The Secret Sauce Of Graaff-Reinet

The Eastern Cape Karoo town of Graaff-Reinet is booming, and here’s why…

- Chris Marais

Midsummer in Graaff-Reinet and the place is parched. The local dam is low, the boreholes are being deployed and it seems everyone not currently blessed with air conditioning will have gone limp by lunchtime.

But in the early morning coolth, South Africa’s fourth-oldest town is a remarkable show of brilliant white buildings, bougainvillea and jacarandas. A lot of jacarandas. It’s like they stole some sexy bits from Stellenbosch and shipped them off to the middle of the Karoo.

The schools work, the gardens and homes are well-maintained, private enterprise abounds in the form of hundreds of little shops of all kinds, the old buildings are religiously restored and preserved, big projects are on the go, tourists are flooding in, semigration is on the rise, local farmers are buying up dorpshuise and the overall energy is mind-boggling. What is the ‘secret sauce’ of Graaff-Reinet? Part of the answer lies right here on Somerset Street.

“Look, there’s Eira’s place,” says my wife Jules, referring to the home of Eira Maasdorp who, with the help of the late Dr Anton Rupert, was one of the heritage preservation legends of Graaff-Reinet. Her yard is a riot of jacarandas, Australian flame trees, bougainvillea, a tall palm tree and a cypress of sorts. It’s Classic Karoo, where everything that can make shade or colour is prized.

Eira was an integral part of the Graaff- Reinet Historical Society in the 1980s, known locally by wags as the Hysterical Society. “Whenever we saw anyone offloading cement and bricks in front of a heritage house, we’d descend on the owners asking all sorts of questions,” she will tell you.

When the municipality made plans to knock down one of the town’s first churches, Eira called businessman Anton Rupert (who also had his roots in Graaff-Reinet) in desperation. He came to the rescue of his hometown.