Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee
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was controversial and it was certainly frowned upon in Holland. Some historians argue that it was widespread at the Cape.30 Analyses of the pattern of manumission show that it was European women rather than men who manumitted slave women who had been wet nurses or ‘foster mothers’.31
Slavery was not widespread on the frontier and life here was much tougher for women. A traveller offered a glimpse of what settling in the deep interior entailed:
A soldier living in a tent during a campaign is not so badly off as a young couple who settle in such a distant wilderness isolated from all human society … Imagine the situation when such a wife should in time become pregnant, and have no assistance other than that of a Hottentot woman, without being able to understand one another.32
But except for the poorest households, women could generally rely on servants to perform most of the mundane tasks of the household.
Marriage and divorce
Parties who wanted to marry had to appear before the Matrimonial Court. The court, consisting of four commissioners (two officials and two burghers), sat in Cape Town. The court asked the following of them: (i) if they appeared voluntarily, (ii) whether they were perfectly free to marry, (iii) if their parents were alive and had given their consent in the case of men under 21 years and women under 18, and (iv) if they were related to each other. If the commissioners were satisfied, the banns were published and the celebration of the marriage took the form of a religious ceremony in the church.33
The right under Roman-Dutch law for a woman to file for divorce in certain circumstances protected women against an abusive husband. In the Netherlands both the state and the Reformed Church viewed marriage and the family as the bedrock of ordered society and neither was in favour of divorce, except in extreme cases. In the eighteenth century, however, there was an explosion of separation suits in the Netherlands.34 It is not known what the divorce rate was, but a visitor to the Cape declared: ‘Most domestic quarrels have their set and fixed remedies provided by the law. If a husband and a wife disagree, it is easy [for them] to separate.’35
At the Cape there were always married European men prepared to risk divorce by having sexual relations with slaves. There was the case of Willem Menssink, a brewer, who early in the eighteenth century carried on affairs with female slaves in his household. His wife was unable to get a divorce settlement.36 However, this happened before endogamous marriages between Europeans had become the social bedrock of society, particularly outside Cape Town. A little more than a century later there was a quite different outcome in the case of Carel Greyling. His slave, Clara, gave birth to a child, believed by his wife to be Carel’s. He tried to shift the blame to his son, but his wife left him immediately. She asked for, and received, an order for the dissolution of her marriage and a property settlement.37
A woman living on an isolated farm who did not enjoy active support from her parents or siblings would find it difficult to take on a husband who had sexual relations with slave women. Pamela, the wife of Galant, a slave who led a rebellion in the Koue Bokkeveld in 1825, had to sleep in the bedroom of Willem van der Merwe, his master. No mention was made in the court record of how Pamela or Van der Merwe’s wife reacted to this. The rebel slaves killed Van der Merwe and a few other white men but did no harm to the white women.38
The Cape and Brazil compared
To highlight the place of white women in Cape society we can compare it with another slave society, namely Brazil. Portuguese law, as applied in Brazil, recognised universal property as the basis of matrimonial property, but in the Catholic Church no divorce was possible. A European woman could do little if her husband wanted to bring the offspring of a liaison with a slave into the household and have them baptised in church. In the words of the great scholar Gilberto Freyre, the settler families in Brazil were enlarged by great numbers of ‘bastards and dependants, gathered around the patriarchs, who were more given to women and possibly a little more loose in their social code than the North Americans were’.39 One has to allow for the fact that Freyre was engaged in the ideological project of making Brazilians proud of the heritage of racial mixture, but for at least some parts of Brazil, like Pernambuco, his description is accurate.
During the first 70 years of the Cape settlement many European men married slave women who had been freed. As noted before, this tendency had declined sharply by 1730, but extramarital sex between European boys or men and slave women was rife. Writing about the Cape, Mentzel reported that European boys more often than not got entangled with a slave belonging to the household without incurring the wrath of their parents.40 For a child born outside wedlock to be legitimised, both child and father had to be present at the celebration of the marriage and the father had to publicly acknowledge that he had procreated the child. This rarely happened if the mother was a slave or a free black.
After 1730 there was some anxiety among the top officials in and around Cape Town that the trekboers who had spread out over the deep interior would become degenerate. Mentzel observed that the frontier colonists had accustomed themselves to such an extent with ‘the carefree life, the indifference, the lazy days and the association with slaves and Hottentots that not much difference may be discerned between the former and the latter’.41 The more affluent burghers in Stellenbosch and Cape Town also expressed the fear that morals on the frontier could become ‘bastardised’, leading to a ‘completely degenerate nation’.42 These fears were unfounded. Between the 1720s and 1790s the settler population was transformed from one that had no firm racial boundaries and was far from strict in religious observance to one in which endogamous marriages were the norm throughout the colony. A premium was now put on membership of the church, which had itself become increasingly racially exclusive.43
Women and endogamous marriages
What role did European women play in this? Before this question is addressed, one must also look at some other factors at work. The first was cultural influences. Like all colonising people of the period, the Dutch were convinced of the superiority of their culture and religion. Cultural chauvinism was an important component of social attitudes. Even before 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