Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 1652 the Dutch had shown a strong cultural aversion to Africans, attributing to them sexual licence, savagery and a diabolical religion.44

      Secondly, there was the legal factor. There was a high incidence of sexual intercourse outside wedlock between Europeans and slaves but, as we have seen, children born from such liaisons were not taken into the burgher’s family, but were incorporated in the slave population. Another legal obstacle to the advancement of women or children of mixed origins was the regulations covering marriages. It is a supreme irony that slave women, with their extremely low social status, were in fact very expensive to marry. The prospective husband first had to buy a female slave from the owner. As part of the manumission regulations he also had to pay a sum to the authorities as a guarantee that she would not become a burden on society. From the remarks of a traveller one can deduce that many a poor European male would have manumitted a slave and married her but for the price of 800 to 1 000 rixdollars that some fetched.45 For instance, in 1810 the burgher Willem Klomphaan was charged 950 rixdollars for his slave mistress and their twins – the price of some farms in Graaff-Reinet. He died after having paid 600 rixdollars.46 By contrast, eligible European girls or women, thanks to the rule of partible inheritance, often had dowries.

      Thirdly, demographic forces were at play. The ratio between European men and European women stood at 260 to 100 early in the eighteenth century and declined to 140 to 100 by 1770. Mixed marriages began to decrease from the 1730s, and men who could not find a European wife tended not to marry. A study of the 1731 census shows that 59 per cent of European men in Cape Town and 51 per cent of those in the rural western Cape never married.47 In 1807 only five per cent of a sample of 1 063 children baptised in that year in the Reformed and Lutheran churches had a grandparent classified by genealogists as ‘non-European’ (invariably a female). At this time the proportion of marriages that were obviously racially mixed in the Tulbagh and Graaff-Reinet districts was one and three per cent.48 A rigid pattern of racial endogamy had been established in the course of the eighteenth century. The offspring of European men who had engaged in illicit liaisons almost all passed into the ranks of the slave or free-black community.

      The church was crucial to the rise of endogamous marriages and the strong position women acquired in society. The role of religion in the first century of the settlement is overstated in popular history, where Van Riebeeck’s official prayer is often cited as evidence of the Europeans’ piety. The fact is that for most of the period of Company rule the burgher community was not regarded as devout. In 1726, only in the case of one-fifth of burgher couples in Stellenbosch were both partners confirmed members of the Reformed Church. In 1743, after touring the colony, the Dutch official G.W. van Imhoff noted ‘with astonishment and regret how little work is done with respect to the public religion’. He added that the ‘indifference and ignorance in the frontier districts is such that they have the appearance more of an assembly of blind heathen than a colony of European Christians’.49

      It was women who took the lead in becoming confirmed members of the church. In the first 50 years of the Stellenbosch district three times more European women than men were confirmed. By 1770, 90 per cent of the adult European women in the very large Stellenbosch congregation were confirmed members of the church, against only a third of the male burghers.50 By the end of the century the men had stepped into line. Observers now generally considered the burghers of the outlying districts to be devout. Couples travelled enormous distances, sometimes involving a journey of five to six weeks, to have children baptised in Stellenbosch and to partake of Holy Communion. Henry Lichtenstein, one of the best-informed travellers, testified to this: ‘[We] never heard from the mouth of a colonist an unseemly word, an overstrained expression, a curse, or an imprecation of any kind … The universal religious turn of the colonists, amounting almost to bigotry, is, perhaps, a principal cause to which this command of themselves is to be ascribed.’51

      It had become the norm that a European man who wanted to marry had to find a European woman. Eligible European women or their mothers probably demanded that a suitor be confirmed in the church before giving their consent. Married couples accepted that it was their duty to baptise their children. A historian who closely analysed the data for the Stellenbosch district has remarked: ‘It is quite possible that pious people mainly sought a partner through the church, but we must seriously consider the possibility that marriage and family were important factors in finding the way to belief.’52

      Why did women stress membership of the church so much? Two reasons suggest themselves. Church membership was virtually the only thing that set people in the dominant white community apart from those who served them, and it also connected them to the wider European world beyond the colony’s shores. The pattern of endogamous marriages limited membership of both the family and the church to Europeans. A church that was racially exclusive was a major step towards a racially exclusive community that upheld and even idealised the status of white women.

      Mistresses and slaves

      With her central place in the household assured by the end of the eighteenth century, the woman became the equal partner of her husband in the running of the household. According to P.B. Borcherds’s account of Stellenbosch life, the internal arrangements of the household were considered the wife’s department exclusively. Members of her household and several servants were ‘generally well employed’ in needlework and other necessary tasks. He added: ‘The rest of the house, such as the bedrooms, nurseries, pantry, kitchen etcetera, was of course the exclusive domain of the mamma.’53

      The dominant image of life in the eighteenth century is usually that of the spacious and elegant Cape Dutch homes of the Afrikaner gentry in the western Cape, but in the newly settled regions conditions could be quite rough. Hendrik Swellengrebel wrote at the end of the 1770s that the houses in the area of Camdeboo (Graaff-Reinet) were sheds 40 feet long and 15 feet wide. Here ‘chickens, ducks and young pigs swirled around’ and two or three families shared the house. An account of the same period of life in the Sneeuwberg declared that houses ‘nearly all comprised a single low-walled room without any privacy’.54

      In the ideology of paternalism the myth was propagated that slaves and servants were members of the household and even part of the extended family: this consisted of the patriarch’s immediate family, some brothers or sisters and their families, one or more bywoners (white tenant farmers) and their families, Khoikhoi servants, and slaves. The master saw a slave or a servant as part of his volk (people) or as ‘a sort of child of the family’.55 The concept of a bonded extended ‘family’ was emphasised by the practice of huisgodsdiens (family devotions). By the end of the eighteenth century it had become common practice for masters to admit their most trusted slaves and servants, usually squatting or standing against a wall, to the family prayers held every day. In the master’s mind the act of inviting the slave briefly into the inner sanctum of his family demonstrated his benign, paternal intent. This ‘benevolence’ was a counterpoint to the violence inflicted on erring servants, and it boosted the burghers’ self-image as Christian colonisers of the land.56

      Invariably, the most stable forms of paternalism were not to be found in the relationship between a master and a male slave but between a mistress and a female slave, particularly one born into the household. Slave women at the Cape seldom did hard manual labour in the fields, as happened in many other slave societies. They had duties within the home, as wet-nurse, nanny, cook, cleaner and confidante of the mistress. A senior official depicted African-born female slaves as ‘the favourite slaves of the mistress, arranging and keeping everything in order’. They were ‘entrusted with all that is valuable – more like companions than slaves; but the mistress rarely, and the slave never, forget their relative situations, and however familiar in private, in the presence of another due form prevails.’57

      No slave system was ever humane and it would be a mistake to consider Cape slavery as anything but brutal. While slave women, especially, developed bonds of allegiance and trust with their ‘family’, they remained perpetual minors who had to sacrifice an independent family life of their own. Slave women, moreover, had to endure the sexual advances of the master class. For them the suffering СКАЧАТЬ