The princes of Orange

HOPETOWN

Between a rock and a hard place

Drive past Hopetown on the N12 and you’d barely spare the town a second glance. Out of the corner of your eye, you might notice a dull place flying by in an even duller landscape. Just north of the town, however, the Orange River creates a green strip where mielies, lucerne and wheat are cultivated under irrigation.

It was quite different a century-and-a-half ago. Back then, Hopetown was on everyone’s lips. Hordes of people flocked here after South Africa’s first diamond was discovered between Hopetown and Douglas. Schalk van Niekerk was visiting the farm De Kalk when he spotted 15-year-old Erasmus Jacobs playing with a shiny stone. He reckoned it could be a diamond and sent it away for testing. The verdict came back that it was a 21,25-carat yellow diamond. Sir Philip Wodehouse, governor of the Cape Colony at the time, bought the diamond for £500 and the stone was later christened the Eureka.

The stampede that followed this discovery yielded nothing, until three years later, when Van Niekerk coincidentally stumbled across a diamond picked up by a Griqua man named Booi, who traded the stone with him in exchange for a team of oxen, 500 sheep and a horse. Van Niekerk sold it to diamond dealers for £11 000 and the Earl of Dudley eventually bought it for £30 000. This 83,5-carat diamond was named the Star of South Africa. More fortune seekers descended on Hopetown, but nothing else was found.

Maybe that’s why the town now seems as though it has started to lose hope. The streets are full of potholes and many of the buildings are rundown. But there are still treasures to be found in Hopetown. You only need to talk to the locals to find them.

Outside the town, on the banks of the Orange River, you will find the De Wet family working on a number of interesting projects, of which their popcorn business,