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The retailer

‘It’s always been in my family.’ 1

Christo Wiese when asked about ‘retail’ in an interview, 2015

The life of a soldier in the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was no picnic. You had to undertake long voyages, on rough seas and in appalling conditions. It was a dangerous business. You would sail around the Cape of Storms to reach far-distant islands in the Indian Ocean. You served in inhospitable places where tropical diseases threatened your life. And you battled through oppressive humidity and temperatures at least 10 degrees hotter than in Holland at its worst.

For Europeans, you usually only worked for the Company as a sailor or soldier if you had no other choice. Or perhaps if the family business was not something you could see yourself being tied to for the rest of your life.

This is what the young Benjamin Wiese did in 1712. He borrowed money from his father, Benjamin senior, and joined Captain Jan van der Merkt of the Arion, a ship with a crew of 158 that could carry a cargo of 630 tonnes. He made it to the Cape of Good Hope, where he spent five weeks, and then sailed onwards to Batavia, or what is now Jakarta, in Indonesia.

A year later and he had had enough. Wiese found his way back to the Cape and left the service of the VOC as a soldier, staying on in the colony as a free burgher. His timing was both good and bad. Good, because in 1714 the Arion disappeared in the South China Sea en route to Japan. Bad, because a smallpox epidemic was then ravaging the Cape. Wiese was also felled by disease, though it is not clear whether it was the smallpox or another ailment. But it was serious enough for him to draw up a will, which reveals that he had no dependants at this stage.

Wiese recovered and married a young widow, Hester Mostert, early in 1714. Together they had three sons. In the year of his youngest son’s birth, Benjamin left the Cape, having struggled to find work. He also wanted to attend to his deceased father’s estate in Amsterdam.

Hester followed him a few years later, leaving their sons in the care of the local Orphan Chamber. Whether she or Benjamin ever made it back to the Cape is difficult to ascertain. But they did come together in Amsterdam, as they registered the birth of a daughter there in 1728.

Pieter Wiese, the only one of the three sons with recorded descendants, followed in his absent father’s footsteps, doing a stint as sailor for the Company. But after marrying Margaretha Swart in Stellenbosch, he decided that agriculture was possibly a better life for him. In 1743 he got permission to let his sheep graze at Vaderlandscherietkloof (Dutch Reed Kloof) in the Piquetbergen. To secure the right, he was obliged to put down 24 rix dollars within a month of signature and thereafter pay the Company the same amount annually. In 1748 he also obtained permission to let his sheep graze on a piece of land next to the Holle River. Pieter, it seems, used what money he had for other purposes than settling his debts with the authorities. By 1754 he had already fallen four years in arrears with his annual payments.

And for some time it seemed that the Wiese line might stop right there. Margaretha bore Pieter four daughters before Petrus Benjamin was born in 1751.

While the Industrial Revolution was transforming Britain into a modern commercial and industrial society, the Cape economy still mainly revolved around farming and trading. Apart from children, very little else was produced on the southern tip of Africa.

Petrus Benjamin tied the knot with Isabella Loubser before he was 19 and together they had ten children. The youngest, Tobias, was born in 1791. As a child he experienced the last years of Dutch rule at the Cape. Britain annexed the settlement in 1795 during the French Revolutionary Wars to prevent France from taking control of the strategic trading post. By this time the colony was inhabited by sixty thousand people of whom twenty-six thousand were slaves.

From 1803 the Batavian Republic – the Netherlands, after a rebranding exercise – governed the Cape, but three years later it was back again under British rule. Tobias’s children grew up in a land with English as the official language.

His son Tobias Gerhardus was ten years old, and too young to farm, when slavery was abolished in 1834. Many Dutch-speaking farmers, who called themselves Afrikaners by this time because they had stronger ties with Africa than Europe, embarked on a series of treks deep into the interior to escape British rule.

Tobias Gerhardus was not one of the Voortrekkers. He moved instead to the Cederberg where he married Christina Koch at the age of 45. The closer you were to Cape Town, the less land was available and the more you had to pay for it. The rules and taxes the British brought with them were also much more efficiently enforced if you could see Table Mountain. The farmers tended to move further and further north in search of suitable land.

It was in the district of Clanwilliam, in the region where his great-grandfather had once taken his sheep to graze, that Tobias Gerhardus’s first son, also Tobias Gerhardus, was born in 1871. When he grew up, the younger Tobias Gerhardus moved 80 kilometres further north and settled in Vanrhynsdorp where he married a young widow, Alida Hendrikse.

Their son Christoffel Hendrik (Stoffel), born circa 1906, pushed even further north to farm. In the Gordonia district there was plenty of land for cattle farmers, and crop farmers too found more and more opportunities thanks to irrigation from the country’s largest river, the Orange (later renamed the Gariep). Upington, founded in 1884, had emerged as the region’s most important commercial centre.

In 1935 Stoffel married Jacoba Wilhelmina Hendrina (Kotie) Wasserfall from the Boesmanland. They had four children. One of them was born on 10 September 1941 in Upington. He was christened in the Dutch Reformed Church in Keimoes and named after his father, Christoffel Hendrik.

When Benjamin Wiese (junior) left the Netherlands in 1712 to start a new life, possibly to avoid going into the family business, he probably never thought his great-great-great-grandson Christo would one day make a fabulous fortune from a business very similar to that of Benjamin’s father. For Benjamin Wiese (senior) was a koopman – a retailer.