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

NOTES

This paper benefited from generous material and intellectual support. Research in South Africa and the Netherlands was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad award, a Title VI FLAS grant from UCLA, and a UCLA Graduate Fellowship. Writing time was afforded by a UC President's Humanities Research Fellowship and by an ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowship made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Leonard Guelke, Hans Heese, Robert Ross, and Rob Shell each graciously shared the products of their labors in the archives of the Dutch East India Company, helping me to make more sense of land tenure and taxation records, and subsequently to access more data than a single researcher could ever hope to encounter. I gratefully acknowledge their specific contributions elsewhere in the notes. Martha Chaiklin, Helen Chenut, Alice Fahs, Rebeca Heifer, Michelle Molïna, and Glen Watt, along with the Frontiers editors and anonymous reviewers, made valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript. Thanks to Ward Smith for seeing a title where I did not.

1. 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.

2. Discussion of these five inventories comes from a wider study of frontier households in L. J. Mitchell, Belongings: Property, Family and Identity in Colonial South Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). Trends in the Cedarbergarea 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, ç et/content/activities/docu m ents/Orphan_Ch amber-Cape_of_Good_Hope/index, htm (accessed July 28,2006).

3. 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.

4. 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).

5. 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 specifie evidence from frontier regions, I hesitate to apply his conclusions rooted in the more settled areas of the Cape directly to the Cedarberg.