Now the Free State’s Naspers-owned daily has been redesigned (c.f. the genial Charles Apple). The stately dignity of its former logo has been coldly replaced by the boringest of banners. Newspaper banners consisting of light text on dark backgrounds are tricky to pull off well. The Guardian does it, as does Le Figaro, but I’ve never really been convinced by either effort. Both, however, are better than Volksblad‘s choice of a supremely dull and featureless typeface for their banner. It has a real Anytown, USA feel to it.

Bring back the old’un! Luckily the redesign of Die Burger, my daily newspaper of choice when I was luxuriating in the comforts of the Western Cape, was much more of an aesthetic success.

Krige’s painting of Clifton beach (above) was tucked into a corner and captivated me immediately. Some art looks better on a screen than in real life, but this was the opposite. The colours and strokes hypnotised me and transported me back to the strand itself, with the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks that divide Clifton’s five beaches. For a number of minutes I stood there entranced by Krige’s view and made two failed attempts to move on before finally tearing myself away.

There were five Kriges up for auction, but besides Clifton only the two portraits — “Xhosa girl” and “Gardener (Montagu)” — intrigued me. The strong colours and delineation mark Krige’s work though the same qualities are not unknown in the more popular, the more expensive (and in my opinion overpriced) Irma Stern. “Watussi Woman”, the best Stern in the show, reached £1,161,250 (R14,768,900 / €1,334,623 / $1,846,852) before the final gavel, easily the highest-earning of the sale. Rather typically of my tastes (and the depressed market), of the five works by Francois Krige included in today’s sale only one sold, a Cape Town cityscape from within the artist’s Dorp Street studio (£16,250 / R206,538).

The other day, however, I stumbled across this photo on Flickr depicting two girls promenading past Grosvenor House after a fine day’s shopping. Grosvenor House, first built by Christian Ludolph Neethling in 1782 and achieving its current appearance in 1803, is one of the finest examples of the flat-roofed patrician town house in South Africa.

My most memorable aspect of South Africa is colour. The entire palette of the Western Cape changes with the seasons from the faded shades and muffled tones of the autumn to the luxurious verdant growth and red-brown soil of the spring and summer.

I find I miss the rainy days in Stellenbosch, donning the Doc Martens for the slippery walk to the J.S. Gericke-biblioteek for a day’s research or down Dorpstraat to De Akker for a pint of Hansa and perhaps a bit of Rhodesian blend in the pipe while you finger through the old India-paper edition of Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson or the latest Hungarian Quarterly.

Still more one misses those days clothed in glorious radiant sunshine: the dappled light shining through the trees as you spend an afternoon with friends, sampling a few wines at Boschendal, or the stark assault of brightness as you rest on the sands at Clifton or Gordonsbaai. It sounds trite but is nonetheless true that South Africa is fine in any season.

While Afrikaans is a mild obsession of mine, I do like finding those holdouts of what they used to call “High Dutch” — in contrast to the ordinary South African spoken Dutch which, because of its differences in grammar and spelling, was eventually recognised as the language Afrikaans.

One such old Dutch holdout can be found on the statue (Af: staanbeeld; lit.: ‘standing-picture’) of Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Timson Lukin in the Company’s Garden, Cape Town. The pedestal proclaims in a very handsome font the General’s rank, name, and orders. In Dutch: Majoor-Generaal Sir Henry Timson Lukin, KCB CMG DSO, Commandeur Legioen van Eer, Orde van de Nyl.

Most of this works perfectly well as Afrikaans but for two slight differences. First: The lack of ‘i’ in de always indicates Dutch rather than Afrikaans, but because of the relative youth of Afrikaans, de can sometimes be employed as an antiquating device. For example, when translating the name of Captain Haddock’s ship in the Afrikaans translation of the Tintin book, the translators chose De Eenhorn (the Unicorn) rather than Die Eenhorn. Obviously an old-fashioned sailing ship would belong to a Dutch-speaking era rather than an Afrikaans-speaking one.

Second is the military rank. Here translated as majoor-generaal, in both Dutch and Afrikaans this evolved into generaal-majoor. Just one of those things. The South African Defence Forces has a history of experimental military ranks which did not last: Commandant-General (for General), Combat General (for Major General), Colonel-Commandant (for Brigadier), Commandant (for Lieut. Colonel), and Field Cornet (for Lieutenant).

There’s your random bit of Afrikaans arcana for the day.

WHILE UNIVERSITY rankings within countries have been popular for some time now, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, it’s only been in the past decade or so that worldwide rankings of universities have come to the fore. The most widely known is probably the Academic Ranking of World Universities produced by Shanghai Jiaotong University, alongside the QS World University Rankings from the firm Quacquarelli Symonds, and the T.H.E. World University Rankings from the weekly magazine Times Higher Education. All such ratings employ varying statistical matrices and methods of divination obscure to the outsider but which, one supposes, must have some form of merit. They are more useful for gaining a general impression of the place of a university rather than comparing and contrasting two or more particular institutions.

The aforementioned ranking structures are rather to formal for us to gain all that much knowledge from. Personal interactions, reputation, age, style of architecture, and other such factors carry much greater import when I judge universities. Oxford and Cambridge, whether you like it or not, are still the top universities in the world, even if they might not be our favourites. You just can’t beat them. While they might not be as much fun as other places, they come closest to achieving the balance of age, tradition, interesting people, serious research, good location, and general niftiness.

For a certain type of person, Harvard remains paramount among American universities, but to be a Harvard undergrad has carried a certain social stigma in our quarters for the past two or three decades. Harvard Business School, however, remains perfectly acceptable. In the Ivy League, Yale, not Harvard, is king, followed by Brown (not thanks to its radical professoriate but rather due to the strong Continental infiltration amongst its studentry). Dartmouth is the fun #3 of the Ivies, while the rest are forgettable (well, Princeton’s not bad really — it has the Whitherspoon Institute — but Cornell, Columbia, and Penn are yawn-worthy).

Up to this point, we have been speaking generally, but there are topical institutions of course. If you really must study ‘business’, then there’s Harvard Business School or INSEAD. Are there any other business schools of actual note? In the military realm, Sandhurst is the unquestionable king. The École royale militaire in Brussels is up there — being Catholic, Francophone, and monarchic attracts good elements from outside Belgium. In the States, there is the Citadel and VMI, but not much else (the federal ‘service academies’ have poor reputations except for Annapolis). One doesn’t hear much about Saint-Cyr these days.

Speaking of France, the reason one can’t come up with proper rankings is because some institutions or groups of institutions would be entirely outside it. The grandes écoles are the best example. They are superbly elitist, the absolute top, but they mostly exist in that little French world, with all its delights and limitations.

But for ‘topical’ institutions, the University of London has plenty: SOAS, LSE, the Cortauld, the various institutes of the School of Advanced Study, etc., etc.

There are also those interesting little schools of art history and conservation, attached to museums like the V&A or auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The École du Louvre, however, must be the queen regnant of these schools.

Charles Taylor’s presence at McGill alone makes it worthy of note, but one suspects there are other strengths at the university. At any rate, it is still a perfectly respectable place to be an undergraduate. Boston College is also quite strong at the postgrad level, except in the theology school where heresy is widely believed to be thriving. Given the wealth and particularity of America’s universities, there are small and unknown centres of excellence in many unexpected places (for example the quite strong literary translation centre at the University of Rochester).

Rome’s universities of both church and state have shabby academic reputations but still attract for being Roman. One always hears seminarians complaining about the Gregorian, but no one can never really complain about Rome, and being a student or a seminarian is as good a reason to be in Rome as any. Rome also has John Cabot University, an ‘American’ institution divided between Americans on their semester abroad and the full-timers (often the layabout members of larger European families, who also frequent the American University of Paris).

And of course many of the Italian universities are not so much places of learning as conspiracies for the avoidance of unemployment on the part of their academics and administrators. Regrettably, much Italian talent moves abroad for higher salaries and better working conditions (Cavalli-Sforza, to name but one, at Stanford), but the handful of scuoli superiori (e.g. the Scuola Normale in Pisa) still maintain their dignity.

In Spain, Salamanca is well-regarded, and there are a number of newer, private, properly Catholic entities that have been created. Of course, Opus Dei are very proud for having created the University of Navarre ex nihilo. Portugal, meanwhile, has yet to recover from the Marques de Pombal’s disastrous eighteenth-century reform of Coimbra.

If you’re one of those people who actually wants a proper education then, for better or worse, you must go to America. Thomas Aquinas College in California and St. John’s College in Maryland might be the last genuine places of higher learning in the European world. Attempts are being made to found a British Catholic version, and many imitations (Catholic, Protestant, and secular) exist around the United States.

If I could name some other honorable mentions in addition to those featured below, I would add Dublin (Trinity, that is), Bristol, the Collège d’Europe, Leiden, Leuven, Utrecht, Uppsala (and all the old Scandos), Heidelberg (and a dozen other German universities), King’s Halifax, Trinity College in Toronto, some parts of Berkeley, York for graduate study but not undergrad, the C.E.U. in Budapest (despite being a Soros project), and Exeter and Warwick aren’t bad really. Some universities, like the Jagiellonian in Kraków or the Charles in Prague, must be mentioned due to age, but I have to plead ignorance as to any knowledge of their current state.

I’m probably leaving out a dozen places that deserve a mention but I’ve forgotten; such are the limits of our fallen human nature. Here follows, arranged from northernmost to southernmost, our completely arbitrary and biased accounting of the six best universities in the world.

St Andrews

The University of St Andrews, Scotland

It’s almost needless to say that St Andrews is the greatest university on the face of God’s green earth, even if it is known as the ‘auld grey toon’. It’s cold and grey enough during the winter to build character but nothing could be more delightful than a stroll down the West Sands on a late spring afternoon — especially if preceded by a five-course lunch amongst friends. Tweed, the after-chapel sherry, the cathedral ruins, the names of departmental buildings that read like a roll of the inhabitants of Heaven: St Katharine’s Lodge, St John’s House, St Mary’s Quad. With balls galore, and more in Edinburgh if you’re bored, four years at St Andrews will definitely wear out your dinner jacket, and an evening of reels will keep you in good health despite the cigarettes and champagne.

It doesn’t hurt that the university has the royal seal of approval, though that seems to matter more now than at the time. Undergraduate Wales and I overlapped for three years at St Andrews, and his presence was barely noticeable — someone you would pass in the street or mention if he had been present somewhere but otherwise his right to normality was jealously guarded by fellow St Andreans, and rightly so.

I’ve already written extensively about the place, so perhaps it would be best to summarise with the words of John Martin Robinson, the current Maltravers Herald of Arms Extraordinary, who described St Andrews as “similar to some people’s view of the afterlife: still like Earth but purified of the unpleasant elements”.

Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Edinburgh University is St Andrews’ younger cousin and the relationship between the two is a bit like that between town and country. St Andrews is in a country town made exceptional by its university, politico-ecclesial history, and that weird sport with sticks and balls, whereas Edinburgh is Scotland’s capital and perhaps the finest city in the English-speaking world.

Location alone makes the University a desirable place to begin with, but it’s a respectable institution in its own right, and has a fun and slightly jauntier mix of people than St Andrews. It’s not unheard of for some families in London and the south of England to send their eligible daughters to Edinburgh for a few years in the hopes of finding a suitable mate. Most often this is as students at Edinburgh University or the Edinburgh College of Art, but sometimes they just buy a flat on India Street and enjoy the social life. Edinburgh U. first-years have to live in the notorious Pollock Halls of Residence, however, which definitely counts against the institution.

Durham

The University of Durham, England

Properly speaking, the University of Durham is the third-oldest university in England, though there’s a pedantic argument on this point duly documented on Wikipedia. The town has the greatest cathedral in the kingdom, and if students join University College (one of sixteen Durham colleges) they have the opportunity of living in Durham Castle, the former bishop’s residence donated to the University shortly after its 1832 foundation.

The ancient capital of the County Palatine is far enough away from London to be outside the metropolitan orbit (as Oxford and Cambridge often aren’t) but having Newcastle and Middlesbrough as the two closest cities is not something in Durham’s favour. The dramatic riparian geography of this cathedral city, however, more than makes up for its less refined neighbours.

Sewanee

The University of the South, Tennessee

If the Ivy League universities are America’s Oxbridge, then Sewanee is the St Andrews of America. Student gowns are even worn, although their use is limited to members of the ‘Order of Gownsmen’, initiation into which is quite boringly based only on the very limited criterion of academic grade point average. Students are known for their attire — neckties predominate for gents attending tutorials for example — and a widespread if perhaps somewhat facile conservatism.

The university was founded by the Southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church and is the sole remaining university retaining its Episcopalian status, an affiliation it takes seriously despite being culturally out of step with the rest of the ever-liberalising, ever-shrinking denomination.

The South is the most interesting part of the United States, and, while a small and insular institution, the University of the South reflects much of the old Confederacy’s attractiveness. Sewanee’s gothic campus sits in the 13,000-acre “Domain” of the University (see above) atop the sylvan Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. It is a tiny university actually — just 1,400 undergraduates and 150-200 postgraduates — but despite this boasts twenty-five Rhodes scholars. Plus its founding bishop, Leonidas Polk, doubled as a Confederate general during the ‘Late Unpleasantness’. It all adds up towards the definition of a unique and fascinating institution.

Stellenbosch

The University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

It would be difficult to conceive of a more ideal location for a university. The centuries-old town of Stellenbosch dominates a small mountain valley in the verdant pulchritudinous winelands of one of the most beautiful lands in the world: the Western Cape province of South Africa. For the Afrikaners, whose language and higher culture developed under the shade of the giant oak trees planted by the old Dutch governor, Simon van der Stel, it is effectively ancient Sumer.

Yet Stellenbosch is not an old past-its-prime ruin but a thriving university town the Financial Times described as “full of well-groomed students with beach-ready figures”. In architectural terms its streets are lined with old Dutch houses alongside modern buildings ranging from the sensitive to the inoffensive.

The town does surprisingly lack a good bookstore, a statement that must be made with apologies to the very capable and friendly staff at the Stellenbosch branch of Exclusive Books on Andringastraat. The Van Schaik Boekhandel in the Neelsie concentrates more on books required by course reading lists, though the Protea Boekhuis further down Andringa at least has a decent second-hand selection.

The town so epitomises leafy comfort one almost forgets the university, its crowning glory. While it has an Afrikaans literary tradition second to none, Matieland isn’t shy of scientific glory: the ‘SUN’ in SUNSAT, arguably Africa’s first satellite, stands for Stellenbosch Universiteit.

As an academic institution of learning and research, its strong points are many: it features towards the top of every list of the best universities in the country and the continent for Law (its most prestigious school), Medicine, Business, Engineering, (Reformed) Theology, Agriculture & Forestry, and of course Afrikaans & Dutch. The History school boasts the unmatchable Hermann Giliomee, but I wonder if Stellenbosch has been losing out on this front to UCT (where Giliomee spent most of his career) and UWC (which boasts Antonia Malan). The closure of the unique Cultural History programme is certainly to be lamented.

More generally, the university’s leadership must be chided for their lamentable decision to turn Stellenbosch into a totally parallel-medium institution (that is, simultaneous course tracks in Afrikaans and English). It will be a sad and loathsome day when a Stellenbosch undergraduate can obtain a degree without taking a single course in Afrikaans.

Otago

The University of Otago, New Zealand

I confess knowing next to nothing about the University of Otago, the oldest in New Zealand, but this accounting makes no claims to be based on actual solid evidence. It might seem curious that Dunedin beat the now-larger cities of Auckland, Christchurch, and Wellington in establishing New Zealand’s first university in 1869, when the town was capital of the Province of Otago. This is explained by Dunedin’s status at the time as the largest city in New Zealand thanks to the Otago gold rush of the 1860s.

When the university set about erecting its first buildings of its own in the 1870s, the administration set the tone for future generations with its choice of a domestic interpretation of the Collegiate Gothic, built in local bluestone faced with Oamaru stone. As Dr D.M. Stuart, the chancellor of the day, commented, “the Council had some old-world notions and liked to have a university with some architectural style”. That fine concept — old-world notions planted firm in fertile new-world soil — undergirds much of the spirit of Otago and indeed the best of New Zealand itself.

Otago is a collegiate university and the names of its colleges harken back to the region’s Scottish roots: Knox, Salmond, St Margaret’s, Cumberland. Aquinas College was founded by the Dominicans in 1954 and it counts among its former students the Right Honourable Sir Anand Satyanand GNZM QSO KStJ, 19th and current Governor-General of New Zealand, and the first Catholic to hold that office. Sadly, the Dominicans left and the college was secularised in the 1980s. The obviously Presbyterian Knox College enjoys a strong rivalry with the Anglican Selwyn College, which was visited by Michael Palin during his 1996 television programme “Full Circle”.

The city of Cape Town has recently effected a small number of street name changes decided at the end of last year. The N2 route as it heads into the centre of the city, currently called Eastern Boulevard, will be renamed Nelson Mandela Boulevard. The open square between the opera house and the city offices will be renamed Albert Luthuli Place. Most significantly, Oswald Pirow Street on the Cape Town foreshore will be renamed Christiaan Barnard Street.

The renaming of streets and other places in South Africa has proved a controversial and unsettling task. Many streets named after leading figures associated with the 1948-1990 apartheid regime remain. In 2001, the New National Party (NNP) mayor of Cape Town, Peter Marais, attempted to rename Adderley Street and Wale Street after Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk respectively. But Marais’s plan provoked a surprising public backlash, as well as opposition-for-opposition’s sake from the local ANC. The proposed ‘Nelson Mandela Avenue’ had already been renamed once: originally Heerengracht, the grateful citizens of Cape Town rechristened it Adderley Street in 1850, as a token of thanks to Charles Bowyer Adderley MP (later 1st Baron Norton) for his successful campaign against turning the Cape into a penal colony.

Normally, I disapprove of renaming. Names that are truly controversial or offensive are usually dispensed with at the earliest possible opportunity. I’m sure everything named after Hitler instantly reverted to former names at the fall of the Third Reich, and we all recall the cheering crowds dismantling statues of Lenin, Stalin, and Dzerzhinsky. Renaming streets which bear the names of apartheid-era government ministers instead gives the impression of attempting to wipe memory clean. It is an attempt to rewrite history. The very fact that these names have survived so long under ‘the new dispensation’ shows that they are relatively uncontroversial. No one is repulsed by the sight of them, nor does anyone go around hacking down the street signs.

However, I think we can make an exception in the case of Oswald Pirow Street. Pirow was among the nastiest of nasties. He had been a pioneering government minister who promoted aviation and founded South African Airways. But Pirow, who met Hitler in 1933, became an overt Nazi sympathiser and was convinced that a European war was coming and that a German victory was certain. Pirow became such a fan of the Nazis that his family only spoke German at home, and his daughter Else told the Daily Express that they felt more German than South African.

In September 1940, he launched his Nuwe Orde (‘New Order’) group, which advocated the establishment of a Nazi-style dictatorship in South Africa. The group was eventually expelled from the National Party when Malan and Strijdom openly condemned Hitler and his philosophy. With the Nuwe Orde candidates all defeated in the 1943 wartime general election, Pirow laid low for the rest of the war. A King’s Counsel, Pirow acted as prosecutor during the 1956 Treason Trial, and Mandela is said to have developed a certain admiration for Pirow thanks to his politeness towards the accused.

Dr Christiaan Barnard (above, right), the famous surgeon who completed the world’s first successful heart transplant, seems an entirely suitable and commendable replacement for Oswald Pirow (above, left). In fact, I’m surprised he doesn’t have a street in the city named after him already, but that’s probably because a major hospital bears his name.

Chief Luthuli, meanwhile, was basically a good egg if sometimes misguided. He was the last moderate leader of the African National Congress and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his consistent refutation of political violence. The ANC was later hijacked by the more extreme and violent wing, and commenced the ‘armed struggle’ against the government which lead to the deaths of so many people as well as the destruction of the ANC’s ostensible moral supremacy (something almost completely ignored by anti-apartheid activists outside South Africa).

Doubtless there were once many streets, squares, and places named after António de Oliveira Salazar, Portugal’s longtime dictator — the Ponte Salazar being the one that springs immediately to mind. That bridge, like most other Salazarian toponyms in the Lusosphere, was renamed after Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, even though the dictator remains a reasonably popular figure (a poll for the RTP television programme The Greatest Portuguese he came out top with twice as many votes as the runner-up).

After Cape Town’s foreshore was reclaimed from the sea following the Second World War, the government which developed the new district chose streetnames based on a variety of themes. Some, rather self-centredly, were named after government ministers — hence Hertzog Boulevard and D. F. Malan-straat. Others recalled the past, such as the Foreshore’s central avenue, Heerengracht, which summoned thoughts of the Amsterdam canal of the same name and had historical resonance as the former name of Adderley Street which it continued.

But Portgual’s important contribution to the exploration of southern Africa was recognised by naming streets after Vasco da Gama and Bartholomeu Dias. The public square that connected these two streets, located behind the headquarters of Afrikaans media chain Naspers was named the Salazar-plein, or Salazar Square, after the long-serving Portuguese prime minister.

The square, unlike most things named after Prof. Salazar, retains its name, but the inheritors of the “Greatest Portuguese” might want to demand their money back: while suitably arboriferous, the space is little more than a glorified car park surrounded by the dull, modernist office buildings typical of the Foreshore.

Coming soon: More on a rather controversial Cape Town street name

In some ways, this is a pity, since I suspect it is at least one of the subconscious reasons that the National Party during its near-half-century of power almost completely avoided any patronage or government support for the Cape Dutch style, except in the realms of preservation as a cultural artefact — and even on that count they sometimes failed. But the benefit is that the Cape Dutch Revival enjoyed prominence during the formative period of the Union of South Africa. Thus, we have buildings such as Winchester Mansions to enjoy.

While I’m a fan of the building, it’s not actually an especially capable exercise in reviving this handsome old style. The Cape-Classical gables are fine in their details — the stucco work under the sill, for example — but somehow fail as a whole. It’s a pleasing but not especially gracious composition.

I think that aspect actually increases my fondness for Winchester Mansions. It is a commercial building, not a palace of state or a place of worship. Here we can afford a bit of laxness and perhaps put it down to comfort.

Harvey’s, the bar, is an excellent place for that most Cape-ly of all rituals, the sundowner. The openness of the promenade allows you a direct view of the sea, so you can enjoy your drink while watching the sun descend over the watery horizon of the South Atlantic. Architecturally speaking, however, my favourite part of Winchester Mansions is the splendid vine-clad courtyard.

East and West Meet at the Cape

The Cape Malays came up with dishes that are all so a part of the South African way of life that they have become almost sacramental substances. Among them are bobotie, sosaties, and bredie. Bobotie, a kind of minced pie, is to South African what moussaka is to the Greeks. Sosaties, or skewered and grilled meats are what shashlyk are to the people of the Caucasus and shish kabob to the Turks. The stew called bredie is what goulash is to Hungarians.

A basic bobotie begins with minced lamb or beef, a little soaked bread, eggs, butter, finely chopped onion, garlic, curry powder and turmeric. All are mixed together, put in a pie dish with meat drippings, and baked in a low oven for a time. The moment the mixture begins to brown, the dish is taken from the oven and some eggs beaten up with milk are poured over the top; then the dish is put back into the oven and baked very slowly to a deep brown. The pace of the cooking is important: if the oven is too hot the bobotie will be dry, and that should never happen, for an ideal bobotie is eaten moist, over rice.

What I have described is (I believe) bobotie as it was eaten in the beginning, but it is no linger the bobotie eaten in South Africa, except in Malay homes. In my own home, for instance, we added a handful of finely chopped blanched almonds and some raisins to the mixture. The simple egg-and-milk mixture poured over the bobotie halfway through the baking (a mixture that can easily turn into a stodgy baked custard) was scorned by our cooks. At a late stage in the cooking they would bat bread crumbs fried in drippings into the mixture and bake it quickly in a hot oven. In her famous book Where Is It? Hildagonda Duckitt, the Fannie Farmer of South Africa, says that a teaspoon of sugar should be added to the meat mixture, and an ounce of tamarind water gives the dish an exceptionally pleasant, tart flavor. But these are only a few variations, and there are almost as many as there are homes in South Africa.

The word sosatie is derived from two Malay words: saté, which means “spiced sauce”; and sésate, which means “meat on a skewer.” This second great standby of the South African diet is usually made of mutton cut into small cubes suitable for spiking on thin wooden skewers. Originally the Cape Malays marinated the meat in a mixture of shredded fried onions, curry powder, chilies, garlic and a generous quantity of tamarind water. They usually did this early in the afternoon and left the meat in the marinade until the next day. They would then skewer the cubes of meat with alternate pieces of mutton fat, and roast them on an open fire or fry them in a heavy skillet. Just before the sosaties were ready the cook would boil the marinade in a saucepan until its ingredient were cooked and the liquid reduced, and he would serve the sosaties with rice and this sauce. But I have had Malay sosaties in which the green ginger also went into the marinade and during the simmering stage the cook added a few bay leaves, an orange leaf or two and another spoonful of curry. Again, the variations are endless; the Olympian Miss Duckitt rounds out her marinade with either vinegar or the juice of lemons (we always used lemon juice at home), sugar and milk. Because of the Muslim proscription against pig products, the Malays never skewered bacon with their sosaties, but it is quite common among other Cape residents nowadays to do sosaties with alternate cubes of mutton and squares of bacon, all conventionally marinated.

The last of the three great Cape Malay main dishes is the stew called bredie. Almost every country in the Western world has its meat stew. The Irish, of course, have Irish stew; the English, Lancashire hotpot; the Dutch, hutspot; the Germans, Eintopf; and the Hungarians, goulash. But only in South Africa is the dish of Oriental origin. The very word bredie is significant: it is a Malagasy word from Madagascar, and between the east coast of Madagascar and the world of India and Malaya there has been a steady coming and going since recorded history began. To this day, the bredies are a culinary reminder of that traffic.

A Cape Malay cook starts a bredie by browning thinly sliced onions in mutton fat, butter or oil, in that order of preference. Meat or fish is then laid over the onions and gently braised. The chosen vegetables, sliced or cubed, are placed on top of the meat with various seasonings, but always with chiles. Curiously, the vegetable used n one of the earliest forms of bredie was pumpkin, even though the Dutch regarded it as food fit only for slaves. Today, pumpkin bredie is one of South Africa’s almost mystical dishes, and if the pumpkin is firm and crisp it can be excellent. Some Cape Malay cooks add a little salt, a few chiles and a potato or two to the pumpkin; others flavor it with green ginger, cinnamon sticks, a few cloves and a little chopped garlic. The variations are endless, and pumpkin bredies are only a subdivision of them. I have had wonderful cauliflower bredies, and others made with green beans, curried beans, turnips, kohlrabi, celery, carrots, peas, button turnips, and a spinach bredie enlivened by the addition of sorrel.

The variation that most stimulates the South African palate, however, is unquestionably tomato bredie. I know about a dozen recipes for cooking tomato bredie, and all of them are good; the one in Miss Duckitt’s Where Is It? is probably as good as any. All bredies begin roughly in the way I have described, but in this recipe boneless mutton is cut into small pieces and browned with onions over a fairly hot fire. Large tomatoes are cut into slices or passed through a mincing machine; if the tomatoes are not quite ripe, sugar and slat as well as the traditional chiles are added. The braised meat, crisp fat and tomato are then stewed as slowly as possible until the liquid in the pot is reduced to a rich, thick gravy. Upcountry, we often added some peeled, cored and sliced quinces to the mixture, cutting the razor edge of the quince flavor with a small addition of sugar. To my mind there is no stew, goulash or hotpot to equal bredie cooked this way and eaten with simple but perfect rice.

Here’s just a handful more photos of Graaff-Reinet from the blog of Angelika Wohlrab, a South African tour guide, author, and photographer. Above is another Cape Dutch gem, the Urquhart House with its splendid plasterwork design in the gable.

This ancient-looking water wheel is in the Reinet House complex. For some reason it has an almost Bavarian feel to it.

Also at Reinet House is this rather significant vine. It was planted in 1870 and is still going strong.

And again — simple, dignified buildings. This is what South African government-built housing should be like: working families deserve affordable beauty.