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Casper, Crebis and the Knegt:
Rape, Homicide and Violence in the
Eighteenth-Century Rural Western Cape
a
Nigel Penn
a
University of Cape Town
Published online: 28 Jul 2014.
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To cite this article: Nigel Penn (2014) Casper, Crebis and the Knegt: Rape, Homicide and Violence
in the Eighteenth-Century Rural Western Cape, South African Historical Journal, 66:4, 611-634, DOI:
10.1080/02582473.2014.925961
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South African Historical Journal, 2014
Vol. 66, No. 4, 611–634, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2014.925961
Casper, Crebis and the Knegt: Rape, Homicide and Violence in the
Eighteenth-Century Rural Western Cape
NIGEL PENN*
Downloaded by [University of Cape Town Libraries] at 22:51 07 April 2015
University of Cape Town
Abstract
Rape is a shockingly prevalent crime in contemporary South Africa. Using a
micro-historical approach to analyse a rape case in the criminal records of the
Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) this article seeks to explore whether rape
was as widespread in the eighteenth-century Cape as it is today. In examining
the details of a case in which a white knecht (hired labourer) raped a Khoikhoi
woman and murdered her son the article finds that no white man was ever
convicted for the rape of a Khoikhoi or a slave woman and seeks to explain why
this was the case. It also finds that though white settlers greatly feared that their
women would be raped by slave or Khoikhoi men, this seldom happened.
Though focusing on rape the article also examines colonial attitudes towards
illicit or extra-marital sex between members of different racial groups. It
concludes that issues of honour and respectability played a factor in limiting
rape and that, despite a climate of violence, there is plentiful evidence of
consensual interracial sex, especially in the frontier regions. Thus, although rape
was a crime that white men could commit with virtual impunity, the records do
not provide evidence that rape was common.
Key words: rape; sex; violence; VOC; Khoikhoi
Introduction
Late in the afternoon on the last Friday of August 1727 an ox wagon bearing three Dutch
women was making its way between Cape Town (or ‘De Caab’) and Riebeeck’s Kasteel.
The wagon had reached the marshy ground alongside the Mosselbank River, north-east of
the Tygerberg and some 30 kilometres from Cape Town, when the women decided to stop
for the night. The nearest farm, ‘Mosselbank’, belonged to Phillipus Rigter, and the women
thought that they would exercise the customary right of Cape travellers – to ask the
landowner for his hospitality – whilst they outspanned their oxen for the night.1
*
Email: [email protected]
1.
The details of the events narrated here are to be found in Cape Archives (CA), Court of Justice (CJ) 331,
Documents in Criminal Cases, 1727, pp. 209–252.
ISSN: Print 0258-2473/Online 1726-1686
© 2014 Southern African Historical Society
http://www.tandfonline.com
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The farm buildings occupied an area of high ground overlooking the Mosselbank River,
which was perhaps more like a stream than a river to European eyes. The surrounding
countryside was lush and fertile after winter rains and the farm itself looked prosperous
with its sheep pens, cattle enclosures, wheat fields and gardens. But all was not well on the
farm. As their servants outspanned the oxen the women became aware of an incessant
wailing and sobbing coming from the huts where the farm’s Khoikhoi labourers lived. It
sounded like a woman crying, like a woman mourning. The three Dutch women walked to
the main building and, not finding anyone to greet them, entered the darkened house. In a
small side room they discovered the sleeping form of the farm’s knegt. It quickly became
apparent to the women that the place was in a state of great disorder and that the man
himself was drunk. The room stank of alcohol and there was a quantity of wine spilt on the
table. They managed to wake the knegt and, once he had lighted a candle, things became a
little clearer. The knegt, at least, liked what he saw.
Of the three women before him Dirkje Helms, aged 45, was the most senior. She was
also twice widowed and a farmer, or landbouweress, in her own right, having inherited her
second husband’s farm, ‘De Vleesbank’, between Riebeeck’s Kasteel and Paarl. As a
widow, Dirkje was known by her maiden name, Helm. At her side was one of the eight
children from her first marriage – to Cornelis Knoetzen – a 16-year old daughter called
Elizabeth Knoetzen. The third woman in the group was Cornelia Nel, wife of the farmer
Adriaan van Jaarsveld, owner of the farm ‘Bootmansdrift’ on the Berg River near Riebeek
Kasteel.2 Dirkje and Cornelia were, effectively, neighbours, their farms a mere five
kilometres apart.3 In 1727 Cornelia was in her early 30s and already the mother of seven
children. She would bear 11 in all. It was she who seems to have attracted most of the
knegt’s attention.
As land-owning matriarchs the two mature women were the social superiors of a hired
servant but Theunis Roelofsz, Rigter’s knegt, was emboldened by drink. It was not every
day that he was able to entertain three white women. His master, Rigter, had no wife or
children at ‘Mosselbank’. Nor were there any slave women on the farm. For the most part,
Roelofsz lived and worked in an all-male environment and he was more than pleased to act
the part of ladies’ host, especially since Rigter was, at that moment, far away on a visit to
Rondebosch. Roelofsz was quick to produce a bottle of wine and, somewhat unsteadily,
poured out a glassful that he offered to the women. Alarmed by the knegt’s lack of sobriety
Dirkje took the glass from Roelofs’z hand and set it down on the table, saying that whilst
they would not drink any wine they would be pleased to join him in drinking a cup of tea.
At that particular moment, tea did not appeal to Roelofsz as a beverage, and he began to
pester Cornelia, the wife of Arij van Jaarsveld, to join him in drinking some wine. Her
refusals, and his drunkenness, now prompted Roelofsz to go beyond the bounds of
propriety, and he declared to Cornelia that if she would not drink wine with him then she
2.
3.
F.A. van Jaarsveld, Van Stamvader Adriaan tot Ernst Jacobus Van Jaarsveld, 1702–1986: ‘n Stukkie
familiegeskiedenis van Onder (Pretoria: Sigma Pers, 1987), 13. Cornelia’s father, Willem Nel, had been the
previous owner of the farm. My thanks to Albert van Jaarsveld, grandson of F.A. van Jaarsveld, for
alerting me to this source.
‘De Vleesbank’ was, in addition, only five kilometres west of ‘Bartholomew’s Klip’.
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613
would have to sleep with him. ‘Why should I do that?’ retorted Cornelia, ‘I have a husband
to sleep with me’.4
The women must have exchanged glances and assessed their situation. They were in a
remote farmhouse with a drunk and lustful man. Without tact the situation might easily
progress from being awkward to being ugly. As Roelofsz continued to press them into
drinking wine Dirkje decided to yield to his ‘continuous persuasion’, agreeing that they
would have one glass of wine with him provided that he brought them some tea. Roelofsz
ordered a slave to put the kettle on and, once the tea had arrived, continued his advances.
This time it was Elizabeth whom he ‘sought to bring into dishonour’ by proclaiming that ‘if
the women will not sleep with me then the girl must sleep with me’. To this Elizabeth
retorted that she would sooner sleep with the Hottentots outside the house than with him,
her remarks prompted by the loud and persistent sound of a Khoikhoi woman crying
outside.5
At this stage Dirkje decided that it would be courting disaster to stay any longer at the
farm so she went outside to order that the oxen be inspanned to the wagon. It was essential
to ride away as quickly as possible. Roelofsz, meanwhile, smarting from Elizabeth’s insult,
told her that she could follow her mother out of the door, as there would be no bed for her
in the house – though there would be for Cornelia. As Dirkje returned to the house to fetch
the other women she was intercepted by one of the farm’s slaves, a man called Arij van der
Cust. Arij wanted to speak to Dirkje and Dirkje, for her part, wanted to explain to someone
with a semblance of authority that she was leaving ‘Mosselbank’ because of the knegt’s
drunken behaviour. Arij cut her explanation short. ‘My God Juffrouw the knegt killed a
Hottentot during the night. The Hottentot is lying there, don’t you hear the old woman
sitting there crying?’6
Dirkje could hear the woman, but she did not go to investigate. Instead, she called
Elizabeth and Cornelia, telling them to get up on the wagon because they were all leaving.
As they crossed the yard Roelofsz accosted them. ‘Don’t you want to outspan the oxen?’ he
asked, unaware that they had already been both outspanned and inspanned. ‘No’, replied
Dirkje. ‘We’re leaving.’ As the women rode away Roelofsz shouted after them in
frustration. ‘Whores! Bitches! Get off my property!’7 His voice, and the sound of a woman
crying, was soon mercifully inaudible to the departing women.
It is not surprising that Dirkje was anxious to leave ‘Mosselbank’ in a hurry though it
might seem rather callous of the women not to have investigated the condition, or
4.
5.
6.
7.
CA CJ 331, Testimony of Dirkje Helms, 9 Sept 1727, pp. 246–247. ‘Soo jiy met mij niet drinken wild dan
sult jij met miy moeten slaapen, op ‘t welke door gezeegte huisvrouw van Arij van Jaarsveld geantwoord
ziynde, waarom soude ik dat doen, ik heb een man om met my te slaapen.’
Ibid. ‘Dat gem: knegt Theunis Roelofsz in deselfs geijligheijd voortwaarende de dogter van haar Comp:
onder ‘t thee drinken ook tot oneer heft soeken te brengen, ten welke eijnde denselven teegen haar seijde soo
de vrouw met mij niet slaapen wil, soo moet de nonje bij mij slaapen, waar op door gesede haar dogter hem
Theunis Roelofsz is ten antwoord gegeeven, dan soude ik liewer bij die Hottentots wyf die daar buite huijlt
willen slaapen als biy jouw.’
Ibid. ‘Mijn God Juff: de knegt heft van de nagt een hottentot dood geslaagen, die hottentot luijt daar, hoord
jij niet die oude Vrouw.’
Ibid. ‘Of zij daar niet wilden uijt spannen/weetende denselven niet dat zij reets sulx gedaan hadden/ dog
door haar geantwoord ziynde van neen en dat ziy wilden weg reijden heft hij Theunis Roelofsz teegen haar
gesegt, reijd Hoer, jou teef, van mijn werf weg.’
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NIGEL PENN
circumstances, of the weeping Khoikhoi woman. But Dirkje had more reason than most to
be wary of a drunken knegt’s sexual advances. Little more than a month before, on 19 July
1727, Dirkje’s husband, Hendrik Neef, had been murdered in his own home by a drunken
knegt by the name of Loef Claassen. What is more, Claassen, like Roelofsz, had been
sexually attracted to one of Dirkje’s daughters. The daughter in question was Elizabeth’s
23-year-old sister, Catharina Knoetzen. Claassen, who worked on a neighbouring farm,
had visited Neef at ‘De Vleesbank’ in order to ask for his step-daughter’s hand in marriage.
Neef’s refusal came after a seemingly convivial drinking session and his reason for rejecting
Claassen – ‘If you were a farmer’s son, yes, but since you are a knegt, no’ – caused deep
resentment. When Neef suggested that the brooding knegt should return to his post,
Claassen first stabbed his host and then beat him to death with a chair, in the presence of
Dirkje, before fleeing the scene of the crime.8 Clearly, therefore, Dirkje knew how
dangerous drunken passions could be, especially when expressed by a knegt. But what had
happened at ‘Mosselbank’ before Dirkje, Cornelia and Elizabeth’s untimely visit?
On Thursday morning, 28 August 1727, Philip Philipsz Rigter, the owner of
‘Mosselbank’, rode from the farm to visit Rondebosch. The records do not explain why
Rigter went to visit Rondebosch but it is not unreasonable to suppose that this was where
his wife, or, more accurately his second wife, lived. Rigter had married Margaretha
Gildenhuys, the widow of Hendrik du Plooy, in 1725. She died in 1728. She was, therefore,
alive in 1727, but there is no mention of her living at the farm. She had had six children with
Du Plooy during 21 years of marriage and it is likely, therefore, that when Rigter married
her – the same year as Du Plooy’s death – she was the occupant of an established family
home and, we may assume, fairly well off.
It is, in fact, very likely that it was Margaretha’s wealth that had enabled Rigter to
obtain ‘Mosselbank’ for, until he married her, and gained burgher status, he had himself
been a knegt and, more recently, the jailer of the castle. Though Rigter’s career trajectory
was not unusual (for more than one knegt made good by marrying propertied widows) it
was, in certain respects, exceptional.9 He had come to the Cape from Amsterdam in 1701 as
both a freeburgher and a married man. By 1715 he sold the property he had acquired and
returned to the Netherlands with his family, which by then included three children. The
very next year, however, he returned to the Cape without his wife and children and as a
Company servant. By 1716 he was Otto van Graan’s knegt and, by 1719, Company jailer.
Had some dramatic reversal of fortune prompted his lowly return to the Cape or was it
domestic discord? We do not know, but his first wife, Catharina Padding, died in
Amsterdam at some date between 1722 and 1725, leaving Rigter free to marry Margaretha
after Margaretha’s husband had passed away.10
8.
9.
10.
CA CJ 333, Documents in Criminal Cases, 1729, Case against Loef Claassen van Mook, pp. 130–179.
Claassen’s crime was committed in 1727 but the documents are amongst those for 1729 as that is the year
that he stood trial. Claasen was 33 years old in 1727 and worked on the property of Jacobus van der
Heyden at Riebeeck’s Casteel.
See for example the career of Martin Melk who began life at the Cape as a soldier in 1746, then worked as a
knegt, and later, as a freeburger (thanks largely to a judicious marriage) owned over 200 slaves by 1776: see
Karel Schoeman, ‘n Duitser aan die Kaap, 1724–1765 (Pretoria: Protea, 2004), 216.
Details of Rigter’s life have been gleaned from G.C. de Wet, Resolusies van die Politieke Raad, Deel VIII,
1729–1734 (Pretoria: Die Staatsdrukker, 1975), 14, n.53, and J.A. Heese and R.T.J. Lombard, SuidAfrikaanse Geslagregisters, (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council).
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CASPER, CREBIS AND THE KNEGT
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Rigter, therefore, had not farmed ‘Mosselbank’ for long on the day that he left for
Rondebosch. Nor can he have had much experience of his knegt’s abilities or character for
he made the fatal mistake of entrusting Roelofsz with the distribution of the labour force’s
drink rations whilst he was away. Theunis Roelofsz was a 32-year-old sailor from
Christiaansand, a port on the south-western coast of Norway. It was unusual for a sailor to
work as a knegt because, on the whole, this was an occupation occupied by soldiers. It was
also unusual to find a Norwegian amongst the knegts as the overwhelming majority of these
people at the Cape were German speakers.11 In the status conscious world of the VOC
sailors were regarded as occupying nearly the lowest rung of the social ladder, marginally
superior to slaves and the Khoikhoi but less worthy of respect than a soldier.12 Sailors were,
in addition, regarded as being inveterate drunkards, and it was certainly an error of
judgment to leave Roelofsz with 16 bottles of wine and three bottles of brandy to distribute
to the farm’s slaves at an appropriate time. Roelofsz’s first act, on finding himself in charge
of the farm, was to distribute some of the wine to himself. At a later date he admitted to
having consumed three bottles of wine on Thursday, after the livestock had been driven
home, but he might well have been economical with the truth. To his credit Roelofsz did
invite one of the farm’s slaves, Jacob van Couchin, to have a drink with him that evening
but, according to Jacob, the knegt was already drunk by then.13 Roelofsz was even drunker
when Friday dawned.
Amongst the labourers at ‘Mosselbank’ were both slaves and Khoikhoi. Apart from
Jacob, who was about 36 years old, there was a slave called Isaak van Ceylon (age
unknown), a slave called Arij van der Cust (approximately 30 years old) and a slave called
Corridon van Trancqubar (aged 40). These four Asian males occupied a building separate
from the main house. There were no female slaves on the farm. It is not clear how many
Khoikhoi there were on the farm but three are named in the records: Jantje, a 25-year-old
man, Casper (age unknown) and Casper’s mother, Crebis, who is simply described as being
old or very old (‘stok oud’). The Khoikhoi lived apart from the slaves, most likely in a
traditional reed or mat hut (described as ‘n huisie’) of their own construction. The
Khoikhoi males acted as shepherd, or drovers, but the slaves too looked after the animals
and there does not seem to have been any rigid job specialisation on the farm.
By the 1730s most of the surviving south-western Cape Khoikhoi were providing labour
to the European farmers of the region. Although we do not know what the wages or terms
of service were for the Khoikhoi labourers of ‘Mosselbank’ we can assume, based on the
few details we have of labour contracts from other farms in the region at this time, that they
were poor. Fortunate Khoikhoi might be remunerated for their service with a sheep or a
11.
12.
13.
Less than five percent of the VOC’s mariners came from Scandinavian countries before 1730. See Jan
Parmentier and Jozefien de Bock, ‘Sailors and Soldiers at the Cape: An Analysis of the Maritime and
Military Population in the Cape Colony During the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’, in Nigel
Worden, ed., Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World (Cape Town:
University of Cape Town), 554.
For the relationship between soldiers and sailors see Nigel Worden, ‘“Below the Line the Devil Reigns”:
Death and Dissent Aboard a VOC Vessel’, South African Historical Journal, 61, 4 (2009), 701–729, and
Nigel Penn, ‘The Voyage Out: Peter Kolb and VOC Voyages to the Cape’, in Emma Christopher,
Cassandra Pybus and Marcus Rediker, eds, Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of
the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 72–91.
Couchin, or Conchin, was a VOC outpost on the west coast of India.
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NIGEL PENN
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cow per annum, or simply with permission to continue herding their own meagre flocks and
herds (if they had any) on the settlers’ farm. Less fortunate Khoikhoi worked for ‘kos en
klere’ (food and clothes) or insignificant wages of tobacco or alcohol.14 Though ostensibly
a free people their treatment was often even harsher than that of slaves. The unsympathetic
VOC physician, William ten Rhyne, assumed that the Khoikhoi should be forced to work
and advised his countrymen in 1686 that if they wished to employ the Khoikhoi as slaves
they should ‘keep them hungry’ and ‘never fully satisfied’ so as to cure them of their
shameful idleness and vice. Fortunately, added Ten Rhyne, the Khoikhoi were so addicted
to tobacco (‘infants of less than eight months old can often be seen smoking’) that
when they have the chance of living for ever free from the restraint of laws and slavery, they yet
prefer servitude to going without tobacco, often slaving at the nod of a master the whole day in
return for a scanty portion of the weed.15
Ten Rhyne could have added that the Khoikhoi, like Europeans, were also very fond of
alcohol and bread.
On Friday morning Roelofsz, ‘continuing in his drunkenness’, went into the Khoikhoi
labourers’s hut and found some bread there, wrapped up in two karosses. He took the
bread and karosses back to the house and showed them to Jacob, declaiming angrily: ‘Look
how the Hottentots steal the blood of our boss.’ ‘That is the Hottentot manner’, agreed
Jacob, no doubt in a placatory tone.16
In equating bread with his master’s blood Roelofsz was, perhaps unwittingly, revealing a
confused knowledge of the Christian sacrament of communion. He might well have
considered that Christianity urged its adherents to be generous, especially in the sharing of
food. In fact, a number of contemporary observers commented that the Khoikhoi were
remarkable for their generosity. Dapper, for instance, reported that:
In generosity and loyalty to those nearest them. They appear to shame the Dutch. For instance, if
one of them has anything he will willingly share it with another; no matter how small it may be they
will always endeavour to share and divide it amongst themselves in a brotherly manner.17
This cultural trait of generosity was, however, frequently misinterpreted by Europeans,
particularly if it involved the appropriation or redistribution of their own property. When
Khoikhoi took what they believed ought to be shared they did not think they were stealing.
Unwilling European sharers, on the other hand, saw this more communal attitude towards
property as confirmation that the Khoikhoi were addicted to theft.
14.
15.
16.
17.
See Nigel Penn, ‘Labour, Land and Livestock in the Western Cape during the Eighteenth Century: the
Khoisan and the Colonists’, in W.G. James and M. Simons, eds, The Angry Divide: Social and Economic
History of the Western Cape (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989), 2–19.
I. Schapera, ed., The Early Cape Hottentots Described in the Writings of Olfert Dapper [1688], William Ten
Rhyne [1686] and Johannes Gulielmus de Grevenbroek [1695] (Cape Town: The Van Riebeeck Society,
1933), 123. For the Khoikhoi’s supposed predilection for tobacco and alcohol see D. Gordon, ‘From
Rituals of Rapture to Dependence: The Political Economy of Khoikhoi Narcotic Consumption, c. 1487–
1870’, South African Historical Journal, 35 (1996), 62–88.
CA, CJ 331, Testimony of slave Jacob van Couchin, pp. 218–220.’Siet soo steelen die Hottentots ‘t bloed
van onsen baas, waarop hij Comp antwoord, dat is Hottentots maniere.’
Schapera, The Early Cape Hottentots, 47.
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CASPER, CREBIS AND THE KNEGT
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We cannot say whether Jacob condoned or disapproved of the Khoikhoi having taken
some bread, but Roelofsz was not to be soothed. It is very likely that Roelofsz’s aggressive
conduct in this instance was linked to his insecure status as a knegt, a man of lowly rank
determined to prove to the slaves and Khoikhoi that his authority was equal to that of his
absent master’s. Out of anger (as he later explained), he began drinking some more. He also
gave Jacob another glass of wine and ordered him to go and find the Khoikhoi shepherd,
Casper, and to bring him home. For a long time Jacob searched the veld adjacent to the
farmlands in vain but eventually saw Casper walking through the gardens, singing as he
came. Jacob ran to Roelofsz to tell him that Casper was approaching.
‘Be quiet. Let him come to me’, was the grim reply.18
Somewhat surprisingly, Roelofsz ordered Casper to sit down and drink with him. He
ordered Jacob, meanwhile, to go and find Jantje, who was herding the sheep, and to bring
both Jantje and the sheep back to the house so that he, Roelofsz, could hold a meeting.
Jacob did not like the sound of any of this. Although he was himself slightly drunk he did
not like the ominous nature of Roelofsz’s much greater drunkenness. In any event, Jacob
was sober enough to realise that it would be detrimental to the sheep to bring them in from
pasture so soon as it was only eight o’clock in the morning. Though Jacob went on his
errand, seemingly obediently, he had no intention of trying to find Jantje. Instead, he went
into the veld, and lay down under a bush where he slept until midday. He then returned to
the house with the intention of explaining to Roelofsz that he had not been able to find
Jantje anywhere.19
The situation at the farmhouse had taken a terrible turn for the worse. In Jacob’s
absence, Roelofsz had been busy plying Casper with drink. It is obvious that this was not a
friendly or sociable act. Rather, it seems, Roelofsz wanted to make Casper drunk so as to
have more control over him. If sailors had a bad reputation for drunkenness, that of the
Khoikhoi was even worse, for it was widely known that they had nothing like the same
defences against alcohol as Europeans did.20 If Roelofsz was planning to inflict some sort
of punishment on Casper for having taken his master’s bread then it would be all the easier
to accomplish if Caper was incapacitated by drink. There was also the lesser satisfaction of
making Casper so humiliatingly drunk that his own drunkenness would appear to be under
control, and his superiority, as a European and knegt, would thereby be maintained. The
objectives of this aggressive drinking were to be enlarged, however, when Casper’s mother
came looking for her son. When Roelofsz saw Crebis he invited her to join them in their
drinking – an invitation she could not well refuse. Under the influence of alcohol Roelofsz
soon began to shift his attention from the Khoikhoi man to the Khoikhoi woman.
Crebis did not normally live at ‘Mosselbank’. We do not know where her home was but
she had come to visit Casper about a fortnight before. We do know that she had another
son called Spaanjaard, who did not stay at ‘Mosselbank’, and it is possible that she usually
stayed with him. By 1727 it is unlikely that there were any independent Khoikhoi kraals in
18.
19.
20.
CA, CJ 331, Testimony of slave Jacob van Couchin: ‘..allen singend hieft sien aankomen en van ’t selve ook
aan den meergem: knegt kennis heft gegeeven op ’t welk den dikwels gem: knegt tegens hom Comp; heft
gesegt Swigt stil laat hom biy mij komem.’
CA CJ 331, Testimony of Jacob van Couchin, 218–220.
‘They become sated and drunk from only a little, when they create a tremendous tumult of shouting and
babbling.’ Quote from Dapper, in Schapera, Early Cape Hottentots, 57.
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NIGEL PENN
the Tygerberg region and most of the local Khoikhoi would have lived on land that was in
the possession of white farmers. Crebis did not speak Dutch, or at least not very well, and
she communicated with Caper in ‘de Hottentot’s taal’. In the records of the Council of
Justice Crebis is always referred to as being old. Since ‘old’ is a relative term, and Khoikhoi
women were thought to look old at an early stage, we cannot say how old Crebis really
was.21 She had at least two adult sons. But she was not so old that Roelofsz did not find her
desirable.
By the time Crebis joined Casper and Roelofsz at the table both of the men were already
drunk. Roelofsz did his best to bring her to a similar level of inebriation and, when he
judged the time to be right, he proceeded to make overt sexual advances. Crebis was in no
doubt that he ‘wanted to know her carnally’ (‘vleeschelijk willende bekkennen’). Casper,
though drunk, was horrified by the knegt’s lascivious overtures and implored him to stop.
‘You must not do this with my mother because she is an old woman. You will have to kill
me first.’ He shouted to his mother to run away because ‘the knegt wants to sleep with
you’.22 Crebis did run out of the house and across the yard. She hid behind an out-house for
a bit before venturing out again into the yard. As she stood, in front of the house, she saw
Roelofsz deliver a blow to her son’s neck with the butt of his pistol. Casper fell to the
ground and Roelofsz hit him twice more, as he lay there, on the side of his head, so hard
that the gun broke.
Jacob van Couchin had witnessed both Roelofsz’s clumsy seduction attempt and the
blows that the knegt smashed into Casper’s skull. When Jacob had first returned to the
house, after his fruitless attempts to find Jantje, Roelofsz had invited him to join him in a
drinking session. The slave had hung back, rightly fearful of Roelofsz’s mood, but he could
not prevent the Khoikhoi from joining in the knegt’s savage symposium. Jacob did not
suggest to the Council of Justice that he might have been able to stop the knegt from
striking Casper, nor would the Council have expected him to intervene. In a society where
slaves could be sentenced to death for merely raising their hand against their master it was
understandable that Jacob would be a largely passive observer.
As Casper lay face down on the ground blood flowed from his mouth and his nose. He
was alive, but he could not speak. Roelofsz showed no concern for him. Instead, he seized
Crebis and began to grope at her private parts (‘haar vrouwelijkheijt voelende’). He then
forced her inside the house and raped her.23
21.
22.
23.
Dapper, in 1668, observed that Khoikhoi were very long lived, reaching ages of 120 years and even more
whereas Ten Rhyne wrote in 1686 that ‘A consequence of their way of life is that premature old age seizes
their lustful and usually exhausted frames’. Schapera, writing in 1933, noted that the apparent longevity of
Hottentots and Bushmen was probably because ‘among them the skin, owing to paucity of adipose tissue,
readily form into deep wrinkles and folds especially on the face, even in fairly young and well-nourished
people, so that individuals may often look much older than they really are’: Schapera, Early Cape
Hottentots, 62, 63, 123.
CA CJ 331, Testimony of Hottentot Crebis, pp. 222–223: ‘… als wanneer den voorm: knegt theunis haar
comp: vleeschelijk willende bekennen haar evengem: soon Casper tegens dien knegt heft gesegt jy sult sulx
met myn moeder nier doen, want dat is een oude vrouw of jy sult my eerst dood moeten slaan, dat ook
immediaat daarop den gem: hottentot Casper aan haar Comp: heft gesegt moeder gaa jy maar weg den
knegt wilt bij jou slaapen.’
CA CJ 331, Testimony of Hottentotin Crebis, 222–223.
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At this stage the slave Isaak van Ceylon returned to the house. Earlier in the day he had
been given some wine by Roelofsz and then sent to the wheat fields to weigh some of the
wheat. He left the fields at about two in the afternoon and, on crossing the yard to the
house, noticed Casper lying at the entrance with his face on the ground. Casper was making
a snoring sound and blood was coming out of his mouth and nose. Isaak did not attend to
Caper as he assumed him to be drunk. Before going to the fields he had seen Roelofsz
giving Jacob, Casper and Crebis wine and had thought them to be drunk even then.
Entering the house, in the front room, Isaak discovered Crebis lying on the floor with the
knegt on top of her, ‘busy committing his act of lustful carnality’ (‘beesig synde om sijn
vleeschelijk wellust met de selve te pleegen’). Isaak once again turned a blind eye to a
disquieting scene and went into the kitchen to light a fire.24
Roelofsz had not noticed Isaak’s entrance but now, hearing a noise in the kitchen, he
detached himself from Crebis, stood up and called out ‘Who is there in the kitchen?’ Isaak
identified himself and walked from the kitchen into the front room. Crebis was lying naked
on the floor whilst the knegt clumsily tried to fasten his flies. ‘The Hottentots have stolen a
lot of bread from their master’, was all Roelofsz offered by way of explanation.25
Crebis attempted to stand up, but the amount of alcohol she had consumed, together
with the shocking effects of the events she had both witnessed and been subjected to, caused
her to fall down. Isaak noted that she was ‘very drunk’ (‘seer beschonken’) but the assault
on her son, together with her violent rape, must have had a terribly destabilising effect on
an elderly woman.
Moved by either sadism or disgust Roelofsz then sprinkled gunpowder over Crebis’s
body and attempted to light it from the bowl of his glowing tobacco pipe. If Isaak is to be
believed he tried to prevent this by brushing the gunpowder off Crebis. Roelofsz then went
into the kitchen and returned with a pail of buttermilk whose contents he ‘threw, from
behind, into her vagina’ (‘van agter in haar vrouwlijkheid heft gegooien’). With unassuaged
cruelty he then fastened a halter to Crebis’s legs and dragged her outside into the yard.
There he found the horrified slave, Jacob, helplessly monitoring events from a distance. He
shouted at Jacob to bring him an iron bolt from the wagon as he wished to thrust it into the
‘Hottentotin’s’ vagina. When Jacob proved unable, or unwilling, to find the bolt Roelofsz
shouted the same instructions to Isaak, who also failed to fetch the bolt. In exasperation,
Roelofsz went to find the bolt himself. He then returned to Crebis and knelt down beside
her with the bolt. The two slaves could not watch. Jacob went into the house and Isaak
looked away.26
A short while later Roelofsz shouted to Isaak to come and see what he had done. Isaak
refused to do so. Roelofsz came to find him. ‘By thunder why don’t you come and see? I’ve
stuck the iron bolt in her vagina’ (‘Wat donder waarom quam jy niet om te sien? Ik heb die
ysere bout in haar vrouwlijkheid gestooken’).27
24.
25.
26.
27.
CA CJ 331, Testimony of Isaak van Ceylon, 225–227.
Ibid.,‘… seyde dat de hottentot soo veel brood van syn meester gestoolen hadde.’
CA CJ 331, Testimony of slave Isaak van Ceylon, pp. 226 –227 and Testimony of slave Jacob van Couchin,
pp. 219–220.
Ibid., p. 226.
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It is telling that Roelofsz wanted to implicate other men in his obscene violation of a
woman. It is as though his socially unacceptable sexual assault could be legitimated by
masculine complicity. But if he had counted on the approval of his inferiors, the farm’s
slaves, he was to be disappointed. They kept their distance. An equally telling detail is that
when Crebis came to testify about her ordeal, some two weeks later, she admitted that she
had been raped but she could not admit to having been penetrated by an iron bolt. Instead,
she insisted that because she had continuously moved her body, and because the knegt was
so drunk, he had been unable to force the bolt into her.28 Likewise, she explained, the
knegt’s attempt to force buttermilk into her vagina had failed. We should bear in mind that
Crebis was giving her testimony in an intimidating, all-male environment, and that at the
Council of Justice hearing her surviving son, Spanjaard, was acting as the translator. In
these circumstances, traumatised as she was, it is understandable that she sought to cling to
the shreds of her modesty and deny that she had been subjected to an almost unspeakable
indignity.
We should also note that although Crebis was using her own language, with her son,
‘who spoke good Dutch’ (‘die goede duijtsh spreekt’), translating, the court record does not
reflect the particularity of her words. It is unlikely that she would have used the expression
‘knew me carnally with force’ for rape. Nor is it likely that Roelofsz, or the slaves, used the
word ‘vroulikheijd’ (‘femininity’ or ‘womanliness’) for vagina. The court’s transcription of
the evidence sought to cloak certain truths in the euphemistic veils of literacy and legalistic
convention and, as a consequence, it is hard to know exactly what meaning the events had
to the participants. It would be wrong, however, to think of Crebis as a passive victim who
allowed words to be put into her mouth. When her testimony was read back to her for
verification in the presence of the accused (a process known as the ‘recollement’) on 15
September, this time with the farmer Willem van der Merwe (who knew the Hottentot
language) acting as translator, Crebis made several corrections to the narrative. The
corrections were of detail, rather than substance – for instance she explained that she had
been dragged outside with a halter round her legs rather than her neck – but they indicate
that she wanted the record to reflect her truth.29 She signed her statement with two vertical,
parallel lines.
Once Roelofsz had finished with Crebis he threw two buckets of water over her and
turned his attention to her son. He seized the unconscious Casper by his clothes and
dragged him inside the house. ‘Look’, said Roelofsz to Jacob. ‘The Hottentot stole so much
bread and now he’s lying there.’ With that, Roelofsz picked up the remnants of his pistol
and began to pound blows into Casper’s back with the butt. Jacob tried to reason with the
knegt. ‘Theunis, why are you murdering the Hottentot?’
It is interesting that Jacob used Roelofs’z first name as it suggests that there was more
than a working relationship between the two men. This assumption is reinforced by the fact
that of all the slaves it was with Jacob that Roelofsz first shared the wine and with Jacob
that he first shared his discovery that the Khoikhoi had been stealing bread.
28.
29.
Joanna Bourke refers to the belief that it is impossible for a man to rape a resisting woman as a myth,
stating that ‘The first article in the rapists’ charter [is] it is ‘impossible to sheath a sword into a vibrating
scabbard’: Joanna Bourke, Rape: Sex, Violence, History (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007), 24–28.
CA CJ 331, Testimony and Recollement of Hottentotin Crebis, pp. 222–224.
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CASPER, CREBIS AND THE KNEGT
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‘What do you mean murder?’ answered Roelofsz. ‘There is no law (‘recht’) for
Hottentots. But if I murdered you or another slave then your master would lose his money
and I’d be accountable.’30
We cannot say whether Roelofsz literally believed that the Khoikhoi were not protected
by the VOC’s laws, but it is clear, at the very least, that he believed the Khoikhoi to be of an
inferior order of humanity to the rest of the colony’s population. By 1727 the Khoikhoi of
the south-western Cape were effectively the subjects of the VOC as their leaders had been
obliged to recognise Company sovereignty after the Khoi-Dutch war of 1673–1677. The
Company had also declared, in a number of proclamations, that colonists were prohibited
from attacking, robbing, or even trading with Khoikhoi on pain of punishment. There had
also been a number of cases, before 1727, in which Europeans who had killed or injured
Khoikhoi servants had been punished by the Council of Justice, albeit relatively lightly, for
their actions. In 1707, for instance, the Company had banished two knegts from the Cape
for the brutal beating and murder of a Khoikhoi servant and sentenced their slave
accomplice to five years on Robben Island. The Company took the occasion to announce
that ‘these natives cannot be regarded and treated as less than free people’, that ‘beating
and murder were intolerable outrages ‘even if perpetrated on a Hottentot’ and that ‘the
laws make no distinction [between crimes] committed against Christians and heathens’.31
As a Company servant Roelofsz could not have been unaware that the VOC, an
organisation supposedly respectful of Christian principles, disapproved of the rape and
murder of its subjects. But his statements, together with his treatment of the Khoikhoi,
suggest that he did not feel there to be any significant restraints on his behaviour towards
them.32
Jacob’s objections, in any event, were soon drowned by a renewed flow of wine.
Roelofsz forced more drink on the slave and has some more himself for good measure.
Eventually Jacob became so drunk that he could not say what happened next. According to
the testimony of Isaak, however, Roelofsz dragged Casper’s body outside of the doorway
and threw some more buttermilk over his head. The knegt was by then so drunk that he
could no longer stay on his legs. In a state of collapse he was carried to his room by Isaak
and Jacob and thrown on his bed.33 A short while later Arij van der Cust and Jantje
returned to the farmhouse, separately. Arij had been away all day showing someone on a
wagon the way to the farm of Antonie van Roiijen. The first thing he did on his return was
to milk the cows. This task completed he went to the house and saw, lying near the front
door, Casper, presumably drunk. Jantje too had been out all day, grazing the sheep in the
veld. Once he had herded them home he found Casper, lying senseless in the doorway,
30.
31.
32.
33.
CA CJ 331, Testimony of slave Jacob van Couchin: ‘… dien knegt weeder geantwoord heft, wat
vermoorden, daar is geen regt voor hottentots, maar als ik een of anders slaaven vermoorde den souden n
meester syn geld (illegible) syn in ik souw er moeten (illegible)’, p. 219.
Cited by Elphick, Khoikhoi, 181. See also Penn, Forgotten Frontier, 46–47, for an account of this incident
and Penn, ‘Labour, Land and Livestock’, 13–19, for instances of inequalities in the treatment of colonists
and Khoikhoi before the law.
A later example of the colonial belief that the authorities did not care about the murder of Khoikhoi people
is to be found in Adriaan van Zyl, the veldwagtmeester of the Hantam in 1786, who announced after
shooting a number of defenceless Khoikhoi that killing them was ‘like pulling a leaf from a tree and that “de
Heren” couldn’t care less about a Hottentot’: Penn, Forgotten Frontier, 174.
CA CJ 331, Testament van slaaf Isaak van Ceylon, p. 226.
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bleeding from his mouth and nose, making snoring sounds. Arij claims it was he who told
Jantje to carry Casper to his hut. Significantly, neither Isaak nor Jacob had thought of
doing so, suggesting either that they were scared of Roelofsz or that there were limits to
their compassion. Jantje made a fire in the hut and Crebis sat next to it with him. The
unhappy woman told Jantje what had happened to Casper and to her. The two Khoikhoi
kept watch over Casper until, at about midnight, he died.34
Jantje told Arij, who in turn told Jacob, who then woke up Roelofsz with the news that
Casper was dead. The knegt lit a lantern and, followed by the others, went to Casper’s hut.
When it proved impossible to wake Casper Roelofsz dropped some of the hot candle fat on
his face to see whether this would shock him into consciousness. It did not.35
Arij, who seemed to be more responsible than the other slaves, saw that Roelofsz was
still drunk. The knegt was also angry that the slaves were suggesting that Casper had done
nothing wrong. In an attempt to prevent any further ‘accidents’ Arij surreptitiously
removed the farm’s guns, gunpowder and shot, as well as Roelofsz’s pistol, and locked
them up. Unfortunately, Roelofsz noticed this and demanded the return of the weapons. He
struck Arij in the face and threateningly inquired whether the slave wanted a bullet or a
(more obscure but doubtlessly unpleasant) ‘noordsche klaauw’. The chastened slave
returned the knegt’s weapons to him but secretly ordered Jantje to Rondebosch to inform
Rigter of what had happened on the farm. Roelofsz returned to drinking.36
As Friday morning dawned Roelofsz was still drunk. Corridon of Trancqubaer decided
to take the sheep into the veld, no doubt to ensure that he was out of Roelofsz’s reach.
Jantje, the other shepherd, was already on his way to Rondebosch. According to Crebis,
Roelofsz now tried to rape her again, ripping her kaross from her body but, ultimately,
failing to accomplish his desire. Crebis may have been confused about the timing of this
event since she stated that after the attempted rape, Roelofsz left her sitting ‘mother naked’
and then rode from the farm, on a wagon, to Rondebosch. But Roelofsz was still on the
farm on Friday evening, when the three Dutch ladies paid him their poorly timed visit. It is
more likely, therefore, that Roelofsz left the farm on Saturday morning, but whether he
attempted to rape Crebis again, on the Friday or the Saturday morning, is difficult to say.
Crebis was both drunk and traumatised and her sense of time may have been distorted by
her horrific ordeal.37
Exactly when Rigter learnt of the events that had taken place on his farm is not clear.
Jantje is likely to have reached Rondebosch before Roelofsz for a Khoikhoi on foot was
faster than an ox wagon. Rigter does not seem to have rushed to ‘Mosselbank’ to take
control. Instead, he informed the authorities, in the form of the Independent Fiscal Adrian
van Kervel, that his knegt had killed a Khoikhoi shepherd at ‘Mosselbank’. Van Kervel
received this information at the end of August and he then dispatched the second Upper
Surgeon of the Company’s hospital, Bartho de St. Jan, to perform an autopsy on Casper’s
34.
35.
36.
37.
CA CJ 331, Testament van slaaf Arij van der Cust and Testament van Hottentot Jantje, pp. 228–229 and
232–233.
CA CJ 331, Testament van slaaf Coridon van Trancqubaer, p. 230.
CA CJ 331, Testament van slaaf Arij van de Cust, pp. 228–229.
CA CJ 331, Testament van Hottentotin Crebis, p. 223.
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CASPER, CREBIS AND THE KNEGT
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body. The surgeon found several wounds on the right side of the head and a great deal of
coagulated blood on the ‘dura materis’ which was, in his opinion, the cause of death.38
As far as the law was concerned Casper had been beaten to death and the question was, by
whom. Van Kervel, and other members of the Council of Justice, subjected all who had been
at the farm to rigorous investigation and, not surprisingly, concluded that Roelofsz (who was
by then in custody) was guilty of both manslaughter and rape. The trouble was that all the
evidence linking Roelofsz to Casper’s death came from the slaves, whose word, by law, had no
validity when placed against the word of a Christian or a free born man. Van Kervel also
refused to accept that any of the slaves had actually seen Roelofsz hitting Casper. As for
Crebis’s testimony, although she was free born, she was a heathen and, moreover, had been
drunk at the time. In Van Kervel’s opinion, therefore, there was no direct evidence, only a
strong presumption, that Roelofsz was guilty of both manslaughter and the ‘most infamous
and evil rape and mistreatment’ of a very old Khoikhoi woman. Had any of the evidence been
presented by people who could testify against free born Christians, Kervel argued, then at the
very least, Roelofsz could have been subjected to torture in order to extract a confession from
him, a procedure that Van Kervel would have been more than ready to resort to, given the
‘arrogant’ and ‘negative’ attitude Roelofsz had displayed when under interrogation.39
Roelofz’s explanation of events at the farm was that he had had something to drink on
Thursday (three bottles of wine) and that when he discovered, on Friday morning, that the
Khoikhoi had stolen some bread he drank more ‘out of anger’. When Crebis found that he
had taken the bread out of the Khoikhoi’s hut, Roelofsz maintained, she began to make a
scene and entered the house so as to wake her drunken son. Crebis herself was drunk, as he,
Roelofsz, had given her some wine earlier. Casper had passed out in the doorway and as
Crebis tried to raise him to his feet they both fell over. It was then that Casper hit his head.
Both of the Khoikhoi lay on the floor. All Roelofsz admitted to having done was that he
had thrown some water over Crebis in order to wake her and when that had failed he tied a
halter to her and dragged her outside. He denied raping her, or violating her with the bolt.
Instead, he claimed, he offered her a gift. In one hand he held the bolt and in the other some
tobacco. He asked her which she would like and she chose the tobacco.40
Though such a choice was probably never offered to Crebis the knegt was subconsciously drawing attention to the widespread belief that sex (symbolised by the phallic
iron bolt) with a Khoikhoi woman could be bought by a gift. This, at least, was a
customary assumption of European men at the Cape. As early as 1627 Thomas Herbert
reported that Khoikhoi women would reveal their pudenda to visitors for any small favour
and many later travel accounts repeated this as a received truth.41 In 1712 Edward Cooke
38.
39.
40.
41.
CA CJ 331, Autopsy Report of Bartho de St. Jan, p. 217.
CA CJ 331, Statement of Independent Fiscal, Adrian van Kerval, pp. 209–215.
CA CJ 331, Interrogation of Theunis Roelofsz van Christiaansand, p. 234. It should be noted that Roelofsz,
as an unmarried sailor, was more than likely to have frequented prostitutes and to be accustomed to paying
for sex. As Lotte van de Pol notes on prostitutes and VOC sailors, ‘there is an indisputable connection
between seafaring and prostitution […] VOC sailors were held in low regard. Their worst qualities, in the
eyes of established citizens, were their habit of frequenting prostitutes and their reckless spending’: Lotte
van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2011), 155–156.
The Herbert extract may be read in R. Raven-Hart, Before Van Riebeeck: Callers at South Africa from
1488–1652 (Cape Town: Struik, 1967), 119. ‘They are, however, unashamed, and for a small piece of bread
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noted that Khoikhoi women would expose themselves for a cheap price: ‘for a Dutch
Doubleke they will show all to the waggish Sailors that ask them.’42 Some European men
may have been content to simply view the genitals of the women in order to satisfy their
curiosity about the existence, or not, of the so-called ‘Hottentot apron’, the elongated
nymphae that Khoikhoi females were reported to possess.43 But others, no doubt, took
their investigations into Khoikhoi sexuality further and there were, no doubt, some
Khoikhoi women who prostituted themselves.44
European travel literature of this time, when discussing the inhabitants of Africa,
commonly attributed to Africans, in general, a promiscuous sexuality. African women, in
particular, were portrayed as being sexually insatiable and immoral. As a number of
authors have pointed out this deliberate denigration of Africans was not unconnected with
attempts to justify the increasing enslavement of Africans by Europeans. The depiction of
African women as being even more sexually voracious than African men is partly
explicable by the fact that the writers of such descriptions, who were themselves males, saw
women as being even more ‘other’ than men.45
These prejudices concerning Africans were magnified in written accounts about the
Khoikhoi as, from the seventeenth century onwards, these people were considered to be the
least civilised of all African and, indeed, all human societies.46 William Ten Rhyne’s
description of Khoikhoi lovers in 1686 leaves the reader in no doubt that Khoikhoi
sexuality is of bestial nature:
Abandoned as they are to every vice, they practice the rite of Venus a posteriori; the woman rests
upon her side higher up than the man, while he reclines in the hollow that serves him for a bed. Thus
after the fashion of the beasts they rush on their mutual embrace.47
If Khoikhoi sexuality was not entirely human then, it was implied, their genitals must be
unnatural. Many travel accounts debate whether Khoikhoi men had ‘male organs of more
than usual size’, or permanently erect penises and described evidence of the self-excision of
one of a man’s testicles.48
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
or tobacco will expose themselves entirely to your gaze’, wrote Dapper in 1668: see Schapera, Early Cape
Hottentots, 47.
Quoted by Linda E. Merians, Envisioning the Worst: Representations of ‘Hottentots’ in Early Modern
England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 133.
For the significance of the debates about the ‘Hottentot’ apron see Sander L. Gilman, ‘Black Bodies, White
Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine and
Literature’, in H.L. Gates, ed., ‘Race’, Writing and Difference. Special issue of Critical Inquiry, 12, 1 (1985),
204–242. See also Shapera, Early Cape Hottentots, 45, n.62.
For a discussion of the somewhat limited evidence of Khoikhoi female prostitutes at the Cape see Gerald
Groenewald, ‘“A mother makes no bastard”: Family Law, Sexual Relations and Illegitimacy in Dutch
Colonial Cape Town, c. 1652–1795’, African Historical Review, 39, 2 (2007), 58–90, 67.
Jennifer L. Morgan, ‘“ Some could suckle over their shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies and the
Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54, 1 (January 1997),
167–192.
See M. Van Wyk Smith’s article, ‘“The most wretched of the human race”: The Iconography of the
Khoikhoin (Hottentots), 1500–1800’, History and Anthropology, 5, 3-4 (1992), .
I. Schapera, The Early Cape Hottentots (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1933), 285–330, 127.
Ibid., 45.
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Khoikhoi females, in particular, were demonised. ‘The women may be distinguished
from the men by their ugliness’, declared Ten Rhyne.49 Not only were their genitals
supposedly deformed, either by nature or self-mutilation, but they were depicted as being
able to fling their breast over their shoulders so as to be able to feed their infants as they
clung to their backs.50 According to Herbert Khoikhoi women could give birth without
pain. They were accused not only of sounding like apes, but of having sex with apes as well.
In the words of Herbert ‘’ tis thought they have unnatural copulation with those beasts and
baboons with whom their women frequently converse’.51 As Z.S. Strother puts it: ‘In the
chain of being that proposes the Hottentot as the missing link between the human and the
animal realms it is the Hottentot woman who serves as the truly transitional figure between
man and ape.’52
It might be assumed, from the above, that European men were revolted by Khoikhoi
women and that this would be have an impediment to sexual contact. Elphick and Shell, in
The Shaping of South African Society, argue that sexual relations between Europeans and
female Khoikhoi were comparatively rare, at least in the seventeenth century, because
Khoikhoi women were ‘still subject to the disciplines of their fathers and husbands and to
the stringent traditional penalties (often death) for adultery’. More controversially, they
add: ‘Moreover, the European male colonists preferred the Asian and “mixed race” women
and looked upon the Khoikhoi, with their animal skins and grease, with distaste.’53 Sexual
preference may be one thing, but sexual need is another, and a feeling of contempt for
another has, historically, been no barrier to sexual intercourse with that person. In any
event it is unlikely that Roelofsz treated Crebis the way he did because he had read
travellers’ accounts of the Cape. But it is likely that these accounts reflected prevalent
European attitudes towards the Khoikhoi and beliefs about their nature. The accounts also
serve to illuminate European ideas about Khoikhoi sexuality and help to explain why no
European was ever convicted of raping a Khoikhoi woman at the Cape during the VOC
period.
H.F. Heese, in his summary of criminal sentences in the eighteenth-century Cape, states
that there were some cases of rape, or attempted rape, which involved whites. But he does
not state what these cases were and whether they involved Khoikhoi women. He does not,
in fact, list a single instance of a sentence being passed against a white man for the rape of a
Khoikhoi woman in his list of criminal sentences. He does state, however, that the majority
of people charged with rape were slaves. Whether their victims were fellow slaves,
Khoikhoi or white, the rapists were invariably executed in a gruesome way. It is clear,
however, that the rape of a white woman was regarded as being particularly shocking and
the worst punishments were reserved for those who had been guilty of this outrage.54
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
Ibid., 115.
Merians, Envisioning the Worst, Ch. 4.
Raven-Hart, Before Van Riebeeck, 119.
Z.S. Strother, ‘Display of the Body Hottentot’, in Bernth Lindfors, ed., Africans on Stage: Studies in
Ethnological Show Business (Bloomimgton: Indiana University Press, 1999), 9.
Richard Elphick and Robert Shell, ‘Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, Settlers, Slaves and Free Blacks,
1652–1795’, in Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–
1840, 2nd edition (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1992), 195.
H.F. Heese, Reg en Onreg: Kaapse Regspraak in die Agtiende Eeu (Bellville: The University of the Western
Cape, 1994), 98.
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Mansell Upham has been the most diligent in searching the VOC’s criminal records for
rape cases but not even he has found an example of a white man being sentenced for raping,
or attempting to rape, a Khoikhoi woman. Upham has taken great care to discover the
exact status and exact circumstances of each rape case arguing, correctly, that the precise
facts are very important in establishing the nature of the crime and whether rape, attempted
rape or consensual sex across the colour line was on trial.55 He has found five incidents of
attempted rape of a European female by a male slave. The first of these occurred in 1705
when a slave called Jacob van Coromandel propositioned 19-year-old Hilletje Smits at
Jonkershoek. Though he did not get as far as having sexual intercourse with her he was
hanged for the crime of desiring a ‘free daughter of European descent’ whilst he himself was
‘a black slave’. A similar incident occurred in 1712 when 30-year-old Robert van Batavia
was attracted by the provocative squatting (so he said) of 17-year-old Neeltjie Olivier as she
mashed rice for chicken feed. After some banter about her deliciously displayed ‘melktert’,
Robert went too far. Attempted seduction was seen as attempted rape. He fled, was caught,
and executed. In 1729 Abel van Timor was broken on the cross for the attempted rape of
12-year-old Helena Willemsz. In 1732 Hendrik van Nias was broken on a cross for the
attempted rape of 17-year-old Susanna Kuun and in 1767 the 17-year-old July van
Malabar, slave of Barend Ackerhuys, was hanged for the attempted rape of his master’s
two daughters, aged 6 years old and 16 months old respectively.56 What these cases prove is
that the VOC regarded the attempted rape of white female minors by slaves as a very
serious offence and had no compunction about accepting the testimony of a white female
minor over that of a male slave.
Only two cases of white female minors actually being raped by slave men have been
found. In 1713, 14-year-old Anna Jordaan was raped at knife point by Antony of
Mozambique and kept in his power during the night. His sentence was to be bound to a
cross and to have his flesh pinched from his body by red-hot irons. He was then to be
broken on a wheel without the coup de grace, decapitated and his body left for the birds.
His head was affixed to a pole close to the scene of his crime. The court explicitly stated
that it found the rape of a European girl by a heathen to be an ‘execrable enormity’ and a
‘godless deed’.57 Earlier, in 1681, Cupido van Bengale had been hanged and burnt under
the gallows for having sexually molested the child Risie Jacobs as she slept. He was also
charged with the crime of having fornicated with the married white woman, Anna Elisabeth
Roleemo, ‘on various and numerous occasions’, three years before, ‘thus adding to his
offence the greater crime of adultery’. Whether adultery really was worse than the rape of a
minor is doubtful. What is not disputed, however, is that the VOC regarded the sexuality of
white women as being out of bounds for slaves.58 Such reactions are in keeping with what
we know of other colonial slave societies, where perhaps the worst crime imaginable, as far
55.
56.
57.
58.
Mansell Upham, ‘“Keeping the gate of Hell…” subliminal racism & early Cape carnal conversations
between black men & white women’, Capensis, 1 (2001), 16–34. See also Robert Shell, Children of Bondage:
A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1834 (Hanover, NH: University Press
of New England, 1994), 315–324. Shell is criticised by Upham for lumping disparate cases of sexual
misconduct together.
Upham, ‘Keeping the Gate of Hell’, 29–32.
Heese, Reg en Onreg, 98–99; Elphick and Shell, ‘Intergroup Relations’ 199–200.
Upham, “Keeping the gate of Hell”, 32–34.
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as the masters were concerned, was the rape of a white woman by a slave, a crime that
simultaneously subverted the sexual, racial and political order. It is likely that this
particular crime was more often anticipated than performed and that some of those slaves
convicted of rape were unjustly accused. But the relative infrequency of the rape of white
women by slaves does not mean that it did not haunt the colonial consciousness.59 There is,
in fact, only one case of a white woman, as distinct from a white girl, or minor, being raped
by a slave at the Cape. The victim was Petronella Marseveen, a mother of four, who was
pulled from her horse and raped by Jeptha van der Caap in 1761 near Roodezandkloof.
Petronella died shortly after her ordeal. Jeptha was bound to a cross, castrated, and his
genitals burnt in a fire. Therafter he was broken on a wheel and decapitated with his head
impaled on a stake at the entrance to the Roodezandkloof.60
It is not surprising that neither Heese nor Upham list a single example of a European
being sentenced for the rape of a Khoikhoi woman since no such sentence was ever entered
in the volumes which record the criminal sentences. These volumes provided the bulk of the
evidence for both Heese and Upham’s invaluable research, but they only record criminal
cases in which sentences were passed.61 There were some cases, and the case against
Roelofsz is one of them, where sentence was not passed because the Council of Justice felt
there was no case. The evidence of these cases is to be found in the records that contain the
documents of the cases, rather than in the records of sentences passed in criminal cases.62
The reason why no white man was found guilty of raping a Khoikhoi woman was not
because such a crime did not occur, but because it was a crime that could not be proved.
Rape was regarded as a serious offence in early modern European societies and could
carry the death penalty. Very often, however, the law seemed more concerned about
protecting the rights of the ravished woman’s family rather than those of the individual
herself. The emphasis was on defending the potential value that a woman might have,
socially and materially, as a marriage partner. Nobody wanted damaged goods and the law
was there to protect a patriarch’s investment in marrying his daughter into a good
lineage.63 It followed from this that the law was less concerned with the rape of a low status
woman, since her social capital was judged to be less than that of a woman of high status.
The same reasoning was extended to the rape of married women. The honour of a high
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
It is disappointing that Worden and Groenewald have not included any rape cases involving slaves in their
selection and discussion of documents from the Criminal Records in the Cape Archives. Nigel Worden and
Gerald Groenewald, eds, Trials of Slavery: Selected Documents Concerning Slaves from the Criminal
Records of the Council of Justice at the Cape of Good Hope, 1705–1794 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society,
2005). See Lucy Valerie Graham’s State of Peril: Race and Rape in South African Literature (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012) for an analysis of the prominence of the ‘black peril’ narrative in the white
settler imagination in South Africa that has been obsessed with the idea of the rape of white women by
black men.
Upham, “Keeping the gate of Hell”, 34.
The series in question is CA CJ 781-800, Criminal Sentences, 1697–1805.
These documents are in the series CA CJ 303-499, Documents in Criminal Cases, 1699–1805.
Roy Porter, ‘Rape, Does it have a Historical Meaning?’, in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter, eds, Rape:
An Historical and Social Enquiry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 217.
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NIGEL PENN
status family was of much greater worth than that of a low status family and the rape of a
serving woman of less consequence than that of a lady.64
Of even greater significance than this bias, however, was the fact that rape was a crime
that was very difficult to prove. The great majority of rape cases involve a crime committed
by a man against a woman in the absence of witnesses. If a woman accused a man of rape it
was very often her word against his and, historically, courts of law tended to give more
weight to the word of a man rather than of a woman. This was especially true of early
modern Christian countries, like the Netherlands, where religious doctrine encouraged the
belief that female sexuality was a snare for the righteous.65 Linked to such prejudices about
female sexuality was the associated idea that a woman’s honour was bound up with her
sexuality. As Wiesner-Hanks puts it: ‘For all women, honour was a sexual matter.’ Sexual
propriety, in a woman, was the hallmark of honour and the most dishonourable name for a
lady to be called was ‘whore’. Rape was thus a crime committed not so much against a
woman’s body, as against her honour and (perhaps more importantly in early modern
Europe) against the honour of her men folk. An honourable woman’s male relatives, rather
than the woman herself, was expected to defend her against the insult of rape, if necessary
in the law courts. A dishonourable, sexually promiscuous or low class woman, on the other
hand, would find few but herself to defend her honour.66
The situation was even worse in a colonial context where the majority of women were
heathen or slaves. It may be appreciated that the chances of a low status, non-European,
non-Christian Khoikhoi woman’s word being accepted against that of a white, Christian
man’s word in a rape case were almost non-existent, a fact confirmed by Van Kervel’s
ruling. Though there were witnesses to Crebis’s rape, they were slave witnesses and thus,
legally, unacceptable. Casper’s attempt to protect his mother’s honour, as we have seen,
cost him his life. The consequence of these legal and customary obstacles to Khoikhoi
women bringing a successful case against colonial rapists is that the crime becomes largely
invisible in the historical records. Was the rape of Khoikhoi women by colonists much
more widespread than the records suggest?
This is certainly the assumption of Yvette Abrahams.67 But we should be cautious about
assuming that colonial men would simply rape Khoikhoi women because they could, an
argument that comes close to the feminist view that rape is functionally integral to
patriarchy and that all men are potential rapists, restrained only by the law. As historians
64.
65.
66.
67.
For a discussion of these points see Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400–1800 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11–55, and William Naphy, Sex Crimes from Renaissance to
Enlightenment (Stroud: Tempus, 2004), 81–100.
See Crawford, European Sexualities, and Naphy, Sex Crimes from Renaissance to Enlightenment. Also
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008).
Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Gender, 48.
Yvette Abrahams, ‘Was Eva Raped? An Exercise in Speculative History’, Kronos: Journal Of Cape
History, 23 (November 1996), 3–21. This self-confessed speculative piece provides no evidence that Eva, or
Krotoa (a young Khoikhoi girl brought up in Van Riebeeck’s household) actually was raped but assumes
that, since she was a vulnerable Khoikhoi woman, ‘It cannot be doubted that Eva could have been raped’
(p. 20). Taking this as a given fact enables Abrahams to claim that the experience of the aptly named first
woman, Eva, was subsequently to be repeated by ‘thousands of Khoisan women’ (p. 3). Though the article
contains some useful insights its speculative methodological foundations and emotive tone (‘Genocide is an
ugly word. The reality was uglier’ [p. 21]) make it difficult to assess rationally.
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like Porter and Bourke have reminded us, ‘it is better to view sexuality as shaped by culture,
values and social habit’ and rape, as a form of sexual behaviour, cannot be removed from
its cultural context.68 It may indeed be true that the colonial context both encouraged the
rape of subaltern women and prevented evidence for this from being recorded in the
criminal records, but one needs to consider rape within an even broader cultural context
than this. In the first place, there is the context of the concept of honour in European
society. In early modern European societies, particularly in Holland, ‘honour depended to
a great degree on proper sexual behaviour’ and neither men nor women would willingly
compromise their honour by too blatant an indulgence in improper sexual behaviour.69
Similarly, studies of rape in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England have shown
that, despite the problems of under-reportage of the crime and the bias against women’s
testimony rape rates were low, at least compared to contemporary figures, suggesting that
men strove to avoid the social stigma of being publically identified as rapists.70
Second, there is also the cultural context of Khoikhoi society to take into consideration.
It is quite obvious that sexual relations between white men and Khoikhoi women took
place but were all of these relationships based on sexual violence or rape? Robert Jacob
Gordon, the commander of the Cape garrison visited Little Namaquland in 1779 and
reported that ‘there are nineteen stock farms in Namaquland. Of these there are five
married farmers; the rest mostly take a Hottentot woman or two which, so I hear, they
marry according to their custom’.71 Admittedly, this was more than 50 years after 1727 and
a long way from the Tygerberg but there is no reason to suppose that only in the lateeighteenth-century Namaquland frontier zone did consensual sex, or marriage, take place
between Khoikhoi women and white men. In Khoikhoi society, as Gordon explained, a
man expressed his interest in marrying a woman by entering her parents’ hut, where she
slept at night, and lying down beside her. If she did not raise the alarm the emboldened
suitor would stay until dawn, allowing the parents to discover him. If they did not protest
marriage arrangements could proceed with, hopefully, benefits to all the parties involved
and gifts of cattle to the bride’s parents.72
Kolb’s description of Khoikhoi marriage customs is essentially similar but contains a
description of rough wooing that seems, to contemporary eyes, disturbingly close to the act
of simulated rape:
But before the request for the girl is made […] the future bridegroom goes [with his father] and offers
dagga to both her parents, and smokes it with them. When now his father perceives that by this
smoking he himself begins to feel somewhat light-headed he tells his future brother-in-law the reason
for the coming of himself and his son, and thus duly asks for the girl. Her father takes counsel a little
with his wife in their presence, and either agrees or refuses […] If the father and son thus receive a
refusal, they soon stand up and leave, and the son seeks for another girl in the same manner and with
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
See Porter, ‘Rape’, 216–219 for criticism of what he calls the ‘hydraulic’, reductionist view of rape.
See Lotte van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 43–56.
See Porter, ‘Rape’, 221–223 and V.A.C. Gatrell, ‘The Rape of Elizabeth Cureton: A Microhistory’, in
Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1994), 447–493.
Peter E. Raper and Maurice Boucher, eds, Robert Jacob Gordon: Cape Travels, 1777 to 1786, Vol. 2
(Johannesburg: Brenthurst Press, 1988), 294.
Ibid. Kolb’s description of Khoikhoi marriage customs is essentially similar.
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the same circumstances. If however they receive a favourable reply, and the parents agree […] then
for the first time the suitor is permitted to speak with the girl and enquire whether she also has an
inclination towards him. If the reply is now again according to his wish, the marriage is now certain;
but if not, they two must fight it out, and this is done in the following manner, the two young people
battling during the whole night, who is to have the upper hand. Not that they stand up and box oneanother’s ears, since such actions would be entirely repulsive to them, but that they lie together and
pinch each other’s buttocks as hard as they can, until at last the girl is tired out and concedes victory
to the boy, so that the whole courtship comes to an end.73
Though such customs may easily have been abused or misunderstood by some white men in
their cross-cultural courtship overtures there were others who went on to live with the
Khoikhoi women as their wives and raised families with them, either with or without the
benefit of Christian baptism.74 The Khoikhoi marriage ceremony itself may have been, as
Kolb said, ‘impolite enough’, but basically, the key features of the ceremony were parental
consent, consensual agreement to marry between bride and groom and gift giving. It is not too
fanciful to imagine that these conditions were often met on the Cape frontier zone when white
men desired Khoikhoi women. Within marriage, according to Kolb, Khoikhoi men and
women were not promiscuous. Adultery was regarded as a capital offence but a man could
take more than one wife if he so wanted so he was not necessarily restricted to one woman.75
As far as the Cape authorities were concerned such marriages would not be considered
to be marriage but rather concubinage, the cohabitation together of a man and woman not
legally married but who lived together as if they were man and wife. In order for a man and
a woman to be legally married at the Cape both partners had to be free and Christian, and,
it should be added, baptised as a Christian, which implied a degree of familiarity with the
Dutch language and customs. Such conditions were not that easily met by those females at
the Cape who were of Khoikhoi or slave heritage so there was a high incidence of
concubinage at the Cape. This was exacerbated by the fact that there were far fewer white
women than white men at the Cape throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
causing white men to seek sexual relationships with un-baptised women.76 It would seem
that even if such relationships gave no de jure rights to the unmarried women and their
children that concubinage did give de facto rights to the illegitimate family members. In
1759, for instance, the common-law Khoikhoi wife of Hendrik Eksteen, Griet, was able to
take control of Eksteen’s farm and labour force after his death without objection from the
local authorities. Griet and Eksteen had lived together for 20 years at the Gouritz River,
parenting five children together. Only when it became clear that Griet had had Eksteen
murdered, out of jealousy, did the authorities move against her.77 For much of the
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
Peter Kolb, Cape of Good Hope Today (Nuremburg: Peter Conrad Monath, 1719), Book 2, Ninth Letter.
Unpublished translation by R. Raven-Hart. Kolb goes on to add that during the wedding ceremony a
Khoikhoi ‘priest’ would urinate on the couple three times. It was for this reason that Willem van Wyk, who
married the daughter of Captain Gal of the Great Namaqua according to the ‘Hottentot fashion’ in 1738,
was known as ‘Pis van Wyk’ thereafter: Penn, Forgotten Frontier, 61.
For miscegenation on the Cape frontier see Penn, Forgotten Frontier, 164–169.
Kolb, Cape of Good Hope Today, Book 2, Ninth Letter.
Groenewald, ‘A mother makes no bastard.’ Groenewald calculates that women formed only 40% of the
adult free-burger population by the end of the eighteenth century: p. 59.
Russel Viljoen, ‘“Till Murder Do Us Part”: The Story of Griet and Hendrik Eksteen’, South African
Historical Journal, 33 (1995), 13–32.
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eighteenth century there was similar tolerance for the so-called ‘Bastaard’ families of the
northern Cape frontier zone whose presence was testimony to the widespread practice of
concubinage between white men and Khoikhoi women.
Significantly the change to the new colonial regime of the British at the Cape in the
nineteenth century, along with its different legal system that accepted the testimony of
slaves and Khoikhoi plaintiffs, did not unearth a hitherto invisible but extensive practice of
interracial rape nor encourage a host of accusations. Although Pamela Scully has shown
that no white man was convicted of the rape of a coloured woman in the criminal records
that she consulted (the early-nineteenth-century rural western Cape) – a fact that seems to
confirm the continuity of the vulnerability of Khoikhoi women to rape – it is significant
that there were not all that many cases of rape brought to court to begin with.78 This
negative evidence may, of course, mask the fact that coloured women were being raped in
large numbers by white men but chose not to trust in the law as a means of redress. But it is
more likely that the rape of coloured women by white men did occur but was not endemic.
Similarly, R.L. Watson has shown that, at the Cape, settler fears that freed slaves and
liberated Khoikhoi would celebrate their emancipation by acts of sexual violence against
white women came to nothing. Indeed, he argues, the Cape was remarkable in that white
settlers there scarcely anticipated rape scares such as those that terrified the whites of the
ante bellum American south or the white settlers of Natal and the Witwatersrand at the end
of the nineteenth century. As Watson states ‘The surviving court records during the period
[1830s] show few cases in which Coloureds or blacks were actually charged with the rape of
white women’.79 There were also very few cases of the rape of coloured or black women by
white men.
The evidence from the early nineteenth-century Cape thus seems to suggest that, despite
some instances of rape taking place, there was no culture of endemic interracial rape in the
colony. The reason for this is very likely to be found less in the deterrence of the death
penalty for convicted rapists, nor in the knowledge that whites were seldom convicted of the
rape of Coloured women, but in the dishonour that was attached to the act of rape by all
sections of Cape society. This feeling of repugnance was probably present in the eighteenth
century as well. As the Roelofsz case illustrates, both slaves and Khoikhoi were appalled by
the knegt’s behaviour. So too were the authorities. Even though Van Kervel obviously
believed in Roelofsz’s guilt and abhorred the act that he had committed, and even though
there was little, legally, that he could do he did express the strongest disapproval he could of
the act by ordering that Roelofsz be banished from the limits and jurisdiction of the VOC
for life, a punishment that meant, in effect, banishment to the Netherlands and the removal
of the sin from the colony.
78.
79.
Pamela Scully, ‘Rape, Race and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth Century
Cape Colony, South Africa’, American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 334–359; and Liberating the Family?
Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth:
Heinemann, 1997).
R.L. Watson, Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 188.
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Conclusion
We do not know what happened at ‘Mosselbank’ after Roelofsz’s banishment. It is likely,
once the autopsy had been performed on Casper, that his body was buried, by his mother
and brother, according to Khoikhoi custom. Ten Rhyne writes that the Khoikhoi would
‘mourn their dead with lamentations for three days, both men and women sitting round the
hut of the deceased’.80 Kolb declared the mourning could last for up to seven or eight days
and described the noise of the howling and weeping as capable of bursting the head of
anyone within a quarter of an hour’s distance away from the mourners. There would have
been clapping of hands and the repeated shouting of ‘Bo! Bo!’81 From this it is clear that
Crebis’s loud and persistent weeping and wailing was a Khoikhoi custom. Casper would
then have been bound up into a foetal position in his kaross, his body would have been
taken out of the back of the hut, not the front entrance, and buried. Stones or logs would
have been placed on the grave to prevent wild animals from exhuming his body. His hut
would then have been abandoned and never again used as a dwelling place. The mourners
might then have been sprinkled with urine by the eldest male present and smeared with
ashes and cow dung, but whether all these ceremonies were observed in the case of Casper
we cannot say.82 We can only assume that, after the burial, Crebis went to live with her son,
Spanjaard, but where he lived the records do not state.
Rigter’s wife, Margaretha, died in 1728 and it seems that there was nothing to keep him
at the Cape any longer. He very likely sold ‘Mosselbank’ and took his share of his deceased
wife’s property back to Amsterdam. It is recorded that he was granted permission to return
to the Fatherland on 22 February 1729 since he had ‘no wife or family’ at the Cape. He was
to travel on the return fleet, in a cabin, unlike his fellow returnees, who were to be housed in
the ‘constapels camer’.83 This detail suggests that he was relatively well-off, a fact
confirmed by his entry in De la Fontaine’s report of 1732 where it is noted that he ‘is met
een gemeene stuiver thuijs gevaaren’.84 We do not know to whom he sold ‘Mosselbank’ in
1728 but by 1753 it was in the possession of Thobias van Dijk.85
Dirkje Helm, whose second husband, Hendrik Neef, had been murdered by a knegt in
July 1727, did not stay a widow for long. In February 1728 she remarried. Her new
husband was Meyndert van Eeden of Bremen, who was very likely another knegt.86 The
man who had murdered Neef, Loef Claassen van Mook, was finally brought to justice in
March 1729. He had somehow managed, in July 1727, to evade capture and stow away on
the Barbesteijn, the flagship of the Admiral of the return fleet bound for the Netherlands.
Once at sea he had been discovered, hiding amongst the livestock, and imprisoned. Off the
coast of Holland he was then transferred to the warship, De Oranje Galleij and, from there,
taken to Middelburg where he spent 14 weeks in prison. At the end of this period he was
placed on the ship Duijnbeek and returned to the Cape for trial. On 21 March he stood trial
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
Shapera, Early Cape Hottentots, 127.
Kolb, Cape of Good Hope Today, Part 2, The Twenty-Second Letter.
Ibid.
De Wet, Resolusies, 22 Feb 1729, 36.
Leonard Guelke and Robert Shell, eds, The De La Fontaine Report, 1732 (New Have: Opgaaf
Project, 1990).
CA C 131, pp. 154–168.
Heese and Lombard, Geslagregister, Vol. 4, p. 348. De Villiers and Pama, Vol. 1, p. 300 is wrong.
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at the castle and was sentenced, on 24 March, to be hanged with his body to be left exposed
to the birds of the air. He was executed on Saturday 2 April, the same day that a large
group of his fellow soldiers engaged in an attempt at mass desertion.87
Dirkje’s daughter, Elizabeth Knoetsen, married Nicholas Pilje in 1740 at the age of 29.
This was a relatively advanced age for a nubile white woman to marry in the eighteenthcentury Cape but it would seem that it was not Elizabeth’s first sexual relationship. She is
credited as having born a child before this, out of wedlock, to Joachim Prinsloo.88 This
child, Anna Elizabeth, would later marry a man who was most likely a freed slave, Moses
Davids van der Kaap, an extraordinary occurrence in a society where the marriage of a
white woman to an ex-slave was virtually unknown.89 Of significance here is the fact that
‘Vleesbank’, Dirkje’s farm, was a mere five kilometres from ‘Bartholemeu’s Klip’, the farm
where Maria Mouton and the slave Titus of Bengal had lived together as man and wife
before their execution in 1714 for the murder of Maria’s husband.90 Elizabeth’s sister,
Catharina, the object of Loef Claasen’s passion, also seems to have had an irregular love
life for in the 1730s she gave birth to a child who was christened at Paarl as Roelof Coertze.
Roelof was to become the founding father of the Coertze family in South Africa (the
surname is a variation of his mother’s maiden name – Knoetsen or Knoetzen) but he too
was born out of wedlock and his father is unknown.91
It is interesting to note how many of the settlers whose lives were connected to the events
that took place at ‘Mosselbank’ had multiple marriage partners or extra-marital sexual
relationships. Only one of the European colonists mentioned in this narrative, Cornelia Nel
(who was married to Adriaan van Jaarsveld) seems to have had a single, socially sanctioned
relationship. Though natural mortality no doubt accounted for the demise of most
marriage partners one is left with the impression that the regions of Tygerberg, Riebeeck’s
Kasteel and Paarl were inhabited by passionate men and women who were quite prepared
to act with impropriety in pursuit of sexual satisfaction. These findings seem to be
contradicted by recent research into the genetic heritage of the Afrikaner population that
has found very low rates of nonpaternity in an old Afrikaner family, namely 0.73%, a figure
that suggests that the children of an Afrikaner wife really were fathered by her husband. It
should be remembered, however, that illegitimate children, or children produced outside
marriage, would have ‘defaulted to the slave and Coloured communities’ and thus ‘while
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
CA CJ 333, pp. 130–179; see also N. Penn, ‘Great Escapes: Deserting Soldiers During Noodt’s Cape
Governorship, 1727–1799’, South African Historical Journal, 59 (2007), 171–203.
Heese and Lombard, Geslagregister, Vol. 4, p. 348. Joachim Prinsloo is listed in Heese and Lombard as
having been christened in 1689 and as not marrying. Heese and Lombard, Geslagregister, Vol. 8, p. 493.
Heese, in his list of ‘Huwelike en ander verbintenisse tussen gekleurdes onderling’ in Groep Sonder Grense
notes the marriage of Moses Davids van der Kaap and Elizabeth Pilliers van der Kaap in 1762. He assumes
that Elizabeth was ‘coloured’ and states that Moses Davids was a burgher and possibly a free slave. There
seems to be no reason to suppose Anna Elizabeth was ‘coloured’ however: H.F. Heese, Groep Sonder
Grense: Die Rol en Status van ‘n gemengde bevolking aan die Kaap, 1652–1795 (Bellville: The University of
the Western Cape, 1984), 78. In The Shaping of South African Society, Elphick and Shell quote Heese as
saying that he had only found six references to unions between black males and European females between
1652 and 1795: Elphick and Shell, ‘Intergroup Relations’, 199. Mansell Upham lists some 15 cases, but not
that of Moses Davids: Upham, ‘Keeping the Gate of Hell’, 20–28.
See Nigel Penn, ‘The Wife, the Farmer and the Farmers’ Slaves: Adultery and Murder on A Frontier Farm
in the Early Eighteenth Century Cape’, Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 28 (2002), 1–20.
Heese and Lombard, Geslagregister, Vol.4, p. 348, and Vol.1, p. 601.
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NIGEL PENN
men may have fathered illegitimate children with slaves in their youth, the recorded
genealogical history of Afrikaners may in fact reflect genetic ancestry correctly’.92
It is difficult to say whether the thrice-married widow Helms and her desirable and
unconventional Knoetsen daughters had been shaped more by the frontier farming
environment or by family genetics. One argument is that the taint of illegitimacy, or
scandal, in a family restricted the family as a whole to pursue illegitimate, rather than
respectable marriages.93 But it is clear that the region behind the Tygerberg was still fairly
turbulent in 1727 and that this had an effect on the way in which settler sexuality was
expressed. The presence of so many unmarried men94 – most of them knegts – seems to
have imparted an edge of violence to courtship procedures and their quest for a sexual
partner seems just as likely to have ended up in concubinage, rape or murder than with a
rich widow. A high percentage of white men at the Cape never married at all and we may
assume that many of them turned to Khoikhoi women for sexual gratification. Though it is
unlikely that rape was involved in every case it is disturbing to realise that, as they initiated
these relationships, such men would have known that they could use force with virtual
impunity. It is also disturbing to know that if they did turn to rape the archival records are
unlikely to record this as having been a crime.
92.
93.
94.
Jaco M. Greef, et al, ‘Low Nonpaternity Rate in an Old Afrikaner Family’, Evolution and Human Behavior
33 (2012), 268–273; and J.M. Greef, ‘Deconstructing Jaco: Genetic Heritage of an Afrikaner’, Annals of
Human Genetics, 71 (2007), 1–16.
Groenewald, ‘A mother makes no bastard’, 84, discusses the hypothesis that ‘illegitimacy runs in families’.
Robert Ross has estimated that 11% of white males at the Cape could not have found European wives.
Elphick and Shell dispute whether this figure was significantly higher than that in Europe at this time but
they do acknowledge that imbalanced sex ratios between white men and white women were likely to be
higher in the frontier zone. See Elphick and Shell, ‘Intergroup Relations’, Shaping of South African
Society, 197.