Colonial tax records hold 3 lessons for South Africa today – economic historian
African Insider | 23.01.2026 17:00
In 1825, a tax collector compiling a census in South Africa’s Cape Colony paused to write a poem in the margin of his work. In it, he complained about the idle chatter of townsmen in Stellenbosch and uncooperative taxpayers. It is a tiny window on the regular frustrations of a 19th-century taxman. But the poem survives only because the bureaucracy did.
