Under the Southern Cross

A Pole under the Southern Cross: Antoni Rehman’s Journey through South Africa, 1875–1877. Edited by Michał Leśniewski. Translated and co-edited by Weronika Muller. HiPSA, 3d ser., no. 7. Cape Town: Historical Publications Southern Africa, 2025.

The Polish German botanist and phytogeographer Antoni Rehman, born in Kraków in 1840, visited South Africa twice, in 1877–75 and in 1879–80, collecting over nine thousand plant specimens, among which 314 were from newly described species. He published accounts of both of his journeys, writings not only of scientific interest but presenting a remarkable account of South Africa in that bygone era. A comic book version of his recollections was published in Poland in 1988, under the title Sam w afrykańskim pustkowiu (“Alone in the African Wilderness”).

    A century earlier, my direct ancestor Daniel Ferdinand Immelman (my grandmother Muriel’s great, great, great-grandfather), then aged sixteen, guided the Swedish botanist Carl Peter Thunberg, one of Linnaeus’s most distinguished pupils, on his first journey into the Cape interior—to the Gamtoos River, lasting from September 1772 to January 1773. Daniel subsequently corresponded with Thunberg and in 1775, he was easily persuaded by another Swedish naturalist, Anders Sparrman, to undertake a trip into the interior again.*

   In that intervening century, the process of assimilation had gone on apace. The presence of men with guns had made huge inroads into Southern African wildlife, and the colonists’ uncontrolled use of fire to clear land had devasted ancient virgin woodlands, so that native construction timber had become a rarity; “all buildings in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and all towns in the interior of the country are predominant built with wood imported from Sweden,” Rehman notes.

   In Cape Town, which then had about 30,000 inhabitants, Rehman was astonished by the multinational composition of the population. In the port, “alongside a ginger Englishman worked a pitch-black man from Mozambique, next to an Indian from Malabar stood a tanned Dutchman . . . a Kaffir, a Bushman and the most diverse multitude of mixed race offspring of Whites and Blacks” he took the train to Wynberg, then a small country village, “equal in everything to the most beautiful rural towns in Europe,” he thought.

    Regarding the Tsitsikamma Forest as of crucial importance for his geo-botanical studies, Rehman reached the village of George on the East Coast in October 1875, where he found that a ‘real mania for ostriches had spread among the local population” (40). The rage in Europe for ostrich feathers, meant that a pound of them sold for £35, and “the poorest colonist would sell his last horse and cow and instead buy an ostrich, sure that it would replace all other forms of generating income.”

    Rehman had a letter of recommendation to an amiable Rhinelander named Johan Justus Müller, who had opened a shoe factory, the first to be established in South Africa, in Blanco, now a suburb of George. Quite coincidentally, knowing nothing about this history, I bought a pair of Nguni veldskoene (veld shoes), made, I was told, in George, at a fair near there in April 2026. Herr Müller’s fledgling industry had survived.

    Later on his travels, en route to Kimberley and the Diamond Fields, Rehman stopped at a farm on the Brak River, near the future town of De Aar. I once, when around ten or eleven, killed a sleepy puff adder on the Brak River’s bank, which would surely have killed me if it had been quicker to strike, since I was there on my bicycle, far from any possible assistance. This has nothing to do with Rehman, of course, and I mention it only because almost eighty years later, I still find it in me to regret gratuitously murdering that snake.

    Of all the fascinating nineteenth-century Africana recounted by Rehman, I shall mention only one other. In Natal, he observes, that unlike other black Africans he had encountered, “the Zulus are in love with their hair; each one of them is their own wig-maker.” Rehman noted three different types of Zulu men’s hairstyles, one involving “a symmetrical cylinder three to four inches tall and flat at the top,” another that “looked like a heart-shaped hat,” and a third with hair “parted very neatly into many rows running from the forehead to the back of the head.”

    If you’d like to know more about all this, I’m afraid you’ll need to get hold of this book.**

*See Anders Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, towards the Antarctic Polar Circle, round the world and to the Country of the Hottentots and the Caffres, from the Year 1772–1776, ed. V. S. Forbes (2 vols.; Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1975); Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels at the Cape of Good Hope, 1772–1775, ed. V. S. Forbes (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1986). Historical Publications Southern Africa (HiPSA) was formerly titled the Van Riebeeck Society.

**Available from https://hipsa.org.za/publication/a-pole-under-the-southern-cross/.