IMAGINE if Knysna’s silk industry had worked. It could have become one of the commodities the town was known for: Knysna yellowwood, Knysna oysters, Knysna silk.
I was thinking about that last week when writing about possible new industries for Knysna, which led me to reread the chapter on Knysna’s silk-spinners in Winnie Tapson’s 1961 book Timber and Tides. What an intriguing tale. On rereading it, I realised that Tapson had actually met the last of the original Italian immigrants, Luigia Scioca (née Fardini), who had been brought to Knysna by the government in 1881 with 50 other Italians to start a silk industry. Luigia was only 13 when she got off the ship, and was in her 90s when Tapson met her in Gouna, “a sturdy, robust little woman, with beauty still in her face. . .the last survivor of the silk spinners who left their mountain home in Italy to grow mulberries and silkworms in Knysna”. Only they didn’t. It was Henry Barrington of Portland who had persuaded the government to bring the Italian immigrants to Knysna, but it was a poorly planned venture. “On 3 May 1881 at the Knysna jetty, a steamer poured forth excited, gesticulating Italian immigrants. Word went around the village that the silkworm people had arrived,” writes Tapson. They camped on the lagoon shore for a few weeks, and eventually set off for Gouna, only about 15km away, but it took weeks as they had to hack a road through the forest. When they eventually arrived at Gouna, expecting to find houses, fields of mulberry trees and barns for the silkworms, “dismay must have sat in their hearts” because there was nothing but “an empty waste of land”. Like immigrants throughout the time, they made a plan. They built houses, ploughed land and planted mulberry trees and crops. But the mulberry trees died. With no mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms, there could be no silk. The government subsidy ended after six months and the silk-spinners were forced to look for work, some in forestry, some on the road Thomas Bain was building to Gouna. Some left for Cape Town and settled in Salt River and Parow. Most of them stayed, married and had families, and the Italian community grew in that isolated spot in the forest. In 1891 the Catholic Church built them a school and a church, which one of their descendants, Rayno Scioca, restored in 2005. Tapson writes that the immigrants, “through hard toil and courage, had turned their wilderness slowly into a sort of exiled Eden”. Not sure they would agree with Tapson’s rose-coloured view. Must have been a very tough life. It’s a pity Tapson did not interview Luigia, using Luigia’s sons Peter and Henry as interpreters. Missed an opportunity for a valuable, first-hand account of the Italian silk-spinner’s story. She did ask Peter if he had ever travelled to Italy to visit the land of his parents. “No,” he replied. “It is best not to go. In Italy there are always wars going on.”
