Prince Albert

I did say I’d say something about Prince Albert when I’d had a chance to research it a bit.  

So - Prince Albert is a beautiful place.  A very small town, really more of a village full of pretty Victorian cottages, art galleries and shops.     

Last year people of the town, children in the schools and prisoners in the jail all painted myriads of oil drums which now appear everywhere as litter bins, as part of the 250 year centennial celebrations.

The first Dutch family to settle in the area, the De Beers, started farming in the 18^th century using the labour of their family of 15 or 16 children.  As more families settled round the area a church was built in a central point for all and a visiting preacher conducted marriages, baptisms and confirmations once every three months.  Presumably burials were a family affair (I nearly said do it yourself but that doesn’t work).

The preacher’s three monthly visit became a tremendous social affair for all the surrounding farms and sometime in the early 19^th century some of the farming families began to have little houses built near the church so that they could stay a while and socialise with each other.   

So Prince Albert isn’t in itself,  a farming community, it’s an area which grew as an offshoot of farming communities, rather than as a farming community itself,  which maybe explains why many of the  pretty Victorian houses are  now lived in by artists and potters and writers.  

And it’s not possible to be in South Africa and skirt round the fact that those artists and potters and writers are mostly white.  There is another area of Prince Albert where the people are mostly black.  

 If you go to a restaurant or café here, it’s usual to see white people sitting at the tables drinking or eating and black people behind the counters serving the food.  

County Store Cafe

 There are white women behind the counter in the library and the pharmacy and black women behind the counter in the supermarket and the cheap dress shop.   

Winkel's Cafe

Most of the cheap dresses have labels saying you can “lay by” which means that if you’d like to buy a dress that costs, say, less than £10, which is probably more than your  day’ s pay, you can buy the dress in instalments, and only take it home when you’ve paid for it. 

Things are changing in South Africa but it’s a slow process.