The hero of the Highveld
In 1859, Dirk Cornelius Uys – a veteran of the Battle of Blood River – decided that a grass plain in a basin of mountains would be as good a place as any to establish the sixth oldest town in what was then Transvaal.
The moment called for some on-the-spot town planning, but Uys – known as “Swart Dirk” – didn’t have paper to sketch out real estate. So, after a black-powder blast from his Sanna rifle, and the thud of a falling eland, Swart Dirk measured out properties and streets using long strips of hide from one of South Africa’s largest antelopes. And so, Wakkerstroom in Mpumalanga joined the list of places founded where an animal was shot – a catalogue shared by Tbilisi in Georgia (King Vakhtang Gorgasali shot a buck), Malacca in Malaysia (a mouse deer’s last stand against King Parameswara) and our own Tweebuffelsmeteenskootmorsdoodgeskietfontein in the North West (self-explanatory).
Wakkerstroom’s founder would later spend time in a concentration camp during the Second Anglo-Boer War. Upon his release, he dug up his buried Krugerrands and established himself as a legendary cattle-breeder in Wakkerstroom, becoming the godfather of the famous Drakensberger breed. Uys lived to the
