The Human Hands that built Du Toits Kloof Pass

The modern world has largely forgotten the profound isolation that defined the Western Cape interior just a few decades ago—an isolation dictated not by distance, but by sheer stone.

My good school friend Pierre Morgenrood, now no longer with us, once sent me an email that set off a cascade of memories about the Worcester of our youth. Pierre wrote:

"As regards Worcester, I think that what definitely played a role was its isolation from Cape Town and its surrounding coastal region. It is my opinion that this factor is not properly understood in these modern times. Up to about 1949 the only way to reach Worcester was via Bain's Kloof or Villiersdorp."

He is entirely right. For nearly three centuries, the formidable Klein Drakenstein and Hawequa mountain ranges stood as a colossal, jagged geological blockade, effectively severing our valley from the expanding coastal trade and infrastructure. To get to Cape Town, you had to negotiate with the peaks. Before the modern pass was realized, traveling to the mother city was an absolute expedition. If you didn’t take the long detour through Villiersdorp, you committed yourself to Bainskloof Pass—the route Andrew Geddes Bain had chosen back in 1845. Local folklore always whispered that Bain had bypassed Du Toitskloof out of pure spite, after a prominent Worcester farmer berated him for shooting pheasants on private property in the kloof. Whether it was spite or colonial budgeting deficits, the result was the same: Du Toitskloof was relegated to obscurity for nearly a century.

The breakthrough only came because of a macro-political crisis during the Second World War. Following South Africa's entry into the conflict and the subsequent capture of tens of thousands of Italian soldiers in North and East Africa, the central government acquired sweeping emergency powers. These regulations allowed the National Road Board to bypass provincial administrative friction and dictate exactly where interned labor would be deployed. Seeking a cost-effective and ready labor force, the state selected these prisoners for the Du Toitskloof project.

About 1,500 of those Italian prisoners were transferred from the main Zonderwater camp to a specialized, forward-operating construction camp on the farm Keerweder, located directly at the western foot of the pass. The internment authorities eagerly romanced the idea that every Italian soldier was an innate master of mountain road building and stonemasonry. The actual reality, however, was beautifully and structurally human: the contingent stationed at Keerweder was largely composed of schoolteachers, shopkeepers, professional musicians, academic students, and only eighteen actual bricklayers. Because of this fundamental mismatch in civilian skills, the progress was notoriously slow, leading local residents to frequently joke that "Rome was not built in a day".

Yet, the actual grit of the construction site revealed a complex, rigid socio-racial division of labor. While the Italian presence is celebrated for the "face" of the pass—specifically the highly skilled masonry, dry-stone retaining wall construction, and geological surveying—the most physically demanding and hazardous tasks were borne by an unseen workforce of Black South African labourers. Many of these men were long-term, highly experienced employees of the Department of Roads who possessed deep expertise in rock-drilling and heavy transport.

My very earliest memory of traversing this newly minted engineering marvel goes back to 1952. I was just a young boy when my family went on  unforgettable trip to Cape Town to see the massive Van Riebeeck Tercentenary Festival. The entire country was gripped by the spectacle, and for a child from the interior, the prospect of seeing the grand pageants on the Foreshore was intoxicating. But to get there, we had to face the pass.

Even though the road was officially open, a drive over Du Toitskloof in 1952 was a grueling, nerve-wracking experience. You had to trust the automobile your parents owned at the time. My father’s car lacked the effortless horsepower we take for granted today. As we left the Worcester valley behind, the vehicle settled into a low, straining groan as the gradient tilted sharply upward. The road was a labyrinth of tight curves and sheer drops designed under strict wartime economic constraints, limiting safe vehicle speeds to just 80 km/h. The engine temperature gauge on the dashboard became the most important instrument in the car. We watched that little needle creep slowly, anxiety-inducingly closer to the red zone as the car chugged higher into the thin mountain air.

The true climax of the journey was arriving at the upper crest and passing through the short, 200-meter tunnel hand-carved by the Italian prisoners. To a young boy, that tunnel was pure magic. It was dark, echoey, and dripping with mountain moisture. We rolled down the windows just to hear the roar of our own engine bouncing off the raw, exposed rock faces. It felt like passing through a portal.

And then, as we burst out of the dark exit onto the Paarl side, the world opened up. The vast, shimmering expanse of the coastal plains lay stretched out before us. But if you craned your neck upward, looking past the sun-glare through the car window toward the absolute summit of Huguenot Peak—standing nearly two thousand meters above the sea—you would catch it: a flash of bright silver light from a solitary cross standing against the sky.

That cross was conceived in 1942 by an Italian surveyor and prisoner named Tanguara, who handcrafted a massive, seven-meter-high wooden cross. Assisted by Hermanus le Roux, a local farm boy who had befriended the prisoners, the men carried the heavy timber structure up the steep, rocky slopes of the Miaspoort Ravine to the absolute summit. Hermanus promised the prisoners that as long as he lived, there would always be a cross on top of Huguenot Peak. True to his word, he replaced the structure multiple times over the decades as winter snows and gale-force south-easter winds claimed it, until a joint public campaign in 1984 raised the funds to install the permanent aluminum cross that stands there today.

Since the modern 3.9-kilometer Huguenot Tunnel was opened in 1988, bypassing eleven kilometers of the old mountain pass, I think I have only driven over the top a single time. Like everyone else, I chose efficiency. But when you choose efficiency, you often leave history behind in the shadows. The old pass, now quietly renumbered as the R101, remains a preserved engineering landscape of hand-hewn masonry and quiet stone walls. The next time you drive through the tunnel, roll down your window, look up at the highest crags of Huguenot Peak, and remember the remarkable, human hands—both Italian and South African—that transformed that brutal mountain blockade into a gateway.