(Excerpt from the book ‘The Greek community in South Africa’)
Dionisis Schinas was born in the 1870s in Tripoli. At the age of 17 he fought with the Germans in East Africa. Then he travelled to Vladivostok where he had been a digger for diamonds and gold. After a short period he moved to China and then to Australia, where he settled for four years before coming to South Africa. He fought with the British troops in the Anglo-Boer war of 1899 and was eventually rewarded by Kitchener with a sum of money that was sufficient to permit him to open a small shop in Brakpan.
