Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony Research Articles

Stolen Childhoods: Cape San Child Captives and the Raising of Colonial Subjects in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

Histories of indigenous child captives in settler-colonies remain marginal amid broader inquiries into colonial-era genocides of indigenous peoples. Yet, child transfers played an integral role in the demise of indigenous populations in numerous settler-colonies. Forced child removals occurred alongside the physical annihilation of parent societies and was often an important part of the erosion and eradication of hunter-gatherer peoples and identities. This article aims to set out an analysis of the integral role played by child abductions and transfers in the genocide of the Cape San during the early nineteenth century, with a particular focus on civilian initiative. In the Cape Colony, civilians initiated the practice of capturing and transferring San children to their invasive settler society. San children were considered malleable and better disposed to forced assimilation as labourers. Apprenticeship legislation was eventually introduced in the Cape Colony to regulate indigenous child transfers and to ensure that its worst abuses were minimised, although these ideals were seldom realised. Apprenticeship legislation attempted to catch up with existing practice set in motion by civilians and in effect, colonial authorities played an enabling role by legally legitimising it. The analysis also explores the narrative justifications for San child abduction and transfer employed by European-descended settlers, and contrasts these with contemporary evangelical-humanitarian discourses. Settlers and missionaries adopted different means to incorporate San children into settler society, while agreeing that incorporation was the desired end. Discursively, settlers and missionaries managed to frame their actions as being in the best interests of San children.

Politieke strategieë van aktiviste vir die amptelike erkenning van Afrikaans

Political strategies of activists for the official recognition of Afrikaans. Five language activists followed different political strategies between 1875 and 1925 to ensure Afrikaans became one of the official languages of South Africa. S.J. du Toit tried to promote Afrikaans, but realised that in the nineteenth century Cape Colony, he could only do it by helping the Dutch advocates acquire several rights. Through the apt manoeuvrings at the National Convention in 1908, General J.B.M. Hertzog and President M.T. Steyn secured official status for Dutch and English in the Union of South Africa, as well as the equal treatment of these two languages. Without language equality, official recognition could easily exist only in name. By choosing a language design, they also ensured that the final recognition of Afrikaans was merely a formality. J.H.H. de Waal and C.J. Langenhoven were the only important activists who were outright anti-Dutch. Through their political actions, they established Afrikaans for certain functions, even before official recognition. Langenhoven also accelerated the standardisation of Afrikaans, thus facilitating official recognition.

The Dutch Reformed Church and the Protestant Atlantic: Revivalism and Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

This article argues for understanding the nineteenth-century, evangelical DRC as an outward looking church, firmly positioned within the Protestant Atlantic. Not only were DRC ministers and congregations in contact with clergy, missionaries, and converts in Africa, Europe, and North America, but they drew inspiration from events and movements abroad. More specifically, this article focuses on a series of revivals which swept the DRC in 1860, 1874, and 1875, fundamentally transforming Dutch-Afrikaners’ religious experience. Although the subject of specifically local forces, this revivalist movement was encouraged by ministers who had witnessed and read about similar revivals abroad. As a result, revivalism offers a way of writing a history of the nineteenth-century DRC which is attentive both to its positions within the Cape Colony as well as the wider Protestant Atlantic. In doing so, this article contributes to a growing body of scholarship which seeks to position Dutch-Afrikaners’ social and cultural worlds within wider contexts, working against arguments that the DRC and its members – most of whom were Dutch-Afrikaans – existed in a state of intellectual isolation.

Savings and economic growth: a historical analysis of the Cape Colony economy, 1850–1909

ABSTRACTThe savings-development nexus is a topical issue in current development literature. No study has yet explored this relationship in nineteenth-century ‘South African’ colonies. An historical analysis of the development of the savings’ trends in South Africa may assist in understanding development trends in the twentieth century. Apart from general descriptions of the nature of economic activity in the Cape Colony very little is known about the role of savings and financial sector development in the growing colonial economy. This paper describes and surveys the nature of financial markets in the Cape Colony between 1850 and 1909 and seeks to explain the relationship between savings and economic growth. Savings is defined in the broad sense of monetary and non-monetary savings and would be assumed to be a proxy for financial development in the Cape Colony. This paper contributes to the economic history literature on the colonial past of South Africa by using recently compiled data on the GDP (Greyling & Verhoef 2015) as well as monetary savings and non-monetary savings (livestock) to test whether the general view that ‘financial development is robustly growth promoting’ can be substantiated in the last half of the nineteenth-century Cape Colony. The Johansen vector error correction model technique is applied to determine the relationship between savings and economic growth. It is found that despite the expectations in the literature that financial deepening contributes to economic growth, the Cape Colony did not display such causal relationship in the period under review.

‘Onschuldig vermaak’: The Dutch Reformed Church and Children's Leisure Time in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which children's leisure time was conceptualised and directed in the Cape Colony between 1850 and the end of the century. Using diaries, letters, and evidence presented to Parliamentary commissions of enquiry, the article argues that the notion of ‘productivity’ was central to ideas around leisure time during this period. Beginning with an overview of the leisure activities of white, middle class, and of poor, coloured, white, and African, children in Cape Town and the Boland during this period, the paper then moves on to a discussion of the child-related work of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). Although other churches organised Sunday Schools and other children's societies, the DRC began this work considerably earlier and achieved a much wider reach. This analysis of children's leisure time demonstrates the extent to which children preoccupied colonial commentators and organisations during the second half of the nineteenth century. The history of childhood remains unexplored within South African historiography. This article addresses this lacuna. It sheds light not only on the changing nature of childhood in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony, but also provides new ways of understanding the colony's industrialisation and economic expansion as a result of the mineral revolution.

Revisiting anglicisation in the nineteenth-century cape colony

Revisiting anglicisation in the nineteenth-century cape colony

'The Seed Blows About in Every Breeze': Noxious Weed Eradication in the Cape Colony, 1860-1909

Crosby has portrayed the plants and 'weeds' that accompanied European colonial expansion as often beneficial to settlement. In fact, many settlers throughout the temperate zones expended vast amounts of capital and labour on the eradication of those imported plants designated as 'noxious weeds', which they deemed a direct threat to the development of the new colonies. This paper explains the spread of key weed species in the nineteenth century Cape Colony where the number of livestock soared, cultivation was extended, and some plants thrived in conditions of rapid environmental change. It analyses the problems experienced in defining plant species, understanding their spread, and devising systems of extirpation. The colonial state, without the finances or powers to impose its will on the rural populace or the technology to re-engineer the environment without their assistance, increasingly focused its attention on changing the culture of settler agriculture, instilling a work ethic, and demonising weeds through a mixture of military, medical and moral metaphors. Nevertheless, weeds sometimes directly imperilled the settlers' tenuous hold on the land. Europeans experienced protracted wars of attrition not only with indigenous people but with drought, pathogens, vermin, and the like. Weed history further qualifies the prevailing picture of colonialism by casting a very different light on the colonial state.

Breaking the Chains. Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

Breaking the Chains. Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain

(1996). Disempowered to Consent: Sara Bartman and Khoisan Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony and Britain. South African Historical Journal: Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 89-114.

Imagint excusations: Missionary English in the nineteenth century Cape Colony, South Africa

ABSTRACT: This case study of the English of early missionaries operating in South Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century serves three main functions. Firstly, it characterizes the interlanguages of some German and Dutch missionaries, which are interesting in their own. right, historically and theoretically. Secondly, it points out the disparity between the actual patterns of use we find in the missionary letters and characterizations of their abilities and repertoires by modern linguists. Finally, it suggests an important early source for the propagation of English in a variety of territories, missionary English is a missing ingredient in ‘New English’ scholarship which needs to be studied closely.

Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

ResumeOn decouvre dans les dossiers de la Colonie du Cap Ouest rurale en Afrique du Sud un nombre inhabituel d'infanticides liees aux missionaires durant la decennie qui a suivi l'emancipation des ...

Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

Book Review: Review Article: Slavery in the Western Hemisphere and South Africa: Legacy of European Colonialism: Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, Breaking the Chains: Labour in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s

Book Review: Review Article: Slavery in the Western Hemisphere and South Africa: Legacy of European Colonialism: Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, Slavery in South Africa: Captive Labor on the Dutch Frontier, Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, Breaking the Chains: Labour in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s

Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa

Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony

African Economic Experiments in Colonial Natal 1845-1880

Recent investigations of African economic life in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony have opened the way for the destruction of much conventional wisdom concerning the course of South African development.1 The emerging story of the rise and fall of black peasant communities challenges the deeply entrenched belief that Africans were hide-bound traditionalists slow to adapt to a dynamic settler economy which they neither liked nor understood--that they were late starters in a race they were bound to lose. This challenge can be strengthened by a review of African economic initiatives in the early decades of the Natal Colony.2 By the time of the Zulu War, African Christian communities had not only established a flourishing peasant economy but had also embarked upon entrepreneurial capitalist ventures on a significant scale. Their story suggests that the well-known curbs placed by white legislators upon African economic activity after the Zulu War were not so much designed to safeguard whites against potential black competition but aimed rather to undo progress which had already been made.3 Moreover, it is at least arguable that the rise of political activism and religious separatism at the end of the nineteenth century owed more to the loss of valued economic opportunities than to a newly-awakened desire to compete on equal terms in the dominant society. Christian missions in Natal provided a favorable setting for African economic experiments. Well-financed operations by nine different missionary societies made Natal one of the most heavily evangelised territories in the world.4 Because Congregational, Methodist, and Anglican missionaries had easy access to influential officials in the early years of the colony, missions benefitted greatly from the land arrangements made by the locations commissigns of the eighteen forties and by Sir George Grey's scheme of Mission Reserves. In addition, Lutheran, Methodist, and Anglican missions purchased extensive farms when land was cheap which served the needs of their converts adequately until about the time of the Zulu War.6 From these bases where the small black Christian population (between eight and ten thousand by 1880) enjoyed a privileged status, missionaries moved immediately to effect an economic revolution. The clothing which missionaries recommended for the sake of modesty was for many of their converts an introduction to a new system of production and exchange. Whether the convert earned his new clothes by wage labor or fabricated them with European looms and needles, he was entering into new kinds of economic relationships. The upright which rose on all mission stations embodied materials and demanded the use of tools unknown in the pre-colonial period. Indeed, on the assumption that the builders of such houses had become importers of dutiable goods, African Christians won exemption from Natal's hut tax.7 Missionaries knew what they were doing when they sought to accelerate the transition to a capitalist economy. Very much under the influence of T. F. Buxton and David Livingstone, missionaries of all denominations agreed that Civilisation and Christianisation would reinforce each other.8 By 1861, a pioneer American missionary could cite facts to support his theory: