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

Settlers began making and recording land claims in the Cedarberg in 1725, but the area did not get a local magistrate until 1837. Thus the Cedarberg was inhabited by settlers making permanent land claims for more than a century before the colonial government established a local administrative presence.10 Consequently, the Cedarberg was long-lived as a contested zone-but one with a paper trail that shows successive generations of settlers transforming tenuous land claims that were frequently interrupted by violent conflict into more widespread, year-round ranching properties anchored by well-stocked houses and complex family relationships. After a half century of land claims, the Cedarberg-though still governed from a distance-was within the colonial orbit to the extent that travelers such as Swedish botanist Carl Thunberg visited the region in 1773-74. He noted, "Hospitality is carried to a great length among the farmers throughout all this country, insomuch that a traveler [sic] may, without being at any expense either for board or lodging, pass a longer or shorter time with these people, who with the greatest cordiality receive and entertain strangers."11 The available range of that hospitality varied greatly, though. European visitors were alternately pleased and dismayed by the domesticity of frontier settlers.

COLONIAL FRONTIERS AND SETTLER HOUSEHOLDS

By the 1770s, the Burger family could graciously host European visitors, an outcome that was not evident in the 17305. How did people born on the frontier grow up to have more outward signs of conformity to European-based norms than their parents did? That a wave of migrant stock farmers opened a region to settlement; subsequently survived relative isolation and armed conflict; engaged in cross-cultural contact with their slaves, indentured Khoisan servants, and indigenous Khoisan inhabitants; eventually won the war; and finally claimed more land does not do enough to explain this phenomenon.12 The conception of frontiers as serially opened and then closed assumes rather than explains the terms of conquest. Leonard Guelke's heterodox/orthodox formulation instead lets us think about a space and time in which people increasingly saw their lot as invested in conformity with the established colony rather than tied to the opportunities and risks of life beyond it.13 Guelke's perspective construes colonial engagements not only in terms of "settler" and "native," but significantly, it also characterizes frontiers as spaces where both colonizing and colonized peoples contested metropolitan expectations. For Guelke, orthodoxy implied a conscious affinity with colonial authority. I argue that this orthodoxy had a domestic component.

In the Western Cape region of southern Africa, conquest can be measured by the proliferation of tenable settler land claims, which were made household by household; increasing signs of European-inflected domesticity are tangible evidence of settlers' success. Thus the Cedarberg-which encompassed sites of violent conflict and provided a harbor for runaway slaves and criminal fugitives during the 1730s and 1740s-was, by the end of the eighteenth century, home to established farms supported by families living according to norms that were more European than African.14