Krota-Eva and Sara – Khoikhoi Servants
Why was it necessary for the Dutch to import slaves at great cost from as far afield as Madagascar, Mozambique, the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and the Indonesian archipelago? Could Jan van Riebeeck not have tried to persuade – or perhaps even force – the local people to work for him? Contrary to popular representations, created for example by Charles Bell’s nineteenth-century painting of Van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape on 6 April 1652, the Khoikhoi were not a docile band of frightened natives in awe of the Dutch, but an independent and self-assured people. Moreover, they consisted of a complex network of tribes and clans. Although they wore animal hides and coveted the glass beads and brass objects which the Dutch traded for their cattle, they showed no consciousness of inferiority or subservience.11 The nomadic Khoikhoi only sporadically offered to do odd jobs in exchange for tobacco and became increasingly infuriated by the presence in the Liesbeeck valley of so-called free burghers. They were being cut off from their traditional grazing pastures and water resources and were often harshly chased away when they complained. In September 1658, a proclamation was issued forbidding Khoikhoi people from approaching the houses of anxious free burghers who also wished to put a stop to cattle theft. The Dutch realised that the Khoikhoi were becoming vrij slim, rather clever, and if they came too close they would soon realise how vulnerable the Dutch were to attack.
Rising tensions over loss of pastures exploded into open conflict in the first Khoi-Dutch war during the winter of 1659. Suspicion and fear, which had been part and parcel of Dutch settlement since the first proclamation on 8 April 1652, would become an integral aspect of life in South Africa.12 Schoeman’s description of a section of land called the Duinen, the Dunes, where a small Khoi community lived, between Signal Hill and Mouille Point, leads him to draw a comparison between the seventeenth century and current times: the encampment was ‘the prototype of the “locations” which would become so typical of the spatial arrangement in the interior of South Africa’.13
In spite of much distrust and animosity, the Dutch did employ some local Khoikhoi women as servants. A few women even got married to white men and became slave owners themselves. The most well-known example of such a woman is Krotoa-Eva of the Goringhaicona community, who was born around 1640 and died in 1674.14 Probably ‘given’ to the Van Riebeecks by her uncle Autshumao to perform the duty of nanny or possibly even to act as a spy, she later became an influential interpreter between the Dutch commander and her own people. Shortly before the Van Riebeecks left the Cape she was baptised, and a few years later, in 1664, she married Pieter van Meerhoff (1637–1668), with whom she had three children. After his death during a slaving expedition she inherited at least one slave: Jan Vos from the Cape Verde Islands. Because of her ‘godless and permissive life’ and her ‘utterly debauched state’, her children were taken from her.15 To pay for their upkeep, the Dutch Reformed Church rented the services of Vos to free burgher Jan Verhagen. Krotoa-Eva was extremely vulnerable to abuse, and many different theories have arisen trying to understand her role in the melting pot of cultures which the Cape was.16
Local women who, like Krotoa, were brought up in white families and kept as servants must surely have been under immense psychological pressure, though they probably received little sympathy or understanding. Schoeman describes the fate of a woman called Sara who hanged herself in the sheep pen of former slave Angela of Bengal, probably because a Dutch lover reneged on his promise to marry her.17
Dutch Servant Women
Armosyn van die Kaap not only tells the story of enslaved women but also recalls stories of the first Dutch madams who in many instances had been servant girls themselves.18 Given the shortage of white women at the Cape, the VOC realised that the free burghers would be more committed to farming if they had wives on the smallholdings. Van Riebeeck, whose wife, Maria, and their children lived with him, suggested that all families voyaging to the East should bring Dutch servant women along and leave them at the Cape before sailing on to Batavia. They could serve as ‘marriage candidates’ and hopefully even succeed in putting an end to the drunken brawls that were a regular occurrence in the settlement’s many taverns. The sunny, healthy climate of the Cape helped lure especially farm girls, and a fairly large number of servant-class Dutch women arrived at the Cape. Very soon after coming ashore, most got married and their status radically altered: they became employers of servants.
The 21-year-old Catharina Croons had left the Netherlands on the Arnhem in 1661 as maid to Reverend Henricus Pelius who, together with his wife and children, was on his way to Batavia. Of the 358 crew members and passengers, 31 people, including the entire Pelius family, died en route to the Cape. Catharina, however, survived, and on 2 July 1661, two weeks after disembarkation, the 25-year-old free burgher TC Müller, originally from Leipzig, was given permission to marry her. The marriage ceremony took place after the Sunday service on 10 July 1661, and was conducted by the secretary of the Political Council.
By the year 1666, sixteen free burgher families were living in the vicinity of the Fort. Most men were gardeners, while others ran a small shop, a bakery and four taverns. Although the presence of white women and children brought some stability to the Cape community of lonely unmarried men, the generally uncivil atmosphere did not change much. According to Schoeman, both the men and the women came from the ‘lower ranks and classes’ of northern Europe and had little education or refinement. He recounts the lives of especially the women, focusing also on the women who in turn worked for them. Anna Hoeks, for example, became fairly wealthy, and eventually owned one enslaved woman and eight men. Hester Weijers from Lier was the servant of a merchant from Batavia who decided to leave her at the Cape on his way back to Holland. In 1658 Hester got married to the hard-working WC Mostaert who had quickly become wealthy thanks to the liquor license he had obtained. After his death, and before returning to Europe, the widow Mostaert manumitted her slaves, Manuel and Elisabeth from Angola, and sold others to the VOC. Her daughter Grisella remained at the Cape and it is documented that when her husband, Tobias Vlasvath, died, she was the owner of several slaves. She socialised with Johanna Maria, daughter of Jan van Riebeeck, when she visited the Cape on a voyage from the East to Europe. Schoeman specifically points to this friendship to illustrate that, owing to the paucity of white women at the Cape, the descendants of a woman from the Dutch servant class could very soon appropriate privilege and become part of the small colonial elite.19
A so-called Cape tradition was starting to develop. As early as 1693 the number of white children born at the Cape exceeded the arrivals from Europe. In 1675 Jannetje Thielemans married the free burgher Gerrit Jansz Visser – the first marriage of a white girl born at the Cape. Schoeman suggests that the couple could be considered the ‘progenitors or founders of the free South African white population’. Furthermore, Jannetjes’s mother, the servant woman Mayken van den Berg, could be considered the ‘grandmother of the Afrikaner people’.20 Mayken was quite extraordinary: