Signboard on the 'Rooted in Time' self-drive tour of the Knysna forests in the Garden Route National Park. https://www.sanparks.org/parks/garden_route/

1. THE WOODCUTTERS
There were forests on the slopes of Cape Town’s Table Mountain
when the Dutch set up their Company’s Garden there in 1652.
Timber was then one of life’s most important commodities. But
by the early 1700s explorers were beginning to bring back news
of vast areas of forest in ‘Outenikwaland’ (the present day
Garden Route).
Two important botanists visited this area in the 1700s: Carl
Thunberg, who would later take over the chair of botany at the
University of Uppsala from Linneus (Carl von Linné), and
Professor Anders Sparrman, who sailed with Captain Cook on
his voyages of discovery.
Both made favourable reports to the colonial government
about the size of these forests, and the government set up the
first woodcutter’s post in the area at Hoogekraal, near George,
in 1777.
And the race was on. The forests of Outenikwaland (later
Outeniqualand) were harvested at an incredible rate. The work
itself was done by a group of people largely of Dutch-Afrikaans
origin who came to be known as the woodcutters.
Usually desperately poor, and generally illiterate, they sold the
timber they cut by hand for pitifully small amounts to
merchants in George and Knysna.
The woodcutters felled enormous areas of timber by hand -
and cut the logs from their felled trees into manageable sized
planks and boards by hand, too.
“The Woodcutter’s day started with the sun. He would either
walk the few miles of forest trail to the tree upon which he
was working or wake up beside it to the smell of a
smouldering ironwood fire and old ash and the clean scent of
fresh wood-chips. Soon there would be the fragrance of coffee
and tobacco smoke and then, with the first shafts of sunlight,
the ringing of axes would begin again. A man and his sons
might spend as long as a month working a giant yellowwood
or stinkwood tree.” Hjalmar Thesen, Country Days
They lived isolated and insular lives in the forests. Their
homes were often no more than crude one- or two-roomed
huts: they had no incentive to build more permanent
structures since they were living on Government land, and
they moved around from time to time in order to be close to
the trees they could fell. Hygiene was poor, and food was often
scarce (the sweet potato was a staple of their diets), but they
were renowned for their fierce independence, and their love of
the trees.
“The woodcutters were self-employed, willing and able to
work, but often lacked the necessary capital, training and, most
important, the opportunity to benefit from their labours.
“In trying to account for the poverty of the woodcutter
population, it is of little explanatory value to adopt the
notion that they were 'prisoners of their culture' which
implies 'that once a people has acquired a pattern of
behaviour more suited to the past, once they have been
imbued with values and norms of a bygone age, they can
simply not adapt themselves to a modern economy.' On the
contrary, the impact of 'modern economy', and more
specifically merchant capital in the area, had more to do
with the poverty of the woodcutters than their presumed
'backwardness' and 'laziness'.” ~ A.M. Grundlingh
In 1939, the right of the woodcutters to work trees in the
forests was annulled, and the Woodcutters’ Annuities Act
providing for the payment of a small pension to each of
them was passed by Parliament.
“The state-owned indigenous forest of the Southern Cape
were granted a well-deserved rest.
“What was left... was a battlefield of devastation. It seemed
best to leave the healing of the worst wounds to nature.
“In the early ‘sixties the natural recovery of the forest had
progressed so far that it was deemed possible and
desirable to take steps toward active rehabilitation. On the
basis of intensive research and planning, a
comprehensive system of natural forest
conservation was developed and, in 1967, put
into operation.” ~ F. von Breitenbach ‘
Southern Cape Forests & Trees’
MYSTERIOUSFORESTDWELLERS
“They were as mysterious as the deepest
forest gorge where few dared to venture, they
could converse with one another in a secret
code so that one of them could quickly drag
away the bush buck - under the keepers noses
– that lay strangled in an illegal snare.
They admitted their deepest fears with the
frankness of children, shared their last piece
of bread or sweet potato with each other; took
the axe from a weak one’s hands and hacked
his wood for him.” Dalene Matthee, author.
THE
WOOD
CUTTERS
LIFE FOR THE
WOODCUTTERS