Eighty-one thousand morgen

Frederik Simon 'Oom Frikkie' Oosthuizen died in 1936 holding, by one account, 81,000 morgen around Zwartkraal - about a quarter of all the ground on this map. This project holds not one deed in his name. What the money was probably in, what it was certainly not in, and the one document that would settle it.

How Oom Frikkie's money was probably made. An argument from the period, not a finding from a document, and it says so wherever it is guessing.

The fact, and the hole underneath it

Frederik Simon Oosthuizen was born in May 1856 and died on 10 October 1936. He married Martha Maria Susanna van der Westhuizen on 5 June 1877, at twenty-one. Everyone called him Oom Frikkie.

Judy Maguire, in the Zeekoegat cameo, puts it plainly [SRC-068]:

Oom Frikkie was the senior family man, owned 81 000 morgen around the family farm Zwartzkraal. He also owned most of the farms from the N1 to the Traka and westwards too — Groot and Klein Sleutelfontein and Zeekoegat.

Eighty-one thousand morgen is about 69,400 hectares. Set that beside the ground measured here: the forty-three whole farms drawn across the district come to 265,800 ha. His reported holding is roughly a quarter of all the ground on this map.

And here is the hole. Not one deed, transfer or ownership span here stands in his name. The farms are here, Zwartkraal, Zeekoegat, Groot and Klein Sleutelfontein, Rhemhoogte. Two of those are one place: the Zwartskraal burial ground's coordinate falls inside Rhemhoogte No. 125, so Zwartkraal is a name carried by ground within that farm rather than a farm beside it. He is here, with nine dated things he did. The join between the two, the thing that would make this a landholding rather than a report of one, is missing.

So what follows is inference from period and place. It is the ordinary Karoo answer, and the reason to write it down is that the ordinary answer is testable. Where it says probably, it means probably.

What it was not

Not gold. An aardvark turned up a nugget on Spreeufontein in 1871 and a second rush came in 1891; Zeekoegat itself was prospected. Nothing productive ever came out of it. The whole story is here, and the longer pattern here. Whatever built Zwartkraal, it was not a reef.

Not feathers, and this is the answer worth arguing with, because the money was extraordinary and it was close. By 1913 South Africa exported 450 tonnes of ostrich feathers worth £3 million: the fourth most valuable export after gold, diamonds and wool, and something like 85 per cent of world supply (EVT-000140). Oudtshoorn's feather palaces went up between 1902 and 1914, and Oudtshoorn is one pass away.

Two things argue against it.

The first is water. Feathers were an irrigation industry before they were a bird industry: the boom ran on lucerne, and lucerne runs on water (EVT-000139). Around Prince Albert, orchards and vineyards were cleared op groot skaal for lucerne camps. The Koup is not that country.

The second is harder, and it is a date. The feather men were ruined in 1914, inside a few months, on fashion, the war, the motor car and plain overproduction (EVT-000141). By 1914 the fall in feather prices was the leading article in De Prince Albert Vriend. Frikkie was not ruined. He built a church hall in 1929 and gave farmland away in 1936. Whatever his money sat in, it survived the year that ended the feather fortunes.

Wool

The chain runs through the district's own dates, and it is genuinely a chain. Each link is the reason the next one paid:

He is born two years before Meiringspoort opens and marries three years before the railway arrives. His entire earning life, 1877 to 1936, sits on top of the wool staple.

The scale of that staple is easy to underestimate now. At the start of the nineteenth century perhaps 1.5 million mostly non-woolled sheep grazed the Karoo; by its close, before drought and the war cut the flocks back, something like 12 million merinos [SRC-199]. The historian William Beinart's assessment, read here at second hand and so not yet verified, is that the Karoo generated more wealth across the nineteenth century than Kimberley did in its first century of diamonds.

What turned veld into carrying capacity

Wool by itself does not explain 81,000 morgen. Koup veld is thin, and a farm is worth what it can carry through a dry year, not what it can carry after rain. Three things changed that inside his lifetime, and all three cost money:

• Water. Drilling machines and wind pumps put water where there had been none, so

ground that could only be grazed after rain could be stocked through the year.

• Fence. The Cape's Fencing Act of 1883 (EVT-000276) and the wire that followed let a

farmer control his grazing, keep stock in and jackals out, and stop paying men to walk behind them.

• Lucerne, wherever there was water to put on it.

This is the part of the argument that explains accumulation rather than income. A farmer who can pay for a borehole and a fence takes more wool off the same veld than one who cannot, every year, for forty years. Capital compounds into carrying capacity, and carrying capacity buys the next farm.

And the years the neighbours could not hold on

Then the district was hit three times in six years. Rinderpest crossed the Limpopo in 1896 and killed draught oxen in millions; transport riding collapsed (EVT-000169). The war followed, Scheepers rode into Klaarstroom in February 1901 and the patrols were caught at Remhoogte the next day (EVT-000212, EVT-000213) - and which Remhoogte is its own open question: the dead Boer's stone stands on Reim Hoogte No. 167, ground with no tie to this family in the record, while the cameo files the affair under Rhemhoogte No. 125, which Oosthuizens had held since 1879 - already theirs that day. And there were droughts.

Land changes hands cheaply in years like that, and it changes hands to whoever still has a cheque. LEAD-0012 predicts exactly this, and one piece of it already fits: Zeekoegat was P.H. du Plessis's farm at the 1891 rush and Frikkie's by 1906, when he built the church on it.

One thing cuts against that story. He already had money in 1885, when he gave £150 towards the Prince Albert church organ (EVT-000079) at twenty-nine. Set against a shepherd's pound a month, that is something over a decade of a working man's wages, handed over in a single gift, a rough comparison across thirty years of prices, but not a small one. So the distress decades explain the extent of the holding. They do not explain its origin. That is older, and probably inherited: his grandfather Ockert Almero was established at Kweekvallei from 1842, and his father J.D.J. held ground at Middelwater and Rhemhoogte.

The dates of his giving are an argument on their own

Set what he did beside what the district was going through:

The middle of that table is the point. Between 1925 and 1933 the wool price fell by about three-quarters; by 1932 a farmer had to shear close to four times the volume to earn what 1928 had earned, and the Great Drought of 1930–33 arrived on top of it [SRC-199]. Men who had borrowed to expand in the good 1920s were foreclosed; the Land Bank was swamped. This is the stretch that emptied werfs across the Karoo and sent a generation into the towns.

He was building through it. A mortgaged man does not put up a hall in 1929, and he does not give away farmland in 1936. That is not proof of where the money came from, but it is good evidence about what it was not in: not borrowed, and not in anything that 1914 or 1929 could kill.

What would settle it

One document: his estate file of 1936/1937, in the Cape Archives estate series, search NAAIRS for Oosthuizen, Frederik Simon. A deceased estate inventory lists every farm with the deed it came in on, its date and its value: the entire accumulation history on one file, in order. That is LEAD-0012.

The edge of that estate is already here. On 20 December 1937, fourteen months after he died, four parcels moved on the same day, on two deeds:

• Annex Modderdrift on deed 13525, to E.A. Oosthuizen, probably his son

Ernest Albert (1894–1970).

• Three farms together on deed 13528 - Kareemoerhoek, Noorsdoringkop and

Kleinbotterkraal, 11,897 morgen in one name - to a transferee the typist recorded only as "born Oosthuizen, married out of community of property to … Marincowitz", probably his daughter Anna Margaretha (1879–1973), who married Gert Jan Oosthuizen Marincowitz in 1918. That day's deed is the subject of Anna Margaretha's 1937, which also complicates the direction of flow: Kareemoerhoek's previous holder was not Frikkie but his brother John Peter, so at least that farm is family ground being redistributed among the next generation rather than the estate itself draining.

Both transferee identifications are probable rather than proven.

Which is the whole problem in one line: the ground can be watched moving between Oosthuizen hands, and not one document shows how the estate itself was assembled.

Everything above the "what it was not" heading is sourced. Everything below it is reasoning from the period, and is offered as a hypothesis to be tested against the estate file, not as a finding. If the inventory turns up and says otherwise, this page changes.

What this story is about

• about Frederik Simon Oosthuizen
• set on Zwartkraal
• set on Zeekoegate

Sources

Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.

1. Rose Willis & Doreen Atkinson, "Zeekoegat: Explorations in the Koup Karoo" (2022) Karoo Development Foundation38pp cameoview it online →
2. "Frederick Oosthuizen - die man wat die Zeekoegat Kerkie 100 jaar gelede gebou het", Lydia Barella Prince Albert Friend (blog)29 Sep 2007view it online →
3. Merino sheep and the ostrich feather boom in the Cape webmerinosa.co.za; southafrica.co.za (Oudtshoorn ostrich industry)view it online →
4. Karoo pastoral economy 1880s-1930s: enclosure, wool prices and the Great Depression web (several)Grundlingh & others, "The effects of the Great Depression (1929-1934) on South African White agriculture", South African Journal of Economic History 5(2), 1990; Wikipedia, "Great Depression in South Africa"; allAfrica / Karoo Space on William Beinart and the nineteenth-century Karoo wool economy; Cape Fencing Act of 1883 and Karoo enclosureview it online →
5. Rose Willis and Doreen Atkinson, with Judy Maguire and Bruce Rubidge, "Klaarstroom: Ancient place of clear waters" (Karoo Cameos, 2021) Karoo Development Foundation, Karoo CameosKaroo Cameos, 2021view it online →

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.