not just a name in a history book for me. He turns out to be family, in the most roundabout and unsettling way.
Following my own genealogy, I traced my Naudé ancestry back to Jacob ‘Jacques’ Naudé, a French Huguenot born in Berlin in 1696 who arrived at the Cape in 1718 aboard the VOC ship Abbekerk — one of the last of his people to escape the religious persecution that had driven thousands of Huguenots out of France. He settled in Drakenstein, became a schoolmaster to the children of Huguenot families, married a widow named Susanne Taillefert and became one of the founding ancestors of the Naudé family in South Africa.
Four generations later, his descendant Charlotta Susanna Naudé married a man named Adam Tas — the grandson of the very Adam Tas whose story you have just read.
It did not end well.
In 1804, in Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape, that Adam Tas murdered his wife Charlotta — my relative — and took his own life a few days later.
History has a way of making the world feel very small. The man celebrated in these pages as one of the Cape Colony’s great champions of justice had a grandson who committed one of its most private tragedies. And the Huguenot refugee who arrived at the Cape eighty years before that, looking for a new life, could not have known that his family line and the Tas family line would one day cross — and that I would be sitting here, three centuries later, piecing it together.
The Helderberg has long memories. So, it turns out, does a family tree.
Next week: what happened to the farm that started it all.
Leave a Reply