Commissioners Plein
The administrative nucleus of early Kaapsche Hoop.
The civic square at the heart of the district administration — where the Republic first tried to govern this mountain, and mostly failed to.
Commissarisplein — the Mining Commissioner’s Square — was the administrative heart of early Kaapsche Hoop, formally re-zoned as the village’s civic centre by the Kruger–Leyds proclamation of 12 May 1891, which names both Commissarisplein and Kantoorstraat.
What the Republic was trying to do here
In August 1882 the South African Republic sent a Gold Commissioner to a mountain where almost nothing existed. He was to register claims, issue licences, settle disputes and represent the State on a frontier several days’ ride from the nearest magistrate.
He was given a title and very little else.
Within his first months he was writing to Pretoria about the office he needed. Within a year he was reporting that the office he had was in poor condition. A safe was sent to him; it arrived without a key. He went the better part of a year without salary while holding several hundred pounds of public money he had no instructions how to remit.
When a building was finally settled on, it took the better part of eight months of letters — a contractor withdrew, a second put a building up badly, a third offered an alternative — and in the middle of it the Commissioner wrote to Pretoria that his head wanted to burst.
This is the real history of Commissioner’s Plein, and it is not the one usually told.Kaapsehoop Heritage Research Centre
It is not a story of a Republic stamping order on a frontier. It is the story of one official trying to make a government exist out of correspondence — in a district with no gaol, on a salary that did not come, with a safe he could not open.
The building question
A small stone cottage stands a few paces from the open ground, and it is known in the village as the Commissioner’s House. It is genuinely old, and it stands on the government square.
A long family tradition held that the first Gold Commissioner built a zinc-clad cottage here in 1882. The archival record does not support that.
What the record does show is that in August 1883 the Government took a building here into its possession and paid for it. What it does not show is which building. The document is a receipt, not a description: no material, no dimensions, no position, no seller — and it belongs to a file concerning more than one building.
So the honest position is this. The Government acquired a building on this square in August 1883. A stone cottage stands on this square today. Whether they are the same building is a question the surviving paperwork has not yet answered — and our research has found that the square carried more than forty separate building events between 1882 and 1927, which makes the question harder rather than easier.
The identification of the buildings on Commissioner’s Plein is under active archival research. What we can already show is that the square held far more than the two or three structures usually described — and that several of them were not owned by the Government at all.
The commissioners
Jacob Ziervogel took the post in August 1882 and handed over on 21 September 1883. C. J. Hoolboom held it as acting commissioner. David Mackay Wilson was appointed to succeed him — the contemporary record shows he had still not arrived by 22 April 1884, though his own memoir, written seventeen years later, puts his arrival in May. From 1884 he oversaw construction of the Government Building next door; that account comes from the memoir, not from a construction record.
Each of the three left the office in circumstances the archives record and the usual histories do not.
A meeting house for the Republic
President Kruger and Generals Joubert and Smit are placed at Kaapsche Hoop in 1885 or 1886 by local tradition and by Wilson’s memoir. Whether the President reached the village at all remains an open question, and no source places the meeting in a particular building.
The first documented repair on the square is a £190 roof job by the contractor R. Fraener in June 1887. The document names the office — an institution — not a building on the ground.
The square afterwards
By the Crown Colony period the square had been reorganised, and a government precinct grew on it: court functions, police administration, holding cells, and quarters for police who remained here until 1974.
A Public Works site plan of 19 September 1927 names the buildings on the square — and one of the things it records is that a building the Government was using belonged to somebody else.
That pattern turns out to run right through the square’s history. It is the most interesting thing we have found, and it is the subject of the book.