The Government Building
Commissarisplein · The 1884 stone building that was meant to govern the mountain.
Eight rooms under one roof — an office, a courtroom, a post office and a cell — drawn in July 1884 for an administration that would be taken apart within seven years.
In July 1884 a digger named P. A. Ogilvie drew a plan, to scale, of the Government Offices at De Kaap. Sixty-five feet of coursed stone, thirty feet deep, a flag on a pole at the front, and eight rooms inside. It is the finest single document the village holds about how the Republic intended to govern this mountain — and about how briefly it managed to.
What Ogilvie drew
A long, low, single-storey range under one pitched roof. Stone walls on a stone plinth, seven openings across the front, and the whole thing facing west onto the square.
Inside, in one line: the Gold Commissioner’s office, a post office, a courtroom — the largest room in the building — a dining room and two bedrooms, with a kitchen standing detached behind. The State, the mail, the court and the Commissioner’s own bed, all under a single roof.
And at the north end, walled off from everything else, two more rooms: a prison, and a room for the constable.
One cell, one constable, one wall
The custodial end of the building is the most deliberate thing on the sheet. The two rooms are separated from the offices by a solid wall with no door through it, and each is entered from outside, through its own doorway in the end gable. The constable’s room sits between the cell and the square.
You could not reach the lock-up from the Gold Commissioner’s office. You had to walk out of the building and round to the end of it, past the constable’s door.
Built for £230 — according to the man who ran it
The account of the building work comes from D. M. Wilson, the Gold Commissioner who occupied it: that President Kruger approved £230, that a farmer nearby supplied the stone and the lime, and that an Irish constable named Pat Murphy put the building up with assistants and the labour of men held in the cell.
Wilson wrote that in 1901, seventeen years after the fact, and no appropriation record has yet been found to confirm it. It is a good story, and it may well be true. It is not yet a document, and this page will not pretend otherwise.
The plan is dated July 1884. Within seven years, the offices it was drawn for had been abolished.Kaapsehoop Heritage Research Centre
A gaol its own officials condemned
The complaints begin early and they do not stop. Three years after the building opened, the Landdrost was still asking for permission to lay a proper floor in the court hall. By the end of 1888 the gaol was reported as much too small. Two years later an official put it more bluntly still: there was no gaol at all, only a small unsuitable box being used as one.
What follows in the records is thirty years of patching — the prison door, the front door, the roof, a cell repaired, a dispensary asked for, prisoners escaping and being advertised for. The Republic never did build the gaol it asked for in 1883. It made do with a room.
The year the administration was taken apart
At the end of 1890 Kaapsche Hoop had a Special Landdrost holding court and a Mining Commissioner registering claims. Within about a year both offices were gone, replaced by a Responsible Clerk and a Resident Justice of the Peace — a far smaller establishment, and a considerable demotion for the village.
In February 1891 the Government Building is recorded in the Republic’s own paperwork as now unused, and the Telegraph Department is given authority to run the telegraph service from it.
The building did not lose its occupants to a better building. It lost its establishment. That is the single most misunderstood fact about this site, and it is the reason the usual account of eighty-nine years of unbroken service cannot stand.
Afterwards
A telegraphist worked in the old building and was still asking for repairs to it in 1893. A purpose-built post and telegraph office — with a house for the man who ran it — was finally put up in 1898 by a local contractor under a village building commission.
Meanwhile the Government Building went on. In 1899 someone was still buying it a flagpole, thirty-five feet long, fifteen years after Ogilvie drew one on the front elevation. By 1905 a resident was complaining that there was no magistrate and no police court here at all. In 1908 furniture was being requisitioned for a court house. A government plan of 1927 names the buildings on this ground as Court House, Gaol and Married Quarters.
The court sat here until 1967. The police stayed until 1974, when the station moved to Ngodwana. Nearly ninety years — but not, as is usually said, ninety unbroken ones. The interruptions are the interesting part.