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Stoffel Koekson

Properties3
descriptionKhoekhoe leader whom Greyton histories place at Boschmanskloof in the late 1600s, where his people built houses. His story survives only in local tradition and has not yet been checked against the colonial records.
tagstheme/heritage, lang/en
aliasesCaptain Stoffel Koekson, Kaptein Koekson

4 min read

Stoffel Koekson was a Khoekhoe leader in the area where Greyton now stands [TBV]. Greyton’s local histories say he traded cattle with the Dutch in the late 1600s, grew wealthy, and moved his people to Boschmanskloof, where they built houses of mud brick [TBV]. The foundations of those houses are said to lie under the old houses of Boschmanskloof today [TBV]. If the story is right, Boschmanskloof is one of the oldest settled places in the valley.

What the letters in square brackets mean

Facts on this page are followed by a tag that shows where they come from.

  • [IC] Independently Corroborated. Confirmed by at least two sources that do not depend on each other, or by an official record.
  • [MS] Mission-Sourced. Comes from one community’s own sources. For Koekson, the story is told in Greyton’s local histories and tourism sources, which appear to share one origin.
  • [TBV] To Be Verified. Seems likely, but nobody has confirmed it yet. Most of this page is TBV.

At a glance

BornNot known
DiedNot known
Known forSettling his people at Boschmanskloof in the late 1600s [TBV]
Link to the valleyThe earliest named settler of Boschmanskloof, and a holder of the land later granted as the farm Weltevreden, where Greyton was built [TBV]

His story as Greyton tells it

Greyton’s histories say that before the Dutch came, the plains and wooded ravines of the area were home to a Khoekhoe people they call the Hessequa (or Hassequas) [TBV]. These histories say the people named the Gobos River after an ancestral chief [TBV].

In the late 1600s, the VOC sent “Ensign Schriver” from the Castle of Good Hope to barter cattle with their headman, Captain Stoffel Koekson [TBV]. Koekson prospered, and took his people to live in Boschmanskloof, where he built them proper houses of mud brick [TBV].

In 1793 the land said to have been Koekson’s was granted by the colony to a young Dutchman, Marthinus Theunissen, who farmed it as Weltevreden [IC]. Sixty years later, Herbert Vigne laid out the village of Greyton on Weltevreden [IC].

Checking the story

Parts of the story fit the colonial record. Isaq Schrijver was made an ensign in the VOC in 1687, and in 1689 he led a large cattle-trading expedition east through the Overberg [IC]. He may be the “Ensign Schriver” of the Greyton story [TBV].

Other parts do not yet fit. Historians place the Hessequa mainly east of the Breede River, and the Chainoqua, led earlier by Soeswa, on the Greyton side [IC]. Koekson may have led a Hessequa group living further west than usual, or a Chainoqua group that Greyton’s histories name differently [TBV]. “Stoffel” is a Dutch name, short for Christoffel, so it was probably given to him by colonists [TBV]. His Khoekhoe name is not known.

  • Soeswa led the Chainoqua, whose land took in the valley, a generation before Koekson.
  • Herbert Vigne founded Greyton on land once held by Koekson’s people. Vigne first settled on a farm at Boschmanskloof in 1846 [TBV].

What is still open

  • Whether the VOC journals of the 1680s and 1690s name Koekson, and how they spell his name.
  • Whether he was Hessequa or Chainoqua.
  • When and how his people lost the land that became Weltevreden.
  • Whether the foundations at Boschmanskloof are his people’s houses. A heritage survey could answer this.
  • What Boschmanskloof families remember of him.

References

  • Wikipedia. Greyton. Koekson, the Hessequa, Ensign Schriver, and the grant to Theunissen in 1793.
  • Greyton Tourism. Greyton’s History. The Gobos River, the mud-brick houses at Boschmanskloof, and Theunissen.
  • South African History Online. Greyton, Western Province. The grant of Weltevreden in 1793.
  • Wikipedia. Isaq Schrijver. His rank of ensign from 1687 and his expedition of 1689.
  • The Digging Stick, volume 6, number 3 (November 1989). Archaeological Society of South Africa. The Breede River as the boundary between the Chainoqua and the Hessequa.

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