Amsterdam, Mpumalanga

Amsterdam is a small sheep farming town in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Other than large sheep farms, there are large plantations of gum, pine and wattle trees in the area.

Established in 1866 and proclaimed in June 1881, this small town was know as Roburnia (after Robert Burns the Scottish Poet), named such by Alexander McCorkindale, who arrived in South Africa in 1864, and intended this to be part of his ‘Nieu Schotland’. The area was to be divided into three parts - Industria - near where we find Chrissiesmeer today; Roburnia - present day Amsterdam; and Londonia - named after London and situated in the south where Piet Retief is today.

McCorkindale had pretentious dreams of settling 300 Scottish immigrant farmers along with their families and livestock, to produce crops, build towns and establish a road to a new port he planned to create at the Usutu River mouth. However, he died of fever in Mozambique in May 1871 and his dreams were never realized. Only 50 Scottish families arrived in the area bringing with them livestock and leaving a legacy of villages and farms with names like Lochiel, Waverley, Lothair and Dingleside, to name but a few.

The Volksraad of the South African Republic renamed the village on 5 July 1882, after the birth town of the republic's State Secretary at the time, Willem Eduard Bok (after whom Boksburg was named), and out of gratitude for Dutch sympathy during the First Boer War (1880 – 1881).

Extensive wattle and other timber plantations are found here, tannin is extracted from the wattle bark and used in the tanning industry, but remains controversial as wattle is such a prolific invader and extremely hard to control and/or eradicate. There is also a South African Natural Heritage site near the town, which is 16 kilometre from the Nerston Border Post between South Africa and Swaziland. The Usutu Forest, just over the border in Swaziland, is the largest single man-made forest in the southern hemisphere. Swaziland’s forestry covers some 1,000 square kilometres, while Mpumalanga has over 6,500 square kilometres of planted forests (mostly alien Pine, Wattle and Eucalyptus), but no single forest is larger than the Usutu.