Page 208 - Bulletin 9 2005

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But what about the people who were there before the herders? So I then decided I had
better start with the early hunter food-gatherers who had gathered tortoises and shell

fish along the coast, built fish traps and slaughtered rhino somewhere between 1.4
million and 300 000 years ago. Marine archaeologists Bruno Werz found the hand axes

the rhino-hunters had dropped near an underwater wreck in Table Bay. They dropped

them long before the ship was wrecked, when Table Bay was a fertile river delta and the
sea level was ten metres lower than it is now. But if Table Bay was a river delta, what

was Camps Bay?

So then I decided to begin at the very beginning, with the geological history of Camps
Bay and 300 million years ago seemed as good a time as any to start, and I ended in the

1970s because it seemed as good a time as any to stop.

Fredrik Ernst von Kamptz

Next I decided it was most unfair that this suburb should have been named after a
fortune hunting young German, Fredrik Ernst von Kamptz who was put off his ship

because of ill health, and saw a better future for himself in the arms of Anna
Koekemoer, a lonely widow with six children and a farm, than he saw scrubbing decks

and eating ship biscuits. Von Kamptz become Anna’s third husband .Anna was the third
wife of Johan Lodewyk Wernich. I worked out from Turok’s chronological tables that

Anna’s new husband must have been a sprightly 77 years old, most unlikely to be

fathering so many children - but a trip to the archives established that she had married
Johan Jan Lodewyk Wernich, the son of Johan Lodewyk Wernich. So I put the son back

in the history books and felt pleased with my detective work.

Von Kamptz took his new bride back to Germany, selling most of her slaves, but
keeping Clara, her stepson Valentin, and a man called Abraham - he gave them as gifts

to Duke Friedrich Franz. I hope that the Duke treated his gifts better than Anna had -

she had a bad reputation with slaves. To the slaves, forgotten people, who worked and
lived in Camps Bay, I also wanted to give some recognition.