STELLENBOSCH
Province/state: Western Cape (until 1994, Cape Province/Cape Colony).
Division: Stellenbosch.
Incorporated: 2000, into Stellenbosch Local Municipality.
Arms granted by the College of Arms on 26 June 1952. They may be blazoned:
Or, upon a fess between three towers gules a peacock proper, tail displayed, between two annulets or.
Crest: An anchor, entwined with an oak tree branch bearing leaves and acorns, all or.
Wreath and mantling: Or and gules.
Motto: Fortis et Superbus.
About the arms:
The arms are reminiscent of the arms granted to the Drostdij of Stellenbosch in 1804, but deliberately ignore several features.
Firstly, the heralds ignored or failed to understand the common feature found in all the arms granted to the five drostdijen and to the Raad der Gemeente Kaapstad (Cape Town Community Council), namely an anchor serving as a supporter.
As a result the anchor appears in these arms, but is relegated to the crest, where it is joined by a sprig representing the oak trees which the town’s founder, Governor Simon van der Stel,[1] had planted in great numbers in the town. The town is still known for its oaks, several of which survive from Van der Stel’s time, and its nickname in Afrikaans is Eikestad (City of Oaks).
The shield of the 1804 arms contains the device (an elaboration of his original family arms) used by the governor. The 1952 grant repeats a few elements from those arms, but also adds two gold annulets (“rings”).
Gold annulets on red – three of them are found in the arms of the Van Riebeeck family – appear frequently in South African coats of arms as a token of their South Africanness.
The original Van der Stel arms were Or, three towers gules, so the simplicity of that coat is repeated in the town’s arms.
The peacock (Pavo cristatus) is blazoned as being “proper”, but has more of a silvery appearance. It is nonetheless drawn with the characteristic “eyes” on the tail feathers.
The motto translates as “Valiant and proud.”
Arms of 1804:
The arms granted by Commissioner-General Jacob Abraham Uitenhage de Mist to the Drostdij of Stellenbosch are those used by Governor Van der Stel (who died in 1712) and were carved on his tomb in the Groote Kerk in Cape Town. This was destroyed in 1836 when the church was rebuilt, but the arms were recorded by Charles Davidson Bell, Surveyor-General of the Cape Colony (who incidentally also designed the Cape triangular postage stamp).
However, I have two illustrations and a description of the arms which are at variance with each other. Pama’s Lions and Virgins has a black-and-white illustration (a photograph of a drawing of De Mist’s grant, kept in the Colonial Archives in The Hague), and from a set of cigarette cards dating back to the 1930s I have a full-colour illustration of the drostdij arms as used by the Stellenbosch Town Council until 1952.
The arms as shown on the cigarette card may be blazoned:
Quarterly: I: Or, two towers gules; II: azure, a peacock proper; III: azure, three annulets or 1 and 2; IV: or, a tower gules; upon an inescutcheon sable, six crescents argent, 2, 2 and 2.
Pama, however, states that the peacock is on a red field, fails to mention the colour of the third quarter, describes the annulets as plates (silver roundels) and names the colour of the inescutcheon as blue. To add to the confusion, in the drawing from The Hague, the hatching on the second and third quarters indicates the colour red, rather than blue.
The significance of the peacock is not explained, but it is the one element (aside from the towers) that is repeated in the 1952 grant.
The inescutcheon was added in honour of Van der Stel’s grandmother, Monica da Costa. There is some uncertainty about her origin, and the 19th-century South African historian George McCall Theal refers to her as “Monica of the Coast”, implying that she was a slave from the Coromandel Coast.[2] But Van der Stel clearly regarded her as a member of the noble Portuguese family Da Costa, whose arms he has appropriated.
Pama also states that the Da Costa arms include not crescents but ribs (to see these arms, click here).
These original arms fell into abeyance in 1827 when drostdijen were abolished in the Cape Colony. However the right to them was assumed when Stellenbosch attained municipal status in 1840 – one of the first towns in South Africa to gain this status – and they continued in use until the grant of 1952.
About the town:
Stellenbosch is the second-oldest permanent settlement in South Africa, and has the distinction of being the country’s oldest town.
It had its beginning in 1679 when Van der Stel, then Commander of the Dutch East India Company's settlement at the Cape, inspected company outposts in the interior and, on 8 November, pitched his tent at the “Wilde Bosch” (wild forest) on the banks of the Eerste River. He decided to allocated land there to colonists and named the place Van der Stels Bosch (later shortened to Stellenbosch) after himself.
The first farmer, Jan Stevensz Botma, settled there in December the same year, and 30 farms were in existence before the town was established in 1685.
In August 1682 four free burghers were appointed as heemraden to settle minor disputes and to supervise roads and bridges.
In 1685 the first landdrost, Jan Mulder, was appointed. (For more information on this form of local government, see here.) The town’s last landdrost, Daniel J van Ryneveld (first appointed in 1814), continued in office as civil commissioner after the 1827 abolition of landdrosts until Stellenbosch acquired municipal status in 1840 under a board of local commissioners.
The town was surveyed in terms of an instructie from Commissioner-General H A van Reede (dated July 1685), and on 15 October 1686 Van der Stel personally supervised the surveying of the first five erven of the first rural town in South Africa.
The drostdij – which combined the council chamber and the residence of the landdrost – was completed in April 1687.
A Dutch Reformed congregation – the second oldest in South Africa – was established in October 1686 and the first church building was consecrated on 19 October 1687.
However on 17 December 1710 a fire destroyed the drostdij, the church building and 12 houses. A new drostdij was completed in 1718 and a new church in 1722. The church building (today called the NG Moederkerk Stellenbosch) was enlarged in 1814 and rebuilt in 1862-63, but still stands on the same site. Until 1823 it was the only church in the town, and it remained the town’s only NG Kerk congregation (for white people) until the 1950s.
However, a Dutch Reformed mission church building (for Coloured people) was erected on the Braak, the town’s grassed main square, in 1823.
Stellenbosch has been an educational centre since 1683 – even before the town was established – when a school was set up at the request of local farmers. In 1840 a government school – the first in the colony under the Herschel system – opened, but eventually closed in 1865.
The Dutch Reformed Theological Seminary was established in 1859, occupying the Old Drostdij, but later moving to other premises. Until 1938 it was the only Dutch Reformed ministers’ training school in South Africa.
In May 1860 a high school for the daughters of Rhenish missionaries, the Rheinisches Institut, was established. It later took in other girls as pupils, teaching in German and English. Since 1905 the school (known across the country as “Rhenish”) has been an English-medium government school, and today it is the oldest girls’ high school in the country.
The Stellenbosch Gymnasium opened in 1866. It was renamed Stellenbosch Boys’ High School in 1902. In 1940 when the school’s rector Paul Roos (in office since 1910) retired, the school became the Paul Roos Gymnasum.
A tertiary institution, Stellenbosch College, grew out of the Gymnasium in 1881. In 1887 it became Victoria College, and in 1918 it became Stellenbosch University.
Other schools and colleges have followed these institutions.
Stellenbosch was considered important enough to be on the route of the first railway line in the Cape Colony, from Cape Town to Wellington. The line to Stellenbosch was opened in 1862, and completed to Wellington the following year. However, it was reduced to branch line status when a direct route from Cape Town to Paarl was opened in 1876.
During the South African War the British Army had its headquarters for the subcontinent at Stellenbosch. Officers who made mistakes in the field were often sent to the town in a staff capacity, and were then described as having been “Stellenbosched”.
The reorganisation of 2000 saw the abolition of the separation between urban and rural local authorities. Stellenbosch and the neighbouring village of Pniel (across the Helshoogte Pass in the Franschhoek valley) were combined with Franschhoek and their rural districts to form a local municipality, part of the Boland District Municipality that now covered not only the Boland but also the northern Overberg and the Witzenberg region.
Since the new municipality includes the Groot Drakenstein mountains, it was planned to name the new municipality Drakenstein. But they were pipped to the post by the local municipality for Paarl and Wellington (the Klein Drakenstein mountains fall into this neighbouring municipality), so the new local government was named Stellenbosch Local Municipality.
