The arrangements for the funeral were made by Hannie, as determined in Combrinck’s will, signed at Woodstock on 28 July 1891. He left her all his furniture, crockery, silver and jewellery, draught horses and harnesses.
Apart from his bequest to Hannie, Combrinck bequeathed an amount of £500 to each of his nephews D.P. de V. (David) and J.A.C. (Kobie) Graaff. Various properties in Cape Town and Woodstock went to his nephew Jacobus Arnoldus Rynhoud and his niece Hannie. She could also take over Woodstock House for the sum of £2 000. The remainder of the estate was divided into equal parts between her and Rynhoud. They were also appointed executors of the estate.23
Hannie married Pieter Maritz Botha in Woodstock House a few years later. The bride was given away by her brothers David and Jan and about 400 guests attended the reception in Woodstock House.24 Maritz Botha, a grandson of the Voortrekker leader Gerrit Maritz, was known as a big-game hunter. After the Thirstland Trek and the founding of Upingtonia he had a fall-out with his leader, and married Hannie. After their wedding she went to live in Villiersdorp, where he only visited her intermittently. In the Dutch Reformed manse in town there was a portrait of Hannie wearing a locket in which she always kept a photograph of Botha.25
Despite Graaff’s earlier indication that he would retire after his year-long term as mayor, he was renominated for the position on 13 August 1891. There was one other nominee, Johan Mocke, who declined the nomination after councillor Thomas O’Reilly had pointed out that the work being done required continuity and that it was the general desire of the taxpayers that Graaff should continue. Mocke, who would succeed Graaff as mayor a year later, agreed that it would be a pity to stop the good work which Graaff had begun.26 Therefore, Graaff was re-elected unanimously and with acclamation.
At that meeting the mayor and city council received an invitation from the Anglican Church to attend the service in St George’s Cathedral the following Sunday morning. At the proposal of councillors Stigant and Wessels, the invitation was gratefully accepted. They added that, if the DR Church invited them, they would like to attend the evening service (evidently in the Groote Kerk). Their proposal was accepted unanimously27 – an indication of an improved relationship between Afrikaans- and English-speaking people in Cape Town, after the First Boer War in Transvaal had brought some estrangement. Mayoral Sunday would remain an institution in Cape Town for a long time.
During this period Graaff also became commander of the Cape Garrison Artillery Regiment, which he had joined as volunteer. He became honorary colonel of the regiment, where his son De Villiers would later succeed him in the same capacity.28
At this point the fulfilment of Graaff’s most important contributions to the city, especially the supply of electricity and more effective management of finances, was still a thing of the future.
At the same time a strong movement developed advocating that he should stand for parliament. One request came from 94 Malays, all of them taxpayers from the city centre and the Bo-Kaap – thus another indication of his esteem among all sectors of the multiracial Cape community. Their petition, signed by all of them, read:
“… a widespread desire has been expressed that no time should be lost in requesting you, even in these early hours of your grief, to allow yourself to be nominated for the vacant seat. Your eminent business tact, the unprecedented record of your first year as Mayor, the ability you have displayed in conducting the affairs of the Metropolis, the influence you carry in high quarters, which will be used for the good of the people, and the thorough knowledge you possess of the Country and its people, all point to you as the man most fitted to carry on the good work of your late Uncle and further the interests of South Africa.”29
The support for Graaff from the Malay community of the Cape was quite significant, as Malays had revolted against the municipal authorities during the smallpox epidemic of 1882.30 The epidemic was so bad that cemeteries within the municipal boundaries were closed. Muslims protested against that, and a Malay resistance movement was led by Abdol Burns, also known as the “Mahdi of Cape Town”.31
Due to his success as mayor Graaff evidently received so much support that he would not find it difficult to be elected to the Cape Parliament. His intention to stand for Parliament was welcomed by the Lantern, which regarded his election as a formality: “… the Cape District could get no better and more enlightened representative within the solemn chamber of the Legislative Council…”32
A few months later, however, the Lantern had a bone to pick with Graaff:
“What is a man without his clothes, or a Mayor without his robes? Thomas Carlyle has declared that a man and a flunkey should always be correctly and distinctly apparelled, and why should not Mayor Graaff of Capetown? True, Mayor Graaff sports the ermine he has no more right to than Jones’s coachman has to the cockade and royal scarlet, but, then, he pays his money and takes his choice. Yes, we have a crow to pluck with the Mayor, and this is how we do it. It was we who went and got him photographed in his brand new official robes, to be resplendently and eternally advertised in these everlasting pages, and then he meanly goes behind our backs and gives our idea (and his photo) to that miserable Argus he is an unfortunate and helpless shareholder in. Mayor Graaff must therefore go to the wall this issue, for, after that, we will neither advertise him, nor his moustachios, nor his beef, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his.”33
Despite this light castigation from a publication that was intensively involved with municipal matters, the public insistence that he should become a Member of Parliament remained strong.
CHAPTER 7
Power for the Cape
A month after his re-election as mayor, Graaff was elected unopposed as member of the Western Circle of the Legislative Council on 14 September 1891.
A news item in a local paper mentioned that he had incurred no costs for an election campaign. Due to the fortuitous circumstances that had enabled him to become a member of the upper house as a young man, he was planning to distribute among Cape Town charities an amount equal to what he would have spent on a campaign.1
Graaff, who was sworn in as member only a few months later, filled the vacancy in the upper house of the Cape Parliament left by Combrinck’s death. His responsibilities, therefore, increased in his second year as mayor, an even busier year than the first. Still, the additional duties did not distract his attention from the modernisation and improvements in Cape Town.
One of the innovations in Cape Town for which much of the credit would go to Graaff was the supply of electricity to replace gas lamps. This was made possible by means of improved water power, to which he had already referred at the end of his first term in his mayor’s minute: “With the water power now available, electric light should be possible and this will prove a boom and large returns from places of business and residences.”2
The idea that the city should get electrical power was not Graaff’s alone; other councillors had pleaded for it earlier. A start had already been made in 1883 when the Anglo-African Light Company supplied power to the railways for 22 lights at the docks and six at the station. The Cape Parliament was illuminated by arc lights. For most Cape consumers there was no centralised power supplier and each user had to generate its own power.3 Graaff’s drive to establish such a power supplier and replace gas lamps with electric lights appeared to have been decisive in the decade after the American inventor Thomas Edison had developed the electric light bulb in 1879.
Pressure for proper electric lighting for the entire Cape Town area increased shortly after Graaff’s second term as mayor had begun. The Lantern published an article describing the robberies and assaults on the Grand Parade at night. The article put the question whether it was “laziness, inertness or stupidity that is responsible for not properly lighting the city”. The author recommended to Graaff to gird his loins and provide proper lighting for the city.4 In an editorial in the same publication, which had been offended shortly before because Graaff had given a photograph of himself in his mayoral robe to the Cape Argus, the mayor was praised for what he had achieved for the city as a 32-year-old:
“He is the most valuable kind of man – a self-made man. But Mr. Graaff’s value to his