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

GENERATION y. BAREND ("THE YOUNGER) & HELENA SMIT; SCHALK WILLEM & HESTER SMIT

Elsje's children-Barend the younger, Schalk Willem, Anna Sophia, and Maria Magdalena-all lived in her household after their marriages, but not all at once. Her sons did not claim slaves or livestock of their own until 1750, after nearly a decade of marriage. At this point, Barend the younger and Schalk Willem either were still part of the household or were their mother's closest neighbors, and Maria Magdalena resided nearby.46 I can locate all but Anna Sophia on neighboring loan farms after 1750. Having established a solid economic footing in the Burger household at Houd Constant, Barend and Schalk Willem-married to sisters Helena and Hester Smit-along with Willem Andriesz. and Maria Magdalena eventually turned distant grazing farms along the Olifants River into permanent residences.47

Brothers Barend the younger and Schalk Willem, their wives, and their sister-who was married to first cousin Willem Andriesz. Burger-continued the expansion into the Cedarberg that had begun with Willem's 1726 claim to Misgunt. This third generation accumulated more wealth than their parents had. Though they ended up living even farther from Cape Town, they used some of this wealth to acquire basic creature comforts, such as beds and chairs, and luxuries such as books and glassware.

When Barend the younger died in 1770, he left Helena Smit with three adult and three minor children, plus a significant estate. A farm house, six men and five women slaves, a wagon, building tools, carpenter's tools, a brandy still, cooking pots, chairs, a four-poster bed, shelves, cupboards, and chests were among the goods inventoried. The opgaafindicatcs their increased agricultural productivity; the estate inventories reveal what that meant for life at home.

Couples made choices about how to spend accumulated wealth, though they did not leave records that reveal who, exactly, made which choices. Furniture, cookware, crockery, wagons, harnesses, milk cans, and brandy stills were not foregone conclusions, but such purchases had to be evaluated against other possible expenses such as grain or breeding stock.48 Moreover, acquiring any material possessions meant selling or exchanging livestock, which many stock farmers were reluctant to do.49 The general increase in consumption over the course of the eighteenth century indicates the importance of the domestic realm for creating colonial identities and claiming territory, but it does not suggest why some families purchased more than others did, or who in the household controlled the purse strings.

CONSUMPTION IN GENERATION 3: AT HOME ON HALVE DORSCHVLOER

Even without details of domestic decision-making, we can see the results of the increased consumption preserved in the property claims and inventories of the third generation of Burgers. At the time of Schalk Willem's death, he and Hester Smit were firmly established in the Cedarberg, with all of their eleven children still living. Schafk Willem had converted Halve Dorschvloer from a loan farm to freehold property in 1763; he maintained the adjacent Misgunt as a loan farm and in 1782 claimed three additional loan farms.SU The assessed value of Halve Dorschvloer was nearly the amount of his parent's entire possessions in 1731, but the farm was only about 15 percent of his estate (see table 1). In fact, Schalk Willem was owed more in outstanding loans than his parents had declared as assets in their report to the VOC.51