Milnertonian

Milnerton was once part of an extensive farm dating back to at least the end of the 18th Century. The location of Jan Biesyes Kraal is indicated on a chart of Table Bay as it looked in 1786. The farm was named in honour of a former Khoekhoe headman of the district. Biesjes is the Dutch word for rushes or reeds , which are found in abundance on the lagoon banks, and were used in the construction of Khoekhoe huts and kraals. On 14 April 1804, the earliest South African newspaper, the Kaapsche Courant , carried an advertisement of a public auction to be held at Jan Biesjes Kraal a week later. It was evidently a thriving dairy farm.                                                                                      Cattle from Jan Biesjes Kraal grazing along the ban...

In his fascinating book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World , the former Royal Navy officer Gavin Menzies asserts that a fleet of Chinese junks commanded by Admiral Zheng He rounded the southern tip of Africa more than sixty years before any Europeans succeeded in doing so. One of the compelling pieces of evidence that Menzies cites in support of his claim is a map of the world drawn in 1459 by the cartographer Fra Mauro, now held by the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. It is the first planisphere (map of the entire world) to have been drawn since the days of the Roman Empire. Fra Mauro has correctly drawn the Cape of Good Hope (which he calls Cap de Diab) and did so thirty years before Bartolomeu Dias became the first European to round the Cape. Fra Mauro also appended notes stating that a ship had rounded the Cape around the year 1420 on a voyage from India. Near this note, he drew a picture of a Chinese junk. Another note describes the huge eggs the crew found when replen...

There's a knack to taking a corner at speed - if you're a boy on a bicycle. I learned that lesson the hard way. You need to ensure that your foot opposite the kerb is down so that the other pedal is up. Otherwise, it will clip the kerb, causing you to bounce off the saddle and bob up and down on the crossbar, causing colourful contusions on your cobblers as you career across the road. There's also a knack to tightening the nut that keeps the saddle horizontal, but more of that anon. All of this is by way of introduction to the last day of our Easter school holidays in 1969. I was patiently trying to get my younger brother to learn the cornering lesson the hard way when a police van pulled up. "Why isn't you boys in school?" The voice emerged from the narrow gap between a peaked cap and a V-shaped tangle of black chest hairs protruding from a safari suit. "We don't attend a government school," I said. "Our term begins tomorrow....

"A police cricket field near Pinelands in Cape Town may hide a 2,000-year-old Phoenician galley beneath its neatly grassed surface." So began an article in the Sunday Times of 7 June 1993. The article was entitled "Van Riebeeck, eat your heart out!" It was by no means breaking news, however. As long ago as the 5th Century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded that two centuries earlier, Pharoah Necho II of Egypt had assembled a small fleet of Phoenician ships, manned by Phoenician crews, to explore the east coast of Africa. Phoenicia was a great maritime nation, known for its sturdy ocean-going ships.  The mariners had returned to Egypt from the west, sailing across the Mediterranean Sea, and claimed to have circumnavigated Africa. Herodotus could not believe their report that in sailing around the tip of Africa, they had seen the sun on their right or starboard (i.e. to the north). It would have been difficult indeed for an ancient Greek to believe this. A...