Germans In South Africa
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Germans In South Africa
German South Africans refers to South Africans who have full or partial German heritage. A significant number of South Africans are descended from Germans. Most of these originally settled in the Cape Colony, but were absorbed into the Afrikaner and Afrikaans population, because they had religious & ethnic similarities to the Dutch and French. Later German migrants, especially during the Witwatersrand Gold Rush and the Natal German settlers of the 1800s, were integrated into English-speaking communities of Gauteng and Kwa-Zulu Natal. History Hundreds of Germans emigrated to the Cape Colony during the Dutch rule between (1652-1806) and in the succeeding centuries. In 1652 the Dutch East India Company's established a supplies station at the Cape of Good Hope under the command of Jan van Riebeeck. The party was made up of 90 settlers, most of them were Dutch & a number of people were from Germany. In the 1680s, more German farmers and women arrived at Cape Colony. In 1691, the p ...
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Johannesburg
Johannesburg ( , , ; Zulu and xh, eGoli ), colloquially known as Jozi, Joburg, or "The City of Gold", is the largest city in South Africa, classified as a megacity, and is one of the 100 largest urban areas in the world. According to Demographia, the Johannesburg–Pretoria urban area (combined because of strong transport links that make commuting feasible) is the 26th-largest in the world in terms of population, with 14,167,000 inhabitants. It is the provincial capital and largest city of Gauteng, which is the wealthiest province in South Africa. Johannesburg is the seat of the Constitutional Court, the highest court in South Africa. Most of the major South African companies and banks have their head offices in Johannesburg. The city is located in the mineral-rich Witwatersrand range of hills and is the centre of large-scale gold and diamond trade. The city was established in 1886 following the discovery of gold on what had been a farm. Due to the extremely large gold ...
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Jan Van Riebeeck
Johan Anthoniszoon "Jan" van Riebeeck (21 April 1619 – 18 January 1677) was a Dutch navigator and colonial administrator of the Dutch East India Company. Life Early life Jan van Riebeeck was born in Culemborg, as the son of a surgeon. He grew up in Schiedam, where he married 19-year-old Maria de la Queillerie on 28 March 1649. She died in Malacca, now part of Malaysia, on 2 November 1664, at the age of 35. The couple had eight or nine children, most of whom did not survive infancy. Their son Abraham van Riebeeck, born at the Cape, later became Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Employment in the VOC Joining the ''Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie'' (VOC) (Dutch East India Company) in 1639, he served in a number of posts, including that of an assistant surgeon in the Batavia in the East Indies. He was head of the VOC trading post in Tonkin, Indochina. After being dismissed from that position in 1645 due to conducting trade for his own personal accou ...
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Johann Franz Drège
Johann Fran(t)z Drège (or Jean François Drège) (25 March 1794 Altona, Hamburg, Germany – 3 February 1881 Altona, Hamburg, Germany), commonly referred to by his standard botanical author abbreviation Drège, was a German horticulturalist, botanical collector and explorer of Huguenot descent. Drège received his first training in horticulture at Göttingen and subsequently worked at botanical gardens in Munich, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Riga. In 1826 he travelled with his younger brother, Eduard, to join his older brother, Carl, who had been working as an apothecary in the Cape since 1821. They established themselves as professional natural history collectors, with Carl concentrating on zoological and Franz on botanical specimens. Their contract with their European contacts expired in 1826, and they decided to launch their own business. August 1826 – May 1827 After starting his collecting career in Cape Town and the surrounding areas, Franz set out on his first journey to ...
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Karl Ludwig Philipp Zeyher
Karl Ludwig Philipp Zeyher (2 August 1799 Dillenburg, Hessen, Germany – 13 December 1858 Cape Town), was a botanical and insect collector who collected extensively in South Africa. He was the author, with Christian Friedrich Ecklon, of ''Enumeratio Plantarum Africae Australis'' (1835-7), a descriptive catalogue of South African plants. In 1816 Zeyher was apprenticed to his uncle Johann Michael Zeyher who was head gardener at the ducal gardens of Schwetzingen. Here he met Franz Sieber and was talked into a partnership with the aim of collecting and selling natural history specimens - a burgeoning industry in the 19th century. They sailed for Mauritius in August 1822, however Zeyher was left at the Cape while Sieber went on to Mauritius and Australia. On his return in April 1824, Sieber picked up the specimens collected by Zeyher, assuring him of payment in due course. No payment ever materialised and Zeyher became aware that he would be forced to operate on his own. He jo ...
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Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Pappe
Karl (or "Carl") Wilhelm Ludwig Pappe (1803, in Hamburg – 14 October 1862) was a German-born physician and botanist who lived and worked in South Africa. He was the first person to hold the position of government botanist and the first professor of botany at the South African College. His herbarium became the oldest surviving botanical collection in South Africa. Biography Pappe studied medicine and botany at the Leipzig University. He qualified in medicine in 1827 with a thesis on the flowering plants of Leipzig, ''"Enumerationes plantarum phaenogamarum lipsiensium specimen"''. Medical career He travelled to Cape Town in January 1831 and was registered as a physician, surgeon and accoucheur (a male obstetrician). He joined the South African Medical Society in 1832 and was one of three doctors in charge of the temporary hospital in Cape Town during the measles epidemic of 1839. From 1855 to 1858 he served as physician to the European Sick and Burial Society and the Wido ...
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Karl Wilhelm Posselt
Karl/Carl Wilhelm Posselt (20 June 1815 Diekow, Berlinchen, Neumark, Prussia – 12 May 1885 Christianenburg, Natal, South Africa), was a German missionary from the Berlin Missionary Society and was active in South Africa where he became known as "the missionary with the violin". Posselt initially trained as a teacher at Neuzelle, but became inspired by mission work during his training and attended a seminary in Berlin from 1834-39. On 21 December 1839 he disembarked at Table Bay after a voyage from Hamburg on the ''Devonshire''. He arrived as a member of the Berlin Missionary Society and in the company of fellow missionaries Ludwig Liefeldt and Johannes Winter. Posselt served his apprenticeship under Carl Friedrich Schultheiss (1815-1855) at the Itemba mission station on the Kubusie River near Stutterheim in Kaffraria. Here he also learnt the rudiments of the Xhosa language. Itemba was razed during the Frontier War of 1846-47, rebuilt and redestroyed in 1850. Posselt and Lief ...
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James Barry Munnik Hertzog
General James Barry Munnik Hertzog (3 April 1866 – 21 November 1942), better known as Barry Hertzog or J. B. M. Hertzog, was a South African politician and soldier. He was a Boer general during the Second Boer War who served as the third prime minister of the Union of South Africa from 1924 to 1939. Throughout his life he encouraged the development of Afrikaner culture, determined to prevent Afrikaners from being influenced by British culture. Early life and career Hertzog first studied law at Victoria College in Stellenbosch, Cape Colony. In 1889, he went to the Netherlands to read law at the University of Amsterdam, where he prepared a dissertation, on the strength of which he received his doctorate in law on 12 November 1892. Hertzog had a law practice in Pretoria from 1892 until 1895, when he was appointed to the Orange Free State High Court. During the Boer War of 1899–1902, he rose to the rank of general, becoming the assistant chief commandant ...
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Debbie Schäfer
Deborah Anne "Debbie" Schäfer (born 18 December 1966) is a South African politician and lawyer who served as the Western Cape Provincial Minister of Education and a Member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament for the Democratic Alliance (DA) from 2014 to 2022. Prior to serving in the provincial government, Schäfer served as a Member of the National Assembly from 2009 to 2014. Early life and family Schäfer was born on 18 December 1966 in Pietermaritzburg in the Natal Province, and is of German descent. During her early years, her family relocated to Johannesburg, where she completed her primary school education. They later moved to Cape Town where she matriculated from Bergvliet High School in 1984.Debbie Schäfer – Western Cape Government
AfricaCom. Retrieved on 27 August 2019
She ...
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Harry Schwarz
Harry Heinz Schwarz (13 May 1924 – 5 February 2010) was a South African lawyer, statesman and long-time political opposition leader against apartheid in South Africa, who eventually served as the South African Ambassador to the United States during the country's transition to majority rule. Schwarz rose from the childhood poverty he experienced as a German-Jewish refugee to become a lawyer and a member of the Transvaal Provincial Council, where from 1963 to 1974, he was Leader of the Opposition. In the 1964 Rivonia Trial he was a defence lawyer. Advocating a more aggressive political opposition to the National Party's racial policies in the 1960s and 1970s, as Leader of the United Party in Transvaal and leader of the liberal "Young Turks", he clashed with the United Party establishment. He pioneered the call in white politics for a negotiated end to apartheid and in 1974 signed the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith with Mangosuthu Buthelezi for a non-racial democratic societ ...
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Helen Zille
Otta Helene Maree (''née'' Zille ; born 9 March 1951), known as Helen Zille, is a South African politician. She has served as the Chairperson of the Federal Council of the Democratic Alliance since 20 October 2019. From 2009 until 2019, she was the Premier of the Western Cape province for two five-year terms, and a member of the Western Cape Provincial Parliament. She served as Federal Leader of the Democratic Alliance from 2007 to 2015 and as Mayor of Cape Town from 2006 to 2009. Zille is a former journalist and anti-apartheid activist and was one of the journalists who exposed the cover-up around the death of Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko while working for the '' Rand Daily Mail'' in the late 1970s. She also worked with the Black Sash and other pro-democracy groups during the 1980s. In the political arena, Zille has served in all three tiers of government, as the Western Cape's education MEC (1999–2001), as a Member of Parliament (2004–2006), as Mayor of Cap ...
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Rudi Ball
Rudi Victor Ball (June 22, 1911 – September 19, 1975) was a Germany ice hockey player. He is a member of the IIHF Hall of Fame. Early and personal life Ball was born in Berlin, Germany and died in Johannesburg, South Africa. Jewish heritage Ball was Jewish, and was one of two Jewish athletes to represent Germany in the 1936 Winter Olympic Games, along with Helene Mayer, and represented Germany at the Summer Games that year. There was much controversy about his inclusion in the 1936 German Olympic Ice Hockey team at the time by the Nazi government. Ball was inducted into the International Ice Hockey Hall of Fame in 2004. Career During his playing career, spanning from 1928 to 1952, he won the German Championship 8 times (1928–1944) and participated for Germany in the 1932 and 1936 Olympic Winter Games and in four World Championships 1930–1938. He played in total 49 official games for Germany, between 1929 and 1938, and scored 19 goals. Ball was voted as the best Eu ...
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New Germany, KwaZulu-Natal
New Germany is a town situated just inland from Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It has been incorporated firstly into Pinetown and now into eThekwini. Originally ''Neu-Deutschland'' and subsequently translated, the name refers to settlement of the area by German immigrants in 1848. They came over to farm cotton, but when that crop proved unsuccessful, the settlers turned to growing vegetables and flowers. The town became a municipality in 1960. History Natal's first German community owed its existence to the immigration scheme of an English Jew, Jonas Bergtheil, who arrived in Natal in 1843 and established the Natal Cotton Company three years later. Bergtheil saw the potential of European settlement along the coast and approached the British colonial office for immigrants. When first the British and then the Bavarian governments rejected his plans, he turned to the Kingdom of Hanover for support. Thirty-five peasant families (about 188 people) from the Osnabrück-Bremen ...
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