Hartbeespoort Hiking: Phaladingwe Trail and Preller House

Join me as we go on a tour of a place rich in South African heritage. Today we explore part of the farm that gave Pelindaba its name and find out just how the name came to be what it is. Now this video is a bit like picking low hanging fruit, given that the place is right there next to the main road and also that some of the history has been recorded already and available all over the Internet. The available history is “Trekker-centric”, given that the farmers were able to record their experiences in writing, in contrast to the indigenous people who accompanied them on the various treks. The bit of history in the video is but a peep through a tear in the veil of time, in which the writer decides what is important enough to be recorded and what is not worth the effort of putting pen to paper. The effect of this is that we do not have as readily available history from the perspective of the followers of the Voortrekkers, so for the most part we kind of get what we get. I guess most of us have experienced the broken telephone experiment, in which a story is started at one end of a chain of people to culminate in often hilarious deviations from the original story at the end of the line. Those who could not read or write, relied on storytelling, praise singing and such like to record history. We need to bear the aforementioned in mind when we think about the rest of this description. Before the Voortrekkers arrived, this area was populated by mostly Tswana people. The Ndebele under Mzilikazi also ended up in the region when they fled from Shaka in present-day Kwazulu-Natal. The Voortrekkers (together with their entourages of “indigenous” people) came into the Hartbeespoort area somewhere in the late 1830s and early 1840s. They persuaded the locals, through various means, to either leave or stay under new circumstances. Some would say that the area had been denuded of people following the Mfecane. Others would argue against this being the case. The video of Pelindaba describes a time quite some years after the arrival of the Voortrekkers. Gustav Preller had only three years of formal schooling, but he did not stop educating himself and the people who would become known as Afrikaners (mostly of Dutch, but also of German and French heritage) of the importance of knowing their history. He was a writer and a newspaper editor. He was also an ardent proponent for the development of Afrikaans as a written and spoken language. He was State Historian from 1936 until his death in 1943 at the age of 68. He had many other accomplishments. Eugene Marais was also a very accomplished individual. He was a newspaper owner and editor at a young age. He was a poet and a writer. He was an advocate. He was also a naturalist who was one of the pioneers in the field of ethology. Through circumstance and life choices, he was also a vulnerable person, but his friend Preller had him under his wings until the end. The Phaladingwe Hiking Trail begins and ends at Preller House on Pelindaba Farm. It is a place of history, with probably most of it still untold. I hope that I will be able to revisit this place in future when I have been able to uncover more. If you have more sources I can delve into, please let me know. I hope that you enjoyed this one. Please subscribe, comment, like and share to help the channel grow and have a look at some of the other videos. A special thank you to Jean and Gavin for their friendliness, time and hospitality when I visited Preller House. Pay your eighty bucks at the gate, take a hike and then relax on their stoep afterwards. They will be delighted to have you. Cheers Craig Music: artlist.io #gustavpreller #eugenemarais #hikingadventures