The man from Tobruk

During our conversations, Linda showed me a picture of her father, called Davids, in his unifrom as a member of the Cape Corps, a regiment manned by men of mixed race, officereed by white men, which was created in 1915 to fight in German East Africa, Tanzania, in WW1. Davids waas at Tobruk with the South Africans in WW2 but don't look for them in any accounts of that seige, they were lumped in with all the other South Africans. Of course after Apartheid was introduced, he was forbidden from marching in the Remembrance Day parade. Nevertheless, he put on his best suit, pinned on his medals and went to salute the parade. His family asked him why he bothered and he answered - no one is going to stop me honouring the comrades who fought and died with me.

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Grape robbers in court

The two boys who stole the grapes in Pniel, were called to appear before a magistrate. If found guilty, they would have a criminal record; a disaster for a boy of mixed race in early 20th century South Africa. It was summer time, hot and dry and one of the locals, having bought a car, offered to take the old chap who was the accuser to court. If you think it is odd that a man of mixed race should own a car, it is because you don't know the people in Pniel. But to our tale! Despite the case being only scheduled for the afternoon, the old chap was picked up early, so that he would not be late, even if there was trouble with the horseless carriage. As it grew hotter the driver stopped to refresh himself at a hostelry and the old chap, freed from the oversight of the predicant, took his mornings. As the heat grew, the car stopped more often, so that, by the time it reached the court it was lunch time and time for a decent lunch and something to wash it down, then forty winks. The court convened at 2pm but, as the witness for the prosecution was sound asleep in the car, the case was dismissed and the boys set free. That's the kind of village Pniel turned out to be. It could have been Cairndhu or anywhere else in Scotland.

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Grapes of Wrath

While we had tea, Linda told me of village life at Pniel. It's first Lutheran predicant was greatly opposed to Alcohol and made a habit of touring the village in the evening to catch any drinking. If he did, he took a sjambok to the miscreant. In general, that acted as an effective cure and preventative but two old chaps took their drink at lunchtime, slept it off in the afternoon and were bright an breezy by the time the inspection was underway. The old chaps had a vine on a structure beside the house and on the front hung a great bunch of grapes and this became more and more of a temptation for two ladds coming home from school in the heat of the afternoon. Thinking the old chaps were asleep, the lads cut down the grapes and were making off with them when one of the old chaps, who hadn't gone for his usual nap that day caught them and reported it to the police. That meant the boys would have a police record and find it difficult to get work but the village rallied round.

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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

Silver Mine

The old mine tunnels into the mountain at Pniel was into solid rock and two hundred and fifty years was aa solid as the day it had been working. Lady Anne Barnard had recorded that the mine never actually produced any silver but when the shareholders, who included the then Dutch East India governor of the Cape began to get annoyed, the operator, a chap called Muller, melted down a few Rix dollars and presented that as the production to keep them quiet.
Muller's assertion that there was silver in the Simonsberg was greeted with excitement as the Dutch East India Company was finding the gold and silver it owned growing scarce and the suppliers in the Dutch East Indies were not prepared to accept any alternative in the form of promissory notes or commodities.
 Jimmy, my guide, asked if it looked possible for there to have been silver and I told him there were many signs of quartz and that could mean there was precious metal in the area.
The old shaft was barricaded off but I could still see down it and there was a wooden ladder of uncertain age hanging there, which Jimmy said I could climb down to the lower level. I had only a hand torch and having tried tricks like that with a proper mining lamp and new chain ladders  and found they didn't reach far enough and I had to climb all the way back up, I declined.
The pictures show the tunnel, one of the crannies where the workers had placed a candle, the shaft and a bit of a dyke that didn't even look worth sampling.

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The Face of God

The Silver Mine I was looking for turned out to be above a village called Pniel, an old village set up by freed slaves in the early 1830's; Pniel translates to 'The Face of God'. I was lucky enough to find a lady called Linda who agreed to arrange for a guide to take me to the old mine.The old plan showed two level tunnels and a vertical shaft but from the village there was nothing to be seen, largely because the mine was in the Simonsberg that seems to hang over the village. My guide turned out to be Jimmy, who had worked in Falkirk and Canada and knew the site well. We climbed up the steep side of the mountain through a wonderful selection of Cape Fine Bos to the entrance to what seemed to be the main access level, where I could look out over the Dwars River Valley. Dwars is the Afrikaans for dry but this was winter and there was snow in the top of the far hills. The view made it a fine picnic spot used often by the villagers from Pniel.

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Lady Ann Barnard

While I was involved in the wine farms around Franschhoek and Stellenbosch I had been trying to find soe information about the silver mine mentioned by Lady Ann Barnard in her memoirs. Lady Ann was the wife of the first secretary to the British Consul to the Cape Colony and made a tour of the area, which is a compulsory reading for anyone interested in the area and its history. She mentioned a silver mine but not its precise location and it was only when looking through a history of Stellenbosch that I found a plan of the old mine and got sucked into a whirlpool of history.  I had thought the nature reserve at Silvermine had something to do with it but, no, this was something else - the first of the many mining scams to be generated in South Africa.
As the picture shows, we are going into the dark on a mountainside through a tunnel dug in 1740 five years before Bonny Prince Charlie landed in Scotland.

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