“All Like and Yet Unlike the Old Country:” Kipling in Cape Town, 1891–1908 – A Reappraisal

Abstract

Walking up the slopes of Table Mountain on Woolsack Drive, one soon reaches the Cape Dutch cottage the road is named after: whitewashed curvilinear gables and teak shutters just visible behind the security gates of what is now a postgraduate residence. The Woolsack was commissioned by Cecil John Rhodes, mining magnate, sometime Cape prime minister and fervent builder of the British Empire. Designed by Rhodes’s protégé, the architect Herbert Baker, this sunny atrium protected from the winds that buffet Devil’s Peak was first occupied by that empire’s most famous chronicler: Rudyard Kipling.