The Way We Were: From Germany to Strand, connecting the dots
![History enthusiast, Jackie Loos continues to slave history and migration in her "The Way We Were" column in the Cape Argus. Picture: Gary Van Wyk/INL](https://iol-prod.appspot.com/image/3270963cb7dbaa115a7de0f9ef2d38d986a7c897=w700 "History enthusiast, Jackie Loos continues to slave history and migration in her "The Way We Were" column in the Cape Argus. Picture: Gary Van Wyk/INL")
History enthusiast, Jackie Loos continues to slave history and migration in her "The Way We Were" column in the Cape Argus. Picture: Gary Van Wyk/INL History enthusiast, Jackie Loos continues to slave history and migration in her "The Way We Were" column in the Cape Argus. Picture: Gary Van Wyk/INL
Retired school principal and inspired local historian Ebrahim Rhoda has been at it again. Tomorrow [30 March 2018] will see the launch of his latest publication in which he discusses the genealogy of the Wentzels, one of the founding families of the Strand Muslim community.
Rhoda is a descendant through his paternal grandmother Jogera Rhoda, née Wentzel, who died aged 35 in August 1917 while giving birth to her 11th child.
Her grandfather Galiel (1815-1885)was the first Muslim Wentzel in the Strand (then known as Mostert’s Bay), but it wasn’t until 2006 that Rhoda grasped the genealogical implications of the surname. It was German, which was an anomaly in a community thought to have been founded by Indonesian fishermen and their slave or Khoisan partners.
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He spent the next decade researching the Wentzels, and (as he puts it) connecting the dots. He has made outstanding use of diverse resources, including scanty official records and the journal of Lady Anne Barnard’s travels in 1798, to track down the only Wentzel who could have fathered Galiel.
Research into the slave registers revealed Galiel’s mother Lena was in all probability a slave in the service of Helena Catharina Malan (1736-1825), widow of Willem Morkel, who owned two farms in the area. After Helena’s death in her late 80s, Lena and her five children were transferred to her nephew (also Willem Morkel).
Rhoda contends that Carel David Wentzel (1780-1857), unmarried teacher on the Morkels’s farms Morgenster and Onverwacht, initiated an unacknowledged relationship with Lena which may have lasted several years. When emancipation finally came in 1838, Lena was 47 and her eldest son Jephtha was 23.
Some ex-slaves chose to stay with their former owners as wage labourers, but those who were more resourceful preferred to take their chances as self-employed artisans or fishermen. Jephtha is believed to have joined the Islamic fishing community at Mostert’s Bay, and changed his name to Galiel Wentzel, married Yasmena Wanza and founded the Muslim branch of the Wentzels in South Africa.
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Using archival sources and valuable oral testimony, Rhoda has been able to trace many of these descendants to modern times in a section entitled: “How Galiel and Yasmena Wentzel’s offspring through inter-marriage made the Strand Muslim community one big family”.
The publication lists some of their trials and tribulations. Two of Galiel’s descendants were diagnosed with leprosy and banished to the leper wards on Robben Island, where they died in 1893 and 1900. On the positive side, Mogammad Noor Wentzel, better known as Imam Noor, became the fourth imam of the Nurul Anwar Mosque in 1949.
* Rhoda’s 35-page booklet is entitled The Wentzels: a pioneering family of the Muslim community of the Strand, and all profits will go charity.
** Jackie Loos' "The Way We Were" column is published in the Cape Argus every week.
*** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Newspapers.