Posted August 21, 2022: The southern and northern edges of countries, regions, and continents have always intrigued me. Perhaps because I grew up on the northern border of the US, which was, of course Canada’s ‘deep south.’ For some unknown reason I found that fascinating—how could my cold home be anybody’s southland (after all, in my so-far short and mostly untraveled life, all information came from books and they told me places South were tropical—or at least warm all of the time. This obsession with north and south (and to a lesser degree, east and west) has lasted from my first geography book to this summer of 2022 when travel included the continent of Africa’s farthest south and farthest (almost) north.
The planning for this summer’s jaunt was a back and forth, mostly between Celia and me, with Sara’s occasional input. We arrived at the Garden Route decision because I wanted to go to South Africa (to somehow re-live my dance impresario years, as I’ve made clear already, but I keep relearning ‘you really cannot go home again’!) and Celia wasn’t through with animals yet, and we both love road trips.
A typical South African Garden Tour is described thusly in Lonely Planet: High on the must-see lists of most visitors to South Africa is the Garden Route, and with good reason: you can’t help but be seduced by the glorious natural beauty. The distance from Mossel Bay in the west to Storms River in the east is just over 200km, yet the range of topography, vegetation, wildlife and outdoor activities is remarkable. The coast is dotted with excellent beaches, while inland you’ll find picturesque lagoons and lakes, rolling hills and eventually the mountains of the Outeniqua and Tsitsikam. Celia was excited, Sara, not quite so thrilled by the road trip aspects but ready to see stuff, and me, well I was some mix of anticipatory and lethargic—in other words, happy to be on to the next thing without being positive I have enough energy to fully appreciate it all. Damn stomach!
We headed out of Cape Town in the pre-dawn chill of the South African winter, having just experienced our first load-sharing candlelit morning of cold coffee and an unlit wash-up. We had been staying at an airb&b with no host to educate us as to the unpredictability of the “captured” state’s blackouts. (In Joburg, our up-scale suburban hotel had protected us from the unpleasant realities of corrupted utility companies—Californians, pay attention!). Dirk, our guide, driver, teacher, raconteur par excellence, and all around nice guy, met us at the front door, and we pretty much bonded immediately. Perhaps that first hour we thought he might be too-talky, but it was soon apparent that almost-literally everything he said was of interest to us. My only conflict with Dirk for the next 5 days was the desire I had to know everything about South Africa from a personal perspective, and his desire to pump us about “what on earth has happened to the US? The country we counted on to be about to provide some modicum of responsible leadership in the world.” He was clear that while he in no way considered US decisions and behavior always right or even smart, he (and many others) had for a long time considered us the best of a somewhat bad bunch of world powers. Now, in general, South Africans think we’ve gone nuts and are heading rapidly down a path that in some ways emulates the rule of apartheid in South Africa. Celia was more interested in talking US politics than I was, so I periodically had to remind them that I had not flown over 11,000 miles to be sickened by the word ‘trump.’
For any of you who have ever made a road trip along the California coast, going a ways inland to the lush fields and farms and back into rugged mountains and scenic valleys, through picturesque towns and back to the sea to see, smell, hear, and taste the ocean—that’s what it was like. With different plants and animals in many cases, but the sense of driving through the closest thing we’ll ever get to a paradisiacal environment is the same.
I’ll invite you to along for the 5-day ride as long as you don’t expect too much detail or for me to name things. I really didn’t think of the Garden Tour as a formal tour; more like a road trip with four friends, one of whom knows a whole lot about the landscape and one of whom is interested in what we stop and do along the way, but prefers to sleep through the most tiresome of our political diatribes. Celia and I liked pretty much everything about it (although I did whine a lot about cold nights and mornings when load-sharing kicked in—and when the other two talkers mentioned Trump’s name too much). Okay. On the Road. (I’ll very occasionally paraphrase or even copy directly from a few government websites to describe a particular attraction. If I use any literary descriptions I’ll cite the source, I promise.)
The first day was a full day’s drive with just enough time to tour the Cango Caves, Africa’s largest show caves and the archaeological and historical highlight of the Klein Karoo.
They lie 29km from Oudtshoorn (pronounced owts·horn) in the picturesque Cango Valley and are situated in a limestone ridge that runs parallel to the well-known Swartberg Mountains. There you’ll find the finest of dripstone caves, with their massive halls and towering limestone formations in a variety of colours. Caves act quite powerfully on my imagination, in that I cannot tour one without imagining living there in some distant past or, more urgently, in an increasingly-likely dystopian future.
There was another brief stop at an ostrich farm, interesting-enough, although we found more pleasure in driving through the beautiful perfectly-maintained little towns with their Dutch-inspired pristinely-white structures, and hearing Dirk’s tales of the days of serious Ostrich-farming wealth. Today, wanting to see if I could find a brief version of this fascinating bit of history, I came across a rather lengthy article by a Cape Town journalist named Nick Dall on a website: Ozy.com. Being a suspicious sort I looked up Ozy Media and found a New York Times article from 2021 about this slickly promoted, briefly spectacular media company, with a politically moderate—to slightly left—slant on things, which shortly after the article was published closed its doors forever…just another Silicon Valley smoke and mirrors-type operation, I guess. However, that doesn’t mean some good journalists/fine writers and researchers didn’t once work there.
Therefore I’m including an article by Nick Dall in this post. Here are some of his credentials just so you feel comfortable with the authenticity of the piece which I find to be an absorbing bit of history from the amazing country of South Africa. Nick Dall lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He is fascinated by culture, history, the environment and their intersection. His journalism has been published in The Guardian, the BBC, Hakai and others. He has also coauthored two books on South African history: Rogues’ Gallery (which I purchased at Clarke’s and am reading) and Spoilt Ballots (both Penguin Random House). Enjoy. I’ll be back soon with more sites and sights along the Garden Route.
Now for the story.
The Rise and Fall and Rise of South Africa’s Ostrich King: Nick Dall (From The Daily Dose, December 10, 2017)
“In 1890, at age 17, Max Rose arrived in hot, dusty Oudtshoorn — penniless and alone, fresh off the boat from Shavli, Lithuania. From humble beginnings as an ostrich feather buyer, he soon purchased a farm where he raised ostriches and grew alfalfa. Sixty-one years later, when he was buried in Oudtshoorn’s Jewish cemetery, he was lauded as the Ostrich King of South Africa, and he’d even rubbed shoulders with real royalty when he met Princess Elizabeth on her official visit to the country in 1947.
“As early as the 16th century, ostrich plumes — sourced from wild birds hunted throughout Africa — featured in the elaborate headdresses of important women like Queen Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette. A few hundred years later, what had always been an extremely rare commodity started to become more readily available, thanks to two South African breakthroughs. In 1863 a farmer successfully domesticated the birds and, a year later, “the first effective ostrich egg incubator, an apparatus called the Eclipse, was patented,” writes Sarah Abrevaya Stein in Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce.
“Oudtshoorn’s first feather boom started in 1875 and lasted about a decade. It was during this period that Lithuanian Jews started to arrive, according to Gavin Morris, director of the South African Jewish Museum. When Russia gained control of present-day Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine, it inherited a population of about 10 million Jews, who were subsequently targeted by czarist pogroms in an unofficial campaign of ethnic cleansing. “That was the push factor,” explains Morris, “but there were many pull factors too.” International travel was easier than it had ever been, and Europeans of all backgrounds were seeking their fortunes in the New World, Africa, Asia and Australia.
“About 10,000 Jewish emigrants made their way to South Africa, drawn by the promise of diamonds and gold. While most settled in Johannesburg (site of the gold rush and, along with San Francisco, one of only two modern cities to count large numbers of Jews among its founders), a significant minority ended up in Oudtshoorn, about 250 miles east of Cape Town. Almost all of the Oudtshoorn Jews came from one of two towns in Lithuania, says Morris, simply because “you’re more likely to move halfway around the world if there are people from your own community on the other side.”
“Because the ostrich feather industry “depended on the whims of women’s fashion,” writes Leibl Feldman in Oudtshoorn: Jerusalem of Africa, it was always “a speculative one.” Rose arrived in the midst of one of many downturns, but, unperturbed, he proceeded to immerse himself in studying the breeding and eating habits of the flightless birds. He was also one of the first farmers to irrigate alfalfa, known in South Africa as lucerne, which he shipped by train to livestock farmers all over the country — a nifty safety net against the caprices of the ostrich industry and a lesson in the age-old principle of diversification.
“The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) devastated the South African economy, but after its conclusion, the feather industry picked up again, with Rose perfectly poised to ride the wave. Between 1903 and 1913, ostrich feather exports totaled a staggering £19 million, trailing only gold, diamonds and wool, and many Afrikaner farmers and Jewish buyers became extremely wealthy men. While most of his contemporaries built elaborate homes known as “feather palaces,” Rose, who had a reputation for being a frugal man but a generous benefactor, never moved from his bachelor quarters in the Central Hotel in Oudtshoorn.
“The good times would not last long. In 1914, writes Stein, a monthly report on the trade from Messrs John Daverin and Company confirmed that “as headgear, ostrich feathers are not worn at all in Paris and America, and hardly at all in England or the Continent.” A postmortem revealed the cause of the industry’s death: the motorcar. Because automobiles moved much faster than horse-drawn carriages, fashionistas were forced to choose more streamlined headgear.
“Rose, like everyone else, lost everything in the crash, but he “kept his ostriches and fed them” even when he didn’t have “enough to eat himself,” according to a 2007 article in The International Jerusalem Post. When the industry improved in the 1940s with an increase in feather prices and a new demand for ostrich leather and meat, Rose owned one-fifth of the 20,000 birds in the country. (Ostrich populations had peaked in 1914 at 870,000.)
“Rose spent his final years worrying not about finances but about the fate of Oudtshoorn’s Jewish community. In the 1930s, as fascism brewed in Europe, South African Afrikaners — still smarting from their horrendous treatment by the Brits during the Anglo-Boer War — sided with Germany. The country’s National Party was openly anti-Semitic, and between 1940 and 1947 many Jewish businesses and factories in Oudtshoorn were torched. The majority of the Jewish community fled to large cities in South Africa and even abroad.
The combined effects of economics and racism have reduced Oudtshoorn’s Jewish population from a peak of 600 families in 1914 to around a dozen today. The bad years of apartheid saw around 50,000 Jews leave South Africa, but many of the 70,000 who remain have an Oudtshoorn connection. Fueled by demand for low-fat meat and haute couture leather, the ostrich industry in South Africa is once again booming.
“Oudtshoorn remains the ostrich capital of the world, and tourists flock there to learn about and even ride the athletic beasts — a giddying experience that’s almost as exhilarating as Rose’s life story.”
Your history lesson for today!