Cornelis Lottering in the sources
Cornelis Lottering was a Boer farmer in the Soutpansberg who helped bring the Dutch Reformed Church’s first missionary there and gave him the land for the station: Michael Buys says he first told him of McKidd and later gave a farm; Hofmeyr says he gave the ground for the station at Goedgedacht; and Magwira says he gave or sold the Kranspoort farm. He was the brother of the Lottering of Waterberg who hosted Hofmeyr on his journeys.
What the sources say
Michael Buys’s account. Michael Buys told Hofmeyr that “Mr Cornelis Lottring was the first who told me of Mr McKidd. He also, with his brother Frans Lottring, did much to get Mr McKidd here, and afterwards gave a place for it” (p. 13; see Michael Buys and Alexander McKidd).
Hofmeyr’s account. Hofmeyr says they had much help from Cornelis Lottering, “a brother of the Lottering in Waterberg” about whom he had written earlier, and that this C. Lottering “had given us the ground for the station”. They considered him a righteous and believing man, “although afterwards we doubted his sincerity”, and in any case a great help while he was with them (ch. 6). Hofmeyr stayed on the farm of Gert Lottering at Waterberg on the way north, on 29 January 1865, and describes him as of “a compassionate heart”, who sent two oxen to a hostile neighbour’s wife in need and gave the travellers two sheep and bread for the road (p. 33). In the yellow-fever outbreak of March 1865, “the wife of C. Lottering also died of the illness”; and during Hofmeyr’s own illness that year, “except what Mr Lottering did (willingly but weakly)”, the station had no school or services (ch. 6). When Africans burned the station after the missionaries left in 1865, they first spared the school building and a couple of houses, among them those of Lottering and Schoeman, but came back and destroyed everything (ch. 6; see Goedgedacht).
Later help. On Hofmeyr’s return from the Colony around 1867, “Brother Gert Lottring” at Waterberg sent 14 oxen to help a stuck wagon, said he had heard Hofmeyr might not return, and told him that a Berlin missionary had bought a place near him; “Brother Cornelis Lottring” sent a span of oxen, and Hofmeyr bought an iron axle from a Brother Lottring; and a cow from “Mr Cornelis Lottering” went to Hofmeyr’s helper Dempers (ch. 7). On the journey described in a letter of February 1869, Hofmeyr found Lottering at Waterberg “very friendly” and recovering from a night attack by thousands of Mapela’s people, whom he and four or five other men had driven back three times, the first shot striking their captain (ch. 8). Which Lottering this was is not clear from the text.
In Magwira. Magwira, citing the Dutch Reformed Church’s archive, says McKidd received one of his two farms, Goedgedacht and Kranspoort, from a farmer called Cornelius Lottering and bought the other with his own money (p. 34); that the Dutch Reformed missionaries “approached settlers, such as Lottering at Kranspoort … for land to start mission work”, which made them more reliant on the Voortrekkers than on local chiefs (p. 35); and that Hofmeyr later purchased Kranspoort from Lottering for mission work and left it to the mission society by will (p. 95). See Kranspoort and Stephanus Hofmeyr.
Cautions
The three sources do not agree on whether Lottering gave Goedgedacht, gave or sold Kranspoort, or sold it to Hofmeyr rather than McKidd, and we have found no deed. The Lotterings named are Cornelis, Gert and Frans, brothers or relatives, with Gert at Waterberg; the sources do not set out who was who. We have found no other source on Cornelis Lottering: a search of a database of Anglo-Boer War camp registers returns later Lotterings of the Zoutpansberg, but we cannot say they are his family. Hofmeyr’s doubt about his sincerity is stated without explanation. 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
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Sources and further reading
- Stefanus Hofmeyr, Twintig jaren in Zoutpansberg (Cape Town: J. H. Rose, 1890), in Dutch; read in the Internet Archive scan (page numbers below are the book’s, as marked in the scan’s text; where we could not fix the page we give the chapter)
- Mashonelo Anderson Magwira, “Land for mission and mission for land: a missiological reflection of the Kranspoort Mission Station in Soutpansberg within the Vhembe district of the Limpopo Province”, MTh dissertation, University of Pretoria (2016), chapters 2 and 6
- 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)
See also Antonio Albasini, João Albasini, Cornelis Lottering, Goedgedacht, Kranspoort and Makhado.
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