A meditation in memory
There’s something very special about memory, and about the act of remembering. Especially in a noisy world and in an era of excess where every day is a bombardment of stimuli and choice at great speed and at great scale. At such times, memory serves as a signal, a signpost to somewhere else – not quite existent but not altogether illusory.
In the Karoo, memories are the threads that hold together the tapestry of a place shaped as much by absence as by presence.
Some of the fondest memories here are of rain. It’s fair to say that few things are spoken about with more reverence. It’s not uncommon to hear locals wistfully talk of “the year it rained on Ouma’s birthday” or the year a river ran its course after many dry seasons.
In the Karoo, rainy days are bookmarks in a story written across reams and reams of dusty, dog-eared pages, stretching from ancient history to the enduring present.
The land remembers.
Thumb through that book of the Karoo and you’ll find the stories of families that have inhabited the land for generations. People who are not strangers to the realities of drought, hardship and sparseness. Yet the memories of hard times co-exist comfortably with recollections of ingenuity, joy and resilience, like sparks from a campfire where people spoke with pioneers and pioneers spoke with the poets.
Some of the Karoo’s most enduring figures embodied all three qualities: Sir John Charles Molteno was a family man, a prolific trader and a visionary. He became the first large-scale Merino wool farmer in South Africa, helping to establish an industry that would shape both the Karoo and the country’s economic future.
Some knew him by his many titles: Prime Minister, owner of the Nelspoort Estate, founder of the region’s first bank; Alport & Co, in Beaufort West. Others knew him more quietly: as a fellow businessman, a neighbour, a farmer, a friend and a family member who understood the rhythms of the land; its long seasons of waiting, its sudden moments of reward. Someone who believed that progress, like farming, required patience, faith and a willingness to invest in futures not yet visible.
200 years later and his legacy is still very much alive. And for Selene Molteno, his great great grand-daughter, that legacy has taken on new shape.
Her couture is created with intent. Considered silhouettes, elegant lines and a live-in sense of luxury that holds space and time for the memories of the land from which it originates.
Her couture is created with intent. Considered silhouettes, elegant lines and a live-in sense of luxury that holds space and time for the memories of the land from which it originates. This is provenance after all – a sense that what is worn carries with it the knowledge of where it came from, why it was made and how it was fashioned.
Every Selene Molteno garment is crafted from 100% natural wool and mohair fibres from South Africa. Afterall, the Molteno’s Nelspoort Estate remains home to the descendants of those first South African Merino sheep, as well as to a herd of Angora goats. Together, they are the progenitors of the noble fibres, Merino wool and mohair, known the world over as the “diamond fibre”.
These precious skeins are as sought-after today as they were two centuries ago. At Selene Molteno, these fibres are handwoven into exclusive creations by Italian artisans, each thread guided by generations of craft and an unspoken respect for material.
And so, memory comes full-circle, weaving its way from the vast plains of the Karoo, northwards to Italy, the ancestral home of the Molteno family.
The land remembers.
