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Imagine being raised on stories about how your family were the true heirs to a billion-dollar fortune – in gold – that had remained unclaimed, drawing interest for more than 200 years. Apparently, the man who’d left the fortune had been an employee of the Dutch East India Company. A slave-owner, it was said that he’d left a will stipulating that his descendants could only attempt to claim the money 100 years after his death. Then there was talk of a curse on the money, and th

The Rose’s Round-up on tourism newsletter details an especially tragic case of the effect of the Bantjes legacy. A wealthy Scottish man by the name of James Alexander Thwaits living in Beaufort West had married a Miss Bantjes and had several children with her. When the notice of Bantjes’ strange will was published in South Africa in 1894, Thwaits disinherited his children from his first wife, believing that these children would qualify to inherit the larger Bantjes fortune. S

Stories abound about people who've tried to claim the Bantjes legacy over the last 130 years. And not all were named Bantjes. Frederick Wiggett Breman, a senior officer in the Johannesburg police force, is believed to have staked a claim in 1900. Cornelius Johannes Pieterse of Pietermaritzburg is said to have been another claimant. His claim was based on the fact that he was the grandson of a sister of the Voortrekker Jan Gerritz Bantjes. Have you or anyone you know tried to