"This Is the Mark of the Widow": Domesticity and Frontier Conquest in Colonial South Africa

Abstract

There is poignancy to a life represented by a list things, an existence documented in material possessions whether meager or abundant. The entangled stories four widows Burger connected by marriage, maternal kinship, land claims, and frontier living show the extent to which colonial history became embedded in homes, familial relationships, and household composition. In South Africa, settlers eventually established hegemony, especially in frontier regions, not only through armed occupation although violent land alienation was admittedly a crucial feature eighteenth-century settlement but primarily in the realm the domestic. Eventually, the settlers achieved success through the intimate, quotidian structuring survival in an uncertain landscape; its progress was marked by increased creature comforts from one generation to the next, including the proliferation European markers status and civility. From a few iron cooking pots and pewter plates to copper tart pans and porcelain teacups, the material success frontier farmers entailed more than extensive land claims and fat livestock; it dwelled significantly on such subjects as furniture, crockery, and other symbols that connected scattered homesteads to the heart colonial society in Cape Town, and thus to European-derived cultural norms. Women and men forged these connections, creating households and domestic space that came to mark their sites settlement as colonial neither African nor European but distinctively of the Cape. The frontier was a place cross-cultural contact, the effects which emerge in subdued dialogue with the more obvious markers European customs evident in estate inventories, reinforcing the perception colonial hybridity. These documents offer a particularly focused lens through which to examine settler households and their material culture. Read in conjunction with property records, tax rolls, and travelers' accounts, the inventories offer a unique, if partial, perspective on the domestic life colonial settlers. The