Rural towns: we can flourish or fail

Prof Graeme Addison, journalist, academic, author, and tour and site guide, has written a magnificent essay about the pasts, presents and futures of rural towns, including Colesberg and Parys in the Free State (where he lives now with his wife, Karen), prompted by an introduction to Toverview, in which he touches eloquently on many of the themes we are seeking to address, and which we are privileged to publish.

By Graeme Addison

Happy country towns are all the same, but unhappy ones are different in many ways. People flourish where civic organisation supports prosperity. They suffer all sorts of miseries under corrupt and mismanaged councils.

If you recognised the first sentence as a parody of the opening line of one of the world’s greatest novels, you will also remember that its chief character, like the author himself, lived in the country and was deeply devoted to the welfare of the people on the land. He scythed hay with them in autumn and marvelled at their strength and resilience under terrible conditions. He also read and thought a great deal, and when he visited the city he was shocked at how shallow and trivial the upper class were.

I have just read an issue of an online newspaper called Toverview (https://toverview.co.za), published by retired journalist Maeder Osler and friends, and centred on the small town of Colesberg in the Northern Cape of South Africa. I was astonished at the range, depth, and colourful detail of its national and local coverage.

Colesberg is dominated by a towering peak called Toverberg that can be seen from great distances but never seems to get closer as you drive towards the town. This optical illusion made travellers of old, riding and riding, think the berg was magical, bewitched. Its name comes from the old Dutch/Afrikaans word tover, meaning magic, enchantment, or witchcraft.

Certainly some magic prevails in the town, which is apparently peaceful but has a torn and scarred history from colonial and apartheid times. You would not guess that from the tranquil and gentrified air of its centre, where restored 19th-century cottages accommodate weekend escapees from cities far away.

Yet within sight of this postcard image lies Kuyasa, Colesberg’s largest township, established under apartheid’s spatial segregation. Its recent history is marked by the events of July 1985, when police killed four young residents during countrywide uprisings. The Colesberg Four, as they are memorialised, were shot dead.

Youths had marched towards the homes of two policemen, torching one officer’s house and vehicle. In response, police in Casspirs and vans entered Kuyasa. Officers inside one home opened fire on the approaching youths, killing the four. Over 70 residents, including 60 children, were arrested. Many suffered severe assault and torture and were teargassed even in their holding cells. Another conflict in the same month injured at least 14 people, including a local reverend.

Memorial to the ‘Colesberg Four’ – four youths shot dead by police during anti-apartheid protests in 1985 — erected by the Northern Cape Provincial Government and unveiled in December 2016. Image: eParkeni.

If ever there was a need for a National Dialogue to address the real problems of South Africans, that need is on display in Colesberg and many other small towns like it. Money flows into the town from visitors but jobs are few and many township residents have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps

The echoes of 1985 are still felt, for Kuyasa smoulders, marginalised in both infrastructure and opportunity. I recognise the pattern all too well because I live in another small town, Parys in the Free State, which has the same mix of ecotourism and poverty. But the two towns are very different in their experience of past and present trauma.

A court has just sacked the entire town council of Parys and handed administration over to the province, citing the abject failure of service delivery that has continued over many years. Parys is one of the very few boom towns in the country, thanks to the attraction of the Vaal River, the Vredefort Dome, and its proximity to Johannesburg. Private enterprise fills the gaps in public services for those who can afford their own boreholes for water and installation of solar energy.

Colesberg is 30 kilometres from the Orange River, and steeped in a clouded history. It too is benefiting from tourism, but in a different way. Parys is all bustle and adventure; Colesberg is quiet and quaint. Colesberg, with its neat Victorian facades, whitewashed churches and Karoo sunsets, has become a darling of travellers and retirees who admire its history, slow rhythms, and the evocative myths of the Toverberg.

Another story unfolds to the curious visitor. During the period of upheaval known as the mfecane/difaqane (c.1815–1840s), a kind of holocaust in the central interior, population displacements and warfare among the Sotho-Tswana, Zulu invaders, Griqua bands, and Korana communities across the region led to the destruction of communities and mass starvation. The Cape frontier, where Colesberg is located, became a zone of both refuge and conflict.

Missionaries established outposts, while Cape colonial forces used the town as a staging post for penetration into lands further north. During frontier wars (against the Xhosa in the east) and during the 1830s–40s Great Trek, it became a rear base for logistics. Its location on the Gariep/Orange River corridor made it crucial for controlling movement into the interior.

The town was officially founded in 1830, initially around a Dutch Reformed Church congregation. It was named after Sir Lowry Cole, Governor of the Cape Colony (1828–1833). Cole was instrumental in encouraging settlement and consolidation of the colony’s northern frontier and was therefore crucial in the policy of land dispossession that has left modern South Africa with a major, so far insoluble, problem. Cole’s governorship is often described in bland administrative terms, but in reality he helped lock in a colonial land policy whose effects remain deeply painful today and are the source of huge inequities between black and white citizens.

Cole set about consolidating semi-nomadic trekboers into settlements in the arid Karoo and along the Orange River. Efforts were made to “pacify” Khoisan, Griqua, and Korana communities, which in practice meant military pressure, treaties of unequal power, and land alienation.

By formalising parishes and magistracies in borderland areas like Colesberg, Cole advanced the policy of turning what had been shared grazing and hunting lands into surveyed, alienable private farms. This was part of a broader British strategy after 1820: stabilise frontiers by filling them with loyal European settlers, backed by magistrates, churches, and military outposts. Cole’s policies thus reinforced a system of racialised land ownership, which became a cornerstone of South Africa’s later segregation and apartheid land regimes.

The assignment of aristocrats like Sir Lowry Galbraith Cole to the remote and troublesome Cape Colony was only a stepping stone to grander positions elsewhere in the British Empire. Individuals who distinguished themselves were promoted to India. But it was on Cole’s watch that the Great Trek happened, the exodus of thousands of Boers from the Cape in protest against British “liberal” policies, while the interior degenerated into genocide. He retired to obscurity in Ireland with the rank of general.

The diamond diggings at Colesberg Kopje in the Kimberley district, which eventually turned into the ‘Big Hole’.

Three decades later, diamonds were discovered around Kimberley, and that changed the British perspective on South Africa overnight. Diamonds, then gold, suddenly turned a colonial backwater into a Mecca for ambitious bureaucrats and military men. A succession of ruthless empire builders, including Cecil John Rhodes, Cape Premier and privateer of land speculation, carried on the dispossession and occupation methods of their forebears.

It is not surprising that a neglected remnant of history like Colesberg should have become a drawcard for retirees of all shades. Fortunately, they count among them concerned people rooted in knowledge of the past. This is the case with the editorial crew of the local newspaper Toverview. The concerns expressed by this publication are national in scope, and even the localised colour features, such as an article by Phakamisa Mayaba on the use of traditional remedies and foodstuffs, reflect typical South African obsessions.

A lengthy article in the most recent edition, written by R.W. Johnson, author long ago of How Long Will South Africa Survive?, unpicked the true motivations behind President Cyril Ramaphosa’s farcical National Dialogue. Why did top figures behind Ramaphosa embrace this venture?

The broad sweep of Johnson’s writing has always drawn me in, but I wondered what connection he had with Colesberg. Yet what he had to say about the ANC’s wasting presence in the South African stage mattered to everyone, no matter where.

“In fact, a major clue came at the ANC’s recent NEC meeting where Andile Lungisa suggested that the NEC leadership should stand down because it was clear that they had run out of steam and ideas and were quite incapable of leading any move to renew the ANC, with the result that the party is continuing its downward drift, evident since the 2024 election. This intervention naturally created quite a sensation. Lungisa is a former deputy president of the ANC Youth League and something of a firebrand …

“The impression that Lungisa was gunning for Ramaphosa was only strengthened when he suggested that the way ahead was to elect a new convenor for the ANC, Thabo Mbeki, with Kgalema Motlanthe, a former acting president of the ANC, as his deputy. Everyone knows that Mbeki is bitterly critical of Ramaphosa …”

Johnson points out that the original idea for a national dialogue came from Mbeki, against the background of the ANC’s dramatic fall in the popular vote. The electorate, says Johnson, is minded to look for an alternative.

“Mbeki’s proposal of a national dialogue was thus an attempt to create such a space, and by dressing it up as a civil society-led initiative it could be depicted as non-political and therefore no threat to ANC discipline.”

In other words, the national dialogue is not national at all but evidence of a power struggle within the leadership of the ruling party, and not a dialogue but a distraction. It is the kind of insight that only a seasoned scholar of South African politics can inject into our discourse. It is strange to encounter it in an obscure journal read mainly in a tiny community, seen as a stopover on the N1 between Johannesburg and Cape Town.

But no. This is no stopover. A kind of rural upsurge of ideas is occurring where you least expect it. Perhaps a RurRenaissance is germinating in South Africa’s backwoods and badlands.

It is a symptom of what was mentioned at the start: Tolstoy’s foreboding novel Anna Karenina, a narrative about the decaying Moscow aristocracy and urban elites who remained totally out of touch with the seething population beneath them. Featuring an autobiographical character, Levin, a wealthy landowner and Count, the novel projects a vision of the high life of urban families in the prerevolutionary era of mid-19th-century Tsarist Russia.

Levin wrestles with himself and his privileges while still attending elegant soirées and horse races in the opulent and carefree society of the time. A parallel story of Anna Karenina’s illicit affair with a rogue named Vronsky plays counterpoint to Levin’s search for meaning. In the background, Anna’s husband, Karenin, is a devoted bureaucrat whose composure crumbles as Anna’s infidelity destroys his belief in decency and order.

South Africans today can hardly fail to identify with this tale of superficiality and emotional turmoil. And the interesting thing is that the urban/rural divide echoes our own situation. South Africa’s small towns contain a refugee intelligentsia who eschew the city to mull over life in the platteland.

This is by no means a new phenomenon. Long before digital sameness compressed thought into mere information, South Africa’s countryside produced a lively rural intelligentsia whose voices shaped national literature, politics, and culture. Thinkers gravitated towards a more authentic place in nature and found it in small towns.

Olive Schreiner’s story of an African farm near Graaff-Reinet is the archetype of this culture. So too is Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, a deep exploration of spirit and surface, origins and imperatives, the journey to the city and the horror of discovery.

Afrikaans and African writers have celebrated the fullness of landed wisdom embedded in the soil like blood. Sutherland, now a centre of astronomy thanks to its glittering skies, was the birthplace of poet N.P. van Wyk Louw and his brother W.E.G. Louw, central to Afrikaans literary modernism. Lovedale Mission in the town of Alice was a crucible for African intellectual life, producing journalists, teachers, writers, and political leaders. Steve Biko, a native of King William’s Town, became the philosopher of Black Consciousness, rooted in small-town life.

But the reverse side of this picture is also instructive. In “The Narrative of Jacobus Coetzee”, one of two stories in Dusklands, novelist J.M. Coetzee gives a fictionalised 18th-century colonial account by Jacobus of his travels and his violence against the Nama people. Domination and dehumanisation seem justified under the guise of “civilisation” and “progress.”

Small-town South Africa has for centuries been the entry point for rural people to join the mainstream economy. But to say so is not to claim they bettered their lot. For many, driven by poverty in rural areas, or displaced from land taken by settlers, or being sharecroppers who could not survive, gravitating towards the town and then the city was a dubious and dangerous option.

In Colesberg’s Kuyasa township, the lived reality tells a story of poverty, unemployment, and underdevelopment, tempered by resilience and entrepreneurial spirit. This contrast is at the heart of Colesberg’s present identity, and it demands sober reflection.

According to the 2016 Community Survey, Umsobomvu Local Municipality (of which Colesberg is the hub) had around 30,900 residents across 9,600 households. Of these households, more than 1,600 are registered as indigent, receiving free basic water, electricity, sanitation, and refuse removal. This represents nearly one in six households dependent on state support to meet daily needs.

Unemployment, the starkest measure of economic exclusion, hovers in the mid-to-high 20s, with some estimates closer to 30% in Umsobomvu, and significantly higher among women and young people. Expanded unemployment across the Northern Cape has been estimated at over 40%, a figure borne out by the queues at municipal offices during job-seeking drives and temporary work programmes. Education levels compound the challenge: only 6.8% of Colesberg adults hold higher education qualifications, while 16% have no schooling at all.

These numbers underline the structural divide. While Colesberg’s CBD markets itself as a safe, genteel stopover, Kuyasa wrestles with inadequate services, limited jobs, and a fragile informal economy.

Despite these constraints, Kuyasa hums with small-scale enterprise. Spaza shops, barber shops, shisanyamas, and kota-and-atchar vendors line its dusty streets. The informal economy provides livelihoods for many households, though profit margins are slim and competition increasingly fierce. Non-local entrepreneurs often dominate the more lucrative sectors, sparking debates about ownership and opportunity.

Yet some local figures, such as tour operator Mbulelo Kafi, recipient of a Northern Cape Tourism Service Excellence Award, have shown what is possible when vision and opportunity align. They don’t in government’s confused initiatives.

Where is the vision, who are the intellectual leaders of South Africa today? The glut of political commentators, the profusion of academics, the deployed comrades who cannot fix a sewer, the blathering of online opinionistas, the braying mob of politicians, all compound to offer no way forward. Go to the land and listen.

FEATURED IMAGE: Part of Colesberg’s Main Street. (Wikimedia Commons)

This article first appeared on Graeme Addison’s Facebook account. Used with permission.