Schoemansdal in the sources
Schoemansdal was the Voortrekker town founded in 1848 below the Vhulorwa and Makwatambani mountains, in Makhado’s country, which was a leading ivory-trading centre until the Boers abandoned it on 15 July 1867. It was first called Zoutpansbergdorp or Oude Dorp, and from the 1850s took the name of Stephanus Schoeman. To the Venda it was a town that stood in their land; its fall was Makhado’s victory.
What the sources say
Founding and place. Wikipedia dates the town to the arrival of Jan Valentyn Botha’s party, part of Andries Potgieter’s trek, on 2 May 1848, building an earthen redoubt and reed huts at the site where Louis Tregardt had camped in 1836; it says Potgieter died there in 1852 and that his son Piet Potgieter led the town until he was killed at Makapansgat in 1854, after which Stephanus Schoeman became its leader. Nemudzivhadi writes that by 1848 it was “the furthest northern White settlement in Southern Africa”, lying at the foot of the Vhulorwa and Makwatambani mountains, on an open plain that seven years earlier had been used by the Venda for ploughing and grazing, which the Whites occupied with Ramabulana’s permission; Makhado’s second residence Makwatambani lay to the east and Luatame about 16 km north-east, and people could watch the town’s activities (pp. 68 to 69). Makhado’s people, he says, watched it grow “with a sense of loss”. See Stephanus Schoeman.
Size. A Portuguese commission in 1855 reported, as Nemudzivhadi gives it, 278 houses and about 1,000 people, of whom 300 were able-bodied men over sixteen; imports of 200,000 lb of lead and 10,000 lb of sugar, and exports of beans, maize, honey, cheese, dried fruit, hides, salt, rhinoceros horn, ivory, butter and timber (p. 68). Wikipedia says the Portuguese visitor Das Neves estimated never more than 70 houses, though excavations suggest more, and gives 1,800 people by one estimate. We cannot reconcile these figures.
Institutions. Nemudzivhadi lists the landdrost, Jan Vercueil, who held court there; the Dutch Reformed Reverend N. J. van Warmelo, resident in the village; a church and parsonage and a school; and furrows bringing good water from the Thivhalalwe River along the streets, with orchards and gardens (p. 69). Wikipedia adds that the church was the first in the Zoutpansberg and doubled as the school during the week, that a first teacher arrived in 1866, and that shops belonged to Albasini, Carvalho, Simmoens and Maré. The ethnologist N. J. van Warmelo, whom Nemudzivhadi interviewed (p. 311), was a grandson of the Schoemansdal pastor.
Ivory and guns. It was the foremost inland ivory market: in the 1864 hunting season more than 350 elephants were killed, according to the record Nemudzivhadi cites; the Soutpansberg produced the most ivory of the hunting centres of the interior; and as elephants moved farther away, ivory fell to 200,000 lb a year (pp. 69 to 71). Because malaria kept White hunters home in the rainy season, they lent guns to Venda hunters to follow the elephants across the Vhembe, against the 1858 hunting law (p. 71). The Venda later argued they had worked for the guns, and the Boers demanded them back; see Madzhie.
What kind of town. Nemudzivhadi quotes Theal and Wagner on the frontier population: hunters, traders and adventurers of many nationalities, some of them fugitives from justice, a number of whom, in Theal’s words, were among the most lawless in South Africa (p. 72). These are the opinions of nineteenth-century and later colonial writers and we do not endorse them; Nemudzivhadi uses them to explain how the town contributed to the conflict. He argues that the town’s very presence threatened Makhado’s authority, though it was said that Makhado had good relations with the Boers from his installation and that his people worked in their homes and fields and accompanied the hunters (pp. 69 to 70).
End and site. See Evacuation of Schoemansdal, 1867. Wikipedia says the town was never rebuilt, that excavations began in 1985 by the Transvaal Provincial Museum Service, that an open-air museum was established whose information centre burned down in 2008, and that the archaeological site is state property with controlled access.
The Dutch Reformed mission near Schoemansdal
The Dutch Reformed Church’s first station in the Soutpansberg, Goedgedacht, lay near the town, and its missionary Stephanus Hofmeyr preached in the town and was sometimes refused a house there. See Goedgedacht, Stephanus Hofmeyr and Kranspoort.
Overview articles
The town’s fall is set in context in The Soutpansberg war, 1863 to 1869.
The tribute and ivory economy behind the town is set out in Tribute, land and the Boer state in the Soutpansberg, 1855 to 1898.
Cautions
The Wikipedia article is the only source we have for the founding date and the excavations, and it is tagged for more sources in places. Population and house counts differ by an order of magnitude between sources. Schoemansdal’s Venda name is not given in the sources we have; the mountain names (Vhulorwa, Makwatambani) are as the scan gave them. Nemudzivhadi is a Venda historian whose subject is Makhado’s reign; he built on oral interviews done between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s and on colonial archive papers, and he often says where his informants and the written sources disagree, as do we.
Izithakazelo and totem
We have found no confirmed totem or praise poem for this page. If you know the Venda or Tsonga traditions of these events and recite related praises, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
- Mphaya Henry Nemudzivhadi, “The attempts by Makhado to revive the Venda kingdom, 1864-1895”, PhD thesis, Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education (1998); open access at the North-West University repository (a scanned copy; we read it by OCR, and page numbers cited are the thesis’s printed numbers)
- Wikipedia: Schoemansdal, Limpopo (tagged as needing more sources in places)
See also Stephanus Schoeman, Schoemansdal, Evacuation of Schoemansdal, 1867, Makhado, João Albasini and Madzhie.
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