The GOAT of goats
Happy Sunday {{first_name}},
Trade wars. Toddlers. An unexpectedly pregnant goat.
If anyone can tie this together into a fascinating piece, it’s Dominique Olivier. In her column this week, she explains how the South African mohair industry was born from a sneaky goat that was sent to us by Turkey. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Read on for a story of the cookbook that went on to outsell everything but the Bible, as well as a bunch of Fast Facts themed around South African excellence in general.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday - and go buy some coffee!
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The GOAT of goats: mohair in South Africa
Tariffs, trade wars, toddlers - and a gift of supposedly non-reproducing goats from Turkey to South Africa.
Aside from playdates as an analogy for trade wars, Dominique Olivier explains how an unexpectedly pregnant goat led to the mohair industry in South Africa.
Talk about “self-raising”
TL;DR: A home economist couldn’t find a publisher for her cookbook, so she became one. It went on to outsell everything but the Bible.
In the 1940s, home economist Ina de Villiers was handing out the government’s official recipe booklet on her rounds for the Department of Agriculture. It had no photographs and, she soon realised, nowhere near enough help for people who were still learning to cook.
So, she decided to write the book that would teach them.
She learned to type, gathered more than 700 recipes, standardised every measurement and arranged the lot by menu. Then she went looking for a publisher.
Nobody was interested. But ’n boer maak ’n plan, and this boervrou wasn’t taking no for an answer.
Her husband, Japie, sold his gold shares to finance her dream, and in April 1951 the couple self-published the now-famous Kook en Geniet. Ina was now author, publisher, marketer and distribution department.
The title page gave the ordering details: Mrs S.J.A. de Villiers, Marais Street, Brooklyn, Pretoria. Twenty-three shillings, post free. You sent your order to Mrs. de Villiers’ home address, and she sent you a brick-shaped cookbook in return.
It sold like soetkoek.
In no time at all, it became known as the essential cookbook for young Afrikaners, and a shame upon your household if you didn’t have one. You could expect to receive it as a standard gift for 21sts, engagements and weddings. Mothers passed it down to their daughters, and in some families, ouma’s coveted first-edition copy was patched with layers of tape as the binding started to give way. Within Ina’s lifetime it was reputed to be the country’s bestselling book after the actual Bible.
Publishing eventually caught up. An English edition, Cook and Enjoy It, appeared in 1961. Human & Rousseau took it over in 1972, then bought the Afrikaans rights in 1990, an incredible 39 years after nobody would touch it.
In 2009, the year before Ina died aged 91, her daughter Eunice (also a home economist) oversaw a revised edition. By then the book had sold more than a million copies. It has never been out of print since that first edition in 1951 - though, sadly, you can no longer order it from Marais Street.
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Dominique’s Fast Facts
Inspired by the country we love, this week’s Fast Facts section is titled: "Hulle weet nie wat ons weet nie”.
In 2004, after a spate of shark bites in False Bay, big-wave surfer Greg Bertish and Dave and Fiona Chudleigh of Muizenberg’s Surf Shack asked local lifeguards and car guards to sit on the mountain above the beach and watch for sharks. They called it “Shark Spotters”. The founders say people laughed when they heard the idea. A year later came a siren and a system of warning flags. After 18 months, the City of Cape Town started funding it and rolled it out to more beaches. In 2015, a review commissioned by the Australian government ranked it the best shark safety measure available.
On 23 June 2000, the ore carrier Treasure sank between Robben and Dassen islands and leaked oil into the water around two of the African penguin’s main breeding colonies. Around 20,000 penguins were oiled. A disused railway warehouse in Salt River became a penguin hospital. The next two months saw thousands of volunteers, most of whom had no prior experience, washing and feeding the birds. To keep the healthy penguins away from the oil slick while it was being cleaned, rescuers trucked nearly 20,000 of them roughly 750 kilometres east and released them near Port Elizabeth, in the hope that the oil would be gone by the time they swam home. Three of them, nicknamed Peter, Pamela and Percy, were fitted with satellite trackers, and the country followed their progress online. They took their time, and when they got back, the water was clean.
Rooibos farming has rested on one caveat for almost a century: the seeds rarely sprout unless their tough coats are cracked first. Now some of those seeds are going to orbit. Two batches, one scarified and the other scarified and treated, are due to launch to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 in December, packed into a small lab container alongside more than a dozen student experiments. They’ll be exposed to microgravity and space radiation before returning in early April 2027. Learners from seven schools in the Cederberg (where rooibos grows) will then plant them alongside seeds that stayed on Earth to see whether the trip changed anything. According to the South African Rooibos Council, they’ll be the first indigenous South African species, and the first seeds from the African continent, to go to space.