D1.8.24: [Untitled]

D1.8.24: [Untitled]

Newspaper Clippings

Bleek remarks on the unruly audience at a recent public meeting convened by municipal commissioners inarticulately proposing unrequested municipal reforms worsened by a bungling of sensitive topics. The public does not respond well to poor or incomplete proposals. A public meeting is the wrong forum for presenting intricate evidence or holding lengthy talks on municipal reforms and extramural sepulture (burial outside the central city limits). All but two of the commissioners subsequently resigned, saddling the municipal secretary with an unfair burden. Therefore, Cape Town needs a higher executive office vested with superior authority, like an archetypally English mayor or Dutch burgomaster. He then critiques requests to extend Cape Town's overcrowded cemeteries and underscores the Malay burial ground of the Lion's Rump as a public health concern. Bleek takes issue with flashy local funerals and states his preference. He proposes a basic organisational structure for how a new Malay cemetery on the Cape Flats might be managed and structurally secured.

Printed newsprint glued on paper

06 April 1865

Two cut-out columns of printed newsprint mounted on foolscap folio (warped).

Public meeting (convened by commissioners), Saul Solomon (Cape Parliamentary leader), reforms, Mr Truter, sepulture (extra-mural), wardmasters (juxtaposed with commissioners), commissioners (all except two resigned), Mayor (elected annually by the Town Councillors), Burgomaster (referring to the Dutch office), eligibility (respectable fellow-citizens)

Pressed clippings of Victorian current affairs opinion pieces by Wilhelm Bleek. Published in Het Volksblad on Thursday, April 6th, 1865. Bleek appears to subscribe to the belief that well-paid (competent) officials are more likely to behave single-mindedly, as they won't need to pursue other income sources to operate judiciously from a position of financial stability.

Van de Sandt de Villiers & Co.