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A visitor to Cradock will experience many things-a sense of soul restoring solitude, one of the most fascinating animals on earth, and one of the most fascinating histories of any country town in South Africa.
CRADOCK
Cradock is the principal town in the Nxuba YeThemba Municipality and was founded in 1813, the second town in South Africa after Grahamstown to be founded by the British. It was started as a Frontier outpost on the Farm Buffelskloof on the Great Fish River, and was named after the Governor of the Cape, Sir John Cradock.
Cradock is famous for several reasons, one of them being the connection with the famous author and pioneer feminist Olive Schriener, who was a governess on a farm in the district and lived in the town for a while. She based her most famous novel, The Story of an African Farm, on her experiences in the Cradock area. After she left the town she had a glorious career of writing, tilting at windmills, upsetting apple carts, infuriating the powerful and championing the underdog at a time when the underdogs needed all the champions they could get. Her house in Cradock is preserved as it was when she lived there and is a declared heritage site. After her death her body and those of her infant daughter and her favourite dog were brought back to the area and were interred in a sarcophagus on top of the Buffelskop Mountain.
During the struggle against Apartheid, Cradock was a centre of this effort and the town was one of the hottest hotbeds of the struggle in the country. The Rev James Calata was an early activist against the system, and was based in Cradock. In the late 1950s he was arrested and sent to Johannesburg where he and 140 other activists including Nelson Mandela were charged with high treason. This was the famous “Treason Trial” which lasted several years. While he was in Johannesburg he was incarcerated in the old Johannesburg Fort and whilst there, a grandson was born who was named Fort Calata after the place where his Grandfather was imprisoned. After his acquittal, the Rev Calata returned to Cradock where he continued his activities even though restrictions were placed on him until his death.
As Fort Calata grew up the struggle against Apartheid was hotting up and he and Matthew Goniwe formed a local anti apartheid organization called the Cradock Residents Association, or CRADORA. In 1985 Calata, Goniwe and two fellow activists were tricked to go to meet “somebody” at the Port Elizabeth airport. They never returned and their burnt out car and their bodies were found outside Bluewater Bay, near Port Elizabeth a short while later. The “Cradock 4” became a cause celebre of the Apartheid struggle, with the accusations that they had been murdered by the Apatheid Security Police, which was denied. Their funeral was one of the biggest to be held in South Africa and at the funeral the United Democratic Movement was formed, which hastened the end of the Apartheid era in South Africa. Their communal grave is in the Lingilishle cemetery in the Ligilishle Township. Many years later it emerged that the Cradock Four had indeed been murdered by Apartheid agents.
Although far removed from the centres of action during the Second Anglo Boer War, the area did become a base where the Boer Guerillas began to operate and during the famous raid on the Cape by the commando led by Jan Smuts, later one of South Africa’s most famous and respected statesman, there was a skirmish where Smut’s forces defeated a British force that was commanded by Major Douglas Haig, who would later become famous a commander of the British Army in France in the First World War.
Cradock has many famous buildings and is the town where the Cape Dutch style of architecture with its elegant gables met the simple, plain and symmetrical English Georgian type of building. The most famous and prominent structure in the town, as in so many karoo towns is the Dutch Reformed Church, which in Cradock’s case is an elegant neo classical building built out of local sandstone and is replicated on St Martin’s In The Field in London. Next to the Church is the Karoo Gardens a botanical garden which in recent years was sadly truncated to build a shopping centre.
Cradock is in the Great Karoo an arid area of vast open plains and big skies, punctuated by flat topped hills called “koppies” and divided by some of the highest mountains in South Africa. It is an area of stark beauty and where those seeking a place to escape the madding crowd will readily find it. It is an area that gives itself naturally to pastoral farms and where Karoo lamb, the finest in the world, is grown. The area abounds with nature and game reserves where the animals of the plains congregate in large herds. The most famous of these reserves near Cradock is the Mountain Zebra National Park; one of the world’s greatest conservation success stories is to be found. Established in 1931 on the summits of the Bankberg range, this National Park was founded to protect the last remaining examples of the Cape Mountain Zebra, the smallest and the rarest of the Zebra types. The park has been expanded to cope with the growth of the population of the Zebra, whose numbers have increased to such an extent that predators such as Cheetah have been introduced.
A visitor to Cradock will experience many things-a sense of soul restoring solitude, one of the most fascinating animals on earth, and one of the most fascinating histories of any country town in South Africa.
Source: Courtesy Eastern Cape Tourism Board - www.ectb.co.za
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