Lutheran Mission

Having explored the old mine Jimmy took me back down to the village for tea with Linda, who was by way of being the village historian. having been raised in a village, I naturally began to enquire about the people and the history and found another fascination tale. The village of Pniel was set up by three farmers around 1830, when the british Empire was outlawing slavery. The farm labourers were, at that time, all slaves and the farmers began to worry that the slaves, once free, would desert the farms and leave them without labour. Three farmers got together and set aside a piece of ground on which their slaves could build houses with the idea that this would make the slaves more inclined to stay and work on the farms as day labourers. The village was taken over by the Lutherans as a mission station, prospered. The residents built their own houses and their own reservoir and survived apartheid by more or less ignoring it, so, if you pay Pniel a visit, don't expect a shanty town.
Blogs are not the place for detailed history and the history of the old mine, for example, is in the sullatoberdalton.com website. The history of the silver mine itself being in     http://sullatoberdalton.com/?page_id=811&preview=true