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Tarkastad
Tarkastad is a Karoo semi-urban settlement situated on the banks of Tarka River in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Tarkastad is on a plain to the north of the Winterberg mountain range on the R61 between Cradock and Komani and only three hours from Gqeberha. The name Tarkastad is believed to come from the Khoi-Khoi word ''Traka'' (meaning women) or the Celtic word ''Tarka'' (meaning otter) and the Afrikaans word ''Stad'' (meaning city). The fact that the town is overlooked by Martha and Mary; two peaks which look like two women resting after a hard day's work, also lends to the name. History The first people to occupy the area around Tarkastad were the San who left an abundance of rock art paintings in Grootvlei just north of the town. The first farmers settled in Tarkastad in 1795 who built watermills, inns and both a Dutch Reformed and Presbyterian Church. Two Great Trek leaders, Andries Potgieter and Piet Retief, farmed here for a short while. After the Dutch farme ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Dutch Reformed Church, Tarkastad
The Dutch Reformed Church in Tarkastad is the 23rd congregationof the Dutch Reformed Church that was founded in the present Synod of Eastern Cape, but currently (2015) it is the 19th oldest congregation because the congregations Dutch Reformed Church, Middelburg, Middelburg, Dutch Reformed Church, Komga, Komga, Greykerk and Dutch Reformed Church, Alice, Alice, which are all older if Tarkastad was, no longer exists. Background In 1952 writes Ons gemeentelike feesalbum album, an overview of all the congregations in the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (NGK), Dutch Reformed Church with a view to the Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival: "The Tarka area - that beautiful region in the shadow of the Winterberg - had its full share of the storms and struggle which shocked the national life during a century and a half." About 26 km outside the town of Tarkastad lies the lonely grave of the victim of the Slachter's Nek Rebellion, Johannes Bezuidenhout, a few kilometers from the scene ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Battle Of Elands River (1901)
The Battle of Elands River took place near the Elands River Poort mountain pass on 17 September 1901 during the Second Boer War. During the battle a Boer raiding force under Jan Smuts destroyed a British cavalry squadron led by Captain Sandeman, a cousin of Winston Churchill, on the Modderfontein farm. This battle is therefore also known as the Battle of Modderfontein. Background After a year of guerrilla war, the Boer leaders decided to send significant raiding forces into the Cape Colony and Natal. About 1000 Boers in six commandos already operated in the Cape Colony. The Boer leaders hoped to cause an uprising in that Dutch-majority territory or at least to widen the theater of war beyond the Boer republics of Orange Free State and South African Republic. Smuts led a commando south into the Cape Colony, while Louis Botha attempted to cross into Natal. Earlier Boer raids into the Cape Colony proved unsuccessful. All had been eventually hounded out by British mounted column ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
R61 (South Africa)
The R61 is a long provincial route in South Africa that connects Beaufort West with Port Shepstone via Graaff-Reinet, Komani (previously Queenstown), Mthatha and Port Edward. The R61 is co-signed with the N9 for 103 kilometres from Aberdeen through Graaff-Reinet to Bethesdaweg, and with the N6 for 18 kilometres near Queenstown. Route KwaZulu-Natal The R61 begins in Port Shepstone at the Marburg interchange with the N2 highway from Durban (at the Oribi Toll Plaza). As the N2 leaves the freeway at an off-ramp and becomes the road westwards towards Harding and Kokstad, the R61 takes over as the freeway south-south-west through the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast. As the 1st section is maintained by SANRAL, the R61 is a toll road for 22 km from the N2 Interchange, through Shelly Beach, Margate and Ramsgate, up to Southbroom. At Southbroom, it stops being both a toll road and a highway. From Port Shepstone to Southbroom, the R61 is followed by the R620 route. From Sout ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Queenstown, Eastern Cape
Queenstown, officially Komani, is a town in the middle of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, roughly halfway between the smaller towns of Cathcart and Sterkstroom on the N6 national route. The town was established in 1853 and is currently the commercial, administrative, and educational centre of the surrounding farming district. History Queenstown was founded in early 1853 under the direction of Sir George Cathcart, who named the settlement, and then fort, after Queen Victoria. Work on its railway connection to East London on the coast was begun by the Cape government of John Molteno in 1876, and the line was officially opened on 19 May 1880. The town war memorial was designed by Sir Robert Lorimer in 1922 with its sculpture by Alice Meredith Williams. The town prospered from its founding up to the worldwide depression of the 1930s, and again thereafter. In the 1960s, the majority of the Black population were moved east to the township of Ezibeleni, as part ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Cradock, Eastern Cape
Cradock, officially Nxuba, is a town in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, in the upper valley of the Great Fish River, by road northeast of Gqeberha. The town is the administrative seat of the Inxuba Yethemba Local Municipality in the Chris Hani District of the Eastern Cape. The town is named after John Cradock, governor of the Cape Colony in early 19th century and commander of the forces. Pre-colonial history For thousands of years San hunter-gatherers were the sole human inhabitants of southern Africa. About 2000 years BP the semi-nomadic Khoikhoi (or Khoekhoen or Khoikhoin) arrived with cattle, sheep and goats. These pastoralists migrated south towards the coast. Rock paintings and petroglyphs (engravings) remain as evidence of the first people who lived here. By the 4th century AD Bantu-speaking people had begun to migrate from central Africa down the east coast into southern Africa. The amaXhosa pressed further south to the banks of the Great Fish River whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Karoo
The Karoo ( ; from the Afrikaans borrowing of the South Khoekhoe Khoemana (also known as !Orakobab or Korana) word is a semidesert natural region of South Africa. No exact definition of what constitutes the Karoo is available, so its extent is also not precisely defined. The Karoo is partly defined by its topography, Karoo Supergroup, geology and climate, and above all, its low rainfall, arid air, cloudless skies, and extremes of heat and cold. The Karoo also hosted a well-preserved ecosystem hundreds of millions of years ago which is now represented by many fossils. The Karoo formed an almost impenetrable barrier to the interior from Cape Town, and the early adventurers, explorers, hunters, and travelers on the way to the Highveld unanimously denounced it as a frightening place of great heat, great frosts, great floods, and great droughts. Today, it is still a place of great heat and frosts, and an annual rainfall of between 50 and 250 mm, though on some of the mountains i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 (Winston Churchill in the Second World War, during the Second World War) and again from 1951 to 1955. For some 62 of the years between 1900 and 1964, he was a Member of Parliament (United Kingdom), member of parliament (MP) and represented a total of five Constituencies of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, constituencies over that time. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was for most of his career a member of the Conservative Party (UK), Conservative Party, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party (UK), Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924. Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire into the wealthy, aristocratic Spencer family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Second Boer War
The Second Boer War (, , 11 October 189931 May 1902), also known as the Boer War, Transvaal War, Anglo–Boer War, or South African War, was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer republics (the South African Republic and Orange Free State) over Britain's influence in Southern Africa. The Witwatersrand Gold Rush caused a large influx of "Uitlander, foreigners" (''Uitlanders'') to the South African Republic (SAR), mostly British from the Cape Colony. As they, for fear of a hostile takeover of the SAR, were permitted to vote only after 14 years of residence, they protested to the British authorities in the Cape. Negotiations failed at the botched Bloemfontein Conference in June 1899. The conflict broke out in October after the British government decided to send 10,000 troops to South Africa. With a delay, this provoked a Boer and British ultimatum, and subsequent Boer Irregular military, irregulars and militia attacks on British colonial settlements in Natal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Piet Retief
Pieter Mauritz Retief (12 November 1780 – 6 February 1838) was a '' Voortrekker'' leader. Settling in 1814 in the frontier region of the Cape Colony, he later assumed command of punitive expeditions during the sixth Xhosa War. He became a spokesperson for the frontier farmers who voiced their discontent, and wrote the Voortrekkers' declaration at their departure from the colony. He was a leading figure during their Great Trek, and at one stage their elected governor. He proposed Natal as the final destination of their migration and selected a location for its future capital, later named Pietermaritzburg in his honour. The massacre of Retief and his delegation by the Zulu King Dingane and the extermination of several Voortrekker laagercamps in the area of the present town of Weenen led to the Battle of Blood River on the Ncome River. The short-lived Boer republic Natalia suffered from ineffective government and was eventually annexed to the British Cape Colony. Early lif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Andries Potgieter
Andries Hendrik Potgieter, known as Hendrik Potgieter (19 December 1792 – 16 December 1852) was a Voortrekker leader. He served as the first head of state of Potchefstroom from 1840 and 1845 and also as the first head of state of Zoutpansberg from 1845 to 1852. Beyond the Orange River Potgieter and his party moved inland to the present Free State, where they signed a treaty with the leader of the Barolong, Moroka. The treaty stipulated that Potgieter would protect the Baralong against the Matabele raiders, in exchange for land. The tract of land was from the Vet River to the Vaal River. The Matabele leader, Mzilikazi, was threatened by the white incursion into what he saw as his sphere of influence, which led to the Matabele's attack on the Potgieter laager in October 1836, at Vegkop, near the present-day town of Heilbron. The attack was beaten off, but the Matabele made off with most of the trekker oxen, crucial draught animals for the wagons. The combined trek gro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Great Trek
The Great Trek (, ) was a northward migration of Dutch-speaking settlers who travelled by wagon trains from the Cape Colony into the interior of modern South Africa from 1836 onwards, seeking to live beyond the Cape's British colonial administration. The Great Trek resulted from the culmination of tensions between rural descendants of the Cape's original White South Africans, European settlers, known collectively as Boers, and the British Empire, British. It was also reflective of an increasingly common trend among individual Boer communities to pursue an isolationism, isolationist and semi-nomadic lifestyle away from the developing administrative complexities in Cape Town. Boers who took part in the Great Trek identified themselves as ''voortrekkers'', meaning "pioneers" or "pathfinders" in Dutch language, Dutch and Afrikaans language, Afrikaans. The Great Trek led directly to the founding of several autonomous Boer republics, namely the South African Republic (also known sim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Celtic Languages
The Celtic languages ( ) are a branch of the Indo-European language family, descended from the hypothetical Proto-Celtic language. The term "Celtic" was first used to describe this language group by Edward Lhuyd in 1707, following Paul-Yves Pezron, who made the explicit link between the Celts described by classical writers and the Welsh and Breton languages. During the first millennium BC, Celtic languages were spoken across much of Europe and central Anatolia. Today, they are restricted to the northwestern fringe of Europe and a few diaspora communities. There are six living languages: the four continuously living languages Breton, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh, and the two revived languages Cornish and Manx. All are minority languages in their respective countries, though there are continuing efforts at revitalisation. Welsh is an official language in Wales and Irish is an official language across the island of Ireland and of the European Union. Welsh is the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
