Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee

burghers against the governor, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and other high officials. In violation of the strict Company policy some officials farmed for the market, increasingly squeezing the burghers out of business. Discontent and rebelliousness became rife in the Cape and Stellenbosch districts. The landdrost Johannes Starrenburg, a well-read and well-travelled man who knew his Cicero, Dio Cassius and Grotius, was deeply disturbed by what he saw as the open contempt the burghers displayed towards the government. He was most upset by a demonstration in 1706 in the town where some burghers danced around him, vowing that they would not abandon the struggle. He took refuge in his house, where he wrote to Van der Stel: ‘[The] women are as dangerous as the men and do not keep quiet.’18 The stiff resistance persuaded the Company directors in the Netherlands to recall Van der Stel and other officials.

      Significantly it was a French woman who played a key role in the establishment of the commando system, which was crucial to the way the farmers subjugated the indigenous people and defended their property. For the first 50 years of European settlement the government allowed burghers only to go on military expeditions that were led by soldiers employed by government and based in Cape Town. For burgers farming in the interior, the Company’s soldiers invariably arrived far too late to recover any stolen cattle.

      In 1716 Gertruida du Toit, wife of Pierre Rousseau, a heemraad of Drakenstein, became exasperated after San raiders had killed her Khoikhoi herder and carried off several head of cattle. Although she lived as far away as the site of the present Wemmershoek Dam near Paarl, she travelled all the way to the Castle in Cape Town to ask senior government officials to allow burghers to assemble a commando to pursue raiders without waiting for the government’s permission. The commandos were an essential part of Boer conquest and settlement for nearly two centuries.

      Inevitably the system was wide open to abuse. Many of the commandos not only retrieved the stolen cattle, but also raided cattle and forced Khoisan women and children to accompany them back to their farms and work there against their will.19 The commando system experienced its finest hour in the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) when it pinned down the British forces despite their vastly superior numbers.

      Slave-born women

      Although there was a correspondence between legal status, colour and religious identity, there was no rigid racial division, particularly during the first 75 years of Company rule. People of mixed racial origins were prominent both as burghers and free blacks and did not appear to suffer any racial discrimination. The frequent racial mixing was due in the first place to the huge gender imbalance in the white population. By 1700 there were in the Cape district twice as many men as women in the adult burgher population, and in the interior the ratio was three to one. Marriages between white men and fair-skinned non-white women were common during the first 75 years. Many stable mixed liaisons occurred outside wedlock, and there was also large-scale miscegenation in the form of casual sex, especially in the Slave Lodge frequented by local European men as well as sailors and soldiers.

      J.A. Heese, a genealogical researcher, has estimated that seven per cent of modern-day Afrikaner families have a non-European stammoeder or progenitress.20 During the early years the situation was fluid enough for some children born from unions of non-European parents to be accepted into the European community. There were two particularly striking cases. The slave Armosyn Claasz was born in 1661 at the Cape. Her mother was presumably a slave from the west coast of Africa; the identity of her father was unknown. She gave birth to the children of four different fathers in the Company’s Slave Lodge; some of them were described as halfslag (half-caste), which means that the father was white. Many of these children and their descendants were absorbed into what became prominent Afrikaner families, like the Volschenk, Coorts, Du Plessis, Pretorius, Horn, Myburgh and Esterhuyzen families.

      The other case relates to the liaison between Louis of Bengal and Lysbeth van de Caab, both considered non-European. Three daughters were born out of this liaison, and Lysbeth had two daughters from another relationship with a European. All the children entered into relationships, either marital or extramarital, with Europeans, and most of their descendants were absorbed into the Afrikaner community. Those most directly involved were the Brits, Van Deventer, Slabbert, Fischer and Carstens families.21

      Genealogies include a few instances of European women marrying non-Europeans. The most striking case was that of Marguerite de Savoye, the daughter of Huguenot parents, who in 1690 married Christoffel Snyman, who, according to oral tradition, made a living from pruning vineyards. He was the son of Anthony of Bengal and a non-white mother. The well-known Snyman family is descended from them. Another case was that of Maria Roos, who in 1794 married David Simon Hoon, the son of a slave from Madagascar and his wife, Rachael, of Indian descent. Other ‘Coloured’ males entered ‘white’ society, including the progenitors of the Antonissen, Jonker, Jacobs and Serfontein families.22

      Confident women

      From an early stage the European women at the Cape displayed a considerable degree of social self-confidence. Girls not only shared equally with their brothers in the estates of their parents, but also received the same elementary education. Women did not show undue respect to people in political or clerical office. Some visitors to the Cape expressed the view that they were more intelligent than the male burghers and better informed.23

      The pattern of women acting as a strong force in the family became firmly established in the agrarian western Cape rather than the port city. Slave owners on farms or in small settlements allowed very little manumission or slave baptism in order to enhance their control over their slaves. Consequently the number of slave women who could compete with European women as stable partners of European men remained extremely small.

      O.F. Mentzel, an astute German who lived at the Cape for most of the 1730s, considered the Cape Town women too glib and status conscious. By contrast, the women in the patriarchal community of the rural western Cape impressed him. He wrote that a girl was not pampered but often put to work in both the house and in the fields. She ‘looked everybody straight in the eye … and [was] unabashed’. As married women they ‘understand more about their husband’s business than the latter do themselves; when this is not the case the affairs are seldom well conducted.’24

      He passed this general judgement:

      In general, farmwomen surpass the men in nature and intelligence, good behaviour and ability to understand anything, wherefore they are almost always held in higher esteem by the Europeans than the women of Cape Town. They are unusually industrious, good housekeepers, and excellent mothers. They are not so ambitious as the townswomen; they do not quarrel over precedence, and it is immaterial to them whether they are seated at the table to the left or the right, or whether they were served first or last.25

      By contrast, Robert Semple, the son of a British merchant who visited the Cape in the early nineteenth century, expressed a favourable impression of the women of the town. He wrote:

      There exists not at all at the Cape that marked difference in the manners of the two sexes that we find in Europe. In conversation the women are free and unreserved, and very often listened to, but make use of expressions by no means to be reconciled with English ideas of decency and propriety. They are not the disciples, they might be the models of the school of Mrs Mary Wollstonecraft, they call everything by its right name, and seem in general to think that actions which men might perform with impunity ought equally to be allowed to themselves.26

      Often called the first British feminist, Wollstonecraft argued that women were naturally equal to men but only appeared to be unequal due to a lack of education. In her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters she argued that the mind was not tied down or dictated by gender, and that the pace of learning had to be adapted to each pupil, regardless of sex.27

      Some Afrikaner women in Cape Town enjoyed considerable free time because they left the task of suckling and rearing their children to a slave woman.28 A visitor wrote: ‘They [the Afrikaner women] seldom suckle their children, the most prevailing practice is to consign them over in a manner to a faithful female slave who suckles them, overlooks them, brings them up, and in a word becomes a second mother.’29 The practice made it possible for the biological mother to ovulate sooner and have children at shorter intervals. Thus wet nurses and nannies shared the burden of the prodigious growth of the burgher