Domesticating the Frontier: A Berger Family Story

One rented farm, a distant grazing permit, 100 cattle, 600 sheep, six horses, six slaves, one old ox wagon, an old plow, a wooden harrow, and assorted housewares.1

1 After 15 years of marriage lived on the frontier, Elsje van der Merwe faced widowhood with few creature comforts. She did, however, have access to land and labor, adequate farming implements, and enough livestock to sustain her household.2 Whether through good management or good luck she prospered, as did her sons.

2 Elsje's story of economic success connects the van der Merwes and the Burgers in a tale of complicated accumulation. Farms, families, cattle, and housewares increased along the Olifants River over the course of the eighteenth century, while the growing community progressively displayed more signs of colonial orthodoxy. The Burger family history—including many van der Merwe wives—is emblematic of the ways in which allied households gradually established settler dominance in the Cedarberg. Although violent land alienation was admittedly a crucial feature of colonial settlement, the daily mechanics of conquest happened in homes. The intimate, quotidian structuring of daily survival in an uncertain landscape enabled gradual settler success. Its incremental progress was marked by increased creature comforts from one generation to the next, including the proliferation of European signs of status and civility. From a few iron cooking pots and pewter plates to copper tart pans and porcelain tea cups, the material success of frontier farmers was not just about extensive land claims and fat livestock, it was significantly about furniture, crockery, and other symbols that connected scattered homesteads to the heart of colonial society in Cape Town, and thus to European-derived cultural norms. Both women and men forged these connections, creating households and domestic space that came to mark their sites of settlement as colonial—not entirely European but rather distinctively "of the Cape."

3 Evidence of a colonial material culture, redolent of European aesthetics but regularly inflected with local character, emerges in household inventories. The frontier was a place of cross-cultural contact; some consequences of this interaction surface alongside the more obvious markers of European customs embedded in lists of household possessions. Estate inventories thus offer a way 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, view into the domestic life of colonial settlers. These records describe material circumstances, evaluate wealth, enumerate children, suggest close relationships among other family members or neighbors, and hint at settlers' ideas about domesticity and class.

The entirety of Willem and Elsje's material possessions were summarized on one page.Fig. 6.1a. Willem Burger's Inventory, 1731 The entirety of Willem and Elsje's material possessions were summarized on one page.Fig. 6.1b. Willem Burger's Inventory, Transcribed

4 These inventories let us see, however darkly, inside settler homes, revealing aspects of what emerged as hegemonic over the course of 350 years of contested cultural interactions. Moreover, by looking inside the homes of a frontier region in the eighteenth century we begin to see how that hegemony was established. We can also see traces of subordinated people and their contributions to a creole society that colonists subsequently claimed as "Afrikaner." A focus on the domestic emphasizes the colonial, hybrid characteristics of South African history while it reveals the power latent in claiming connections to European culture. As Antoinette Burton and Ann Stoler eloquently argue, the colonial was created in the quotidian; power was embedded in the intimate. Thus, we need to challenge a presumed distance between state politics and family life and explore those tangled linkages. In this context, the personal and its records are an invaluable source for explaining how one society exercised political, economic, and social control over another.3

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Household Inventories, Historical Sources

5 There is poignancy in a life represented by a list of things, an existence documented by assets, whether meager or abundant. Although the Burger family history is greater than the sum of its possessions, the probate remnants from three generations of family members illustrate trajectories—both geographic and economic—of frontier settlement. The Burgers' history is representative of patterns of land acquisition, material accumulation, marriage strategies, and household composition typical of frontier settlers.4 Their inventories also reveal aspects of generational change and cast light on shifting frontier dynamics.

6 In a family's lifecycle, death was a moment of reckoning that produced a specific set of records, overseen and subsequently preserved by the state. Dutch practices of community property in marriage and partible family inheritance assured a surviving spouse half the couple's wealth and an equal portion for each child. When a marriage partner died and minor children survived, the government required an official tally of the couple's assets in order to ensure a fair accounting of the minors' portions.5 The resulting household inventories are evidence of families' lived experience entwined with imperial power. Since colonial law only required an inventory if minors survived, they do not exist for all members of a family or for every frontier household. Consequently, inventories are particular relics of the state's regulation of inheritance, providing partial but valuable details about mundane daily life across class lines.6

7 There are important limits, though, to what these eighteenth-century records can say about colonial domesticity and household intimacy. The inventories show a proliferation of beds, for example, but do not comment on who slept in them. Successive generations of colonists owned increasing numbers of slaves, but the available sources unfortunately do not locate their labor. Typically slaves herded distant livestock (thus slept in the fields) or did agricultural work on the farm (and slept in the barn) or performed household chores (and slept in the kitchen or at the foot of the master's bed).7 Archived documents identify specific families and put their households into a general colonial context, but do not provide enough concomitant detail to reconstruct all the facets of domestic relationships.

8 A historical reconstruction based on inventories skews the story toward European-descended settlers at the expense of the slaves and Khoisan indentured servants (inboekselinge) who were a fundamental part of colonial households, and whose ideas and actions were integral to colonial dialogues.8 Without consistent prodding, these records tend to obscure Asian and African presence, but this disparity reminds us of the obstacles faced by subordinated peoples.

9 There is not yet enough scholarship on families, domesticity, and gender for eighteenth-century South Africa to locate specific labor or categorize it according to gender, class, race, or generation. Without egregious speculation, I cannot populate a house and farmyard with women and men at different, complementary work as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich does so well for colonial New England.9 These records of quotidian existence do, however, symbolize the state's ability to regulate the material consequences of death,10 showing just how powerful a merchant company acting like a prince could be, both in Cape Town and on the colonial frontier.

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Frontier Households

10 After a half century of land claims, the Cedarberg—though still governed from a distance— was within the colonial orbit to the extent that travelers like Swedish botanist Carl Thunberg visited the region in 1773–74. He noted,

Hospitality is carried to a great length among the farmers throughout all this country, insomuch that a traveller [sic] may, without being at any expense either for board or lodging, pass a longer or shorter time with these people, who with the greatest cordiality receive and entertain strangers.11

The available range of that hospitality varied greatly, though. European visitors were alternately pleased and dismayed by the domesticity of frontier settlers.

11 By the 1770s the Burger family could graciously host European visitors, a capability that was not evident in the 1730s. Barend Burger and Helena Smit, both born on the frontier, grew up to have more outward signs of conformity to European-based norms than their parents did. This phenomenon is not explained by a wave of migrant stock farmers opening a region to settlement; subsequently surviving relative isolation and warfare; engaging in cross-cultural contact with their slaves, indentured Khoisan servants, and indigenous Khoisan inhabitants; eventually winning the fight; and finally claiming more land. Such a conception of frontiers as serially opened then closed assumes rather than explains the terms of conquest. Looking instead at the Cedarberg through Leonard Guelke's formulation of heterodox and orthodox frontiers brings into relief specific aspects of conflict and elements of identity formation. Starting from this perspective also emphasizes that people variously contested this process, both across colonial social boundaries and within groups of colonists, Khoisan, and slaves.12 Finally, exploring the dynamics of orthodoxy reveals the extent to which conquest had a significant domestic component.

Cross Reference:
A working definition of frontier

12 In the Cedarberg, we can measure colonial conquest by the proliferation of tenable settler land claims, which were made household by household; increasing signs of European-inflected domesticity is tangible evidence of their success. Thus the Cedarberg—which encompassed sites of violent conflict and provided a harbor for runaway slaves and criminal fugitives in the 1730s and 1740s—was by the end of the eighteenth century home to established farms supported by families living according to norms that were more European than African.13

13 The most basic unit of settler social and economic organization, whether in town or the frontier regions, was the household.14 Frontier households centered on a married couple and their children, and included slaves, Khoisan indentured servants, and other settlers, usually relatives.15 Neighboring homesteads helped to sustain each other.16 Linked by relationships determined by women as much as by men, they were the locus of colonial frontier conquest.17

Meet the Burgers

14< Genealogy Chart: Fig. 6.2. The Burger Family

Notes

Note 1: CA: MOOC 8/5.35, Estate Inventory of Willem Burger, 12 July 1731. CA: RLR 1/38/25, loan farm permit for Houd Constant, 16 Nov. 1730; CA: RLR 2/9/18, loan farm permit for Misgunt, 18 Sept. 1730. back

Note 2: Guelke estimates a stock farmer's minimum needs as a horse, a wagon, 20 cattle, and 50 sheep, amounting to about 1,000 Cape guilders in "Freehold Farmers," 87. back

Note 3: Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 9, 12–14; Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5–7. back

Note 4: Trends in the Cedarberg-area inventories mirror those from Eastern Cape frontier households reported by Susan Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Eastern Cape Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Frontier inventories differ from the more detailed records of established colonial residences in Cape Town; for Cape Town, see Antonia Malan, "Households of the Cape, 1750 to 1850: Inventories and the Archaeological Record" (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 1993). Complete transcripts of estate inventories in the Cape Archives have recently been made available online; see Toward a New Age of Partnership (TANAP) Web site: http://www.tanap.net/content/activities/documents/
Orphan_Chamber-Cape_of_Good_Hope/index.htm (accessed 28 July 2006). back

Note 5: Secretary William Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, facsimile reprint (Cape Town: Struik, 1966); Robert Ross, Beyond the Pale: Essays on the Histories of Colonial South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), 139–40. back

Note 6: For practical guidance in working with inventories, auction papers, and other estate documents, see Carohn Cornell and Antonia Malan, Household Inventories at the Cape: A Guide for Beginner Researchers (Cape Town: UCT Historical Studies Department, 2005). back

Note 7: Robert C.-H. Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1838 (Hannover and London: University Press of New England, 1994). back

Note 8: Examples of these dialogues include Russel Viljoen, "Indentured Labour and Khoikhoi 'Equality' Before the Law in Cape Colonial Society, South Africa: The Case of Jan Paerl, c. 1796," Itinerario 29:3 (2005), 54–72; Patricia van der Spuy, "'Making Himself Master': Galant's Rebellion Revisted," SAHJ 34 (1996), 1–28; John Mason, "Hendrik Albertus and His Ex-Slave Mey: A Drama in Three Acts," JAH 31:3 (1990), 423–45. back

Note 9: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1997) provides a solid analysis of gendered household labor in the nineteenth century. In Children of Bondage, Shell explores the gendered and sexualized nature of master-slave relationships, but without specific evidence from frontier regions, I hesitate to apply his conclusions rooted in the more settled areas of the Cape directly to the Cedarberg, where there was a significant Khoisan labor pool. back

Note 10: Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), 11–40; Mbembe, "The Power of the Archives and its Limits," in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, et al., (Cape Town: David Philip, 2002), 19–26. back

Note 11: Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels at the Cape of Good Hope, 1772–1775, trans. J.& I. Rudner, ed. V.S. Forbes (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1986), 51, 191. back

Note 12: Guelke, "The Making of Two Frontier Communities: Cape Colony in the Eighteenth Century," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 12: 3 (1985), 419–48. Hermann Giliomee articulates an open and closed frontier model in "Processes in Development of the Southern African Frontier," in The Frontier in History: North American and South Africa Compared, eds. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 19–26. For a more detailed historiography of the frontier in South African scholarship, see Chapter 2. back

Note 13: On frontier violence, see Penn, The Forgotten Frontier, esp. Chapter 4. On desertion, see Penn, Rogues, Rebels and Runaways. back

Note 14: For South Africa, see Ross on "co-resident groups," Beyond the Pale, 146–47. Relevant comparisons of early modern European social, political, and economic households include Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 160–64; Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 8; Sarah Hanley, "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern Europe," French Historical Studies 16:1 (1989), 4–27. back

Note 15: Ross, Beyond the Pale, 146, n34. back

Note 16: In frontier areas, I use "neighboring" to describe the closest farms, which in some cases were adjacent land claims (along a river, for example) or in other cases might have been as much as a half-day's ride away on horseback. back

Note 17: Wayne Dooling also recently argued for the importance of women in facilitating the transfer of landed estates in "The Making of a Colonial Elite: Property, Family and Landed Stability in the Cape Colony, c. 1750–1834," JSAS 31:1 (2005), 159. back