The thundering hooves of the Härdap!

Rehoboth, runner-up in the Kwêla Town of the Year competition, is known for its tall camelthorn trees, perfect roosterkoek, beautiful women – and its horses. Piet van Rooyen visited the 2025 Rehoboth Winter Cup, where almost 100 horses competed in a grand total of 19 races.

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The people of Rehoboth are not shy to be called Basters. On the contrary, this community is proud of its name, which translates to “bastard” (see Place of the Basters, page 64). I remember seeing a beautiful dark-skinned girl in a café one day, her white T-shirt proclaiming “100% Baster” across her full bosom.

Horses have always gone hand-in-hand with Baster identity. After all, it was on horseback, with fully laden ox-wagons, that the Basters left the Cape Colony and Orange River behind in the 19th century when they moved into the southwestern interior. Carrying the Bible and a dose of Western civilisation with them, they settled in Rehoboth.

The likely founding period of the settlement was somewhere between 1840 and 1870 - more than 150 years ago - although the first riders, their followers and families, had arrived earlier. The name has Biblical roots ("Rechovot" in Hebrew) and is said to mean “comfortably spacious”, or “enough room to expand”. The town is situated where the sun reaches its southernmost turning point, right at the Tropic of Capricorn.

Protected by enfolding hills, and with a good supply of underground water, this is certainly a place worthy of Biblical blessing.

THE FIRST LEADER of the Rehobothers was Captain Hermanus van Wyk, who, together with his council, administered the “congregation” according to “ancestral laws”. The Van Wyk blood still runs strongly in their veins, although other Afrikaans surnames, including Olivier, Junius and Swarts, are common. There are English, German and Scottish connections, too, reflected in names such as Dunn, Bayer, MacNab, Dentlinger and Angermund.