'Waar is beter dorp in Zuid Africa dan Stellenbos?'

An eighteenth-century poem about taxation and the town it records

Two hundred years ago, a man was sitting next to a mill, collecting tax information. He was obviously bored, because in the margins of his scrolls that recorded the names of settler husbands and wives, and their number of children, slaves, horses, cows, wheat and wine, he penned a poem about tax administration but also about the town in which he was collecting this information.

‘Waar is beter dorp in Zuid Africa dan Stellenbos?’, he began his second stanza. Where is there a better village in South Africa than Stellenbosch?

The unnamed 1825 official, who we guess was probably veldkornet Christiaan Ludolph Neethling, was clearly enamoured of his town. We can only guess the reasons why. Perhaps it was its natural beauty, situated in a valley below Simonsberg and the Jonkershoek mountains. Perhaps it was the graceful architecture of what was then the second-largest town in the Cape Colony; by 1825, houses had filled many previously empty blocks. Or perhaps he was impressed by the material prosperity of its inhabitants. Although the town had suffered several fires, most recently in 1803 when forty houses were damaged or destroyed, and the political situation in the colony was volatile, the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century growth in both buildings and occupants suggests an increase in general prosperity.

Yet it’s the next three lines that reveal the true soul of the town: