Except for a handful of midwives, no women were on the company payroll; but since women were always in a minority among the free population, they had exceptional opportunities for marriage and for remarriage if they outlived their first husbands. Moreover, women accumulated property, because under the prevailing Roman-Dutch law, the wife was the legal owner of half the combined estate.
Compared with contemporary European colonies in the Americas, the tiny Cape colonial population was remarkably unsophisticated. Formal educational institutions were meager. A few boys and girls were taught basic skills at several elementary schools in the town and at elementary schools of sorts attached to the churches that the company founded at Stellenbosch (1686), Drakenstein (1691), Roodezand (later Tulbagh; 1743), and Zwartland (later Malmesbury; 1745). A minister founded the only high school in the colony in 1714, but it received little support and was abandoned in 1725. Most colonists, moreover, were indifferent to religion, at least until the last few years of the eighteenth century, when a new wave of Dutch clergy spurred signs of an evangelical movement. A visitor had commented in 1714 that the clergy had made little headway among the colonists, “due in no wise to the faltering of their zeal, but to the stupidity and indolence of the burghers.”15
Formal authority over the colony was virtually a monopoly of the Dutch officials. The governor and Council of Policy, consisting exclusively of senior officials, ruled the Cape, subject to instructions from the Council of Seventeen in Amsterdam and the governor-general in Batavia. Officials also had a majority in the judiciary (the Court of Justice) and the other administrative bodies, and the governor nominated the burgher members of those bodies. Even the religious establishment was controlled by the company. The ministers were salaried officials; the Church Council was nominated by the governor and Council of Policy, and it, too, consisted largely of officials.
The creation of a settler community led to conflicts. Competition took place between two classes of producers: the senior officials and the most successful settlers. As was common practice among servants of the Dutch East India Company, the Cape governors Simon van der Stel (1679-99), his son Willem Adriaan van der Stel (1699-1707), and their cronies used their opportunities to enrich themselves. They got possession of large blocks of the best arable land, numerous cattle ranches, and many slaves and exploited their official positions to control access to shipping and external markets. A crisis came in 1705, when Willem Adriaan van der Stel modified the wine concession to his advantage. Sixty-three free burghers signed a petition denouncing the officials and sent it to Amsterdam. The officials responded by getting 240 signatures to a counterpetition. Eventually, the directors dismissed the governor and three other senior officials, deprived them of their colonial estates, and forbade officials to own land or to trade. The local officials had been given notice that they were dependent on the goodwill of the substantial colonial farmers. Corruption was nevertheless the way of life in the Dutch East India Company. Those prohibitions had always been on the company statute book, and always ignored. Throughout the eighteenth century, as previously, Cape officials found ways to supplement their salaries in defiance of the law.16
The company never solved this problem. It was primarily concerned to reduce its losses in administering its colony by continuing to dominate the local economy, buying local produce low and selling imported goods high, and turning a blind eye to its servants’ ways of augmenting their salaries at the expense of the local people. The resulting tensions between company interests and settler interests were only slightly ameliorated by marriages between officials and burghers’ daughters. They came to a head again in the last quarter of the century, when the Netherlands had lost its economic supremacy to France and Britain and the Dutch East India. Company, on the verge of bankruptcy, was in no position to satisfy the demands of the Cape burghers.
By 1778, leading Cape Town businessmen and arable farmers had accumulated considerable wealth. In that year they initiated another agitation. They sent two delegations to the Netherlands, appealing not only to the directors of the company but also to the States-General, complaining of the effects of the company’s economic policies and demanding freedom to trade with foreign ships and effective political representation. The alliance between urban and rural interests, however, was fragile and soon began to fall apart. Moreover, the quarrel became embroiled in the ideological and political struggle in the Netherlands, where supporters of the status quo were confronted by “Patriots,” who were influenced by the revolution in North America and the democratic ideas of the Enlightenment. The directors were conservative, and when their faction triumphed in 1787, they were able to ignore the burghers’ demands.
Slavery created far the most significant division in Cape society. As in other slave societies, the relationship was rooted in the fact and threat of violence. The law that prevailed at the Cape derived from the Roman-Dutch law of the Netherlands and the statutes of Batavia. “Slaves were unable to marry; had no rights of potestas over their children, and were unable to make legal contracts, acquire property or leave wills. As the exclusive property of his master, a slave was obliged to obey any order that did not involve a criminal offence, and could be sold or bequeathed at will.”17
To deter others, the company executed its major criminals in diabolical ways. Carl Peter Thunberg, a Swedish botanist, observed that
on the 31st of July [1773] a slave was executed, who had murdered his master. The delinquent being laid on the cross and tied fast to it, first his arms and legs were burned in eight different parts with jagged tongs, made red hot; afterwards his arms and legs were broken on the wheel, and lastly, his head was cut off and fixed on a pole. The judge that tries and condemns the criminal is always present, and walks in procession to the place of execution, in order to give solemnity to the ceremony. . . . There are two gallows out of the town, one ... on which Europeans are hanged, and the other ... on which slaves and Hottentots are executed.18
The company controlled the slaves in its Cape Town lodge on military lines. The lot of women owned by the company was especially humiliating. To augment the company income, they were encouraged to prostitute themselves to sailors and were made to work alongside men on the most grueling tasks. Private slave owners were constrained by the fact that their slaves were valuable property. The condition of slaves varied with the owner’s temperament, occupation, and prosperity. The relationship was characterized by paternalism, an ideology that structured and legitimized subordination and exploitation and was expressed in a blend of affection and coercion. Some of the privately owned slaves in Cape Town fared relatively well, even being allowed time to trade on their own account. In rural areas, prosperous farmers sometimes left slaves in charge of farms. Yet the threat of violence was always present, and many slave owners enforced their authority with frequent use of the whip.19
Many slaves made bids for freedom by absconding. Some roamed beyond the colonial frontiers and eventually joined indigenous communities. Others tried to survive as predators on colonial society. From time to time, bands of escapees lived precariously by robbing burgher homesteads from refuges on the slopes of Table Mountain and Cape Hanglip, on the eastern side of False Bay. Such escapees were fortunate if they were able to steal a gun and to have the assistance of slaves who were still in service. Sooner or later, however, colonial commandos hunted most of them down and shot or captured them, after which the Court of Justice sentenced them to death or to some other brutal punishment.20
Historians differ in their assessments of Cape slavery. Nigel Worden and Robert Ross stress the coercive aspects and consider that, since the slaves were derived from widely different cultures and divided in small groups among many owners, they were too atomized to form a community with a collective identity, such as existed in North America. Consequently, they contend, although male slaves greatly outnumbered male burghers in the rural areas, there were no opportunities for them to mobilize and rebel, and their only alternative to acquiesce
nce was to abscond. That may be too clear-cut an interpretation. Robert Shell stresses the effects of the “psychological bonds which in many—but not all—cases bound the slave to his master and vice versa.” He continues: “Although the slave was incorporated into the stem family, that incorporation was deliberately limited. The owners attempted to infantilize their slaves with dress, naming patterns, and ordinary language. All these measures combined to form what may be called the family means of control.”21 John Mason points out that by the nineteenth century, in spite of their disparate backgrounds, the slaves did form a self-conscious community in Cape Town and its neighborhood, where most of them lived. Escapees created organized groups on Cape Hangup and maintained relations with slaves who remained, and many who accepted the fact of enslavement carved out a living space by resisting their masters’ exactions in subtle ways—feigning illness, going slow, destroying or stealing property, and expressing their cultural autonomy in songs and dances.22
In slave societies, several factors may blur the distinction between slave and free, and between race and class: a shared religion, manumission, the growth of a free community of former slaves, and miscegenation. In the Cape colony, these conditions were rarely met.
“By the end of the seventeenth century, it was an accepted prerequisite of manumission that a slave should be baptised, speak good Dutch, and have a guarantor who would pay the Poor fund, which might provide relief if the freed slave became destitute.”23 The company ran an elementary school for its slave children and baptized some of them, but it neither gave special privileges to its baptized slaves nor manumitted more than a handful. The burghers baptized few slaves and manumitted an even smaller proportion than the company. As a result, the manumission rate was low: during the eighteenth century, on average, no more than one person was manumitted for every six hundred slaves each year, and the free black population was never more than 8.4 percent of the free burgher population. Only a handful of former slaves, moreover, were able to acquire capital and land and set themselves up as farmers, and as time went on nearly all of them were squeezed out. The free Blacks were therefore concentrated in the relatively fluid society of Cape Town, where they made a living as artisans, cooks, innkeepers, fishermen, and small-scale retail traders. They formed 16 percent of the free burgher population of the Cape district in 1750 and 13 percent in 1770.24
Throughout the company period, there were a few marriages between European men and freed slave women. There was also a great deal of extramarital sexual activity across the status and color lines, nearly all of it between white men and slave women. Visiting sailors fathered numerous children by Cape slaves, especially in the company’s lodge. Burghers also patronized the urban slaves and had sexual relations with slave and Khoikhoi women on the farms, where men always exceeded women in the burgher population. The children of free fathers and slave mothers were slaves, but many of the female children became the mistresses and, in some cases, the manumitted legal wives of burghers. As a result of these relationships, the “black” population of the colony became considerably lightened, and the “white” population became somewhat darkened. It has been estimated that approximately 7 percent of the genes of the modern Afrikaner people originated outside Europe and that this occurred mostly during the company period.25
The Dutch East India Company’s colony at the Cape of Good Hope had characteristics that distinguished it from other societies. It was fulfilling its founders’ intentions to be a fortified refreshment station on the trade route between Europe and Asia. But it was much more than a refreshment station. It was the home of a small but vital mass of people of European origin who had become an increasingly independent force in shaping the colonial society. They owned virtually all the productive land but did not themselves do the manual labor. They used the labor of slaves, who were continually being imported from Asia, Madagascar, and Mozambique, and of indigenous pastoralists, whom they had deprived of their land and livestock and who had been decimated by smallpox. In Cape Town, a cosmopolitan entrepot, social relations were more fluid than in the countryside, but even there the free blacks were too few, and the constraints on them too severe, to blur the increasingly close coincidence between the lines of race and the lines of class. This picture was complicated still further by events to the north and east of the arable lands.
The Dutch Colony, 1652-1795: The Pastoral Northeast
As early as 1700, white colonists had acquired control of the land between the Cape peninsula and the mountain escarpment, where the soil and the reliable winter rainfall made agriculture possible. By that time, too, virtually all the agricultural farmers were also raising cattle and sheep, at least as a sideline. Some colonists—younger sons of farmers and others who lacked sufficient land and capital for successful agriculture—were already living exclusively as pastoralists and hunters. The slave economy excluded them from other occupations. Throughout the eighteenth century, extensive pastoral farming, with hunting as a sideline, absorbed the bulk of the increase in the white population. These white pastoralists became known as trekboers—semi-migrant farmers.
The environment favored the trekboers. Although vast areas of arid land lay beyond the mountain escarpment, there were also areas that were suitable for sheep and cattle, where a person could make a start with relatively little capital. The indigenous pastoralists, who called themselves Khoikhoi, demoralized by the collapse of their communities in the vicinity of the Cape peninsula and, after 1712, devastated by smallpox, were unable to prevent the colonists from getting access to the streams and the springs and from gradually establishing control of the land. The result was a process of dispersal of whites from the agricultural colony: northward toward the Orange River and eastward on either side of the arid Great Karoo and Little Karoo. By the 1770s, however, trekboer expansion was checked in all directions: iñ the north by extreme aridity 300 miles beyond the Cape peninsula; in the northeast by hunter-gatherers based in the Sneeuberg Mountains 400 miles from the peninsula; and in the east by Bantu-speaking mixed farmers 450 miles from the peninsula, beyond Al-goa Bay.26
The company did nothing to impede this process. In fact, needing supplies of meat and pastoral products, it adopted a system of land tenure that favored expansion. A trekboer was obliged merely to pay a small annual fee for the right to occupy a six-thousand-acre farm. In theory, he was merely a conditional lessee of a “loan farm”; in practice, he was able to treat his landholding as his outright property, which could be bought, sold, and inherited.
The trekboers supplied the southwestern Cape with sheep, cattle, and butter, but the company did scarcely anything for them. There was no government post beyond Stellenbosch until 1745, when the company founded one at Swellendam, 120 miles east of Cape Town. In 1786 it inaugurated another at Graaff-Reinet, near the northeastern limit of trekboer expansion. Stellenbosch, Swellendam, and Graaff-Reinet were district headquarters run by a landdrost, a salaried company employee. These local administrations were extremely sketchy. A landdrost had scarcely any salaried staff—perhaps a clerk and a soldier or two. He was obliged to rely heavily on the unpaid services of prominent trekboers known as heemraden and veldkornets. In each district, six heemraden were appointed by the government from lists prepared by the existing holders of those offices. Besides administering the affairs of the district, the landdrost and the heemraden formed a court of justice with minor civil jurisdiction. In each subdivision of a district, a veldkornet, appointed by the landdrost and heemraden, was responsible for law and order. This meant that the most substantial trekboers had a major say in the conduct of the local administration and the inside track in relations with the authorities in distant Cape Town.
As the century progressed, the trekboer families spread out thinly over a vast area. Of the 13,830 burghers in the Cape Colony in 1793, only 3,100 were in the vast eastern district of Graaff-Reinet and 1,925 in Swellendam district. Stellenbosch district, which included much of the more densely populated arable country, had 4,64
0 colonists, and the small Cape district, including the town, had 4,155.27
Transportation between the trekboer homesteads and between the trekboer country and the Cape peninsula—which contained Cape Town, the seat of government, and Table Bay and Simonstown, the only harbors in the colony that were used throughout the eighteenth century—was over rough tracks, traversed on horseback or by ox wagon. From Graaff-Reinet it took up to three months for a wagon to go to and from the Cape. Trekboers nevertheless depended on acquiring guns and gunpowder for the hunt and for protection; they also imported tea, coffee, sugar, and tobacco as essential commodities. To pay for these, they sold sheep, cattle, and butter, and in some cases elephant ivory, to Cape Town tradesmen who toured the country collecting them and drove the livestock on the hoof to the Cape. For the rest, the trekboers relied on their own resources. They were largely, but by no means wholly, a noncapitalist subsistence community, on the periphery of the market economy; and since there were no substantial villages east of Stellenbosch—Swellendam had only four houses thirty years after it had become the seat of a landdrost—there were few specialized artisans and every trekboer was a jack-of-all-trades.28
The further the trekboers moved from the arable southwest, the more their European material comforts and culture became diluted. Hendrik Swellengrebel, the son of a former governor of the colony, toured the colony in 1776—77 and subsequently described trekboer living conditions:
As far as Swellendam and Mossel Bay and occasionally as far as the Zeekoei River, one finds quite respectable houses with a large room partitioned into 2 or 3, and with good doors and windows, though mostly without ceilings. For the rest, however, and especially those at a greater distance, they are only tumble-down barns, 40 feet by 14 or 15 feet, with clay walls four feet high, and a thatched roof. These are mostly undivided; the doors are reed mats; a square hole serves as a window. The fireplace is a hole in the floor, which is usually made of clay and cowdung. There is no chimney; merely a hole in the roof to let the smoke out. The beds are separated by a Hottentot reed mat. The furniture is in keeping. I have found up to three households—children included—living together in such a dwelling. The majority, by far, of the farmers from the Overberg [beyond the mountain escarpment] come to Cape Town only once a year, because of the great distance—I have discovered that some are reckoned to live 40 “schoften” or days’ journey away—and because of the difficulty of getting through the kloofs [passes] between the mountains. To cross them they need at least 24 oxen, two teams of 10 to be changed at every halt and at least 4 spares to replace animals that are crippled or fall prey to lions. Two Hottentots are necessary as well as the farmer himself. The load usually consists of 2 vats of butter (1000 lb. in all) and 400 to 500 lbs. soap.29
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