When Oom Willem arrived in South Africa in 1926, his first stop was in the Western Transvaal, but the Free State beckoned.
“I went to a big cattle ranch in the Western Transvaal that belonged to a Norwegian company, and I worked there for about nine months. Then I heard about two Hollanders, Van Beek, who had a farm in the Free State, and they were breeding Afrikaner cattle,” he told Piet Adendorff in an interview many years later.
Piet Adendorff became a good friend after Oom Wil...