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Chapter 2

Eastern Cape roots

The first Rupert arrived in South Africa in 1857.

Johann Peter Ruppert, the founder of the South African Rupert family and Anton Rupert’s great-grandfather, was a native of Prussia. According to family lore he came from Gräfrath near Solingen, although his death certificate in the Cape Town archives gives his birthplace as Trier, the oldest city in Germany. He was one of the many German founders of Afrikaner families – 33,7% of Afrikaners of the period from 1657 to 1867 were of German descent, the second-largest group after those of Dutch descent (34,8%).1

After the outbreak of the Crimean War (1854-56) Johann Peter Ruppert enlisted in the British army, which was recruiting reinforcements on the European continent. With the rest of what was known as the German Legion, he was stationed at Colchester near London under the command of Major-General Baron Richard von Stutterheim. The war ended before the Legion was sent to the Black Sea, and Ruppert and his comrades were given the option to settle on the eastern frontier of the British colony at the Cape. With the cost of the frontier wars a drain on the treasury, the British government was keen to settle military pensioners on smallholdings so that they could be called up for military duty when the need arose.

The volunteers were told that there was a dearth of women at the Cape and were advised to find wives before they set forth. On 19 October 1856 the eighteen-year-old Ruppert wed seventeen-year-old Emma Susanna Grandfield-Crosby, a Colchester girl. Thus the South African Ruperts − Ruppert soon lost its second p − are descended from British and Prussian stock.

By that time the Cape, strategically situated on the sea route to the East, had burgeoned into a prosperous colony. Trade in wine and wool was flourishing and the government could launch large-scale public projects. But there was a serious shortage of skilled labour and European immigrants could help fill the gap.

Two events had given rise to the shortage of labour. Many craftsmen and workers died in the smallpox epidemic of 1857, while the ‘national suicide’ of the Xhosa in the same year, the consequence of visions reported by the prophetess Nonqwase, resulted in large-scale loss of life.2

By 1858 a contingent of 2 362 officers and privates of the German Legion, accompanied by only 361 women and 195 children, had been settled in the drastically depopulated frontier area later known as the Ciskei. In due course they were joined by a further 2 700 German civilian settlers, friends and relatives of the military settlers.

Johann Peter Ruppert (private number 1678, in the third company of the German Legion’s second regiment) disembarked in East London. According to family tradition he was musically talented, and a violinist in the military band. He was initially stationed at Berlin, one of a number of Eastern Cape towns that were given German names, where he was granted land.

The British government’s plan with the German settlers in the buffer zone at the frontier did not work out as intended. The frontier problem was becoming less acute and, at the outbreak of the mutiny in India, over 1 000 members of the German Legion volunteered for service on that subcontinent. Only 386 eventually returned. The ones who remained were mostly unable to farm successfully on their five-acre holdings, much of which was not even arable. In 1861 the German Legion was disbanded.

Johann Peter Ruppert and his wife were among the settlers who moved to Graaff-Reinet, where the Ruperts would have a lasting influence. This Karoo town with its colourful history had been established in 1786 as the centre of the fourth district at the Cape, with a drosdy (magistrate’s residence) as the seat of local government, and a military commandant. The district encompassed a vast area stretching from the Indian Ocean almost to the Gariep River, with an indigenous population ranging from the Xhosa in the east to the Griqua and San in the west. By the time the district was proclaimed there were already 600 farmer families of European descent.3

As early as 1795 the people of Graaff-Reinet showed their mettle when they rebelled against the authority of the Dutch East India Company, earning a reputation as the first Boer republic. The town also has a niche in early South African history as the home base of eminent figures like Andries Stockenström (1792-1864) and Andrew Murray (1794-1866), moderator of the synod of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). Murray ministered in Graaff-Reinet alongside members of the London Missionary Society like Dr John Philip and Dr JT van der Kemp, whose views differed greatly from his.

In the confrontational climate of the eastern frontier Stockenström, the district’s first landdros or magistrate, later lieutenant-governor of the Eastern Cape, stood for coexistence with the indigenous population and advocated truth and justice as fundamental principles. The views of this influential and far-sighted leader resemble the philosophy Anton Rupert was to adopt more than a century later.

Stockenström was responsible for laying out the charming town, which, with its water furrows, was known as the ‘Jewel of the Karoo’. Set in the horseshoe bend of the Sundays River, it boasted an imposing church and parsonage (later the Reinethuis), as well as Cape Dutch, Georgian and Victorian residences cheek by jowl with flat-roofed Karoo houses. Today it is a picturesque museum town with 220 proclaimed historical sites, the most in any town in South Africa.

The descendants of the rebels of 1795 gradually developed more and more grievances against the British colonial administration, and by 1838 the Great Trek, the migration of Afrikaners to the interior, was in full swing. Several eminent Trekker leaders had close ties with Graaff-Reinet. Gerrit Maritz was a wealthy wagon maker in the town, with an outlying farm called Welgevonden, eventually owned by Anton Rupert’s son Anthonij. Andries Pretorius of Blood River fame farmed in the district. Two provincial capitals − Pietermaritzburg and Pretoria − were named after them. The marriages of renowned Trekker leaders Piet Retief and Louis Trichardt were solemnised in the local church, and Andries Hendrik Potgieter was baptised there. Another prominent Trekker leader, Sarel Cilliers, was born at nearby Nieu-Bethesda.

Two presidents of later Boer republics − JN Boshof of the Free State and TF Burgers of the Transvaal − hailed from Graaff-Reinet. Further down the line, Dr DF Malan, later prime minister of South Africa, left his position as minister of the DRC in Graaff-Reinet to become the first editor of Die Burger, the oldest Afrikaans daily newspaper. And Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, founder-leader of the Pan Africanist Congress, the Africanist resistance movement that broke away from the African National Congress in the late 1950s, went to school and now lies buried at Graaff-Reinet.

Many other cultural leaders, business people, educationists, medical doctors and agriculturalists put their stamp on Graaff-Reinet. The town was quite ‘cosmopolitan’; the strong Afrikaner presence was complemented by English-speaking and Jewish families as well as initially a smaller group of black people and a considerably larger population of coloured people.

The first Rupert arrived in Graaff-Reinet during a worldwide depression in the aftermath of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The wool market was flat and mildew was wreaking havoc in the vineyards of Graaff-Reinet. In 1868 the mildew was brought under control through the use of sulphur, and the town became renowned as a source of brandy and a potent home-distilled brew called withond, ‘white dog’. The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1867 and of gold at Pilgrim’s Rest in 1874 restored the fortunes of the town. Fortune hunters from all over the world landed at Port Elizabeth and travelled to the minefields via Graaff-Reinet. There were over 60 camping sites for ox-wagons travelling north. In 1879, amid great festivity, Graaff-Reinet became the terminus of the new railway line from Port Elizabeth. At one stage the town had no fewer than four newspapers.

The pioneer Johann Peter Ruppert started off as a foreman on the farm Bloemhof, but then worked in Graaff-Reinet as a wagon maker until his death in 1882. According to family tradition he was killed in a shooting accident while hunting, which is not implausible, since the plains of the Karoo teemed with game in those days.4

He and his wife Emma Susanna belonged to the Anglican parish of St James at Graaff-Reinet. In 1865, a few years after their arrival in the town, the colonial government decreed that instruction at all government schools in the Cape Colony would henceforth be conducted in English. English newspapers at the Cape, convinced that the English were the ‘dominant race’, propagated a militant form of cultural imperialism; the Cape Argus dismissed Afrikaans as a ‘bastard jargon’, unworthy of the name ‘language’. Despite this the Ruperts, like many other immigrant families, gradually adopted Afrikaans as their home language. After the marriage of the pioneer couple’s surviving son to an Afrikaans-speaking girl, the family eventually joined the Dutch Reformed Church.

Three of the pioneer couple’s four children died in childhood, two of them of diphtheria within ten days of each other in the epidemic of 1869. Only the eldest son, Anton Rupert’s grandfather Anthony Edward, survived to adulthood. Like his father, he died at the age of 44 years. Emma Susanna died in 1919.

Grandfather Anthony Edward Rupert was a builder. During his last illness in 1906 he wrote a document − it is still in the family’s possession − describing his humble beginnings at the village of Petersburg, plying his trade from one farm to the next. Sometimes he went around on horseback, but when in dire straits he travelled on foot. Before his marriage to Maria Elizabeth Dippenaar in 1885 he rented a house from the coloured congregation of the London Missionary Society for £2 per annum. He had to cover the thatched roof with a canvas wagon tent to keep out wind and rain.

After his marriage his fortunes improved. He built a school at Graaff-Reinet and another on the farm Letskraal, where Andries Pretorius had farmed before the Great Trek. At Petersburg, on the ox-wagon route to Kimberley, he built a church whose cornerstone still bears his name. His reputation spread. In 1899, shortly before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War, he and his family settled in Graaff-Reinet itself, where he restored and renovated houses. Although all building materials had to be transported by ox-wagon, he could complete a farmhouse within six weeks – an achievement that required considerable organisational abilities.5 Ds Rooi Abraham Louw, who had known the builder Rupert at Graaff-Reinet, once told Anton Rupert: ‘Your grandfather was the most hard-working man I ever met.’

The eldest of the skilled builder’s eight children, John Peter Rupert, born in 1888, practised as an attorney at Graaff-Reinet, where his family would live for nearly a century. In this town, with its eventful history, his son Anton was born 28 years later.