The making of a colonial elite: Property, family and landed stability in the Cape Colony, c.1750-1834

Journal of Southern African Studies

Volumn 31, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 147-162

  Dooling, Wayne ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COLONIALISM; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; LANDOWNERSHIP; SLAVE; SOCIAL STATUS;

AFRICA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; SOUTH AFRICA; SOUTHERN AFRICA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WORLD;

EID: 17444411952     PISSN: 03057070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/03057070500035802     Document Type: Review

References (159)

1. Knechten were Company servants temporarily hired out to free burghers. 'No employer expects such a man to do any work for himself, Mentzel noted. 'He only supervises all the work and sees that the slaves perform their tasks in the field and elsewhere properly and at the right time'. O. F. Mentzel, A Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape of Good Hope, 3 volumes (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, and 1925), III, p. 98.
2. I b i d.
3. Proximity to Cape Town allowed these settlers to 'conveniently turn everything into money and obtain everything they want for their money'. Ibid p. 101.
4. Ibid., pp. 101-102.
5. Ibid., p. 106.
6. Ibid., p. 110.
7. The key works in this regard are: N. Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985).
8. R. Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the History of Colonial South Africa (Hanover, N.H., and London, Wesleyan University Press, 1993).
9. R. Elphick and H. Giliomee (eds), The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840 (Cape Town, Maskew Miller Longman, 1989).
10. R. C.-H. Shell, Children Of Bondage: A Social History of Slave Society at The Cape Of Good Hope, 1652-1838 (Hanover, Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
11. S. Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Eastern Cape Frontier 1760-1803 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).
12. R. Ross, 'The Rise of the Cape Gentry', Journal of Southern African Studies, 9, 2 (1983), pp. 193-217.
13. Ross, 'Cape Gentry', pp. 193, 207-208.
14. L. Guelke, 'Freehold Farmers and Frontier Settlers, 1652-1780', in Elphick and Giliomee (eds), Shaping, p. 84.
15. Ibid..
16. L. Guelke and R. C.-H. Shell, 'An Early Colonial Landed Gentry: Land and Wealth in the Cape Colony (1652-1731)', Journal of Historical Geography, 9 (1983), pp. 265-286.
17. Ross, 'Cape Gentry'.
18. W. Dooling, 'The Decline of the Cape Gentry, c.1838-1900', Journal of African History, 40 (1999), pp. 215-42.
19. In this regard I have drawn much inspiration from S. Hahn, 'The "Unmaking" of the Southern Yeomanry: The Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1860-1890', in S. Hahn and J. Prude (eds), The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America (Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
20. See, for instance, G. Schutte, 'Company and Colonists at the Cape, 1652-1795', in Elphick and Giliomee (eds), Shaping, pp. 283-324.
21. C. Beyers, Die Kaapse Patriotte Gedurende die Laaste Kwart van die Achtiende Eeu en die Voortlewing van hul Denkbeeld (Pretoria, Van Schaik, 1967).
22. I am not suggesting that 'culture' and 'property' somehow inhabit distinct spheres of human existence or provide alternative explanations for specific kinds of economic/non-economic behaviour. For a highly stimulating demonstration of the way in which colonial cash crop production for a distant market was embedded within cultural concerns of ego, honour and reputation, see T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985).
23. For the intersection between identity and struggles over land in more modern times, see S. Berry, Chiefs Know their Boundaries: Essays of Property, Power and the Past in Asante. 1896-1996 (Oxford, James Currey, 2000).
24. On this see R. Ross, Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A Tragedy of Manners (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).
25. For a richly detailed account of the material life of the eighteenth-century frontier, see Newton-King, Masters and Servants esp. Chapter 8.
26. See J. Gerstner, The Thousand Generation Covenant: Dutch Reformed Covenant Theology and Group Identity in Colonial South Africa, 1652-1814 (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1991).
27. However, for the making of the world-view of a white, urban, English-speaking colonial bourgeoisie, see K. E. McKenzie, 'Gender and Honour in Middle-Class Cape Town: The Making of Colonial Identities 1828-1850' (D. Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 1997).
28. For a brief study of civil records see W. Dooling, Law and Community in a Slave Society, Stellenbosch District, South Africa, c.1760-1820 (Cape Town, Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1992), pp. 44-54.
29. Those persons sharing the same last name.
30. Rose, 'Rise of the Cape Gentry', p. 207.
31. Ibid., p. 208.
32. The South African Ministry of Land Affairs has recently made such detailed research into the history of land tenure in South Africa virtually impossible by charging all researchers (except those tied to government) the wholly unreasonable fee of R15.00 per hour for access to Deeds Offices across the country - the Republic's repository of land titles and of course the primary documentary record of colonial and apartheid-era land alienation.
33. Despite the many excellent studies on South African agriculture, it is striking how little we know, in any specific detail, about the history of land and land-ownership. One exception is C. Murray, Black Mountain: Land, Class and Power in the Eastern Orange Free State, 1880s-1980s (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1992).
34. The settler population increased steadily, from 259 (including 55 women and 117 children) in 1679, to just under 2,000 in 1717 (including 350 women), to about 5,000 in 1751, to 10,500 in 1780. Between 1720 and 1790 slave numbers rose from about 2,500 to 14,500, an average of 2.56 per cent per annum: Guelke, 'Freehold Farmers', p. 66.
35. Ross, Beyond the Pale, p. 20. At the time of slave emancipation, the Colony's slave population stood at 38,257. See Cape Archives (hereafter CA) Slave Office (hereafter SO) 3/12.
36. Guelke, 'Freehold Farmers', p. 83.
37. Cited in Worden, Slavery, p. 64.
38. Newton-King, Masters and Servants, p. 154.
39. Ibid..
40. Guelke, 'Freehold farmers', pp. 92-93.
41. CA Master of the Supreme Court, Deceased Estates (hereafter MOOC) 8/8, no. 46, Inventory in estate of J. M. Coors and J. Coetzee, 8 July 1758. The British government initially valued the Rixdollar at four British shillings, that is, 1/5 of a pound.
42. CA MOOC 8/9, no. 1, inventory in estate of J. Steenkamp and H. van Heere, 21 February 1759.
43. CA MOOC 8/10, no. 15, Inventory in estate of S. S. Walter and M. Lombaard, 8 January 1762.
44. CA MOOC 8/10, no. 38, Inventory in estate of H. van der Merwe and M. Fik, 8 December 1762.
45. February 1762.
46. CA MOOC 8/11, no. 5, Inventory in estate of J. Blignault and A. Rossouw, 18 April 1752.
47. G. Thompson, Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa (Cape Town, Van Riebeeck Society, 1967 and 1968), p. 91.
48. In the Stellenbosch district, wine production increased from 7,336 leaguers in 1814 to 16,517 leaguers in 1823, an increase of 125 per cent; in the Cape district, production increased by 350 per cent for the same period, from 372 leaguers to 1,672 leaguers. See M. Rayner, 'Wine and Slaves: The Failure of an Export Economy and the Ending of Slavery in the Cape Colony, South Africa, 1806-1834' (PhD thesis, Duke University, 1986), p. 32.
49. I b i d.
50. Ibid., p. 97.
51. Ibid., pp. 91-112.
52. Ibid., p. 196.
53. In the 1820s, 40 per cent of the 374 farms on which wine production was concentrated were mortgaged for more than half of their declared value. And 58, or 16 per cent, carried mortgages greater than the declared value of the property upon which loans had been secured: Ibid., p. 211.
54. CA Master of the Supreme Court, Insolvent Estates (hereafter MOIB) 1/19, Records in insolvent estate of Jacob Daniel de Villiers, 14 October 1831.
55. One Rixdollar was valued at three guilders.
56. CA MOIB 1/25, Records in insolvent estate of Jacobus Johannes van Reede van Oudtshoorn, 9 April 1833.
57. CA MOIB 1/21, Records in insolvent estate of Isaac Cornelis de Villiers, 18 June 1832.
58. Thompson, Travels, p. 92.
59. CA MOIB 1/19, Records in Insolvent estate of Jacob Daniel de Villiers, 14 October 1831.
60. CA MOIB 2/297, Liquidation and distribution account in insolvent estate of Hendrik Cornelis van Niekerk, 5 June 1827.
61. CA AC 6, Minutes of evidence of William Proctor before Council of Advice, 13 December 1826.
62. Rayner, 'Wine and Slaves', p. 240.
63. Records of the Cape Colony, hereafter RCC, volume 29, p. 91.
64. RCC, volume 21, p. 102.
65. CA MOIB 2/505, no. 21, Liquidation and Distribution Account in Insolvent Estate of William Proctor, 10 May 1839; CA M3 1974, Map of Malmesbury.
66. On the familial nature of credit and debt for the post-emancipation period, see Dooling, 'Decline of the Cape Gentry'.
67. CA MOIB 2/275, no. 83, Liquidation and distribution account in insolvent estate of Tobias Mostert, 10 May 1827;
68. Deeds Office, Cape Town (hereafter DO), Deed no. 76, 16 March 1785.
69. DO, Transfer Deed (hereafter TD), no. 44, 15 July 1825.
70. CA MOIB 2/195, Liquidation and distribution account in insolvent estate of Hugo Hendrik Mostert, 22 April 1825.
71. The Abolition Act passed in the British Parliament in 1833 made allowance for a sum of £20 million to be paid to slave-owners throughout the empire as compensation for their alienated property: CA SO 20/2, An Act for the abolition of slavery, 28 August 1833. A total of £1,247,000 made its way into the Cape Colony. See South African Commercial Advertiser, 4 August 1841. Slave compensation payments clearly rescued an economy that was in terminal decline, despite the predictable claims from slave-owners that payments were insufficient.
72. Fieldcornetcies were administrative wards headed by fieldcornets. Those described here were chosen for their representativeness: Mosselbanks Rivier and Moddergat were key wheat- and wine-producing fieldcornetcies closely tied to the market in Cape Town. Riviersonderend, situated in the Overberg, was considerably removed from the Cape Town market and employed predominantly Khoisan labour, whilst the Bokkeveld was at the heart of the pastoral economy on the northern frontier.
73. CA SO 20/13; CA SO 20/16, Valuations of slaves for the purpose of compensation.
74. CA SO 20/13, Compensation nos. 3753, 3765.
75. CA SO 20/13, Compensation nos. 3760, 3768, 3769.
76. CA SO 20/13, Compensation no. 3909.
77. BPP, Compensation nos. 3879, 3901. Cloete originally put in a claim for 38 slaves: CA SO 20/13, Compensation no. 3879.
78. CA CRB 129, Central Road Board (hereafter CRB).
79. DO, TD no. 175, 29 December 1842; CA SO 20/13, Compensation no. 3881. See also the estates of other large slave-owners, Tieleman Roos and Jacobus Rossouw: CA CRB 129.
80. S. Newton-King, 'In Search of Notability: The Antecedents of David van der Merwe of the Koue Bokkeveld', The Societies of Southern Africa, Collected Seminar Papers, 20 (London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1994), p. 26.
81. A. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1986);
82. E. S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, Norton, 1975).
83. Breen, Tobacco Culture, p. 34.
84. M. J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Charlottesville and London, University Press of Virginia, 1998).
85. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, pp. 85-88.
86. On the relative importance of primogeniture in the American colonies see, C. R. Keim, 'Primogeniture and Entail in Colonial Virginia', William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 25 (1968), pp. 545-568.
87. H. Brewer, 'Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: "Ancient Feudal Restraints" and Revolutionary Reform', William and Mary Quarterly 3rd series, LIV (1997), pp. 307-346.
88. G15-1865, The Commissioners appointed for the Western Districts by His Excellency the Governor, on the 9th of January, 1865, to consider and report upon the working of the Colonial Law of Inheritance.
89. Guelke, 'Freehold Farmers', p. 81.
90. Ross, Beyond the Pale, p. 141.
91. Worden, Slavery, p. 31.
92. See p. 151 above.
93. CA MOOC 13/1/3, no. 117, Liquidation and Distribution Account in estate of Jan Blignault and Anna Russouw, 8 August 1757.
94. CA MOOC 10/6, no. 50, Inventory in estate of Jan Blignault, 23-27 May 1752.
95. According to Worden, Slavery, p. 50, between 60 and 70 per cent of all slaves sold at the auctions of deceased estates were sold to 'outsiders'.
96. In 1717, by which time it had handed out about 400 freehold farms, the Company adopted the 'loan farm' system. In theory, only the opstal or fixed improvements, could be transferred; in practice, however, settlers enjoyed considerable security of tenure on loan farms and the value of opstallen 'came to include the value of the land on which they stood'. Guelke, 'Freehold Farmers', p. 79.
97. S. E. Katzenellenbogen, 'Reconstruction in the Transvaal', in P. Warwick (ed.), The South African War, the Anglo-Boer War 1899-1902 (London, Longman, 1980), p. 348, has described the form of land tenure and partible inheritance that prevailed in the nineteenth-century Transvaal as 'almost medieval'.
98. George Thompson, cited in Ross, Beyond the Pale, pp. 143-144.
99. DO, TD no. 75, 3 September 1751; TD no. 38,18 March 1757; TD no. 167,29 October 1782; TD no. 139, 1 May 1797; TD, no. 157, 14 April 1810.
100. The owners of Wolwedans were as follows: Barend Lubbe (1715-1726), Willem Stolts, free black (1726-1751), Jacobus van Aarden (1751-1757), Dirk Verwey (1757-1782), Dirk Gysbert Verwey (1782-1797), Jacobus Gideon Louw (1797-1810), Hendrik Brand, (1810-1819), Thomas Fredrik Dreyer (1819-1819), Hugo Hendrik Mostert (1819-1825), Nicolaas Everhardus Mostert (1825-1835), Christaan Lodewyk Wicht (1835-1838).
101. DO, TD no. 45, 22 March 1757; TD no. 10, 10 January 1769; TD no. 39, 8 February 1811; TD no. 42, 31 January 1812; TD no. 39, 5 May 1815.
102. DO, TD no. 71, 25 November 1763; TD no. 174, 9 October 1773; TD no. 110, 11 July 1782; TD no. 76, 16 March 1785; TD no. 103, 11 November 1825; TD no. 323, 16 December 1835.
103. DO, TD no. 68, 19 August 1751; TD no. 116, 25 June 1760, TD no. 33, 15 August 1764; TD no. 53, 14 April 1792; TD no. 86, 21 November 1796; TD no. 189, 29 December 1797; TD no. 197, 22 July 1800; TD no. 97, 28 September 1803; TD no. 102, 28 September 1803; TD no.405, 7 October 1808; TD no. 494, 19 October 1810; TD no. 135, 6 November 1812; TD no. 136, 6 November 1812; TD no. 127, 27 November 1829; TD no. 147, 2 December 1831; TD no. 131, 13 February 1835; TD no. 73, 25 July 1835.
104. See for example, W. Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 235.
105. Traditionally non-landowning classes, such as merchants, could also show similar cultural attachment to partible inheritance. See M. Lamar, '"Choosing" Partible Inheritance: Chilean Merchant Families, 1795-1825', Journal of Social History, 28, 1 (1994), pp. 125-145.
106. Published Government Papers G15-1865, Report of the Law of Inheritance Commission for the Western Districts; A7-1867, Report of the Select Committee on the Law of Inheritance Bill.
107. 'In a Republic', wrote a Bloemfontein newspaper in 1895, 'we do not see that the law of primogeniture is possible. If the old families cannot keep their land, they must go, and perhaps a stranger will possess it, and the descendants of the original owners of the land will either become farm labourers on the property, or trek to other parts'. See 'The Law of Inheritance', The Friend of the Free State and Bloemfontein Gazette, 18 January 1895;
108. and also T. Keegan, Rural Transformations in Industrializing South Africa: The Southern Highveld to 1914 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1986), p. 39.
109. Ibid..
110. It has to be borne in mind, of course, that much of the defence of partible inheritance was mere rhetoric. There is as yet no detailed historical study of testamentary practices of the landowners of the nineteenth-century Highveld, and there is some evidence that landowners did attempt to limit subdivision and practised some form of 'primogeniture': South African Papers, Cd. 1463, Milner to Chamberlain, February 1903.
111. Katzenellenbogen, 'Reconstruction in the Transvaal', p. 350.
112. Serfs provided the primary security for loans to the extent that two-thirds of serfs were mortgaged to the state on the eve of serf emancipation in 1861. Many landlords were said to enjoy a standard of living no higher than that of their serfs. See R. Manning, The Crisis of the Old Order in Russia: Gentry and Government (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 9.
113. V. Kivelson, 'The Effects of Partible Inheritance: Gentry Families and the State in Muscovy', The Russian Review, 53 (1994), p. 206;
114. V. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces: The Muscovite Gentry and Political Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 115.
115. Kivelson, Autocracy in the Provinces, pp. 4, 38-39, 47, 115.
116. Kivelson, 'Effects of Partible Inheritance', p. 206.
117. CA J188, Opgaaf of widow of Francois du Toit, Drakenstein District, 1732.
118. CA MOOC 8/7, Inventory no. 71 and no. 711/2, 24 December 1748.
119. These were buildings and improvements on fixed property and theoretically the only property that had value and could be transferred.
120. CA MOOC 8/9, Inventory no. 21, 4 August 1755; CA MOOC 8/8, Inventory no. 8 and no. 81/2, 22 May 1755.
121. So apparently did George Washington of Virginia: Rozbicki, Complete Colonial Gentleman, pp. 35-36.
122. See pp. 151, 155.
123. DO, TD no. 113, 29 August 1752.
124. CA MOOC 8/8, no. 5, Inventory in estate of J. Blignault and A. Russouw, 18 April 1752.
125. C. Pama and C. C. de Villiers, Geslagsregisters van die Ou Kaapse Families (Cape Town, A. A. Balkema, 1966).
126. See R. Ross, Cape of Torments (London, Routledge, 1983), pp. 23-24.
127. J. Hoge, 'Martin Melck', Tydskrif vir Wetenskap en Kuns, 12 (1933-34), pp. 198-209.
128. Pama and de Villiers, Geslagsregister.
129. Pama and de Villiers, Geslagsregister, III, p. 1,022.
130. DO, TD no. 140, 20 April 1726.
131. DO, TD no. 50, 31 May 1732.
132. DO, TD no. 173, 24 November 1734.
133. See p. 157 above.
134. CA MOOC 8/8, Inventory no. 8 and no. 81/2, 22 May 1755.
135. DO, TD no. 45, 22 March 1757.
136. Pama and de Villiers, Geslagsregister, I, pp. 484-485.
137. See p. 158 above.
138. DO, TD no. 10, 10 January 1769.
139. Pama and de Villiers, Geslagsregister I, pp. 1-2.
140. See note 78.
141. DO, TD no. 354, 1 November 1800.
142. CA MOOC 8/33, Inventory no. 58, 16 June 1819.
143. SO 6/92, Slave Register, Stellenbosch, folios 10, 11.
144. DO, TD no. 187, 23 November 1821.
145. CA SO 6/93, Slave Register, Stellenbosch, folio 96.
146. CA SO, 20/13, Valuation of slaves in fieldcornetcy of Mosselbanks Rivier for purpose of compensation, Claim no. 3753. Similarly, by the late eighteenth-century women were amongst the largest slave-owners in northeastern Brazil, notes S. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 290.
147. This is a point first made by Martin Hall in 'The Secret Lives of Houses: Women and Gables in the Eighteenth-Century Cape', Social Dynamics, 20 (1994), pp. 1-48.
148. See pp. 150-155 above.
149. A college of four heemraden was established in Stellenbosch district in 1682. In 1685 a landdrost was appointed to preside over the meetings of the heemraden. Landdrosts were VOC officials. For a detailed study of the workings of the Cape legal system in the VOC period, see Dooling, Law and Community.
150. Ross, 'Cape Gentry', p. 214.
151. CA CJ 75, Landdrost of Stellenbosch to Court of Justice in case of D. G. Verwey, 4 July 1793, 132ff.
152. For an elaboration of this point, see W. Dooling, '"The Good Opinion of Others": Law, Slavery and Community in The Cape Colony, c. 1760-1830', in N. Worden and C. Crais (eds), Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1994).
153. For a different interpretation of the rule of law as practised at the Cape, see R. Ross, 'The Rule of Law at the Cape of Good Hope in the Eighteenth Century', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 9 (1980), pp. 5-16.
154. Bankruptcy in the eighteenth century appears to have been rare. Mentzel, Geographical and Topographical Description, III, p. 58, claimed to have witnessed only three bankruptcies during his eight-year stay at the Cape, and these were in any case in the relatively less fertile Bottelary region. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, bankruptcy was a frequent and regular occurrence in the history of a great many farms.
155. See Dooling, 'Decline of the Cape Gentry', pp. 233-239.
156. Mentzel, Geographical and Topographical Description, II, p. 102.
157. J. Mason, 'The Slaves and their Protectors: Reforming Resistance in a Slave Society, 1826-1834', Journal of Southern African Studies, 17 (1991), pp. 104-128.
158. W. Dooling, 'Slavery and Amelioration in the Graaff-Reinet District, 1823-1830', South African Historical Journal, 27 (1992), pp. 75-94.
159. Dooling, 'Decline of the Cape Gentry'.