The rise and fall of Afrikaner women

Hermann Giliomee

(Talk given at lunch hosted by editor of Cape Times Literary Lunch and by Fine Music Radio, at Spier Estate, Stellenbosch, on 2 August 2003)

Sometimes the question is posed to me: “What surprised you most in writing your book?”

I have worked on Afrikaner history for most of my academic career, but in writing The Afrikaners as a kind of “biography” I made three surprising discoveries. They relate to

— Afrikaner women
— the rise of Afrikaans as a public language, and
— apartheid.

Today I want to talk about the first of these surprises, namely the Afrikaner women.

There are many sayings paying tribute to the importance of women. In China, Chairman Mao Zedong once said “Women hold up half the sky.” The Russians have a proverb, “Women can do everything and men the rest.” But do we take this seriously when we write history? I would not say that the male historians have deliberately suppressed the role of women but they sure have missed a lot. It is the biggest untold story of the Afrikaner people. I became aware of this while writing my book, but it was only while writing this lecture that I discovered how much historians have missed.

No one seems to have discovered as yet that Afrikaner women enjoyed possibly the strongest position in the family of all white women in the history of European colonial expansion. The Afrikaner women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can only be described as very tough, very formidable and very resourceful. They were people that men could cross or thwart only at great peril. In all the crucial political developments in Afrikaner history they played a decisive role.

Significantly it was not a trained historian but Karel Schoeman, a novelist, who in his series of biographies of extraordinary woman highlighted the unique role women played in pre-industrial South Africa. They were: Armosyn, a slave, Olive Schreiner, an English woman, and Machtelt Smit and Susanna Smit, both Afrikaner women.

But a second surprise lay in store: During the first two or three decades of the twentieth century these tough and resourceful Afrikaner women virtually disappeared from the public life except as members of women’s organisations. They lagged far behind their English-speaking counterparts in campaigning for the franchise and addressing feminist causes.

A liberal Dutch heritage and a Huguenot influence
Where do the strong Afrikaner women come from? We must begin our investigation in the Netherlands, which influenced the Cape’s character much more than did Germany or France.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Dutch enjoyed the most individual mobility in Europe. The Roman-Dutch law practised there went further than other legal codes in recognising that all people - men and women, free men and slaves - had some rights. It conferred no special privileges on the nobility, but in the words of the great jurist Voetius, it “preserves equality and binds the citizens equally”.

In the Netherlands the position of women was recognised as more advanced than anywhere else in Europe. The Roman-Dutch law in the Netherlands and the law in Portugal were the only legal systems in Europe that retained universal community as the basis of matrimonial property. In the case of the husband’s death the widow inherited half the estate and the sons and daughters the other half. Under the law that was used in the province of Holland and the Cape there were several valid reasons for the separation of bed and board or divorce, the foremost being adultery. In the case of divorce the wife received half of the estate. The wife could dispose of all the moveable assets donated by a husband to a concubine.[1]

We should look at colonial history from a comparative perspective. During the seventeenth century the Dutch and the English were locked in a battle to dominate world trade. Yet the difference in the status of women could not have been greater. The Dutch gave to women in their colonies a share in property rights that was totally denied them by the English, whether in their colonies or at home. In England and other European countries (except the Netherlands) the husband became owner of the wife’s moveable property. She lost all claims to it even if she survived him. Edmund Morgan, the leading authority on early American history, formulates it as follows:

Economic rights were not as gendered in New Netherlands as they were in New England or in New York … [After] the English took over … women were excluded from any share in formal public power and even in the privacy of the family a woman’s very identity was subsumed in her husband’s; any property she brought into the marriage was his, any debt she owned was his, almost any tort she committed was his.[2]

In the Cape settlement women could draw on the liberal Dutch heritage. The first Afrikaner women at the Cape were of humble origins, often being sent straight from orphanages, but people could hardly fail to notice even in these orphans the strong social position of women in the country in which they had grown up. Under Roman-Dutch law there were no legal limits imposed on a husband to dispose of common assets or to discharge debts out of the common assets. On the other hand the wife had the contractual capacity to carry on a trade, business, or profession without the specific consent of her husband. In the Netherlands Dutch women were closely involved with their husband’s job, particularly if he was in business or commerce, often enjoying full recognition for their role.[3]

Women in Cape Town received licenses to keep guesthouses or taverns or to engage in any other business. They could not hold a burgher position, like that of heemraad, or an ecclesiastical office, like that of a minister or elder, but when they married a burgher they shared the general status of burghers.

Outside Cape Town and the town of Stellenbosch the burgher community did not have any serious class divisions.

From an early stage 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 primitive education. Women did not show undue respect to people in political or clerical office. At the Cape there was even something of a “widowarchy”. A widow who had been left half a farm could consider the options for a subsequent marriage just as an astute modern investment manager would. Many widowed Cape women remarried several times, accumulating a small fortune.

Neither the state nor the Reformed Church in the Netherlands or the Cape was in favour of divorce, except in extreme cases, because they viewed marriage and the family as the bedrock of ordered society. In a vivid way Nigel Penn tells the story of Willem Messink, a brewer in Cape Town, who early in the eighteenth century carried on affairs with slaves in the household even after his wife separated from him. But she could not get a divorce settlement.[4] However, this happened during a period in which marriages or stable liaisons between Europeans and slaves or ex-slaves were common. A little more than a century later there was the case of Abraham Carel Greyling, whose wife left him immediately after his slave, Clara, gave birth to a child his wife believed to be Carel’s. Greyling tried to shift the blame to his son, but his wife asked for, and received, an order for the dissolution of her marriage and a property settlement.[5]

Then there was the influence of the Huguenots. Without a fatherland to return to, the Huguenots at the Cape had to take root or disappear. Religious persecution had made them more fiercely determined to resist an unjust authority than anyone else. Near Aix-en-Province in France there is a Huguenot museum. On a wall Maria Durand had scrawled her name. She was kept there in a cell for 38 years, refusing to renounce her faith. Descendants of the Huguenots were to establish positions of leadership in Afrikaner society out of all proportion to the numbers of the original immigrants.

The Huguenots also made a difference in another respect. When their party arrived at the Cape in 1688 there was still a severe shortage of European women, prompting many men to take half-caste slaves as brides or a stable partner outside wedlock. The Huguenots were generally already married, and their daughters young as well as fecund. As the girls in these large families grew up, men’s stable liaisons with non-European women declined and a pattern of white endogamy became established. It is remarkable how many Afrikaner families have a Huguenot as a stammoeder (ancestress).

There is evidence of female assertiveness in one of the first political battles at the Cape. In the years 1705 to 1707 the farming burghers were engaged in a serious conflict with the governor, Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and other high officials. In violation of the regulations the latter were farming for the market, squeezing the burghers out. Johannes Starrenburg, the landdrost of Stellenbosch, was a well-read and well-travelled man, who knew his Cicero, Cassius and Grotius. Starrenburg was deeply disturbed by the anarchy and the open contempt the burghers were displaying towards the government. He was most upset by a demonstration in 1706 in the town of Stellenbosch, 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.” [6]

The status of Afrikaner women in eighteenth-century Cape society
For European women the task of settling down in a colony in a strange, new continent was much more daunting than for a man. Particularly in a slaveholding colony they were extremely vulnerable if European men were allowed to exploit slave women as their desire dictated. Women dreaded the prospect of having to compete with someone outside their status group and their culture for the love and favours of European men. Frequent racially mixed marriages or stable liaisons would impact negatively on the status and scarcity value of European women.

Let us first consider the Western Cape, which was a slave society, and do so within the context of another slave society, namely Brazil. In Brazil, Portuguese law applied, which recognised universal property as the basis of matrimonial property, but in the Catholic Church no divorce was possible. A woman could do little if her husband had an open liaison with a slave woman and then wanted to have the relationship “acknowledged” or recognised by bringing the bastard offspring into the household and having them baptised in the church. In the words of the great scholar Gilberto Freyre, the family of settlers in Brazil was enlarged by

a far greater number 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.

Freyre continued:

No Big House in the days of slavery wanted any effeminate sons or male virgins … The one always approved was the one who went with the girls as early as possible … One who lost no time in taking Negro women that he might increase the herd and the paternal capital.[7]

We have to allow for the fact that Freyre was engaged in an ideological project to make Brazilians proud of the heritage of racial mixture, but for at least some parts of Brazil, like Pernambuco, his description is valid.

European women at the Cape could not simply assume that a society would somehow develop “naturally” in which they would enjoy a strong position. By 1690 there were 260 male burghers for every 100 female burghers, and this gender imbalance declined to stand at 150:100 and by 1770 at 140:100. The question was whether European women could somehow find the means to employ sanctions against mixed marriages and against legitimising the racially mixed offspring of their husbands and sons. Between 1652 and the early 1720s many European men married slave women who had been freed

On the frontier beyond the first mountain ranges women confronted the possibility that men might become dissolute and prefer to live with indigenous women. There is the observation of OF Mentzel, who lived at the Cape during most of the 1730s and was one of the shrewdest observers. He wrote that of some of the farmers

have 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.[8]

Slave women were by no means out of bounds as objects of sexual exploitation. There was a constant demand for slaves with a slave population that could not reproduce itself due to the practice of wet-nursing and an imbalance in the sexes. There is a report of a woman who kept a guesthouse in Cape Town, who shoved a slave girl into a visitor’s room and closed the door. Mentzel reports that wealthy boys “more often than not get entangled with a slave who belong to the household” without incurring the wrath of his parents[9]. The important point, however, is that the rule of uterine descent applied: such a child was not taken into the burgher’s family but entered the slave population.

Despite the inclination to enjoy a life of “lazy days” mixed marriages decreased sharply. Taking a black wife evidently entailed such a loss of status that it was considered better to remain a bachelor. European men unable to find a European wife tended not to marry. A study of the 1731 census showed that 59 per cent of Cape Town’s European men and 51 per cent in the rural western Cape never married. It had also become much more difficult for children (especially males) from mixed extramarital liaisons to become absorbed into the European community.[10]

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 indicated by genealogists as “Non-European” (invariably a slave women). 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.[11] If European men had illicit liaisons the offspring almost all passed into the ranks of the free-black community.

The hidden hand behind this was female rather than male, or to put it in more academic language: European women succeeded in preventing European men from marrying outside the European community and bringing illegitimate half-caste children into the family.

We can conclude that by the 1720s the norm of racially endogamous marriages was firmly established in the rural Western Cape and was very much part of the ethos of the migrants in the rapid expansion into the interior during the eighteenth century, which by 1775 extended to the Fish River in the east, the Sneeuberge in the north-east and the Orange River in the north-west.

We can state at this point that the Afrikaner women of the eighteenth century struck observers as remarkable characters. The best description was by that exceptionally keen observer OF Mentzel, an educated German who lived at the Cape for most of the 1730s. He was not particularly complimentary of the Cape Town women considered by him to be too glib and status conscious. It is the women of the patriarchal rural Afrikaner community in the Western Cape that he singled out for praise. He reported 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.”[12]

He passes this judgement:

In general farmwomen surpass the men in nature and intelligence, good behaviour and ability to understand anything, wherefore they are almost 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.[13]

He described how tough it was for European women to settle in the deep interior where there were virtually no roads and no towns, except for Swellendam, established in 1745 and Graaff-Reinet (1786), which remained mere hamlets until well into the nineteenth century. Yet, according to him, it was not too difficult for a man to find someone who was prepared to leave her parents and join her husband in settling in the distant interior. Mentzel gave a glimpse of what this 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 than that of Hottentot woman, without being able to understand one another.[14]

It was in such conditions that the tough and resilient Afrikaner woman of the pre-industrial era took root and survived.

Maintaining racial endogamy
How did the women maintain racial endogamy? The legal rights of burgher women are but one part of the explanation. The other part concerns the church. I believe religion and the rise of a racially exclusive church were indispensable for European women building up their position. We often hear of Van Riebeeck’s prayer, but the fact is that for most of the period of Company rule the burgher community was not seen as remarkably 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 GW van Imhoff noted “with astonishment and regret how little work is done with respect to the public religion”. He added that

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.[15]

However, by the end of the eighteenth century there was a dramatic change. The Afrikaner community had become one of the most devout communities in the world. Henry Lichtenstein, one of the best-informed travellers, testified to this early in the nineteenth century:

[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.[16]

It can hardly be a coincidence that it happened after white women had begun to form a critical mass. Women took the lead in becoming confirmed members of the church. By 1770, 90 per cent of the adult female burghers in the very large Stellenbosch congregation, but only one third of the male burghers, were confirmed members of the church.[17]

The men would quickly step into line. Foreign travellers noted that the burghers in the outlying districts travelled enormous distances, sometimes a journey of five to six weeks, to have children baptised in Stellenbosch and to partake of the Holy Communion.

Why did women stress membership of the church so much? Two reasons suggest themselves. Church membership was virtually the only thing that set the dominant white community apart from the slaves and the servants on the farms. It was also the only mechanism for limiting membership of the family to whites. The church would consecrate no marriage without both partners being confirmed. Parents refused to give permission to a suitor for their daughter’s hand if he was not confirmed. A church that was racially exclusive was an important first step towards a racially exclusive family and a racially exclusive community that would be the very foundation of the Afrikaner people and of the apartheid order of the distant future.

But legal rights and church membership are not sufficient to explain the extraordinarily strong position of the women in the household. The role of the woman as an equal partner in the production process in the largely subsistence economy was crucial.

One of the first descriptions of this was given in the memoir of PB Borcherds of life in Stellenbosch in the early decades of the nineteenth century. According to this account the internal arrangements of the household were considered her department exclusively. Members of her household and several servants were “generally well employed” in needlework and other necessary tasks. “The rest of the house, such as the bedrooms, nurseries, pantry, kitchen etcetera were of course the exclusive domain of the mamma.”[18]

In 1890 Olive Schreiner, still one of the most respected feminists, painted her famous picture of the Afrikaner woman. Schreiner lived as a teacher and governess among Afrikaner farmers in Cradock and Colesberg in the final decades of the nineteenth century. She remarked that the Boer woman not only brings to the common household an equal share of material goods, but - and this is of infinitely more importance - “she brings to the common life an equal culture.”[19] 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 stood side by side with the man facing death in fighting human enemies and wild beasts. She has a “determining influence in peace and war”. Schreiner adds:

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.[20]

Schreiner 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. On the farm all the domestic arrangements were her domain - slaughtering, cooking, making clothes, educating the children, instructing them in the Christian faith and the Boer traditions. This prompted Schreiner to write that the Boer woman “retained the full possession of the one full half of the labour of her race.” She had no intention of becoming the “drone of society” of 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” and gets others to raise her children. There was no mental chasm between the Boer woman and her male comrade, Schreiner concluded. She enjoys a position of “intellectual equality with her male companions, a condition which seems to constitute the highest ideal in the human sexual world.”[21]

Finally there is the picture drawn by ME Rothman, who wrote under the name MER. During the mid-1920s, when the campaign for the women’s franchise in South Africa was gathering momentum, she gave a speech to English-speaking suffragettes in Cape Town explaining why Afrikaner women had not taken up the cause. She first referred to “the very large amount of thought and forethought” that the husband sought and got from the wife as to his share of farming and then remarked:

When the town housewife plans her day she need not first see that the sheep is caught, slaughtered, cut up, slated or otherwise used; for such a simple thing as the children’s bread and butter she will not have had long before hand to plan for the best sort of corn, the best milling process, the fuel for baking and cooking, the milking, the cow’s feed, even the sowing for pasturage, the separating of the milk, and the churning of the butter. It is in the nature of things, I am sure, that the housewife who has to care for food production through all its stages has little attention to spare for the housekeeping of the state, and is only too thankful to leave that to the men.[22]

Of course the picture is incomplete if it does not include slaves and servants. In slaughtering, cooking, serving up the food and needlework the Boer woman had slaves and servants to assist her, although she did not hesitate to get her hands dirty. Our image of life in the eighteenth century is that of the spacious and elegant Cape Dutch homes of the Afrikaner gentry in the western Cape, but in most households masters and servants lived in close proximity to each other in very humble circumstances, particularly in newly settled regions. 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 kept house. An account of the same period of life in Sneeuberg declared that houses “nearly all comprised a single low-walled room without any privacy.”[23]

The relationship between masters and mistresses and their slaves and servants is usually described in terms of the concept of paternalism. The ideology of paternalism had to bear the brunt of the burden in reconciling slaves to their fate. Owners propagated the myth that slaves were members of the household and even part of the extended family, consisting of the patriarch’s immediate family, some brothers or sisters and their families, one or more bywoner families, Khoikhoi servants, and slaves. The master called the slaves and servants his volk (people). Paternalism was supposed to represent a bargain. At the most elementary level, slaves were expected to display loyalty and respect towards the master or mistress. The master class acted as if they were fathers, rewarding faithful slaves and disciplining those who erred, as they did in the case of their children. They also cared for them, fed them properly, and nursed them when they were sick.

Some masters referred to their slaves as “a sort of child of the family”.[24] The concept of a bonded extended “family” was emphasised by the common worship of the Lord of both masters and slaves. By the end of the eighteenth century it became 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 action of inviting the slave briefly into the inner sanctum of his family demonstrated his benign and moral intent. This “benevolence” was a counterpoint to the violence inflicted on erring servants, and it boosted the burghers’ self-image of Christian colonisers of the land.[25]

Paternalism ultimately justified slavery for the master’s rather than the slave’s benefit. It could give rise to a very kind and caring treatment of the slave, but it was incapable of recognising the equal human dignity of the slave

The model of a paternalist relationship was taken with those Afrikaners who migrated from the settled western Cape to become stock farmers in the interior. Early in the nineteenth century the traveller Lichtenstein described a farm on the north-eastern frontier as a place where family harmony reigned among master, mistress, slave and Khoikhoi servants.[26]

Invariably, however, 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 in the case of female slaves born into the household. Slave women seldom did hard manual labour in the fields, as happened in many other slave societies. They had other duties within the home: wet-nurse, nanny, cook, cleaner and confidante of the mistress. Bird’s 1822 account 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, (forgot) their relative situations, and however familiar in private, in the presence of another due form (prevailed).”[27]

The slave wet-nurse was a pivotal figure in the burgher family. While wet-nursing was frowned upon in Holland, at the Cape the suckling of European babies by slave women was widespread. It 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 population. Wet-nursing, in consequence, also contributed to the failure of the slave population to reproduce itself in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, since suckling a child hampered a wet-nurse’s own fertility. Acting as a nanny to white children limited the time a female slave could spend with her own.

A few words have survived as a testimony to this intimate relationship: minnemoer or mina (“love mother”) and aiya/aia (“old nursemaid”).

Some visitors speculated that the intimate relationship European boys had with the wet-nurse and nanny could, in later life, have found expression in being more at ease with black women and even preferring sex with them rather than with white women. But this is in the realm of speculation and it is striking that when boys became adults they did not manumit their wet-nurses, while analyses of the pattern of manumission show a tendency for European women to manumit slave women who had been wet-nurses or “foster mothers.”[28]

No slave system is ever mild and it would be a mistake to consider Cape slavery as anything but brutal. The cruellest part was often the tight and suffocating ties. Slave and burgher children played with each other as friends but when they grew up the master-slave hierarchy came into play. The burgher child became a master; the slave remained a slave. Even in adult life a slave continued to be addressed as jong (boy) or meid (girl), to be called by his or her first name and to go about barefoot. Slave women, especially, developed bonds of allegiance and trust with their “family”, but remained perpetual minors and, like slave men, almost always had to sacrifice an independent family life of their own for that of their master and mistress. Slave women, moreover, had to endure the sexual advances of the master class. For them the suffering was most acute, having to endure both the intimate and the harsh side of Cape slavery.[29] It was slave women who most often felt betrayed by the paternalistic relationship.

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 the masterly account of paternalist slavery here makes the very plausible distinction between the responses of the house slave and the field slave. 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”. It was a different matter in the house. Here the slave and the servant worked and lived in close contact with her mistress and the master. They knew her well enough “to read insubordination into a glance, a shift in tone, or in a quick motion of the shoulders.”[30]

Genovese is firm that no evidence suggests that house servants 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.”[31]

Cape slavery was much more widespread than most 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 a least one slave. There were few slave overseers; the control of the master and mistress was mostly very personal and direct. While there were no slave uprisings at the Cape in the eighteenth century there were several cases of docile slaves suddenly erupting in a murderous rage.

Fears about insubordinate slaves were credible enough for burghers to cite as grounds for not complying with government orders that would take them away from their farms for a long period. In 1782, seventy eight farmers from Drakenstein petitioned the government to be absolved from a month’s guard duty, lest in their absence their wives and families would be left “open to the refractoriness and wantonness of their slaves, from which, by continuation, even greater evils, such as rape, theft, robbery and murder can be feared.”[32]

While this could be interpreted as a case of special pleading, Sparrman’s reliable account of the mid-1770s suggests that keeping slaves made masters very uneasy about their security. He was told of the danger of slaves “becoming furious at night and committing murder, more particularly on the person of the masters.” The traveller noted: “Everybody in this country is obliged to bolt the door of his chamber at night, and keep loaded firearms by him, for fear of the revengeful disposition of his slaves.”[33]

For the dominant class the only way of dealing with such a situation was to have control very firmly in their hands and to try to get even more power, for instance the right to give a slave a severe beating instead of sending him to the legal authorities.

The British, who took over the Cape first in 1795 and then again in 1806, saw things in a very different light. They wanted to reform slavery, first by ending slave imports and then by giving government far more power to regulate the relationship between master and slave in ways that offered the slave some protection. In 1823 the government lay down minimum standards for food, clothing, hours of work and maximum punishments and in 1826 made the recording of punishments compulsory and introduced a further limitation on punishment.

Slave women submitted the vast majority of complaints to the guardian of the slaves. There is strong evidence that the measures to reform slavery upset the owners more than the eventual abolition of slaves. Andries Stockenstrom, who was both a slave owner and a liberal administrator, concluded that the only solution was to abolish slavery. He wrote:

[Nothing] short of the extermination of slavery can save us from the greatest calamities; without a prospect of it the people and the Government at home [Britain] will never cease plaguing the masters, and the slaves will torment them to such a pitch that one execution after the other must be the result.[34]

In 1828 the government introduced Ordinance 50 to free Khoikhoi labour from all restrictions. It stated that the law would place “every free inhabitant in the Colony on a level, in the eye of the law, as to the enjoyment of personal liberty and the security of property”. It would remove all disabilities suffered with respect to marriage and testimony, and abolish the passes the Khoisan were requested to carry, and also the indenturing of Khoisan children. It prohibited employers from inflicting corporal punishment on their workers

The impact of these measures on the burghers of the districts on the eastern frontier was profound. By the end of the 1820s burghers there owned one sixth of the slave population. The eastern frontier was also much more dependent on Khoikhoi labour than other districts. After the introduction of Ordinance 50 of 1828 the Khoikhoi began moving away in large numbers from the farms. An observer, describing the scene on the frontier, wrote:

I have myself known farms which had been completely abandoned by the last remaining Hottentots having given up service or retired to the missionary schools, taking with them the flocks or herds which they have earned in their employer’s service and rejecting every offer or bribe to continue any longer in such service.[35]

These developments were a body blow to the whole paternalist order. As Genovese and others who wrote on the system remarked, owners and employers craved nothing so much as the gratitude of the slave and the servant. For a master or mistress a servant’s withdrawal from a relationship presumed to be benevolent, let alone being accused in court of maltreatment, was almost impossible to comprehend except in terms of instigation by malignant forces. In their eyes the British government in Cape Town and their perceived agents on the frontier, namely the employees of the London Missionary Society, were to blame for their servants’ turning against them.

Several Voortrekker leaders had had brushes with the law about punishing their slaves or servants. In 1825 Piet Retief was charged with maltreating two of his slaves. The court found no grounds for action. Hendrik Potgieter had to appear in court to face the accusation by one of his slaves that his master made him work at night. Potgieter claimed that the slave could not do his work by day because at night he was “playing the fiddle and having dancing parties”.[36] The court rejected the slave’s complaint.

Another trek leader, Piet Uys, became interested in trekking as a means of bringing the Gospel to Africans in the deep interior. He did not become politically disaffected until after the arrest of his wife on charges he considered malicious, brought by an indentured slave. When he reached the Orange River on his trek, he wrote about the causes of the emigration. The people, he noted, had asked for a vagrancy law but it was refused; they had asked for huijs reg [literally “domestic rights”, meaning the right to punish someone in one”s household], but this was also refused.[37] By removing themselves from the colony the trekkers could reassert their old paternalist order. Indeed, many of the Voortrekkers were able to persuade many servants or ex-slaves to go with them.

It is the conventional wisdom to consider the lack of labour along with a lack of land and lack of security as the main causes of the Great Trek. By the mid-1820s there was still no talk of a trek, although all these factors were at work. Yet by the early 1830s many frontiersmen were preparing to move away. It is plausible that the collapse of the paternalist order on the frontier following the reform of slavery and the freeing up of Khoikhoi labour were the moving causes of the Great Trek.

Women appear to have had a leading hand in the almost revolutionary decision of the Voortrekkers to sell up at a cheap price and take the huge risk to settle in the deep interior in the midst of much larger numbers of Africans. A British settler on the frontier wrote while the trek was getting underway: “They fancy they are under a divine impulse”, adding: “the women seem more bent on it than the men.”[38]

The women’s grievances were articulated by Anna Steenkamp, a niece of Piet Retief, after she had left the colony. Her principal objection was that slaves had been “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.” Steenkamp was probably referring to cases of slaves’ complaints against their masters and their being permitted to give testimony against them in court.

On the frontier it was not so much a racial hierarchy that the burghers wanted to preserve; rather their fight was against the gelykstelling, or social levelling, of people belonging to different status groups - master and servant, people born into the Christian community and those the missionaries had converted, burghers who farmed and defended the land and non-burghers.

JN Boshoff, a colonial Afrikaner serving as a government official in Graaff-Reinet, later called gelykstelling in the church a secondary cause of the trek. In the early stages of settlement on the frontier, Communion was administered separately to slaves, free blacks, Basters and Khoikhoi. After the synod of 1829 this practice was prohibited. Boshoff wrote that the trekkers were aggrieved that “blacks were encouraged to consider themselves on an equal footing with the whites in their religious exercises in the church though the former are heathens and no members of such community.” [39]

Voortrekker women and Boer republics
The events on the eastern frontier had produced a fury among Boer women against British rule that would not go away. For them there could be no compromise with the British, no subjugation to British rule. The trekker women had not left the colony as mere adjuncts of their husbands; they had helped to make decisions and had enforced discipline over servants. This authority over servants was greatly undermined in the decade before the trek, when servants and apprentice slaves began to take their masters and mistresses to court.

The women on the trek made their presence felt in 1838 when a British force annexed Port Natal (later Durban) where a section of the Voortrekkers had settled. The commander reported that opposition to British rule was particularly strong among Afrikaner women. They had experienced great want and insecurity, but “they all rejected with scorn the idea of returning to the Colony.” He 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.”

At the meeting in Pietermaritzburg, Afrikaner women gave Cloete a baptism of fire, with the redoubtable Susanna Smit playing a leading role. She was the sister of Gert Maritz and Stephanus Maritz, who at the time was chairman of the Volksraad, and the wife of Erasmus Smit, the missionary-cum-teacher. Smit was not an ordained minister and Susanna Smit had to live on a meagre pension, in a precarious financial and social position.[40]

Smit headed the delegation of Afrikaner women who confronted Cloete. He reported that they expressed “their fixed determination never to yield to British authority … but [that] they would walk out by the Draaksberg [Drakensberg] barefooted, to die in freedom, as death was dearer to them than the loss of liberty.” They told Cloete that as a result of the battles they had fought alongside the men, the men had promised them “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”.[41] It is without any question one of the first occasions in world history that a lobby of women boldly demanded equal political rights with men. Clearly something extraordinary was going on here, something about which historians have kept quiet.

Women were at the heart of three events that shaped the early expressions of Afrikaner nationalism. The first was the uprising in 1880-81 of the Transvaal Afrikaners against the British occupation, leading to a crushing British defeat at Majuba and their withdrawal from the Highveld. Olive Schreiner wrote in the early 1890s:

The Transvaal War of 1881 was largely a woman’s war; it was from the armchair beside the coffee table that the voice went out for conflict and no surrender. Even in the [Cape] Colony at the distance of many hundred miles Boer women urged 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.

She added that it was the Boer woman “who still today [the 1890s] has a determining influence on peace or war”.[42]

This turned out to be a remarkably prescient comment. After some disastrous defeats in the second phase of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) the Transvaal burghers by June 1900 were ready to surrender. Two forces prevented it: the Free State burghers under President MT Steyn and the Boer women in the two republics. The great suffering and privation that they were prepared to endure baffled men, both Boer and British. They hid in mountains, forests or reed-overgrown rivers, or wandered across the land in so-called vrouwen laagers, all to avoid capture and being sent to concentration camps. They were also, with few exceptions, determined that their husbands and sons had to continue fighting, even to the death. Setting their houses on fire did not cow them. Some candidly declared that they preferred their houses to burn down than to see their husbands surrender. A British officer noted after two months of farm burning that, without exception, the women said that they would not give in.

Women scorned men who gave up the fight. After the British had overrun the Free State in mid-1900, a Boer woman noted: “[We] think the men should be on commando instead of meekly giving up their arms to, and getting passes from, the English.” [43] In one camp the British authorities considered separating Hendsoppers (Boers who had surrendered) and women, because of the bitter reproaches of the women. In another camp a Hendsopper wrote of being “unmercifully persecuted by the anti-British sex”.[44] In Cape Town the historian GM Theal issued this warning: “The women are the fiercest advocates of war to the bitter end … For independence the Boer women will send husbands and son after son to fight to the last.”[45] JR MacDonald, a British visitor, concluded after the war: “It was the vrouw who kept the war going on so long. It was in her heart that patriotism flamed into an all-consuming heat. She it is who returns, forgiving nothing and forgetting nothing.” [46]

Defeat in war also made women cling to their culture. Indignation about British war methods prompted a Bloemfontein woman to wonder aloud whether she should continue letting her children speak English. Reflecting on what separated her from the English, another Free State woman came up with an answer: republicanism, history, the taal (language) and “hatred of the [British] race”.[47]

Despite the shattering defeat, the Bittereinder stage of the war had changed the course of South African history. At stake were the political character and reputation of the Boer people, their republican commitment, and their willingness to pay the highest price for their freedom. In the early stages of the war Milner had remarked that the Boers loved their property more than they hated the British and would never fight for a political system. It was the valour of the Bittereinders and above all the grim determination of the Afrikaner women to persevere until the bitter end that won the Boers universal respect as freedom fighters. Smuts, and also the British commander General Kitchener, observed that this stand had made a vital difference. It meant, as Smuts pointed out, that “every child to be born in South Africa was to have a proud self-respect and a more erect carriage before the nations of the world.”[48] The Women’s Monument erected outside Bloemfontein is virtually unique in paying tribute to the sacrifice of women in war, particularly the deaths in the concentration camps. It seems particularly inappropriate to consider the monument to be a symbol of female subservience rather than the manifestation of a deep sense of indebtedness of Boer leaders, like President MT Steyn, who took the initiative in having it erected.[49]

In the first decades of the twentieth century Afrikaners were flocking to the cities and a rapid and often traumatic process of urbanisation. In the first phase of Afrikaner settlement in the towns and cities many women in the towns were wage-earners and were often the sole providers. At the time of the unification of South Africa in 1910 the nationalist leader, JBM (Barry) Hertzog, noticed the large number of Afrikaner women in his audiences. They stood firm in “maintaining language, life, morals and traditions”. “They feel more than the men,” he remarked. Hertzog did not support the Rebellion but he thought it showed the serious strains that had emerged after unification, with the Afrikaner working class, including the women, becoming increasingly militant. After the Rebellion he said of the Afrikaner women: “Perhaps they were the greatest rebels.” He concluded with a warning: “If one ignores the voice of Afrikaner women, one would land this country in a political hell.”[50] Afrikaner women were prominent in the violent 1922 strike.

The political eclipse of Afrikaner women
But in writing the book I made a second surprising discovery. From the early 1920s to the early 1990s Afrikaner women almost disappeared from the political scene as political actors in their own right. It became one of the least assertive female communities in the Western world. In the preface I suggest an answer: the Afrikaner nationalist project of political emancipation and liberation between 1935 and approximately 1960 did not go hand in hand with the emancipation and liberation of the Afrikaner women. There were very few “public” Afrikaner women that had roles separate from those of their husbands (Tibby Visser, Gladys Steyn, ME Rothman, Johanna Raath and Mabel Jansen come to mind). Between 1933 and 1981 only five Afrikaner women were elected to Parliament.

The decline of Afrikaner women activism and the rise of a more militant and exclusivist Afrikaner nationalism did indeed occur simultaneously. But if there was a correlation - and it is not yet certain that there was - there is certainly no evidence to suggest that Afrikaner nationalism caused Afrikaner women, who had held such a strong position in the pre-industrial household, to accept the almost complete domination of men in all political, economic and social issues and institutions in both urban and national life.

We can identify three forces that undermined the position of women.

The first is the gender definition of civic rights that was there from the beginning of the Cape settlement. The Company instructed teachers to produce “decently educated burghers”[51] and only men were considered burghers. In line with the position in England only women were excluded from the vote in the liberal Cape constitution of 1853. Also during the early 1850s the Republic of the Orange Free State restricted the franchise to burghers and the South African Republic limited it to white men. By the end of the century it had become an article of faith among most white politicians that women were totally unfit for the franchise. Paul Kruger never thought for a moment of enfranchising the Boer women and thus creating a huge electoral majority, which would have been a masterstroke against the war games of Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner. In 1898 laughter greeted a suggestion in the Cape Parliament that women be allowed to vote.[52] As late as 1909 the leading liberal John X Merriman made what the historian Leonard Thompson calls “a characteristic assertion” that women were quite unfit to exercise the vote”.[53]

In the second half of the nineteenth century Victorian attitudes towards the role of women pervaded gender relations and education policy in the Cape Colony. As an author noted, there was no fanaticism so secure as the belief that “the real vocation of all girls was marriage and looking after children; that of all boys working in employment with a career leading to advancement and responsibility, and providing for dependent women.”[54]

In a recent study, The Victorian House: Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed, Judith Flanders writes that the wife’s mission, apart from monitoring the servants and making useless beaded objects, was to ensure that her husband was untroubled by domestic matters. It quotes the heroine of a popular novel who gradually understands that “the pinnacle of womanhood is the renunciation of the use of her intelligence.” An American lady wrote home from Victorian London: “I have spoken with becoming infrequency, and chiefly about the Zoo. I find the Zoo is almost certain to be received with approval.”[55]

These attitudes pervaded the Cape, and in particular the Cape educational system in which Victorian gentlemen predominated. In 1926 the Afrikaans writer MER, who was born in 1875, gave a speech in which she argued that there was a clear difference between the British and American female teachers sent out to teach in South Africa. The former did not believe in top quality education for girls; the latter did.[56] More research is needed into white education but it seems as if the Victorian approach to the education of girls prevailed in the twentieth century.

The position of the Afrikaner woman was undermined on two sides, that of the large impoverished section and that of the very small middle class.

To take the poor first: Continuous expansion of the stock farming frontier for close on two centuries ended in the 1880s and 1890s. Over the next 50 years bywoners (tenant farmers) and inefficient farmers were steadily squeezed out. Desperately poor Afrikaners with only a modicum of formal education arrived in the towns and cities. Urban and rural white poverty, which was predominantly Afrikaner poverty, was the most pressing problem of the white supremacist state during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

On the basis of research done in the late 1920s the Carnegie Commission concluded in 1932 that out of a million Afrikaners more than 300 000 lived below a pauper’s level and an equal number were poor but lived above a pauper’s level. The Depression of the early 1930s made matters worse. As late as 1945 a report of the Social and Economic Planning Council found that 45 per cent of the total farming population had cash earnings of less than £100 a year and of these about half earned under £50.[57]

Behind the myth of Afrikaner solidarity there is a story of class divisions and class exploitation in Afrikaner ranks that has not yet been told. The accounts of the redoubtable ES (Solly) Sachs provides a first draft. He successfully built up the Garment Workers Union (GWU) as a union primarily of Afrikaner and coloured women in the textile and clothing industries on the Witwatersrand. By the mid-1930s the industry employed nearly 17 000 white women, the overwhelming majority of them Afrikaners, and some 3 000 coloured women. A crisis in gender relations formed part of the crisis in urban Afrikaner society. Married Afrikaner women typically contributed 20 to 40 per cent of the household income of urban Afrikaner families.[58] In many households a woman was the sole breadwinner, challenging the authority of fathers and husbands. There also was a challenge to forms of exploitation within white society. The GWU leadership invoked a host of images: the struggling bywoner on a farm, the tenant farmer in debt to the landlord, the backward woodcutter, the impoverished Afrikaner girl in a racially mixed slum, and the mother trying to hold a family together on starvation wages.

Sachs observes that “many of the wealthier farmers would not employ their poorer brethren as workers; they preferred docile labour of Africans and coloureds.” There was a constant flow of Afrikaners 15 to 25 years old to the offices of Sachs’s union in Johannesburg. Many of them could find accommodation only in Vrededorp in “filth and squalor hardly equalled by the worst slums in the world”.[59]

Sachs’s remarks about the Afrikaner women who became garment workers are significant:

The women had not come to the city for adventure and romance but to earn money for themselves and to help their parents …They were used to being treated as inferiors by the men folk on the land … and this proved of great help to them in adjusting themselves to their new life. They assumed no superior airs as members of a master race or as the daughters of landowners. They were sensible, practical and free from any illusions, desperately anxious to find jobs quickly, to learn their trade and to earn money. There was no groaning and moaning, and they bore their endless troubles with patience and good cheer.[60]

The two main contenders for the political support of the Afrikaner working class women were Sachs, with his socialist appeal, and the Afrikaner nationalists, who tried to encapsulate the Afrikaner workers in ethnic institutions. Sachs was scathing in his criticism of the failure of Afrikaner politicians to address the concerns of the Afrikaner working class women in the cities. Although allowance has to be made for his animus towards his bitter enemies, his comments on the nationalist politicians are not unfounded. The NP was prepared to offer some protection to white workers as whites but was hostile towards “workerist” demands for an improvement of wages and working conditions. It spent, as Sachs observes, millions on subsidies for farmers, but nothing on hostels or other suitable accommodation for young workers in the city. There was, Sachs wrote, “no social insurance of any kind and when the women became unemployed they starved”. He denounced the hypocritical male glorification of the woman’s honour in the classic Victorian mould:

South Africa’s politicians are in the habit of paying lavish compliments to the women, whose courage and virtue they consistently extol … But these high-minded chivalrous gentlemen, these saviours of white civilization, who showed so much concern for the honour of white women did not display the slightest interests in the terrible plight of thousands of white “sisters” and daughters, who toiled for a mere pittance, lived in abysmal poverty and often went hungry.[61]

Middle-class women became involved in Afrikaner welfare organisations, which concentrated on the Afrikaner poor, incorporating them socially into the ranks of “respectable” white society and politically into the Afrikaner nationalist movement. By 1930 white poverty was predominantly perceived as an urban problem, and as such was much more visible. Afrikaner women’s welfare organisations increasingly made the plight of the urban white poor an issue of public concern. These women’s organisations were established in the wake of widespread poverty and suffering in the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer War: the Afrikaanse Christelike Vrouevereniging (ACVV) in the Cape, the Oranje Vrouevereniging (OVV) in the OFS, and the Suid-Afrikaanse Vrouefederasie (SAVF) in the Transvaal. Some redoubtable women, of whom Miems Rothman, who wrote under the name MER, was the most outstanding, led the ACVV, the largest and best organised. The organisation was as much concerned about white poverty as about racial mixing and the exploitation and oppression of women.

The construction of apartheid
Fearing that the white poor in the mixed slums would be lost to the volk, the ACVV sought to persuade Afrikaner families to move out. Rothman described the situation in 1925 in these words:

Receiving inadequate wages and forced to rent the cheapest rooms or houses, poor [white] people often have to live with coloreds ... they sometimes chat like neighbors, they help each other when there is illness (it is especially the coloreds that help the whites), their children play together in the streets.

The ACVV tried to “rescue” the children by placing them in institutions or as domestic workers with middle-class Afrikaner families. For Rothman the survival of the Afrikaner volk depended on its working class becoming consciously white and consciously Afrikaner.[63]

The United Party government was already greatly stepping up its efforts to provide relief and assistance, but Malan’s NP argued that the state could do even more. By the mid-1930s the Afrikaners had come to speak generally of “our poor”. One of the few to express doubts about this was the writer MER. In her column in Die Burger MER asked pointedly: “Are we not going astray if we think of the welfare of the Afrikaner or of the white population as our only task?” [64]

By the early 1930s racially integrated slums were a dominant feature of all the major towns. Over the next two decades the white elite across party divisions increasingly felt that this omelet had to be unscrambled. It was not the NP but the United Party that took the initiative through the Slums Act of 1934, which made it possible to expropriate whole areas. Using the law, the Johannesburg City Council and other local authorities began removing all slum dwellers.[65] They re-housed whites, but settled blacks in new townships at a distance. In Cape Town new coloured townships were established. But there was still no legislation prohibiting coloureds or blacks in the Cape Province from living where they wanted to.

Together with the Dutch Reformed ministers, the ACVV pushed strongly for legislation to buttress the position of the white poor as part of white labour aristocracy. Delegations to the Smuts government asked for population registration, segregated suburbs that included driving the coloureds out of “white suburbs”, and a ban on all sexual relations between white and coloured people.

Conclusion
The role of Afrikaner women, backed by a legal position that was stronger than anywhere else in the European colonies, was of fundamental importance in forging a racially exclusive Afrikaner people. After the 1730s this community rarely allowed people of colour outside Cape Town into the core family and the church. Anything that could threaten this was considered a major threat to the system of paternalism that underpinned master-slave relations in the rural Western Cape and master-servant relations in the deeper interior. The British government’s intervention in and ultimate abolition of any form of coerced labour upset nobody more than the Afrikaner women. The loss of paternalist control over labour as a result of this was in all probability a much more important cause of the Great Trek than is normally assumed. It also explains the women’s encouragement of a war to the bitter end in the South African War of 1899-1902. In the twentieth century the position of autonomy that Afrikaner women had enjoyed in the pre-industrial period suffered a precipitous decline, but there is little doubt that the National Party under Dr DF Malan took very seriously the demands of Afrikaner women’s organisations for racially exclusive white suburbs and a ban on interracial sex

Between the seventeenth century and the late twentieth century Afrikaner women declined from a point where they had held possibly the strongest position of all women in the Western world to one where they were subjected to pervasive discrimination and had become politically much less assertive than African women in their own country. (There is the story of Prof Erica Theron who posed this question after Prof HB Thom, Rector of the University of Stellenbosch, had announced new salary scales in the University Senate: “Do they apply to men as well?”) What accounted for this?

Olive Schreiner offered an answer. She once spoke to a remarkable African woman who was suffering pervasive disabilities under the condition of polygamy and subjection and was very bitter about it. Yet she blamed no individual man and did not intend to revolt; instead she displayed “a majestic acceptance of life and conditions of her race being what they were”. Schreiner concluded that women of no race or class will ever rise in a revolutionary attempt to readjust their position “while the welfare and persistence of their society requires their submission”. That ends when changing conditions of that society make “women’s acquiescence no longer necessary or desirable”[66]

Let me end with a suggestion: Afrikaner women acquiesced in the twentieth century because they subordinated the cause of female liberation to the dictates of the Afrikaner nationalist movement committed to the social and economic emancipation of the Afrikaners, conquering the state and consolidating white supremacy. Now that white supremacy is over and Afrikaner nationalism has disintegrated the acquiescence of women is no longer required. There is no single reason left why irrational male claims and demands should be countenanced. When the Afrikaner men in the 1990s gave up power they unwittingly gave up more power than they had ever contemplated. And that includes the power in the bosom of the family.

Endnotes:

[1] AH van Wyk, The power to dispose of assets of the universal matrimonial community of property: a study in South African law with excursions on the laws of Brazil and the Netherlands, doctoral diss, Leiden University, 1976, pp110, 195-213, 262.
[2] Edmund Morgan, “Subject woman”, New York Review of Books, 31 October 1996, p 67. Morgan discusses here the following books: Carol Berkin, First Generation: Women in Colonial America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) and Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American society (New York: Knopf, 1996).
[3] Karel Schoeman, Armosyn van die Kaap: Voorspel tot Vestiging, 1415-1651 (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1999), pp 251-54.
[4]Nigel Penn, Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth-Century Cape Characters (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), chapter 1.
[5] John Mason. “Fit for freedom”: The Slaves, Slavery and Emancipation in the Cape Colony, South Africa, doctoral diss, Yale University, 1992, p 215.
[6] GD Scholtz, Die ontwikkeling van die politieke denke van die Afrikaner (Johannesburg: Voortrekkerpers, 1967), vol 1, p 241.
[7] Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1956), p 349.
[8] OF Mentzel, A Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town: VRS, 1944), vol 3, p 115.
[9] Mentzel, Description, vol2, pp109-10.
[10] Leonard Guelke, “The Anatomy of a Colonial Settler Population, 1657-1750”, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 21, 3 (1988), pp 462-63.
[11] For a further five per cent of the sample, one of the grandparents was of unknown (and possibly European) descent. The sample of 1 063 consisted of children whose descendants can be traced to the present and are now designated as white. See GFC de Bruyn, “Die Samestelling van die Afrikaner”, Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe, XV1 (1976) and personal communication; JA Heese, Die Herkoms van die Afrikaner, 1657-1867 (Cape Town 1971) and personal communication.
[12] Mentzel, Description of the Cape, vol 3, pp 58, 103, 112-13, 120.
[13] Mentzel, Description of the Cape, vol 3, p120.
[14] Mentzel, Description, vol 3, p 120.
[15] GC de Wet (ed) Resolusies van die Politieke Raad vol 10: 1740-43 (Pretoria: Staatsdrukker, 1984), p 226. Also cited in De Gereformeerde Kerkbode 1854, vol 11, p 169.
[16] H Lichtenstein, Travels in South Africa, 1803-1805 (Cape Town: VRS, 1928), vol 1, p 116.
[17] AW Biewenga, Die Kaap de Goede Hoop, een Nederlandse Vestigingskolonie, 1680-1730, doctoral diss, Vrije Universiteit, 1998.
[18] PB Borcherds, An Autobiographical Memoir (Cape Town: African Connoisseurs Press, 1861, 1963), pp196-97.
[19] Olive Schreiner, Thoughts on South Africa (London, 1923, reprint: Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1992), p175.
[20] Schreiner, Thoughts on South Africa, p 175.
[21] I have drawn this from Olive Schreiner’s 1890 essay “The Boer Women and the Modern Woman’s Question”, Thoughts on South Africa, pp168-193.
[22] University Library, Stellenbosch, Manuscripts Division, MER Collection, Speech to Women’s Enfranchisement League, 1926.
[23] PJ van der Merwe, The Migrant Farmer in the History of the Cape Colony, 1657-1842 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), p 166.
[24] Robert Shell, “The Family and Slavery at the Cape, 1680-1808” in Wilmot James and Mary Simons (eds), The Angry Divide: Social and Economic History of the Western Cape (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989), p 24.
[25] Stanley Trapido, “Household Prayers, Paternalism and the Fostering of a Settler Identity”, paper presented at LSE, London, 8 December 2000.
[26] Lichtenstein, Travels, vol 2, p 23.
[27] Anonymous [WW Bird], State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822 (London: John Murray, 1823), p 74.
[28] Robert Shell, “Tender Ties: The Women of the Cape Slave Society”, Societies of Southern Africa, papers presented at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, vol 17 (1992), p 14.
[29] See particularly the two studies Robert Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1994) and Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family?: Gender, Labour and Sexuality in the Western Cape, South Africa, doctoral diss, University of Wisconsin, 1993.
[30] Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan. Roll: The World the Slaves Made (London: Andre Deutsch, 1974), p 364.
[31] Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p 363.
[32] Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1983), p 30.
[33] Anders Sparrman, A Voyage to the Cape of Good Hope, 1772-1776 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1973), pp 73,102.
[34] André du Toit and Hermann Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought, vol 1: 1780-1850 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), p 67.
[35] André du Toit and Hermann Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought, vol 1: 1780-1850 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), p 67.
[36] CFJ Muller, Die Oorsprong van die Groot Trek (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1974), p 371.
[37] Visagie, Die Katriviernedersetting, p 323.
[38] EA Walker, A History of Southern Africa (London: Longmans Green, 1957), p 200.
[39] Muller, Oorsprong, p 205.
[40] ’n Paar Samewerkers, Die Dagboek van Anna Steenkamp (Pietermaritzburg: Natalse Pers, 1937), p 47.
[41] This section on the meeting in Pietermaritzburg is based on Karel Schoeman, Die wêreld van Susanna Smit, 1799-1863 (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1995), pp 112-59.
[42] Schreiner, Thoughts on South Africa, p 176.
[43] M Marquard, Letters from a Boer parsonage (Cape Town: Purnell, 1967), p 78.
[44] AM Grundlingh, Die ‘Hendsoppers’ en ‘Joiners’: die rasionaal en verskynsel van verraad (Pretoria: HAUM, 1979), p 142.
[45] AM Grundlingh, Die ‘Hendsoppers’ en ‘Joiners’: die rasionaal en verskynsel van verraad (Pretoria: HAUM, 1979), p 142.
[46] JR MacDonald, What I Saw in South Africa (London: The Echo, 1902), p 24.
[47] AM Grundlingh, Die ‘Hendsoppers’ en ‘Joiners’: die rasionaal en verskynsel van verraad (Pretoria: HAUM, 1979), p 142.
[48] GD Scholtz, Die Ontwikkeling van die Politieke Denke van die Afrikaner (Johannesburg: Perskor, 1978), vol 5, p 101.
[49] Albert Grundlingh, “The National Women’s Movement”, Greg Cuthbertson et al (eds), Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race and Identity in the South African War (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), pp 22-25.
[50] A.M. Grundlingh, Die ‘Hendsoppers’ en ‘Joiners’: die rasionaal en verskynsel van verraad (Pretoria: HAUM, 1979), p 142.
[51] WH Rabe, Die Opvoeding van Dogters, Masters diss, University of Stellenbosch, 1945, p 7.
[52] JL McCracken, The Cape Parliament, 1854-1910 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p 29.
[53] LM Thompson, The Unification of South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), p 344.
[54] Eileen M Byrne, Women and Education (London: Tavistock, 1978), p 56.
[55] I have drawn this from a review in The Economist, August 23-29, 2003, p 64. The Victorian House is published by HarperCollins.
[56] University of Stellenbosch Library, Manuscripts Collection, ME Rothman Papers, Speech given to Women’s Enfranchisement League, 1926.
[57] ES Sachs, Rebels’ Daughters (London: MacGibbon, 1957), p 38.
[58] ES Sachs, Rebels’ Daughters (London: MacGibbon, 1957), p 38.
[59] Sachs, Rebels’ Daughters, p 33.
[60] Sachs, Rebels’ Daughters, p 36.
[61] Sachs, Rebels’ Daughters, p 38.
[62] Lou-Marie Kruger, Gender, community and identity: Women and Afrikaner nationalism in the volksmoeder discourse of Die Boerevrou, 1919-1931, MA diss, UCT, 1991, pp 9-15.
[63] Marijke du Toit, A Social History of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging, doctoral diss, UCT, 1992, pp 242, 356.
[64] Marijke du Toit, A Social History of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging, doctoral diss, UCT, 1992, pp 242, 356.
[65] Marijke du Toit, A Social History of the Afrikaanse Christelike Vroue Vereniging, doctoral diss, UCT, 1992, pp 242, 356.
[66] Olive Schreiner, Women and Labour, pp 13-14.

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