By Dawn Kennedy
Cape Town - While many no doubt, briefly, admire the picturesque village embraced by mountains on either side, most people drive through Pniel, dashing over Helshoogte and onwards towards Franschhoek, and in their haste miss one of the Western Cape’s most unique and charming villages.
You have to park your car, get out and chat to the locals to discover what makes Pniel so magical. My guide through Pniel is Elma Lammers, a gregarious, bubbly woman with the most wonderful laugh. It’s loud, quite raucous and frequently occurring.
I wish I could bottle Elma’s laugh – I’m thinking of something similar to smelling salts – you could just twist the cap off the bottle, allow the effervescent sound to escape and immediately you would feel better.
If laughter is the best medicine, Elma is a freewheeling physician, scattering medicine liberally. As well as laughing, Elma loves to talk.
A native of Pniel, she knows everyone, and stops to have a chat with each person. Not just a cursory, hello, how are you kind of greeting, you understand. But an in-depth discourse.
Throughout the day, Elma consoled the ill, rescued marriages and built up businesses.
Everyone that she introduced me to was part of some complicated kinship pattern that I struggled to unravel – “This”, she would announce blithely “is my uncle’s brother’s sister in law”, or something equally confounding.
Elma attributes her almost supernatural vivacity to growing up in Pniel: “it was wonderful; full of laughter, warmth and affection,” she says.
So what is that makes this village special? Quite simply, the Congregationalist Church at the centre of town, according to Elma. Pniel has only one religion – there is no space for dispute and attending church is not optional. Indeed, religion permeates Pniel. Its biblical name comes from Genesis and refers to the time that Jacob wrestled with an angel. El means God and Pin means face, so Pniel is literally a place where you are in the face of God.
If there are any non-believers in Pniel, I didn’t meet them. Biblical iconography, along with family portraits, decorate the wall of every home that I visited.
The first father of Pniel congregation was Johan Fredrick Stegman. Born in Babylonstoren on 9 May 1825, he came to Pniel when he was 18 years old.
Rumour has it that every evening the young priest rode around on a white horse ensuring that his congregation was safely indoors at 9pm and not up to any sinning.
The second pillar of Pniel is the school. Pniel prides itself on good education and the first person that Elma takes me to meet is a retired headmaster of the primary school; a tall and elegant man who Elma hugs often and grabs onto for a good laugh.
“He was the foundation for us going forward,” she says with pride.
At the entrance of the museum, housed in an original farm house, dated 1780s, a map shows the origins of Pniel which came into existence when the emancipated slaves from two farms – Papier Molen and De Goede Hoop – were donated 49 hectares of land.
“Look how tiny the piece of land is. Why did the farmers donate so little?” Exclaimed a visitor to the museum. Indeed, perched above two vast tracts of land the donated property looks like an olive poised on top of two hearty loaves of bread.
Pniel is a proud little place that has pulled itself up by the bootstraps through hard work and education. People from Pniel pride themselves on their self-sufficiency. Elma recalls that when she was growing up, the residents never had to leave the village.
The village had a butcher, a grocer, a post-office and, until 1998, even its own municipality. Initially, the church dealt with all the village affairs: water, tax etc, but allocated a management committee, that became the municipality, to deal with secular affairs in 1917. Pniel only became part of Stellenbosch municipality in 1998.
In fact, people from Pniel were so self-contained that they used to call the settlement across the river Languedoc – overseas, and Elma’s father joked that he would put a tree trunk across the river so that the family could travel abroad. When the children from Pniel had to attend high school in Ida’s Valley, they were teased and called “plaasjapies” or country bumpkins.
On the village green, you will find one of four slave monuments in South Africa. It consists of a leg iron, symbolically open, that is cemented into rock from both the local mountain and Robben Island to represent the suffering caused by slavery.
We round off the day in Pniel with a visit to Alma’s parents. They invite me into the living room of their picture postcard home. The mother, aged 70, still works as a spiritual councillor at Kylemore Primary School.
She was deeply moved by the plight of a mother of four children who were living in a decrepit shack since her husband died.
The rain came through the roof and although the mother was working hard it was a miserable existence.
Elma’s elderly father spent two weeks building a Wendy house that they had just delivered to the woman.
The mother beams with pride, saying, “The lord provided.”
Pniel is idyllic, but not without problems. Across the river, Languedoc, a shambolic township that resulted from Anglo Americas sudden withdrawal from Boschendal leaving behind a mass of jobless and hungry people.
I’d come here to visit the museum, but what I discovered was that although Pniel has a rich history it is not its past that makes it interesting – but rather its present that makes it so delightful.
Pniel is a place that we should visit, not to learn about the past, but to consider how to live well together in the present.
Cape Times