THERE is nothing like playing historical sleuth. Take for instance the spat between Tielman Roos and the Drakenstein kerkraad around 1771.
According to the Kwartmillenium Gedenkboek of the NGK(1941), the drama started in 1771 with Thomas Theron’s appointment as ouderling. Four members of the congregation - Tielman Roos, Pieter Silje, Jan Nieuwoudt and Pieter le Riche - were opposed to the appointment, insinuating that Theron was of questionable character.
Church minutes hint at “waterleidingen en wegruiming van gemaakte dammen, op een ouden wrok tegens den beschuldigde”.
Unwilling to accept Theron’s appointment, the four men were placed under “kerklike sensuur” in 1772.
Half the congregation objected, and petitioned the decision to censure them, but to no avail.
The feud escalated and in 1777 Roos accused Ds Van der Spuy of handling the matter “op een pauslijke en bisschoppelijke wyse”.
The “broederlike twis” split the Drakenstein community in two, and many of those who sided with Tielman Roos no longer attended church services and neither were their children baptised.
And that was that, until I found myself looking up a reference in Karel Schoeman’s book Die Bosmans van Drakenstein 1705-1842 on the slave church on De Nieuwe Plantatie (now Grande Roche Hotel).
Whose names should crop up? None other than that of Ds Petrus van der Spuy and Thomas Theron, and the story that emerges provides an interesting glimpse of Drakenstein society during the last decades of VOC rule.
Ds Petrus van der Spuy was from one of the Cape’s wealthy families, well educated (in Holland) and a bachelor. A man of good fortune, as Jane Austen would say.
He settled into the local pastorie - with no less than five slaves to do his bidding, and was not shy to entertain. Hendrik Swellengrebel, son of the former governor of the Cape, visited him in 1776 and 1777 and praised his cellar. The white wine, he wrote, was as good as the best French wines, the red wines like excellent Bordeaux.
Hendrik Cloete of Groot Constantia was also acquainted with the dominee, and in a letter to the same Hendrik Swellengrebel written at the height of the Theron saga, gossiped about van der Spuy’s difficult situation.
The Bosmans were one of Drakenstein’s prominent families and joined the fray. Several members of the Bosman family’s signatures can be found on the 1772 petition against the kerkraad.
A few years later the kerkraad chastised Hermanus Bosman (jnr) for attempting to baptise his children in Cape Town.
Hermanus’ brother Izaak also wrote a pamphlet in which he referred to the dominee as “onbekeerd ... een souvereijne Paus of Anticrist”.
By 1778 both Tielman Roos and his son Johannes were active in the Patriot movement’s fight for political rights for free burghers.
In 1779 Johannes Roos was part of a deputation to petition their cause in Amsterdam, and in 1780 his father Tielman also travelled to Amsterdam on the Patriot’s business, and to address the Dutch Reformed Church’s governing body on the situation in Drakenstein.
Johannes Roos was also active in a rebellion in Stellenbosch and had hero status. In Drakenstein his actions were compared to that of Estienne Barbier, the leader of a 1737 uprising during which Barbier nailed his political grievances to the Drakenstein church door.
These were clearly turbulent times in the Cape colony.
Even the landdros for Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, Marthinus Adrianus Bergh, was forced to resign in 1778 because he was unable to maintain his authority over the local burghers.
The heated battle between the two factions in the Drakenstein congregation lost a great deal of momentum with the death of Tielman Roos in 1780, and Ds van der Spuy’s decision to resign in 1781.
