Cape Colony

The written history of South Africa begins in 1652, when the Dutch captain Van Riebeeck established a refreshment station of the VOC at Cape Good Hope. The station developed into the present city of Cape Town. In 1688, some 270 French Huguenots arrived and settled in the so-called Franschhoeck (French County). Three years later the Cape Colony was founded. They imported shoots from their homeland. The oldest, still existing wine farm is Groot Constantia, founded as early as 1684 by Simon van der Stel. At present South Africa is the eighth largest wine producer in the world. South African wines, red and white, are famous for their good quality. The paper pays attention to the wine theme in Afrikaans literature. Wine as demon (N.P. vanm Wyk Louw) an wine as part of civilized, aesthetic life (D.J. Oppermna), co-exist with literature stressing the social complexities of slavery and racism on wine farms (André P. Brink)

In 1832, Lea, a twenty-six-year-old slave from the Graaff-Reinet district of Britain's Cape Colony, complained to the assistant protector of slaves that her female owner, Saartjie van der Merwe, had beaten her. Lea claimed that the beating had resulted in her having a miscarriage during the eight days that she walked to town to lay the complaint. Lea was not alone in complaining about violence experienced at the hands of women owners—in Graaff-Reinet it was common. The legislation that enabled Lea to complain attempted to entrench gendered norms and ideas relating to gender roles and violence. Women in Graaff-Reinet, however, had experiences of violence that did not fit comfortably with ideas about the relationships between violence and gender held by colonial officials. This essay explores aspects of this discomfort and calls for further exploration of what such discomfort might mean for normative ideas of patriarchy, masculinities, and femininities.

Contrary to popular opinion, the recent interest in the role of slaves and
Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans is not merely a reaction to current political realities. Instead, Afrikaans historical linguistics originated at the turn of the 20th century in the very debate about the contribution of slaves and Khoikhoi to the development of Afrikaans. This article traces this history, and demonstrates that considerations of the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the history of Afrikaans have formed a golden thread in debates about the origins of the language throughout the 20th century until the end of apartheid in 1994. The aims of this article are
twofold: to trace how various of the most influential Afrikaans linguists have viewed the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans, on the one side; and to investigate how and to what extent they have used external history (as opposed to the internal development of the language) in the construction of their theories, on the other side. The article demonstrates how increasingly Afrikaans linguists have come to realise how and to what an extent history determines the parameters within which linguistic proposals should be sought to trace development of Afrikaans.

How comfortable was the life of the average settler in the Dutch Cape Colony of the eighteenth century? The generally accepted view is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress being made in the 143 years of Dutch rule (1652-1795). In this article I show that new evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records contradicts earlier historical accounts. These documents bear witness to a relatively affluent settler society, comparable to some of the most prosperous regions of eighteenth-century England and Holland. This detailed picture of the material wealth of the Colony should inspire a revision of the standard accounts. I also briefly consider the causes and consequences of this prosperity.

The vicissitudes of the Griqua people in nineteenth-century South Africa have been characterised variously as a "tragedy" and an "injustice". Although once a significant factor in the internal politics of the country, their history is little known in modern South Africa and rarely studied by historians. Because of their peregrinations, documents about them are scattered all over the country, often in the most unexpected places. In this article, a recent discovery of a handwritten journal by Nicolaas Waterboer, the last Griqua 'kaptyn' (captain), is presented. Although historians have known that he visited Griqualand East shortly after its establishment, it is now possible to have a first-hand account by a sympathetic observer who intimately knew the people involved and their history. This is a rare opportunity to hear the voice of an African indigene describing the history of his own people and proffering his own motivations.

Afrikaans is the mother tongue of a sizeable group of speakers in the Republic of Namibia, where it also serves as a lingua franca among speakers of different languages. This article investigates the establishment, spread and use of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in precolonial and colonial Namibia until the annexation by South Africa in 1920, when the language achieved official status. Afrikaans was introduced to Namibia at the turn of the 19th century by the Oorlams, Westernised Khoikhoi groups who mostly used a form of Dutch for communication. During this same period, missionaries started to labour among the Oorlams and the indigenous Nama of South and Central Namibia, which led to greater stability in the local communities. Due to the greater socio-economic and political power of the Oorlams, their language became the prestige language which was increasingly used by both the Nama and other groups with whom they came into contact. During 1810–1840 Afrikaans spread as a lingua franca over a large part of Namibia due to the hegemony of the Oorlams. From this period until the German annexation during the 1880s, Afrikaans was widely used for diplomacy, teaching, religion and trade by both mother-tongue and non-mother-tongue speakers. Although the German annexation led to the loss of certain higher function for Afrikaans, the language remained being widely used as a lingua franca, a position which was strengthened by the arrival of the Basters and European farmers from South Africa from the 1870s onwards. The latter event increased the number of speakers of Afrikaans and spread its use over an even wider geographic area. By the time of the South African annexation of Namibia, Afrikaans was already widely used as a lingua franca in a large number of functions, which ensured the longevity of the language in that country.

This article explains how South African foresters have selected, experimented with and successfully grown Australian genera and species of trees in plantations during the past 130 years. First in the Cape Colony in the 1880s and 1890s, and later elsewhere in South Africa in the twentieth century, foresters developed theoretical techniques to find climates similar to those in southern Africa in order to select exotic species of trees from those regions. They then tested these species in experimental arboreta and plantations across South Africa to select the most successful and valuable species to grow commercially in each area. This globally unique and ultimately successful research programme arose in response to local environmental constraints, an increasing demand for timber, and the difficulties that foresters and white settlers faced when trying to select and grow Australian trees. This article revises historical understandings of the development of silviculture in South Africa and intervenes in current scientific and popular debates over Australian trees in South Africa.

In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a maritime service station in Table Bay on the southwestern coast of Africa for its fleets to and from the East Indies. Within a few years, this outpost developed into a fully-fledged settler colony with a free-burgher population who made an existence as grain, wine, and livestock farmers in the interior, or engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Cape Town, the largest settlement in the colony. The corollary of this development was the subjugation of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San inhabitants of the region, and the importation and use of a relatively large slave labor force in the agrarian and urban economies. The colony continued to expand throughout the 18th century due to continued immigration from Europe and the rapid growth of the settler population through natural increase. During that century, about one-third of the colony's population lived in Cape Town, a cosmopolitan harbor city with a large transient, and overwhelmingly male, population which remained connected with both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The unique society and culture that developed at the Cape was influenced by both these worlds. Although in many ways, the managerial superstructure of the Cape was similar to that of a Dutch city, the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of its population meant that a variety of identities and cultures co-existed alongside each other and found expression in a variety of public forms.

This paper, based in textual analysis and in unpublished manuscript sources, reconstructs the process of creation of J. M. Orpen's landmark 1874 article "A Glimpse into the Mythology of the Maluti Bushmen", from his conversations with Qing in December 1873 to the publication of the article in the Cape Monthly Magazine in June 1874. It also throws light on the relationship between J. M. Orpen and George Stow, of whose work Orpen did not have a high opinion. The paper also shows that Orpen, whose interests were mainly focused onthe history and culture of the Basotho, did not give a special importance to his 1874 article.

This article seeks to emphasise the notion that the Cape settlement of the
VOC period needs to be studied within the context of the Dutch world and
not in isolation. In recent research, empires are seen more as a collection of
nodes than structures of a centre with peripheries. Each node can be part of
several networks, which contribute to the shaping of that node. When applied
to the Cape settlement this concept makes a valuable contribution to our
understanding of Cape society and its residents. The Cape was a complex society
in which several different groups lived together. Each of these experienced
their environment in another manner influenced by the networks they were
part of, and each of these made their own contribution to the shaping of
the Cape settlement. This article focuses on the burgher group and especially
those burghers from the middle and upper layers. These burghers were the
ones who were mostly exposed to the many connections of the Cape with the
Netherlands through for instance religion, education, enterprise, the justice
system, and travel. As a result, they came to regard themselves as burghers of
the United Netherlands who were entitled to all the rights and privileges of
that status. The VOC administration did not agree and argued that all were
subjects of the Company. The position on both sides of the conflict needs to
be referenced to the larger framework of the Dutch world. As such this clash is
a practical example of how the Cape during the Dutch period can only really
be understood as part of a larger context which shows that the Cape, although
perhaps unique and atypical, ultimately was part and parcel of the Dutch
trading empire and its networks.

Louis Anthing (1829-1902) is almost unknown to contemporary South African historiography, yet the published and manuscript documents derived from the investigation he conducted in Bushmanland in 1862 about the reports of massacres of Bushmen by white and coloured farmers make of the extermination of the |xam possibly the first officially documented genocide. The archival reports also suggest that the genocidal campaign against the |xam was planned before hand by the perpetrators. This paper also tries to piece together the few facts known so far about Anthing’s life, and proposes that the massacre sites mentioned in his reports should be protected as “sites of conscience”, thus using the landscape as a memorial and as a means to educate present and future generations about the horror of genocide.

Although Bleek and Lloyd archival material of ǀxam (Bushman) folklore, oral history, and customs has been studied from a number of different disciplinary dispositions, a thorough linguistic analysis and description of |xam has not yet been done. What has, however, emerged in research into the archive since the 1990’s, has been a challenge to the perception of the archive as internally coherent and bound purely to the ǀxam language – Afrikaans, the intermediary language of communication between Bleek, Lloyd and the ǀxam, at least initially, has proven to have played a much larger role in the transcription and translation process than previously thought. This article reviews the existing literature of studies concerned with Afrikaans’ relation with the archive and argues for composing a corpus of all the extant Afrikaans linguistic data which can be gleaned from it – and, importantly, to use this data to create a sketch of the variety of Afrikaans known as Orange River (also Gariep or North Western) Afrikaans as it was spoken in the 19th Century Cape frontier. Through this, the understudied variety of Orange River Afrikaans could be described with greater accuracy, and the possible influences of ǀxam, and Khoesan languages more generally, on the development of Afrikaans could be better understood.

'An Entirely Different World': Russian Visitors to the Cape 1797-1870. Edited by Boris Gorelik. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society for the Publication of Southern African Historical Documents, 2015. ISBN 0981426468, 9780981426464

The Russian view of the Cape as represented in this volume may be unique.
During the period in question, Russia had no cultural, political or economic ties with South Africa. Russians saw the Cape only as a convenient stopover en route to the Far East, to their country’s distant domains that could not be reached by sea otherwise. The Cape was one of the ‘exotic’ lands they would visit on such journeys, their first and only introduction to the African continent.
Although amazed and perplexed by the ‘entirely different world’ they found here, Russian travellers would often draw unexpected parallels between life in their motherland and the realities of the Cape Colony.
The selections include memoirs of such important Russian personalities as Yuri Lisyansky, Vasily Golovnin, Ivan Goncharov and Konstantin Posyet. Most of the texts appear in English for the first time.

The Swellengrebels were the most important family at the Cape under Dutch East India Company (VOC) rule to become members of the Netherlands governing elite. Hendrik Swellengrebel was the colony's only locally-born governor, while his father and other members of the family at the Cape were born in Russia. Their migration between Europe, Africa and Asia reflected the development and functioning of the Dutch trade and patrimonial networks. Even on the periphery, at the Cape and among Dutch expatriates in Russia, those networks provided opportunities for overseas employment and upward social mobility. The case of the Swellengrebels shows that not only goods but also people could make their way from Russia to the Cape and the VOC Asia. Patronage enabled both spatial and upward social mobility. Keeping mutually beneficial relations with influential patrons such as Nicolaes Witsen, members of the Swellengrebel family navigated their way within the Dutch trade networks and achieved prosperity and a high status in such culturally diverse societies as Russia and the Cape. The social advancement, identity transformations and transcontinental migrations of the Swellengrebel family demonstrate the materiality of transcontinental patrimonial networks in the early modern period.
Full text: http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0018-229X2021000100003&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=en

This article examines the survival strategies of Lutheran dissenters in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony. The Cape Colony was officially a Reformed settlement during the rule of the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C.) but also had a significant Lutheran community. Until the Lutherans received recognition in 1780, part of the community chose to uphold their faith in secret. The survival of Lutheranism in the Cape Colony was due to the efforts of a group of Cape Lutheran activists and the support network they established with ministers of the Danish-Halle Mission, the Francke Foundations, the Moravian Church and the Lutheran Church in Amsterdam.

Southern Africa during almost the entire nineteenth century was from economic, cultural, ethnical and above all political aspects divided into British colonies, Boer settler communities (from the 1840s republics) and territories controlled by independent native tribes and kingdoms. From the first years of the 1850s to 1881 the leaders of the British colonial policy made several attempts to unite the divided subcontinent (colonies and states) and organize a loyal self-governing, federal, British dominated South African dominion like Canada, New Zealand or Australia. That conception became the main line of Great Britain's South African colonial policy when the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon was the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1874-1878. This study deals mainly with Lord Carnarvon's South African federal scheme as well as those factors which influenced his colonial conception about the subcontinent.

Literary history is a problematic and shifting discourse, especially in the multilingual, post-colonial South African situation. In this book, the author draws on his intimate knowledge of documents written in Dutch during the 17th century and the texts that were produced in this language and its variations as it gradually became Afrikaans by the end of the 19th century. A History of South African Literature: Afrikaans Literature 17th–19th centuries brings an important expansion and regeneration of Afrikaans historiography within the context of South African literary history. A History of South African Literature: Afrikaans Literature 17th–19th centuries is divided into three broad historical periods: the Dutch colonial time (1652–1795), British colonial time (first part of the 19th century) and the time of the language movements (latter half of the 19th century). It follows an inclusive approach, discussing and contextualising a wide variety of documents, like travelogues and perso...

This article seeks to emphasise the notion that the Cape settlement of the VOC period needs to be studied within the context of the Dutch world and not in isolation. In recent research, empires are seen more as a collection of nodes than structures of a centre with peripheries. Each node can be part of several networks, which contribute to the shaping of that node. When applied to the Cape settlement this concept makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of Cape society and its residents. The Cape was a complex society in which several different groups lived together. Each of these experienced their environment in another manner influenced by the networks they were part of, and each of these made their own contribution to the shaping of the Cape settlement. This article focuses on the burgher group and especially those burghers from the middle and upper layers. These burghers were the ones who were mostly exposed to the many connections of the Cape with the Netherlands thro...

Cape Town during the eighteenth century was an integral part of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) trading empire in the Indian Ocean, acting as a refreshment post, refitting harbour and market town for the rural hinterland. In the absence of a pliable indigenous population the mainstay of its labour force was slavery. Historians have long recognized the diverse regions of the Indian Ocean world from which slaves were obtained, but precise enumeration of the town’s enslaved population has been hampered by sources that combine the urban population with the rural hinterland. This paper uses new data obtained from household inventories to show how the main sources of Cape Town’s slave population shifted from South Asia in the early parts of the century, to Southeast Asia and then to the Southwest Indian Ocean and especially eastern Africa by the time of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.  The paper then argues that both the Indian and the African roots of Cape Town’s slave heritage have been obscured by the strong emphasis in popular perception and memory on ‘Malay’ slaves from Southeast Asia and analyses the political dynamics behind such a distortion.

In the eighteenth century, possessions of the different European mercantilist companies rarely interacted, commercially or otherwise. For example, communication between the Dutch colony at the Cape and the French Mascarenes under the regime of the Compagnie des Indes was mostly fortuitous. However, when the French islands were in need of provisions during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), local authorities did not hesitate to establish a direct maritime connection with the Dutch Cape Colony in order to obtain wheat and wine. Throughout the conflict, the governors of the two colonies maintained a regular and friendly correspondence to ensure such a significant flow of provisions from the Cape to the Mascarenes that the latter became the Cape’s most important foreign trading partner.