Smalltown Karoo: Rietbron, Klipplaat, Jansenville, Pearston and Willowmore

By Chris Marais and Julienne du Toit

Welcome to one of the quietest villages in the Karoo: Rietbron.

If you’re an adrenalin junkie, a wild adventurist, someone who can’t sit still for a second or a person who needs a thrill a minute to survive, then you should bypass Rietbron.

In fact, it’s quite easy to bypass Rietbron. It lies somewhere on a 150km detour between Beaufort West and Willowmore, crossing the Amos River, the Muiskraal River which eventually feed the Sout River.

But Rietbron does not specialise in flowing rivers or mountain ridges in the distance. Most people think of the Karoo as a flat plate of geography floating in the belly of South Africa. It’s not.

You’ll always see rocky bumps on the horizon. Not, however, from Rietbron. It’s the Very Flat Mind’s Eye Karoo, where the horizon is only occasionally broken by the perky ears of a hee-hawing donkey straying into your field of vision. You have to want to visit Rietbron to get there.

And yet, so many big city types from Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town come here and fall in love with the space, the stillness and the isolation. They buy holiday homes here, which are renovated by a talented and enterprising builder-engineer, and escape to Rietbron whenever they can.

Just more than a century ago, local farmers between Beaufort West and Willowmore built themselves a church and box-like Nagmaal houses here. Which is how most of the settlements in the Karoo began.

Klipplaat‘s Royal Visit

Way back in 1947, long before she became Queen, the young Princess Elizabeth stopped off at Klipplaat when the Royal Family were on their grand railroad tour of South Africa.

During SA’s golden century of rail travel, Klipplaat was a major junction. At one stage you could hardly move for all the comings and goings of the old steam behemoths heading for Cape Town, Port Elizabeth or up to Graaff-Reinet.

This was of great benefit to the local mohair and wool farmers wanting to ship their products to market, particularly in Port Elizabeth. In fact, there was a minor ostrich boom in the area for a while, and the rail system helped that business along too.

And when the Anglo-Boer War came along, Klipplaat was abuzz with British soldiers, quartermasters and mountains of military gear. Not far away lurked the mounted Boer units, waiting to disrupt this rail traffic any way they could. Hoping, of course, that the supplies on the trains included a case or two of Scotch whisky.

In 1979 the locomotives were phased out in favour of diesel and the little village went into decline. Today, there’s a rusty loco standing outside Klipplaat as a memorial to better days. Bikers and overlanders enjoying the wide landscapes of the Karoo often stop here and pose for photographs with the old train in background.

The Jansenville Gnome

Jansenville, on the southern reaches of the Karoo Heartland, is brimming over with angora goats, mohair and country legends.

Take the famous Gnome Tale of Jansenville, for instance. A local woman once had her garden gnome stolen from her farm stall and pleaded publicly for its return. It came back, but was nicked again. Then the gnome came home once more, only to be pilfered a third time.

By now, so much publicity had been generated that the women received many, many gnomes from a responsive public. But the original gnome never made it back.

South Africa’s first mohair museum is in Jansenville, part of a Mohair Meander which includes Beaufort West, Graaff-Reinet, Jansenville, Alicedale and Port Elizabeth.

When Michelle Obama wore a designer cardigan made of mohair from a Karoo farm in the Camdeboo district, the news item made fashion headlines around the world. Movie stars and talk show hosts gushed over mohair, which now has the cachet of cashmere and silk, regularly seen on the world’s catwalks.

With more than 668 000 angora goats, South Africa produces an annual clip of nearly 2.3 million kilograms – around half the world’s mohair. The vast majority of that comes from the Eastern Cape Karoo – and Jansenville is the country capital of mohair.

Most of this sumptuous fibre goes to the textile weavers and fashion houses of Italy, but a fair amount stays at home too, and is transformed into blankets, carpets, scarves and some of the finest socks ever to grace a human foot.

Pearston’s Pear Tree

Before the beautiful Dutch Reformed Church building went up in the Eastern Cape village of Pearston, faithful worshippers would gather under the pear tree on Rustenburg, Casper Lotter’s farm.

A dominee would ride across from Somerset East and do the honours. This may have been fun during the spring months of September and October, during blossom time, and again in the autumn months of April and May. But during high summer when ripe pears bombed down without warning, and in the icy cold of deep winter? Maybe not so much.

The pear tree was significant. But was it so significant that the settlement was later called Pearston? Not really. The village was in fact named after one John Pears, a dedicated English teacher who later preached in the Dutch Reformed Church and dedicated much of his life to the local community.

Of all the farms in all the Karoo, Cranemere must be among the best known. Set not far from Pearston on the Graaff-Reinet road, Eve Palmer describes it lovingly in her evocative classic, The Plains of Camdeboo.

This was also the first farm in the area to be permanently inhabited, thanks to a fresh and cheerful spring discovered by Gerrit Lodewyk Coetzee. He dammed the spring and created a lake in the desert, precisely the reason George Palmer bought the land from him in 1880.

Willowmore – The Look of Yesterday

If you look at your typical Karoo town, you’ll see the most imposing building is the Dutch Reformed Mother Church.

It’s generally a Victorian-era masterpiece that looms over the rest of town like a spiritual guardian.

And that’s why most Karoo towns came into being. Farmers in the area needed somewhere to pray and socialise, so they had churches built and congregations formed around them. And the dominee (preacher) normally had the best house in town.

Willowmore, however, had different origins. An Englishman called William Moore had a farm here, at the northern entrance to the magical Baviaans Wilderness, called The Willows. Farmers from all over the district used to gather here and play tennis. It was such an agreeable spot that a town was declared here.

Of course, a grand Mother Church followed.

Modern-day Willowmore still has the pace and the look of yesterday, of a slower tempo of life. Golf has become the most popular sport and the Karoostyle buildings are generally well preserved.

Then there’s the Freedom Challenge, nearly 2 000km of winter cycling through the vast Karoo from the Midlands of KwaZulu Natal down to Cape Town.

But if you like your transport a little more sedate, then hop on the Willow Limo and see the town from between the twitching ears of a couple of slow-moving donkeys…

For more stories on the Karoo from Julienne du Toit and Chris Marais, try their Karoo Roads series of books, priced at R350 (landed) each.

The Karoo Quartet Special (Karoo Roads 1 – 4) consists of more than 60 Karoo stories and hundreds of black and white photographs. Priced at R960 (including taxes and courier in South Africa), this Heritage Collection can be ordered from julie@karoospace.co.za