Robert Shell’s study, Children of Bondage: A Social History of Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838, includes a chapter on enslaved women with the ambiguous and ironic title ‘Tender Ties’. In the chapter, Shell demonstrates how the ‘choices slave and free women made and the constraints they lived under shaped the families, the households, and the psychology of the slave society of the colonized Cape’.2 The institution of slavery was driven by the economic interests of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost- Indische Compagnie, or the VOC), but was entrenched in private households and working relationships on farms. Shell argues that, while frontier and class interests were significant factors in South Africa’s racial and political philosophies, these influences were secondary manifestations of a more universal force, namely the family as the fundamental unit of subordination. The evolution of attitudes and identities between enslaved people and their masters and mistresses took place in the intimate domestic setting of the home.
Some years after Shell, novelist and historian Karel Schoeman (1939–2017) convincingly comes to the same conclusion in Armosyn van die Kaap (2001) that slavery indeed had far-reaching consequences for South Africa: ‘Habits and traditions which originated during the seventeenth century to this day encroach tragically upon relationships between races and continue to strongly influence society.’3
Armosyn
Armosyn van die Kaap consists of two parts, Voorspel tot vestiging 1415–1651 (Prelude to settlement; 1999) and Die wêreld van ’n slavin 1652–1733 (The world of an enslaved woman; 2001). The main title makes it clear that Schoeman is telling the story of slavery in such a way that emphasises the people involved, the women and men who were brought to the Cape against their will and deprived of freedom. Schoeman condenses the enormous archive about early Cape history by focusing in a personal and empathetic way on one enslaved woman named Armosyn. He also tells what he knows about many other enslaved persons, endorsing the view held by James Armstrong in his study relating to Madagascan slave lists:
[I]t is easy to lose sight of their individuality in their anonymity. Too often they are lost under the label that describes their status. Yet every slave was a human individual with a face and a name. A slave is but a slave, an abstraction, but a slave with a name becomes a man, a woman, a child. Hence lists of slave names have an essential and peculiar interest, an actualising power, that derives from their symbolic intersection with individual existence and social anonymity.4
Very few biographical facts about Armosyn are known. It is likely that she was born at the Cape in 1661, three years after slavery became institutionalised and a year before Jan van Riebeeck left the Cape. Armosyn is a highly unusual name derived from zijde, the Dutch term for a special weave of silk. According to Shell, she was a so-called Company slave, which means that her mother, whose name is not known, was probably one of the few Angolan or Guinean enslaved women brought to the Cape in 1659. Cape annals of the 1660s refer on a regular basis to extramarital relationships between white men and enslaved women and to children born out of wedlock. It is probable that Armosyn’s father was a white man called Claas, but Claas could have also been an enslaved man. While living in the Slave Lodge, Armosyn gave birth to the children of four different men: ‘Some of the children were of mixed race, implying that the fathers were white. A few of these children and their offspring became members of prominent Afrikaner families.’5 In the will she had drawn up when she was about 67 years old, Armosyn is described as ‘vrij swartin Armossijn Claasz van de Caab’, a ‘free black woman of the Cape’, indicating that she was manumitted.
Schoeman selected, combined and arranged published material in ways which enabled him to sketch as comprehensive a picture as possible of the very mixed community at the Cape where Armosyn moved around.6 With the benefit of hindsight regarding race relations in South Africa, he makes an informed effort to recall the suppressed voices of Armosyn and many others from that dark past. Schoeman uses mainly slave registers, convict rolls, inventories of estates, travelogues and letters as his sources, and at times permits himself novelistic descriptions when, for example, he tries to recall the muffled voices of household slaves in the kitchen and the shuffling of their bare feet on the cold tiles, wondering what the domestic situation would have been like on a chilly night in Groot Constantia, the old manor house of governor Simon van der Stel (1639–1712).7
In attempting to understand the development of the culture of domestic work in South Africa during the twentieth century, it is important to realise how strongly it was influenced by the institution of slavery. I will therefore briefly dwell on a few of the enslaved women whose lives Schoeman brought to the fore particularly in the second of his Armosyn books. I also pay attention to some of the European women he mentions: women who were born into the Dutch servant class but whose status changed once they got to the Cape. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were few white women, and the newcomers married almost immediately after setting foot in the new settlement; they were quickly elevated from the position of being a maid in Holland to becoming an independent housewife at the Cape, in many cases also a slave owner.
Having a white skin was the all-important key to success; race outweighed class at the Cape and would continue to do so for centuries to come. About 63 000 enslaved people were imported to the Cape and about the same number were born into slavery, but during the 150 years of VOC governance about 1 000 previously enslaved and local indigenous women married free burghers of European origin and thereby passed into the ‘master’ class, while only two manumitted men gained this status by marrying women of European origin.
Eva, Maria and Angela of Bengal, Anna Koning, Cornelia and Lijsbeth, Klein Eva
The scarcity of labour was a huge problem at the Cape. Not only fortifications but also homes and hedges needed to be built, trees felled and the ground tilled for farming. Even before 1658, when the importation of slaves began in earnest, a few efforts were made to benefit from the system of slavery which was already entrenched in colonial regions all over the world. The Rode Vos was sent to Madagascar on a slave-buying mission in April 1654, but returned empty-handed to the Cape. At the end of that year, chief merchant Frederick Verburgh was sent to the east coast of Africa, this time in the Tulp, but he managed to buy only one woman, aged about thirty, whom he called Eva. Together with her two-year-old son called Jan Bruyn, she was brought to the Cape, where, according to historian Anna Böeseken, she was ‘made available’ as a house servant to sergeant Jan van Harwaerden, whose Dutch wife had not yet joined him.8
In 1657, admiral De la Roche St André bought two ‘Arab girls’ in Abyssinia (the present Ethiopia) whom he gave to Maria van Riebeeck as a gift. Cornelia and Lijsbeth were about twelve and ten years old. At the same time, St André presented Maria van Riebeeck with a gift from the King of Antongil in Madagascar: a five-year-old girl called Klein Eva, or Little Eva.9 The original names of Cornelia, Lijsbeth and Eva are unknown. Later on, the two ‘Arab girls’ were ‘lent’ first to the widow of Frederick Verburgh, and later on to the wife of the sick-comforter Pieter van der Stael. Little Eva had the task of sweeping floors at the Fort, ‘in other words to act as cleaning lady’, as Schoeman puts it. A Cape domestic worker culture was starting to develop: brooms and floor mops belonged in black hands. According to the VOC muster-rolls, Maria van Riebeeck at this stage had three eygen or own slave women from Batavia, Mrs van der Stael also had an enslaved woman from Batavia, and the wife of the chief surgeon had a male slave. By June 1657, there were twelve enslaved people at the Cape: eight women and four men.
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