Rehoboth

A mule tram, a rent paid in horses and Koos Petisie

On 1 July 1912 Wilhelm Solf, Germany’s colonial secretary, came down from Windhoek to see Rehoboth for himself. Both of his party’s vehicles stuck fast in deep sand on the way. Solf wrote afterwards that the town needed a railway of its own, and by the following January it had one.

The tram that had to meet every train

The main line from Windhoek had reached Rehoboth station, at kilometre 98, in December 1911, and the station was 12 km short of the town. The usual reason given is cost. The historian Klaus Dierks says the Baster council asked for it to be kept at that distance.

The state laid a 60 cm track across the gap and leased it to Georg Bräuer, a former colonial soldier who kept a store in town and a hotel at the station. He bought his rolling stock second-hand from the old narrow gauge line between Swakopmund and Windhoek: small Krauss engines (two or three, the railway historians disagree), a coach or two and a few goods wagons. Trains started on 15 January 1913. Only one engine was ever in steam. If a second train was needed it was a four-wheel trolley behind a horse.

Traffic was thin. Supplies for Bräuer’s own shop came in, along with oats bound for a stud farm at Maltahöhe, and almost nothing went out. But the lease said he had to meet every main line train, passengers or no passengers. Once a year he and all his staff went up to Windhoek to be examined by the railway doctor, a Dr Weisske.

Steam lasted two years and four months. A photograph in Walter Rusch’s collection shows two of the locomotives wrecked at the station, most likely when the Germans pulled out in May 1915. Bräuer carried on with mules, his passengers on a garden seat fitted into an open wagon. The South African railways lifted the track in 1933, by which time their road service was running to town. The passenger coach ended up as a store for flammable goods and blew up in 1945.

Two of the water tenders and a length of the rail went to the Rehoboth Museum, where a railway enthusiast photographed them in 2009. A year later the Bahnhof Hotel was still standing behind the station, a private house by then, with the old liquor notices on the stoep.

Eight horses, and one a year after that

The Basters did not arrive as owners of Rehoboth. Hermanus van Wyk rented it. The deal he struck with Abraham Swartbooi in 1870 was eight horses down and one horse every year. Later, with the community’s flocks grown, he tried to buy the land. A price of 2,750 pounds was agreed as an option, but Swartbooi held off selling.

It was an empty mission he took over. Franz Heinrich Kleinschmidt had arrived on 11 May 1845, the Swartbooi Nama settled around him, and the foundation stone of a church went down that August. By 1849 the Swartboois had a written law book of their own, so the Basters’ famous Paternal Laws of 1872 were the second code drawn up here, not the first. In July 1864 the Swartboois left ahead of an Oorlam raid. Kleinschmidt fled when it came the next month and died at Otjimbingwe on 2 September.

The man who came north with the Basters from Pella on the Orange River was Friedrich Heidmann, a glazier before he was a missionary. He stayed with them until 1906. His wife Ida died here in 1899, and in 2013 the town’s information office was still sending visitors to her grave, along with the Kaptein se Boom, the tree where the first Baster meeting was held, and the library, which was Kaptein Cornelius van Wyk’s house.

The professor who came to measure them

In 1908 a Freiburg anatomist, Eugen Fischer, arrived with money from the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The Basters interested him for one reason. Here were about 3,000 people of mixed European and Khoekhoe descent whose family histories were well known. He published the result in 1913 as a study of the “bastardisation problem” in humans, claiming that racial traits were inherited by Mendel’s rules. His advice was that such people were useful to the colony and should not become more numerous. Mixed marriages had been banned there since 1905.

The book was reprinted as late as 1961, and it is usually counted among the texts that Nazi race law leaned on, though how directly is disputed.

Koos Petisie

Samuel Beukes was born in Rehoboth in 1890 and worked as a post office messenger from 1904. He fought the Germans in 1915. That April his Kaptein had met Louis Botha at Walvis Bay, and the Basters said afterwards that he had promised them independence. No record of the meeting was kept, and nobody has shown that he did.

Beukes spent the rest of his life trying to collect. He is recorded as the first person from this country to petition the League of Nations, and the South Africans called him Koos Petisie. When aircraft threatened the town on 5 April 1925 and the rising folded without a shot, 632 people were detained. Fewer than half were Basters: 289, against 218 Herero, 75 Nama and 50 Damara who had been living on Baster land. Dierks records that Beukes and 43 others were put in front of a firing squad and reprieved when Geneva stepped in. I have found that in his work only.

He joined the Baster Council in 1928 and kept writing, to the United Nations after 1945. Two UN envoys sought him out in May 1962. He died in December 1965, aged 75.

The habit stuck. In 1996 Kaptein Hans Diergaardt and six others took Namibia to the UN Human Rights Committee over the communal land of the old 14,216 square kilometre territory, which the state took over at independence. He died in 1998. The ruling came in September 2000 and threw out the land claim, but it found against the government on one point: a 1992 circular telling officials to answer Afrikaans phone calls and letters in English only.