Books by Gerald Groenewald
N.Worden and G.Groenewald (eds) Trials of slavery: selected documents concerning slaves from the criminal records of the Council of Justice of the Cape of Good Hope, 1705-1794 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society), 2005
South African Historical Journal 62, 3, 2010
This special issue of the South African Historical Journal reflects on the state of the field of ... more This special issue of the South African Historical Journal reflects on the state of the field of pre-industrial history at the Cape of Good Hope. It is an opportunity to look back on the previous decade of research, identify accomplishments, and chart future directions. We note a significant historiographical shift from research that focused broadly on colonised peoples, particularly slaves and Khoesan, to emerging literatures that give equally careful attention to colonisers. This shift moves the field toward a more complete picture of colonial society; it accompanies a present period of political uncertainty. The growing body of scholarship on early colonial history is drawing more practitioners. The resulting exploration of new topics and the revision of existing interpretations are producing robust, methodologically diverse work, especially noteworthy for its interdisciplinarity. While this work increasingly situates the Cape in broader regional and global histories, even more intentional efforts are required in order to avoid parochialism. The transition from Dutch to British rule at the Cape also requires further scrutiny. These efforts have the ability to challenge existing periodisations and lead to a re-examination of the continuities before and after the mineral revolutions.
Trials of Slavery is a first in South African historiography, a collection of 87 verbatim records... more Trials of Slavery is a first in South African historiography, a collection of 87 verbatim records of trials involving slaves at the Cape during the 18th century. The cases are drawn from the exceptionally rich archives of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), and illuminate not only the grim details of crime and punishment at the Cape in that century, but also abundantly details telling features of the lives, labours, languages and outlook of slaves and other inhabitants of the Dutch colony. Reading these case records provides glimpses of these slaves as flesh and blood people instead of as a faceless, silent mass, the object only of outsiders’ observations and enumeration. The transcriptions are printed in the original Dutch, along with an English translation and historical commentary.
Book Chapters by Gerald Groenewald
[with Jessica Murray] In: Ann R. Hawkins, Catherine S. Blackwell & E. Leigh Bonds (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Romantic Women Writers , 2022
Lady Anne Barnard is primarily known for her writing about her life in the Cape Colony. Those tex... more Lady Anne Barnard is primarily known for her writing about her life in the Cape Colony. Those texts include a vast collection of letters, diary and journal entries, and memoirs. However, her oeuvre is much more extensive, and its other elements, including her poetry and sketches, deserve greater attention. Although her most famous poem, “Auld Robin Gray”, brought her significant recognition during her lifetime, most readers today have not connected the famous Scottish poet with the prolific chronicler of life in the Cape Colony.
In her Cape life writing, she is very much an active presence in her texts and, if her power was partially restrained by her gender, she still exercised a significant amount of agency. The extent to which she feels able to express her opinions freely depends, at least to some degree, on
the type of text she is producing and on the likely imagined audience for the particular type of text. While even supposedly private writing always imagines or perhaps tentatively anticipates an audience, the writing is shaped by the varying degrees of this expectation. For instance, even
though Barnard revised some of her earlier diary entries later in her life, one would regard a diary as a more private type of writing than a journal. Different politics of representing the self necessarily come into play depending on the readership one expects. Although Barnard
attempted to exert some control over her reading audience (by, for instance, explicitly prohibiting the publication of some texts and decreeing that others were exclusively for the eyes of family and dear friends), she was savvy enough to know that these efforts offered no guarantees. While we thus do, and should, read dairies and journals differently, we cannot assume that the former offer any direct insight into Lady Anne’s thoughts. They all provide specific authorial versions of the self that have been constructed, albeit with different levels of care
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, ed. Thomas Spear, 2020
In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a maritime service station in Table Bay on the sout... more In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a maritime service station in Table Bay on the southwestern coast of Africa for its fleets to and from the East Indies. Within a few years, this outpost developed into a fully-fledged settler colony with a free-burgher population who made an existence as grain, wine, and livestock farmers in the interior, or engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Cape Town, the largest settlement in the colony. The corollary of this development was the subjugation of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San inhabitants of the region, and the importation and use of a relatively large slave labor force in the agrarian and urban economies. The colony continued to expand throughout the 18th century due to continued immigration from Europe and the rapid growth of the settler population through natural increase. During that century, about one-third of the colony's population lived in Cape Town, a cosmopolitan harbor city with a large transient, and overwhelmingly male, population which remained connected with both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The unique society and culture that developed at the Cape was influenced by both these worlds. Although in many ways, the managerial superstructure of the Cape was similar to that of a Dutch city, the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of its population meant that a variety of identities and cultures co-existed alongside each other and found expression in a variety of public forms.
In: Penny Russell & Nigel Worden (eds.), Honourable Intentions?: Violence and Virtue in Australian and Cape Colonies, c. 1750-1850, 2016
The chapter opens with an introductory section discussing the various opinions of 17th and 18th c... more The chapter opens with an introductory section discussing the various opinions of 17th and 18th century Dutch legal authorities on the different types of honour for women and men, and the ways in which its loss could be compensated. This leads me to the central question of the paper: how were the customs, manners and laws inherited from the Dutch Republic changed and adapted in a different socio-economic context, in particular a colonial situation marked by huge differences in power between the free and unfree, and by the formation of new identities and status groups, increasingly marked by an awareness of race? How did men and women of European descent at the Cape view their own honour with regards to sexual morals, how did others view their actions, and how did these attitudes change over time in a setting which became socially and politically more complex?
The first section deals with the ways in which women viewed and defended their sexual honour and does so through the lens of breach of promise cases, especially ones which involved pre-marital births. Whereas in the Dutch Republic a whole repertoire of informal actions existed through which women could restore their honour, at the Cape they mostly turned to the courts (either the matrimonial or the civil court). In these cases they often produced testimonies of their honourable conduct, revealing their own perception of themselves and that of the community. Interestingly, in most cases the woman herself brought the action, and not her father, indicating the importance of personal honour in sexual matters. In cases where the men in question could not be convinced to honour their promise of marriage, the women’s loss of honour was ‘amended’ through monetary awards.
The second section investigates how the sexual behaviour of colonist men affected their perceived status in society. I do so by focusing on cases of divorce on the basis of adultery involving slave women. Roman-Dutch law considered sex with any person except one’s spouse adultery, and did not allow a difference in status to affect the crime (unlike Roman and Germanic law where sex with a slave did not constitute adultery). This may be the case in law, but was more social opprobrium at the Cape attached to colonist men who cheated on their wives with slave and Khoi women? I discuss these issues with relation to cases from the 1760s-1780s which caused much stir. I demonstrate that these seemingly private affairs impacted on the public standing of prominent men who could be ruined and stripped of their public honour through their private misconduct in a society which was becoming more and more aware of social and racial status differentiation.
The third section picks up on the issue of how the public censure of private morality changed over time and increasingly started to involve race. Here I discuss the treatment of children born out of wedlock by the Dutch Reformed Church, in particular their admittance to the sacrament of baptism. Whereas for most of the Dutch period, the Church had no qualms about admitting such children, this started to change significantly in the 1780-90s when the morality of unmarried mothers was being questioned and sometimes publicly censured. This change was the result of the impact of pietist and Enlightenment ideas about the behaviour of ‘a good mother’ at the Cape, within the context of a rapidly changing society during the Revolutionary wars. The fact that this moral regulation was aimed at mostly working class women, often of mixed race, paved the way for the more familiar public discussion and concern over morality of the nineteenth century.
D'Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard & William O'Reilly (eds), The Atlantic World, 2014
Why is Southern Africa so rarely covered in volumes on the Atlantic World? Although, in the wake ... more Why is Southern Africa so rarely covered in volumes on the Atlantic World? Although, in the wake of the Second World War, some pioneer historians and advocates of a unified analysis of the four continents bordering the Atlantic considered southern Africa to be part of this ‘community’, this was not borne out in the subsequent developments of Atlantic history which has been little concerned with the deep southern part of the ocean. Thus, a major new synthesis such as Thomas Benjamin’s “The Atlantic World” contains no discussion of Africa south of Angola and hardly mentions the Cape of Good Hope. This state of affairs is partly related to the fact that early practitioners of Atlantic history viewed the ocean as ‘a basin around which a new civilization slowly formed’. But this basin was not completely bounded or closed-off: the original purpose for crossing the Atlantic was to connect Europe with the East Indies, and this the passage around the Cape of Good Hope in the south Atlantic continued to provide throughout the period covered by this volume (1450-1850), as is increasingly being acknowledged. But perhaps the main reason for this state of affairs in the historiography of the Atlantic is the result of the isolation of South African historians until the 1980s and their own inward-looking habits and practices. For a long time historians of the colonial Cape tended to look to the hinterland and the interior of Africa, forgetting that the inhabitants of the Cape during this period were mostly ocean-oriented. This is what will be described in this chapter, which also affords one the opportunity to rethink the traditionally conceived notion of the Atlantic World as being bounded and closed-off. Serving as it did as a pivot between two oceans; the existence of a colonial society at the Cape of Good Hope made possible the development of a globalised, unified oceanic world by the nineteenth century.
W.A.M. Carstens & N. Bosman (eds), Kontemporêre Afrikaanse Taalkunde, 2014
"The origins and establishment of Afrikaans"
Nigel Worden (ed.), Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town, 2012
Adrien Delmas & Nigel Penn (eds), Written Culture in a Colonial Context: Africa and the Americas, 1500-1900, 2012
Robert Shell (ed.), From Diaspora to Diorama: The Slave Lodge in Cape Town, 1658 to 1828 (2nd ed.), 2009
Nigel Worden (ed.), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 2007), 2007
Journal Articles by Gerald Groenewald
Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, 77, 2, 2023
While the activities of the Dutch administration of the Cape of Good Hope between 1652 and 1795 i... more While the activities of the Dutch administration of the Cape of Good Hope between 1652 and 1795 is fulsomely recorded in the vast archive of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), ego documents or life writing, such as private diaries and letters, from ordinary inhabitants of the colony are very rare. This state of affairs hampers historians' understanding of how the population of the Cape during this era reacted to and felt about events that we know well from the viewpoint of the VOC. For this reason alone, the existence of three letters by a burgher militiaman during the contest over the Cape between Britain and the VOC authorities during June to September 1795, is significant. Although these letters have resided in the manuscript collection of the National Library of South Africa in Cape Town for half a century, they remain unknown to most historians and the general public. This article presents a translation with commentary of these letters and reveal the valuable insights a perceptive reader can glean from them, not just about the military operations of mid-1795, but also about the political, social and cultural history of the Cape at the end of the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of an ordinary citizen.
Gender Questions 11, 2, 2023
This article explores women's role in the alcohol trade in Cape Town between 1680 and 1795, parti... more This article explores women's role in the alcohol trade in Cape Town between 1680 and 1795, particularly their use of social and symbolic capital against the background of their male counterparts' activities. While these women are conspicuous due to their direct involvement in the alcohol trade, they, too, did so within a context of spousal cooperation and family involvement. Several men entered the trade because of marriage into an alcohol retail family, while in many cases, wives were heavily involved in their husbands' entrepreneurial activities. Some families were involved in this trade over several generations, mostly through the female line. This paper demonstrates that the greater social and economic freedom accorded women in the Dutch Republic during this period also occurred in the colonial space, including Cape Town.
Historia 66, 1, 2021
In August 2019, economist Johan Fourie of Stellenbosch University invited Historia to publish a ... more In August 2019, economist Johan Fourie of Stellenbosch University invited Historia to publish a “reflection piece” he had written and presented in March that year at the University of the Free State. In it he puts forward his views of what History does, what it ought to do, and how it can perhaps be done better here in (South) Africa. His central concern is with big data and digitising records. He issues a number of seemingly bold challenges and provocations to historians. A slightly edited version of that piece is reproduced below. Rather than publish it as a stand-alone piece, however, and in the spirit of respectful exchange, we are publishing four substantial engagements with several of the arguments made by Fourie. These responses are by Faeeza Ballim, Gerald Groenewald, Jennifer Upton and Tinashe Nyamunda, all of whom are experts in their respective fields and experienced in their craft. Each takes the substantive points made by Fourie seriously, and responds to them in different ways. Best read as perspectives on a complex and enduring debate amongst people who are mindful of the politics of the past as well as being critically engaged with what historians “do” in the present, they recognise the technological and methodological promises of digital histories and big data, but eloquently remind us too of their limitations and indeed their potential pitfalls. There is much more to discuss, not the least of which is the responsibility for the ownership of and access to such records in a democratic and socially just world. The authors’ information is included at the close, after a brief “Response” by Fourie.
Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 74, 2, 2020
The vicissitudes of the Griqua people in nineteenth-century South Africa have been characterised ... more The vicissitudes of the Griqua people in nineteenth-century South Africa have been characterised variously as a "tragedy" and an "injustice". Although once a significant factor in the internal politics of the country, their history is little known in modern South Africa and rarely studied by historians. Because of their peregrinations, documents about them are scattered all over the country, often in the most unexpected places. In this article, a recent discovery of a handwritten journal by Nicolaas Waterboer, the last Griqua 'kaptyn' (captain), is presented. Although historians have known that he visited Griqualand East shortly after its establishment, it is now possible to have a first-hand account by a sympathetic observer who intimately knew the people involved and their history. This is a rare opportunity to hear the voice of an African indigene describing the history of his own people and proffering his own motivations.
South African Journal of Cultural History 33, 2, 2019
Contrary to popular opinion, the recent interest in the role of slaves and
Khoikhoi in the genesi... more Contrary to popular opinion, the recent interest in the role of slaves and
Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans is not merely a reaction to current political realities. Instead, Afrikaans historical linguistics originated at the turn of the 20th century in the very debate about the contribution of slaves and Khoikhoi to the development of Afrikaans. This article traces this history, and demonstrates that considerations of the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the history of Afrikaans have formed a golden thread in debates about the origins of the language throughout the 20th century until the end of apartheid in 1994. The aims of this article are
twofold: to trace how various of the most influential Afrikaans linguists have viewed the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans, on the one side; and to investigate how and to what extent they have used external history (as opposed to the internal development of the language) in the construction of their theories, on the other side. The article demonstrates how increasingly Afrikaans linguists have come to realise how and to what an extent history determines the parameters within which linguistic proposals should be sought to trace development of Afrikaans.
Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe vol. 56, no. 4-2, Dec 2016
Afrikaans was first introduced in Namibia’s current territory by migrant Oorlam and Baster groups... more Afrikaans was first introduced in Namibia’s current territory by migrant Oorlam and Baster groups who imposed it in its Cape Dutch form as a prestige language and inter-ethnic medium of communication. The status of Afrikaans in Namibia was consolidated during the South African regime which systematically promoted it while preventing indigenous languages from spreading out of their intra-ethnic contexts of use. A linguistic consequence of independence, which Namibia gained in 1990, was that English suddenly became the country’s only official language, as well as the dominant language in education. Despite the hegemonic status that English acquired in Namibia, Afrikaans is today still popularly represented as the main lingua franca in Namibia, or at least as an important one. However, the position of Afrikaans in
urban areas could nowadays be under threat from the sustained influx of migrants from Namibia’s northern districts, including those that constitute the traditional homeland of the Ovambo, the country’s numerically dominant group, where English is better known than
Afrikaans. An indication of the pressure that Afrikaans might be subject to in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, is the demographic preponderance that the Ovambo group has locally acquired within the last three decades. Based on a qualitative survey conducted among an
ethnoracially representative sample of young Namibians, this article provides a description of the status and use of Afrikaans in contemporary Windhoek, as well as a reflection on its
potential for locally maintaining itself as a lingua franca. It generally shows that Afrikaans has to compete with English in that function, while indigenous languages are still largely restricted to intra-ethnic contexts of use. Afrikaans is clearly perceived as the lingua franca
with more “covert prestige” in that it is associated with informality and a sense of local identity. By contrast, English is generally associated with overt prestige and formal functions, and it is characteristically used as a lingua franca within groups that do not understand Afrikaans, such as among particular Ovambo migrants. It is not enough, however, to give an
account of Windhoek’s sociolinguistic profile in which English and Afrikaans are presented as the two main lingua francas without specifying which form of Afrikaans is used in which contexts as a lingua franca. Standard varieties of Afrikaans do not seem to possess enough
neutrality to function as a medium of inter-ethnic interaction as they are perceptually amalgamated with “White Afrikaans”, that is, the linguistic marker of an ethnoracial group, namely, the Afrikaners, that is still largely seen as self-insulating in the context of Windhoek. Those varieties of Afrikaans perceived as more neutral for the purpose of inter-ethnic
communication are Coloured varieties of Afrikaans, with which various Non-Coloured ethnic groups seem to identify. However, there are indications that English rather than those varieties tends to be used by Non-Whites in communication with Whites, even when Afrikaans is
notionally shared as a native language. Where Standard Afrikaans is used in inter-ethnic communication, it is mostly unilaterally by Afrikaners, as it is apparently not widely used in informal contexts outside of that group. Also relevant to a description of the uses of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in the context of Windhoek is the practice among Non-Whites of combining it with English in the form of Afrikaans-English mixed codes. As regards the long-term prospects of Afrikaans in Windhoek, the data suggest that Afrikaans in its local Coloured varieties has potential for spreading as an attribute of a local urban identity among migrant groups, as it already has done among Ovambo born in the city or in the southern districts in general, to the point that language shift might be taking place among them from Oshiwambo to combinations of Afrikaans and English.
The retail of alcohol was so central to the economy and society of the Cape of Good Hope during t... more The retail of alcohol was so central to the economy and society of the Cape of Good Hope during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it earned the nickname “tavern of two oceans”. This retail business was organised on the so-called
lease or monopoly ('pacht') system whereby a person paid the authorities for the right to sell a certain type of alcohol for a given period in a specific area. This article traces the intellectual origins of this system of alcohol retail at the Cape during the VOC era. It does so by tracing both the idea of using leases or monopolies, first in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and by investigating the ways in which various products, including alcohol, were leased off in the largest and most significant of the VOC’s colonies, Batavia, during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is demonstrated that the ways in which alcohol retail and other economic activities were organised at the Cape developed out of practices established elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch world, but that the exact nature of the system was adapted to unique local circumstances at the early Cape. As such, this comparative article serves as an illustration that developments at the Cape in such a central sphere as business practices were the product of both global and local forces and influences.
In Cape Town under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (1652-1795) free trade was severely r... more In Cape Town under the rule of the Dutch East India Company (1652-1795) free trade was severely restricted. During its founding years, the free inhabitants all shared the same socio-economic background, yet three to four generations later a stratified society had developed with a clearly identifiable elite. Partly this was the result of some burghers amassing large capital resources through utilising the possibilities afforded by the lucrative alcohol trade. A large measure of this success was due to the exploitation of an intricate network of connections built up through kinship and social capital. This article concentrates on the cultural aspects of the lives of the most successful alcohol entrepreneurs, taking a multi-generational view. If they were the financial elite of Cape Town, were they also the social and cultural ones? How did they view themselves and how were they viewed by others? In order to answer these questions the article uses Bourdieu’s concept of ‘symbolic capital’, arguing that it operated in tandem with economic and social capital. Two broad aspects of the cultural lives of wealthy alcohol traders are addressed. Firstly, the article discusses their consumption patterns and the use of material culture in showcasing their wealth such as choice of address, the use of slaves and carriages, and the display of jewellery, paintings and curtains. Secondly, it investigates to what extent these people’s status was acknowledged by others – both in concrete terms by being elected to major civic functions (especially in the burgher militia) and in symbolic terms, notably their role in formal processions through the town.
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Books by Gerald Groenewald
Book Chapters by Gerald Groenewald
In her Cape life writing, she is very much an active presence in her texts and, if her power was partially restrained by her gender, she still exercised a significant amount of agency. The extent to which she feels able to express her opinions freely depends, at least to some degree, on
the type of text she is producing and on the likely imagined audience for the particular type of text. While even supposedly private writing always imagines or perhaps tentatively anticipates an audience, the writing is shaped by the varying degrees of this expectation. For instance, even
though Barnard revised some of her earlier diary entries later in her life, one would regard a diary as a more private type of writing than a journal. Different politics of representing the self necessarily come into play depending on the readership one expects. Although Barnard
attempted to exert some control over her reading audience (by, for instance, explicitly prohibiting the publication of some texts and decreeing that others were exclusively for the eyes of family and dear friends), she was savvy enough to know that these efforts offered no guarantees. While we thus do, and should, read dairies and journals differently, we cannot assume that the former offer any direct insight into Lady Anne’s thoughts. They all provide specific authorial versions of the self that have been constructed, albeit with different levels of care
The first section deals with the ways in which women viewed and defended their sexual honour and does so through the lens of breach of promise cases, especially ones which involved pre-marital births. Whereas in the Dutch Republic a whole repertoire of informal actions existed through which women could restore their honour, at the Cape they mostly turned to the courts (either the matrimonial or the civil court). In these cases they often produced testimonies of their honourable conduct, revealing their own perception of themselves and that of the community. Interestingly, in most cases the woman herself brought the action, and not her father, indicating the importance of personal honour in sexual matters. In cases where the men in question could not be convinced to honour their promise of marriage, the women’s loss of honour was ‘amended’ through monetary awards.
The second section investigates how the sexual behaviour of colonist men affected their perceived status in society. I do so by focusing on cases of divorce on the basis of adultery involving slave women. Roman-Dutch law considered sex with any person except one’s spouse adultery, and did not allow a difference in status to affect the crime (unlike Roman and Germanic law where sex with a slave did not constitute adultery). This may be the case in law, but was more social opprobrium at the Cape attached to colonist men who cheated on their wives with slave and Khoi women? I discuss these issues with relation to cases from the 1760s-1780s which caused much stir. I demonstrate that these seemingly private affairs impacted on the public standing of prominent men who could be ruined and stripped of their public honour through their private misconduct in a society which was becoming more and more aware of social and racial status differentiation.
The third section picks up on the issue of how the public censure of private morality changed over time and increasingly started to involve race. Here I discuss the treatment of children born out of wedlock by the Dutch Reformed Church, in particular their admittance to the sacrament of baptism. Whereas for most of the Dutch period, the Church had no qualms about admitting such children, this started to change significantly in the 1780-90s when the morality of unmarried mothers was being questioned and sometimes publicly censured. This change was the result of the impact of pietist and Enlightenment ideas about the behaviour of ‘a good mother’ at the Cape, within the context of a rapidly changing society during the Revolutionary wars. The fact that this moral regulation was aimed at mostly working class women, often of mixed race, paved the way for the more familiar public discussion and concern over morality of the nineteenth century.
Journal Articles by Gerald Groenewald
Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans is not merely a reaction to current political realities. Instead, Afrikaans historical linguistics originated at the turn of the 20th century in the very debate about the contribution of slaves and Khoikhoi to the development of Afrikaans. This article traces this history, and demonstrates that considerations of the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the history of Afrikaans have formed a golden thread in debates about the origins of the language throughout the 20th century until the end of apartheid in 1994. The aims of this article are
twofold: to trace how various of the most influential Afrikaans linguists have viewed the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans, on the one side; and to investigate how and to what extent they have used external history (as opposed to the internal development of the language) in the construction of their theories, on the other side. The article demonstrates how increasingly Afrikaans linguists have come to realise how and to what an extent history determines the parameters within which linguistic proposals should be sought to trace development of Afrikaans.
urban areas could nowadays be under threat from the sustained influx of migrants from Namibia’s northern districts, including those that constitute the traditional homeland of the Ovambo, the country’s numerically dominant group, where English is better known than
Afrikaans. An indication of the pressure that Afrikaans might be subject to in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, is the demographic preponderance that the Ovambo group has locally acquired within the last three decades. Based on a qualitative survey conducted among an
ethnoracially representative sample of young Namibians, this article provides a description of the status and use of Afrikaans in contemporary Windhoek, as well as a reflection on its
potential for locally maintaining itself as a lingua franca. It generally shows that Afrikaans has to compete with English in that function, while indigenous languages are still largely restricted to intra-ethnic contexts of use. Afrikaans is clearly perceived as the lingua franca
with more “covert prestige” in that it is associated with informality and a sense of local identity. By contrast, English is generally associated with overt prestige and formal functions, and it is characteristically used as a lingua franca within groups that do not understand Afrikaans, such as among particular Ovambo migrants. It is not enough, however, to give an
account of Windhoek’s sociolinguistic profile in which English and Afrikaans are presented as the two main lingua francas without specifying which form of Afrikaans is used in which contexts as a lingua franca. Standard varieties of Afrikaans do not seem to possess enough
neutrality to function as a medium of inter-ethnic interaction as they are perceptually amalgamated with “White Afrikaans”, that is, the linguistic marker of an ethnoracial group, namely, the Afrikaners, that is still largely seen as self-insulating in the context of Windhoek. Those varieties of Afrikaans perceived as more neutral for the purpose of inter-ethnic
communication are Coloured varieties of Afrikaans, with which various Non-Coloured ethnic groups seem to identify. However, there are indications that English rather than those varieties tends to be used by Non-Whites in communication with Whites, even when Afrikaans is
notionally shared as a native language. Where Standard Afrikaans is used in inter-ethnic communication, it is mostly unilaterally by Afrikaners, as it is apparently not widely used in informal contexts outside of that group. Also relevant to a description of the uses of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in the context of Windhoek is the practice among Non-Whites of combining it with English in the form of Afrikaans-English mixed codes. As regards the long-term prospects of Afrikaans in Windhoek, the data suggest that Afrikaans in its local Coloured varieties has potential for spreading as an attribute of a local urban identity among migrant groups, as it already has done among Ovambo born in the city or in the southern districts in general, to the point that language shift might be taking place among them from Oshiwambo to combinations of Afrikaans and English.
lease or monopoly ('pacht') system whereby a person paid the authorities for the right to sell a certain type of alcohol for a given period in a specific area. This article traces the intellectual origins of this system of alcohol retail at the Cape during the VOC era. It does so by tracing both the idea of using leases or monopolies, first in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and by investigating the ways in which various products, including alcohol, were leased off in the largest and most significant of the VOC’s colonies, Batavia, during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is demonstrated that the ways in which alcohol retail and other economic activities were organised at the Cape developed out of practices established elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch world, but that the exact nature of the system was adapted to unique local circumstances at the early Cape. As such, this comparative article serves as an illustration that developments at the Cape in such a central sphere as business practices were the product of both global and local forces and influences.
In her Cape life writing, she is very much an active presence in her texts and, if her power was partially restrained by her gender, she still exercised a significant amount of agency. The extent to which she feels able to express her opinions freely depends, at least to some degree, on
the type of text she is producing and on the likely imagined audience for the particular type of text. While even supposedly private writing always imagines or perhaps tentatively anticipates an audience, the writing is shaped by the varying degrees of this expectation. For instance, even
though Barnard revised some of her earlier diary entries later in her life, one would regard a diary as a more private type of writing than a journal. Different politics of representing the self necessarily come into play depending on the readership one expects. Although Barnard
attempted to exert some control over her reading audience (by, for instance, explicitly prohibiting the publication of some texts and decreeing that others were exclusively for the eyes of family and dear friends), she was savvy enough to know that these efforts offered no guarantees. While we thus do, and should, read dairies and journals differently, we cannot assume that the former offer any direct insight into Lady Anne’s thoughts. They all provide specific authorial versions of the self that have been constructed, albeit with different levels of care
The first section deals with the ways in which women viewed and defended their sexual honour and does so through the lens of breach of promise cases, especially ones which involved pre-marital births. Whereas in the Dutch Republic a whole repertoire of informal actions existed through which women could restore their honour, at the Cape they mostly turned to the courts (either the matrimonial or the civil court). In these cases they often produced testimonies of their honourable conduct, revealing their own perception of themselves and that of the community. Interestingly, in most cases the woman herself brought the action, and not her father, indicating the importance of personal honour in sexual matters. In cases where the men in question could not be convinced to honour their promise of marriage, the women’s loss of honour was ‘amended’ through monetary awards.
The second section investigates how the sexual behaviour of colonist men affected their perceived status in society. I do so by focusing on cases of divorce on the basis of adultery involving slave women. Roman-Dutch law considered sex with any person except one’s spouse adultery, and did not allow a difference in status to affect the crime (unlike Roman and Germanic law where sex with a slave did not constitute adultery). This may be the case in law, but was more social opprobrium at the Cape attached to colonist men who cheated on their wives with slave and Khoi women? I discuss these issues with relation to cases from the 1760s-1780s which caused much stir. I demonstrate that these seemingly private affairs impacted on the public standing of prominent men who could be ruined and stripped of their public honour through their private misconduct in a society which was becoming more and more aware of social and racial status differentiation.
The third section picks up on the issue of how the public censure of private morality changed over time and increasingly started to involve race. Here I discuss the treatment of children born out of wedlock by the Dutch Reformed Church, in particular their admittance to the sacrament of baptism. Whereas for most of the Dutch period, the Church had no qualms about admitting such children, this started to change significantly in the 1780-90s when the morality of unmarried mothers was being questioned and sometimes publicly censured. This change was the result of the impact of pietist and Enlightenment ideas about the behaviour of ‘a good mother’ at the Cape, within the context of a rapidly changing society during the Revolutionary wars. The fact that this moral regulation was aimed at mostly working class women, often of mixed race, paved the way for the more familiar public discussion and concern over morality of the nineteenth century.
Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans is not merely a reaction to current political realities. Instead, Afrikaans historical linguistics originated at the turn of the 20th century in the very debate about the contribution of slaves and Khoikhoi to the development of Afrikaans. This article traces this history, and demonstrates that considerations of the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the history of Afrikaans have formed a golden thread in debates about the origins of the language throughout the 20th century until the end of apartheid in 1994. The aims of this article are
twofold: to trace how various of the most influential Afrikaans linguists have viewed the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans, on the one side; and to investigate how and to what extent they have used external history (as opposed to the internal development of the language) in the construction of their theories, on the other side. The article demonstrates how increasingly Afrikaans linguists have come to realise how and to what an extent history determines the parameters within which linguistic proposals should be sought to trace development of Afrikaans.
urban areas could nowadays be under threat from the sustained influx of migrants from Namibia’s northern districts, including those that constitute the traditional homeland of the Ovambo, the country’s numerically dominant group, where English is better known than
Afrikaans. An indication of the pressure that Afrikaans might be subject to in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, is the demographic preponderance that the Ovambo group has locally acquired within the last three decades. Based on a qualitative survey conducted among an
ethnoracially representative sample of young Namibians, this article provides a description of the status and use of Afrikaans in contemporary Windhoek, as well as a reflection on its
potential for locally maintaining itself as a lingua franca. It generally shows that Afrikaans has to compete with English in that function, while indigenous languages are still largely restricted to intra-ethnic contexts of use. Afrikaans is clearly perceived as the lingua franca
with more “covert prestige” in that it is associated with informality and a sense of local identity. By contrast, English is generally associated with overt prestige and formal functions, and it is characteristically used as a lingua franca within groups that do not understand Afrikaans, such as among particular Ovambo migrants. It is not enough, however, to give an
account of Windhoek’s sociolinguistic profile in which English and Afrikaans are presented as the two main lingua francas without specifying which form of Afrikaans is used in which contexts as a lingua franca. Standard varieties of Afrikaans do not seem to possess enough
neutrality to function as a medium of inter-ethnic interaction as they are perceptually amalgamated with “White Afrikaans”, that is, the linguistic marker of an ethnoracial group, namely, the Afrikaners, that is still largely seen as self-insulating in the context of Windhoek. Those varieties of Afrikaans perceived as more neutral for the purpose of inter-ethnic
communication are Coloured varieties of Afrikaans, with which various Non-Coloured ethnic groups seem to identify. However, there are indications that English rather than those varieties tends to be used by Non-Whites in communication with Whites, even when Afrikaans is
notionally shared as a native language. Where Standard Afrikaans is used in inter-ethnic communication, it is mostly unilaterally by Afrikaners, as it is apparently not widely used in informal contexts outside of that group. Also relevant to a description of the uses of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in the context of Windhoek is the practice among Non-Whites of combining it with English in the form of Afrikaans-English mixed codes. As regards the long-term prospects of Afrikaans in Windhoek, the data suggest that Afrikaans in its local Coloured varieties has potential for spreading as an attribute of a local urban identity among migrant groups, as it already has done among Ovambo born in the city or in the southern districts in general, to the point that language shift might be taking place among them from Oshiwambo to combinations of Afrikaans and English.
lease or monopoly ('pacht') system whereby a person paid the authorities for the right to sell a certain type of alcohol for a given period in a specific area. This article traces the intellectual origins of this system of alcohol retail at the Cape during the VOC era. It does so by tracing both the idea of using leases or monopolies, first in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and by investigating the ways in which various products, including alcohol, were leased off in the largest and most significant of the VOC’s colonies, Batavia, during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is demonstrated that the ways in which alcohol retail and other economic activities were organised at the Cape developed out of practices established elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch world, but that the exact nature of the system was adapted to unique local circumstances at the early Cape. As such, this comparative article serves as an illustration that developments at the Cape in such a central sphere as business practices were the product of both global and local forces and influences.
The first chapter treats the origins and operation of the alcohol pacht (lease) system and its contribution to the Cape economy. This is followed by a prosopographical analysis of all 198 of the alcohol pachters. Chapter three presents the biography of Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen as a vehicle with which to present the theoretical concepts attended on entrepreneurship, which are employed in the rest of the thesis. Chapter four illustrates the importance of social capital and kinship to what was still a largely immigrant society in the 1730s, while chapter five traces the changes which had occurred by the 1770s. These two chapters also demonstrate the ways in which the urban and rural elites coalesced over time. The final chapter shows to what extent the economic success of pachters was translated into other forms of power.
This study is a critical investigation of the socio-historical foundations of the Convergence Theory for the genesis of Afrikaans, as developed by Hans den Besten. It is done within the theoretical framework of the study of Creole genesis as suggested by the gradualists (John Singler, Jacques Arends and Philip Baker) and the Complementary Theory of Salikoko Mufwene. These approaches stress the use of socio-historical material. In line with this the work of historians on aspects of the early Cape society, c. 1590-1720, especially the number, distribution, origins and mutual contact between the three main groups at the Cape, viz. the Khoikhoi, slaves and European settlers, is used. Material from primary sources such as travel descriptions is also used. This historical material is used to test and nuance the Convergence Theory. It is shown that the central proposition of this theory, viz. the existence of a stable pidgin among the Khoikhoi and slaves in the period before 1713, is not tenable. Moreover, many of the details of the theory still offers a useful framework for the study of the history of Afrikaans and that the rejection of a stable pidgin does not dispute the important role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans.
The study consists of five main chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the development of Afrikaans historical linguistics and shows how two basic views developed about the role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the development of the gradualist hypotheses and Mufwene’s Complementary Theory against the background of theories of Creole genesis. The methodology, techniques and examples of the work of these theorists are stressed. Chapter 4 gives an overview of what the Convergence Theory entails and points out the problems which can be levelled against it from a socio-historical viewpoint. Chapter 5 is a detailed exposition of those historical aspects of Cape society, c. 1590-1720, that are of importance in the evaluation of the Convergence Theory. The demography of the Cape and mutual contact between the Khoikhoi, Europeans and slaves are emphasised, although other factors, such as the rise of the free-black community and the role of education, are also considered. The analysis is supported by quantitative data of historians on the number and origins of slaves (Addendum 8). Chapter 6 considers the criticisms that were levelled against the Convergence Theory in the light of the historical data presented in chapter 5. It is shown which aspects of the theory are unacceptable and which should be nuanced. Finally a short comparative perspective with two other Dutch colonies is given to show how decisive a role Khoikhoi and slaves played in the genesis of Afrikaans. Apart from quantitative data, the Addendum also contains a corpus of utterances in any form of Dutch or English by Khoikhoi and slaves in the period 1590-1720 which were noted in the course of this research project.