The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures. I tell the story by changing the setting from the 2000s to the late 1800s when much of the technology behind bacon curing was unraveled. I weave into the mix beautiful stories of Cape Town and use mostly my family as the other characters besides me and Oscar and Uncle Jeppe from Denmark, a good friend and someone to whom I owe much gratitude! A man who knows bacon! Most other characters have a real basis in history and I describe actual events and personal experiences set in a different historical context.
The cast I use to mould the story into is letters I wrote home during my travels.
Minette, the Cape Slaves, the Witels and Nitrogen
Copenhagen, May 1891
Last week Andreas tells me that we will not be doing anything the following Saturday. Uncle Jeppe visits Liverpool once a year. He is returning to Copenhagen and Andreas and his dad asked me to welcome him to the harbour. I am always delighted to spend time with the old man! I was looking forward to the train ride into the city with him. I was bright and early at the harbour and when the English steamer docked, I eagerly looked through the crowd to see him.
Minette
The crowd was milling around with people greeting and porters busily hauling luggage to waiting horse carts and some, off to board the train. I scanned the milling crowd and my eye caught sight of a beautiful young lady, a bit younger than me. She looked a lost with no porter by her side, carrying two leather travel bags, too heavy for her. My glance passed over her, looking for Uncle Jeppe. My gaze almost immediately returned to her. There were two reasons for this. She was beautiful and there was something familiar about her! She looked up and right at me and suddenly I recognized her. “Minette!!”
My heart jumped with excitement! At the same time as I recognised her, she saw me and a broad smile graced her beautiful face! “Minette!” I blurted out! The last person on earth I was expecting and the one person that I most dearly want to see! “Minette!” I said again, this time a lot softer as I riched her after a few large strides to get to her. “Minette, what on earth!?” I said again. She dropped her bags and we embraced! “I almost did not recognise you with your hat and your nice dress!
“What are you doing here?” “Where are you staying?” “Come,” I said and picked her bags up. “I’m here to visit you,” she said and started walking with me towards the train. I was still baffled. “Two months ago Andreas wrote to me. He invited me to visit and surprise you.” I realised that it must have been after Andreas and my long drinking session in Copenhagen that I write to you in my last letter that he hatched his plans. It appears that he took his lead from the many times I spoke about you in all my adventures.
Suddenly I remember that I was there to welcome Uncle Jeppe! She saw the panic in my eyes as I started looking around again. “Uncle Jeppe is only arriving next week,” she helps me out of my misery. “He is still in Liverpool. The whole thing was a ruse to get you to the harbour!”
I have never been this excited to see anybody! The last time I saw her we were sitting in Pennys Cave on Table Mountain with our friends. Minette and I love exploring the mountains and valleys around Cape Town and we would do this as often as we get an opportunity.
Drosters Gat
It was on one of our hikes that we discovered the cave on Kogel Bay, Dappa se Gat, where I think the slaves lived who took in the pigs from the Colenbrook which became known as the Kolbroek pigs. We discovered the Cave when we hiked from Hermanus to Cape Town, one year. We started at Hangklip at Pringle Bay close to Hermanus where my younger brother, Elmar, Juanita and their two kids live.
I started reading Alexander Von Humboldt’s work when I was still a small boy and was captivated by the destruction brought about by European colonists. In my imagination, I would accompany Von Humboldt on his travels across South America and the Russian Steppe. I got intensely interested in the physiology of the human and animal body when I read about his work with Guthrie. The sense of adventure and the need to explore partly come from stories such as his.
Across the decades that separate our lives, Von Humboldt mentored me. If I had enough money to buy a book I wanted, but not enough for food for the day, I would buy the book. Choices between using my savings from my Transport work to buy a house in Cape Town or to either travel to Europe to learn how to make bacon or go on an expedition to the Magaliesberg Mountains always ended up on whatever would teach me the most and be the greatest adventure. Buying a house never was a priority!
During my time as a Transport Rider across the vast open spaces of Southern Africa, I witnessed the destruction that people bring to nature and each other first hand. I visited old Tswanruins at the Vaal River between Paryd and Potchefstroom and at Hartebeespoort. I hiked through these massive Tswana and Sotho cities at the Suikerbosrand and in Johannesburg on the farm of Sarel Marais. The cities of the Tswana and the Sotho were decimated by Mzilikazi Khumalo, a Southern African king who founded the Mthwakazi Kingdom now known as Matabeleland. It was precisely because Minette and I shared these priorities and values that I was drawn to her. Well, apart from her good looks and inquisitive personality.
The existence of slavery and the wholesale destruction of our natural world went hand in hand. A period followed where I had an intense interest in slavery and the knowledge I gained allowed me to understand our land better. The Kolbroek pigs are an excellent example.
Minette and I knew there was another famous cave where a community of runaway slaves lived. Between Pringle Bay and Rooiels, much closer to the water’s edge, legend has it that these poor people discovered a cave that can house them and hide them from the slave masters. The entrance is very narrow and like Dappa se Gat, one can enter it only during low tide. It is accessible from the sea. It became known as Drostres gat (cave). From Rooi Els to Kogel Bay is a short distance.
We rode out to Pringle Bay at Cape Hangklip. It is always good to rely on local knowledge when looking for these things. Locals directed us to a restaurant and bar called Miems. The owners are Morris and Kerneels. Morris, a tall and well-built man, is a trained geologist who worked in Johannesburg mines for many years. Kerneels, his partner and he traveled to Ireland a few years ago in a stunning reversal of where people go to find their fortunes. Where most Europeans are hoping for the new world to provide a living, Morris and Kirneels went to Ireland where they worked till they saved enough to start Miems at Cape Hangklip. He too read the account of Green about Drostersgate (Drosters cave) between Pringle Bay and Rooiels.
An old farmer wrote that the Gat (Cave) can only be accessed at low tide and climbing down down a precipice with a rope. A neighbor and he went in with candles for about eighty yards. He remembers that it was dark and damp and one could see bones of large game animals and cattle still scattered across the cave floor. They also found trunks of melkhout trees, used to make fire to roast the meat. He wrote that there are graves of “strandlopers” (scavengers) around the general location of the cave. Morris has been to the exact location more than once and says that he is not able to get into the cave. The opening is too small for such a big man. He tried to access it from the sea without any success. It does not surprise me that the salves managed to get into areas where he could not. By all accounts, they were gaunt and small.
Minette and I looked for it and when we could not find it, we returned to Miems for another few pints. Back at the bar that evening, it seemed as if everybody had a cave story where runaway slaves hid out.
It is immediately obvious that finding food would have been a massive challenge. There are accounts of such slaves wandering around on Table Mountain only to eventually returned to Cape Town and hand themselves over to authorities to face the cruelest punishment rather than dying of starvation. It is this reality that made the feat of young Joshua Penny even more remarkable who stayed for an extended time period on Table Mountain.
The only place on the mountain that was regularly inhabited by these most unfortunate people was an overhang up Platteklip Gorge on Table Mountain. There are accounts of slaves who lived up this gorge taking live cattle up. Anyone who ever hiked up there will know that taking a cow or an ox up there must have been extremely arduous. The cave can still be seen to this day up the oldest recorded route up Table Mountain.
The many accounts of the struggle for food of the slaves and the fact that keeping livestock was a strategy they used to sustain themselves lend tremendous credence to my theory about the fate of the Kolbroek pigs. In the Hangklip area, there are a number of other well-known legends of runaway slaves-communities hiding away in caves. The area is mysterious and to this day, sparsely populated. An old man once told me, there are many ghosts in these mountains!
We hiked from Rooi Els to Kogel Bay when we first discovered Dappa se Gat. We just passed Kogel bay and I got to the stretch of beach, strewn with round boulders, resembling cannon shot when I saw the cave. Dappa se gat! The cave is a couple of hundred meters deep and during high tide it is inaccessible. I sat in front of the cave and tried to imagine what it must have been like for the runaway slaves.
My mind effortlessly wondered to the sinking of the Colebrook and the fate of the pigs that swam ashore. So it happened that not even on Minette and my wildest adventures were we ever very far from bacon, hams, salamis, and pigs.
The Witels
Another favourate site of ours is the Witels River. Between the Matroosberg and the Winterhoek Mountains is the town of Ceres that officially existed since 1854. A pass was constructed called, Michells Pass which follows the route to Ceres next to the Bree River. Where the Witels flows into the Bree River is an open “outspan” area which is clearly seen on the West bank of the river. I am sure that the trekkers spent a couple of nights here, feeding and resting their cattle before taking on the pass.
The first pass was built by Jan Mostert and was called Mostert’s Hoek Pass (1765). Jan was one of the first settlers to settle on Ceres’ side of Tulbagh. The pass was a very rugged 3kms. The road was so bad that wagons had to be dismantled and sections crossed on foot, the cargo and the wagons strapped to the backs of oxen.
Charles Michell surveyed Mostert’s Hoek Pass in 1830 to improve it. Andrew Geddes-Bain constructed the new pass in 1846, with the assistance of 240 convicts. The Bree River runs all the way into the Warm Bokkeveld. The pass effectively reduced the travel time from Cape Town to Beaufort West from 20 to 12 days. It was almost possible to do the route with a horse-drawn carriage.
On my way to Johannesburg through Kimberly, I stayed at the Winterberg Mountain Inn. It was the main road between the Cape and Kimberley. It was formerly known as Mill & Oaks Country Inn. The restaurant is built on the foundations of an olf wheat-mill dating from the 1800s. It was called the Ceres Meul (Mill). It is not known exactly when the Mill was built. Probably in the late-1700s by the first European settlers. The Inn is the kind of place that I prefer. Steeped in history, enough ghosts to chase, legends to unravel, exceptional food and great company!
One of Minette’s banking clients told her about the Witsels river; that it runs down towards the Bree River from the southern Peaks of the Hex River mountains. The best approach is through the Waaihoek Kloof. The man who first identified the route will forever remain nameless in accordance with his own wishes. The next time I stayed at the Winterberg Mountain Inn, I asked the locals if they know the access route. They explained to me in great detail. When I got back to Cape Town a few months later, I immediately looked Minette up at the Bank and the plan was set out for a legendary hike.
One ascends a mountain and through a very precarious route, access the river. Once you are in the river, there are very few ways out. The cliffs are for the most part right next to the river, forcing you to either swim or jump from boulder to boulder. At certain places, the cliffs fold over the river creating long stretches that you swim through caves, following the flow of the river. Next to the river, there are small stretches that resemble sea sand. It created the most amazing places to sleep. To go up the mountain, into the Witels River and out at the Bree River takes around 5 days. Some young people are able to cover the distance in a day provided that they don’t take anything heavy in their backpacks. The best Minette and I did was 2 days from start to finish, but the river was very full and progress painfully slow. The Witels river has become a spiritual pilgrimage for us and ranks as one of our most favourate routes on this bountiful earth!
One of the Witels hikes it started raining. Rain down the Witels can be life-threatening if it rains higher up in the catchment area and the river comes down. The force of the river carries large boulders from higher up, downstream and the force is such that if one would be in the water when this happens, chances for survival are slim to zero. We moved our backpacks higher up the sandbank and as close to the cliff as we could get a comfortable place to lay down. I was trying to get Minette’s mind off the raging river!
Nitrogen
I was laying under my sleeping bag. Minette was getting her overnight spot comfortable for the night; painstakingly removing the rocks that would start to irritating her once the initial tiredness has worn off. I asked her if she knew what air was made off. “Oxigen and of course. . . ” “Nitrogen!” she answered.
“Correct! It was discovered separately in 1772, by the Scottsman, Daniel Rutherford and in the early 1770s by a Swiss, Carl Scheele. Rutherford called it “noxious air” and Scheele, “foul air.”” I replied.
I briefly explained for fear that I would bore her, “It exists as a gas and comprises of two nitrogen atoms, joined to form one gas molecule. They are split apart by something of high energy such as a lightning strike. This leaves the two atoms free to react with other matter floating around it.
Nitric Oxide
“One of these elements floating around in the atmosphere is oxygen. Nitrogen reacts with oxygen and forms nitrogen monoxide (NO). Nitrogen monoxide, a colourless gas, is an extremely important compound. It is also called nitric oxide or nitrogen oxide. The nitric oxide is heated from the energy from the lightning flash that created it.”
The drizzle was coming down softly. Minette finished nesting and I got enough energy together to build a fine. I cleared a small sandy patch at my feet and with a twig I wrote the simple chemical reaction in the sand.
N2 (g) + O2 (g) lightning —> 2NO (g)
“There are different sources of Nitric Oxide. Very important one which I will tell you about later.”
Nitrogen Dioxide
“As it cools down, it reacts further with the oxygen molecules around it to form nitrogen dioxide. Nitric Oxide is one nitrogen atom attached to one oxygen atom. It now combines with another oxygen atom and forms nitrogen dioxide, a poisonous, brown, acidic, pungent gas. There is another important molecule that exists in our atmosphere as a gas namely ozone which is three oxygen atoms that combined into a molecule. Nitrogen mostly reacts with ozone to form nitrogen dioxide.”
“Like nitrogen, oxygen occurs as two oxygen atoms, bound in one molecule. Ultra-violet light and lightning cause the two tightly bound oxygen atoms to separate and react, either with other single-atom oxygen molecules or with more stable two-atom oxygen molecules. In the latter case, three oxygen atoms are bound into one molecule (O3). It is not very stable and quickly breaks down into one oxygen atom and or two oxygen atom molecules or it reacts with nitric oxide to form nitrogen dioxide.”
I wipe my previous simple formulation from the sand to write another very simple one.
NO (g) + 1/2O2 (g) —> NO2 (g)
Nitric Acid
“Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) reacts with more oxygen and raindrops. Water is H2O. The two oxygen atoms of nitrogen dioxide combine with the one from water to form 3 oxygen atoms bound together. There is still only one Nitrogen atom giving us NO3 or nitrate. There is now still one Hydrogen atom left and it combines with the nitrate to form nitric acid (HNO3). Nitric acid falls to earth and enters the soil and serves as nutrients for plants. Old writers called nitric acid (HNO3) aqua fortis or spirit of niter.”
I clear the sand at my feet for a third equation.
3NO2 (g) + H2O —> 2HNO3 (aq) + NO (g)
“Nitric acid is highly reactive and combines with salts in the soil. The Hydrogen atom is replaced by a calcium, potassium or sodium atom, converting it to a nitrate salt. This salt is called saltpeter. The extreme importance of this is that it is plant food. Saltpeter is used today for gunpowder, fertiliser and to cure meat.”
“Fascinating,” Minette said a bit sarcastic. I did not notice that she started cooking supper and I can help. She hands me an onion to peel. “Saltpeter!”, she said. I thought its the sweat from a horse. My dad always said that we ride the horses till the white saltpeter is running down his neck!
I smiled because she did not know how completely correct she was! The few raindrops that fell stopped. The sound of the rushing river and the peace of the mountains transcends everything. I looked at her in the glow of the fire and was struck by her beauty!
The Witels became one of those important cathedrals in our life! The first time I came down the Witels, it arrested my soul and I fell in love with it. Unspoiled! If you are thirsty, you drop into the water and drink directly from the river. The only company for almost the entire length if the baboons on the cliffs. The place I gave my first lecture on nitrogen and the place where I first noticed how beautiful Minette is. It was the start of the two great loves of my life. Unraveling the technical reasons why saltpeter cures meat and Minette!
How much I would love to have you guys here with us. Today, as they say in the Bible, “my joy is complete” with Minette here with me. What I was feeling on the Witels and in Penny’s Cave is now undeniable. I have very strong feelings for this amazing woman who traveled halfway around the world to see me.
When we got home, Andreas and his family provided Minette with her own room. I was overjoyed that she is staying with us. That evening around the supper table we told our stories, including my nitrogen lecture on the Witels. Andreas slapped me on the shoulder when he walked past me. Let Minette join you tomorrow for Uncle Jeppes’ lunchtime lecture. He is going to start with “satltpeter” and if you and Minettes’ interest in it, you will both find it fascinating.”
We had the most amazing dinner!
Well, kids, its time to go to bed. A great week is waiting for me with Minette here. Next weekend I will write and tell you all about it!
The quest to understand how great bacon is made takes me around the world and through epic adventures. I tell the story by changing the setting from the 2000s to late 1800 when much of the technology behind bacon curing was unraveled. I weave into the mix beautiful stories of Cape Town and use mostly my family as the other characters besides me and Oscar and Uncle Jeppe from Denmark, a good friend and someone to whom I owe much gratitude! A man who knows bacon! Most other characters have a real basis in history and I describe actual events and personal experiences set in a different historical context.
The cast I use to mould the story into is letters I wrote home during my travels.
The Danish Cooperatives and Saltpeter
Copenhagen, March 1891
My dear Minette,
It is Sunday afternoon. I slept most of the morning. I am excited and refreshed. I know you are here in spirit. Life has turned out much more insanely exciting than I could ever have hoped for. The entire thing is a grand adventure of discovery. I could never dream that trying to unlock the secrets of bacon would be as insanely exciting as it all turned out to be. Hopefully, you will receive the letter I wrote yesterday before you get this one. I will hold on to it and post it next Friday.
I have been wondering about meat curing for as long as I can remember. Even as a child I tried to imagine how people discovered that dry meat lasts longer. Initially, I believe that people ate meat raw or fermented. Animal carcasses that are left outside will start to ferment. Fermentation breaks the tough muscles down and the first priority of humans must have been to find ways to get tough game meat soft. Leaving the carcass then outside or in water to protect it from preditors would have been a natural way of softening the meat. Later, boiling the meat and roasting it over fire became other ways to soften meat or pulverizing it with a stick or a rock.
I imagine that as people soon discovered that dry meat lasts long and the wonderful benefits of salt. Food was initially only seen as something to consume in order to fuel our bodies. As humans developed, we started changing food into an art form. The king or leader and people with means could now demand the best meat. We learned that meat, like any other food, can be prepared in many different ways to improve the taste and food changed into art. These different techniques of “softening” meat were becoming art in themselves and Sharma, medicine men and women and housewives became the custodians of this new technology.
When we make bacon, we use a technique called curing. Cured meat is identified by three things. The salt and saltpeter change the colour of the meat. When an animal is killed, the meat blooms a beautiful red colour. If you do not rub it with saltpeter, it changes to a dull brown colour. If you, however, rub it with a mixture of salt and saltpeter, it changes the colour to a pinkish-reddish colour. Related to the science of making good bacon, colour is the first key.
The second thing that saltpeter does is to impart a unique cured flavour to the meat. The third characteristic of cured meat is taste. The last one is longevity. Cured meat lasts long outside a refrigerator and in Europe is the staple food in many countries as far as meat is concerned.
I know saltpeter is important because it imparts all three characteristics to bacon. Let me rather say it like this. Using Saltpeter is not the only guarantee for good bacon, but leaving it out of the salt-rub, you will never get the right colour, taste or longevity. You have the option of drying the meat without saltpeter in which case it will also last longer, but the meat will be dry and it will not have the characteristic taste of cured meat.
In South Africa, the old Dutch farmers fused their knowledge of drying meat in the chimnies in Holland and the North European practice of using vinegar in their hams with the indigenous practice of hanging meat out in the sun and wind to dry. I have found this to be an ancient practice among all the peoples of southern Africa that I met in my travels.
The Dutch farmers add coriander and black pepper with salt to the vinegar to create what they call biltong. The coriander and black pepper were initially added to mask any off-flavours in case the meat did not dry quick enough and some spoiling of meat has set in. This is a good example where drying works well to preserve meat with or without saltpeter. Saltpeter can only be left out of the recipe if vinegar is used and lots of salt.
I have always known that the secret of bacon is in saltpeter, but saltpeter is not everything that goes into the making of the best bacon on earth. So, my quest to understand bacon starts with saltpeter. What is it and why does it have the power to give longevity to meat, change the colour back to the colour of freshly slaughtered meat why does it give this unique taste? These are the questions I knew I had to answer first.
Besides understanding saltpeter, our goal in Cape Town is to set up a factory and not merely making bacon for home use. Scale changes everything. This is a lesson I learned from very early on. On my grandfathers’ farm, I have seen how easy it is to make the best bacon on earth if we make it for our family only. When my dad’s bacon became famous and Dawid de Villiers Graaff placed an order with us, we made five-time more we normally do. It was a disaster! Everything went wrong. We had more workers to help, but they were not trained. We could not keep the meat cool and in the end, we had to feed most of the meat to our dogs. Scale is difficult and the importance of the right structure of a bacon factory is something that we can not under-estimate. Right from the word go, I came face to face with lessons pertaining to structure and ingredients and the first ingredient to look at was saltpeter!
The Spirit of the Danes
The morning was crisp and interesting. Andreas’ dad is an impressive man. He is very intelligent with an amazing knowledge of many things. He gave me a lot of perspective on what Jeppe told me on Friday. For example, how did it come about that a man of Jeppes age was exposed to learning new butchering and curing techniques? Why was there in Denmark such a focus on continued education that people showed up for lessons by the Irish, in sufficient numbers to make a proper transfer of skills possible. How did the most current thing about the structure of a bacon plant fit so nicely into the Danish culture? How were the Danish people inspired to take up a new way of doing things?
It often takes a prophet to change long-held perceptions; a visionary to change entrenched positions! An inspirational man who draws his own strength from the Divine to lift peoples gaze from their own depressed positions and onto better things. To instill hope. These are however not all that is needed because these are often also the qualities of an imposter and someone who destroys. What is needed are all these qualities with a simple and effective plan to improve things. A person who can lead people to a better and more profitable future.
Andreas’ dad told me about just such a man. In many ways, he is the father of the agricultural miracle of Denmark. It may sound like a boring report on men and women who lived very long ago, but the truth is that it is an inspirational story about men and women with their backs against the wall. Who triumphed against the odds. The man at the center of the story is N. F. S. Grundtvig.
Denmark was an impoverished nation. They lost Schleswig-Holstein to Germany. The soil of their lands was depleted and yielding fewer crops with every harvest. In all of Europe, the Danish soil seemed to be the poorest. The conditions in 1864 were dire and farmers had little hope competing with Russia and America with their crops. They were not making money. Apart from little diversified agriculture, there was very little money in the country. Farmers identified dairy farming as a lucrative diversification of their economy, but they lacked the money to make their plans a reality. The depleted soil on the farms offered little collateral for lenders to advance money against.
I wish so much that I would get every South African to hear their message. We are a nation of faith and still, we complain as if we have no hope. What we need in South Africa is a prophet, a visionary and a very good plan! The plan will in all likelihood have to be built on very practical education! It is exactly for this reason that I am here! I need to be very clear on the plan! To my great amazement, the bedrock of the structure of the Danish bacon factory is in the first place not on the mechanics of doing it one way as opposed to another way. The basis of their entire system rests on an almost religious belief in the power of cooperation and education!
Grundtvig was a churchman who lived between 1783 and 1872 and was described by some as the Apostle to Denmark. He taught that Danish people must love their own country above all, more than any other real estate on earth. He believed that Danes must love God and trust each other; their own skill and ability to solve problems; that success will come through cooperation. The principal way to achieve this was through education and what he called the “cultivation of the people.” This was distilled through his concept of high school which is completely different from high school in the rest of the world.
N. F. S. Grundtvig’s high schools were initially attended by people from the age of 18 to 60 or even older and everyone in between. Every farmer’s adult son and daughter, every farmer himself or his wife, considered it a loss not to attend High School for at least one term. The poor and the rich paid the same small fees and lectures covered an array of interesting subjects. Religion and nationalism were part of the course, but it never dominated the other subjects. Men and women looked forward to high school in the same way as Americans looked forward to a trip to Europe. What he achieved is that even more than the information that was imparted, a general method of teamwork was created which would become the basis for cooperative farming and production. Later, men and women aged between 16 and 35 mostly attended these high schools. Young men attended in the winter and young ladies, in the summer. Experimental agricultural farms were set up around the schools. The teaching was not done from textbooks, but from practice.
Cooperation
His teachings against individualism slowly but surely sowed the seeds which germinated into mutual trust and a belief that by doing things together, more can be achieved. Directly as a result of this, in 1881/ 1882 the first cooperative dairy farm was established in Jutland. The Danes realised that to be successful, they must find ways for their fields to yield better crops and they must develop better ways to use their crops, once harvested. Better than selling it at depressed margins on the open market in competition with the Russians and the Americans would be to utilise it to produce commodities. On par with a relentless focus on scientific farming practices was unprecedented cooperation. The middle man had to eliminate. The farmer and the salesman joined forces and discovered that by cooperating they always had “something to go on,” a phrase which became an example of the new approach.
The cooperatives were set up where every member had equal rights. Each member of the dairy cooperative had one vote and his milk was collected every morning and the cooperative agents returned the skimmed milk. The cows, therefore, produced butter and feed for the pigs. Money is loaned from the bank. Each member made himself responsible for repaying the loan in accordance with the number of cows he had. Every seven days, the members received 25% of the value of the milk they delivered to the cooperative. Apart from selling the milk to the cooperative, the member was entitled to his shares of the profit on the sale of the produce. The cooperative kept 25% from which running expenses were paid and the loan was repaid.
There is another reason, Andreas’ dad tells me, why the Danish system works so well. Not only did they manage themselves, but they also elected farmers to positions of power in government. It was not only, like the Americans, for the people, by the people, but the Danes took it one step further. The need and most pressing priority was their agriculture and so the cooperatives elected representatives for the farmers, by the farmers to the government. These men and women abhor profiteering so that the priority is the benefit of the many. This hatred for large trusts and monopolies goes back to the old feudal system which was prevalent in Europe. Peasants did not own land, but in Denmark, this changed and the peasants were allowed to own their own farms. This gave them every stimulus and motivation to improve the small farms. It is said that 90% of all farmland in Denmark is owned by small scale farmers. The first revolution in Danish agriculture was ownership.
The new farm owners started protesting against rulership and land aristocracy. They sought more political power and proper representation. They worked out a constructive plan to break up the remaining large feudal farms and to distribute it among sons and daughters of the workers. Farm ownership, a systematic and thorough education system and the cooperative model for farming and production all work together. The one feeding the other and strengthening the overall agricultural experiment. In large part, the middle man was eliminated and the few matters run by the state are done for the benefit of the farmers and not for the government to make a profit. A good example is the railways. Still, the Danish farmer is not a socialist. They simply believe in cooperation who thinks in terms of self-help and are not reliant on the state for help.
As Andreas’ dad spoke, I again wished I could get him to South Africa to come and tell them how it was done in Denmark. I know that cooperation runs much deeper than simply pooling resources. The role of education and private ownership was the basis of the Danish miracle and I see no reason why the exact same model cant work in South Africa. The one reason I see is how deeply distrust runs between the different peoples who call South Africa their home.
Skimmed Milk to Pork to Bacon
In Denmark, it was probably the need to find a use for the skimmed milk that gave the farmers the idea of raising pigs in the same way that the need to feed cows indoor for nine months of the year forced them into intensive farming in fodder. Pig farming therefore directly grew out of dairy farming. It was going well with the establishment of cooperative pig farming and the live pigs were sold to Germany.
Before 1888, Danish farmers relied on selling all their live pigs in Germany. The Germans, in turn, produced the finest Hamburg bacon and Hams from it and it was mainly sold to England. A disaster struck the Danish pork industry when swine fever broke out in the country in the autumn of 1887. This halted all export of live pigs. Exports to Germany fell from 230 000 in 1886 to only 16 000 in 1888. One of the most insane industrial transformations followed. In a staggering display, the Danes identified the problem, worked out the solution and dedicated every available nation resource to solving it. The creation of large bacon curing cooperatives was born out of the need to switch from exporting live pigs to processed pork in the form of bacon and to sell it directly to the country where the Germans were selling the processed Danish pork namely England. The project was a stunning success. In 1887 the Danish bacon industry accounted for 230 000 live pigs and in 1895, converted from bacon production, 1 250 000 pigs.
After breeding and pig farming, the next step in great bacon production is slaughtering. On 14 July 1887, 500 farmers from the Horsens region created the first shared abattoir. On 22 December 1887, the first co-operative abattoir in the world, Horsens Andelssvineslagteri (Horsens’s Share Abattoir), received their first live pigs for slaughter. In 1887 and over the next few years eight such cooperative abattoirs were set up and there is still no end in sight where it will end. Each is in excellent running condition. As in the case with the dairy farmers, each member of the cooperative has only one vote. The profit of the middleman and the volumes exported for butter and bacon are determined by the cooperative. The market price is fixed in Copenhagen on a daily basis by an impartial committee.
Every farmer in Denmark or manager of a bacon curing plant cant be a scientific person, and yet, it is important that farmers and factory managers alike know something of the science underpinning their trade. It is here where the high school lessons play an important role because it provides a solid foundation and the government is doing the rest. They have a system of inspectors who look after farms and factories where they do the exact calculations, for example, to show how much butter must be produced from the milk of each cow. The reason for the inspections was that the Danish Government were required to guarantee the quality of the bacon and the butter it delivered to England, but it had the double benefit of on the one hand guarantees the quality and satisfy the English requirements and on the other hand, improved the quality by assisting the farmers and producers.
The logic of cooperation was extended into England, the largest market for Danish bacon. Some years ago the English bacon market was being serviced for the Danes by middlemen. The farmers organised a selling agency in England to represent them known as the Danish Bacon Company of London. The concept was applied to many areas of the Danish economy. Banking and buying in Denmark are likewise done cooperatively. Every village has a cooperative store.
The farmer in Denmark also uses the state in another interesting way. Commissions are sent abroad to study foreign methods. It was most probably on one of these trips that the Danes came across the striking workers in Ireland whom they brought back to Denmark to teach them mild curing. Mild curing technology that came from Ireland years earlier became the cornerstone of Danish bacon. It was this industrialised model that allowed the Danes to become the undisputed leaders in the world bacon trade. The Danes did exactly what we intend doing namely learning not only how the cooperative factory is set up, but also the inner workings of such a factory. They learned this from the Irish and I intend learning it from them! That will satisfy one of the cornerstone reasons why I am in Denmark.
Neat, Prepared, Ready
Many years ago, on one of my visits to Johannesburg, I met another chemicals traders with the name of Willie Oosthuizen. Willie told me that wherever I am in the world, before I leave home, every morning I must ask myself, “am I ready, prepared and neat? These are according to him, the three essentials without which nobody will be in a position to use opportunities that come our way every day.
Thinking about the Danish Bacon trade, I realise that the government ensured that when the right time came, the industry was ready, prepared and in a general position of neatness. It is a strange thing that as we walked through this small Danish town and I saw the small but neat Danish houses, that I could see this Danish approach to life in everything. I do not see class differences between people. I see people from all walks of life getting together in small coffee shops at the end of the day, celebrating life and sharing stories.
I can see how my quest to unravel good bacon curing is teaching me as much about life than it is teaching me about meat. Andreas told me something this afternoon before I retired to my room which is very curious. He told me that I am too quick to claim that this is the end of my quest. That simply knowing the steps of bacon curing without understanding it is not to know the steps at all. Brief exposure to the Danish attitude towards work and cooperation and the internal mechanics of a bacon curing operation is only the beginning of my education.
We were sitting in a small coffee shop one afternoon when Andreas and I were talking about all these matters. Nothing about the pork trade is easy! It is one of the most wonderfully complex trades on earth! He asked me how long I think I will have to stay before I know enough to set up our Woodys bacon plant in Cape Town. I knew enough by now not to simply venture a guess. “As long as it takes”, I said. He smiled. “There is so much to learn!” “Stay for at least a year!”. He then produced a pouch with salt in. He placed it in the middle of our table. I dipped a finger in the salt and tasted it. I recognised it as saltpeter. “This, he said, is the next subject. I discussed it with Jeppe and he agrees that after the structure of the factory, understanding Saltpeter is your next priority!”
That was where our business talk ended. The rest of the afternoon we talked about life. What it was like growing up in Cape Town and the many different cultures that co-exist in this great city. I shared many of my experiences with him from my transport business. I told him the story of Joshua Penny and how, after his ordeal on table Mountain, a Danish captain gave him a job on his ship sailing for Europe. I invited Andreas to visit us when we set the Cape Town factory up. The evening was pleasant and I became very fond of my Danish instructor. A great friendship was struck that would last the rest of my life.
Please give the kids all my love and to our dear parents. Please give them both my letters to read before you sent it on to Oscar, James, and Will. I will write Dawie Hyman, David de Villiers Graaff, and Uncle Jakobus separately.
I miss you dearly!
Eben
——————
Photos from Chris Speedy and my visit to Denmark in 2011 when Andreas Østergaard introduced us to the science of bacon production. Chris was a master, but as for me, I knew nothing! 🙂
Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan) 7 October 1906, p 60. From The Little Kingdom at the Mouth of the baltic Great Nations May Learn How to Build Up a Trade in Dairy and Meat Products.
Ellsworth County Leader (Elsworth, Kansas) 18 December 1919, p 2.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
Woodys Bacon
South Africa, August 1890
Upon my return from Johannesburg, I again stopped over at Oscar’s farm. The few days that I had to think things over while offloading in Johannesburg made me more excited than ever! This is exactly the kind of opportunity I have been looking for!
Oscar’s farm is a well-run business. Every month he receives newsletters from the Cape and Holland about farming and he studies them in detail to learn about farming in the modern way. In doing this, he reminds me of my Oupa Eben. He has always been very careful to study the farming magazines in great detail to keep up to date with the newest farming trends.
During my second visit to Oscar’s farm, I got to know his wider family also. Oscar’s father, Uncle James Klynveld, is a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church. His, like Oom Jan, Oom Giel and Oom Sybrand is a more sensible faith compared to many in the Transvaal Republic at this time. He sees all humans as equal before God, irrespective of language and skin colour. This was a view not widely held in the Transvaal. Even in England, there were those who questioned the equality of all races with a debate if black people have souls. Oscar and I shared his view and agreeing on such matters are important when starting a business together.
We also shared the view that England, the two Boer republics, the native tribes, the freed slaves and their descendants, how these groups treated and mistreated each other over the years and acted shamefully in taking what is not theirs and killing and enslaving one another; that, together with the influx of immigrants into the Transvaal in search of gold and the ambition of men like Rhodes – that all these ingredients cannot spell anything but war. Nation against nation and territory against territory. We see the clouds of war gathering in almost every newspaper we pick up and conversations we have with other people. War is inevitable and we want to plot the most sensible road ahead for our young families.
We believe our future is not connected to the land, as many of our fellow Boers believe it to be. Both Oscar and I see our future in free enterprise. Farming, in Oscar’s mind, is not a God-given right to the Boer nation, but a business that has to make a profit. Security is not vested inland, but a positive bottom line. The idea of a bacon company appeals to us. The markets we can service are enormous. The two Boer republics, the colonies in the Cape and Natal, passing ships and the British Navy and army are all markets within our reach. There is also the very tantalising possibility to export our finest bacon to the old world of Europe and England.
Johannesburg, Market Square. Photo supplied by Dirk Marais.
Oscar and I spend the better part of three days making plans and strategizing. I got an opportunity to meet his two brothers, James and Willem. Both are equally impressive men, like Oscar. Will was an industrial psychology student at the Potchefstroom University. James did trading for the Netherlands Bank of South Africa. Both men were immediately very excited when they heard of our plans and right there and then it was decided that they would join us at the earliest opportunity. Will would focus on marketing and James on finances. Before I left a date was set when the company would formally be established.
Johannesburg Market Square. 1895. Photo supplied by Dirk Marais.
This is how it came about that on one winter morning in August 1890, a formal meeting was convened in Potchefstroom to establish a bacon curing company. (1) Potchefstroom was the former capital of the Transvaal, before the seat of government was moved to Pretoria. Like all Boer towns, it has big gardens surrounding large houses and trees lining the streets. It appears like an oasis on the road from Kimberly which is a monotonous part of the route travelling from Cape Town, through Kimberly to Johannesburg.
We met in Oscar’s voorkamer (living room). It was a bitterly cold night. A hand full of burgers came. Oscar’s wife, Trudie, expecting their 3rd daughter was there. James and Willem and Anton, Oscar’s father-in-law. Some of the Boers came out of curiosity but a few successful farmers were there, looking for an opportunity to invest in the venture. My dad and my brothers, Andre and Elmar, came through for the occasion, taking the train to Bloemfontein and hiring a coach to Potchefstroom.
Oscar’s dad opened the meeting with scripture reading and prayer. His text was Ecclesiastes 9:11. “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.” (2) He is a man of wisdom and used the words of another wise man, Solomon, to set the course for the adventure ahead. “In the end,” he said, “it will not be our speed, strength, wisdom, understanding, skill or even the riches from investors that will give us success, as important as all these are. Without being at the right place, at the right time, nothing will come to fruition. Commit to the dream and exploit every opportunity with a bounty of enthusiasm and the dream will be turned into a reality.” With these words and in prayer, he commended our venture into the hands of the Almighty God.
After Uncle James’ words, it was my turn. I presented the outline of the plan and in the middle of my speech, Oscar jumped in when he saw I was using too many words and he summarized the plan nicely. Looking at the faces in the crowd, I could see that our words found favour among the listeners.
Despite much talk and plenty of enthusiasm, being thoroughly convinced that our plan will find widespread appeal, nobody was prepared to join our venture or invest in the business, except a young mining engineer from Kimberly, Dawie Hyman who made a small investment with me personally on account of our long-standing friendship and Anton, Trudie’s father and Oscar’s father-in-law. Initially, it would be up to Oscar and myself to prove that a quality curing operation is possible in our land.
My dad insisted that the standard we aim for in bacon production is nothing less than the legendary Wiltshire Bacon from C&T Harris in England and the bacon we cured on the farm. His reasoning was that even though he believed his own bacon recipe to be the best in the world, the Europeans and English figured out a way to do it faster at consistently good quality. It was one thing to produce one batch of good bacon per year from one pig, but doing it day in and day out, year in and year out was a completely different story. It was a widely held belief around the world that the Harris operation in Wiltshire produces the finest bacon on earth.
Everybody agreed to this, but it presented a problem, far more daunting than our lack of capital. Nobody knew how to cure Wiltshire style bacon. It was decided that since my kids were a bit older than Oscar’s, I had to travel to Europe and England to learn the art of curing large quantities of good bacon! Oscar would stay behind, muster the support and prepare our factory.
We decided not to go to England straight away despite the fact that the Harris family’s factory is there. On the one hand, there was the fear that war could break out any day and this would jeopardize our quest. On the other hand, since my ancestors came to the Cape of Good Hope from Denmark and since an old spice trader advised us to visit Copenhagen first, the decision was made to start there.
Oscar and I met up in Johannesburg a few weeks prior to the founding meeting in Potchefstroom. The city, only two and a half years or three years old by 1890 was already an impressive place. The streets were broad with buildings on either side, built in a style and an architecture that rivals those of the biggest cities in England. (3)
The main business street is Commissioner street. Off it is the new club, the Bank of Africa, the new Exchange buildings, two large hotels, and several two stories buildings, set up with the sole purpose of conducting business and spanning entire blocks with offices for hundreds of brokers and speculators. There is a hustle and bustle about the city as bricklayers are furiously at work, filling every available space with new buildings. (3) There are several open spaces provided in the city to act as recreation areas and market squares. In the middle of the city is the principal, large market square.
This square is my final destination when I travel to Johannesburg riding transport from the Cape. It is filled each morning with ox wagons loaded with produce from the Transvaal, the Cape Colony, Natal, and the Free State, sold to the highest bidder. In the centre of the square is a large brick building, 100 feet wide and 200 feet long, the market house proper. It is surrounded completely by coffee stalls. (3)
Traders between the Chains, Simmonds Street, Johannesburg. Supplied by Dirk Marais.
We met in the stately Mounts Bay Hotel in Pritchard Street. (4) At the hotel’s bar, time and chance overtook ability, as Solomon would have it, and completely by accident we met an old spice trader from Copenhagen. He drank a copious amount of beer, even at midday, while always smoking his pipe. He overheard us talking about bacon production and asked if we will be interested in the finest bacon spices from Denmark.
Two particular aspects of the meeting were very fortuitous. Firstly, it turned out that he had an intimate knowledge of the spice industry and could tell us exactly where we can get the best curing salt for meat. Secondly, he knew just the man who could teach us how to make good bacon on a large scale. He was insistent that if we were serious about learning this art, we should travel to Denmark first where he would introduce us to a young friend of his who did an apprenticeship in meat curing and cutting. (5) In doing this we realised that he is also helping himself for the future because if we are successful we would most certainly buy spices from him.
At the time I could not understand why we would learn the art of Wiltshire bacon curing, from a man in Denmark. Was it even the same process? How did the Danes do it? That night in the Mount Bay Hotel on Prichard street I had to much good local witblits with Oscar and the trader from Denmark to be overly concerned with this question. This is how it came about that Oscar and I made the plan of inviting friends and family to a meeting at his farm where we would establish our bacon curing company. We were resolved to give practical manifestation to our vision without any delay.
In the Cape Town Docks. Photo supplied by Martin Greshoff.
Soon I was back in Cape Town, wrapping up my business and preparing for the trip to Denmark. I met Uncle Jakobus at his Papendorp home with David de Villiers Graaff. The plan excited David. (6) I was reluctant to ask either him or Uncle Jakobus to invest in our venture. They would be our biggest client in the Cape and I did not want to compromise future price negotiations by having one of our main clients as an investor. Oscar was concerned about how such a move would be viewed by other potential clients who are opposition of Combrinck & Co in the market. So, I omitted the possibility of investing in our venture from our final moments together, being content to greet my old friends and share good Cape wine together. In later years I looked back with great fondness at this meeting. It was the last time I would see Uncle Jacobus.
David, on the other hand, I continued to see over the years, and our friendship grew even stronger. The next time we meet would be in Copenhagen. That same month, on 14 August 1890, David was elected as mayor of Cape Town at the young age of 31.
John Woodhead, a much older friend from our mountain climbing circle of friends, owned a leather tanning business (7) in town. He was the current mayor of Cape Town. He and David knew each other well. John bought almost all the hides from Combrinck & Co.. The young David grew up in front of him and after John’s second term in office as major (1886 and 1888), he proposed the young David as Major. (The Sheffield Daily Telegraph and Dommisse, page 43 -51)
Cape Town pier lit up at dusk and photographed back in 1925. Judging by how still the water is in the photo it must have been a pleasant calm evening back then. Photo and caption by Grant Findlater.
Photo supplied by Michael Fortune.
John knew Table Mountain and spent lots of time there on account of large civil projects which he initiated. There is the impressive Woodhead Reservoir and the Woodhead Tunnel. John who grew up in England came from a family of big civils people. There, one of his family members built the Woodhead Pass crossing the Pennine chain of hills.
I said farewell to my hiking buddies by trecking up Table Mountain with them one last time before I depart. The group that came up was Mike, Achmat, Taahir, Uncle John, Minette and I. For our last hike together before I leave for Denmark, we decided to do a very special hike. Mike was leading the group. He had previously spent about a year looking for Penny’s cave, an iconic cave on the mountain. When he located it, he investigated all possible access routes and could lead us on the safest and best way to it. We went up with Platteklip Gorge, past the slave caves (8), down with Grott Ravine, across to Fountain Ravine where we scrambled to Penny’s Cave (9). This mysterious and secluded cave overlooks the Atlantic. We spent the night here.
The cave is believed to be one of the locations where Joshua Penny lived for over a year. He was an American, impressed into the British Navy, who visited the Cape where he took part in the Battle of Muizenberg in 1795. He deserted and spent fourteen months in hiding on Table Mountain. So he became the person who is reported to have lived the longest on Table Mountain without any support from the city.
Jim Searle led an expedition of mountaineers in 1892 and 1894 to what is believed to be the main cave where Joshua Penny stayed. The cave is very difficult to find and access. It is located on Fountain Ravine on Table Mountain and it overlooks the Atlantic, just as Penny described in a book that he published about his adventures. The main clues of Penny’s use of this cave are items found in the cave that dates back to the time of Penny’s habitation and correlates to descriptions given by him about items of clothing and a knife he had with him. These items are beautifully displayed at the Cape Town offices of the Mountain Club of South Africa, courtesy of Mike Scott. Looking at all the evidence carefully, it is probable that the cave, identified as Panny’s Cave by the Mountain Club of South Africa, is indeed the right cave.
That night the small group of intimate friends laughed and told stories till long after midnight. We dreamed about the mountains that I would climb in Europe and celebrated our great friendship. I was, in particular, sad to say good buy to Minette.
Photo supplied by Andre Strydom.
A year earlier Julie and I decided to end our relationship, opting to rather stay the best of friends than living together as husband and wife. We married when we were children and as we grew up, realised that we are growing apart with vastly different views of life. This became a matter of bitter resentment from my larger family, but it was the right thing to do. It saddened my dad especially, but over the weeks and months and years, as he could see how we each individually were happier with our new circumstances, I think he made peace with it. Julie and I lived in very close proximity to each other on the slopes of Table Mountain and bringing kids up in two homes that close was a convenient arrangement for both of us in light of my many travels. It continued to baffle the Cape Town community, but we did not care for their opinions on the matter.
In the years following this, I became better friends than ever before with Minette who was now working for the Bank of the Netherlands in Cape Town. I started spending a lot of time with her seeking advice on financing our bacon company and we hiked up Table Mountain almost every weekend when I was home. I grew very fond of her and suddenly, sitting in Penny’s cave, watching the majestic sunset over the western ocean, I realised how much I would miss her.
The Nederlandsche Bank en Credietvereeniging voor Zuid-Afrika was founded on Thursday, 1 March 1888 in Amsterdam as the Nederlandsche Bank en Credietvereeniging voor Zuid-Afrika (“Dutch Bank and Credit Union for South Africa”). The bank opened its first offices in Church Street in Pretoria on 1 August (12) and Minette worked for their branch in Stellenbosch.
I spend a few days with my Mom and Dad, helping around the house and riding to work with Dad in the mornings. He encouraged me to seek the best artisan and to be trained by him. He told me that he wished he was young again and could embark on such an adventure with me.
Almost every moment of my last days at home I spent with the kids. Tristan and Lauren are the light of my life and the only thing that made it possible to leave them was the knowledge that what I learn would enable our new company to prosper so that we could provide for our families.
One spring morning, late in 1890, I was on the deck of a Danish vessel, en route for Copenhagen. I waved goodbye to everybody who came to the harbour to see me off. My gran, Ouma Susan, my mom and dad, my Uncle Jan Kok and his family, David de Villiers Graaff, the kids, my hiking friends, and Minette. My brothers, Andre and Elmar were also there. Oscar and Trudie came down from Potchefstroom to see me off and Oscar’s father in law, Anton. Dawie Hyman came down from Kimberley.
As the ship set sail and the crew was scrambling about, as Table Mountain and the view of my friends and family faded, my mind wandered back to Oscar’s voorkamer and the founding meeting of our company. The Harris family smoked their bacon if it was destined for one of the colonies on account of the added preserving power given by the smoke. (10) Since the clients would expect the same smokey flavour, we knew that our bacon would be wood smoked also. One of the Boer ladies who attended, a prolific artist, saw the connection of bacon, natural wood smoking and suggested the name Woody’s. (11) Oscar and I liked it and it became the name of our bacon company.
With a sudden cold sea breeze in my face and open sea ahead, with the greatest sense of excitement and expectation, I softly whispered to myself, “and so starts the adventure of Woody’s Bacon!!”
(1) Eben created the Woodys bacon brand in August 2007. Oscar, who had a distributions business in Potchefstroom, Transwest Distributors, joined forces with Eben in December of that year and in January 2008 they created Woody’s Consumer Brands (Pty) Ltd. together with Anton. They initially outsourced their manufacturing.
They started to prepare for their own factory in 2011. It was the culmination of a process that started on a flight between Johannesburg and Cape Town in January 2011 where Oscar and Eben decided to re-think the entire Woodys strategy and gear themselves for a much bigger company. Oscar and Eben has been joined by Willem on the Woodys Executive by this time. The first step of the plan was a transition from contract packers to an own factory.
(2) Quote from the KJV, would have been from the Dutch Statevertaling, the standard bible text used in 1890 among the Boers. In actuality, the text and its interpretation was suggested many years earlier to Eben by his friend Dawie Hyman who, apart from a qualified engineer, is also a graduate from the Masters Seminary and who was a pastor in Johannesburg before returning to the USA. It became one of Eben’s favourite Bible texts.
(3) Description of Johannesburg and the journey from Kimberley from The Burlington Free Press (Burlington, Vermont), 14 Feb 1890, page 7, Scenes in South Africa
(4) The Mounts Bay Hotel was built in 1889 in Pritchard Street and survived until 1909.
After Woody’s Consumer Brands was created, the first meeting was held at the Palazzo Hotel, at Montecasino, Johannesburg at the end of Jan 2011. It was attended by Eben and Oscar as well as Dawie Hyman who initially was part of the company and an investor who supported Eben while establishing the brand and a lifelong friend of Eben’s, Elmar, Eben’s brother who was initially involved in a scheme to procure pigs from small farmers in the Southern Cape and Sophia Krone, an old school friend if Eben, turned top-notch corporate consultant and executive coached who lead the inaugural meeting and who was very involved early on in direction and goal setting of the company. She did not like the out-sourced manufacturing model, predicting that the company would struggle until it had its own manufacturing plant.
(5) In 2011, Oscar and Eben met with the Danish owner of a spice company in Johannesburg. This paved the way for a visit to Denmark where they would start learning the art of bacon and be introduced to the spice industry by a skilled young man from Denmark who is both an expert in spices and a who did a deboning apprenticeship.
(6) In the 1890s, David visited Europe and the United States to investigate the use of refrigeration in meatpacking plants. In Chicago, he visited the Armour Meat Packing plant. In January 1890, back in South Africa, he exchanged letters with Pulsometer Engineering Company about the latest refrigeration technology. Soon afterward, refrigeration chambers were installed at Combrinck & Co. (Dommisse, page 31 – 33)
(7) J. Woodheads & Sons, a leather tannery business, was established by John Woodhead in 1867. The company exists to this day, still located in Cape Town, making it one of the oldest companies in South Africa.
(8) These are two shallow caves up Platteklip Gorge that were inhabited by runaway slaves. The caves are situated right next to the old footpath up the gorge just before one enters between two large vertical cliffs. This was still the route up by the late 1800’s and would have been the route that Eben, Minette, Achmat and Taahir took if they did the hike in 1890.
(9) Joshua Penny was an American, impressed into the British Navy, who visited the Cape, where he took part in the Battle of Muizenberg in 1795. He deserted and spent fourteen months in hiding on Table Mountain.
Jim Searle led an expedition of mountaineers in 1892 and 1894 to what is believed to be the main cave where Joshua Penny stayed (where he stayed the longest). The, very difficult to find and access, the cave is located on Fountain Ravine, Table Mountain and it overlooks the Atlantic, just as Penny described. The main clues of Penny’s use of this cave are items found in the cave that dates back to the time of Penny’s habitation and correlates to descriptions given by him about items of clothing and a knife he had with him. These items are beautifully displayed at the Cape Town offices of the Mountain Club of South Africa, courtesy of Mike Scott. Looking at all the evidence carefully, it is probable that the cave, identified as Panny’s Cave by the Mountain Club of South Africa, is indeed the right cave.
On 13 June 2019, Eben, Tristan, and Mike Wakeford hiked to Penny’s cave. To do so was a lifelong dream of Eben. Years earlier he mentioned this desire to Mike, a friend, and professional mountain guide. Mike has himself spent years investigating various access routes to the very secluded cave.
Eben flew back to Cape Town from Johannesburg where he was working at Van Wyngaardt on 12 June. On the morning of the 13th, on Minette’s birthday, the three set out to the cave. After their hike, Eben posted the following on FB.
“Around 10 years ago a relationship started with the story of Joshua Penny, the American who was pressed into service by the British, partook in the Battle of Muizenberg in 1795, deserted, learned bushcraft from the Khoi and who lived for a considerable time on Table Mountain. He escaped to Table Mountain in 1799 after he was arrested and faked injury. He lived in caves in Table Mountain, making traditional Khoi dishes and brewed beer from honey and smoking his pipe.
A member of the mountain club of SA located the cave. Jim Searle led an expedition of mountaineers in 1892 and 1894 to what is believed to be the main cave where Joshua Penny stayed. Articles were recovered that fit the description by Penny of what he took with him. It became known as Penny’s cave. He lived in many caves on the mountain but was this one of them and his last one where he left his few possessions? I was skeptical about this being one of his caves because a piece of wood that Penny used to cut small notches in to keep time was presumably found, and lost in the way down. Having been to the cave I am, however, convinced it was his caves. Its location is obscure enough and fits his way that he hunted animals by chasing them over cliffs. He may have discovered it while doing just this. It is secluded enough and difficult to get to which fits the choice a man in hiding.
It was an ordeal for young Penny. When he eventually went down after, think it was 2 years, the Danish Captain that he met on the Muizenberg side did not recognise him as human. He was probably wearing animal skins and his condition must have been very bad.
The location of the cave is not widely publicised and it is extremely difficult and treacherous to get to. Mike Wakeford spent years looking for ways to get to the cave. This morning T and I fulfilled a life long ambition to hike to it when Mike took us on the adventure of a lifetime. Minette, Luani, and Luan celebrate their B Day today and we gave Minette a present of getting a route that she and her sister will be able to use to get to his cave.
Here is the clip of our arrival at the cave this afternoon.
So many years of planning and research. Mikes amazing efforts of exploring all possible routes. Tristan, wow, joining us on an epic epic epic epic adventure. Everything on the origin of meat dished being inspired by Joshua’s story. Minette, our motivation to search for an accessible route. I am speechless tonight!!! Wow!! Wow!! Wow!!! Life is beautiful!!!!”
Here we arrive at the cave.
Here are the first glimpses of the cave.
Inside Pennys Cave.
(10) This is true as a historical fact. Bacon, in those days, sent to the colonies, was not only cured but smoked also. Coating the bacon with smoke gave it added antimicrobial protection on the long journey. In England, cured, unsmoked bacon is sold as a product option to this day while in the previous colonies, the bacon is usually cured and smoked.
(11) The name was suggested by Carina Lochner from Somerset West who also designed to Woodys logo as well as the Woody’s packaging for the first few years. The name originates from the fact that Woody’s is produced using natural wood smoke.
(12) “In 1903 the company was renamed to Nederlandsche Bank voor Zuid-Afrika (“Dutch Bank for South Africa”). In 1906, the bank expanded and an office in London was opened. The bank split in 1951, renaming its South African part as Nederlandse Bank in Suid-Afrika Beperk/Netherlands Bank of South Africa Limited (“NBSA”). In 1969, the number of South African shareholders increased significantly and the company became 100% South African-owned after the Bank Mees en Hope sold 20 percent of its shares. The South African part was completely independent. The Dutch part of the bank no longer exists. Syfrets SA and Boland Bank listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1969. In 1971 NBSA changed its name to Nedbank. Nedbank Group formed from the merger of Syfrets SA, Union Acceptances and Nedbank in 1973. In 1986 Old Mutual Limited became the major shareholder (53%) of Nedbank.
In 1992, Syfrets, UAL Merchant Bank, and Nedbank Investment Bank Division merged to become Nedcor Investment Bank (NIB). Old Mutual, Nedcor’s holding company, was demutualised and listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1999. It became a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. Nedcor and Old Mutual joined forces in an offshore private banking venture and acquired the Isle of Man and Jersey private banking business of Robert Fleming & Co. in 2001.
The new Nedcor Group was formed on 1 January 2003, combining Nedcor, BoE, Nedcor Investment Bank, and Cape of Good Hope Bank into one legal entity. The Nedcor Group was renamed the Nedbank Group on 6 May 2005. As part of the managed separation, on 15 October 2018, Old Mutual reduced its shareholding in Nedbank Group to 19,9%.” (Didi Basson, https://www.facebook.com/groups/TodayinSouthAfricanHistory/)
References:
Dommisse, E. Sir David de Villiers Graaff, First Baronet of De Grendel. 2011. Tafelberg.
Heinrich, Adam R. 2010. A zooarcheaelogical investigation into the meat industry established at the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East Indian Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, The State University of New Jersey.
Linder, Adolphe. 1997. The Swiss at the Cape of Good Hope. Creda Press (Pty) Ltd
The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Wednesday, 20 April 1898, Obituary
Simons, Phillida Brooke. 2000. Ice Cold In Africa. Fernwood Press
Photo Credits:
New York Tribune, Sunday, 18 March 1900, Page 23, The War in South Africa
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
The Greatest Adventure
Johannesburg, May 1890
Crossing the Vaal River, c 1890
Soon after I started my transport business, I married the daughter of a German immigrant who set up a blacksmith business, making wagon wheels in Port Elisabeth, Colin Beckmann. I met Julie at church. We fell in love and decided to build a life together. She was 20 and I was 26.
Her grandfather on her mother’s side was the British High Commissioner to Zambia and very English. My parents were delighted with our relationship. Not on account of the position of her grandfather but because they thought I would never find a wife!
My friend, David (Dawie) de Villiers-Graaff had a different focus. He told me many times whenever I brought the subject of marriage up that he will marry as soon as he made his millions. I thought about those words often over the years and wonder who was a millionaire at 25. Him with millions in the bank or me with my family with two kids. Then again, he created a wealth that will last many generations and engineered advantages for his children and successive generations. Looking back on my life, having children early is still a choice I would make 100 times over.
Very soon after our marriage, I was back on the road, hauling mainly food and building materials between the Cape and Johannesburg. Even when Julie was pregnant with our two children, Tristan and Lauren, I did not stay home very long, always being driven by a strange mix of a somewhat misplaced quest for adventure and a drive to care for my young family. When I was home we were happy together but being away from home had its toll on our relationship.
The Vijloensdrift Ferry, c 1900
On one of my trips in 1890, I was crossing Vijoensdrift. It is a few hours ride outside Potchefstroom and one of the best places to cross the Vaal River on your way to Johannesburg.
I was contracted by a certain Mr. Vincent Reeves to transport chickens to the Johannesburg market. Mr. Reeves, originally from Minnesota in the USA, purchased land in the Parys district and set up a chicken farm. He studied chicken farming intensely and was successful in Minnesota. Upon learning about the discovery of gold on the Rand, he conceived a plan to buy land in the Transvaal Republic, not far from Johannesburg to farm chickens for sale in the lucrative Reef market where gold mining was exploding. (1)
Mr. Reeves was, by all accounts, a very good chicken farmer but not well versed in geography. An unscrupulous fellow back in Minneapolis convinced him that Parys was closer to Johannesburg than it actually turned out to be. The reality is that Parys is in the Orange Free State and Johannesburg in the Transvaal – two different Boer republics. Nevertheless, he thought it was close enough, which it is, and forged ahead, setting up the farm. On this day I was trying to cross the Vaal river at Viljoensdrift with Mr. Reeves’ chickens on my ox wagon, taking them to the Johannesburg market.
It was after a particularly wet spell and the river was high. I was tired after a long journey, eager to get to Johannesburg and my exhaustion caused an error in judgment. I should have taken better notice of the speed and level of the river. We should not have crossed at that time.
Hans Viljoen had set up the ferry and by 1857 was taking travelers, their horses, and wagons across the Vaal River. Over the years, the crossing became known as Viljoensdrift. (2) This was where I was making the crossing.
Everything went according to plan. Just before we reached the Transvaal side of the river, one of the ferry anchors came loose. It tilted slightly to one side and dipped into the rushing current. As the ferry got pushed down, my wagons started rolling forward. Desperately I tried stopping it from the front but it was too heavy. On it was Mr. Reeves chickens, salt, maize, and building materials. I had little chance.
On the Transvaal side of the river, a Boer from the Potchefstroom district was waiting to cross himself. His name, Oscar Klynveld. He was sitting on the bank, on his horse, when the anchor rope came loose. With no hesitation, he spurred his horse on and raced towards the ferry while yelling to others on the bank to come and help.
Crossing the Vaal was not always smooth sailing. Here, an ox wagon got stuck crossing the Vaal river.
His horse plunged into the water. He kept feeling the depth of the water with the handle of his whip (5) with water swirling around his horse’s chin as it tried to keep its head above the water. The surging river caused the ferry to tilt dangerously and bags of grain dislodged from the wagon. Oscar jumped into the water and swam the last few meters next to his horse.
He pushed himself up onto the ferry. His trusted steed turned to make it back to the land. Oscar scrambled onto the ferry and grabbed hold of the one front wheel, shouldering back against the forward motion of the wagon. Together we held it. Tentatively.
He continued to scream at others to swim faster to get to us. Within the blink of an eye, there were five Boers on the ferry and we held the wagons back till the wagon was steadied. I saw Hans Viljoen running down to the landing site of the ferry, cursing and swearing at his workers who, by this time, re-fasten the anchor that came loose.
The ferry, my wagons and seven, very wet and cold, Boers made it safely to the Transvaal side of the Vaal River. That was how a friendship started that would last a lifetime.
Oscar invited me to his farm, not far from Vijoensdrift. I left one of my men in charge of the wagons and set off on my horse, Lady. Oscar was farming in the old Boer republic of Transvaal, in the Potchefstroom district. When I told him about Mr. Reeves and his chickens, he was eager to learn more since he heard similar stories about farmers in Europe and America who set up successful pig farms close to large cities. He was always looking for ways to expand his farming operation. What interested him about pork farming was how one sow produced many piglets compared to cows and sheep and you can take the pigs to the market sooner. There was already large chicken farms around Potchefstroom and he had no interest in competing with them.
On my account, I did not know much about farming, but I did know a great deal about Dawie, Uncle Jacobus and Combrinck & Co. who bought and slaughtered many pigs. They even farmed for themselves. They supplied the public in Cape Town, the passing ships at the Cape of Good Hope and had contracts with the Cape government to supply the navy and the army. (3) Oscar saw the opportunity to not only supply Johannesburg but as soon as the railway line is linked all the way from Johannesburg to Cape Town, why not sell the pigs to Combrinck & Co.!
Johannesburg markplein …1890. Photo supplied by Nico Moolan.
Oscar and I talked till late in the night. His wife, Trudie kept making us fresh coffee. We wondered about selling pigs. I, of course, knew how to dry cure bacon. It was, so to speak, in my blood from childhood. We could cure our own bacon! Of course, Uncle Jacobus already made and sold bacon using my dad’s recipe, but making it was a long and slow process that could only be done during the winter. As a result of this, Combrinck & Co. imported much bacon. The best imported bacon was produced by the Harris family in Calene, in Wiltshire, England. Oscar and I reasoned that if they can produce large volumes of bacon and sell it here in South Africa, why can’t we cure the bacon in Potchefstroom and sell it across the country? We could possibly even export it to other countries!
One thought led to another and as we spoke, a clear plan started to emerge that involved producing and selling bacon. Later that evening after supper Oscar and I transitioned from coffee to witblits (4). I told him about my misgivings about the future of the country and that I did not see riding transport as a long term occupation. Not only was I skeptical about the safety of such an occupation in a land which I saw becoming more divided by the day and racial prejudice and distrust increasing, I also expected the railway line between the Cape and Johannesburg to be completed very soon and there would be no more need for the transport rider. On his side he was eager to diversify away from cattle farming and the prospect of processing the meat further appealed to him.
That night I was not just a young man who cured bacon once a year on his grandparents farm. I was a master butcher who could do anything. Together, we saw ourselves as invincible and everything seemed easy. We knew the right people and had the right skills to farm, make the bacon and sell it. How difficult could it be?
Over the years we have many times thought back to the many similar discussions we had in the beginning. Little did we know what skill, knowledge, and capital it took to set up and run a bacon curing company. Especially to make good quality bacon like the Harris family with their Wiltshire cured bacon.
That night in Potchefstroom we had all the answers to life’s questions and it is right that young people should think like this. Otherwise, if tainted by the skepticism of experience, nothing new will ever be started. There are very few times when ignorance is a good thing but in this case, it really was. If we knew how difficult the voyage would be that we embarked on, we would never have done it! As it is, it turned out to be the start to the greatest adventures ever!
(1) Vincent H. Reeves from the Twin Cities, Minnesota was a chicken farmer and an entrepreneur in the 1890’s who owned a 10-acre farm in the Golden Valley. He made a careful study of the chicken industry and devised to use steam to do away with the hens altogether for incubation. (Saint Paul Globe, page 5)
Eben and Oscar met when Eben was the Johannesburg Depot manager for Goosebumps Frozen Foods and Oscar was the owner of Transwest Distributors, located in Potchefstroom. Oscar was a sub-distributor, used by Goosebumps to service farts of Gauteng and the North West province. One of the commodities that Eben and Oscar worked on together during this time was the distribution of frozen chickens. Oscar had Eben’s name saved on his phone for a long time as “Eben Chicken.”
(2) “It started with the drift, that is a river crossing over the Vaal. Hans Viljoen advertised in 1857 that he has a pond and is able to ferry people, wagons and live stock over the Vaal on his father’s farm Witkop…. Until a few years ago one could still see the steel post to anchor the rope. The crossing must have been active until 1927 when the road bridge (single lane) was constructed.” (ruralexploration)
(3) It is this tradition of supplying the general public, state departments and the navy of Combrinck & Ross (Domisse, page 26) that, I believe, laid the foundation of the future success of David de Villiers-Graaff with Combrinck & Co and later Imperial Cold Storage & Supply Ltd. They continued to supply the British army and won the contract to supply meat to the British forces during the Second Anglo-Boer war which contributed substantially to the wealth generated through the company.
Woody’s Brands was created in the first place to supply retail. This is a notoriously difficult market to enter but both Eben and Oscar had mainly retail experience and for them was a natural starting point. It was buyers at Shoprite and Pick ‘n Pay who motivated Eben to create the Woody’s Brands and who gave the company its first break. Retail remained the almost exclusive focus of the company during its first 5 years, until around 2015 when its own factory made it possible for them to enter catering and food services markets.
(4) Witblits or “white lightning,” similar to Moonshine is a brandy made from grapes.
(5) The image of measuring the depth of the water with a whip I got from a series of articles I did on the life of Petrus Pooe. “Petrus remembers that the Vaal River was in flood, and describes the difficulty experienced in crossing it above Lindequesdrift. “I had never seen such drama in my life,” he says. He remembers his father feeling the depth of the water with the handle of his oxen whip, his brother Samuel leading the oxen into the water until it was swirling around his chin, the surging river dislodging bags of grain from the wagons.”
The photo is Crossing the Vaal (at Vereeniging) published on the web by The Heritage Portal. The life and story of Perus Pooe is from, Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa by Tim Keegan, 1988, published by David Philip, Cape Town.
References:
Dommisse, E. Sir David de Villiers Graaff, First Baronet of De Grendel. 2011. Tafelberg.
Saint Paul Globe (Saint Paul, Minnesota), 3 March 1890, Page 5, Chickens by Steam.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
Drums of Despair
Johannesburg, December 1889
In 1889 my life was carefree! I was fully fascinated by the world I was born into. Riding transport between the Colony and Johannesburg allowed me to forge a bond with the disappearing natural world and my interactions with the people of the land allowed me to study the human condition up close. Both nature and the human mind were possible pathways to connect with the eternal. Nature is an obvious point of connection. It is our culture that carries our religion and since it is the primary human connection with the divine I wanted to learn more about it. Its up-close and intimate study was the unintended benefits of my first profession as a transport rider. When I later chose to take up meat curing as a profession it was this exact same drive that caused in me the desire to understand it completely.
I found that when I considered myself and life around me, I understood everything, including myself, to be temporal. My mind, however, perceived the eternal. Despite the fleeting nature of life and its ever-changing cycles, I continually searched for that which is permanent. The grandeur of Africa, I could see with my own eyes, to be very impermanent. A consideration of the human mind, likewise, did not bring me any closer to what is eternal. My experience at the Shambles brought about grave doubts if the human mind, despite the noblest mental inventions of language, writing and the evolution of constructs such as tribe, nation and religion, could stop humans from wandering into the most ghastly cruelty. It rather seemed to me that the exact same mechanics that build the mental worlds of algebra and trigonometry, language, nationhood and marriage, created cruel systems of torture and horror.
I kept on searching, but before I could make real progress, I had to understand the evolution of thought much better. In particular, I needed to see the mental devices of our enormous brains at work. It was when I looked into this that I, on the one hand, identified only turmoil and strife for our land’s future. The mind, I saw, give us the ability to build a complex set of assumptions that we aproach life with. The natural world is unaware of our tribal affiliations or our systems of faith. Without humans, these notions disappear completely. The biggest impact of our culture on nature is where culture leads to our manipulation of nature and, as is mostly the case, our destruction of it.
On the other hand, I saw that despite the evolution of thought, even the notions of gods and demons, heaven and hell, are unable to align the human condition with what is eternal and fixed. I saw that if anything, these concepts brought about greater strife on earth and increased our cruelty to one another and a continual destruction of nature. So overwhelming was the evidence of this that I completely gave up on it at a very young age. I later abandoned my quest to touch the eternal and fixed for practical reasons of earning a living. It was then that I ventured into meat curing. What follows is the final lessons I had to learn to become thoroughly disellusioned with our mental world and any notions of a peaceful future for southern Africa. It was the simple, age-old disciplines of the art of curing and the wonderful complexity of the mechanics underlying it which became the tool that took me by the hand and brought me to the answer of permanency in a temporary existence. The rest of my story gives the account how this unfolded.
Reports from the Church
Inquisitiveness was in my blood and at 20 I was eager to know what forces are crafting our world. I had to consider if riding transport, which allowed me to study nature and the cultures of our land, would bring me any closer to the answers I was looking for. Daniel Jacobs whom I had the pleasure to host at my campsite was a dedicated student of history. He was an author and a historian with a special interest in church and family history. He always travelled with his books. To him, they were his closest companions and it allowed him to read the most fascinating quotes to me. I became obsessed with tracing a story back to the very beginning and the first contact of Europeans with the people of southern Africa fascinated me.
These points of first contact showcased the different cultures and would uncover the true nature of human inventions to me, whether physical or mental images. I was too young to have been an eye witness to the first contacts but fortunately there exist many first-hand accounts from others. It was Daniel Jacobs. for example, who told me about the early years of the Cape Colony from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed Church. This was important since the Dutch Reformed Church became the dominant church in South Africa for many years and since it was the most important Boer church, its voice would be, if anything, biased to the Boer settlers. If it, therefore, paints the early colonists in an unfavourable light in its relation to the indigenous tribes, there is a great deal of credibility to the report. The night when we camped together, he read me some of his own poetry and when we spoke about the early history of the Colony, he fetched a book on the Dutch Reformed Church and read me sections from it. I was fascinated by an entry from 1795.
The DRC recorded how it saw the history, that “the colonists had been gradually spreading over the lands occupied by the Hottentot (1) and Bushman(1) tribes. These, too weak to make resistance, looked with no satisfaction on the arrival of the whites in their midst. As the latter were taking their lands, they retaliated by driving off cattle, and the Boers, taking up their long-barrelled hunting guns, exacted bloody and cruel revenge. The colonists ground down and oppressed by those in authority, spread themselves thus, heedless of the threats and admonitions of their government. That they did not spread more widely to the north and east was owing to the fact, that along their northern line the arid deserts skirting the Orange River offered little temptation to transgress the boundary, while at the eastern extremity they were fronted by the warlike and independent Amakoze Kaffirs (1), who, far from allowing any inroad into their territory, commenced a system of aggression upon the colonists.”
The “matter-of-fact” commentary by the Dutch church in Africa startled me. It was the stories about this eastern frontier that my dad would later tell me in great detail, that convinced me that the Dutch church was wrong in painting the indigenous tribes as the aggressor. The real aggressor was the white people, as he was in the rest of the land. What I started to discover was not the facts of what happened. These are very well documented. I started to understand the thinking that was driving the action.
“The farms, particularly in the east, lay very remote from one another, and between them lived the Hottentots (1) in their miserable kraals and smoky huts,” Daniel continued. “They still went unclothed, only covered with a kaross. The governor had forbidden, under pain of severe punishment, that any Hottentot (1) should be enslaved. Still, it was frequently done, as slaves proper were dear to purchase. Many Hottentots (1) and slaves ran away from their masters, particularly if badly used, and formed themselves into bands to rob and murder, and make the outlying farms unsafe.” (M’Cater, 1869)
My own experience informed me that the church was right. So completely devoid of respect were the colonists of the African people that hunters could, in later years apply on hunting permits for animals to kill Khoi or Bushman. The level of brutality by invading Europeans towards the people, beasts and places of this land is hard to fathom or put in words. Not only the Dutch Boers, but the English also partook heartily in the orgy of violence. They shared in the most savage treatment of the Southern African tribes. My dad told me about the wars in the Eastern Frontier.
The Frontier in the East
The savagery of the English knew no bounds! I always stop myself when I say this to add that many English were fierce opponents of slavery and brutality towards indigenous peoples, motivated by the English Church. Oom Stefanus Jordaan who’s farm I once visited told me that the continuation of the practice of slavery in the Transvaal was the spiritual motivation for the English to annex it and for the Anglo-Boer war of 1880 and 1881. (2) From the same parliament in London, not only unspeakable evil emanated but also good!
Even in my lifetime, visiting Boer farms in the Transvaal left me with a bitter-sweet taste in my mouth and I could see that the attitudes of the farmers were steeped in a long tradition of oppression and destruction. On the one hand, these people were the warmest and heartiest people I knew. Rugged, industrious and hard working with a faith that almost moved mountains. On the other hand, I was angry to see the little black kids, indentured by people like the Jordaan’s on account of the fact that they were caught on their farms or captured when the Boers raided native villages or bought as “black ivory” on auctions like you would trade cattle. Slavery was alive and well in the independent Boer republics even after the Anglo Boer War and the treatment of black people in this way was a source of great anguish for me. It was and could never be right that any person treats another with such cruelty and disdain. This knowledge was one of my earliest childhood memories, the horror I felt when I saw people being mistreated.
The amaXhosa
In few other places in our land did the savagery of the English find a greater expression than in the eastern frontiers of the Cape Colony. The indigenous people they encountered here was the amaXhosa. The Xhosa nation never adopted the monarch as a powerful, centralizing figure such as the Zulus from Natal. In the Xhosa tradition, he was always viewed as the figurehead of the nation. The king, for example, do not appoint the chiefs. They are appointed by the people. When new chiefs secured the support of his people, the king would formally appoint them. In the same way, even the kingship itself was secured after a struggle between the possible heirs of the throne. The monarch would settle disputes and declare wars. The king ruled by the council of his chiefs.
The Xhosa developed a system called segmentation which allowed for the chiefs more aggressive and ambitious sons to depart and carve out an existence away from the ruler’s house, called the Great House. This was often the case with eldest sons from the Right Hand House which was a Xhosa invention to give status to the second favourite wife’s children, referred to as the right-hand wife and the accompanying Right Hand House. In this way, sons could splinter off their father’s house and establish new chiefdoms and still remain part of the amaXhosa.
The Colonial expansion to the east came in direct conflict with the Xhosa kingdom. The shadowy figure of Phalo set his Great Place from where the tribe would be ruled up to the west of the Kei River. The struggle for dominance between his sons would set the stage for another brutal war against the Cape Colony on its Eastward Expansion.
A short introduction to some of the key players in the drama is in order to set the stage. Gcaleka inherited the Phalo’s Great House with Rharhabe as his Right Hand son. When Phalo passed away in around 1775, Gcaleka was the heir of Phalo’s Great House. Rharhabe was his right hand son. In an ensuing battle for the throne, Rharhabe lost to Gcaleka and the former moved west of the Kei with his followers. The white Colonists would later call this region Ciskei. The region where Phalo resided with Gcalekas Great House later became known as Transkei.
Two dominant tribes now emerged. To the west of the Kei river was the amaRharhabe and to the east, amaGcaleka. This is important only to Xhosa people. As far as foreigners are concerned, they are all part of the amaXhosa. When Phalo died, Khwawuta succeeded him. West of the Kei, Rharhabe was killed in battle in around 1782 along with his heir, Mlawu. Mlawu’s son, Ngqika became hair apparent but since he was still underage, his uncle, Ndlambe was appointed till Ngqika would be old enough to rule. Ndlambe was the second son of Rarhabes Great House and Mlawu’s full brother.
Back to the east of the Kei River, Khawuta died in 1794. The heir in line as chief of the amaGcaleka was his son Hintsa who was also to be the ruler of the amaXhosa. Councellors would rule in his place till he come of age. This means that both houses to the east and west of the Kei were ruled by minors. As the minors grew up old scores had to be settled with other chiefs and more importantly, with the Cape Colony.
It would be the stories of the frontier wars in the East of the Colony that would provide me with the clearest picture of what the invasion by the colonists did to the psyche of the locals. It became my most vivid example of the development of the mental landscape in the minds of people, called religion.
I spoke to my dad about the Jordaans’ and what I learned from Daniel. He told me that the Boers religion gave them the justification in their eyes to “leave” the Colony where they felt marginalised and treated unfairly and trek to the promised lands where they had, according to the belief of many, the right to dispossess the heathens (as they saw them) who occupy it. It seemed as if they had their religious beliefs forever, but here, in the case of the amaXhosa, I could see the progression of a god concept and how it morphed almost in front of my eyes. It was the actions of the Boers and the English in particular which caused the development of a theology among native tribes which does not bode well for the future. Like the Jews developed their Messianic theology in slavery and the Apostle John penned the book of Revelations under intense persecution by the Romans, so the soul of the black African, desperately trying to make sense of the rape of his culture and the persistent onslaught upon his existence, found solace in their deep spirituality which was progressed to bring hope. In so doing, the drums of desperation and despair would be heard for generations to come in this magnificent land.
The Cruelty of the English and the Faith of the amaXhosa
My dad loved telling stories. A story, as I learned, must have a beginning, middle and end. My dad’s story began with the arrival of a new leader for the Colony at the Cape of Good Hope in Lord Charles Somerset, the second son of the fifth Duke of Beaufort, a direct descendant of King Edward III of England. He arrived in Cape Town on 6 April 1814 as the new governor. Emotions ran high on the eastern front of the Colony preceded by 4 bloody wars with the amaXhosa as the Colony expanded and continued to dispossess amaXhosa land. As Summerset arrived, war was again looming on the eastern front. To stabilise it, he first sorted out matters with the Boers. After a small Boer uprising was put down and the ringleaders dealt with, believing that he firmly entrenched English supremacy and their new rule over the Dutch, by 1816 he turned his attention to the amaXhosa.
In Summerset’s estimation, he had two options in dealing with them. He could either completely conquer the amaXhosa and rule over them as subjects of the Colony or they had to be driven out beyond its borders. The amaXhosa continued to raid farms into areas that previously belong to them. Somerset, from his English- and Eurocentric perspective, believed he could “civilize” them. He looked towards the missionaries to teach them improved agriculture and a more peaceful Christian existence. My dad told me that Somerset remarked to Earl Bathurst that through these interactions “civilization and its consequences may be introduced into countries hitherto barbarous and unexplored.” My dad, as a follower of Alexander von Humboldt, did not share Somerset’s English and Euro-centric view of the superiority of their culture and had great respect for the sophistication of the indigenous peoples and their technology which, according to him, was above all, more in balance with the natural laws governing our world.
In the end, Somerset chose intimidation as his first direct engagement with the amaXhosa as he tried to end their cross border raids. He arranged an audience with the chiefs who ruled to the west of the Kei River, Ngqika and Ndlambe with some minor chiefs. So I became familiar with two iconic figures in the life of the amaXhosa in King Ngqika and Prince Ndlambe. Somerset incorrectly assumed that they speak for the entire amaXhosa nation who were ruled by two houses since the time of Phalo, the son of Tshiwo, the son of Ngconde, son of Sikhomo, son of Nkosiyamutu, son of king Xhosa. Since the time of Phalo, there has been a Great House under his son Gcaleka and a right-hand house under his son Rharabe. It was Rharhabe who crossed the Kei River with a number of followers who fought a bitter war against the Khoi in the area over land and cattle and eventually killed their king Hinsati. He negotiated the sale of land for his tribe from the Queen, Hobo, between the Keiskamma and Buffalo rivers.
Like a complete fool, Summerset staged the meeting with Ngqika and Ndlambe as a theatre-like production intended to intimidate. Summerset was present with his soldiers in full arms while the chiefs had to leave their soldiers behind. Somerset sat on a chair while the amaXhosas had to squad on the floor. Ngqika was the senior chief present. Ngqika was the grandson of Rahrabe or the son of his great house. This gave him the rightful claim to the amaXhosa throne!, Still, in the Xhosa tradition, he could not make binding agreements on behalf of the other amaRharhabe chiefs. Ngqika tried to explain this to him but Somerset wanted none of it. He lost his temper and with gifts and threats coerced Ngqika into an agreement that the chief could not enforce. Confident that he solved the problems of the Eastern Frontier, Somerset returned to Cape Town.
There was another reason why Ngqika was the wrong horse to back in peace negotiations. In 1794 he attacked the great house of Gcaleka to the east of the Kei River. Hintsa, who was only 5 when his father died in 1794 was imprisoned by Ngqika, had by this time come of age and turned out to be a good and popular leader. Under his leadership, the Great House of the amaXhosa reestablished itself and was now intent on asserting control over the chiefdoms west of the Kei. Of course, this meant settling a score he had with Ngqika and he naturally supported Ndlambe as the chief of the amaRharhabe. This support from Hintsa and the new support he received from his powerful son, Mdushane gave Ndlambe great courage. The other encouragement he received was the support he got from a powerful war doctor, Nxele. In a sense, everything I told you about so far is only background information to set the context of this remarkable man who would have a profound influence on the religious life of the amaXhosa. It would be the gifted and spiritual Nxele that would become my eyewitness account of the development of religion and the mental images that binds cultures together.
The Gospel According to Nxele
Nxele was “spiritual”, even as a child. The great scholar, Tisani, a friend of my dad, says about Nxele that he “was a solitary, mysterious child, often wandering off by himself. When he grew older Nxele went to live in the bush for extended periods. He fasted there and on occasional visits home he refused food because, he claimed, it had become unclean during preparation through the sins of his people.” (Tisani, 1987) Early on in his life, he was already recognised as a diviner who called out the sin of his people.
He led the mourning ceremony after Chief Rharhabe and his son Mlawu passed away. Long before he learned about Christianity, he was a spiritual leader, at least in the same league as the Missionaries he would later encounter. His creativity would prove him to be not only on the same level but superior to them in his natural ability and perception of the power of the divine narrative.
These innovations of Nxele came in the context of a bitter war with the Colony. He experienced the treat of the Colony to his people on many levels. He started to meet the men whom Somerset relied on to bring about a peaceful British takeover, the English missionaries. He stayed with Chief Ngquika at Joseph Williams’s mission station for a week where he was exposed to elements of Christianity and its messengers. From the start, there was tension between Nxele and the missionaries.
Nxele was able to see through the intentions of the missionaries and still, to taker the good out of their message. He started to use concepts that he was exposed to by the missionaries and so he preached against witchcraft, theft, adultery and blood-shedding, decidedly Christian themes. At one point he chastised Chief Ndlambe for having more than one wife. He was not opposed to the total teachings of the missionaries and as a result of his influence, the missionaries were accepted among the amaXhosa.
Chief Maqoma. South African History Online. March 7, 2013.
He was able to identify the fault lines, not only in the Christian system of belief, but also the inconsistencies in the lives of its evangelists. At the heart of the missions of the whites was a belief that they were “better”. Their message, their God, their culture, their language, their music, their laws were in their mind “better” and in their view, the African was inherently inferior.
It disappointed Nxele greatly! Where he respected them for their spirituality and their pursuit of the good in humans, they did not reciprocate in attitude. The missionaries saw him as inferior to them. The “we alone are right” and “we are better” attitude of many Christians is something that I find odd to this day contrary to the heart of their message. Nxele’s respect for the Christian message and his disappointment in the messengers is something that I would experience myself in the years to follow. His profound disappointment resonates with me.
He correctly saw the Missionaries as equally zealous to proselytise the amaXhosa to the English culture and customs as much as to the gospel of Jesus Christ. In a direct response to the desperate plight of the amaXhosa in the face of the brutality of the English and the Boer, Nxele expanded on the belief system of the amaXhosa. From his deep spirituality, and no doubt, in an effort to give hope to the afflicted and to try and make sense of the brutality perpetrated against them, he progressed their theology and taught that there were two Gods being Thixo and Ndaliphu. According to his teachings, Thixo is the God of the Whites and Mdalidiphu, the God of Blacks. Mdalidiphu is superior to Thixo and the world was the battleground between the two – the age-old struggle between good and evil.
Nxele’s theology taught that Mdalidiphu would prevail against Thixo and punish him and his sinful followers. Nxele’s next progression reminds me of the sermon on the mount of Jesus when he said, “you have heard it taught of old, but I say to you. . .” In other words, I now give a new law thereby becoming a lawgiver myself as the son of God. Nxele did something similar when he said to the amaXhosa, “you have heard it said of old, but I say to you. . .” He too became a lawgiver. According to him, Tayi was the son of God and in an extraordinary move, like Jesus, he proclaimed himself as the son of God when he taught that he is the brother of Tayi. According to him, Tayi was killed by the white people and for this, they were thrown into the sea. They emerged from the sea in search of land, the abantu abasemanzi. Nxele was, therefore, the agent of Mdalidiphu and his son and it was he who would drive the white man back into the sea. His teachings were remarkable and powerful to a nation where the fabric of its society was being assailed on all sides.
One can see the comfort that his message brought to people, dispossessed from their lands and brutalised in every way possible. The hope that it inspired in the hearts of young and old reminds me of the hope the Messianic prophecies brought to Israel in exile in the land of Babylon. The fact that one people could inflict such suffering on another to precipitate a shift in theology stands as a testament to the cruelty of humans and at the same time, the resilience of the human spirit which is able to carve out hope amidst the most desperate situations! It speaks to the brilliance of Nxele! It also showcases a cultural device that oppressed people used, probably from the earliest time when the first cognitive and conscious humans roamed Africa, in which the human mind develops mythology to gives hope amid desperate circumstances. It connects us with the universal consciousness and allows us to look beyond our immediate circumstances. This is the exact same device that sprang Christianity itself and still, at this junction in the east of southern Africa, it was Christianity who brought about this unspeakable opression.
A Gospel of Peace or Eternal Struggle
If we now juxtapose the position of Pretorius and the fundamental Calvinism of the Boers who saw the land before them as a gift of God to be taken and from which all who do not serve their God must be driven with the teachings of Nxele, the clouds of war which I saw from the actions of the Boer and the Brit, becomes drums of war which declare the certainty of a bloody future. Locked up in the beating of the drums was a plea for recognition and humanity.
My dad did not have contact with tribes from the north and could not know their theological leanings, but he told me that he would not be surprised if the same fundamental religious developments were taking place in the black consciousness across the region as proud owners of the land, setting them up, in the most fundamental way against the colonial people and their drive to disposes the African tribes politically, culturally and in terms of land. Whenever I brought up the history of brutal attacks of Voortrekkers venturing into the interior by local tribes, my dad’s response was always the same. “What did they expect? How would they respond to invaders into their own lands?” My dad had only harsh words to Voortrekker icons, but reserved his harshest criticism for people like Summerseat and later Rhodes as the enemy of humanity itself and examples of the most wicked of humans.
The supernatural world had failed to deliver and the amaXhosa was faced with two options. Either they had to rise up against the white invaders with the help of the divine or they had to submit themselves to the new order as preached by the missionaries who laboured among them.
Two Roads
In the world of the amaXhosa, Ndlambe was recognised as the leader of the chiefs to the East of the Kai River and he had the support of the powerful Nxele. Each Rharhabe chief, however, had the freedom to choose his own spiritual counsellors and in reality, they did not all agree with Nxele. Chiefs chose councillors who mirrored what path they themselves favoured. This was nothing sinister or to be frowned upon. It was custom, and truth be told, in line with how these matters were being handled in Europe. Not that this matter as some kind of a higher standard, but it must be said for Europeans who would frown on this, forgetting their own history! It was the practice that the spiritual counsellor would limit his dialogue between the chief and the supernatural to what the chief was willing to accept.
King Sandile, Nienaber, C and Hutten, (2008) L. The Grave of King Mgolombane Sandile Ngqika: Revisiting the legend, The South African Archaeological Bulletin
The two rivals Ngqika and Ndlambe represented two opposing choices to the nation. Ngqika appointed Ntsikana as counsellor who was a Christian convert. His message was one of peaceful coexistence with Europeans through submission. Ndlambe, on the other hand, had the independent-minded Nxele who did not see himself as subservient to the Christian Missionaries; who was longing to see the awakening of black identity and prophesied that the amaXhosa would prevail against the white man. These notions were fundamentally part of the being of Nxele as we have seen from the theology he preached.
Nxele, patronised by Ndlambe grew in political power and wealth. He encouraged his adherents to, as it were, “go forth, multiply and fill the earth.” It is interesting that Boer leaders in later years would likewise encourage their people to have many children to strengthen the Boer numbers. Nxele taught that he would bring back to life the black people who had died and their cattle. He prophesied about a long and prosperous future for his people, built upon resisting the white invaders of their land!
Nxele served a useful purpose to Ndlambe in building support from other chiefs against Ngqika. Ngqika was married to Thuthula, Ndlambe’s wife whom he abducted and Nxele preached against him as an adulterer and their marriage as an incestuous relationship. This served the purpose of Ndlambe well.
In contrast to this was the theology of Ntsikana. He was driven by a vision he had to preach the Christian message in isiXhosa using Xhosa imagery and traditional forms of music. He used the image of God as a cloak that protects all true believers and the way to peace was by submitting to his will. Initially, he approached Ndlambe to be his patron, who wanted none of it. It was after this that he turned to Ngqika. Ngqika never converted to Christianity and never had a sizable following. Still, Ngqika saw his teachings in line with his own view of cooperation with the white colonists and appointed him as a counsellor. Ntsikana, in line with his theology, encouraged him to seek an alliance with the British. Ntsikana passed away in 1821 and his small group of followers were entrusted to the care of the British Missionaries.
This was the setting for another bitter war on the eastern frontier, the first where Somerset would be involved. So it happened that I was able to see the development of theology from the stories of my dad.
I discovered that not all good stories need to have a beginning, middle and end. That it really depends on what you want from the story and if you have what you wanted, sometimes it’s good to leave it there. So it is with this story. My intention is not to re-tell the story of the war. It is the development of the Black contentiousness in response to the colonial aggression which was the point my dad wanted to convey and the fact which informed my decisions about my future. It also taught me the valuable lesson that our religion exists only in our minds. It is our own creation. and as much part of our culture as our language and our technology. Without us, it does not exist. As such, it has no perminancy. It is not fixed, but ebbs and flows with the tide of human affairs.
Seeds of War on African Soil
Seeds of war were germinating in the soil of Africa. The exploits of the invader and the resister alike were being calcified through their religious belief systems and in a world where neither the white colonists nor the black people would disappear or annihilate the other, it signalled a long and bitter future of deep mistrust, hatred and bloodshed. I projected that true peace would not come as long as the traditional Afrikaans church represented the majority of the white population. That the time would have to come where a new religion must take hold which is not focussed on annihilating and dispossessing and killing, but where a positive message of hope and possibilities would prevail. I could well imagine a time when many will turn their back on a religion based on differences and what it is “against”. When others will not be demonised for being different and when respect would be mutual. This would signal the start of a true reconciled future where both black and white would live together as humans and will recognise the power in unity and freedom for all, represented by a new faith!
My Time to Play was Over
I knew my time was up to criss-cross this vast land and I had to seek out other opportunities. Apart from the nature of mental constructs and culture, I started to see science as a particular cultural development but built upon a completely different set uf presuppositions and an altogether more productive world view.
I am very comfortable with the image of science as many rivers feeding into the ocean of truth running down many different hills. These hills are African, Chinese, American, European. In fact, fevery culture on earth contributed to science. Science is the new religion that many turn to and as much as it is also a construct of the human mind, the outcomes of the entire enterprise is “better.” The one aspect of culture that I could wholehartedly ascribe to was science. So began one of the most thrilling adventures of discovery!
One day I embarked on another trip to the Transvaal from Cape Town. This would be the trip where a most fortuitous event would occur. A problem that would lead to a meeting that would lead to a plan that would result in the rest of my life. On this trip, I met the most interesting Boer from Potchefstroom, Oscar Klynveld.
Photo Credit: Hilton, T., Flickr
Notes
The words “Hottentot”, “Bushaman” and “Kaffirs” were used in the original publication and is repeated for the sake of accuracy. Today they are recognized as derogatory terms and the use of the term Kaffir are prohibited by legislation.
An article, setting out the case for the First Anglo-Boer War of 1880/ 1881 and the continued annexation of the Transvaal; published in The Times (London, Greater London, England), 22 Feb 1881, page 9.
Reference
Laband, J. 2020. The Land Wars. The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony. Penguin Randon House.
M’Cater, J.. 1869. Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. With Notice of the other Denominations. A historical Sketch. Ladysmith, Natal. W & C Inglis.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
Seeds of War
Johannesburg, December 1889
First house in Johannesburg
My Career Choice – Riding Transport
In the six mile spruit near Pretoria. Another gem from the pictorial description of the Transvaal by HF GROS. Circa early 1890’s. Photo supplied by Jonathan Rudolph.
Bacon is more to me than a culinary delight. It is my connection with the eternal processes of life and the discovery of these living systems are some of the greatest stories ever told. My goal is to tell them here. I can however not tell the story of bacon in isolation. To understand the value of bacon in my life and how it became my teacher, it is important to see why I lost faith in religious thought, human culture and even our ability to preserve nature and for these things to be my points of connection with the eternal and unchanging. My greatest disappointment was that Africa was on a path of war in a time when I first had to find my own place in the universe. I had to learn that Africa, in my case, did not hold the answers I was looking for and before I could live here, I had to leave!
My dad was a magistrate in the district of Woodstock in Cape Town. He was my best friend in the entire world and when I told him that I did not desire to study further, as he did after school, but rather choose to ride transport between Cape Town and Johannesburg, he did not like it, but he supported me. He saw why I had to do it.
I did not follow any particular passion other than a general quest for adventure. Ancient ways were disappearing and wanted to get up close and personal with Africa before Europeans destroyed it. There was the almost wholesale slaughter by hunters for sport and food; farmers believed that game carried animal diseases which meant they often would shoot game for the sake of shooting game; the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley and gold on the Rand brought people from around the world with strange new customs with no regard for the land. Apart from the adventure, riding transport was a very lucrative undertaking. In those days there were only two ways to make money quickly. One was to join the diggings in Kimberley and take your chances there and the other was to ride transport between either the harbour cities of Cape Town and the interior or Durban to the interior. (1)
When I told my dad my plans he did not immediately reply. Not for days. I could tell he was thinking about it. At night I heard my bedroom door in the old house open and I knew my dad was watching me as I lay half asleep. Later I would know how it is when you look at your kids and you see their total lifespan in one glance. A few days later, when I came home from the mountain with Minette, he called me to the stables. There was a mare, light brown with a white mark on her forehead. I never saw her before. My dad handed me the rains. “Her name is Lady!” he said. “You will need a good horse. The road between the Colony and the Rand is long!” We never spoke about it again.
The Route Between Johannesburg and the Cape Colony
The morning of my first expedition to Johannesburg came. The three wagons left at 2:00 in the morning. The plan was that I would follow later and catch up with them outside town. I heard the driver call the name of the oxen and cracking the whip as they moved down the hill from our house towards the main road out of Cape Town, past the Shambles where David de Villiers Graaff now ran Combrink & Co. and the new city railway station was being constructed. I was too excited to go back to sleep. At 5:00 a.m. my mom called me. The coffee and rusks were ready.
The coal stove warmed the kitchen. My dad poured the coffee into the saucer and slurped it up. That’s how he drank it – every morning before the sun was up. He walked over to the hat rack where he fetched his felt hat and cravats and said to me, “Come, I ride with you till you catch up with the wagons.” When we got to the wagons my dad stopped and I rode up next to him. We shook hands, firm and warm. As if we would never see each other again. “Look after yourself! Be careful! Be vigilant! Bring back great stories and when you are back – tell me everything!”
This became our routine. My dad would ride out with me until I got to the wagons. He would greet me in almost the exact same way every time. Months later upon my return, my dad would be waiting for me at Durbanville hills and we would ride back together the last few hours. He would tell me about my brothers and how their studies are progressing and the health of my mom. He would have me recount in the greatest detail every event of my trip, always spurring me on to “leave out nothing!” Even though he did not formally approve of how I chose to occupy myself, I knew that he was vicariously living every moment through me. When I heard him re-tell my stories to Uncle Jacobus, sitting under the big trees next to his enormous home by large wooden tables, eating the finest bacon imported from C & T Harris in Wiltshire, England, I knew that he was proud of me and did not care that people frowned upon the choices I made.
We all knew that Johannesburg would soon be reached from Cape Town by a two-day train ride. (3) The advantage for the businessman and the material development of the continent was clear, but a deep sadness came over me whenever I thought of it, knowing that I was part of the last generation to see this land unspoiled. My dad also knew this and when I told him one day how few elephants I saw between Cape Town and Worcester, he remarked that we came to build a new land but in reality, we were destroying it. “Soon,” he said, “the great beasts of the field who made the roads we travel on and who sustained life here for untold generations would be gone and having destroyed nature – on what will we pray then?”
Plain Street, Johannesburg. Supplied by Michael Fortune.
My dad was a great fan of Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist who explored South America. He learned many of Von Humboldt’s books off by heart. Von Humboldt wrote eloquently on the destruction of South America by colonization, and my dad often pointing out the same progression in our land.
It was indeed the giant elephants who created the network of connecting roads across Africa. No other animal has the ability to clear a road through rugged terrain like a herd of them. Ancient elephant migration paths across Africa have been used by other animals since the dawn of time. They were the arteries that distributed humanity across this vast land acting as human migration routes. African tribes travelled it, to trade salt and copper. European settlers with their ox wagons used these paths to connect territories. Dutch farmers, disgruntled by the abolition of slavery and in general revolt against the Cape Government, trecked along with them out of the Colony into the interior to form a new people, the Boers. Along these ancient roads, I now transport material and supplies to small rural settlements.
Danie Jacobs
One of my points of permanence I was looking to as an anchor in life was nature. As I saw it disappearing before my eyes, my response was to try and hold on to it by being alone in nature for as long as it was still there. My other point of connection was my love for the different cultures who lived in this land. I respect culture for its age and sophistication of development. I was hungry to meet “real people”, shaped by millennia of cultural development. Take Daniel Jacobs as a good example. One night at a dry riverbed outside Kimberly, a slightly older Boer asked if we could camp together for the night. He was travelling alone and our transport party provided him with the security in numbers for the night which lone travellers lack. He was on his way to Johannesburg on government business. No sooner did he introduce himself when I realised that he was one of those “real people” I always hoped to meet on my travels.
Market Street, Jh., c. 1890. Courtesy of Nico Moolman
Daniel Jacobs was an impressive man. His stature was tall and astute, and his mannerism was enduring and kind. His mind was keen and alert. He had a love for history and a keen intellect. I liked him and I liked what he likes! We spoke till late in the night. Despite his energy, Daniel had a sadness about him which I did not fully understand. Was it a sadness or a realism about life? I was unsure.
I told him stories of our adventures on Table Mountain. He knew Cape Town well but has not been on Table Mountain as often as Minette, Achmat, Taahir, and I. Despite this, we had the same experience that in nature we meet God. In the simplest interaction with animals; the witnessing of grand vistas; breathtaking sunsets; stormy highveld afternoons; Cape winter winds – for us, these were the heavenly choruses praising the Creator.
We spoke about all these matters. Later that night he took out a notebook from the pocket of his black jacket. He opened it and angled it against the fire to read. Of course, he knew his words, and as he read he dropped his hands, holding his notebook and reciting it from memory. A poem. He penned it, one of his many travels to Johannesburg from the Colony. In Afrikaans. The simple words and phrases mixed and precipitated a word image that I later often recalled when I would see vast herds of game on the Highveld or feel the rain in my face as I crossed the salt lakes on the other side of Kimberly. Of spiritual Barnes – the reservoir of the words of God contained in our experience of nature.
Bloemfontein district, 1890s; Courtesy of Nico Moolman
He titled it Geesteskuur
Kom kinders van Suid-Afrika
Kom luister na die stem van God
Wat die wind daar buite dra
Die sang van die duif in die dennebos
Die geskarrel van die veldmuis op soek na kos
O Here u natuur
Is vir ons 'n geesteskuur.
Kom kinders van Suid-Afrika
Kom luister na die stem van God
Wat die wind daar buite dra
Die breek van die branders teen die kus
Die gekras van die seemeeu op soek na vis
O Here u natuur
Is vir ons 'n geesteskuur
He titled it Spiritual Barn
Come, Children of South Africa,Come and listen to Gods voiceCarried by the wind out thereThe song of the dove in the pine groveThe felt mouse running and looking for foodOh, Lord, your natureFor us, it is a spiritual barnCome, Children of South Africa,
Come and listen to the voice of GodCarried by the wind out thereThe breaking of the waves against the coastNoisy seagulls looking for foodOh LORD, your natureFor us, it is a spiritual barn (2)
We parted the next day and I knew that a friendship was struck for life. It is these encounters with real people that inspire me.
Daniel Jacobs
The Jordaan’s and the Theology of Andries Pretorius
I don’t just marvel when it happens – no, I actively seek out those who will make an impact on me. To me, people like Daniel Jacobs are like wild animals and nature. They define this land and yet, people like them are disappearing.
The rugged Boers of the interior with their stubbornness, coffee, beskuit and biltong. They farm this desolate land and live semi-pastoral, semi-hunter existences. For all their striving for independence, they are becoming completely subjected to European laws and customs. Soon, the only features that will set them apart from European trends will be their almost universal disdain for the English, their strict Calvinist religion, and their language (and of course moerkoffie, beskuit, and biltong).
I heard stories, no doubt exaggerated, as these tales are, of Englishmen who lost their way, and when they happened upon a Boer homestead, being turned away without food or water only to die in the wilderness. I wonder if these stories were fact or fables intended as a warning for English would-be travellers to these lands.
Theologically, they remained isolated and free from the softening that took place in Europe and England of the harsh positions following the reformation. In a way, it was much on account of their faith that they were able to endure the hardships of the frontier, as was the case in countries like America.
In any event, I wanted to travel through their lands and experience their warm culture, their openness to strangers (as long as you don’t speak English), the perseverance of their faith and their dedication to their own family and kind, before their way of life as frontiersmen change forever.
I once stayed on a farm in the district of Potchefstroom, owned by Petrus Jordaan. His father knew the legendary Boer leader after whom Pretoria was named, Andries Pretorius, personally. The Jordaan family was a traditional Boer family who lived exactly the kind of life that I wanted to observe up-close. The immediate and extended family all lived together. There was strength in numbers, something that was very useful in a frontier situation.
Everybody had their work each day. There was no time to be idle, except on a Sunday, which was the Lord’s Day. Mealtimes were very important. Everybody gathered for breakfast, lunch, and supper around Petrus Jordaan’s big dining room table. A bowl of water was poured and passed from one person to the next and everybody washed their hands in it. The water was never changed during the washing and the visitor always washed last. Only then was the water thrown out.
Each meal was an elaborate affair with food that people from the city could only dream of. At night, after supper, one of the kids would run to fetch the big family bible. It was handed down from generation to generation, translated into old Dutch. Petrus would read a passage and pray. After bible reading, the family lingered at the table and shared stories from the day until either Petrus or his dad, Stefanus, would get up and announce that it was a hard day and time to retire to bed.
One such evening, Petrus’ father, Oom Stefanus Jordaan told me about Andries Pretorius. Under his leadership, a group of Boers tried to set up a republic south of the Vaal River. A struggle for independence followed lasting seven or eight years until the British won a decisive battle at Boomplaats and Pretorius fled across the Vaal with a group of his followers to set up the Republic of the Transvaal (“Trans,” as in “across” and “Vaal,” as in “the Vaal river”).
The Khoi and the San had their beliefs which shaped their actions. I had mine and Pretorius had his. I wanted to understand why a faction of the Boers seemed so preoccupied with enslaving the people of this land. Oom Stefanus did not mind when I asked him about it. He explained that for Pretorius and some of his follower’s slavery is an inherent right and duty of the white man in this savage land. One of Pretorius’ favourite scriptures was from the Old Testament, where Israel was commanded to either slay or enslave the surrounding nations. To him, the natives were the people of the cities who were “far off,” and he had the Divine command to enslave them. His was the nation of God, the chosen, who would bring God’s light into a savage, godless land. The Boers had a God-given right to occupy the lands of these people. They were to him the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites whom the Lord had commanded to destroy. (4)
The policy has been carried out in a cruel and relentless way. Entire tribes were massacred. Adults were killed and children carried off and indentured on farms. Indenture was a savage replacement for slavery where the indentured person could be sold as a tradable commodity. They sometimes received a small allowance for their labour and sometimes not. The big supposed advantage over slavery was that the period of indenture had a definite end-date when they would be freed and when they would sometimes receive additional compensation for their labour, or sometimes not. They would, sometimes, be given land from the farmer to settle permanently on at the end of the indenture, and, sometimes, nothing. Oom Stefanus told me how even leaders like Paul Kruger participated in these schemes and that the policy was almost universal in the Transvaal Republic. (5)
Indignation rose up in my heart against this cruelest of practices when I heard things like Petrus Jordaan’s wife say that after a few years, these young ones accept their fate and become accustomed to their new life, as the memories of their parents fade. They become so loyal to the Boer family that they are prepared to fight against the English with the Boers. When I hear stories like these, my mind wanders back to the Cape and the many black friends I grew up with and call my friends to this day.
Oom Pieter Rademan
I have family who lives close to Johannesburg where I love visiting when we camp out at the Vaal river before we cross. I would leave my wagons in the care of a foreman and undertake the 12 hours ride to his farm. Oom Pieter Jacobus Rademan (born 13 September 1838) grew up in Swellendam in the Cape Colony and moved north to the Orange Free State where he met and married Susanna Maria Geldenhuys from Kroonstad. He settled at Rooiwal in 1872 where they now live with their 10 children. Oom Piet represents everything that I respect and love about the Boer people.
When I started the transport company, I would camp on his farm and bring him building material from the Cape. These days, his barns and homestead are all built, and I carry only tobacco for Oom Piet that my dad sends him and spices for Aunt Santjie in my saddlebag. The trip to Rooiwal is a short and pleasant detour. Sometimes I will take Aunt Santjie thread from my mom or recipe books from a dealer in Adderley Street. (6)
Oom Piet lived to the ripe old age of 99. I was, in later years, told the story that when Oom Piet was advanced in years, he thought that his dominie (pastor) did not visit him often enough (home visitation by the pastor was very important to the Boers). He instructed his workers to harness the horses and prepare the carriage. He rode to Vredefort where he stopped in front of the pastor’s house. Ds. Van Vuuren invited him to get down and come in, but he refused. He told Ds. Van Vuuren he is an old man and may pass away any day now. He is scared that he will die and when he gets to heaven, the Lord will ask him how it’s going with his servant in Vredefort and that he will have to tell the Lord that he does not know because Ds. Van Vuuren no longer visits him at his home! (7)
Oom Piet Rademan at his horse buggy, which he rode till his death at 99.
Oom Piet’s faith is of a milder nature than some of the extreme positions of the Transvaal Boers. He was a kind and gentle man. His is a sincere faith similar to that of my uncle, Oom Jan (my mother’s brother), Oom Sybrand and Oom Giel. These are all family members who became dominies in the NG Kerk.
Oom Piet was a simple man who tended his Afrikaner cattle and planted his mielies on the rocky hills surrounding his simple but functional home. His children are the backbone of his workforce and the small number of natives who work for them are treated in fairness and allowed to live in the way that they have been accustomed to for hundreds of years, receiving a wage at the end of every week. (5) There are, for sure, stories doing the rounds in the family of him and his wife, who could be hard taskmasters if the workers did not perform their duties up to standard, but of the practice of indenture there was no sign and they desired nothing else but the peaceful existence of all peoples.
Oom Piet’s farm became a place where I would have some of my happiest times in the interior. I visited there as often as I could. In later years my grandfather, Oupa Eben, and grandmother, Ouma Susan, obtained the farm next to him, Stillehoogte. (7) The northern Free State became my second home and from their farm, I could see the herds of wild animals starting to dwindle, even during the short time I rode transport.
What is true for the Boers was true for the indigenous African tribes. Their cultures have been in decline since the Dutch, German, French and the English arrived at the Cape of Good Hope and ventured into their lands. I grew up with the boys from all the different peoples of this land but often wondered about their beliefs and stories and language before they came to the Cape. Now they are Christian and Muslim and they speak English or Dutch, as I do. I wondered what their language was in Malaysia or India, in Madagascar and in Mozambique. What were the names of their gods and what stories did their parents tell them of their ancestors? What games did their people play, which they don’t even know?
I have seen the Khoi burial sites at the foot of Signal Hill. I heard the stories of how they danced when the full moon appeared and how the mountain was sacred to them. It saddened me that I could not find a single Khoi boy who could teach me their songs or who knew their legends of Table Mountain. Did their warriors and hunters ever climb to the top? What did they call this breathtaking rock planted at the tip of the great African land?
I knew the caves where escaped slaves hid out on the mountain; I heard from the old people how one could see their fires burn at night against the mountain slopes from town; but these were sad stories, testimony to the cruelty of humans. Even as a child when I first heard these accounts, I wondered who they were and what stories they could tell. Likewise, I wondered about the stories of the Khoi. Lost stories. Of a spirit world that existed in the dreams and trances of their Sharma’s and old people. These spurred me on to find and tell the stories of Africa which I still hear before they disappear forever.
Career Choices
I knew I had to find another career. This was not to say that riding transport was not financially rewarding or insanely exciting. Some years I was able to come home with as much as GBP4000 ($20 000) in my pocket, every 6 months. Without knowing it, I was receiving a better education than any university could offer and that while I was building up cash reserves for a much bigger adventure. Still, my repertoire of remarkable stories grew ever larger.
Above all, I wanted to understand why things are happening in our beautiful land which was taking place. What was the thinking at the heart of so much hatred I could see? And then again, if I spend time with my Boer family on their own or with my black friends alone, these are some of the heartiest people on earth and I have the time of my life. Each person is unique and teaches me about life and about our natural world. Different peoples have different cultures and yet, I could see the value of each people and how they did things were beautiful!
Still, my career choices, I was certain, would be impacted by the gathering clouds of war!
(1) The exact same options were identified by the Moor brothers in the late 1800s living in Natal, sons of English (Irish?) immigrants. 1872, the oldest of the Moor brothers, FR Moor, went to Kimberly to make his fortune. His brother, JW Moor, later became important in the history of bacon in South Africa when he along with other farmers from the Estcourt area created the First Farmers Cooperative Bacon Company in 1917. JW was the chairman. This company later changed its name to Eskort, the iconic South African bacon producer.
(2) The railway linking Johannesburg and Cape Town were completed in 1892.
(3) Daniel Jacobs write: “Nadat ek my Nasionale Diensplig voltooi het, was ek nog vir ongeveer ag jaar betrokke by Stellenbosch Kommando met die hou van o.a. jeugkampe vir veral Kleurlingkinders. Ek dink dit was hier by die laat 1980’s toe ons vir ‘n week lank ‘n tipe Weerbaarheidskursus van die Weermag by die Voortrekkers se Wemmershoek-terrein naby Franscchoek bygewoon het. Ons moes elke oggend alleen iewers gaan sit en stiltetyd hou. Ek het toe die een oggend in ‘n denenbos gesit. Terwyl ek daar sit het ek baie bewus geraak van God se teenwoordigheid. Ek het toe die eerste strofe van die gediggie geskryf na aanleiding van wat ek daar beleef het. Alles wat ek hier skryf – geluid van die wind – duiwe se sang en die geskarrel van die veldmuis het ek waargeneem terwyl ek daar gesit het. As ek my oë toemaak kan ek nog in my geestesoog die veldmuis sien wegskarrel. Ek het later jare (seker so 4-5 jaar gelede) die tweede versie bygevoeg tydens ‘n Mannekamp by die Mooihawens Kampterrein in Bettiesbaai.
(4) Recorded by Trollop in his history of South Africa; cited in a newspaper article about slavery in the Transvaal. Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago, Illinois), 30 December 1880, page 4, “The Revolt of the Pro-Slavery Boers.”
(5) From an article, setting out the case for the First Anglo-Boer war of 1880/ 1881 and the continued annexation of the Transvaal; published in The Times (London, Greater London, England), 22 Feb 1881, page 9.
(6) Information supplied by Nerine Rademan Leonard and Jan Kok.
(7) The story was told by Oom Jan Kok, my mother’s oldest brother. Oom Pieter was their grandfather on their mother’s side, which makes him my great-grandfather. My grandmother, Ouma Susan, was taking care of Oom Piet till his death and was only allowed to marry my grandfather, Oupa Eben after Oom Piet passed away. On the day of his death, his pipe was still warm. He smoked till the day of his death.
(8) Stillehoogte was the farm of my grandparents, Oupa Eben and Ouma Susan. Every long-weekend and every school holiday we spent on the farm in the Northern Free State.
Stillehoogte belonged to Oom Piet Rademan and Ouma Santjie inherited it from her father. My Ouma Susan Kok inherited the farm since she had the Rademan (Geldenhuys name – Susanna Maria).
Aunt Meraai (Oom Sybrand and Oom Michiel Straus’s mom) had inherited the farm Leeuspruit because she had her Grandmom Uys’ name and Leeuspruit belonged to Oom Giel Uys.
As far as Oom Jan knows, the farm Stillehoogte was a farm on its own and not part of Rooiwal. The other Rademan children also inherited land in this area. Oom Jan is also not sure if this was part of Rooiwal. Oom Freek got the farm Rosebank. Oom Attie got the farm Goudinie , Oom Lourence the farm Windhoek. All these could have been one farm because they border each other.
Reference
M’Cater, J.. 1869. Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa. With Notice of the other Denominations. A historical Sketch. Ladysmith, Natal. W & C Inglis.
Tisani, E. V. “Nxele and Ntsikana” (MA diss., University of Cape Town, 1987), p107
Photo Credit
The Cincinnati Enquirer (Cincinnati, Ohio), 1 November 1908, Page 31.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
The Shambles
Cape Town, December 1886
Unlocking the secrets of how bacon is made would soon become the single obsession of my life. The monumental discoveries that would elucidate the complex and altogether mesmerising set of chemical reactions responsible for producing the world’s greatest culinary delight would be revealed mostly from Europe and England. The history of unravelling the secrets of bacon became intimately connected with the greatest discoveries of humanity. Bacon was part of my life, yet I did not comprehend the all-consuming passion it would become. Producing the world’s best bacon on an industrial scale would become as much an obsession as would the mountains and the seas of our great land.
The Dilemma with Impermanence
It is in our minds where we live and breathe and have our beings. Our culture resides there. The first phenomenal mental development of humans was our ability to think in the 3rd person. We could think in the hypothetical. Our advanced brains allowed us the power to construct mental patterns and as the sophistication of these patterns evolves, we worship them.
Our ability to distil pictures into letters to form an alphabet is no more or less than the further ordering of language. In language, the nouns probably developed first. The ability to tell the tribe members about animals, water and warn them of danger. Humans developed verbs to indicate action. We developed techniques to be very specific in detail by the modifying power of pronouns and adjectives. As is the habit of humans, we worshipped our crowning invention, the spoken “word”. We poured into the mental image of a “word” mythical power. We imagined that through this powerful tool, the universe to be created and it to be the medium of our communion with the divine whom we imagined to be in control of all of reality.
Words, however, disappointed us because it was, as we found out, very impermanent. It is fleeting and exists only for as long as humans can accurately remember them. So, we limited the ultimate power of words to be what it can achieve in altering the physical world when the divine or human diviners utter them.
In the never-ending cycles of ever-increasing levels of sophistication and complexity, we made the progression from mental pictured contained in spoken language to the greater permanence of writing. We endowed the spoken word with the permanency we imagined true of the gods we worshipped by writing it down. First in images and then in letters which form words that carry meaning. For the first time, we were able to give thought greater permanence and so, as is the way of humans, we worshipped it. The written word became our god!
It is no wonder that Europeans equated the need to spread the technology of writing to the spread of the Gospel. From an early age, I understood this. I saw the different cultures of our land existing in the first place in the minds of the peoples of this great land, transferred from one generation to the next, not as something we are born with, but as something that we are taught from the moment of our first interaction with the outside world when we enter it as babies. I understood that the technology of the black tribes compared to the Europeans was not any different. Both were inventions of the mind; both were developed due to pressing needs in its environment. One may be more useful compared to the other in certain environments, but both stand on equal footing as being human inventions. By itself, one is not superior to the other.
One of the dilemmas of the humans experience is that we are temporary in our bodies but our consciousness perceives us as eternal. We are very impermanent and frail and still, we search for a tangible connection with our past and future generations in an attempt to connect with what lasts. Before I could discover the magnificence of bacon which is completely apart from any human intervention I had to be disappointed in what I thought was my connection with the ancients and the worlds to come.
I had to come face to face with the brutality of the human mind. This knowledge did not come from Oupa Eben but when I turned 18, I had my first introduction to the brutael man!
The Savage Human
At age 18 I knew that life was beautiful. Surrounded by a loving family and my own mountain and sea kingdoms to explore, I found myself in a happy spot. No other reality brought my romantic notions of humanity crushing down more dramatically than the Shambles.
While growing up, the city abattoir was at the bottom of Addely street on the beach. It was aptly named the Shambles after the famous Smithfield Market in London known by the same name. Years earlier, so my parents told me, the slaughter of animals happened all across the city and a formal city abattoir was only established in 1820. What was intended to be an improvement on home slaughter, the Shambles became a city eyesore. Cattle would be slaughtered and the offal left on the beach for the tide to take away into the sea. The offal not taken away by the tide was feasted on by stray dogs and leopards that came down from Table Mountain. In the sea, sand sharks gorged themselves on offal. They were so numerous that the bay was called Haaibaai (shark bay).
The stench from the beach was nauseating. On a hot and windless day in the bowl in front of Table Mountain where Cape Town was developing, a foul smell hung over the beach below the abattoir. It would hover over the sea and slowly envelop the city. I later learned that setting slaughterhouses up next to waterways for the exact reason to carry away the offal and blood to soak into the sand was a well known European and English practice, but in few locations did it have the dramatic effect it had in Cape Town. Sailers who know India well later told me that the only possible place on earth where the abattoir was more objectionable, was the city abattoir in Bombay.
As children, we avoided the abattoir but on one November day, after a week of uninterrupted rain, I found myself aimlessly wandered through the streets to get some fresh air. Suddenly I was on the outskirts of the city. Without realizing it, I started to follow the cattle route into town. Of course, I always knew it was there. Cape Town was not such a large city but I never went there.
That day, as I followed the cattle trails into the city, the air smelled fresh with the scent of fynbos (the local fauna biome). All nasty odours were mercifully washed from the air by the persistent Cape storms of the previous week. The usually dusty Cape roads turned muddy with pools of water everywhere. Droves of cattle were being herded into town. Curiosity took over. It was not so much that I decided to follow them as it was like an invisible hand pulled me, herding me along with the cattle.
The boys driving the cattle gleefully whistled for the animals to keep moving while they chatted amongst themselves and threw small rocks at animals who stopped to graze. As they approach the Shambles, the animals became weary but kept moving, spurred on by thirst and hunger until they reached the cattle pens. The animals were driven from the many farms that developed around Cape Town from as far afield as Piketberg and Worcester. I was intrigued by the scale of the sight before me as curiosity turned into amazement. (1) Cape Town was the tavern of the sea and the number of animals slaughtered had little relation with the number of souls living in the expanding city.
Cattle traders sold the animals to butchers who dispatched their apprentices to bring the animals to the slaughter. What I saw disturbed me greatly. As the apprentices herded the cattle from the holding pens the animals smelled the blood on the beach. They did not know what was happening up ahead, but they knew it was not a place they wanted to go. In response to their reluctance to move forward, the herders became brutal in goading them. They beat them mercilessly with wooden sticks. I was shocked that humans could inflict such cruelty on other creatures. From stress and fatigue, some of the animals collapsed in the mud just to be picked up by men pushing wooden carts who would pull them onto the carts and take them to the slaughter site.
The dreary sight of animals laying in the mud; the sound of the butcher’s apprentices beating them; the mud mingled with blood ahead and the foul smell of the offal and on the beach below the slaughtering sites made for a miserable picture. The sun was coming through the clouds and the sudden November heat did not improve the picture as the nasty smell developed and filled the air. Nearby, Uncle John Woodhead’s tanning business was boiling the last scraps of fat off skin and bones which did not help with the smell.
The end of the animals who were brought to the slaughtering sites by wooden carts and those who fearfully walked there by themselves were the same. Their hooves were tied together in pairs and all four pulled together till the animal fell. The butchers moved swiftly to slit the animal’s throat to bleed out. As soon as the animal is dead, the skin is removed on the ground and the intestines taken out and thrown onto the beach. Khoe (indigenous people), sitting on the outskirts of the killing area on their haunches collect it. To them, it is a delicacy.
Take at the Oko-Oba abattoir in Lagos, Nigeria
It was not the fact that the animals were killed that distressed me. I made peace with the fact that like other predators, humans have sustained themselves on the flesh of animals for millennia. The rhythm of birth and death was something that I recognized as being a fundamental truth of our existence. When it was a matter of life or death, humans have the innate character of predators. What I could not understand was how it was being manifested. The same drive for procreation developed almost in every human culture into something ordered and beautiful. We could reconcile our psychological needs with our physical needs in marriage or something similar in other cultures. I was abhorred that we invented ways to slaughter animals that were crueller than any predator on earth evolved into when killing its prey. In many ways, we did not treat the animal with respect! As if we not only killed to manage hunger but it seemed as if we derive some morbid pleasure from seeing fellow inhabitants of the earth suffer.
Combrink & Co.
The day I visited the Shambles shocked me. I decided to make the most of my visit and to look an old and dear friend of mine up. My friend was none other than David de Villiers Graaff who was running Combrink & Co for Uncle Jacobus. He was. however, not at his butcher’s shop. I stood in his shop, looking at large men, skilfully turning the carcasses of hogs, cattle, and sheep into meat cuts familiar to me. Much of the meat was packed with salt for preservation. Most were sold from the shop to the public. Those destined for the ships were packed in barrels. Combrink & Co. was a well run operation. It had meat wagons which they stocked for home deliveries. Their wagons were a feature of life in Cape Town and later they set up small retail outlets across town which they supplied from the butchery at the Shambles.
That night I could not sleep. Of course, I did not describe everything that I saw that day, choosing to rather forget some of the detail. Not all the butchers were good butchers and some were in too much of a hurry to start removing the skin before the animal was dead.
When I got home I told my dad what I saw. He saw everything as ordered under the sun and in the centre of it all is an almighty God who orders and assigns a role to every creature. The lion does not feel pity for the buck that it hunts. The buck feels no pity for the grass that it feeds on. It is God’s decreed order in life. “In the same way,” my dad explained, “God gave us animals to sustain us through their milk and their flesh. It is God’s way.” He did, however, not like the brutality. The animals, my dad believed, should meet their end swiftly and cleanly and should not be mistreated on their way to take their place in the circle of life. He did not like that we made a sport out of death at all and he reminded me that the San Bushman, as they were called, have the greatest respect for the animals their hunt.
My dad drew parallels between the brutality towards the animals and to people. He told me that we can not expect people who enslaved other humans and traded them like commodities to show any mercy to the domesticated animals nor to the wild beasts of the field. He maintained that people who do not treat the indigenous people of this great land with respect will likewise not treat animals with dignity. Europeans, according to my dad, lost their own humanity and replaced it with arrogance. They do not respect themselves, yet they lord it over others and impose their views and beliefs as if they alone possess knowledge. Like Uncle Jakobus, my dad abhorred the straight lines of the Dutch and often said their thinking can be seen in their architecture and city design. My dad sometimes referred to the straight lines of the Dutch as being evidence of their cruelty!
I learned for the first time that night that my dad was an abolitionist. He told me how, as a young man of law, he vigorously campaigned for the freedom of slaves and the equality of all. We spoke about a vision for a world where we would live in harmony with all and show the same respect for our domesticated animals as the Khoe has towards their cattle and fat tail sheep and the San shows towards the wild beasts of the field.
The Khoe
The Khoe was the first pastoralists in southern Africa. They called themselves Khoikhoi (or Khoe), which means ‘men of men’ or ‘the real people’. This name was chosen to show pride in their past and culture. The Khoikhoi brought a new way of life to South Africa and to the San, who were hunter-gatherers as opposed to herders. Both groups had ancient traditions based on respect for animals.
My dad told me that an old Khoe captain once told him, referring to his own people as the real owners of the land, that the Europeans are “the greatest slaves in the world with our so exactly fixed and precise way of life.” (2) The Khoe and San, according to my dad, are the truly free people while we are prisoners to a merciless culture with no heart.
Moving the Abattoir
The Adderly Street Abattoir was ordered to move soon afterwards in 1883. It was done as part of a general campaign to clean up the city. Instrumental in this campaign was my friend, David de Villiers Graaff, then only the 22-year old. It was this event of closing the Shambles that prompted Combrinck & Co. to install their own slaughtering line.
In 1883 a lawsuit was brought against the city on the basis that the Shambles was a public disturbance and had to be removed. Sir Henry de Villiers who was chief justice led a full bench of the supreme court to hear the case. An in-person inspection was carried out one morning after the slaughter of animals. The judges and lawyers walked the beach; sewerage was flowing into the sea; the stench was unbearable. Late in 1883 Justice de Villiers delivered judgment and said that the least the city could do was to slaughter the animals elsewhere. This sealed the fate of the Shambles and it was moved. David de Villiers Graaff and Lord/ Sir John Henry were close family. (3)
Meat Quality and Stress
One day I related my experience to Dawie (David). He grew up in the Shambles and I was keen to get his perspective. He told me something that piqued my interest. That the animals with the best meat quality are animals who not only had the right feed but were not exposed to stress before slaughter.
It begins by feeding them well on good grass, months before they are brought to the abattoir. Then, once at the abattoir, the animals must be properly rested before slaughter. Stress destroys good meat. David later showed me their new slaughtering lines and explained to me how stress either creates dark and dry meat or, especially in pork, meat that is pale, soft and characterized by exudate. Unbeknownst to me, this became my first chemistry lesson related to bacon and I was intrigued. Despite the cruelty underlaying the lessons, the experience of the butchers fascinated me.
That good bacon comes from good meat and good meat comes from happy animals. I wondered why the meat from game was not as soft as the meat from domesticated animals since, in my estimation, the wild animals were the happiest. I would question my teachers in school about these matters, but they had no real answer. It would be years before I understood the chemistry of meat. Still, a seed was planted. An interest in meat production that would become an all-consuming obsession and in the end, the facts I learned here in Cape Town would become the cornerstone of producing the best bacon on earth.
Events soon transpired in my life that would set the stage for me to travel to Europe on the most exciting learning adventure ever. Similar to the cruel treatment of animals which lead to the discovery that happy animals have the best meat, the impetus which moved me to leave the shores of Africa to study the art of bacon was dark, disturbing and altogether alarming.
I was still looking for permanence in the wildlife of Africa and the people who came to call her shores, “home”. Bacon would replace all of these and lead me to uncover the true art of living. Before this could happen, I had to know humans better and how we create myths and legends in our mind and how close we are in our developed psyche with the cruellest of human instincts. I first had to understand the depth of the problem before I could thirst for an answer! All this happened just after my 18th birthday!
(1) The experience comes from visiting the largest abattoir across Africa, where time stood still.
(2) François Valentijn (1726), quoted by Mansell Upham.
(3) Three De Villiers brothers came to South Africa with their wives. They were Abraham and his wife Susanne, Pierre and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of the hat maker of Thierry in the province of Bri and Jacob and Susanne’s sister, Marguerite. The three sons’ father was Pierre de Villiers from La Rochelle in France.
The second son, Pierre and his wife Elizabeth had a son, also called Pierre. Young Pierre married Hester Roux and in 1725, they had a son. Since French as a language was dying out at the Cape, the named him Pieter. Pieter married twice. With his first wife, he had nine children and with his second wife, eight. The biographer of Lord de Villiers, Eric A. Walker called him a “notable parent” which is probably an understatement! 🙂
Jacob Nicolaas was born to them in Paarl in 1786. He married Suzanne Maria Bernhardi and named their oldest son Carl Christiaan who, in 1834 married Dorothea Elizabeth. They had nine children and the fourth son was John Henry de Villiers. He signed his name, not as John Henry, but as Johan Hendrik. He was born on 15 June 1842.
Sir David’s father was Petrus Novbertus Graaff and his mother was Anna Elizabeth, daughter of Pieter Hendrik de Villiers. This has definitely been traced somewhere, but it is fun working it out for oneself. It seems that Anna’s father was the brother of J. H. de Villiers, which then makes Lord de Villiers, the uncle of the wife of Petrus Graaff, the father of Sir David de Villiers Graaff. Whichever way you look at it, there is a rather close family relationship between Lord/ Sir John Henry de Villiers and Sir David de Villiers Graaff.
Photo Credit:
Khoi cattle and sheep:
Cattle in holding pen before slaughter. Eben van Tonder
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
Kolbroek
Cape Town, April 1886
Falling asleep on Stillehoogte, the farm of Oupa Eben and Ouma Susan is one of my most cherished memories. I still smell the sheep in the kraal next to the house as if I was there this morning. Elmar and I slept in one room. It was Oom Uysie’s room before he moved out. My mom and dad slept in the spare bedroom. Andre slept with my grandparents in their room on a bed at the foot end of my grandparents’ bed.
In the morning we were woken by farm sounds and smells. Maids were cleaning the house, sweeping the carpets with a broom made from long local grass. Ouma was preparing breakfast on a coal stove. Oupa just came in from the felt to get his morning coffee. Oom Uysie, my mom’s younger brother who managed the farm with his dad and our grandfather, stopped by for coffee.
Below: Oupa Eben
Whenever he arrived there was no more sleeping. He would make sure that we were out of bed by the time he left by stealing our blankets or spraying us with cold water. It was good humour which one does not appreciate when you are 7, but when you are a bit older, one misses it. Thinking back, I understand how much his morning visits meant for him and Oupa!
After Oupa Eben passed away it was not the same on Stillehoogte. At church on Sunday, whenever they sing a hymn, my mom would cry. One morning Ouma Susan was very sad at the breakfast table. She told my mom about a dream she had. She was standing in the church foyer, looking at the photos of the elders and deacons. Oupa Eben was a church elder when he passed away. In the photos where Oupa Eben stood was a large black spot. Even in the photos, his life was blotted out! My mom was not a very emotional person but she was washing the dishes and I could see the tears running down her cheek. We all miss Oupe Eben very much.
Ouma Susan, bringing coffee where the men are working in the field on Stillehoogte.
Oupa Eben and Oom Uysie put up four pig pens. They farmed with Large Whites. One day Oupa Eben got home with the most adorable little pigs. He said they do not have to be housed in a pen. These were very special pigs. They are roaming farm pigs who take care of themselves feeding on the scraps from the farming activities. They were South African Kolbroek pigs.
Oupa Eben asked if I know why they are called Kolbroek? Of course, I did not. Oupa knew that I loved a good story. I would always pester him to tell me a story. After he told me a story I would re-tell it to myself. Over and over again. I would take any of the many footpaths on Stillehoogte and, hiking for hours, re-telling the story to an imaginary audience. I am not sure why I loved it so much, but I did! It was the greatest enjoyment imaginable! I knew that he was actually asking if he can tell me the story of the Kolbroek. After work, Oupa Eben called me to come and sit by him. He would tell me the story of the Kolbroek!
Below: Oupa Eben and Ouma Susan
Domestication and the Formation of Breeds
“The story of the Kolbroek begins many years ago in the middle of the 1700s in the south of England. Pigs are fed on the mast of the forest, which is the fruit of trees and shrubs such as acorns and nuts. Europeans are very fond of fattening the pigs on what was called “hard mast.” The hard acorns and nuts from oak, hickory, and beech trees are the hard mas. The forests were either part of common lands or royal forests. The practice of annually fattening the pigs in the forests for around 60 days was called pannage.”
“Pigs in England were big, long-legged with menacing facial expressions. Animals who are not penned up face predators. When they run they must run fast. For this reason, they are extremely skittish. The slightest indication of danger and they have to move quickly! Their bite must be ferocious as must be their build and facial expression. They are dark in appearance with stripes that resemble their ancestors, the wild boar.”
“On the other hand, pigs in China did not have these pressures. Instead, they had a very comfortable life for thousands of years. They were kept in small and comfortable housing close to the farmer’s house. Being penned up protect them from predators and where European pigs went to the forest for two months, weather depending, once a year where they had to eat hard actors and nuts, Chinese pigs were fed scraps from the farming activities all year round. An animal who does not have to run and be on the constant lookout for predators grows smaller, fatter, shorter legs with less menacing faces. The stripes of their wild European counterparts changed into spots. They pick up weight faster than the European cousins just like people do when they don’t have to walk long distances or do manual labour.” This last bit Oupa added with a grin. He enjoyed comparing pigs with people and used to say that calling some of the people he had to deal with from the Cooperative “pigs” is an insult to perfectly decent animals.
“It was the English East India Company who brought these Chinese pigs to England in the 1700s.” Oupa Eben was a “no-frills and no-fuss” man. He said stuff in a way that one understood easily. This being the case, one must still remember that Oupa was a very clever man! He knew that any inventions first happen in the mind, not in the physical world. This is called the metaphysical. The interaction between what we can feel and touch and that which is, initially, only in the mind.
Oupa Eben explained to me that by the late 1600s and early 1700s, a metaphysical shift took place in the English mind. They started to see “matter” not as the unavoidable experience of nature, but as something that could be manipulated and controlled. Themselves they saw as the masters who, as Gods ultimate creatures were called upon and empowered to control the physical. Just as the pigs responded to the pressure from nature by either becoming smaller and fatter as in China or remaining big, fast and ferocious as in Europe, the English wool industry was pressured to produce clothing for the local market in bigger quantities than could be done by individual villagers, working in isolation. Thus, the organization of labour changed. This shift was due to a change that happened in the minds of people.
The English Empire was taking shape and the demand from the colonies added to the mother-land for clothing added up to a demand that completely outpaced the meagre output of any individual person. Imaginative entrepreneurs stepped forward who worked out how to use the forces of nature for their personal ends. They invented better and faster ways to spin wool and make clothing. They realised that work itself can be re-organised, even without machine power. Where they combine human power with machine power, output went through the roof! The results were spectacular! The fertile imagination of the English dreamt up new machines that could do what 100 people could not. The buzz words of the time were “bigger,” “better,” and “faster.” They used nature in a way that was never thought possible before. Energy to drive these machines were cleverly being tapped from steam and water.
As people realised that they could manipulate and harness nature, as the sciences were being invented, we became masters of nature. The most important metaphysical realisation was to re-think how we organise labour but also how we manipulate nature. In the world of farming, this was not a new phenomenon. It has been happening for many thousands of years but a new momentum was added through the industrial revolution.
The earliest discovery was that animals that are penned up, change! The biggest reason was that we were able to manipulate their breeding. Animals became used to us and we found that they were more useful to us. For starters, our food did not run away from us or live in forests where we had to go hunting them. If our animals stayed close, so did our food! We created animal enclosures where we could separate those with less desirable characters from those with qualities we want. “A good example of this,” said Oupa Eben, “is aggressive animals. We do not like aggressive animals. The menacing bull becomes biltong. The horse that continually breaks out and bites other horses and handlers are served as pastissada.” It takes many generations to change a completely wild animal into an animal that is less threatening to humans; more useful. One that can work and supply milk or become food. The larger farm animals were domesticated first and as the industrial revolution was taking hold in Europe, it was the turn of the village pig.
Oupa Eben lit his pipe, peered out from the farmhouse over his land. It was late afternoon. The farmwork was done and it was the best time to ask him to tell you a story. I sat on the soft grass outside the back door, between the back porch and the brick cooler where all the perishables were kept. It was a simple invention used around the world. Two layers of bricks filled up with charcoal in the middle and regularly soaked with water. This cooled the inside of the square structure with wooden shelving where the butter, eggs, cheese, and milk were stored. Oupa Eben was sitting on a garden chair he brought from the porch to have a better view of his lands. “I guess you want to hear about the Kolbroek,” he said smiling.
He lit his pipe again. “One can imagine that the pigs bought from the English East India Company were sold to wealthy aristocrats and landowners. Chinese boars were used by villagers to breed with their sows. It meant that in a particular village, the characteristics of the boar were transferred to the entire village pig population. This resulted in regional characteristics and in the 1800s it formed the basis of breeds.” “So,” Oupa Eben told me many times, “on the one hand the old farmers removed animals with less than desirable character traits by either slaughtering them or separating them from others and not allowing them to breed, and, on the other hand, by using males with characteristics which the farmer desired to breed with the sows one gets an animal with the right look and temperament. In the case of the Chinese pigs, imported into England, it produced a smaller animal, rounder and fat that picked up weight fast but much bigger than the original Chinese pigs on account of the larger size of the English pigs they bred with.”
Oom Timo
Oupa Eben stopped with his story when his younger brother walked out of the back door and joined us. He and his wife, Aunt Thelma, were visiting. Her maiden name was Berriman. The Berriman’s immigrated from Cornwall. Her father was an immigrant gold miner on the Reef. Her brother was also a miner working mostly at Crown Mines. Tim moved into Thelma’s mother (Hilda’s) home just before or just after they were married. Later, they owned their own home in Parkview, Johannesburg. (1)
“I am telling Eben the story of the Kolbroek pigs,” Oupa said when Oom Timo sat down next to Oupa on a chair which he brought from the porch. I was very small and did not know that as Oupa knew everything about raising cattle, sheep, and pigs, Oom Timo knew about ships. Oom Timo gestured Oupa to continue, which Oupa did.
Once Upon a Time in Kent
“In Kent, an English East Indian ship preparing to sail to the East via the Cape of Good Hope. The Colebrook was one of these impressive ships. It weighed 739 tons and was 137 feet long, 35 feet wide and had 3 decks. She was built by the most famous shipbuilders of the time, Perryard, and launched in 1770. The Captain was Arthur Morris, and she was on her third voyage.”
“On 6 January 1778, she loaded lead bars called lead ingots or lead pigs and provisions at Blackwall in the East India Docks on the Thames. On 3 February, she sailed to Gravesend. Here she loaded shot, copper, stores, gunpowder, wine, guns, corn, military recruits and, very importantly, livestock. The livestock included pigs which were procured from the local pig market. The pigs were a cross between Chinese and English pigs and since they were all the result of mating with the local landowners’ boar, they had similar characteristics.”
“On 8 March 1778, she set sail from the Downs with 212 passengers, crew and soldiers on board in the company of three other vessels, the warship Asia, the other East Indiaman, the Gatton, and the Royal Admiral. She stopped at Madeira to load 43 pipes of wine. On 26 May, she sailed from Madeira for Bombay and China, passing the Cape of Good Hope.”
Kogel Bay
Oupa was sitting at the edge of his chair, telling the story. I remember him leaning back when he got to this part and saying to Oom Timo, “You know the story well and you know all the right shipping terms. You take it from here!” Oom Timo put his hand on my head who was still sitting on the grass. “The Colebrook took three months to reach the Cape!”
“She did so on Tuesday, 24 August 1778. It was winter and she was not allowed to enter Table Bay due to frequent and severe winter storms. She had to sail around Cape Point and dock in the much better protected Simon’s Bay in False Bay. She [lanned to rounded Cape Point and turn East for Simon’s Bay. At 11h30, as she was rounding Cape Point, she struck Anvil Rock, lurking just beneath the waves. Anvil rock was not indicated on the Dutch Maps that Arthur Morris used.”
“The Colebrooke almost immediately freed herself from the rock. Water poured into the hull. The crew put on the pumps within minutes but there were already three feet of water in the hold indicating serious damage. After a hurried conference between Captain Arthur Morris and his officers, they realised that they would not be able to nurse the ship to Simon’s Bay. The water pouring into the Colebrook made her unresponsive and difficult to steer.”
“Instead, they decided to take her all the way across False Bay and find a suitable spot to beach on the eastern side of the bay. This would not require any difficult manoeuvring. Still, the plan was not without risk. The far side of the bay was, as far as they were aware, largely uninhabited. The coast is very rocky with steep mountains coming right down to the water. They did not know if they will find a suitable stretch of beach.”
“The Gatton and Asia despatched boats with 8 people in each to assist the Colebrook’s crew with the pumping of water. These men raced to her aid while her company ensign was flying upside down, a signal of distress. The men dropped a weighted sail off the bows when the hole in the hull became inaccessible due to the flooding. It was hauled under the hull where it was secured over the hole, slowing the ingress of water down. They attempted to push the guns overboard to lighten her load, but these were already submerged and the plan was abandoned.”
“Her companion ships followed her across the bay. Captain Morris sent the second and third officer up the mast to look for a sandy beach to run the ship onto. In the distance, they identified a small, secluded beach almost directly ahead and would later learn that it was called Kogel Bay. The water from False Bay continued to claim the Colebrook. As she was approaching the beach there were already 14 feet of water in her hold. Her bow was so low that she was sipping water through the hawse holes. These were small cylindrical holes cut through the bows of a ship on each side of the stem. It was used to pass cables through to be drawn into, or let out of the vessel. The situation was desperate!”
“Water started bubbling through her front hatches, signalling that her sinking was imminent. At 4pm on the afternoon of 24 August, 200m off the beach at Kogel Bay, she grounded. Her topsails were let go, which had the effect of swinging her stern around to bring her bow into the wind and swell. The mizzen mast was cut away to stabilise her after which the boats were launched.”
“The first boat was a pinnace. It had sails and several oars. Fifteen men were aboard. The surf at Kogel Bay is treacherous at best of times with a very strong rip current. On that particular day, the wind was strong making the situation even more precarious. Tragedy struck when the boat capsized in the surf. When the ensuing madness dissipated a smashed boat and seven bodies were on the beach at Kogel Bay. Survivors were hypothermic from the ice-cold False Bay water, in a desperate state on the beach. All other attempts to get people onto the beach was abandoned. The second boat was swept into the open sea and only recovered the next day. The rest of the crew, soldiers, and passengers were transferred to the other ships.”
Kogel Bay, 2019. Minette, Luan, Tristan, Eben. Photos by Eben
The Pigs of Kogel Bay
Oupa Eben interrupted Oom Timo. “What we told you so far is conventional wisdom, written up in history books from the testimony of the men who were there. What follows is from testimony Oom Timo heard first hand from the great-grandchildren of people who were on the beach that day.” I blurted out. “But, the beach was desolate. Nobody around!” “So we thought,” Oom Timo said and gestured Oupa to take over the storytelling again.
“There were two additional sets of characters on the beach that day which, for completely different reasons, people were reluctant to talk about. Kogel way is located in an area called Cape Hangklip which became, by that time, a refuge for runaway slaves on account of its desolation. Here they lived in caves. One of the places they made their home was Dappa se Gat, a large cave situated right on Kogel Bay!
Looking out onto Kogel Bay from Dappa se Gat
It is an enormous cave, unaccessible during high tide but deep enough to house a community of people. They would be able to get far into the cave, out of reach of the water. It is quite possible that they were witnessing the entire debacle from the safety of their cave-home. I wonder if they thought the ships to be a party sent to recapture them in which case the safest thing to do would have been to abandon the cave and hide in the thick bush between the mountain and the beach. “If they did this, as I suspect,” Oupa continued, “they would have seen that something managed to swim from the Colebrook to the beach.”
“That “something” was a sounder of swine. This was not something unusual. The English Navy and the English East India Company both had a standard procedure that the pigs must be let out of their pens if it seems imminent that a ship will sink so that they can swim ashore to provide food for the shipwreck survivors. This is presumably what happened to the pigs from Kent.”
“When they got to the beach, the slaves took them. The slaves had a long history with pigs. Pig-keeping was not very popular at the Cape. The Dutch farmers who farmed pigs let them roam free in the valleys and gorges and when they wanted to slaughter one, they had to capture one. The job of looking after them was mostly reserved for slaves. At the Slaves Lodge in Cape Town, where the Dutch East India Company’s slaves were kept, they were allowed to keep pigs to provide extra income for the lodge.”
“Not only did the slaves have a long history with pigs and pig husbandry, but they knew that they had to keep domesticated animals to survive. There are accounts of this time where they kept cattle in Dappa se Gat. There are in the Cape Hanglip area several such caves where the slaves kept livestock. It is not known if the pigs were kept at Dadda se Gat or somewhere else. What is known is that a local magistrate complained to the Governor about the slaves and local farmers who looted the remains of the Colebrook.”
“A farmer would not have dared to take the pigs in due to heavy penalties that were exacted for anyone found with looted goods in his or her possession. The fact that the pigs were kept by the slaves is the reason why they survived as a more or less uniform type of pig which later became known as a breed.”
This does not prove the veracity of Oupa Eben and Uncle Timo’s account of the Kolbroek pigs, but I later found an interesting account from World War II which reminds me of the story of the Kolbroek. It comes from the memoirs of a Latvian woman, Agate Nesaule. When she was a child, she was an inmate of a British-run refugee camp in occupied Germany. As was often the case in these camps, inmates had to get by on meagre rations. A local German farmer gave the inmates some piglets. This was illegally done and the piglets were kept in various spaces in the barracks. They were fed on food that spoiled or whatever else could be scavenged. Agate commented that they “also enjoyed watching the little pigs, a hopeful sign of the future, thriving for their own sake.” (Nesaule, 1995) As was the case with Agate, I suspect that this kind of human-animal interaction between the slaves and animals they kept served a greater need than simply for the slaves to look forward to a pork roast or beef steak. There must have been a tremendous psychological benefit for the slaves to keep the animals in such close proximity.
“The sinking of the Colebrook captured people’s imagination. For a short while, the Kogel Bay was even called Colebrook Bay. This was later changed back to Kogel Bay. The pigs were called Kolbroek pigs, a perversion of the ship’s name. This colloquial name for the pigs stuck.” “And that,” Oupa Eben concluded, “is how an English pig, crossed with a Chinese, ended up at the Cape of Good Hope!”
Oupa Eben and Oom Timo started talking about politics. I lost interest and left to join my brothers and cousins who started walking to the stables to help milk the cows.
I miss Oupa Eben. I wish I asked oom Timo to tell me some of his stories. It is why I write my recollections of the story of bacon and how I discovered it. It is also why I want it to be known that bacon taught me about the art of living. I want you to know my story.
Oupa bought a few Kolbroek pigs from a trader in Cape Town and since that day, we slaughtered and cured a Kolbroek every year. It is not a bacon pig as the large White and the Berkshire. These pigs have straight backs and long loins for bacon. The Kolbroek is a lard pig, ideal for making hams, lard and, as you will see, not bad at all for bacon. Apart from this, they have the most delicious meat. One can taste the difference.
So it happened that bacon and farming with pigs had been in my blood from a very early age. I first heard the story from Oupa and Uncle Timo in the month in which I turned 17 and still, I could not comprehend how these matters would consume the rest of my life. It started with my dad’s secret bacon recipe and the Kolbork pigs that Oupa Eben brought home one autumn afternoon in April!
Further Reading
Read with Chapter 09.15 The English Pig where I deal with the source of pigs for Gravesend where live pigs were loaded onto ships.
Information about Oom Timo was given to me by Leon Kok. His mail to me reads:
“There is quite a bit about Tim, not least his SAAF war years in Somaliland, Abyssinia and the Western Desert generally. For example, he was among several young Air Force chaps from the Union that destroyed 101 enemy planes, countless lorries and other transport within three months in the most trying conditions. He also accompanied Prime Minister (General) Jan Smuts on a reconnaissance flight in the Desert on one occasion. He escaped being taken a prisoner by Rommel and was involved in what came to be known as ‘The Graveyard of Italian Hopes’. His maverick return from the Desert to SA in late 1945 almost constitutes a book in itself.
Tim and I spent tens of hours over about 30 years chatting about his memories of the war. Yes, he was an air mechanic and indeed a lot more. He would like to have been a pilot but was deemed too short.
Tim didn’t serve in Korea. He became an auto-electrician in Johannesburg shortly after disembarking from the UDF and had his own auto-electrical business in Bethlehem OFS for several years. He then sold out and moved to Durban and joined an auto-electrical business there. He rode a motorbike until well into his seventies, which included a fairly serious accident. He survived it and carried on with business as usual.
Thelma’s maiden name was BERRIMAN and her folk, I suspect, immigrated from either Cornwall or England. Her father was an immigrant gold miner on the Reef. Her brother was also a miner, mainly at Crown Mines. Tim moved into Thelma’s mother (Hilda’s ) home there just before or just after they were married in the late 1940s. Later, they owned their own home in Parkview, Johannesburg. Hilda, when widowed, moved in with them until her death in Durban in approximately the 1980s. Tim and Thelma never had children.
Not sure whether you ever saw the TV Series ‘The Villagers’, produced in the 1970s by Gray Hofmeyr (he and I were at school together). That typified the Berriman home.”
Timo Kok during WWII
“Oupa en Ouma het 4 kinders gehad,
Johan (Leon se pa) gebore 02 Mei 1908. Hy was die enigste een van die kinders wat op Universiteit was – Wits, as ek reg onthou
Gustaf. Gebore 12 Mei 1910 en oorlede 10 Julie 1910
Oupa Eben. Gebore 18 Junie 1911
Miempie (Bosman. Ma van Mariet en Ronnie en Jantjie) Gebore 23 November 1913
Timo is soos al die ander kinders op heilbron gebore waar my oupa jan ‘n sendeling was. Sy vrou was Engels en het NOOIT geleer om Afrikaans te praat nie. Sy het beweer Timo het eendag vir haar gelag toe sy probeer Afrikaans praat het en het toe nooit weer probeer nie
Uncle Timo and his dad before he left on a campain in North-Africa during WWII. Photo sent to me by Oom Jan who got it from Oom Sybrand.
So ver my kennis strek was Timo ‘n vlug-ingeneur in die oorlog en het eers in Noor-Afrika en Later in Italië geveg.
Ek dink nie hy was ooit in Korea nie. Ek dink Leon sal vir jou meer inligting kan gee. Die foto wat ek aanheg kom uit een van jou ma se albums.
Mag die feestyd vir julle wonderlik wees. Vir die eerste keer sedert Joretha-hulle in Engeland is, gaan ons op Kersdag ALMAL om een Kersmaal aansit. Marinus bring vir cathy saam en ons het opdrag gekry dat ons op Kersdag GEEN Afrikaans mag praat nie, want ons moet Cathy laat tuis voel.
Ek wens so ek kan julle klomp neefs en Niggies met al julle aanhangsels bymekaar kry om een tafel.”
Photo Credits:
Four small pigs are Kunekune, courtesy of the Empire Kunekune Pig Association of New York (https://www.ekpa.org/) They are a close family of the Kolbroek.
Anvil Rock and Kogel Bay Map: John Gribble & Gabriel Athiros.
The story of bacon is set in the late 1800s and early 1900s when most of the important developments in bacon took place. The plotline takes place in the 2000s with each character referring to a real person and actual events. The theme is a kind of “steampunk” where modern mannerisms, speech, clothes and practices are superimposed on a historical setting. Modern people interact with old historical figures with all the historical and cultural bias that goes with this.
My birth was a very ordinary event. The midwife on duty that night recounted her sketchy memory on my 16th birthday. She recalled it on account of the daughter of a certain Edwin Gregory (1) who was struck by a Cape Cobra when she visited the grave of her father in Somerset Road. She was rushed to the hospital where she passed away minutes before my birth, just before 11:00 p.m. on the evening of the 13th of April 1869. It was a Tuesday.
Three facts that I learned on my 16th birthday was that my birth was largely overshadowed by the death of Lady Gregory, whose father passed away in June 1858 on Table Mountain. He was trapped by bad weather and perished from the cold. The inscription on his gravestone makes it the earliest recorded death on the mountain..
The second was that my mother was admitted at around 6:00 p.m. with bleeding and that I was born at 11:00 with no complications. The third fact was that after my birth, my father produced a small piece of bacon from his knapsack. From this, he carved a piece with his pocket knife and offered some to Maria de Lange, for that was the name of the midwife, to gain sustenance. She doubled as a nurse when there were too many emergencies at the hospital and was on duty that night.
These facts surrounding my birth proved to be prophetic since both became passions of my life. Not Lady Gregory’s death or the cobra that bit her or even her father who perished, but the connection with the mountain. Table Mountain became my playground as a young child and as a teenager, I heard the calling of her majestic cliffs. It became my church where I worshipped God and felt closest to the creator. Here, I dreamt and fought imaginary battles, hunted with mighty dragons and later contemplated the marvels of our natural world and the secret of life. A place of reflection to seek wisdom for every business decision I later had to make or was fortunate to be part of.
The second important fact was the bacon my dad had with him. Every year we cured our own bacon on the farm of my grandparents. My dad told us that it is the only food that is enjoyed by the rich and the poor alike. The rich eat it as a delicacy on account of its unique taste. The poor benefit from the fact that curing and smoking preserve meat for future use. A full quarter of half a kilogram can be cut from a single loin each morning and sustains a worker for an entire day. In the evenings it can be boiled in water which the children drink while the parents eat the meat to gain strength for the work of the next day. That way, each family member can go to bed with a measure of satisfaction. (2) Making good bacon was important to us and later, making the best bacon on earth became an obsession that completely consumed me.
When my 16th birthday was celebrated, Cape Town was known among sailors as the Tavern of the Seas. Despite this, in those days, there was not a single good hotel in town (3) and at the invitation of the 64-year-old Uncle Jacobus Combrinck (4), my Afrikaans speaking mother, Susanna (Santjie) and my father, Andries (Dries), decided to host the celebrations at his large Papendorp (5) mansion. The enormous house had a small stream running through an elaborate garden and was ideal for events like 16th birthday celebrations.
Jacobus Combrinck
Uncle Jacobus was a butcher. He was taught the business by a family friend, Johannes Mechau, who graciously took him on as an apprentice at the age of 10 after his father passed away and his mother could not make ends meet. Following his apprenticeship, he was appointed as foreman of the business of Othmard Bernard Schietlin. Schietlin was the leading butcher in Cape Town who eventually returned to Switzerland and Jacobus started his own butchery.
Scheitlin was an example of the kind of men who came to Cape Town in those days. Adventure was in their blood, and few other places in the world attracted more of them than the Cape of Good Hope. Uncle Jacobus tells me that Scheitlin was born in Switzerland. When he turned 18, he left home, travelling through France, Holland, England, and Germany. He got a job as a cabin boy and worked his way to the Cape of Good Hope. Here he set up the pork butcher’s shop in Papendorp. It was this business where Uncle Jacobus was a foreman which he later took over when Scheitlin returned to Switzerland with his family. (6)
Flavours and tastes are things butchers specialise in. A good butcher has an intimate knowledge of herbs and spices, and Uncle Jacobus, even in his old age and despite being retired, was still the master of his trade. At his home, he grew his own herbs in his enormous garden. Sage, rosemary, thyme, bay leaf, chives, ginger, garlic, saffron and of course paprika. He abhorred the straight and “unnatural lines” of the Dutch, as he called it. Instead of “hideous straight-lined herb gardens” he planted his herbs throughout his garden. Some under trees, some against walls, in shady spots or in open, well-drained areas. Sage grows best in sunny spots. In between, he planted paprika. Wild-rosemary, indigenous to the Cape, was planted along the fences. This bushy evergreen shrub grows up to 1 meter high with a silvery, grey leaf. He would walk through his garden and harvest the spices. Seeing him ambling through his garden, pruning scissors in hand and basket in the other is an image that will live with me forever. On the night of my 16th birthday celebrations, he personally prepared the meat with the skill of the master butcher that he was.
Pork is my favourite meat and featured prominently. Pork loins, wrapped in pickled pork skin, roasted to perfection. Rind-on pork belly, spiced with black pepper and cold smoked for seven days. Pork neck, roasted in honey and pineapple juice. Small kebabs with cured, smoked pork belly and apricot pieces. Pork trotters, cured in vinegar and fried over an open fire. Eisbein with bay leaves, cooked in dark Dutch beer, which he bought from the Woodstock Hotel. Colon stuffed with kidneys and heart. These were a few of the dishes that adorned the large, heavy wooden tables set out under tall Essenhout trees close to the homestead.
Our Dutch Reformed pastor who baptized me as a baby, Ds. Lindeque was there as well as our family doctor, Dr. Van Eeden. My mother’s brother, Ds. Jan Kok, also a Dutch Reform minister, and his wife, Magna, attended with their three daughters, Joretha, Suria, and Daleen. Of course, my own two brothers were there, Andre and Elmar, and the midwife, Maria de Lange, with whom my parents kept contact on account of the fact that they attended the same church.
An old friend of mine and a family member of Uncle Jacobus, Dawie de Villiers-Graaff (7) who has been running Uncle Jacobus’ butchery since 1876, attended with his younger brother, Jacobus. Uncle Jacobus Combrinck never married and didn’t have children of his own. He took some of the Graaff brothers and one sister in when their own parents fell on hard times, farming on their Wolfhuiskloof farm in the Villiersdorp district. Dawie was only 11 when his Uncle Jacobus brought him to Cape Town to work in his butchery.
Hannie, the Graaff sister, kept house for the boys and was our host for the evening. Dawie finished evening high school run by the Dutch Reformed Church where my uncle, Ds. Jan Kok was a part-time teacher. This made the evening very personal. Everybody knew each other.
Dawie was a serious young man and became a mentor to me. As a strict Calvinist and accustomed to hard times, he has a relentless work ethic. In appearance, he is dark and handsome. Girls are smitten by him but he shows not much interest in them. He has a full head of black hair and a droopy black moustache. Short in stature and slender build, he has an enormous spirit. He pressed me to finish high school before setting out to learn a trade and conquer the world.
He himself was never that fortunate. At least not as far as schooling was concerned. As a boy, he had to attend school in the evening while learning the butchery trade by day. Long hours at the small space allocated to Uncle Jacobus’ butchery, Combrinck & Co., down at the local abattoir at the bottom of Adderley Street, made him value school learning and is forever an example to me of what can be achieved through part-time learning.
Mountain Gang
I met Minette in 2011 when I joined her on the Witels Hike in the Cederberg Mountains. The photos above are from this hike. Adventure was the thing that brought us together!
The other people at my 16th birthday celebrations were mountain friends. There was the inimitable Minette Bylsma with Achmat Jackson and Taahir Osman. A love for the mountain bound us and in later years would become a common interest that would evolve into love between Minette and me. Our relationship would be much more than the mountains but never less. It all started there and over the years we would both continue to feel most at home there.
Dawie has never been keen on mountaineering. His life revolved around school and work in his teen years and now, building an empire as the heir apparent of Uncle Jacobus’ butchery business. Unlike Dawie, we, however, grew up in the shadow of the majestic mountain. Our friendships were forged well before we took to the mountain to fuel our dreams and before we set our ambitions on more daring pursuits. Cape Town has been, as it is to this day, a unique place for kids to grow up.
Since Cape Town is at the southern tip of Africa one may expect the children to be hailing from the indigenous tribes, but Cape Town in the 1870s was not so. Unfortunate and shameful acts of powerful European nations cast devastating spells over this beautiful land and from the struggles of many a unique culture emerged.
Rainbow Nation
For sure, I grew up with many black boys. My white friends were from America, England, Scotland, France, Germany, Russia, and many other places. I have friends from Arabia, Egypt, India, China, and the Malay Peninsula. Even from St Helena where Napoleon died. It seems as if I am able to count friends from every part of the world and every country. (8)
The Royal Observatory – 1857 – Illustrated London News Print.jpg. Supplied by Martin Greshoff.
Some wore red jackets and round red caps made by their mothers for the pilgrimage to Mecca. Some were Christian and had to go to Sunday school when I wanted to play. Some of my black friends wore no shirts under their jackets and no shoes. (8)
Despite these differences of colour, background, income, and religion, when we played we were all just children. We played mostly Dutch games since these were the European people who first came here. In the daytime, we would play a kind of a pitch and toss game similar to cricket or baseball and at night we would gather in the bright moonshine and dance in a ring, singing Dutch songs. The police would allow us to play these games and only interfere when we start playing card games which were not allowed. (8)
After we played, we all ran down to Table Bay and swam in the sea before returning to our different houses. Some, like myself, stayed in their own rooms, in big houses. Some lived in small houses that look more like two-bedroom barns, sleeping at times up to 30 children in one room. (8)
As we grew into our early teenage years, the games of bat and ball and dancing in circles evolved into a quest for adventure. This is how it happened that some of us exchanged late night swimming at Table Bay with venturing ever higher up on Table Mountain. By the age of 16, Table Mountain was part of our lives as much as our daily bread.
Supplied by Michael Fortune.
Most of our friends did not share our newfound passion. Slavery no longer existed at the Cape, but stories of runaway slaves hiding in the caves were supplanted by the fear of escaped convicts who might hide on the mountain. These, along with the exaggerated accounts of leopard sightings, meant that only a hand full of us made the transition from the bay to the mountain, and at the age of 16, the desire for adventure in most of my childhood friends was spent. A few of us cultivated the desire for adventure, and these were all there with me at the house of Uncle Jacobus, celebrating my 16th birthday well into the night.
What no one of us comprehended that night was that our forays onto the mountain were training for bigger adventures that awaited us. Some involve actual battle and war; some, revolution and a fight for freedom, and as in my case, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, the answer to the question of life, death and everything that exist! It did not come to me through revelation or as answers following a conscious search. It came to me through the simplest pursuit imaginable – of understanding and practising both the art and science of bacon curing. All these started once upon a time in Africa and comes together in is the story of bacon and the art of living.
(1) From a tombstone in Maitland Cemetery, originally in Somerset Street. Edwin Gregory “perished from cold on Table Mountain,” June 1858.
(2) The evaluation of bacon was made by Edward Smith in his 1876 book, Foods, page 65. (D. Appleton and Co, New York)
(3) Quote: “The very best hotel in Cape Town would disgrace the meanest, dirtiest, most unsanitary village in England,” William Clark Russell, English nautical novelist, 1880.
(4) Jacobus Combrinck was born in Worcester on 21 May 1828
(5) Papendorp is the current Woodstock.
(6) Linder, Adolphe. 1997. The Swiss at the Cape of Good Hope. Creda Press (Pty) Ltd; page 270
(7) Dawie or David de Villiers-Graaff would have been 26 and a city councilor. He served as city major in 1891 – 1892.
(8) A beautiful description of the life of boys in Cape Town at the end of the 1800s was published in the Indiana State Sentinel on 17 Nov 1880, page 6, written by E. B. Biggar, called The Boys of Cape Town.
Bacon and the art of living is a study in the birth of the elements of bacon curing. Neither the chemical reactions, nor the different mechanical processes are simple. Everything about bacon is complex and beautiful. One of the most amazing stories within the grand story of bacon, is the story of sodium nitrite.
Pork is changed into bacon by the reaction of nirtrite (NO2-). With salt, it is the curing agent. The meat industry uses nitrite in the form of an ionic compound, sodium nitrite. It is sold as Quick Cure or Insta’ Cure, Prague Salt, Prague Powder or simply Pink Salt or Curing Salt. It is coloured pink to distinguish it from ordinary salt (sodium chloride). Every spice company sells it. It is the essential ingredient in the meat curing process.
Meat changes colour from the red fresh meat colour to an unappetising brown colour within days. (1) If one injects nitrite into the meat or rubs a mixture of salt and a small percentage of nitrite onto it, the meat will develop an appatizing reddish/ pinkish fresh meat colour (Hoagland, Ralph. 1914) and a characteristic cured taste. It will retain this colour for weeks and months if packed in the right conditions. (1) Nitrite provides an indispensable hurdle against a particularly nasty food pathogen, clostridium botulinum. It also endows the meat with a distinct cured taste.
During ages past, it has however not been nitrite that was added to meat to accomplish this, but its cousin, nitrate (NO3-). They may be cousins, but are very different in characteristics. Nitrate takes several weeks or even months to cure meat where nitrite accomplishes the same task in 12 hours. How the change happened from using nitrate or salpeter in meat curing to nitrite is an epic story.
Overview
This article tracks the migration of the meat industry from the use of saltpeter (potassium or sodium nitrate) as curing agent to sodium nitrite. It gives an overview of the scientific discoveries which started to reveal the mechanisms of meat curing. This understanding lead to the realisation that a direct application of nitrite as the curing agent will be vastly superior to the use of saltpeter (nitrate).
This was a dramatic discovery since in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, the world saw nitrite as a dangerous drug at best and a poison that polluted drinking water and cause death of cattle. Using this directly in food and meat curing was unthinkable.
Sodium nitrite was available in this time for application in the coal-tar dye and medical industries. Science and engineering have however not worked out its large scale production in a way that will make it a commercially viable proposition for direct use in meat curing from a price and availability perspective.
World War One provided the transition moments required to change everything. Germany invested heavily in nitrogen related technology for the war. The most organised scientific and engineering environment on the planet in the early 1900’s focused its full attention on overcoming the manufacturing challenges in the service of the manufacturing of munitions. It also required this technology to overcome the challenge of being cut off, as a result of the war, from the natural sodium nitrate deposits in Chili that it required as fertilizer to drive its enormous agriculture sector during the war. At the same time, the use of saltpeter in meat curing was prohibited under the leadership of Walther Rathenau so that the valuable nitrate could be reserved for manufacturing of munitions.
This prohibition, I believe, was the initial spark that caused butchers to change to the use of sodium nitrite. At the same time, sodium nitrite was being produced in large volumes since it had, in its own right, application in the manufacturing of explosives. Health concerns and probably the need to have it reserved for munitions, lead to a ban, similar to nitrate, on its use in meat curing. So, World War One solved the scientific challenges of large scale manufacturing of sodium nitrite, the engineering challenges of building production facilities and provided the impetus for the meat industry to change by banning the use of saltpeter in meat curing. The ban was lifted after the war.
Following the war, Germany had to find markets for its enormous war time chemical stock piles. One of the ways it “sold” sodium nitrite was as a meat curing agent based on its inherent benefits of curing consistency and the vastly shorter curing time required.
It was introduced to the world mainly through the Chicago based firm, Griffith Laboratories, who imported it as Prague Salt from Germany and later improved on it by fusing the sodium nitrite to sodium chloride and sold it as Prague Powder.
Early humans to Polenski (1891)
Early humans did not know they added nitrate to the meat. A mixture of salt and a small amount of saltpeter was used to cure meat in order to preserve it and to retain the fresh meat colour.
Saltpeter is found naturally around the world in typically dry areas. Deposits exist in India, China, Mexico, the USA, and the Middle East. Despite its wide occurrence, the concentration of natural saltpeter is low. (Whittaker, CW, 1932: 10)
Saltpeter is also made by human effort. Europe, particularly Germany and France, Great Britain, India and the United States all acquired the technology to produce satpeter. (Van Cortlandt, P, 1776: 7, 8)
In South Africa, saltpeter deposits are found in the Griquatown beds of the Transvaal geological system. It extends from just South of the Orange River Northwards to the Kalahari Desert and then Eastwards into the Old Transvaal from Zeerust to Polokwane. The nitrate deposits occur in the middle portions of these beds, in softer and more decomposed shale. These South African reserves have fortunately never been mined even though it was used on a small scale to make gunpowder for the old Boer government. (Whittaker, CW, 1932: 10)
Saltpeter was at the heart of the arms race of the middle ages. It was used mainly in gunpowder, but as the worlds population grew, it became indispensable as a fertilizer and for curing meat. (See Bacon and the art of living, chapters 2, 3 and 4)
The French chemist, Antoine Lavoisier worked out its chemical composition. It is an ionic compound consisting of the metal potassium and its power is nitrate. Potassium Nitrate. (Mauskopf, MSH. 1995: 96) Trade in Saltpeter around the world was done through companies such as the Dutch East Indian Company (Dutch abbreviation, VOC) who traded it for its main use as an ingredient in gunpowder. It was by volume one of the largest commodities traded by the Dutch East Indian Company who set up the trading post in 1652 that became Cape Town.
Major developments shifted the balance of power away from Indie, China and home grown saltpeter production to South America where huge deposits of sodium nitrate were discovered that would become the principal source of the worlds nitrate for much of the 1800’s.
A man walks down a dirt road in the Atacama Desert. Despite being one of the most inhospitable places on earth, the Atacama is still mined: in 2010 this made world-wide news, when the Copiapó mining accident led to the dramatic rescue of 33 trapped miners (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills).
A popular legend tells the story of the discovery by two Indians in the Atacama desert in the South of Peru. According to the legend, after a hard day’s work, they camped in the Pampa and started a campfire to warm themselves. All of a sudden the ground started to burn and they ran away, thinking that they have seen the devil. They reported the event later to a priest in Camina who returned to the site. He had it analysed and found it to contain sodium nitrate (the same power as potassium nitrate, but linked to another common metal). The priest, according to the story, threw the rest of the soil in the courtyard of his house and saw the plants grew vigorously. He recommended the soil as an excellent tonic for the plant kingdom. (Wisniak, J, et al., 2001 :433)
So was discovered the enormous sodium nitrate deposits of the Atacama desert. The fertilizer properties of the salt was known long before the 1600’s. There are references to saltpeter and the nitrate ground in 1604. During the time of the Spanish Conquest, in the 1700’s, miners working in the South of Peru realised that gunpowder could be manufactured from the material in the soil instead of potassium nitrate. (Wisniak, J, et al., 2001 :433)
A report published in 1803 by Juan Egana, Secretary of the Royal Court of Mines in Chile showed the Huasco region is “covered in a large part by a crust of niter salt, well crystallized, and several inches thick” (Wisniak, J, et al., 2001 :434)
The region was developed and by 1850 exports reached 24 000 tons/ year. In 1910 it was 2.4 million tons per year and by 1916, 3 million tons per year from 97 plants. (Wisniak, J, et al., 2001 :434)
By the beginning of the 1900’s the country buying the largest quantity of the Chilean saltpeter was Germany (Wisniak, J, et al., 2001 :434) who used it aggressively in their agriculture sector as fertilizer.
There is a close correlation between sodium and potassium nitrate. Its difficult to distinguish between sodium and potassium nitrate just by tasting it. Scientists were able to distinguish between the two compounds from the mid 1600’s and knew that sodium nitrate had a much greater ability to attract water (Whittaker, CW, 1932: 3). This made sodium nitrate a much better curing agent than potassium nitrate.
Nitrite was described in 1864 by the English Physiologist, B. W. Richardson. He outlined how to manufacture it and its chemical properties. (Wells, D. A., 1865: 233) Much earlier, in 1777 the prolific Swedish chemist Scheele,working in the laboratory of his pharmacy in the market town of Köping, made the first pure nitrite. (Scheele CW. 1777) He heated potassium nitrate at red heat for half an hour and obtained what he recognized as a new “salt.” The two compounds (potassium nitrate and nitrite) were characterized by Péligot and the reaction established as 2KNO3→2KNO2+O2. (Péligot E. 1841: 2: 58–68) (Butler, A. R. and Feelisch, M.)
The technology existed in the 1800’s to not only produce potassium nitrate (salpeter) and nitrite, but to also test for these.
Remember that curing up till 1890 has been attributed to saltpeter (potassium nitrate) or Chilean saltpeter (sodium nitrate). In 1891 a German food scientist, Dr Ed Polenski, working for the German Department of Health made an observation that would change the world while studying curing brines. When he tested the curing brine made from saltpeter and salt, days after it was made, he found nitrite to be present. This was surprising since saltpeter is potassium or sodium nitrate, not nitrite.
Dr Ed speculated that the nitrate (NO3-) was changed into nitrite (NO2-) through bacterial action, a reduction step between nitrate and nitrite that was well understood by this time. He had a hunch that nitrite is responsible for curing of meat and not the nitrate directly, as was previously thought.
From Polenski (1891) to WWI (1914 to 1918)
Following Dr Ed’s observations in 1891, considerable resources from around the world were dedicated to understand the chemistry of meat curing.
When World War One broke out, the concept of nitrite as curing agent (as opposed to nitrate) was firmly established.
Ralph Hoagland, Senior Biochemist, Biochemie Division, Bureau of Animal Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, published an article in 1914, Coloring matter of raw and cooked salted meats. In this article, he shows that nitrite as curing agent was a known and accepted fact by the outbreak of World War One (Hoagland, Ralph. 1914)
Readers who dont have an interest in the detailed description of the key discoveries may want to skip over the rest of this section altogether or glance over it generally. The goal of the section is to give the reader a sense of how firmly and universally the concept of nitrite as the curing agent was established by 1914. In the midst of the technical names and jargon, don’t lose the sense of the universal interest. The 1700’s, 1800’s and beginning of the 1900’s was a time when the average person was as interested in chemistry as we are today about communication and information technology.
The difference between nitrates and nitrites, for example, was taught in school curriculum. An article appeared in the Daily Dispatch in Brainerd, Minnesota in the 20’s, that gives as an example of a diligent high school student, that he or she would know the difference. (The Brainerd Daily Dispatch (Brainerd, Minnesota). 17 January 1923. Page 3.)
Following Dr. Polenski’s observation, the German scientist, Notwang confirmed the presence of nitrite in curing brines in 1892, as observed by Dr Polenski, but attributed the reduction from nitrate to nitrite to the meat tissue itself. The link between nitrite and cured meat colour was finally established in 1899 by another German scientist, K. B. Lehmann in a simple but important experiment.
Karl Bernhard Lehmann (September 27, 1858 – January 30, 1940) was a German hygienist and bacteriologist born in Zurich.
In an experiment he boiled fresh meat with nitrite and a little bit of acid. A red colour resulted, similar to the red of cured meat. He repeated the experiment with nitrates and no such reddening occurred, thus establishing the link between nitrite and the formation of a stable red meat colour in meat. (Lee Lewis, W., 1925: 1243)
In the same year, another German hygienists, K. Kisskalt, confirmed Lehmann’s observations but proved that the same red colour resulted if the meat was left in saltpeter (potassium nitrate) for several days before it was cooked. (Lee Lewis, W., 1925: 1243)
K. B. Lehmann made another important observation that must be noted when he found the colour to be soluble in alcohol and ether and to give a spectrum showing an absorption band just at the right of the D line, and a second band, often poorly defined, at the left of the E line. On standing, the color of the solution changed to brown and gave the spectrum of alkaline hematin, the colouring group (Hoagland, Ralph. 1914).
The brilliant British physiologist and philosopher, John Scott Haldane weighed in on the topic. He was born in 1860 in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was part of a lineage of important and influential scientists. (Lang, M. A. and Brubakk, A. O. 2009. The Haldane Effect)
J. S. Haldene contributed immensely to the application of science across many fields of life. This formidable scientist was for example responsible for developing decompression tables for deep sea diving used to this day. (Lang, M. A. and Brubakk, A. O. 2009. The Haldane Effect)
“Haldane was an observer and an experimentalist, who always pointed out that careful observation and experiments had to be the basis of any theoretical analysis. “Why think when you can experiment” and “Exhaust experiments and then think.” (Lang, M. A. and Brubakk, A. O. 2009. The Haldane Effect)
An interesting anecdote is told about him from the time when he was studying medicine in Jena. He apparently carefully observed the amount of beer being drunk, noting that the students on the average drank about 20 pints per evening.” (Lang, M. A. and Brubakk, A. O. 2009. The Haldane Effect)
Before we look at Haldene’s contribution, let us re-cap what has been determined thus far.
Polenski and Notwang discovered that nitrite were present in a mix of saltpeter and salt, after a while, even though no nitrite were present when the brine was mixed.
Karl Bernhard Lehmann linked nitrite conclusively with the reddening effect of fresh meat that was boiled in a nitrite and water solution with some free acid. He also showed that this does not happen if fresh meat is placed in saltpeter and water solution and boiled immediately. K. Kisskalt showed that the same reddening occurred if fresh meat is left in saltpeter for some time.
K. B. Lehmann managed to “isolate” the colour by dissolving it in ether and alcohol and analyze it spectroscopically.
What S. J. Haldele did was to apply the same rigor to cured meat and became the first person to demonstrate that the addition of nitrite to hemoglobin produce a nitric oxide (NO)-heme bond, called iron-nitrosyl-hemoglobin (HbFeIINO). (Lang, M. A. and Brubakk, A. O. 2009: 119)
Nitrite is further reduced to nitric oxide (NO) by bacteria or enzymatic reactions and in the presence of muscle myoglobin forms iron-nitrosyl-myoglobin. It is nitrosylated myoglobin that gives cured meat, including bacon and hot dogs, their distinctive red color and protects the meat from oxidation and spoiling. (Lang, M. A. and Brubakk, A. O. 2009: 119)
This is how he did it. He concluded (1901) that its red colour is due to the presence of the nitricoxid hemochromogen resulting from the reduction of the coloring matter of the uncooked meat, or nitric-oxid hemoglobin (NO-hemoglobin). (Hoagland, Ralph. 1914)
Remember the observation made by K. B. Lehmann that the colour of fresh meat cooked in water with nitrites and free acid to give a spectrum showing an absorption band just at the right of the D line, and a second band, often poorly defined, at the left of the E line. (Hoagland, Ralph. 1914)
Haldene found the same colour to be present in cured meat. That it is soluble in water and giving a spectrum characteristic of NO-hemoglobin. The formation of the red color in uncooked salted meats is explained by the action of nitrites in the presence of a reducing agent and in the absence of oxygen upon hemoglobin, the normal coloring matter of fresh meats. (Hoagland, Ralph. 1914)
Ralp Hoagland (1908) studied the action of saltpeter upon the colour of meat and found that its value as an agent in the curing of meats depends upon the nitrate’s reduction to nitrites and the nitrites to nitric oxid, with the consequent production of NO-hemoglobin. The red colour of salted meats is due to this compound. Hoagland conclusively shows that saltpeter, as such, has no value to preserve the fresh colour. (Hoagland, Ralph, 1914: 212)
The reason why the knowledge did not translate to a change in curing brines was very simple. The technology and infrastructure did not exist to produce enough nitrite commercially to replace saltpeter. This means that to produce nitrite was very expensive.
There were some attempts to capitalise on the knowledge gained. The German scientist, Glage (1909) wrote a pamphlet where he outlines the practical methods for obtaining the best results from the use of saltpeter in the curing of meats and in the manufacture of sausages. (Hoagland, Ralph, 1914: 212, 213)
Saltpeter can only effect the colour of the meat if the nitrate in the saltpeter is reduced to nitrite. Glage gives for the partial reduction of the saltpeter to nitrites by heating the dry salt in a kettle before it is used. It is stated that this partially reduced saltpeter is much more efficient in the production of color in the manufacture of sausage than is the untreated saltpeter. (Hoagland, Ralph, 1914: 212, 213)
The fear of nitrites
The lack of a large scale production process for sodium nitrite and the engineering to build these plants were however not the only factors preventing the direct use of sodium nitrite in meat curing brines. As one review literature from the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, one realises that a major hurdle that stood between the use of sodium nitrites in meat curing was the mistrust by the general public and authorities of the use of nitrites in food. The matter relate to the high level of toxicity of nitrite, a matter that will be dealt with separately in Bacon and the art of living.
The first recorded direct use of nitrite as a curing agent was in 1905 in the USA where it was used in secret. (Katina, J. 2009) The USDA finally approved its use as a food additive in 1906. (porkandhealth) This did not mean that the public would accept it.
Sodium Nitrite started to be used in this time as a bleach for flour in the milling industry. Several newspaper articles reveal public skepticism and the great lengths that the scientific community and industry had to go to in order to demonstrate its safety as a bleaching agent for flour. An article appeared in The Nebraska State Journal Lincoln, Nebraska on 29 June 1910 entitled, “All for bleached flour. No harm can come from its consumption says experts”. The article deals with a federal court case about the matter and interestingly enough, it seems from newspaper articles that the government was opposing its use. Many other examples can be sited.
There is a 1914 reference in the London Times that shows the general view of nitrite as not just restricted to the USA. The article appeared on 9 June 1914 and a reference is made to sodium nitrite where it is described as “a dangerous drug with a powerful action on the heart.” (The London Times. 1914. Page 118) The reference was to the use of nitrite for certain heart conditions.
It is interesting that sodium nitrite did not find an immediate application in the meat industry, even after it was allowed in 1906 in the USA.
In my view, this points to problems surrounding availability and price. If the issue was the public perception alone, this could have been overcome with a PR campaign by the meat industry as was successfully done by the milling industry.
On 13 Dec 1915 George F. Doran from Omaha, Nebraska, filed an application for a patent for a curing brine that contained nitrites. His application strengthens the evidence that it was not the knowledge of nitrite and its role in curing that was lacking, but availability and price. He states the objective of his patent application to “produce in a convenient and more rapid manner a complete cure of packing house meats; to increase the efficiency of the meat-curing art; to produce a milder cure; and to produce a better product from a physiological standpoint.”
One of Doran’s sources of nitrite is “sterilized waste pickling liquor which he [I have] discovered contains soluble nitrites produced by conversion of the potassium nitrate, sodium nitrate, or other nitrate of the pickling liquor when fresh, into nitrites. . .” “Waste pickling liquor is taken from the cured meats. Nitrites suitable for use in carrying out the present invention may be produced by bacterial action from nitrates and fresh pickling liquor by adding a small percentage of old used pickling liquor. The bacteria in old pickling liquor are reducing bacteria and change nitrates to nitrites.” (Process for curing meats. US 1259376 A)
The use of old pickle has been described much earlier than Doran’s patent. His usage of old pickle when he understood the reduction of nitrate to nitrite and nitrite’s role in curing along with the fact that sodium nitrite was available can point to only one reason – price. It comes 10 years after sodium nitrite was first tested in curing brines for meat and shows that it has never become the curing agent of choice most probably due to limited availability and price. Much more about this later.
The postWWI era (1918 and beyond)
After WWI something changed. Saltpeter (potassium or sodium nitrate) has been substituted by the direct addition of nitrite to the curing brines.
The question is who pioneered this. Why and how did sodium nitrite production become so commonplace that it became available to bacon curing plants around the world?
Industry developments like this do not happen “by itself.” Someone drives it in order for it to become general practice in an industry.
Chilean Saltpeter is a good case in point. Even though natural sodium nitrate deposits were discovered in the Atacama desert, it took a considerable effort on the side of the producers (mainly the Chilean Government) to work out the benefits of sodium nitrate and to market it to the world. It is, for example, famously reported that the first shipment to Britain was dumped in the sea before the ship docked on account that the cargo attracted customs duty and the ships owners could not see any commercial application for sodium nitrate. (2)
In the same way, the direct application of nitrite in curing brines must have been driven by someone.
The Griffith Laboratories, Inc.
The Chicago based company of Enoch Luther Griffith and his son, Carroll Griffith started to import a mixture of sodium nitrite and salt as a curing substitute for saltpeter from Germany in 1925. The product was called Prague Salt (Prague Powder, 1963: 3)
The Griffith Laboratories (3) played a key role in marketing the new curing brine in the USA. They took the concept of the Prague Salt (sodium nitrite) and in 1934 announced an improved curing brine, based on the simple use of sodium nitrite, where they fuse nitrite salt and sodium chloride in a particular ratio. They called it Prague Powder. Their South African agents, Crown Mills (4), brought the innovation to South Africa. (Prague Powder, 1963: 3, 4)
It is fair to assume that if Prague Salt was being sold to Griffith in the 1920’s, the German producers must have sold it to other countries and companies around the world also.
The benefits of Prague Salt and later Prague Powder over Saltpeter is dramatic. Prague Salt (sodium nitrite) does not have the slightly bitter taste of saltpeter (Brown, 1946: 223). It allows for greater product consistency since the same percentage of nitrate was not always present in the saltpeter and the reduction of nitrate to nitrite takes longer or shorter under various conditions (Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, December 1925: 1243). The big benefit was however in the curing time required. Instead of weeks or even months that is required with saltpeter, curing could now be done in days or even hours with sodium nitrite. (The Food Packer, 1954: 64) From there, brand names like Quick Cure or Instacure.
This means that we have narrowed the time line for invention of Prague Salt (Sodium Nitrite) to between 1914, the beginning of the Great War and 1925 when Griffith imported it from Germany.
However, a document, published in the USA in 1925 shows that sodium nitrite as curing agent has been known well before 1925.
The document was prepared by the Chicago based organisation, The Institute American Meat Packers and published in December 1925. The Institute started as an alignment of the meat packing companies set up by Phil Armour, Gustavus Swift, Nelson Morris, Michael Cudahy, Jacob Dold and others with the University of Chicago.
A newspaper article about the Institute sets its goal, apart from educating meat industry professionals and new recruits, “to find out how to reduce steers to beef and hogs to pork in the quickest, most economical and the most serviceable manner.” (The Indiana Gazette. 28 March 1924).
The document is entitled, “Use of Sodium Nitrite in Curing Meats“, and it it is clear that the direct use of nitrites in curing brines has been practiced from earlier than 1925. (Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, December 1925: 1243)
The article begins “The authorization of the use of sodium nitrite in curing meat by the Bureau of Animal Industry on October 19, 1925, through Amendment 4 to B. A. I. Order 211 (revised), gives increased interest to past and current work on the subject.”
Sodium Nitrite curing brines would therefore have arrived in the USA, well before 1925.
It continues in the opening paragraph, “It is now generally accepted that the salpteter added in curing meat must first be reduced to nitrite, probably by bacteria, before becoming available as an agent in producing the desirable red color in the cured product. This reduction is the first step in the ultimate formation of nitrosohemoglobin, the color principle. The change of nitrate to nitrite is by no means complete and varies within considerable limits under operating conditions. Accordingly, the elimination of this step by the direct addition of smaller amounts of nitrite means the use of less agent and a more exact control.”
Griffith describes the introduction and origin of Prague Salt and later, Prague Powder as follows in official company documents:
“The mid-twenties were significant to Griffith as it had been studying closely a German technique of quick-curing meats. Short on manpower and time, German meat processors began curing meats using Nitrite with salt instead of slow-acting saltpeter, potassium nitrate. This popular curing compound was known as “Prague Salt.” (Griffith Laboratories Worldwide, Inc.)
The World War One link
The tantalizing bit of information from Griffith sets World War One as the background for the practical and large scale introduction of direct addition of nitrite into curing brines through sodium nitrite.
There has to be more to the reason for saltpeter being replaced by sodium nitrite as curing agent than the reasons given by Griffith. For starters, the meat industry has always been under pressure to work fast with less people due to pressure on profit margins. The need to cure meat quicker due to short manpower and time as a result of the war could not be the full story.
The World War One link from Griffith does not give all the answers, but it puts the introduction of sodium nitrite to meat curing between 1914 and 1918, at least 7 years before Griffith started to import Prague Salt.
A document from the University of Vienna would fill out the story. According to it, saltpeter was reserved for the war effort and was consequently no longer available as curing agent for meat during World War One. (University of Vienna). It was reserved for the manufacturing of explosives, and for example, the important industry of manufacturing nitrocellulose, used as base for the production of photographic film, to be employed in war photography. (Vaupel, E., 2014: 462) It gets even better. Not only did the prohibition on the use of saltpeter expand the information from Griffith as to why people started using sodium nitrite (macro movements in culture does not take place because of one reason only), but it provide a name to the prohibition.
In August 1914, the War Raw Materials Department (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung or KRA) was set up under the leadership of Walther Rathenau. It was Rathenau who was directly responsible for the prohibition on the use of salpeter. (5) He therefore is the person in large part responsible creating the motivation for the meat industry in Germany to change from saltpeter to sodium nitrite as curing medium of choice for the German meat industry during Wold War One.
Walter Rathenau’s actions may have motivated the change, but it was the developments in synthesizing ammonia, sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite which provided the price point for the compound to remain the curing agent of choice, even after the war and after the prohibition on the use of saltpeter was lifted.
Atmospheric Nitrogen
One ofthe most important scientific riddles to be solved in the late 1800’s/ early 1900’s was how to produce ammonia and its related chemicals from atmospheric nitrogen. Sir William Crookes delivered a famous speech on the Wheat Problem at the annual meeting of the British Association for the advancement of Science in 1898.
In his estimation, the wheat production following 1897 would seriously decline due to reduced crop yields, resulting in a wheat famine unless science can step in and provide an answer. He saw no possibility to increase the worlds wheat yield under the prevailing agricultural conditions and with the increase in the world population, this posed a serious problem. He said, “It is clear that we are taxed with a colossal problem that must tax the wits of the wisest.” He predicted that the USA who produced 1/5th of the worlds wheat, would become a nett importer unless something change. He pointed to the obvious answer of manure, but observed that all available resources are being depleted fast.
Sir William saw a “gleam of light in the darkness” and that “gleam” was atmospheric nitrogen. (Otago Witness. 3 May 1900, Page 4)
It was the German Chemist, Fritz Harber who solved the problem, with the help of Robert Le Rossignol who developed and build the required high pressure device to accomplish this. (www.princeton.edu)
In 1909 they demonstrated that they could produce ammonia from air, drop by drop, at the rate of about a cup every two hours. “The process was purchased by the German chemical company BASF (a coal tar dye supplier), which assigned Carl Bosch the difficult task of scaling up Haber’s tabletop machine to industrial-level production.Haber and Bosch were later awarded Nobel prizes, in 1918 and 1931 respectively, for their work in overcoming the chemical and engineering problems posed by the use of large-scale, continuous-flow, high-pressure technology.” (www.princeton.edu)
“Ammonia was first manufactured using the Haber process on an industrial scale in 1913 in BASF’s Oppau plant in Germany.” (www.princeton.edu)
It was the vision and leadership of Walther Rathenau, the man responsible for restricting the use of saltpeter, that drove Germany to produce synthesized Chilean Saltpeter. He saw this as one of the most important tasks of his KRA. He said: “I initiated the construction of large saltpeter factories, which will be built by private industries with the help of governmental subsidies and will take advantage of recent technological developments to make the import of saltpeter entirely unnecessary in just few months“. (Lesch, J. E., 2000: 1)
Fritz Harber was one of the experts appointed by Rathenau to evaluate a study on the local production of nitric acid.
During World War One production was shifted from fertilizer to explosives, particularly through the conversion of ammonia into a synthetic form of Chile saltpeter, which could then be changed into other substances for the production of gunpowder and high explosives (the Allies had access to large amounts of saltpeter from natural nitrate deposits in Chile that belonged almost totally to British industries; Germany had to produce its own). It has been suggested that without this process, Germany would not have fought in the war, or would have had to surrender years earlier.” (www.princeton.edu)
So it happened that Germany became the leader in the world in synthesised sodium nitrate production and it effectively replaced its reliance on saltpeter from Chile with sythesised sodium nitrate, produced by BASF and other factories.
So, as a result of the First World War, sodium nitrite was produced at levels not seen previously in the world and in large factories that was build, using the latest processing techniques and technology from a scientific and an engineering perspective. Sodium nitrite, like sodium nitrate was being used in the production of explosives. Nitroglycerin is an example of an explosive used extensively by Germany in World War One that uses sodium nitrite in its production. (Wikipedia.org. Nitroglycerin and Amyl Nitrite)
Ball-and-stick model of Amyl nitrite used in the production of nitroglycerin. Amyl nitrite is produced from sodium nitrite. The diagram shows the amyl group attached to the nitrite functional group.
Sodium nitrite and the coal-tar dye industry
The importance of the manufacturing cost of nitrite and the matter surrounding availability can be seen in the fact that sodium nitrite has been around since well before the war. Despite the fact that it was known that nitrite is the curing agent and not nitrate, and despite the fact that sodium nitrite has been tested in meat curing agents, probably well before the clandestine 1905 test in the USA, it did not replace saltpeter as the curing agent of choice. My hunch is that it did not enter the meat industry as a result of cost.
The technology that ultimately is responsible for synthesising Chilean Saltpeter and made low cost sodium nitrite possible was being incubated in the coal-tar dye and textiles industry and in the medical field. The lucrative textiles and dye industry was the primary reason for German institutions of education, both in science and engineering to link with industry, resulting in a strong, well organised skills driven German economy. For example, “Bayer had close ties with the University of Göttingen, AGFA was linked to Hofmann at Berlin, and Hoechst and BASF worked with Adolph Baeyer who taught chemists in Berlin, Strasbourg, and Munich.” (Baptista, R. J.. 2012: 6)
“In the late 1870s, this knowledge allowed the firms to develop the azo class of dyes, discovered by German chemist Peter Griess, working at an English brewery, in 1858. Aromatic amines react with nitrous acid to form a diazo compound, which can react, or couple, with other aromatic compounds.” (Baptista, R. J.. 2012: 6)
Nitrous acid (HONO) is to nitrite (NO2-) what nitric acid (NO3) is to nitrate (NO3-).
According to K. H. Saunders, a chemist at Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., Martius was the chemist to whom the introduction of sodium nitrite as the source of nitrous acid was due. (Saunders, K. H., 1936: 26)
The economic imperative
The simple fact is that ammonia can be synthesized through the direct synthesis ammonia method at prices below what can be offered through Chilean Satlpeter. (Ernst, FA. 1928: 92 and 100) Sodium Nitrite can be supplied at prices below Chilean saltpeter and this made sodium nitrite the most effective curing agent at the lowest price since World War One.
As an example of the cost differences, the price of Nitric Acid (HNO3) from direct synthesis in 1928 was $23.60 per ton HNO3 plus the cost of 606 lb. of NH3 by-product and from Chilean Nitrate at $32.00 per ton of HNO3, plus the cost of 2840 N NO3 by-product. (Ernst, FA. 1928: 112)
The advantage of scale and technology
By 1927, Germany was still by far the worlds largest direct syntheses ammonia producer. Production figures of the year 1926/ 1927 exceeded Chilean saltpeter exports even if compared with the highest levels of exports that Chilean saltpeter ever had in 1917. A total of 593 000 tons of nitrogen was fixed around the world in 1926/27. Of this figure, Germany produced 440 000 tons or 74%. The closest competitor was England through the Synthetic Ammonia and Nitrates Ltd. with a total capacity of 53 000 tons of nitrogen per year. (Ernst, FA. 1928: 119, 120)
In the USA 7 direct synthesis plants were in operation with a combined capacity of 28 500 tons of nitrogen per year. (Ernst, FA. 1928: 120)
Supporting evidence from the USA
The thesis that before the war, the production of sodium nitrite was not advanced enough for its application in the meat industry (resulting in high prices and low availability) is confirmed when we consider the situation in the USA.
The first US plant for the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen was build in 1917 by the American Nitrogen Products Company at Le Grande, Washington. It could produce about one ton of nitrogen per day. In 1927 it was destroyed by a fire and was never rebuild. (Ernst, FA, 1928: 14)
An article in the Cincinnati Enquirer of 27 September 1923 reports that as a result of cheap German imports of sodium nitrite following the war, the American Nitrogen Products Company was forced to close its doors four years before the factory burned down. The imports referred to, was as a result of Germany selling their enormous stockpiles of sodium nitrite at “below market prices” and not directly linked to a lower production price in Germany, even though this was probably the case in any event. ( The Cincinnati Enquirer ( Cincinnati, Ohio), 27 September 1923. Page 14.)
The Vienna University document indicate that the fast curing of sodium nitrite was recognised and the ban was lifted when the war ended. It was this fact that Griffith picks up on in their literature.
This is how it happened that sodium nitrite replaced saltpeter as curing salt.
Conclusion
The ban on the use of saltpeter for non military uses by Walther Rathenau is the likely spark that caused butchers to look at alternative curing systems. A known alternative was sodium nitrite. Despite a similar ban on the use of nitrite, later imposed for concerns over the safety of nitrite in meat and because sodium nitrite was also used to produce explosives, it was available in such large quantities around Germany that it was possible to defy the ban.
The likely consequence of the developments surrounding the production of atmospheric nitrogen is that sodium nitrite was being produced at prices that was previously not possible. These prices, combined with the volume of sodium nitrite now available made it a viable proposition to replace saltpeter in meat curing and to remain the curing brine of choice, following the war.
(1) “The red color of fresh lean meat, such as beef, pork, and mutton, is due to the presence of oxyhemoglobin, a part of which is one of the constituents of the blood remaining in the tissues, while the remainder is a normal constituent of the muscles. When fresh meat is cooked or is cured by sodium chloride, the red color changes to brown, owing to the breaking down of the oxyhemoglobin into the two constituents, hematin, the coloring group, and the protein, globin.
On the other hand, when fresh meat is cured by means of a mixture of sodium chloride and a small proportion of potassium nitrate, or saltpeter, either as a dry mixture or in the form of a pickle, the red color of the fresh meat is not destroyed during the curing process, the finished product having practically the same color as the fresh meat. Neither is the red color destroyed on cooking, but rather is intensified.” (Hoagland, Ralph. 1914)
(2) The first export of salitre (sodium nitrate) was authorised by the Chilean government in March 1830 and went to the USA, France, and to Liverpool. It is the latter shipment which failed and was thrown overboard. Different sources give different reasons for the action. One, that price was not attractive, another, that the excise duties were to high, and a third that the Port captain did not allow the boat to come in because it was carrying a dangerous load. A few farmers in Glasgow received a few bags. They used it as fertalizer and reported a three fold increase in crop yield. (Wisniak, J, et al. 2001: 437)
(3) Steve Hubbard, Vice President, Global Marketing and Innovation at Griffith Laboratories Worldwide, Inc. graciously provided me with much of the information from company documents.
(4) Crown Mills was bought out by Bidvest and became Crown National.
(5) The first War Raw Materials Department (KRA) in Germany was created (KRA) in mid-August 1914, as suggested by Walther Rathenau. (Vaupel, E. 2014: 462) Walter was the son of the founder of AEG and “one of the few German industrialists who realized that governmental direction of the nation’s economic resources would be necessary for victory, Rathenau convinced the government of the need for a War Raw Materials Department in the War Ministry. As its head from August 1914 to the spring of 1915, he ensured the conservation and distribution of raw materials essential to the war effort. He thus played a crucial part in Germany’s efforts to maintain its economic production in the face of the tightening British naval blockade.”
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