A number of Dutch wives arrived at the Cape later than their husbands, including Petronella Joosten, Grietje Pieterz and Grietjen Willeboorts; some were accompanied by young daughters. In spite of the great demand for wives, the immigration of unmarried women did not, however, take place on any great scale. Schoeman writes that the largest group of unmarried females to arrive was the eight orphan girls sent by a Rotterdam orphanage, the Gereformeerde Burgerweeshuis. The girls arrived on 4 August 1688 aboard the Berg China. Nine months later they were all married to the sons of Stellenbosch free burghers, and the first babies were born shortly afterwards. One of these orphans was Willemijntje Ariëns de Wit, who married the German migrant Detlef Biebouw on 24 December 1688. At that stage he already had one daughter, born to the enslaved woman Diana van de Kaap. He had acknowledged the child, but ‘had no special feelings or obligations towards the mother’. According to Schoeman, this was not exceptional. As in the Dutch East Indies, it was quite acceptable for white fathers to acknowledge the children they had sired with indigenous women, and then to take them away from the mothers.21
Cross-overs and a New Language
It often happened that so-called free blacks, enslaved people who had been manumitted, in turn became slaveholders. Some also had European manservants. Interesting crossovers between race and class occurred, for example when the free black Anthonie van Angola appointed the German Hans Jes van Sleeswyk as foreman on his farm in the district of Stellenbosch in 1693. Though he appears to have paid the foreman more than the average wage,22 research has shown that most manumitted slaves and their immediate offspring were not necessarily more empathetic masters than the white free burghers.23 However, according to Shell, a quarter of the owners who manumitted their slaves during the period 1715–91 were free blacks, a numerically smaller group: ‘we must conclude that free blacks liberated their slaves many, many times more frequently than did the Europeans.’24 Manumission usually took place as a gesture of benevolence.
At the same time, a new language was developing at the Cape, the only Germanic language that originated outside of Europe. The name Afrikaans ‘locates the vernacular firmly in the colonial society and emphasizes its independence from metropolitan Dutch,’ Ana Deumert maintains.25 VOC officials forced Khoi people to quickly adapt to brutal bartering, negotiations which were conducted through interpreters such as Krotoa-Eva who had learned to speak Dutch in the household of Van Riebeeck. When enslaved people started arriving at the Cape after 1658, Malay and Portuguese – well-known languages of trade in the Indian Ocean world in which the VOC operated – were introduced, and added to the melting pot of languages at the Cape. Afrikaans developed mainly in households of the Dutch as a result of unrestrained daily contact between women, children, enslaved people and indigenous servants. Small wonder, then, that Afrikaans was initially called a ‘kitchen language’.26 Although those kitchens are often imagined as being on farms, it is important to realise that, for more than a century, most Dutch and enslaved people lived in the peri-urban area of present-day Cape Town; up until 1767, 40% of all slaves in the colony lived in the city.
An example of the important role that slaves played in the genesis of Afrikaans is the distinct way in which the word ‘ons’ (we) is used in Afrikaans.27 Long before the use of ‘ons’ instead of ‘wij’ by white people was commented on by Dutch travellers, VOC officials reporting on court cases in which enslaved people gave witness, had documented this use of ‘ons’. Besides revealing that slaves used Malay, creole Portuguese or even Bugis, the reported words of the slaves provide some of the earliest forms of the restructuring of Dutch which eventually resulted in Afrikaans. This significant early shift from Dutch was therefore first heard through the ‘voice of the slave’. Although most court statements were written up in the third person, and the original voices of slaves and other testifiers are largely muffled through the layers of transmission into the archival record, there are important records of interrogations in which answers given by the accused or witnesses were written down more precisely, thus revealing the linguistic complexity of Cape society. Those slaves who gave statements in Dutch were, of course, not using their first language. It is, however, their efforts at Dutch which are so telling. Up until the 1870s these varieties were usually referred to in a derogatory way as Kaaps(ch) Hollands(ch) or Cape Dutch.
Millions of so-called coloured South Africans are descendants of European whites and the earliest inhabitants of the Cape, the Khoi, and also of the enslaved people from countries such as Indonesia, Bengal and Madagascar. Many of their descendants are still labourers, often poor, who speak the variety of Afrikaans known as Cape Afrikaans (or Kaaps). More than 400 years after the first involuntary and sporadic steps towards a new society were taken at the Cape, Afrikaans is the third most widely-spoken language in South Africa.28 Sixty per cent of its seven million speakers are not white, but coloured, black and Indian people.
Coloured Labour
In 1672 most of the labour at the Cape was still done by whites: the 64 free burghers had 53 white servants and owned 63 enslaved men. However, during the first quarter of the eighteenth century labour patterns and relations began to change.29 According to historian Hans Heese, every white household in Cape Town had by then one to three slaves working for them, while white farmers who were married to white women had between ten to sixteen slaves on their farms. Interestingly, ‘mixed’ couples or those of ‘mixed’ ancestry had fewer slaves – probably a sign of their own lower economic status. In 1738, there were 4 602 male and 1 155 female enslaved people working in the private sector.30
Just under a century later, in 1823, the VOC issued a decree permitting baptised slaves to marry. Moreover, during winter they were not allowed to be put to work for longer than ten hours per day, and in summer for not longer than twelve hours. On Sundays they could not be forced to do any work that was not urgent. The mere fact that such rules needed to be laid down indicates that it was not evident to most that, after a week’s work, a person deserved a day’s rest. To this day, rules regarding maximum working hours and minimum wages are laid down to protect domestic workers from exploitation.
As in Batavia, many customs and rules of conduct regulated life at the Cape. Besides always going barefoot, enslaved people were forbidden to use pavements and were forced to walk in the road. Only those who could speak Dutch were allowed to wear hats. Even more indicative of their separate and inferior status were the terms slaaf (slave) and lijfeigene (serf). The word jongen (boy), referring to a white male servant or an adult enslaved man, was already in use in 1658. In the early eighteenth century, a diary entry of Adam Tas refers to his slaves both as jongens and knapen (lads). From very early on, it became customary to call all slaves, irrespective of their age, jongens and meiden – boys and girls.31 These modes of address would become entrenched in Afrikaans, and were in use up to the late twentieth century. In her short story ‘Amos en Tabita’ (1955), Elisabeth Eybers, for example, refers to Amos as the tuinjong, the garden boy – a term still used by many English-speaking South Africans, regardless of whether the gardener is 18 or 70 years old. In Domestic Workers: A Handbook for Housewives (1973), Sue Gordon deemed it necessary to stress the importance of acknowledging the adulthood of domestic workers and refraining from derogatory usage such as ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ instead of ‘domestic worker’ and ‘gardener’.32
In JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), the black farmer Petrus signals the divide between skilled and unskilled work when he says, ‘For digging you just have to be a boy’ – that is, a black labourer. The reader is informed that ‘Petrus speaks the word with real amusement. Once he was a boy, now he is no longer. Now he can play at being one, as Marie Antoinette could play at being a milkmaid.’ (152)
As in other Dutch colonies, it was