Irene, Gauteng

Irene (pronounced "eye-REE-nee") is a small town south of Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa.

Stone arrowheads and tools, discovered in the Hennops river bed and dating back many years prove that people have been living in the area for a very long time.Fact|date=July 2008

The earliest historical writings of the period record that the Bakwena tribe, known as the Crocodile people, lived in the area in the early 1800s. When Mzilikazi (whose people became known as the Matabele) came to the area in 1825, he killed many of the Crocodile people and drove the rest away.

One of the Boer Voortrekkers, Daniel Elardus Erasmus, who left the Cape Colony in the 1830s to seek economic and political independence in the hinterland, settled in the area on a farm that became known as Doornkloof. Doornkloof became known as the "kerkplaas" of the district. When Daniel died in 1875 he left the farm to his three sons.

Fourteen years later Alois Hugo Nellmapius - a businessman who established a transport business between Lourenço Marques and Pilgrim's Rest, as well as a Gin and Whisky factory, the first gun powder factory in South Africa and the Irene Lime works - bought two thirds of the Doornkloof farm. Nellmapius often entertained in a grand style on the farm and a frequent guest was Transvaal president, Paul Kruger.

Nellmapius employed experts on his farm, one of whom was Sir Arnold Theiler who later established the Onderstepoort Research and Veterinary College. Another was Mr Fuchs to lay out the farmhouse gardens.

Irene was first proclaimed a township in 1902 by Johannes Albertus van der Byl – better known as Bertie – who bought the Irene Estate in 1896. The Doornkloof farm had been renamed Irene Estate by Nellmapius after his daughter Irene. Bertie was first in the line of the Irene-born van der Byls who are now in their fifth generation. The family have been responsible for building up the herd of dairy cows on the farm, as well as planting many hundreds of trees, at a time long before environmental consciousness.

Irene was the site of one of the Burgher refugee camps or Concentration camps where the British housed the Boer women and children, whose homes had been destroyed in the Second Boer War to house Boer women and children.

General Jan Christiaan Smuts bought a third of the original Doornkloof farm in 1908 and needing a home for his growing family, bought for £300, the wood and iron building which had served as the Officers’ Mess of the British Forces in Middleburg during the Anglo-Boer War, and transported it to the site at Doornkloof. The ashes of General Jan Christiaan Smuts are scattered on Smuts Koppie near Doornkloof farm which was Smuts' family home. The Smuts House Museum illustrates the life-style and multi-faceted career of one of South Africa’s greatest sons.

Part of Centurion, it was incorporated, along with the rest of Centurion, into the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality in 2000. It is situated next to the R21 and N1 highway, and has seen increased development in recent years.