Hofmeyr is a small

Karoo The Karoo ( ; from the Afrikaans borrowing of the South Khoekhoe !Orakobab or Khoemana word ''ǃ’Aukarob'' "Hardveld") is a semi-desert natural region of South Africa. No exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo is available, so its ext ...

town in the

Eastern Cape Province The Eastern Cape is one of the provinces of South Africa. Its capital is Bhisho, but its two largest cities are East London and Gqeberha. The second largest province in the country (at 168,966 km2) after Northern Cape, it was formed in 1994 ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring countri ...

, 20 km west of the

Bamboesberg The Bamboesberg is a mountain range in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. This range was named for the bamboo '' Thamnocalamus tessellatus'' growing in its ravines. The Bamboesberg is an outlier of the Stormberg Mountains and part of the range is se ...

mountain range. It lies 64 km north-east of Cradock at an altitude of 1,252 metres. According to the 2011 census, the

population Population typically refers to the number of people in a single area, whether it be a city or town, region, country, continent, or the world. Governments typically quantify the size of the resident population within their jurisdiction using a ...

of Hofmeyr proper is about 326 persons and the neighbouring township of Luxolweni is about 3354. In former times it lay at the centre of a flourishing

sheep Sheep or domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') are domesticated, ruminant mammals typically kept as livestock. Although the term ''sheep'' can apply to other species in the genus ''Ovis'', in everyday usage it almost always refers to domesticated s ...

-farming district and managed some salt pans 10 km to its west. Founded in 1873, the town was initially named Maraisburg. To avoid confusion with the

Gauteng Gauteng ( ) is one of the nine provinces of South Africa. The name in Sotho-Tswana languages means 'place of gold'. Situated on the Highveld, Gauteng is the smallest province by land area in South Africa. Although Gauteng accounts for only ...

area of

Maraisburg Roodepoort is a town in the Gauteng province of South Africa. Formerly an independent municipality, Roodepoort became part of the Johannesburg municipality in the late 1990s, along with Randburg and Sandton. Johannesburg's most famous botanical g ...

it was renamed Hofmeyr in 1911 in honour of

Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr (Onze Jan) Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr (4 July 1845 – 11 October 1909) was a South African politician. He was affectionately known as ''Onze Jan'', "our Jan" in Dutch. Life He was born in Cape Town, educated at the South African College, and at an early ag ...

, a campaigner for the equal treatment of

Afrikaans Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...

and

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

and a prominent figure in the Eerste Taalbeweging. The

Hofmeyr Skull The Hofmeyr Skull is a specimen of a 36,000-year-old anatomically modern human skull that was found in 1952 near Hofmeyr, South Africa. Background The skull was found in the 1950s on the surface of an erosion gully, a dry channel bed of the Vl ...

, belonging to a 36,000 year old

anatomically modern human Anatomy () is the branch of biology concerned with the study of the structure of organisms and their parts. Anatomy is a branch of natural science that deals with the structural organization of living things. It is an old science, having its ...

, was found in 1952 in the dry wash of the Vlekpoort River just outside Hofmeyr.

References

External links

Populated places in the Enoch Mgijima Local Municipality Populated places established in 1873 Karoo {{EasternCape-geo-stub