Huguenots and the South African Cape

With the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, French Protestants were stripped of any protect-ion they may have had in Louis XIV’s France. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the exiles' large communities in England, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland, but then people started talking about the small Hug­ue­n­ot diaspora in South Africa. I searched the other blogs and found a little eg The du Preez Family blog in Huguenot Exodus (1688 & 1689)

Cape of Good Hope and the Western Cape region

In fact the Dutch East India Co./VOC, under Jan van Riebeeck, had already made a permanent Calvin­ist settlement on the Cape of Good Hope. He arrived with five ships in Cape Town bay in 1652. Cape Town’s settlement was a predominantly as an interim port for VOC ships, en route from Europe to Asia. In order to fully stock Cape Town’s port, the VOC admitted good Protestant citizens who could settle as farmers and provide the food and drinks. As early as 1671 the first Huguenot refugee, Francois Villion/Viljoen, arrived at the Cape.

Clearly the Dutch East India Co. encouraged the Huguenots to emigrate to the Cape because they shared Calvinist beliefs. But they also recognised that most of the Huguenots were exper­ien­ced farmers from parts of France that specialised in wine growing. After their arrival at the Cape, the immigrants were expected to make a living from agric­ulture, business or by practicing a trade. If they decided to farm, they were allotted farm land without cost. As soon as a few families settled, they laid the first stone of the Cape’s Dutch Reformed chur­ch 1678, built and later renovated in the typical Cape Dutch style.

An agent was sent out from the Cape Colony in 1685 to attract more settlers and new immigrants began to arrive eg in 1686 the brothers Guill­aume and Francois du Toit reached South Africa. Timing was everything! With the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, many a French Protestant was looking around for a home. By 1688-9 the 201 Hug­uenot families who arrived were just large enough to leave an impression on the young settlement at the Cape, only 70 km outside Cape Town.

Franschhoek Valley, site of Huguenot vineyards

In 1688, French Huguenot refugees were given land by the Dutch government in a valley called Olifantshoek/Elephant's Corner. The name of the area soon changed to Le Quartier Francais and then to Fransch­hoek Valley. That year a group of c200 French Huguenots arrived from La Motte d'Aigues in Provence and other areas. As described by fellow blogger A Post-Modern Protestant in Paris in his post South African Wine a French Protestant Heritage, they specialised in vineyards.

When the de Villiers brothers arrived at the Cape with a reputation for viticulture, and in time, the brothers planted many thousands of vines at the Cape. They moved from the original farm that they had been granted, La Rochelle, to finally settle on individual land grants near Fransch­hoek in places they named Bourgogne, Champagne and La Brie. Lucky were the passing ships that stopped in Cape Town.

Huguenot Monument in Franschoek, 1945

Individual arrivals contin­ued on and off until the end of Company-supported emig­rat­ion in 1707. Undoubtedly these French Huguenot exiles created fertile valleys out of the tough land they had been given in the Cape. But the white pop­ulation in the Cape was small, so they soon married their children and grandchildren into the fam­ilies of other colon­ists. And it didn’t help that the Dutch East India Co. insisted that schools taught exclusively in Dutch. By the mid C18th the Huguenots ceased to maint­ain a distinct ident­ity. Within two generations even their home language largely disappeared.

What is left now? Some important surnames, today mostly Afrik­aans speaking, remain in families who had French-speaking great great grandparents eg Cronje/Cronier, de Klerk/Le Clercq, de Villiers, Terre-blanche and Viljoen/Villion. Plus a number of wine farms in the Western Cape still have French names, as do their products.

La Motte winery, named for the settlers' French home.

Then there is a large monu­ment, Huguenot Monument in Franschoek 1945, commemorating the arr­iv­al of the Huguenots in South Africa, that wasn’t inaug­urated by Dr AJ van der Merwe until 1948. The cen­tral fe­m­ale figure stood for religious free­dom, denied the Huguenots in their beloved France but offered by Dutch South Africa. A useful analysis of the Huguenot Monument can be found in the Franschhoek blog. Finally the Memorial Museum of Franschhoek next to the monument celebrates the his­tory of the French Huguenots who settled in the Cape.

Ochberg's Orphans, 1921. Dedication ceremony, 2011.

In 2005, The Jerusalem Post ran an appeal for information about South African philanthropist Isaac Ochberg. He was the man who helped to finance, and centrally participated in the rescue of Jewish children in 1921 from the Pale of Settlement (Ukraine in particular) and their resettlement in South Africa. A film called The Ochberg Orphans was the result, directed by Jon Blair in 2008.

You might know of heroic figures during WW2 eg Irena Sendler, Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, Varian Fry and Nicholas Winton but 1921 seems very early for heroic gestures. Many thanks to my South African friends for bringing this story to my attention.

Group passport photo

In the early 1920s, reports trickled through to South Africa of tragic forces occurring in the Ukraine. Following the collapse of the old Czarist Empire in 1917, rival Red and White armies were fighting for control. Although the battles did not start out as particularly anti-Semitic, the Jews' condition deteriorated. Famine was followed by typhoid epidemics for the entire population, but it was made worse for the Jews by pogroms. Ukrainian and Polish peasants joined forces with reactionary military forces to massacre Jews wherever they found them inside the Pale of Settlement.

In despairing letters smuggled through enemy lines, Jews begged their cousins in South Africa for help. These pleas immediately stirred South Africa's Jewish communities. People asked at meetings across the country if at least the children could be rescued from the Ukraine. Before any organisation could step in, generous offers of financial and other assistance were made by Russian-born Cape Town businessman Isaac Ochberg.

Two questions became critical: How could the orphans be rescued from a war-torn region, and would the South African government create any difficulties in admitting them? Ochberg quickly met Jan Smuts, prime minister between 1919–1924, who gave the children entry visas. Smuts could have sunk the rescue plan in an instant, had he chosen to. His support was essential and warmly welcomed.

As reports of the Jews' plight continued to arrive in South Africa, the size of the tragedy became clearer. 100,000-150,000 Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered by Ukrainian nationalists and another 400,000 Jewish orphans were starving. The next step was for someone to travel to Eastern Europe and make arrangements on the spot. Ochberg agreed to go. For two months Ochberg travelled by train, wagon and on horseback around the Pale, looking for orphaned children. The Ukrainian children knew only that "The Man From Africa" was coming and he was going to take some of them away to a new home, on the other side of the world.

Ochberg's worst problem was how to select which children to take and which he had to leave in Eastern Europe. So he decided to choose eight children from each institution, until he reached a total of exactly 200. Since the South African government required that the children had to be in good physical and mental health, careful selection was essential. In addition, only those who had lost BOTH parents were accepted.

In Pinsk alone, so many children had been orphaned that 3 new orphanages had to be opened. At first, Pinsk was so isolated by the fighting that the children were dependent solely on their own resources. There were no blankets, beds or clothes. Typhus broke out in one of the orphanages and the pogroms raged for a week at a time. As order was restored, food supplies began to trickle in, first from Berlin and then from the Joint Distribution Committee.

Isaac Ochberg 1879–1938

Ochberg moved from town to town, visiting Minsk, Pinsk, Stanislav, Lodz, Lemberg and Wlodowa, collecting orphans. How did he get the children out - on wagons?

Three months later, with the 200 children in London, he wrote to the leadership in South Africa: "I have been through almost every village in the Polish Ukraine and Galicia and am now well acquainted with the places where there is at present extreme suffering. I have succeeded in collecting the necessary number of children, and I can safely say that the generosity displayed by South African Jewry in making this mission possible means nothing less than saving their lives. They would surely have died of starvation, disease, or been lost to our nation for other reasons. I am now in London with the object of arranging transport and I hope to be able to advise soon of my departure for South Africa with the children."

A tremendous reception awaited the orphans when they came ashore in Cape Town. So large was the group of children that the Cape Jewish Orphanage was unable to house them all, so 78 went on to Johannesburg.

Ochberg died in 1937 while on an ocean voyage, 59 years old. He was buried in Cape Town at one of the largest funerals ever seen there. Ochberg left what was then the largest single bequest to the Jewish National Fund. The JNF used it to redeem a piece of land in Israel called Nahalat Yitzhak Ochberg - which included the kibbutzim of Dalia and Ein Hashofet.

An Ochberg dedication ceremony will take place at Kibbutz Dalia on 19th of July this year, 90 years after the rescue project. For the thousands of descendants of his orphans, he is the reason they are alive. The original orphans'  children and grandchildren will honour Ochberg’s memory by the establishment of a JNF Memorial Park and museum that will bear his name. As the Blair film suggested, Ochberg's legacy is a reminder that a small group of people can, through their actions, make a big difference.

Ochberg orphans disembarking in Cape Town, 1921

The names of the orphans have been published in Tracing the Tribe: The Jewish Genealogy Blog. It is recognised that the list is not yet complete and that the spellings may be imperfect. 

Rudyard Kipling and Australia, 1891

In 1891 Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) left Britain on what he called a small excursion to the other end of the world because he didn't know how to handle his lady friend Caroline Balestier. Like many men in a romantic tangle, he got himself out of town! But Kipling went further - he travelled to Australia and New Zealand, via the SS Mexican to South Africa and then the SS Doric to Australia!

When his father told the story of Rudyard's sudden travels,  papa's version didn't mention any woman. John Lockwood Kipling only recalled that young Rudyard had exhausted himself by his prodigious literary output in 1890 and 1891, so the young man set off on a sea voyage round the world to recover his nerves.

Kipling spent only a few weeks in Australia - 2 days in Sydney, one day in Hobart and the rest of the time in Melbourne. Although only in his mid 20s, he was already famous by the time of his visit, so he was introduced to various dignitaries, was interviewed by several journalists, and was quoted extensively in the press. 

How did it fit all the travelling in? We know that during his fortnight in Melbourne, Kipling travelled along what is now the Great Ocean Road and wrote a short poem mentioning both Lorne and the Erskine Falls. And he must have also visited Apollo Bay which he called Paradise. [Kipling was effusive in his praise of places he liked. During his New Zealand stay, he decided Milford Sound was the Eighth Wonder of the World].

Kennedy & Pinney, Kipling down under : Rudyard Kipling's visit to Australia: 1891.

Note that the portrait on the front cover was painted by John Collier (1850–1934) in that same year that Kipling did his "small excursion" overseas.

It was not an entirely happy visit, according to Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia. Kipling got locals offside when he criticised Australians for having too much government for the size of population, for being too Labour in its politics, for tending to go on strike too easily and for not being cautious enough about the Yellow Peril on the doorstep.

His views appeared in print in Melbourne's most important daily newspaper, The Age, on 13th of November 1891. Needless to say, many Australians were displeased with the remarks of an outsider, a blow-in. But the press did constantly invade his privacy, and they published gossip about his private romantic life, so Kipling was also displeased. 

Kipling paid a very short visit to Hobart. In later years Hobart would feature in his writing only in the poem he called Song of the Cities, in which sixteen cities in the empire were given a quatrain each. Kipling may not have loved the southern city, but he had taken a good deal of effort to learn its history.

Kipling had already left Australia when he received the news that his closest male friend, the publishing agent Wolcott Balestier, had suddenly died in London. He rushed home as soon as he could and married Wolcott's sister Carrie the very week he returned to Britain, even though he had loved Wolcott far more than he loved the sister.  Perhaps he felt guilty for not being there, when Wolcott needed him most. Perhaps Rudyard wanted to memorialise Wolcott's name (and genes) through their future children.

literary marker, Sydney

This trip to Australia was a brief and largely uneventful visit, so Kipling might have been expected to carry very little away with him by way of lasting feelings about the most far flung part of the British Empire. In fact, as his later writing established, he was deeply impressed by his stay. For decades to come, his work would be sprinkled with Australian references. In the Just So Stor­ies, which contain The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo, Kipling gave a vivid impression of his travels from Melbourne to Sydney, and then from Melbourne to Adelaide, by train.

It was in South Africa’s Boer War (1899-1902), a full decade after his trip to Melbourne, that Kipling came to really like Australians, and his experiences with that group of soldiers left him impressed. He said he had never met "a cleaner, simpler, saner, more adequate gang of men". As a result, he wrote a beautiful poem Lichtenberg about a homesick Aussie soldier riding through a small South African, while thinking of his wattle-filled Hunter Valley home. A Sahib's War was another piece of writing that demonstrated Kipling’s respect for the Australian fighting man.

During the years of the Boer War, the various Australian states federated into one modern nation. Kipling discussed the news with his good friend Cecil Rhodes and decided that it was a great imperial coming of age.

 Historians love a paper trail. I recommend the following books and documentary:

1. Fullerton, Susannah Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia, Picador, 2009
2. Kennedy, Rosalind and Pinney, T Kipling Down Under, Xlibris, 2000.
3. Kipling, Rudyard Letters of Travel 1892-1913, London, Macmillan,1920
4. Treasures of the Trust: Batemans, Dec 2006.