LETTERS

A crafty kraal

I found Toast Coetzer’s article about Copperton in go! #168 very interesting, specifically the photo of the kraal built with “bricks” of solid sheep dung on page 45.

There are very few of these kraals left in South Africa. Before I read the article, I had thought there was only one!

I grew up on a farm called Bultfontein in the Richmond district in the Northern Cape and we had such a kraal. According to my dad Freddie (84), the kraal dates from his great-grandfather’s time, so around the 1890s.

There weren’t jackal-proof camps in those years. Herders watched over the sheep in the veld by day and kept them in a kraal built with stone and branches at night.