He and his family then lived in their church house in Pastorie Street, which they had ordinarily used when attending nagmaal in the village.
#MORSE CODE OXEN TRIAL#
He was locked up in gaol without any trial or hearing whatsoever, but was subsequently released on parole, although confined to the boundaries of the village of Victoria West. He was accused of spying and signalling messages about the movements of the British forces to Boer commandos at night, using Morse code. One day eleven soldiers from the Sixth Inniskillin Dragoons, who were stationed at Victoria West, arrived at Kweekwa and Pieter Olivier was summarily arrested. On occasion she had baked as many as 26 loaves at a time to satisfy demand from the passing British troops. This was a great humiliation for this highly regarded man, especially as he had remained strictly neutral in the affairs of the war, and his wife Crissie had even baked bread for British soldiers and sold it to them.
They immediately seized Olivier’s horses and sheep, and left him with just four donkeys. Olivier was a prosperous farmer, and he had imported an American windpump which he used to provide water for his 204 horses and his other livestock.Īfter the first Boer commandos entered the Cape Colony at the end of 1900 to disrupt enemy forces and to recruit Cape Rebels to the Boer cause, the British proclaimed martial law in this area.
Sometimes British troops would touch at Kweekwa in search of water and feed for their trek-oxen, mules and horses, and indeed for themselves. This vast tract of land was later subdivided into the farms Trompsgraf, Adriaanskuil, Nuwefontein, Ysterkoppe and Witkranz.ĭuring the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), British columns frequently used this transport route from Victoria West, where there was a railway station on the main line between Cape Town and Johannesburg, to Namaqualand. He was an industrious farmer and succeeded in earning a good living for himself, his wife Christine (Crissie) and their family.Īs far back as 1853, Pieter’s father, Andries Philippus, had purchased 29 000 morgen of land adjacent to the transport route from Victoria West to Carnarvon, Williston and Calvinia. Pieter Johannes Olivier, of the farm Kweekwa in the district of Victoria West, was a law-abiding, peace-loving farmer who kept horses and sheep, and wrested an honest living from the arid soil in the heart of the Great Karoo.
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