Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee

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СКАЧАТЬ harshest side of the Cape form.58 It was probably slave women who most often felt betrayed by the paternalistic relationship.

      Paternalism challenged

      Except for the criminal records, we do not know much about what happened when things went wrong in the paternalistic relationship. The documentation is much richer in the case of the American South. Eugene Genovese, author of a masterly account of paternalist slavery in the American South, makes a plausible distinction between the responses of house slaves and field slaves. If a master and a field slave fell out, the latter could, as Genovese puts it, ‘lower his eyes, shuffle and keep control of himself’. By contrast, the house slaves lived in close daily contact with the mistress and the master. The mistress knew them well enough ‘to read insubordination into a glance, a shift in tone, or in a quick motion of the shoulders’.59

      Genovese is firmly of the belief that no evidence suggests that house slaves more readily accepted slavery than the field slaves, while much evidence exists to suggest the reverse. Psychologically and physically the house slaves were much more dependent on the master and the mistress, but they were also much more aware of their weaknesses and flaws than the field slaves. Their masters’ depend­ence on their black slaves went hand in hand ‘with gnawing intimations of the blacks’ hostility, resentment and suppressed anger’.60

      At the Cape, slavery was much more widespread than in most of the other slaveholding societies. Half the colonists owned slaves. By 1770 approximately 70 per cent of the burghers in Cape Town and of the farmers in Stellenbosch owned at least one slave. There were few very large farms with supervisors, and control was mostly very personal and direct. While there was no mass slave uprising at the Cape, apart from one in 1808, there were several cases of docile slaves suddenly erupting in a murderous rage.61

      The British, having acquired the Cape early in the nineteenth century, reformed slavery, first by ending slave imports and then by giving government far more power to protect slaves. In 1823 the government laid down minimum standards for food, clothing and hours of work and the maximum punishments permissible, and in 1826 it made the recording of punishments compulsory and introduced a further limitation on them.

      Slave women submitted many of the complaints received by the newly appointed guardian of slaves. On the eastern frontier some slaves took their mistresses to court. These developments represented a body blow to the whole paternalist order. Owners craved nothing so much as the gratitude of a slave or a servant. For a master or mistress a servant’s withdrawal from a relationship presumed to be benevolent, not to mention an accusation made in court of maltreatment, was almost impossible to comprehend, except in terms of instigation by malign forces.

      Developments on the eastern frontier produced a fury among white frontier women against British rule that would not abate for many decades. For them there could be no compromise with the British, no willing subjugation to their rule. The women had not left the colony as mere adjuncts of their husbands; the decision was one they had helped to make. In some cases it had been precipitated by what had happened to them personally. The Voortrekker leader Piet Uys only became politically disaffected after the arrest of his wife on charges brought by an indentured slave, which he considered malicious.62 At least fifteen families headed by widows participated in the different trek parties.63

      The government also intervened in ecclesiastical matters. As part of its attempt to do away with all status distinctions in order to achieve equality before the law, the British government in 1829 put an end to the widespread practice of Communion being served separately to people who were white and not white. Significantly, it was a woman, Anna Steenkamp, a niece of Piet Retief, who lodged the strongest protest. She complained that slaves were placed on an ‘equal footing with Christians, contrary to the laws of God, and the natural distinction of race and religion … wherefore we rather withdraw in order to preserve our doctrines in purity.’64

      It was also a woman, Olive Schreiner, later a major feminist figure in England, who realised that the expression of racial superiority by British officials towards the Afrikaners on the frontier fundamentally alienated them from the government. As a governess on farms in the districts of Colesberg and Cradock three decades after the Great Trek, she heard stories of how the trekkers had been estranged from the government by overbearing officials. She wrote:

      [What] most embittered the hearts of the colonists was the cold indifference with which they were treated, and the consciousness that they were regarded as a subject and inferior race by their rulers … [The] feeling of bitterness became so intense that about the year 1836 large numbers of individuals determined for ever to leave the colony and the homes they created and raise an independent state.65

      The feeling of being scorned as inferior or ignorant incensed women in particular. They appear to have had a leading hand in the radical decision of the Voortrekkers to sell up at a cheap price and take the risk of leaving the Cape and settling in the far interior. A British settler on the frontier wrote while the trek was getting under way: ‘They fancy they are under a divine impulse’, adding that ‘the women seem more bent on it than the men.’66 The resentment of a section of Afrikaner women towards the British would cast a long shadow on South African history.

      Republican women

      The women on the Great Trek made their presence felt in 1838 when a British force briefly annexed Port Natal (later Durban), where a section of the Voortrekkers had settled. The British commander, Major Samuel Charters, wrote that among them there were families who had been living in ‘ease and comfort’ but were now reduced to squalid ‘poverty and wretchedness’. However, they ‘bore up against these calamities with wonderful firmness, and, with very few exceptions, showed no inclination to return. They considered themselves as unjustly and harshly treated by the Colonial Government while under its jurisdiction and all they now desired from it was to leave them to their own resources and not to molest them again.’ Dislike of English rule was particularly strong among the women. Charters added: ‘If any of the men began to droop or lose courage, they urged them on to fresh exertions and kept alive the spirit of resistance within them.’67

      In 1839 these trekkers proclaimed the Republic of Natalia under a Volksraad (Assembly), but in 1842 the Cape government sent a force of 250 men to Port Natal to annex the territory. In their ranks was Henry Cloete, an anglicised Cape Afrikaner, dispatched as a commissioner with the task of reconciling the trekkers to the British occupation. He announced that the Volksraad would be allowed to administer the interior districts until the British government had made a final decision about the territory’s status. In July 1842 the Volksraad invited Cloete to Pietermaritzburg, and, while a hostile crowd gathered outside the building, deliberated with him. The men eventually decided to submit to British authority.

      After the meeting a delegation of women subjected Cloete to a baptism of fire, with the redoubtable Susanna Smit68 playing a leading role. She headed the delegation that confronted Cloete. He reported that the women expressed ‘their fixed determination’ never to yield to British authority. Instead they ‘would walk out by the Draaksberg [Drakensberg] barefooted, to die in freedom, as death was dearer to them than the loss of liberty’. Angered by the men as well, they told Cloete that as a result of the battles they had fought alongside their husbands, ‘they had been promised a voice in all matters concerning the state of this country’. Yet the all-male Volksraad was now submitting to the British despite the women’s protests. The women’s fury dismayed Cloete; he considered it ‘a disgrace on their husbands to allow them such a state of freedom’.69

      Clearly something exceptional had happened. During the nineteenth century women on both sides of the Atlantic were denied the vote, either because they owned no property or were poorly educated, or because of a supposed natural lack of aptitude for public affairs. It was only in 1893, when New Zealand granted the vote to women, that a national or colonial state enacted women’s suffrage in national elections.70 It is against this background that Henry Cloete’s bewilderment must be understood.

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