Jo'Burg Days: Hamburg - In The Eastern Cape
Barbara Durlacher gives a fascinating account of how the town of Hamburg in South Africa's Eastern Cape region came to be founded. Barbara has a German-born ancestor who lived in that area.
Hamburg came into being through a twist of world fate that dates back to 1855 when England was involved in the Crimean War and needed to boost its forces. With characteristic British logic, the solution was to create a "German legion for England".
With that, they set about recruiting German volunteers from the North German towns of Hamburg, Bremen and Cuxhaven. Since the prospect of death and disease in the Crimea held no appeal for any sober-minded German, soldiers were enlisted from the local taverns where they were fed copious amounts of beer and around 10,000 of them were led forth for training.
However, before they could go into battle, the Crimean war ended and England re-routed them to South Africa in 1857 to create buffer settlements between the British colonists and the Xhosa along the Keiskamma River in the Eastern Cape.
This region, once peacefully inhabited by the Xhosa people had, since the early 1800s, seen interminable battles for territory and cattle between the British and the Xhosa. About this the German soldiers-settlers were none the wiser.
Every male settler received a plot of land and they built several settlements in the area, including Hamburg, styled precisely along the lines of German villages.
Written accounts of how the settlers interacted with the local Xhosa people are scarce, but relations were often more friendly than existing tensions would have us imagine. Several settlers described their admiration for the Xhosa people's agricultural skills.
There was also active business between the Germans and the Xhosa. Settler descendent Auguste Le Roux recalls how tobacco was successfully grown by her father, and that it brought in good money as "the natives were good customers".
Xhosa farmers in turn, would slaughter pigs and sell them to the Germans whom, they noted, were excessively fond of pork.
However, because of distance to markets and difficult transport, most of the German settlers eventually sold their land to local Xhosa people.
The above is probably the most authentic account of the origin of our Von Der Decken ancestor, who is said to have been born in the Schlesweig-Holstein region of Northern Germany.
