In 1838, some 39,000 slaves in the Cape Colony were freed by British Empire decree - though it took several years for the law to be fully implemented. Between 1653 and 1856, approximately 72,000 slaves had arrived in the Cape, either imported as unfree labour or prisoners of war from the colonial battles fought across South and South East Asia. Around 62% of the slaves were from Africa and Madagascar and around 90% or more of POWs were also from Africa. Just over 17,300 slaves brought to the Cape were from South Asia and a further 13,500 were from the Indonesian archipelago. In addition, there were were many slaves who originated in the territories of Bengal, Burma, Siam, Laos, Molucca, Cambodia, Cochinchina, Annam and Tonkin; it is forgotten today that some slaves even originated in Japan. Because a major plantation economy was never established at the Cape beyond the small wine-farms (that came later in Natal between 1860 and 1911, with the importation of indentured South Asian labour to work the sugar plantations), the long legacy of slavery in the Cape is often forgotten. What follows is an extract from A Taste of Bitter Almonds that details my own families convoluted ties to slavery at the Cape:
... the black-and-white image of a strikingly poised young woman. She was wearing the finest silk brocade corsetry of her age, the Photostat reproduction of the original 17th Century oil painting barely dulling the gleam of her bodice. The delicate lace ribboned at her elbows and throat seemed unusually relaxed for the era. Her throat had a string of what are probably pearls and she held a peach in one hand and a folded fan in the other. Her hair was tightly coiled and coiffed into two formations like ear-muffs at the sides of her head: delicately-built with high cheekbones and a calm, intelligently appraising gaze, she looked like an ancient Princess Leia. The caption gives her as “Anna de Koning, wife of Oloff Bergh”.
The text drew me into the tale of the remarkable South Asian slave Angela of Bengal (1633?-1720), Anna's mother, who was sold to Riebeeck in 1659, seven years after he'd made landfall and established the VOC fort – in the year in which he fought the 1st Dutch-Khoekhoen War against the Strandlopers and ordered the bitter almond hedge planted. Angela of Bengal's career is dramatic : sold by a departing van Riebeeck to his second-in-command in 1662, she and her three illegitimate Eurasian children were liberated when the man was transferred to the VOC's East Indies headquarters of Batavia; she established a market garden on the slopes of Table Mountain on her own 3,35-hectare plot of land, Den Leem Bries, bounded by what is now Castle Street and titled to her in 1702, and made good selling fresh fruit to scurvy-vulnerable passing ships. She secured her future in 1669, marrying VOC soldier and sometime free burgher Arnoldus Willemz “Jaght” Basson of Wesel in what was then part of the United Dutch Republic; the couple became, the text states, “the progenitors of all the Bassons in South Africa.”
Of interest to me is Angela of Bengal's eldest daughter, Anna de Koning (or de Coningh, or de Coninck in the notoriously unstandardised spelling of the era), the woman in the picture and likewise a former slave, born out of wedlock in 1661 to the VOC soldier and mason François de Coninck of Ghent in what was then the Spanish Netherlands, now Belgium.
Anna and her two half-brothers were freed along with their mother in 1666, and Anna later married-up in dramatic fashion, to a Swede, Oloff Bergh of Göteborg, close friends with Simon van der Stel, the Eurasian VOC Governor of the Cape, who later became the settlement's military commander in the 2nd Dutch-Khoekhoen War. Her eldest surviving daughter, Christina Bergh, married the stamvader, patriarch, of the De Wet family, Jacobus de Wet, and two of their daughters married into my stamvader’s family: Johanna Hillegonde de Wet married Jacobus Johannes le Sueur (1734-1807), the magistrate of the district of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein and fourth child of François le Sueur (?-1758), my stamvader, who had arrived at the Cape in 1729 on board the Midloo as the last Huguenot settler, to preside as dominee over die Groote Kerk in Cape Town between until 1746, and who married the Governer’s sister Johanna Catharina Swellengrebel in 1730; while her sister Catharina Jacoba de Wet married Jacobus’ brother Petrus Lodewikus le Sueur.
Stamvader François le Sueur hailed from Ooyen in Gelderland, near the border with the Spanish Netherlands, to which his father, Jacques le Sueur, married to Johanna Smit, had fled from Catholic persecution in France in about 1695. Among the preacher’s children, his fourth in particular prospered: Jacobus Johannes le Sueur became the Stellenbosch Magistrate and married a German daughter of the founding elite, the Blankenburgs of the famous wine-farm Meerlust, who bore him 18 children. After retiring from the Lord’s work in 1846, Dominee François, or Franciscus as he’d been nicknamed by the Dutch, purchased the Ekelenburg estate in Rondebosch, in the shadow of Table Mountain. The original Eckelenburg homestead burned down in the 1850s, but was rebuilt and decades later, in 1917, a portion of the land was sold to the Marist Brothers who built the St Joseph’s school there.
Back in the early settlement, a cultural watershed moment occurred in 1707 when a white teenager named Hendrik Biebouw stood up to Stellenbosch magistrate Johannes Sterrenberg, a predecessor of my ancestor magistrate le Sueur, who had attempted to pacify a mob in the town, retorting: “Ik ben een Afrikaander – al slaat de landdrost mij dood, of al zetten hij mij in de tronk, ik zal, nog wil niet zwijgen!": "I am an African – even if the magistrate were to beat me to death, or put me in jail, I shall not be, nor will I stay, silent!” For his remarkable stance in essentially denying the jurisdiction of the the Dutch colonist overlords because he was a white African, an “Afrikaander” – the first time the word occurs in the colonial record – Biebouw was deported to Jakarta. This incident, celebrated by later generations of Boers (literally Farmers) as part of their foundational mythology is notable because Biebouw was not speaking Afrikaans, that “kitchen Dutch” tongue of the underclasses that only came into its own in the late 19th Century, but Dutch, so the intent of his words are clear. Not least, Biebouw is believed to have half-caste siblings .
So in the inimitable fashion of Old Cape families, I share with the Bassons and the de Wets a common ancestor in the freed South Asian slave Angela of Bengal, a formidable matriarch who became the first land-holding “free black” in the Cape and who in turn became a slave owner, whose Eurasian half-breed daughter Anna de Koning rose to become the wife of the man who commanded military expeditions against the aborigines, and who was for 11 years mistress of the Manor House at the grand estate at Groot Constantia after Governor Simon van der Stel’s death – and yet whose multicultural environment was inexorably shifting away from identification with Europe to identification with Africa.
Back at home I have a scan of the front page of the Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser, dated Saturday 2 May 1801. The newspaper records the offerings of an auction of another of my ancestors’ homes, at No.29 Heerengracht, Cape Town, then as now, one of the most prestigious addresses in the Mother City:
“On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the 5th, 6th, and 7th Instant, 1801, Will be Sold Publicly, A House and premises, No.29 Heere Gragt, the property of the late Mr. Le Sueur. Also a quantity of household furniture, bedsteads, bedding &c. gold, silver, copper, pewter, iron, China, and glass ware, men and women slaves, some very able masons, carpenters &c. merchandize, and several other articles, all to be viewed on Monday the 4th”.
I was also aware that le Sueurs had owned an estate at Fresnaye overlooking the Atlantic Ocean (today, suburban Le Sueur Avenue is all that remains of its long driveway) – but until I discovered the Cape Town Gazette article, had no proof of the obvious: that we’d once owned slaves of colour, all lumped together with the other “merchandize.”
Dorothea van Bengale stammoeder of AHLERS
Maria Magdalena Combrink stammoeder of ALBERTS
Johannes Christoffel van Balie ANTHONISSEN
Rachel Johanna Catharina van de Kaap stammoeder of BAM
Angela van Bengale stammoeder of BASSON
Anna de Coningh stammoeder of BERGH
Anna Bok stammoeder of BESTER
Catharina van de Kaap stamoeder of BEYERS
Diana van Madagscar stammoeder of BIEBOUW
Anna Groothenning van Bengale stammoeder of BOK
Arriaanje van Cathryn stammoeder of BOSHOUWER
Ansela van de Kaap stammoeder of CAMPHER
Catharina van Malabar stammoeder of CORNELISSEN
Maria Everts stammoeder of COLYN
Magadalena Ley, stammoeder of COMBRINCK
Christina Bergh stammoeder of DE WET
Cornelia van Saxen stamoeder of DEYSSEL
Sara Heyns stammoeder of EKSTEEN
Maria Heufke van de Kaap stammoeder of FLECK
Anna Willemse stammoeder of FRANKEN
Susanna van Bombassa also called van Madagascar, stammoeder of GERRITS
Elizabeth Plagmann stammoeder of GEYER
Apollonia Cornelia Mocke stammoeder of HANCKE
Marie Beyers stammoeder of HARMSE
Susanna Visser stammoeder of HATTINGH
Cecilia van Angola stammoeder of HERBST
Lasya Rachel Struwig stammoeder of HEYNE
Maria Schalk van der Merwe stammoeder of HEYNS
Maria LOZEE stamoeder of HEYNS
Elizabeth VION van de Kaap stammoeder of HUMAN
Catharina Hoffman & Johanna Jonker stammoeders of LANDMAN
Barendina van Graan stammoeder of LANGEVELD
Helena Rebekka Schott van de Kaap Stammoeder of LANGEVELD
Catharina Valentynse stammoeder of LEEUWNER
Susanna Fleck stammoeder of LEHMANN
Spacie van de Kaap stammoeder of LESCH
Sara Pieters stammoeder of LESER
Petronella Johanna Hartog stammoeder of LINGENFELDER
Sophia Rebekka Plagmann stammoeder of MOCKE
Jette Claesz stammoeder of MOLLER
Cornelia van de Kaap stammoeder of NEUHOFF
Agnitie Colyn Stammoeder of OBERHOLSTER
Susanna Biebouw stammoeder of ODENDAAL
Sara van de Kaap stammoeder of OELOFSE
Martha Catharina Jacobse & Johanna Jonker stammoeders of OLCKERS
Apollonia Jansz stammoeder of PLAGMANN
Cornelia Cornelisse stammoeder of PYL
Dorothea van de Kaap stammoeder of PYPER
Christina Voges stammoeder of SCHUTTE
Johanna Christina Langeveld stammoeder of SPAMER
Stamvader Christoffel SNYMAN
Maria Lozee stammoeder of STEYN
Beatrix de Vyf stammoeder of SUBKLEF
Magdalena Aletta Hartog stammoeder of VAN COPPENHAGEN
Agnietie Campher stammoeder of VAN DER SWAAN
Rebekka van de Kaap stammoeder of VAN GRAAN
David Simon stamvader of VAN HOON
Jannetje Bort stammoeder of VAN KONINGSHOVEN
Catharina van Colombo stammoeder of VERMAAK
Catharina van Bengale stammoeder of VERMEULEN
Maria van Bengale & Maria van Negapatnam stammoeders of VISSER
Sara van Graan stammoeder of VOLSCHENK
Johanna Bok stammoeder of VOS
Anna Willemse & Regina van de Kaap stammoeders of WEPENER
Magteld Cornelisse van Bengale stammoeder of WILLEMSE
Other families with slave 'stamouers'
ABRAHAMSE
BANTJES
BEZUIDENHOUT
Anna Willemse Stammoeder of BRAND
Geertruy Boshouwer Stammoeder of BRONKHORST
CONTERMANN
DE HAAN
DE WIT
FABER
FRISNET
HASSELAAR
HARTZENBERG
Adriaentje van Cathryn Stammoeder of HELM HENDRIKSEN
Alida Cornelis Stammoeder of HEYDER
HEYNIKE
JACOBS
JANSEN
JONKER
Maria Steyn Stammoeder of KRIEL
Gerbrecht Boshouwer Stammoeder of van LOCHERENBERG
MAURITZ
Maria Cornelisse Stammoeder of NIEWOUDT
OKTOBER
SEPTEMBER
Adriaentje Claasen Stammoeder of SPELDENBERG
VAN HOOVEN
Alida Cornelis Stammoeder of VAN DEN BERG
Cornelia Cornelisz Stammoeder of VAN TONDEREN
VOSLOO
WOLHUTER
[ENDS]
