Irrigation.the cultivation of such property and in particular I direct that with regard to such property irrigation should be the first object of my Trustees.
An Agricultural College.For the guidance of my Trustees I wish to record that in the cultivation of my said landed properties I include such things as experimental farming, forestry, market and other gardening and fruit farming, irrigation and the teaching of any of those things and establishing and maintaining an Agricultural College.
(3.) Groote Schuur.
- ↑ Mr. Garrett, writing in the Pall Mall Magazine for May, 1902, says:—“If you would see Rhodes on his most winning side, you would seek it at Groote Schuur. It lies behind the Devil Peak, which is a flank buttressed by the great bastion of rock that is called Table Mountain. The house lies low, nestling cosily among oaks. It was built in accordance with Mr. Rhodes’s orders to keep it simple-beams and whitewash. It was originally thatched, but it was burnt down at the end of 1896, and everything was gutted but one wing. From the deep-pillared window where Mr. Rhodes mostly sat, and the little formal garden, the view leads up to a grassy slope and over woodland away to the crest of the buttressed peak and the great purple precipices of Table Mountain. Through the open park land and wild wood koodoos, gnus, elands, and
merely scratching the surface the natives raise crops of mealies and other cereals superior to those grown elsewhere in Manicaland. It is an old saying in South Africa that you find no good veldt without finding Dutchmen, and several Transvaal Boers have settled in the neighbourhood. English fruit trees flourish, and Mr. Rhodes has laid out orchards in which the orange, apple, and pear trees (now five years old) have borne well. Very interesting also are the evidences of an old and practically unknown civilisation—the ancient ruins, the mathematically constructed water-courses and old gold workings which are to be seen side by side with the trans-African telegraph to Blantyre and Cairo which runs through the property, and connects Tete with the Zambesi.”
