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

Despite holes in our knowledge, it is clear that the most basic unit of settler social and economic organization, whether in Cape Town or the frontier regions, was the household.15 Frontier households centered on a married couple and their children and included slaves, Khoisan indentured servants, and other settlers, usually relatives.16 These homesteads helped to sustain each other; linked by relationships determined by women as much as by men, they formed the locus of colonial frontier conquest.17

The clerks of the Dutch East India Company apparently did not need to delimit households. Recognizing marriages, land claims, and the annual agricultural production of married couples as well as individual adult men was sufficient for the company's purposes. Beyond marriage and slave ownership, the settlers' organization of social and productive relationships went unrecorded by the VOC. So, the colonial archives do not document the specific composition of frontier households, yet enough evidence exists from which to infer generalizations.18

These households were stable but fluid. Long-term loan-farm claims and an increase in the value of farm buildings listed in inventories indicate that leaseholders maintained a domestic base and improved the permanent structures on that land. The question of who actually lived in the farmhouse-and how many houses might have graced a single farm-remains unanswered, for now. Here I offer carefully reasoned assumptions about who comprised households, based on inventories and the annual census and taxation rosters (the opgaaf).

The opgaaf recorded adult men first and in a primary position. Free Chinese, emancipated slaves, and mixed-race individuals all appeared in its pages, though the preponderance of entries listed European-descended settlers. Each adult man merited a line in the annual register. Next to his name was space for his wife's, which in Dutch custom remained her maiden name. Then came columns for enumeration: minor children separated into boys and girls, overseers, followed by slaves, livestock, crops, and weapons. When boys reached adulthood, their names appeared in the register directly below their parents1 names. Thus, a careful reading of the opgaaf shows a family's lifecyde. A young man appeared first in his father's household with possessions limited to some permutation of a horse, a pistol, a musket, and a sword. Sometimes he acquired livestock, slaves, or both before he married, but not always. After marriage, adult sons' names often stayed on the list for several years below their parents' names. Daughters typically went from unnamed tally marks under their parents' names to some other place in the opgaaf, recorded as someone's wife, starting the process again.

Grouping people into households according to the list presented in the opgaaf is speculative but tenable. Genealogies describe consanguineous relations, while estate inventories name spouses and children, minor and adult. Freehold and loan farm records attest to land claims, but most stock-farming families had more than one permit, so property records alone do not necessarily indicate where people lived. And none of these sources is explicit about which people lived together. Nevertheless, repeated patterns in the opgaaf mirror documented family relationships and offer reasonable assumptions about neighbors.19