Durban - These two roads are named after Milesina Bowen, the elderly widow of an army officer. Although the road is called Melesina, the correct spelling is Milesina. She settled on a small farm in the Glenmore/Umbilo area in the 1840s and called it Kefentrenfa. We know something of her life because her friend and neighbour, Eliza Feilden, who lived on Feniscowles farm, wrote affectionately of her in her memoir My African Home, published in 1887.
When Bowen arrived in Durban from Brazil, she had already buried her husband and two of her three sons. Sadly, it was not long before she lost her younger son, Henry, a medical doctor, who died on June 20, 1850.
Because there was no consecrated ground in Durban, she buried him under a magnificent tree in her garden, a garden which Henry “had beautified with many rare and curious exoticks (sic) likely to benefit the rising colony.” Feilden sketched his grave, but it is not known whether this sketch still exists.
Despite the age difference, Feilden was in her 20s and Bowen in her 70s, the two women became close friends.
Small and slender, Bowen walked with a stoop, but had a singular, even intimidating, personality.
Not everyone liked her, particularly her hasty temper. Feilden, however, regarded her an elegant poetess, a great reader and clear reasoner: “An hour's chat with her is a treat in the wilderness of Africa.” Like her son, she was a passionate gardener. Feilden credits her for the introduction of the pawpaw to then Natal, as she had lived in Brazil and brought seeds with her when she came to Durban.
Feilden often walked or rode over to her older neighbour, although Feilden’s husband feared his wife would be attacked by “tigers” (as they called lions). But she always lived to tell the tale.
Although not wealthy, Bowen offered to help the Feildens when their sugar crop in Springfield was destroyed in the Great Storm of 1856.
Bowen enjoyed writing poetry and would, on special occasions, send short poems to Feilden, who treasured them enough to keep and later publish in her memoir. One of the poems ends with these lines: “Yet, when my weary race is run, Forget me not! Forget me not!”
The two street names in the vicinity of her farm preserve the memory of this doughty lady.
The Feildens returned to England in 1857, never to return, but Eliza corresponded with Bowen until her old friend's death on November 13, 1861, aged 83.
She was buried in the West Street cemetery alongside her son Henry, whose remains had been exhumed from beneath the tree in the garden in October 1851. Ten years later, “his deeply sorrowing mother, a childless widow in a foreign land joined her best of sons”. Oddly the grey stone slab misspells her name as Melesina.
On either side are two of her friends and prominent ones at that: Dr William Stanger, Natal’s first surveyor general who died in 1854, and Henry Francis Fynn who died less than two months before Bowen.
The photo shows the Bowen slab with Fynn’s headstone on the left.
As there are no photos of Bowen or her simple house, Feilden’s own sketch of the view from Feniscowles farm is reproduced: To visit Bowen, “we passed through a lovely green valley amid a dozen of the largest oxen I have ever seen”. The recent photo of Umbilo, from the corner of Feniscowles and Selborne roads, would be unrecognisable to the two ladies almost 170 years later.