History Webs

• Home
• Articles
• Oral History
• Photographs
• Resources
• About

References

* Constructing the Du Toit's Kloof Pass by Andre E Martinaglia, published in The Cape Odyssey of March/April 2007.
* Paarl Valley 1687 - 1987, ed.AG Oberholster, HSRC, Pretoria, 1987.
* The Romance of Cape Mountain Passes, Graham Ross, David Philip Publishers, Cape Town, 2002

Manganese mine

Lorem ipsum his ut explicari vituperata adversarium, semper commune mediocrem eos ex. Vim solet consul vocibus ei. Facer fuisset officiis vel ex, at vix partem tractatos, habeo maluisset id mei. Ad duo sale munere facete. Ex vidit brute feugiat qui, mei ullum zzril aliquam id, est ei tollit munere persecuti. Ius cu gloriatur constituto neglegentur, quem scripta vulputate ne quo, qui in quem accumsan. Ad nominati sententiae usu, sit te commodo minimum.

Italian POWs

During their stay in Paarl, many Italian POWs had their portraits taken at the Gribble Studio. (Copyright Drakestein Heemrking) Sgt Maj Georgio Taducci worked a a head clerk in the orderly room at the Du Toitskloof POW camp. The image is from the Drakenstein Heemkring files link

Italian Cross

Read about the Italian Cross on the Huguenot Buttress and the Drakenstein farmers' pledge to the Italian POWs.

The history of the Du Toitskloof Pass

The Du Toitskloof Pass was completed in 1945, until then the main route to the north was via Bainskloof Pass near Wellington, through Michelll's Pass, and then through Ceres to Sutherland and beyond. Some 500 Italian POWs interned in Paarl provided some of the manual labour to build the pass. At the end of WWII, most of the POWs returned to Italy, and the pass was completed using local labourers.

Du Toitskloof Pass was named after a French Huguenot, Francois du Toit (1664-1731), who owned the farm Kleinbosch in Daljosaphat. His farm was just below the Hawequa cattle track that passed though a narrow kloof and gave access to the land beyond the Hawequa mountains. The track was used by nomadic Khoikhoi stock farmers and free burgher hunters and cattle farmers. Governor Simon van der Stel called the track "Het Oliphants Pad" in a communication with his son and future governor of the Cape, Willem Adriaan. The cattle track probably started in the Blouvlei Valley southeast of Wellington near Hawequa Neck.

Several attempts were made to build a wagon road through the pass. In 1785 a farmer called Joshua Joubert started on a private road through the kloof. The road attracted to much traffic that he applied for permission to levy a toll to help finance the rest of the project. The government would however not allow Joubert to build a toll gate, and Joubert was unable to maintain the road.

Lt Schonfeldt's road In 1824 Lt. Detlef Siegfried Schonfeldt bought a farm in the Kloof and convinced neighbouring farmers to help him build a wagon road through the pass. The government provided equipment and explosives, and advertisements were placed in the local newspaper asking the public for financial help. The demand for a road was such that Schonfeldt received financial help from farmers in Worcester, Paarl, Stellenbosch, Franschhoek and donations from as far afield as Beaufort West. By 1826 Schonfeldt had managed to complete a rudimentary wagon track through Kley Gat or Kleigat - the most difficult section of the kloof, but had run out of money. He appealed to the government for more money, instead they gave him permission to levy a toll to help maintain the road. It was a tall order, and by 1832 the Cape of Good Hope Almanac & Directory warned travelers that the road was little more than a cattle track and no longer passable by wagon. Moreover, there had also been a number of fatal accidents.

In 1846 the Cape government revisited the idea of building a road through the kloof. Both Charles Mitchell and Andrew Geddes Bain surveyed the kloof, but concluded that the project would be too expensive. Bain went on to build Bainskloof Pass. The latter was opened in 1853, and travelers applauded Bainskloof's gentle gradient - ideal for wagons and carriages. In sharp contrast, Schonfeldt's wagon track through Du Toitskloof was described as a dangerous and rocky path that ran over steep slopes and along narrow precipices.

Yet the allure of a passage through Du Toitskloof remained.
In 1858 George Pilkington, a civil engineer, surveyed Schonfeldt's road. Once again the route through the Du Toitskloof Mountains was discarded as being too expensive.

Du Toitskloof once gain made headline news in 1890s when a manganese mine was opened on a ridge near Kley Gat or Kleigat. Yet instead of transporting the ore by ox wagon, the mine's owners built an elaborate cable system from the mine to Wellington from where it could be transported by rail to Table Bay harbour.

Farmers continued to build service roads along the foothills of the mountain. Jannie le Roux of the farm Vendome built two access roads below Hawequa Neck during the 1920s to reach his grazing fields. The road was about 180m below the present day pass. This was his second road. An earlier road further down the slope was so narrow that Le Roux had a dedicated donkey cart made for the road - less than 1m wide. His farm road was however never used as a public thoroughfare.
During the first decades of the 1900s people living in Worcester petitioned the government for a pass through the Drakenstein Mountains, but the prohibitive cost of building a pass kept the project on hold.

World War II Finally, in 1940 the National Roads Council decided to go ahead with the construction of a pass through the Du Toitskloof. The road would be 46km from the Berg River Bridge to the Goudini junction, and include a tunnel below the notoriously difficult Kleigat passage. The total cost was estimated at £750,000. The project would also provide gainful employment for the large number of Italian POWs interned in the Drakenstein Valley. Subsequently, a temporrary POW camp was built in Klein Drakenstein to accommodate about 500 men (some sources say 1,500 POWs). The POWs lived there until they were expatriated at the end of the war. Before returning to Italy in 1945 four of the POWs erected a T-shaped wooden cross on Huguenot Buttress overlooking the pass to commemorate their stay in the Drakenstein Valley. Local farmers in turn agreed to maintain the cross in their memory. The Italian Cross as it is known today has since been replaced with one of stainless steel.

Traffic on the newly built Du Toitskloof Pass increased rapidly and within two decades plans were afoot to build a tunnel through the Du Toitskloof Mountains in accommodate the increased flow of traffic and shorten the route through the mountains. Construction on the Huguenot Tunnel began in 1984 and the tunnel was completed in 1988 at a cost of R125 m. Today the 4km Huguenot Tunnel from the Miaspoort Valley to the bridge over the Elands River shortens the distance between Paarl and Worcester by 11km.