Maverick Africans. Hermann Giliomee
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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.
Women were also at the heart of the early expressions of Afrikaner nationalism. The first was the uprising in 1880 –1 of the Transvaal Afrikaners against the British occupation of their country, leading to a crushing British defeat at Majuba and their withdrawal from the Highveld. Olive Schreiner wrote in the early 1890s that the war was largely a ‘woman’s war’. Women urged their menfolk to actively resist the British authorities. ‘Even in the [Cape] Colony at the distance of many hundreds of miles Afrikaner women implored sons and husbands to go to the aid of their northern kindred, while a martial ardour often far exceeding that of the males seemed to fill them.’71
In 1890 Schreiner painted her famous picture of the ‘Boer woman’. She noted that the ‘Women’s Movement’, as she called feminism, always desired nothing more and nothing less than to stand beside the man as his full co-labourer, and hence as his equal. The Boer woman on the farm had already attained this. Referring to Roman-Dutch law, she stated: ‘The fiction of common possession of all material goods … is not a fiction but a reality among the Boers, and justly so, seeing that the female as often as the male contributes to the original household stock.’72 On the farm all the domestic arrangements were her domain – slaughtering, cooking, making clothes, educating the children, and instructing them in the Christian faith and Boer traditions.
Schreiner concluded that the Boer woman ‘retained the full possession of one full half of the labour of her race’. She had no intention of becoming the ‘drone of society’ like upper-class women in Europe, leading a parasitic life in which she is ‘fed, clothed and sustained by the labours of others for the mere performance of her animal sex function’, while employing others to raise her children. There was no mental chasm between the Boer woman and her male comrade, Schreiner concluded. She enjoyed a position of ‘intellectual equality with her male companions, a condition which seems to constitute the highest ideal in the human sexual world’.73
Thus the woman not only brought to the common household an equal share of material goods, but – and Schreiner thought this infinitely more important – ‘she [also] brought to the common life an equal culture.’74 In her view there were few societies in which ‘the duties and enjoyments of life are so equally divided between the sexes’ as in Boer society. The Boer woman even stood side by side with the man, facing death in fighting enemies. She remarked that it was the Boer woman ‘who still today [the 1890s] has a determining influence on peace or war’.
Ten years after she wrote these words Boer women, to use her phrase, did indeed play a major role in the bittereinder phase of the South African War. The Republican forces had suffered some disastrous defeats in the first year of the war, and by June 1900 the Transvaal burghers were ready to surrender. Rejecting this option, President M.T. Steyn of the Republic of the Orange Free State propagated the idea of a war to the bitter end. So did many of the Boer women in the two republics.
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