Carl Borckenhagen

Carl L. F. Borckenhagen (21 February 1852 – 5 February 1898) was an influential journalist and political leader of the Orange Free State, and a founder of the Afrikaner Bond.

He was for a period one of the most powerful men in southern Africa, however the Dictionary of National Biography adds: "It is almost impossible to define the precise extent of his influence and political significance since, while seeing to it that others, in public posts, carried out his ideas, he himself kept in the background."

Borckenhagen was born on 21 February 1852 in the Rodenbeck subdistrict of Minden, Westphalia, Germany, the son of a Prussian officer in the Franco-Prussian War Ludwig Borckenhagen, and his wife Julie Seedel. (He was brother to the Ludwig Borckenhagen of later naval fame.) He was schooled in the nearby town of Koblenz, where his health began to deteriorate from severe exposure to nighttime mid-winter temperatures, when he spent a period there without shelter. Soon after completing his studies, he met a British lady named May Dorothy Blackmore (1853-1923) who was on holiday in Germany, and they got engaged. She had grown up in Cape Town (her father had been a naval officer at the castle there) so, because of Borckenhagen's poor health, they decided to emigrate there.

Borckenhagen arrived in the Cape Colony in 1873. The country was undergoing a vast economic boom, but as Borckenhagen's health continued to deteriorate, he swiftly decided to leave the humid Cape, and head inland to the dryer Orange Free State - a long and laborious journey by ox-wagon. As his health immediately recovered, Borckenhagen began work at the business of Emanuel Fichardt at the Berlin Mission near Edenburg. The couple also married on 10 February 1875, and had eight children - four daughters and four sons (two of whom died in childhood).

They moved to Bloemfontein in 1875, where Borckenhagen began work as a bookkeeper, then as an ambitious young journalist, and swiftly rose to a position of extreme influence in the republic. After working for a while on a publication, De Boerenvriend Huisalmanak, he became the founder and editor of its successor, the Free State Express ("De Express") newspaper, in 1877. He also acquired the printing press of Frederick Schermbrucker (an incendiary and deeply unpopular politician who was burned in effigy as he left) and built the business into the biggest media source in the republic.

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