Historian Rod Kruger sheds light on one of the first men to ever photograph Roodepoort landmarks

With more than click of a button, captured moments may last an eternity.

Mining and Roodepoort are inseparable, as are the photographers and documentarians that have helped trace the footsteps of those first pioneers. Many will be familiar with the timeless photos that remind us of those first steps forward but not everyone is familiar with the story behind one of the earliest compilers of photographs taken of an embryonic Roodepoort.

Born 1842 in Switzerland, Henri Ferdinand Gros arrived in South Africa in the late 1860s. Traces of his early attempts to establish permanent places of business in what is now the Northern Cape can been found in the archives from the Burgherdorp Gazette and the Diamond News in 1870 and 1872 , respectively. Gros would travel across the country visiting the mining towns and would eventually set up ‘photographic gallery’ at the corner of Church Street and van der Walt Street in Pretoria in 1877.

There, Gros would capture important images from Britain’s annexation of the Transvaal as well as scenes in Pretoria during the First Boer War. Images from that war were later bound into 200 limited edition copies of News of the Camp. Another noteworthy piece were his photographs of Pedi monarch Chief Sekukuni in 1879 before his photographic of the Transvaal in 1888. Gros returned to Europe in 1895 and his Pretoria studio was taken over by J. Perrin.

Gros contributed significantly to the Transvaal’s photographic history. His journeys would bring him to what is now Kloofendal, capturing the enduring images of those who first dug into the rocks that form part of the reef that has produced the vast sum of the world’s gold. The Swiss’s work was meticulously compiled by Strubens Valley historian, Rodney Kruger, doing so for The Heritage Portal in 2016.

Photographers capture that which is most beautiful and worth of preservation and just like Gros, Kruger has been documenting the area around Confidence Reef for much of his adult life.

“Gros was truly interesting. He came from Switzerland just in time to cover all the big gold events,” said Rod. The original photographs are securely kept in the archives of a museum in Pretoria.

Explaining his own progression behind the lens, Rod said, “I was born with a camera in my hand and it has been a lifelong obsession. I spent years with chemical photography but am very much in love with digital. I now specialise in dance photos and also dance myself. Photography led me into research of the story of gold discovery on the Witwatersrand. Now I teach it and take history tours”.

Be sure not to let 2023 get too far along without taking one of Rod’s tours through Confidence Reef and learning of the wealth under our feet.