Bloemfontein

Bloemfontein began in 1846 as a British fort on the open grassland north of the Orange River, set up by Major Henry Douglas Warden as an outpost in a region shared by Korana, Barolong, Griqua and trekboer communities. One suggested origin of its name is "Bloem's fountain", after the Griqua leader Jan Bloem II; the Sesotho name for the place, Mangaung, means "place of cheetahs". Britain first annexed the territory as the Orange River Sovereignty, then withdrew in 1854, and Bloemfontein became the capital of the independent Boer republic of the Orange Free State.

The republican decades gave the town its sandstone public buildings and its character as an administrative centre rather than a mining or industrial one. Its president, Jan Brand, governed for a generation, and the Fourth Raadsaal of 1893 remains the grandest survival of that era. Talks between Britain and the Transvaal held in the city in 1899 failed to prevent war, and British troops occupied Bloemfontein in March 1900 and built a concentration camp nearby for Boer women and children; the camps of the war left a lasting mark commemorated at the National Women's Monument of 1913.

After the Union of 1910 the city was made the judicial capital of South Africa, the seat of the Appellate Division and today of the Supreme Court of Appeal, which balanced the legislature in Cape Town and the executive in Pretoria. On 8 January 1912 delegates met in the city to found the South African Native National Congress, later the African National Congress; the National Party was founded in the city two years afterwards. The writer J. R. R. Tolkien was born here in 1892. Since 2011 Bloemfontein has been the seat of the Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality, and it remains the Free State's provincial capital.

Bloemfontein is a city of three strong language communities living side by side: Sesotho, spoken across the townships and much of the province, Afrikaans, long dominant in the suburbs and the farming districts around, and English as the working language of the courts, the university and business. Conversations slide between them, and public events are often multilingual.

Law and learning shape the city's tone. The presence of the Supreme Court of Appeal brings advocates, judges and law students; the University of the Free State, founded in 1904 and once an Afrikaans-medium institution, is now a large multilingual university whose debates about language policy and transformation have drawn national attention. The city has an active theatre and choral scene, and the Vryfees arts festival in winter and the ten-day Macufe festival in October fill its venues.

Rugby is close to a civic religion, and the Free State Cheetahs draw crowds to the Free State Stadium. The city's older identity as the "City of Roses" survives in its public gardens and in the October festival that celebrates them. Memorial culture is unusually visible for a city of this size: war museums, monuments and statues sit within walking distance of each other, and the arguments about which past they commemorate, and how, are part of ordinary public life. Manners are formal and unhurried by big-city standards, and greetings before business are expected.

About 256,000 people lived in Bloemfontein itself at the 2011 census and some 750,000 in the wider Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality, which also takes in Botshabelo and Thaba Nchu. The city is the administrative heart of the Free State, and government departments, the courts, the university, hospitals and schools provide much of the employment, alongside retail, transport and the servicing of the surrounding maize and sheep farms.

Settlement patterns still follow the apartheid plan. The wealthier suburbs spread south and north of the centre in low houses behind walls, while the townships of the Mangaung area lie to the east and south, with formal housing, informal settlements and a long commute by minibus taxi into the centre. The working day starts early, the centre empties after five, and social life moves to the malls, the Westdene restaurants and the sports grounds.

Unemployment is high, as across the province, and municipal services — water supply, road maintenance and refuse collection — are a constant subject of local complaint. Power cuts have shaped routines for years, easing more recently but still prompting households and businesses to keep torches, gas rings and batteries at hand. Winter mornings are cold enough for frost on the grass, and the dry air and dust of the plateau are part of daily life.

Free State cooking is meat, maize and bread. Pap, a stiff maize porridge, is the staple, eaten with boerewors sausage, a beef or mutton stew, or chakalaka, a spicy vegetable relish. Lamb from the dry veld around the city is prized, whether as chops over the coals or slow-cooked in a potjie, the three-legged iron pot set over a fire. Braai is less a meal than a weekend institution, and biltong and droëwors — air-dried, spiced beef and sausage — are the everyday snack.

Sesotho households add motoho, a fermented sorghum porridge, and ting, a sour maize or sorghum porridge, alongside beef or chicken stews and morogo, wild leafy greens. Vetkoek, fried dough balls split and filled with curried mince, and bunny-style takeaways are common street food, and boerekos traditions show up in melktert, koeksisters and the rusks that go with early coffee.

The restaurant scene concentrates on steakhouses, grills and pizza, with Indian and Portuguese-influenced peri-peri chicken places and a growing number of coffee roasteries in Westdene. Craft beer is brewed in the province, and the wine on most lists comes from the Cape. Padstalle on the roads into the city sell farm cheese, preserves, dried fruit and potbrood, and cherries and asparagus from the Ficksburg district in the east of the province reach the markets in their short seasons.