The Legend of Jebello and the Makadas Express

Whispers from the Buffelsdrift Valley

I wasn’t there to see it with my own eyes, but the stories of the Buffelsdrift valley are etched into my mind like they were my own. My father, Solly, and my Uncle Theo were both born right there on the farm, Buffelsdrift, in the heart of the Little Karoo. They grew up in a world that felt a million miles away from the one we live in today, a world where wealth was measured in ostrich feathers and the arrival of a steam train was the event of the decade.

Our family’s history in that valley goes back centuries, to the early 1700s when the trekboers first arrived to claim "loan farms." But the stories that Solly and Theo loved to tell most were from the early 20th century, a time of massive booms and even bigger crashes. They told me about their father—my grandfather, Barnett Kramer—who arrived in South Africa as a young man, a Lithuanian immigrant with nothing but a peddler's pack. He and Morris Fischer had a shop in Voorbaat but eventually settled at Buffelsdrift, built a general store, and became a local pioneer. It was through his eyes, and the eyes of my father and uncle, that the legend of the Karoo truly came to life.

The Era of White Gold

Before the Great War of 1914-1918  changed everything, the Little Karoo was the center of a global luxury trade. They called it the era of "White Gold." Every fancy lady in London, Paris, and New York was desperate for ostrich plumes to adorn their massive hats. Solly and Theo used to talk about how a single pair of breeding birds could fetch £1,000—a literal fortune that could buy a whole farm.

This was the age of the "Feather Palaces." Farmers were building sandstone mansions with grand stoeps and stained glass, showing off wealth that seemed like it would never end. But, as Theo always warned, what goes up must come down. The boom crashed hard when World War I hit and the invention of the motorcar made those big feathered hats impossible to wear. You couldn't exactly sit in an open-topped car at thirty miles an hour with a two-foot plume on your head! By the 1920s, the money had dried up, a terrible drought had set in, and the valley was left isolated and struggling.

The Puncture-Proof Road to Laingsburg

One of the biggest hurdles back then was the sheer isolation of Ladismith. The town was tucked away, guarded by the Swartberg mountains. Getting goods or people to the main rail lines was a mission that would break most men. While there was a post cart that labored over the Garcia Pass from Riversdale to the south, my grandfather Barnett looked in the opposite direction: north, toward the railhead at Laingsburg.

The "road" to Laingsburg was little more than a jagged scar through the Karoo scrub and shale. In 1913, Barnett bought a rare Overland motorcar and used it to provide a motorized lifeline for soldiers coming home on leave. It was a brutal test of man and machine. The tracks were covered in sharp shale that sliced through rubber like a knife. On one legendary journey, Barnett suffered eighteen punctures. Just imagine that—jacking up the car eighteen times in the white-hot Karoo sun, patching the rubber, and pumping it back up by hand. He’d do that 130-mile round trip twice a day sometimes, his clothes caked in white dust. He was a pioneer who proved that the motor engine was the only thing that could truly break our valley’s isolation.

The Coming of the Makadas

Finally, in 1923, the South African Railways started building the branch line from Touws River. It took years of lobbying, but the "Iron Road" was finally coming to Ladismith. People called the train the "Makadas." Some say the name came from the firemen shouting "Make a dash, driver!" to get the engine over the steep hills, while others say passengers had to "make a dash" for the shade when the train hissed into the station.

The construction was a massive operation, full of workers who had been wealthy "ostrich barons" just a few years before, now working on the line for a few pennies a day. But more than the train itself, the construction brought a character the Karoo would never forget: the Chief Engineer, an Italian named Jebello.

The Man, the Car, and the Royal Hotel

Jebello wasn’t your average engineer. He was a man with an outsized reputation and a car to match—a gleaming, luxurious Chalmers motorcar. In a land where people were still mostly using donkey carts, Jebello’s Chalmers was a thundering mechanical marvel of the modern age. It was fast, loud, and incredibly expensive.

Jebello had a very specific weekend routine. Every Friday evening, once the dynamite blasts were silenced, he’d steer that Chalmers into Ladismith and head straight for the Royal Hotel, the social heart of the town. Theo said Jebello would get "terribly lit-up" on the local spirits at the Royal and stay in that happy state until Sunday morning. The problem, of course, was getting him back to the construction camp in one piece.

The Magneto Party-Line and the Sunday Drill

To save Jebello from himself—and to save the district's children and livestock—the farmers developed a high-tech solution: the magneto party-line telephone system. These were the old wooden boxes mounted on the wall with a mouth-funnel and a crank handle. A "party-line" meant that every farm on the route was on the same circuit. If you picked up the earpiece, you could hear everyone’s business.

The moment Jebello stumbled out of the Royal Hotel on Sunday morning and fired up the Chalmers, the hotel proprietor would run to the phone. He’d give the handle a frantic, continuous crank—a "general alert." "Jebello has just left!" he’d shout into the funnel.

Because it was a party line, that shout acted like a living telegraph. Every farmer on the route heard the warning. It was like a military drill. The first farmer on the road would drop the phone and scream for the farmhands: "Clear the road! Jebello is coming!"

The Roar of the Chalmers

The "Jebello Drill" was something to see. They’d scramble to usher the children into the house and bolt the doors. Then came the animals. Family dogs were whistled in, horses were led to the back paddocks, and the cows, pigs, and poultry were all driven as far from the road as possible.

A few minutes later, a massive, roiling cloud of Karoo dust would appear on the horizon. Out of the dust came the roar of the Chalmers engine. The roads were full of "sinkplate" (corrugations) that would rattle your teeth, but Jebello didn't slow down. He would thunder past, the car bouncing over the ruts, with the engineer likely singing an opera at the top of his lungs, completely oblivious to the panic he was causing.

Once the mechanical beast had vanished, the farmer would rush back to his phone, crank the handle again, and shout: "Jebello has just passed here! He’s headed for Winkelplaas!" The relay race would continue farm by farm until he finally rolled into the construction camp, entirely unscathed. The district would then breathe a sigh of relief that everyone was "safe for another week."

A Silent Line

The Makadas line eventually stopped running after the catastrophic floods in 1981 washed away the tracks. The "White Gold" is a distant memory now, and the old magneto phones are long gone. But whenever I think back on the stories Solly and Theo told me, I can almost hear the frantic ringing of a wooden telephone box and the roar of a Chalmers motorcar. Jebello might be gone, but in the valley, his legend still makes a dash through history.

6 March 2026