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Archiver > SOUTH-AFRICA > 2000-03 > 0954147813


From: "Ernest Bessinger" <>
Subject: Re: Early Cape Tolerance
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 11:03:33 +0200
References: <200003251446.GAA19306@bl-14.rootsweb.com> <38DD4638.C1FF2F34@clover.com.au>


This piece by Marq de Villiers may make out that there is control of races
by the church. I though see an established community (150 years after van
Riebeeck) that is starting to settle into class (or cast) systems. There is
a group (and it isn't clear if it is church/ government inspired) that
tends to feel themselfs superior (again it looks like snobism rather than
law). Question - where is all the records of the Khoi that has been
integrated or the 10% that are interacial unions?

Also in the 1790s, a more complex stratification process
was under way in Cape Town. About 10 per cent of urban
marriages crossed colour lines, usually joining white men and
the offspring of slave-white unions, and there were still
numerous incidents where religion took primacy over race -
the alchemy of Christianity converting black into white -
but they were diminishing. Rules of racial conduct were
beginning to emerge, and if the freewheeling population still
paid little attention to the rules, the preconditions for codifi-
cition were being worked out. White attitudes towards free
blacks were shifting as the class system developed; the blacks
were emerging as a proletariat. Attitudes towards the Khoik-
hoi were more complicated, since in town they were blending
into an undifferentiated kleurling population, European in
culture, urban in nature, imitative in character; here are the
seeds of the Afrikaner attitude towards "coloureds" as
"brown cousins," not very different but not similar either, an
ambiguity of perception that persists into modern times.
By the 1790s a complicated society was emerging in the
town, which was still clustered around the docks and the
governor's house within the fort. At the apex of the social
pyramid were the senior Company servants surrounding the
governor. They spoke a modified low Portuguese and also a
Dutch of an almost ostentatious refinement, considering that
many of them by this time were not Hollanders at all but had
seen brought up in company stations in the East; most aimed
to retire to estates in Java rather than to the Netherlands.
Some had built magnificent houses on the Oranjezicht slopes
of table Mountain overlooking the harbour and the Castle.
They formed a small, inbred clique, whose social arrange-
ments were intricate, decadent, a complicated pavane of
status-seeking and privilege. The Eastern influence was clear
in the Malay workmanship of the gables of the new houses,
and to some extent in the developing cuisine in which Orien-
tal spices played a significant role.
Below this class was an emerging group of substantial
merchants. On a social level with them were the wealthy
farners of the near hinterland; when Jan (de Villiers) inherited
Boschen-
dal from his father, Abraham, it was already valued at 40,000
guhters, a pretty fair sum. The rest of the urban population
consisted of the merchant class who ran the Tavern of the
Sea; - tavern-keepers, victuallers, hoteliers, brothel-keepers,
tradesmen; free burghers who for lack of training drifted into
shopkeeping; free blacks, some of them well off (some kept
slaves of their own), who made their living as craftsmen,
fishermen (even fleet-owners), middlemen, and tradesmen;
the garrison; convicts, rounders, and rogues of every descrip-
tion; and, of course, the slaves. There were also a few Asian
political exiles, some of them eminent Indonesian princes
with a hundred and more slaves, who lived out their lives
without much affecting the colony; there were two such
estates on Robben Island. A larger group of Asians came in
chains as convicts. Many of these did not live long enough to
complete their sentences. Those who did generally joined the
Cape's many rogues and trouble-makers. The law-abiding ex-
convicts were just as much trouble. The Council of Policy, as
the Company executive arm was called, demanded that they
be taken back to their place of sentence: "After their sentence
has expired they become free and remain free, competing
with the poor whites of European descent in procuring their
livelyhood, and [are] consequently very injurious to the
latter?'
In the countryside around Stellenbosch and Paarl, which
included the settled and prosperous farmers of the Draken-
Stein Valley, attitudes were much more rigid than in town.
These substantial burghers looked down on the loose living
in Cape Town; they developed a society formal in its conser-
vatism, stratified in its social relations, orthodox in its
Calvin-
ism; it was a slave-owning population that treated its
Khoikhoi retainers as people without resources of their own,
to be looked after, disciplined, educated, and controlled.
Intermarriage and sex across the colour line were increasingly
rare, possibly because the sex ratios in the white population
were more nearly equal than in other parts of the colony. The
Khoikhoi came into contact with whites only as servants; the
aspects of European culture they assimilated most rapidly
were the craft skills useful in marketing themselves as labour
- masonry, plasterwork, carpentry, weaving, and others.

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