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Book cover
Added: 20 Sep 2010
Pietermaritzburg 1838-1988: a new portrait of an African city (University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter, 1988).
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Title page
Added: 20 Sep 2010
Pietermaritzburg 1838-1988: a new portrait of an African city (University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter, 1988).
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Contents
Added: 20 Sep 2010
Pietermaritzburg 1838-1988: a new portrait of an African city (University of Natal Press and Shuter & Shooter, 1988).
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Acknowledgements
Added: 20 Sep 2010
One of the happiest aspects of the preparation for this book has been the warmth and friendliness shown to us by all the people who have become involved.
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Foreword
Added: 20 Sep 2010
'The disadvantage of mem not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.' So wrote G.K. Chesterton.
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Introduction
Added: 20 Sep 2010
'Pietermaritzburg the lovely city', Alan Paton hailed it. So it remains for countless others, whether they too were born and brought up within the same basin of hills, or whether they came to make their homes here only later in their lives. Paton regretted, though, that as a young person he knew little of the realities of the place where he lived; and certainly even less of the thousands of black people on the periphery of the white man's city or beyond those encircling hills, people who were nevertheless an integral part of its being. He was not alone in these derelictions, which so many others still share, and which this book hopes to redress.
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Recasting the portrait of Pietermaritzburg
Added: 20 Sep 2010
Written works on Pietermaritzburg have fallen, until recently, into two broad categories: descriptive guides which seek to attract tourists and capitalist enterprise to the city; and more personal essays which attempt to portray the full sweep of its history. A feature of almost all these works is that the emphasis is on the growth of the white community, and its achievements and potential, and that scant mention is made of the blacks, coloureds and Indians who are equally part of the city.
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The living environment
Added: 17 Sep 2010
From my study window, situated a mere 12 km north of Pietermaritzburg city's edge, I hear the shrill whistle of the reedbuck cut through the darkness of night. Down in the vlei below the house the jackal's eerie call moves on the night breeze, and all is still. Other animals live in the tall grass of the vlei and the dense bush of the hills, but they are known only from fleeting glimpses on the long road home at night: the bushpig, bushbuck, blue and grey duiker, genet and mongoose.
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The physical environment
Added: 17 Sep 2010
The geological formations present in the Pietermaritzburg area consist simply of an ancient (1 000 million-year-old) solid, but greatly contorted Basement, and a succession of more recent and much less deformed sedimentary cover rocks.
This article contains a box entitled 'Fog or smog?'
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Cloudburst over Machibise
Added: 17 Sep 2010
rain, rain
with fresh wet grass breath
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Flooding of the Dorpspruit
Added: 17 Sep 2010
In the 1920s and 1930s flooding took place with almost every rainstorm in Pietermaritzburg.
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Floods
Added: 17 Sep 2010
Possibly the worst storm ever recorded in Pietermaritzburg occurred on Tuesday 14 January 1947. A total of 230 mm of rain fell in 19 hours.
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Pietermaritzburg: the first 2 000 000 years
Added: 17 Sep 2010
Before Voortrekker Pietermaritzburg there was no urban focus in the area. The austerity of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer way of life or of the subsistence farming characteristic of the Iron Age required relatively small-scale and scattered patterns of settlement. Nevertheless, some of the features of the local environment which attracted Voortrekker settlement were also important to earlier communities who chose to live here.
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Before Mgungundlovu: the upper Mkhomazi region in the early nineteenth century
Added: 17 Sep 2010
The intrusion of Boer pastoralists into the region east of the Drakensberg in the late 1830s, the emergence of the Republic of Natalia, and the establishment of Pietermaritzburg as its capital have too often been seen as having occurred in a demographic and political vacuum. Conventional accounts pay very little attention to the interaction that took place between the Boers and local communities or to the prior history of those communities. For an unknown period before about 1820 the region seems to have been dominated by the cluster of Wushe chiefdoms that occupied the Mngeni valley from what is now the Dargle area to beyond Otto's Bluff (kwaKhwela).
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Pieter Mauritz Burg: the genesis of a Voortrekker hoofdplaats
Added: 17 Sep 2010
It is common knowledge that Pietermaritzburg was named after the two Voortrekker leaders Pieter Retief and Gerrit Maritz. Yet originally the name was spelt Pieter Mauritz Burg and it has been claimed that Pieter and Mauritz were Retief's Christian names.
The Voortrekker genesis of Pietermaritzburg is important because of the indelible imprint which the choice of site, street and block plan, as well as the choice of street names, etched on the subsequent colonial and provincial capital of Natal.
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The Church of the Vow
Added: 17 Sep 2010
The importance of the Voortrekker Museum in Pietermaritzburg, generally believed to be the Church of the Vow, is almost impossible to overestimate. While the building has undoubtedly effectively served as the Church of the Vow, there is evidence to suggest that it was never meant to be used permanently as a church.
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Pietermaritzburg and its environs
Added: 17 Sep 2010
At first glance the Trekkers' choice of site for the town of Pietermaritzburg may seem a curious one. Admittedly the place was a safe distance from the port, but why choose a treeless, sloping plain nestling in a hollow? Unfortunately we do not know the answer to this question, as the Trekker leaders, in attempting to attract more settlers, exaggerated its potential. But we can follow the course of the environmental history of the area and see what use the settlers made of its vaunted potential and how they, in turn, amde their impact on the environment in the first few decades of white settlement.
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The segregated city
Added: 17 Sep 2010
In The Story of an African City, J. Forsyth Ingram introduces Pietermaritzburg in the 1890s by narrating a journey by train to the capital from Durban. His description of the capital, 'nestling under the noble Zwaartkop range of mountains', begins at Foxhill Station to the south of the city. From the ridge behind, the full extent of modern metropolitan Pietermaritzburg is revealed in one panoramic sweep.
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Pietermaritzburg's coat of arms
Added: 17 Sep 2010
The civic coat of arms of Pietermaritzburg was registered in the College of Arms, London on 19 May 1961; and in terms of the South African Heraldry Act of 1962 on 4 May 1973.
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The place of the elephants?
Added: 17 Sep 2010
What have the following words in common: Goobinschlofe, Megoonloof, Umgingiloova, Umkugings Sloave, Umkunkinglove? They are all variations of Umgungundlovu, the name of King Dingane's capital between the two Mfolozi Rivers , which he built immediately after the assassination of his brother Shaka in 1828. The number of different spellings of Umgungundlovu is matched by the number of interpretations of the name.
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A bad row of teeth?: Pietermaritzburg's architecture
Added: 17 Sep 2010
KwaZulu-Natal's capital city has never been architecturally unique despite its location and the inevitable eccentricities that result from colonial isolation. Numerous visitors have remarked on its pleasant setting, the haphazard range and quality of its structures and the lack of aesthetic town planning which is so characteristic of many nineteenth-century British settlements. Their comments, at best affectionate, usually indicate lack of approval.
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Of bricks and bonds
Added: 14 Sep 2010
Pietermaritzburg's earliest dwellings were of wattle and daub, but these were soon replaced by small buildings of sun-dried bricks.
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Architecture: the new amidst the old
Added: 14 Sep 2010
As part of its efforts to make the people of Pietermaritzburg more aware of the quality of its built environment, the Pietermaritzburg Society in 1986 organised a competition in which the participants were asked to name what they thought was the ugliest building in the city. It seemed a fine idea at the time, but if the results proved anything it was that whatever awareness existed lacked, in most cases, a sound aesthetic base.
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The Pietermaritzburg Town Hall
Added: 14 Sep 2010
Up to 1840 the town hall as a building type was unknown. The inventive Victorians, gathered in rapidly growing cities, soon changed that. The Town Hall became the object of civic pride.
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Parks and gardens
Added: 14 Sep 2010
In the early years of its existence Pietermaritzburg was anything bbut attractive. The Voortrekkers started the planting of trees in the streets to provide much-needed shade. This article covers public parks, Market Square, the Botanic Gardens and private gardens.
It also contains a contribution entitled "Tales trees tell" by Kerri Jones.
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Edendale, 1851-1930: farmers to townspeople, market to labour reserve
Added: 11 Sep 2010
Edendale is a sprawling black urban area bordering the Pietermaritzburg magisterial district, adjacent to the Swartkop location. Unlike most black urban areas, Edendale has freehold ownership of land. This gave the community a measure of freedom from state-controlled black urban development. The history of Edendale is that of the precarious but tenacious struggle of a mixed community to retain its independence in an increasingly hostile and coercive white South Africa.
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Vulindlela
Added: 11 Sep 2010
In 1946 roughly 66 per cent of the African population of Pietermaritzburg district lived in the western areas that were to become the Vulindlela district. By 1985 this figure had rise to 80 per cent. The landscape and buildings in Vulindlela are very different from those usually found in an African township.
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Growing up in Loop Street
Added: 11 Sep 2010
With my parents and elder brother I lived in house no. 441 Loop Street from 1937, when I was one year old, until 1952. Separated from no.439 by a shared access to their back gardens, the front elevations of these red-brick houses were identical in reverse.
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Nineteenth-century Loop Street
Added: 11 Sep 2010
Loop Street still has much of its nineteenth-century character, in the buildings that remain from that era, in sites that have strong nineteenth-century associations, and in its side-streets that can trace their names to residents of bygone years. This article focuses on some of the street's earliest nineteenth-century buildings, and on how some of the older streets acquired their names.
It contains an insert entitled "Servants in the 1920s and 1930s" by William Bizley.
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Sobantu Village
Added: 11 Sep 2010
From the earliest days of Pietermaritzburg, the African community provided its own accommodation on the edge of town or on the properties of its employers, while some Africans were housed in barracks and compounds. White officials and residents generally regarded this as an unsatisfactory arrangement and for many years the establishment of a native village was recongised as a possible solution to perceived problems of control and sanitation. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act was passed in 1923 and provided the Council with the necessary incentive and power.
This article includes an insert "140 years of family ties with Pietermaritzburg" by Waldy Ahrens.
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Colonial capital
Added: 10 Sep 2010
The Capital, today rather a tongue-in-cheek phrase, has real meaning in the historical growth of Pietermaritzburg. Durban could just as easily have become the principal administrative centre; and Pietermaritzburg might then have languished as a struggling country town with little to distinguish it from Richmond, Ladysmith, Greytown and half a dozen other rural market villages in the colonial uplands of Natal. Instead, its position as the seat of government gave it an immediate primacy in many facets of Natal's development.
This article contains an insert by Jack Frost on Government House.
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Colonial capital to provincial centre, 1904-1912
Added: 10 Sep 2010
In 1860, a spokesman for the Pietermaritzburg Town Council, fired with patriotic fervour aroused by the visit of Queen Victoria's midshipman son, Prince Alfred, but lacking in geographic knowledge, declared: "Our city promises at no distant date to be the chief city of Central Africa". Sadly, or fortunately, depending on one's viewpoint, his prophecy has not come true.
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The old Natal Parliament
Added: 10 Sep 2010
The Voortrekker Volksraad, which ruled the Republiek Natalia, met between 1839 and 1845 in a simple building on the site of the present City Hall.
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Royal visitors
Added: 10 Sep 2010
With the arrival in 1850 of the Byrne settlers, Pietermaritzburg became a thoroughly Victorian city and Natal a loyal Queen's colony.
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Royal visits
Added: 10 Sep 2010
In 1925 dutiful sons and daughters of the Empire are marched up in droves to Pietermaritzburg station, there to welcome Prince Edward.
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Legal centre of Natal
Added: 10 Sep 2010
Pietermaritzburg has held the primary place in Natal's legal affairs throughout its existence.
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The trial of Langalibalele
Added: 10 Sep 2010
One of the earliest treason trials held in Pietermaritzburg took place in 1874. Langalibalele was charged with treason for failing to appear before the Secretary for Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, when summoned to explain the non-registration of firearms which members of his Hlubi chiefdom had acquired while working on the Griqualand West diamond fields.
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Gandhi's admission as an advocate
Added: 10 Sep 2010
Gandhi entered in his diary for 3 September 1894: "Was admitted. Had to put off the hat. The application for admission as translator withdrawn. Received about 7 telegrams of congratulations".
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Fort Napier: the imperial base that shaped the city
Added: 10 Sep 2010
For seventy-one years, Pietermaritzburg served as an important base for the British Army. Although no battle took place in or near the city, imperial troops marched out to fight in numerous campaigns ranging from minor skirmishes with cattle-raiders and black peasant farmers to the major wars with the Zulu kingdom and the Boer republics.
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The city laager, 1879
Added: 10 Sep 2010
News of the British disaster at Isandlwana reached Pietermaritzburg on the morning of Friday, 24 January 1879. Further information revealed heavy casualties among the Natal Carbineers and heightened the sense of alarm at a possible Zulu invasion. Work on the laager was underway in earnest by Sunday 26 January.
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Three camps of World War II
Added: 10 Sep 2010
The Second World War saw the establishment of three large camps on the southern and south-eastern outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, about four kilometres from the city centre. They were Oribi Military Hospital and Camp, the Durban Road Prisoner of War Camp and the Hay Paddock Transit Camp.
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The Natal carbineers and Pietermaritzburg
Added: 10 Sep 2010
The connections between volunteer regiment and community in nineteenth-century Pietermaritzburg were strong in the case of the Natal Carbineers, the oldest existing regiment in Natal. In the absence of modern forms of entertainment, regimental parades, drills and annual camps, as well as balls, gymkhanas and race meetings, were a welcome relief from the daily round.
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What's in a name
Added: 10 Sep 2010
Possible forerunners of the Carbineers include the Pietermaritzburg Yeomanry Corps (1848) and the Umgeni Rangers (1851). The Carbineers were initially formed as the Pietermaritzburg Irregular Horse.
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Sweat and fun
Added: 10 Sep 2010
The Carbineers combined the fun aspects of encampments with a consistently high standard of manoeuvres, drill and shooting.
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Economic development of the capital city, 1838-1910
Added: 31 Aug 2010
The establishment of Pietermaritzburg as the spiritual and political capital of the Republic of Natalia ensured that it would also become a focal point for social and commercial exchange. Yet the city's emergence as a significant economic centre proved to be a gradual process.
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The economic depression of the 1860s
Added: 31 Aug 2010
The early 1860s were years of expansion and development for Pietermaritzburg. Most of its citizens were involved in trade and commerce rather than production and it was for this reason that the area was hard hit by the depression.
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The Great Depression and white unemployment
Added: 31 Aug 2010
Not until September 1930 did Pietermaritzburg begin to feel the effects of the Great Depression, which had followed on the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929. Yet in responding to the escalating rate of unemployment among all sectors of the City's population, there was a lack of official concern for the plight of any besides the whites, at whom all attempts to alleviate the condition of the jobless were aimed.
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The Pietermaritzburg market and the transformation of the Natal Midlands in the colonial period
Added: 31 Aug 2010
Although the development of Pietermaritzburg was linked to its status as the political capital of the colony of Natal, its growth was also encouraged by its position as the economic hub of the Midlands district.
This article also contains a box entitled 'Unemployment in Pietermaritzburg, 1986' by Norman Bromberger.
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The coming of the railway to Pietermaritzburg
Added: 31 Aug 2010
During the 1860s trial surveys were carried out on several routes for a railway to run from Durban to Pietermaritzburg, and for an extension in the direction of Ladysmith and the northern Natal coalfields. It was not before 1873, however, that a detailed survey was undertaken, which delineated much of the route the main railway line ultimately followed.
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From rickshaws to minibus taxis
Added: 27 Aug 2010
In a city of 'magnificent distances' as J. Forsyth Ingram described it, transport has always been important; no more so than in the contemporary metropolis, where the poor especially have long distances to travel daily to and from work. In 1982 rickshaws were introduced and soon became a ubiquitous feature of the capital's streets.
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Pietermaritzburg and the railway
Added: 27 Aug 2010
There is no better way to approach Pietermaritzburg than on a train from the interior.
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Industrialization 1838-1987
Added: 27 Aug 2010
The Boers, who had left the Cape Colony and founded Pietermaritzburg as their capital in 1838, developed the locality largely as an agricultural village. The earliest recorded industrial activity in the area was the milling of grain, grown both on the townlands and the surrounding farms.
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African reaction to the beer halls
Added: 27 Aug 2010
In 1960, fifty-one years after beer halls were established in Pietermaritzburg in 1909, black women armed with sticks marched into them and forced the male customers to leave. The women then picketed the beer halls so effectively that for days the men were too scared to return. Beer halls have been both resented and frequented by urban Africans. They perceive them as instruments of their poverty and symbols of government oppression, yet recognise that they meet certain social and recreational needs.
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Educational capital of white Natal
Added: 27 Aug 2010
To speak of white education in the Pietermaritzburg of 1988 is an anachronism of no mean proportions. It is nevertheless true that in the first 150 years of its formal existence, Pietermaritzburg's paramountcy in white education in Natal is an historic reality.
This article also includes an insert on teacher education in Pietermaritzburg written by Jack Frost.
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An appraisal of black education in the Pietermaritzburg area, 1987
Added: 27 Aug 2010
Comprehensive reports prepared for the Buthelezi Commission and by the KwaZulu/Natal Planning Council outlined the picture of black education in the region, including schools in the Pietermaritzburg area. This assessment, while aware of the main points in those documents, is a more personal appraisal of the situation.
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The University of Natal and Pietermaritzburg
Added: 27 Aug 2010
The Act which gave birth to the University was promulgated on 11 December 1909. Subsequently the Pietermaritzburg City Council granted 40 acres of land in Scottsville on which the first university building was erected. Designed by the local architect J. Collingwood Tully and built at a cost of 30 000 pounds, its foundation stone was laid on 1 December 1910 by the Duke of Connaught.
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The Natal Museum
Added: 27 Aug 2010
The notion of a Natal Museum arose from a desire to maintain cultural standards in a small and highly isolated community of English settlers just established in the nascent town of Pietermaritzburg. Victorian ideals regarding the value of education, and the great popularity of museums in Britain, would have contributed to the high priority given to such an institution.
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The Voortrekker Museum
Added: 27 Aug 2010
On the instigation of Dr G.M. Pellissier, a commission was appointed in 1908 by the council of the Dutch Reformed Church to investigate means by which the Church of the Vow could be rescued from desecration, bought back for the people of South Africa and made into a permanent memorial. On 16 December 1912 it was taken into use as a Voortrekker Museum.
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World religions in Pietermaritzburg
Added: 20 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg is a place where people from Europe and Asia have met those of Africa. These people have all brought with them languages, customs and beliefs, so it is not surprising that most of the world religions are represented in Pietermaritzburg. Although Christianity with its various strands predominates, African indigenous religion, Hinduism and Islam also have strong support. Judaism has had a small following since the beginning of European settlement. Buddhism made its appearance during the last century.
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The controversy surrounding Bishop Colenso
Added: 20 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg in the nineteenth century was the unlikely venue of an ecclesiastical controversy which caused ripples over much of the British Empire.
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Pietermaritzburg cemeteries
Added: 20 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg's historic central cemetery was sited, as was the norm in Voortrekker dorps, on the edge of the original street layout. The subsequent British takeover of the dorp resulted in the construction of numerous churches, but rather than each having its own adjacent churchyard, as was the custom in British settler towns such as Richmond, the Voortrekkers' cemetery was enlarged and, in 1859, divided into seven denominational compartments straddling Commercial Road.
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The Roman Catholic centres
Added: 20 Aug 2010
The first Roman Catholic priest to visit Natal in modern times was Father Thomas Murphy who arrived in November 1850 on an official visitation on behalf of the Catholic Bishop of Grahamstown. It was he who applied for a grant of land in Pietermaritzburg for a chapel. This was granted in July 1851.
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Grey's Hospital
Added: 20 Aug 2010
Until 1855 Pietermaritzburg's sick had to rely solely on the care available in their own homes. Those suffering from both mental and financial disorders languished in the local gaol. That this was built long before Grey's Hospital, an institution now indissolubly linked with the name of our city, throws an interesting light upon the social perspectives of the time.
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Mental health in colonial Pietermaritzburg
Added: 20 Aug 2010
On 27 July 1855, counsellors and burgesses of the City of Pietermaritzburg resolved to grant a piece of land, in extent 50 acres, of that part of the city known as Townlands to the colonial government of Natal for the sole purpose of establishing a public lunatic asylum later known as the Natal Government Asylum or Town Hill Hospital, and more recently forming part of the Midlands Hospital Complex.
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Midlands Hospital
Added: 20 Aug 2010
The founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910 brought to an end the close administrative relationship which the city and colonial government had with the Natal Government Asylum on Town Hill. All psychiatric services were transferred to the central government Department of the Interior.
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Midlands Hospital
Added: 20 Aug 2010
The founding of the Union of South Africa in 1910 brought to an end the close administrative relationship which the city and colonial government had with the Natal Government Asylum on Town Hill. All psychiatric services were transferred to the central government Department of the Interior.
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Edendale and Northdale Hospitals
Added: 20 Aug 2010
Hardly ten kilometres from the City Hall, Edendale Hospital is an apt and often disturbing reminder that Pietermaritzburg is indeed an African city. The feel at the hospital is unmistakably Third World. In many ways it is a monument to the uneasy interface between the Third and First Worlds.
Northdale Hospital was commissioned in 1974 to provide medical services for the coloured and Indian communities in Pietermaritzburg.
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The Pietermaritzburg voter and parliamentary elections
Added: 11 Aug 2010
There is no doubt that the Pietermaritzburg electorate has exhibited a British imperial bias throughout the Union and Republican eras, in that the majority has consistently rejected Afrikaner nationalism and republicanism up until the general election of 1987. Apart from that, the pattern of voting is rather more complex.
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Liberals in Pietermaritzburg
Added: 11 Aug 2010
Some of South Africa's greatest liberal figures have had their roots in Pietermaritzburg. Bishop Colenso worked in the city; Edgar Brookes, Alan Paton and Selby Msimang were born here.
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Gandhi: the Pietermaritzburg experience
Added: 11 Aug 2010
It was in Pietermaritzburg in 1893 that a young Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi, took a decision that irrevocably committed him to his political and religious destiny as a leader.
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The Natal Witness and 'Open Testimony'
Added: 11 Aug 2010
There is only one source which covers, and in detail, every year of the history of Pietermaritzburg since 1846. That is the Natal Witness.
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The freedom of the press
Added: 11 Aug 2010
On founding the Natal Witness in 1846, David Dale Buchanan promised to bear 'fair and open tesimony' in matters of public interest and committed his newspaper to 'the cause of sound progress, just government and constitutional liberty, without regard to persons or parties'.
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Dr E.G. Jansen, the doyen of Afrikaner culture in Natal
Added: 11 Aug 2010
E.G. Jansen was born in the Dundee district of Natal on 7 August 1881. He matriculated at Durban Boys' High in 1898 and obtained an LLB degree in 1905. In 1906 he started to practise as an attorney in Pietermaritzburg and in 1908 he was called to the bar.
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Afrikaners in Pietermaritzburg: cultural patterns and political awareness
Added: 11 Aug 2010
At the turn of the twentieth century, Natal was predominantly English-speaking. Of the 97 109 whites living in Natal in 1904, only 16 000 were Afrikaners. English social and cultural patters dominated community life.
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Opposing apartheid in the Pietermaritzburg region
Added: 09 Aug 2010
In the struggle for black rights in South Africa, Pietermaritzburg is probably best known to the world as the place where Gandhi was thrown off a train.
The Gandhi incident was an exceptional and dramatic event, but the fight to preserve what rights black people had, and to win those others which were theirs by right, has been carried on in and around Pietermaritzburg since that day in less spectacular fashion by many other individuals and organizations.
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The university and political protest
Added: 09 Aug 2010
There have been a number of occasions on which constituent parts of the University of Natal have taken part in political protest and the university supports their right to do so.
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Mrs E.E. Russell and the role of women in the city's public life
Added: 09 Aug 2010
In the year that Pietermaritzburg gained the status of a provincial rather than a colonial capital, Mrs E.E.M. Russell, then Miss Columbine, arrived from England to take up a teaching post. She was in her early twenties and during the next fifty years was to play a leading role in a number of organizations relating to education, women and charities. She was also the city's first woman mayor.
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'I remember Mister Gandhi'
Added: 09 Aug 2010
There are still elderly Indians living in Pietermaritzburg who well remember some of the activities of 'Mr Gandhi' in the city.
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Governing Pietermaritzburg
Added: 09 Aug 2010
In Pietermaritzburg's city centre and its surrounding garden suburbs, the business of everyday government is carried out smoothly and unobtrusively.
But this easygoing rhythm does not extend throughout the Pietermaritzburg area, especially not of recent years. As the present decade has unfolded, Sobantu to the east and Edendale, Ashdown, Imbali and their neighbours to the west have all been wracked by increasingly bloody conflict.
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Background to political violence: Pietermaritzburg region 1987-8
Added: 09 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg approached the 150th anniversary of its founding in the aftermath of one of the greatest crises in its history. From the beginning of 1987 to the early months of 1988 some 600 people were killed in an outbreak of political violence in the townships to the west of the city and in the adjoining peri-urban areas of KwaZulu.
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The performing arts
Added: 07 Aug 2010
If it were possible for inhabitants of Victorian Pietermaritzburg to have scanned the entertainment section of the Natal Witness in November 1986, they would have felt completely at home.
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The Christy Minstrels
Added: 07 Aug 2010
Visiting professional companies also helped to encourage the various regimental and amateur ministrel groups which flourished in Pietermaritzburg in the nineteenth century.
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Charles Lascelles Grey
Added: 07 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg - the city of scandal, religion and theatricals. So it was dubbed over a hundred years ago and, excluding religion, owed much of this reputation to Charles Lascelles Grey.
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The Tatham Art Gallery
Added: 07 Aug 2010
The Tatham Art Gallery is one of only seven art museums in South Africa. It was established in the early twentieth century with all the enthusiasm and gusto that many colonial late Victorians brought to idealistic and high-minded projects.
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Sleepy Hollow?
Added: 07 Aug 2010
O little twon of Maritzburg,
how snugly dost thou lie -
a hazy mile of tar and tile
beneath the bright blue sky
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Afrikaans authors of Pietermaritzburg
Added: 07 Aug 2010
Natal has sometimes been regarded as the Cinderella province of Afrikaans literature, a view which was certainly valid 75 years ago. However, since then some of the Afrikaans community's greatest poets have hailed from or have spent important parts of their creative lives in this province, more specifically in Pietermaritzburg.
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Sinjale
Added: 07 Aug 2010
"Deur die late stilte
van my kamer jaag ..."
Opperman wrote his poem while living at 20 Longmarket Street
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Alan Paton and Pietermaritzburg
Added: 07 Aug 2010
One of the striking features of Alan Paton's literary style is a certain vivid directness. In the opening chapters of Towards the Mountain, he evokes his childhood and young manhood in Pietermaritzburg in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
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Cinema and theatre in the 1920s and 30s
Added: 07 Aug 2010
Scott's Theatre could count on visiting stars of international repute. There were two picture houses in Pietermaritzburg through the silent era, the Rinko and the Excelsior. The most memorable non-cinematic entertainers that passed through Maritzburg belonged to fairs and circuses.
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The Imperial Hotel
Added: 07 Aug 2010
The Imperial Hotel was originally a private residence built in 1877 by a Mr T.W. Woodhouse, who was later mayor of Pietermaritzburg.
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The pubs of Pietermaritzburg
Added: 06 Aug 2010
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Pietermaritzburg appears to have been a very thirsty place because at almost every corner of our main streets one came across a public house where liquid refreshment could be enjoyed.
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The sporty hollow
Added: 06 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg is indeed located in a hollow, but far from that setting inducing lethargy, the city can in fact lay claim to the title of a sporting capital. After all, it has given birth to two of the world's most popular and formidable feats of endurance - the Comrades and Duzi Marathons.
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Problems of black sport in an apartheid city
Added: 05 Aug 2010
It is generally accepted that sport is a major component of the white South African way of life: rugby has often been decribed as a national religion and a form of social and political expression. The carefully tended turf of a white school's soccer or rugby fields, compared with the rough grass and stones of the black, is a graphic indication of the social and political process.
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Aurora Cricket Club
Added: 05 Aug 2010
Aurora, the multiracial Pietermaritzburg cricket club, was formed in early 1973 to challenge the idea that mixed sport was illegal and to test the attitude of white dominated sporting bodies.
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The Comrades Marathon
Added: 05 Aug 2010
At the start of the 1986 Comrades Marathon in Pietermaritzburg, a sea of over 10 000 runners stretched back hundreds of metres from the City Hall. The scene was lit by banks of floodlights and television crews on tall platforms recorded the drama for those who chose to remain in bed.
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Herman's Delight
Added: 05 Aug 2010
At dusk on any Tuesday evening throughout the year, runners of all shapes and sizes (and ability) can be seen streaming through Alexandra Park, pitting themselves against the stop watch in a weekly time trial known as Herman's Delight.
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The Duzi Canoe Marathon
Added: 05 Aug 2010
The gruelling Duzi Canoe Marathon, held annually in late January on the Msunduze and Mngeni Rivers, starts in Pietermaritzburg's Alexandra Park, and has become canoeing's answer to the Comrades Marathon. Completing the 'Duzi' has become synonymous with fitness, stamina and skill. It is South Africa's biggest and best known canoe race and attracts the country's top paddlers.
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Clubs and societies
Added: 05 Aug 2010
To judge from the list of clubs and societies in Braby's 1986 Directory of Pietermaritzburg, the city's inhabitants would have delighted Samuel Johnson with their clubbability, though not all institutions provide the kind of conversational intermingling he had in mind.
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The Maritzburg Croquet Club
Added: 04 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg is one of only five localities in the whole of South Africa which possesses association croquet clubs, so that the Maritzburg Croquet Club and its members, adept in the arcana of bisques, roquets and peels, make a distinct and distinctive contribution to the ambience of the city.
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Motor racing in the 1920s and 1930s
Added: 04 Aug 2010
With private motor transport came the advent of motor racing, a sport that was very much suited to that mixture of adventure and under-bonnet know-how that the car brought with it in the twenties and thirties.
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Architectural conservation: the challenge
Added: 04 Aug 2010
Town planners tell us that town planning is a dynamic discipline. Many who in the last decade have lived in Pietermaritzburg or re-visited it, agree: the architectural evidence of change is everywhere.
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Pietermaritzburg red brick: then and now
Added: 04 Aug 2010
The use of red bricks in the municipal office building at 333 Church Street in 1969 heralded the start of a movement towards using similarly coloured bricks in a number of large buildings in the central area.
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Towards a new Pietermaritzburg
Added: 04 Aug 2010
Pietermaritzburg's past might possess unique aspects, but its history has much in common with many other cities, particularly those in South Africa. So too its future. Thus we will have to improvise solutions to our own peculiar problems, while at the same time addressing challenges no different from those facing any other apartheid city.
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General
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