Nigel Penn. South African Historical Journal. Volume 66, Issue 4. December 2014.
Rape is a shockingly prevalent crime in contemporary South Africa. Using a micro-historical approach to analyse a rape case in the criminal records of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) this article seeks to explore whether rape was as widespread in the eighteenth-century Cape as it is today. In examining the details of a case in which a white knecht (hired labourer) raped a Khoikhoi woman and murdered her son the article finds that no white man was ever convicted for the rape of a Khoikhoi or a slave woman and seeks to explain why this was the case. It also finds that though white settlers greatly feared that their women would be raped by slave or Khoikhoi men, this seldom happened. Though focusing on rape the article also examines colonial attitudes towards illicit or extra-marital sex between members of different racial groups. It concludes that issues of honour and respectability played a factor in limiting rape and that, despite a climate of violence, there is plentiful evidence of consensual interracial sex, especially in the frontier regions. Thus, although rape was a crime that white men could commit with virtual impunity, the records do not provide evidence that rape was common.
Introduction
Late in the afternoon on the last Friday of August 1727 an ox wagon bearing three Dutch women was making its way between Cape Town (or ‘De Caab’) and Riebeeck’s Kasteel. The wagon had reached the marshy ground alongside the Mosselbank River, north-east of the Tygerberg and some 30 kilometres from Cape Town, when the women decided to stop for the night. The nearest farm, ‘Mosselbank’, belonged to Phillipus Rigter, and the women thought that they would exercise the customary right of Cape travellers—to ask the landowner for his hospitality—whilst they outspanned their oxen for the night.
The farm buildings occupied an area of high ground overlooking the Mosselbank River, which was perhaps more like a stream than a river to European eyes. The surrounding countryside was lush and fertile after winter rains and the farm itself looked prosperous with its sheep pens, cattle enclosures, wheat fields and gardens. But all was not well on the farm. As their servants outspanned the oxen the women became aware of an incessant wailing and sobbing coming from the huts where the farm’s Khoikhoi labourers lived. It sounded like a woman crying, like a woman mourning. The three Dutch women walked to the main building and, not finding anyone to greet them, entered the darkened house. In a small side room they discovered the sleeping form of the farm’s knegt. It quickly became apparent to the women that the place was in a state of great disorder and that the man himself was drunk. The room stank of alcohol and there was a quantity of wine spilt on the table. They managed to wake the knegt and, once he had lighted a candle, things became a little clearer. The knegt, at least, liked what he saw.
Of the three women before him Dirkje Helms, aged 45, was the most senior. She was also twice widowed and a farmer, or landbouweress, in her own right, having inherited her second husband’s farm, ‘De Vleesbank’, between Riebeeck’s Kasteel and Paarl. As a widow, Dirkje was known by her maiden name, Helm. At her side was one of the eight children from her first marriage—to Cornelis Knoetzen—a 16-year old daughter called Elizabeth Knoetzen. The third woman in the group was Cornelia Nel, wife of the farmer Adriaan van Jaarsveld, owner of the farm ‘Bootmansdrift’ on the Berg River near Riebeek Kasteel. Dirkje and Cornelia were, effectively, neighbours, their farms a mere five kilometres apart. In 1727 Cornelia was in her early 30s and already the mother of seven children. She would bear 11 in all. It was she who seems to have attracted most of the knegt‘s attention.
As land-owning matriarchs the two mature women were the social superiors of a hired servant but Theunis Roelofsz, Rigter’s knegt, was emboldened by drink. It was not every day that he was able to entertain three white women. His master, Rigter, had no wife or children at ‘Mosselbank’. Nor were there any slave women on the farm. For the most part, Roelofsz lived and worked in an all-male environment and he was more than pleased to act the part of ladies’ host, especially since Rigter was, at that moment, far away on a visit to Rondebosch. Roelofsz was quick to produce a bottle of wine and, somewhat unsteadily, poured out a glassful that he offered to the women. Alarmed by the knegt‘s lack of sobriety Dirkje took the glass from Roelofs’z hand and set it down on the table, saying that whilst they would not drink any wine they would be pleased to join him in drinking a cup of tea. At that particular moment, tea did not appeal to Roelofsz as a beverage, and he began to pester Cornelia, the wife of Arij van Jaarsveld, to join him in drinking some wine. Her refusals, and his drunkenness, now prompted Roelofsz to go beyond the bounds of propriety, and he declared to Cornelia that if she would not drink wine with him then she would have to sleep with him. ‘Why should I do that?’ retorted Cornelia, ‘I have a husband to sleep with me’.
The women must have exchanged glances and assessed their situation. They were in a remote farmhouse with a drunk and lustful man. Without tact the situation might easily progress from being awkward to being ugly. As Roelofsz continued to press them into drinking wine Dirkje decided to yield to his ‘continuous persuasion’, agreeing that they would have one glass of wine with him provided that he brought them some tea. Roelofsz ordered a slave to put the kettle on and, once the tea had arrived, continued his advances. This time it was Elizabeth whom he ‘sought to bring into dishonour’ by proclaiming that ‘if the women will not sleep with me then the girl must sleep with me’. To this Elizabeth retorted that she would sooner sleep with the Hottentots outside the house than with him, her remarks prompted by the loud and persistent sound of a Khoikhoi woman crying outside.
At this stage Dirkje decided that it would be courting disaster to stay any longer at the farm so she went outside to order that the oxen be inspanned to the wagon. It was essential to ride away as quickly as possible. Roelofsz, meanwhile, smarting from Elizabeth’s insult, told her that she could follow her mother out of the door, as there would be no bed for her in the house—though there would be for Cornelia. As Dirkje returned to the house to fetch the other women she was intercepted by one of the farm’s slaves, a man called Arij van der Cust. Arij wanted to speak to Dirkje and Dirkje, for her part, wanted to explain to someone with a semblance of authority that she was leaving ‘Mosselbank’ because of the knegt‘s drunken behaviour. Arij cut her explanation short. ‘My God Juffrouw the knegt killed a Hottentot during the night. The Hottentot is lying there, don’t you hear the old woman sitting there crying?’
Dirkje could hear the woman, but she did not go to investigate. Instead, she called Elizabeth and Cornelia, telling them to get up on the wagon because they were all leaving. As they crossed the yard Roelofsz accosted them. ‘Don’t you want to outspan the oxen?’ he asked, unaware that they had already been both outspanned and inspanned. ‘No’, replied Dirkje. ‘We’re leaving.’ As the women rode away Roelofsz shouted after them in frustration. ‘Whores! Bitches! Get off my property!’ His voice, and the sound of a woman crying, was soon mercifully inaudible to the departing women.
It is not surprising that Dirkje was anxious to leave ‘Mosselbank’ in a hurry though it might seem rather callous of the women not to have investigated the condition, or circumstances, of the weeping Khoikhoi woman. But Dirkje had more reason than most to be wary of a drunken knegt‘s sexual advances. Little more than a month before, on 19 July 1727, Dirkje’s husband, Hendrik Neef, had been murdered in his own home by a drunken knegt by the name of Loef Claassen. What is more, Claassen, like Roelofsz, had been sexually attracted to one of Dirkje’s daughters. The daughter in question was Elizabeth’s 23-year-old sister, Catharina Knoetzen. Claassen, who worked on a neighbouring farm, had visited Neef at ‘De Vleesbank‘ in order to ask for his step-daughter’s hand in marriage. Neef’s refusal came after a seemingly convivial drinking session and his reason for rejecting Claassen—’If you were a farmer’s son, yes, but since you are a knegt, no’—caused deep resentment. When Neef suggested that the brooding knegt should return to his post, Claassen first stabbed his host and then beat him to death with a chair, in the presence of Dirkje, before fleeing the scene of the crime. Clearly, therefore, Dirkje knew how dangerous drunken passions could be, especially when expressed by a knegt. But what had happened at ‘Mosselbank’ before Dirkje, Cornelia and Elizabeth’s untimely visit?
On Thursday morning, 28 August 1727, Philip Philipsz Rigter, the owner of ‘Mosselbank’, rode from the farm to visit Rondebosch. The records do not explain why Rigter went to visit Rondebosch but it is not unreasonable to suppose that this was where his wife, or, more accurately his second wife, lived. Rigter had married Margaretha Gildenhuys, the widow of Hendrik du Plooy, in 1725. She died in 1728. She was, therefore, alive in 1727, but there is no mention of her living at the farm. She had had six children with Du Plooy during 21 years of marriage and it is likely, therefore, that when Rigter married her—the same year as Du Plooy’s death—she was the occupant of an established family home and, we may assume, fairly well off.
It is, in fact, very likely that it was Margaretha’s wealth that had enabled Rigter to obtain ‘Mosselbank’ for, until he married her, and gained burgher status, he had himself been a knegt and, more recently, the jailer of the castle. Though Rigter’s career trajectory was not unusual (for more than one knegt made good by marrying propertied widows) it was, in certain respects, exceptional. He had come to the Cape from Amsterdam in 1701 as both a freeburgher and a married man. By 1715 he sold the property he had acquired and returned to the Netherlands with his family, which by then included three children. The very next year, however, he returned to the Cape without his wife and children and as a Company servant. By 1716 he was Otto van Graan’s knegt and, by 1719, Company jailer. Had some dramatic reversal of fortune prompted his lowly return to the Cape or was it domestic discord? We do not know, but his first wife, Catharina Padding, died in Amsterdam at some date between 1722 and 1725, leaving Rigter free to marry Margaretha after Margaretha’s husband had passed away.
Rigter, therefore, had not farmed ‘Mosselbank’ for long on the day that he left for Rondebosch. Nor can he have had much experience of his knegt‘s abilities or character for he made the fatal mistake of entrusting Roelofsz with the distribution of the labour force’s drink rations whilst he was away. Theunis Roelofsz was a 32-year-old sailor from Christiaansand, a port on the south-western coast of Norway. It was unusual for a sailor to work as a knegt because, on the whole, this was an occupation occupied by soldiers. It was also unusual to find a Norwegian amongst the knegts as the overwhelming majority of these people at the Cape were German speakers. In the status conscious world of the VOC sailors were regarded as occupying nearly the lowest rung of the social ladder, marginally superior to slaves and the Khoikhoi but less worthy of respect than a soldier. Sailors were, in addition, regarded as being inveterate drunkards, and it was certainly an error of judgment to leave Roelofsz with 16 bottles of wine and three bottles of brandy to distribute to the farm’s slaves at an appropriate time. Roelofsz’s first act, on finding himself in charge of the farm, was to distribute some of the wine to himself. At a later date he admitted to having consumed three bottles of wine on Thursday, after the livestock had been driven home, but he might well have been economical with the truth. To his credit Roelofsz did invite one of the farm’s slaves, Jacob van Couchin, to have a drink with him that evening but, according to Jacob, the knegt was already drunk by then. Roelofsz was even drunker when Friday dawned.
Amongst the labourers at ‘Mosselbank’ were both slaves and Khoikhoi. Apart from Jacob, who was about 36 years old, there was a slave called Isaak van Ceylon (age unknown), a slave called Arij van der Cust (approximately 30 years old) and a slave called Corridon van Trancqubar (aged 40). These four Asian males occupied a building separate from the main house. There were no female slaves on the farm. It is not clear how many Khoikhoi there were on the farm but three are named in the records: Jantje, a 25-year-old man, Casper (age unknown) and Casper’s mother, Crebis, who is simply described as being old or very old (‘stok oud’). The Khoikhoi lived apart from the slaves, most likely in a traditional reed or mat hut (described as ‘n huisie’) of their own construction. The Khoikhoi males acted as shepherd, or drovers, but the slaves too looked after the animals and there does not seem to have been any rigid job specialisation on the farm.
By the 1730s most of the surviving south-western Cape Khoikhoi were providing labour to the European farmers of the region. Although we do not know what the wages or terms of service were for the Khoikhoi labourers of ‘Mosselbank’ we can assume, based on the few details we have of labour contracts from other farms in the region at this time, that they were poor. Fortunate Khoikhoi might be remunerated for their service with a sheep or a cow per annum, or simply with permission to continue herding their own meagre flocks and herds (if they had any) on the settlers’ farm. Less fortunate Khoikhoi worked for ‘kos en klere’ (food and clothes) or insignificant wages of tobacco or alcohol. Though ostensibly a free people their treatment was often even harsher than that of slaves. The unsympathetic VOC physician, William ten Rhyne, assumed that the Khoikhoi should be forced to work and advised his countrymen in 1686 that if they wished to employ the Khoikhoi as slaves they should ‘keep them hungry’ and ‘never fully satisfied’ so as to cure them of their shameful idleness and vice. Fortunately, added Ten Rhyne, the Khoikhoi were so addicted to tobacco (‘infants of less than eight months old can often be seen smoking’) that
when they have the chance of living for ever free from the restraint of laws and slavery, they yet prefer servitude to going without tobacco, often slaving at the nod of a master the whole day in return for a scanty portion of the weed.
Ten Rhyne could have added that the Khoikhoi, like Europeans, were also very fond of alcohol and bread.
On Friday morning Roelofsz, ‘continuing in his drunkenness’, went into the Khoikhoi labourers’s hut and found some bread there, wrapped up in two karosses. He took the bread and karosses back to the house and showed them to Jacob, declaiming angrily: ‘Look how the Hottentots steal the blood of our boss.’ ‘That is the Hottentot manner’, agreed Jacob, no doubt in a placatory tone.
In equating bread with his master’s blood Roelofsz was, perhaps unwittingly, revealing a confused knowledge of the Christian sacrament of communion. He might well have considered that Christianity urged its adherents to be generous, especially in the sharing of food. In fact, a number of contemporary observers commented that the Khoikhoi were remarkable for their generosity. Dapper, for instance, reported that:
In generosity and loyalty to those nearest them. They appear to shame the Dutch. For instance, if one of them has anything he will willingly share it with another; no matter how small it may be they will always endeavour to share and divide it amongst themselves in a brotherly manner.
This cultural trait of generosity was, however, frequently misinterpreted by Europeans, particularly if it involved the appropriation or redistribution of their own property. When Khoikhoi took what they believed ought to be shared they did not think they were stealing. Unwilling European sharers, on the other hand, saw this more communal attitude towards property as confirmation that the Khoikhoi were addicted to theft.
We cannot say whether Jacob condoned or disapproved of the Khoikhoi having taken some bread, but Roelofsz was not to be soothed. It is very likely that Roelofsz’s aggressive conduct in this instance was linked to his insecure status as a knegt, a man of lowly rank determined to prove to the slaves and Khoikhoi that his authority was equal to that of his absent master’s. Out of anger (as he later explained), he began drinking some more. He also gave Jacob another glass of wine and ordered him to go and find the Khoikhoi shepherd, Casper, and to bring him home. For a long time Jacob searched the veld adjacent to the farmlands in vain but eventually saw Casper walking through the gardens, singing as he came. Jacob ran to Roelofsz to tell him that Casper was approaching.
‘Be quiet. Let him come to me’, was the grim reply.
Somewhat surprisingly, Roelofsz ordered Casper to sit down and drink with him. He ordered Jacob, meanwhile, to go and find Jantje, who was herding the sheep, and to bring both Jantje and the sheep back to the house so that he, Roelofsz, could hold a meeting. Jacob did not like the sound of any of this. Although he was himself slightly drunk he did not like the ominous nature of Roelofsz’s much greater drunkenness. In any event, Jacob was sober enough to realise that it would be detrimental to the sheep to bring them in from pasture so soon as it was only eight o’clock in the morning. Though Jacob went on his errand, seemingly obediently, he had no intention of trying to find Jantje. Instead, he went into the veld, and lay down under a bush where he slept until midday. He then returned to the house with the intention of explaining to Roelofsz that he had not been able to find Jantje anywhere.
The situation at the farmhouse had taken a terrible turn for the worse. In Jacob’s absence, Roelofsz had been busy plying Casper with drink. It is obvious that this was not a friendly or sociable act. Rather, it seems, Roelofsz wanted to make Casper drunk so as to have more control over him. If sailors had a bad reputation for drunkenness, that of the Khoikhoi was even worse, for it was widely known that they had nothing like the same defences against alcohol as Europeans did. If Roelofsz was planning to inflict some sort of punishment on Casper for having taken his master’s bread then it would be all the easier to accomplish if Caper was incapacitated by drink. There was also the lesser satisfaction of making Casper so humiliatingly drunk that his own drunkenness would appear to be under control, and his superiority, as a European and knegt, would thereby be maintained. The objectives of this aggressive drinking were to be enlarged, however, when Casper’s mother came looking for her son. When Roelofsz saw Crebis he invited her to join them in their drinking—an invitation she could not well refuse. Under the influence of alcohol Roelofsz soon began to shift his attention from the Khoikhoi man to the Khoikhoi woman.
Crebis did not normally live at ‘Mosselbank’. We do not know where her home was but she had come to visit Casper about a fortnight before. We do know that she had another son called Spaanjaard, who did not stay at ‘Mosselbank’, and it is possible that she usually stayed with him. By 1727 it is unlikely that there were any independent Khoikhoi kraals in the Tygerberg region and most of the local Khoikhoi would have lived on land that was in the possession of white farmers. Crebis did not speak Dutch, or at least not very well, and she communicated with Caper in ‘de Hottentot’s taal’. In the records of the Council of Justice Crebis is always referred to as being old. Since ‘old’ is a relative term, and Khoikhoi women were thought to look old at an early stage, we cannot say how old Crebis really was. She had at least two adult sons. But she was not so old that Roelofsz did not find her desirable.
By the time Crebis joined Casper and Roelofsz at the table both of the men were already drunk. Roelofsz did his best to bring her to a similar level of inebriation and, when he judged the time to be right, he proceeded to make overt sexual advances. Crebis was in no doubt that he ‘wanted to know her carnally’ (‘vleeschelijk willende bekkennen’). Casper, though drunk, was horrified by the knegt‘s lascivious overtures and implored him to stop. ‘You must not do this with my mother because she is an old woman. You will have to kill me first.’ He shouted to his mother to run away because ‘the knegt wants to sleep with you’. Crebis did run out of the house and across the yard. She hid behind an out-house for a bit before venturing out again into the yard. As she stood, in front of the house, she saw Roelofsz deliver a blow to her son’s neck with the butt of his pistol. Casper fell to the ground and Roelofsz hit him twice more, as he lay there, on the side of his head, so hard that the gun broke.
Jacob van Couchin had witnessed both Roelofsz’s clumsy seduction attempt and the blows that the knegt smashed into Casper’s skull. When Jacob had first returned to the house, after his fruitless attempts to find Jantje, Roelofsz had invited him to join him in a drinking session. The slave had hung back, rightly fearful of Roelofsz’s mood, but he could not prevent the Khoikhoi from joining in the knegt‘s savage symposium. Jacob did not suggest to the Council of Justice that he might have been able to stop the knegt from striking Casper, nor would the Council have expected him to intervene. In a society where slaves could be sentenced to death for merely raising their hand against their master it was understandable that Jacob would be a largely passive observer.
As Casper lay face down on the ground blood flowed from his mouth and his nose. He was alive, but he could not speak. Roelofsz showed no concern for him. Instead, he seized Crebis and began to grope at her private parts (‘haar vrouwelijkheijt voelende’). He then forced her inside the house and raped her.
At this stage the slave Isaak van Ceylon returned to the house. Earlier in the day he had been given some wine by Roelofsz and then sent to the wheat fields to weigh some of the wheat. He left the fields at about two in the afternoon and, on crossing the yard to the house, noticed Casper lying at the entrance with his face on the ground. Casper was making a snoring sound and blood was coming out of his mouth and nose. Isaak did not attend to Caper as he assumed him to be drunk. Before going to the fields he had seen Roelofsz giving Jacob, Casper and Crebis wine and had thought them to be drunk even then. Entering the house, in the front room, Isaak discovered Crebis lying on the floor with the knegt on top of her, ‘busy committing his act of lustful carnality’ (‘beesig synde om sijn vleeschelijk wellust met de selve te pleegen’). Isaak once again turned a blind eye to a disquieting scene and went into the kitchen to light a fire.
Roelofsz had not noticed Isaak’s entrance but now, hearing a noise in the kitchen, he detached himself from Crebis, stood up and called out ‘Who is there in the kitchen?’ Isaak identified himself and walked from the kitchen into the front room. Crebis was lying naked on the floor whilst the knegt clumsily tried to fasten his flies. ‘The Hottentots have stolen a lot of bread from their master’, was all Roelofsz offered by way of explanation.
Crebis attempted to stand up, but the amount of alcohol she had consumed, together with the shocking effects of the events she had both witnessed and been subjected to, caused her to fall down. Isaak noted that she was ‘very drunk’ (‘seer beschonken’) but the assault on her son, together with her violent rape, must have had a terribly destabilising effect on an elderly woman.
Moved by either sadism or disgust Roelofsz then sprinkled gunpowder over Crebis’s body and attempted to light it from the bowl of his glowing tobacco pipe. If Isaak is to be believed he tried to prevent this by brushing the gunpowder off Crebis. Roelofsz then went into the kitchen and returned with a pail of buttermilk whose contents he ‘threw, from behind, into her vagina’ (‘van agter in haar vrouwlijkheid heft gegooien’). With unassuaged cruelty he then fastened a halter to Crebis’s legs and dragged her outside into the yard. There he found the horrified slave, Jacob, helplessly monitoring events from a distance. He shouted at Jacob to bring him an iron bolt from the wagon as he wished to thrust it into the ‘Hottentotin’s’ vagina. When Jacob proved unable, or unwilling, to find the bolt Roelofsz shouted the same instructions to Isaak, who also failed to fetch the bolt. In exasperation, Roelofsz went to find the bolt himself. He then returned to Crebis and knelt down beside her with the bolt. The two slaves could not watch. Jacob went into the house and Isaak looked away.
A short while later Roelofsz shouted to Isaak to come and see what he had done. Isaak refused to do so. Roelofsz came to find him. ‘By thunder why don’t you come and see? I’ve stuck the iron bolt in her vagina’ (‘Wat donder waarom quam jy niet om te sien? Ik heb die ysere bout in haar vrouwlijkheid gestooken’).
It is telling that Roelofsz wanted to implicate other men in his obscene violation of a woman. It is as though his socially unacceptable sexual assault could be legitimated by masculine complicity. But if he had counted on the approval of his inferiors, the farm’s slaves, he was to be disappointed. They kept their distance. An equally telling detail is that when Crebis came to testify about her ordeal, some two weeks later, she admitted that she had been raped but she could not admit to having been penetrated by an iron bolt. Instead, she insisted that because she had continuously moved her body, and because the knegt was so drunk, he had been unable to force the bolt into her. Likewise, she explained, the knegt‘s attempt to force buttermilk into her vagina had failed. We should bear in mind that Crebis was giving her testimony in an intimidating, all-male environment, and that at the Council of Justice hearing her surviving son, Spanjaard, was acting as the translator. In these circumstances, traumatised as she was, it is understandable that she sought to cling to the shreds of her modesty and deny that she had been subjected to an almost unspeakable indignity.
We should also note that although Crebis was using her own language, with her son, ‘who spoke good Dutch’ (‘die goede duijtsh spreekt’), translating, the court record does not reflect the particularity of her words. It is unlikely that she would have used the expression ‘knew me carnally with force’ for rape. Nor is it likely that Roelofsz, or the slaves, used the word ‘vroulikheijd’ (‘femininity’ or ‘womanliness’) for vagina. The court’s transcription of the evidence sought to cloak certain truths in the euphemistic veils of literacy and legalistic convention and, as a consequence, it is hard to know exactly what meaning the events had to the participants. It would be wrong, however, to think of Crebis as a passive victim who allowed words to be put into her mouth. When her testimony was read back to her for verification in the presence of the accused (a process known as the ‘recollement’) on 15 September, this time with the farmer Willem van der Merwe (who knew the Hottentot language) acting as translator, Crebis made several corrections to the narrative. The corrections were of detail, rather than substance—for instance she explained that she had been dragged outside with a halter round her legs rather than her neck—but they indicate that she wanted the record to reflect her truth. She signed her statement with two vertical, parallel lines.
Once Roelofsz had finished with Crebis he threw two buckets of water over her and turned his attention to her son. He seized the unconscious Casper by his clothes and dragged him inside the house. ‘Look’, said Roelofsz to Jacob. ‘The Hottentot stole so much bread and now he’s lying there.’ With that, Roelofsz picked up the remnants of his pistol and began to pound blows into Casper’s back with the butt. Jacob tried to reason with the knegt. ‘Theunis, why are you murdering the Hottentot?’
It is interesting that Jacob used Roelofs’z first name as it suggests that there was more than a working relationship between the two men. This assumption is reinforced by the fact that of all the slaves it was with Jacob that Roelofsz first shared the wine and with Jacob that he first shared his discovery that the Khoikhoi had been stealing bread.
‘What do you mean murder?’ answered Roelofsz. ‘There is no law (‘recht’) for Hottentots. But if I murdered you or another slave then your master would lose his money and I’d be accountable.’
We cannot say whether Roelofsz literally believed that the Khoikhoi were not protected by the VOC’s laws, but it is clear, at the very least, that he believed the Khoikhoi to be of an inferior order of humanity to the rest of the colony’s population. By 1727 the Khoikhoi of the south-western Cape were effectively the subjects of the VOC as their leaders had been obliged to recognise Company sovereignty after the Khoi-Dutch war of 1673–1677. The Company had also declared, in a number of proclamations, that colonists were prohibited from attacking, robbing, or even trading with Khoikhoi on pain of punishment. There had also been a number of cases, before 1727, in which Europeans who had killed or injured Khoikhoi servants had been punished by the Council of Justice, albeit relatively lightly, for their actions. In 1707, for instance, the Company had banished two knegts from the Cape for the brutal beating and murder of a Khoikhoi servant and sentenced their slave accomplice to five years on Robben Island. The Company took the occasion to announce that ‘these natives cannot be regarded and treated as less than free people’, that ‘beating and murder were intolerable outrages ‘even if perpetrated on a Hottentot’ and that ‘the laws make no distinction [between crimes] committed against Christians and heathens’. As a Company servant Roelofsz could not have been unaware that the VOC, an organisation supposedly respectful of Christian principles, disapproved of the rape and murder of its subjects. But his statements, together with his treatment of the Khoikhoi, suggest that he did not feel there to be any significant restraints on his behaviour towards them.
Jacob’s objections, in any event, were soon drowned by a renewed flow of wine. Roelofsz forced more drink on the slave and has some more himself for good measure. Eventually Jacob became so drunk that he could not say what happened next. According to the testimony of Isaak, however, Roelofsz dragged Casper’s body outside of the doorway and threw some more buttermilk over his head. The knegt was by then so drunk that he could no longer stay on his legs. In a state of collapse he was carried to his room by Isaak and Jacob and thrown on his bed. A short while later Arij van der Cust and Jantje returned to the farmhouse, separately. Arij had been away all day showing someone on a wagon the way to the farm of Antonie van Roiijen. The first thing he did on his return was to milk the cows. This task completed he went to the house and saw, lying near the front door, Casper, presumably drunk. Jantje too had been out all day, grazing the sheep in the veld. Once he had herded them home he found Casper, lying senseless in the doorway, bleeding from his mouth and nose, making snoring sounds. Arij claims it was he who told Jantje to carry Casper to his hut. Significantly, neither Isaak nor Jacob had thought of doing so, suggesting either that they were scared of Roelofsz or that there were limits to their compassion. Jantje made a fire in the hut and Crebis sat next to it with him. The unhappy woman told Jantje what had happened to Casper and to her. The two Khoikhoi kept watch over Casper until, at about midnight, he died.
Jantje told Arij, who in turn told Jacob, who then woke up Roelofsz with the news that Casper was dead. The knegt lit a lantern and, followed by the others, went to Casper’s hut. When it proved impossible to wake Casper Roelofsz dropped some of the hot candle fat on his face to see whether this would shock him into consciousness. It did not.
Arij, who seemed to be more responsible than the other slaves, saw that Roelofsz was still drunk. The knegt was also angry that the slaves were suggesting that Casper had done nothing wrong. In an attempt to prevent any further ‘accidents’ Arij surreptitiously removed the farm’s guns, gunpowder and shot, as well as Roelofsz’s pistol, and locked them up. Unfortunately, Roelofsz noticed this and demanded the return of the weapons. He struck Arij in the face and threateningly inquired whether the slave wanted a bullet or a (more obscure but doubtlessly unpleasant) ‘noordsche klaauw’. The chastened slave returned the knegt‘s weapons to him but secretly ordered Jantje to Rondebosch to inform Rigter of what had happened on the farm. Roelofsz returned to drinking.
As Friday morning dawned Roelofsz was still drunk. Corridon of Trancqubaer decided to take the sheep into the veld, no doubt to ensure that he was out of Roelofsz’s reach. Jantje, the other shepherd, was already on his way to Rondebosch. According to Crebis, Roelofsz now tried to rape her again, ripping her kaross from her body but, ultimately, failing to accomplish his desire. Crebis may have been confused about the timing of this event since she stated that after the attempted rape, Roelofsz left her sitting ‘mother naked’ and then rode from the farm, on a wagon, to Rondebosch. But Roelofsz was still on the farm on Friday evening, when the three Dutch ladies paid him their poorly timed visit. It is more likely, therefore, that Roelofsz left the farm on Saturday morning, but whether he attempted to rape Crebis again, on the Friday or the Saturday morning, is difficult to say. Crebis was both drunk and traumatised and her sense of time may have been distorted by her horrific ordeal.
Exactly when Rigter learnt of the events that had taken place on his farm is not clear. Jantje is likely to have reached Rondebosch before Roelofsz for a Khoikhoi on foot was faster than an ox wagon. Rigter does not seem to have rushed to ‘Mosselbank’ to take control. Instead, he informed the authorities, in the form of the Independent Fiscal Adrian van Kervel, that his knegt had killed a Khoikhoi shepherd at ‘Mosselbank’. Van Kervel received this information at the end of August and he then dispatched the second Upper Surgeon of the Company’s hospital, Bartho de St. Jan, to perform an autopsy on Casper’s body. The surgeon found several wounds on the right side of the head and a great deal of coagulated blood on the ‘dura materis’ which was, in his opinion, the cause of death.
As far as the law was concerned Casper had been beaten to death and the question was, by whom. Van Kervel, and other members of the Council of Justice, subjected all who had been at the farm to rigorous investigation and, not surprisingly, concluded that Roelofsz (who was by then in custody) was guilty of both manslaughter and rape. The trouble was that all the evidence linking Roelofsz to Casper’s death came from the slaves, whose word, by law, had no validity when placed against the word of a Christian or a free born man. Van Kervel also refused to accept that any of the slaves had actually seen Roelofsz hitting Casper. As for Crebis’s testimony, although she was free born, she was a heathen and, moreover, had been drunk at the time. In Van Kervel’s opinion, therefore, there was no direct evidence, only a strong presumption, that Roelofsz was guilty of both manslaughter and the ‘most infamous and evil rape and mistreatment’ of a very old Khoikhoi woman. Had any of the evidence been presented by people who could testify against free born Christians, Kervel argued, then at the very least, Roelofsz could have been subjected to torture in order to extract a confession from him, a procedure that Van Kervel would have been more than ready to resort to, given the ‘arrogant’ and ‘negative’ attitude Roelofsz had displayed when under interrogation.
Roelofz’s explanation of events at the farm was that he had had something to drink on Thursday (three bottles of wine) and that when he discovered, on Friday morning, that the Khoikhoi had stolen some bread he drank more ‘out of anger’. When Crebis found that he had taken the bread out of the Khoikhoi’s hut, Roelofsz maintained, she began to make a scene and entered the house so as to wake her drunken son. Crebis herself was drunk, as he, Roelofsz, had given her some wine earlier. Casper had passed out in the doorway and as Crebis tried to raise him to his feet they both fell over. It was then that Casper hit his head. Both of the Khoikhoi lay on the floor. All Roelofsz admitted to having done was that he had thrown some water over Crebis in order to wake her and when that had failed he tied a halter to her and dragged her outside. He denied raping her, or violating her with the bolt. Instead, he claimed, he offered her a gift. In one hand he held the bolt and in the other some tobacco. He asked her which she would like and she chose the tobacco.
Though such a choice was probably never offered to Crebis the knegt was sub-consciously drawing attention to the widespread belief that sex (symbolised by the phallic iron bolt) with a Khoikhoi woman could be bought by a gift. This, at least, was a customary assumption of European men at the Cape. As early as 1627 Thomas Herbert reported that Khoikhoi women would reveal their pudenda to visitors for any small favour and many later travel accounts repeated this as a received truth. In 1712 Edward Cooke noted that Khoikhoi women would expose themselves for a cheap price: ‘for a Dutch Doubleke they will show all to the waggish Sailors that ask them.’ Some European men may have been content to simply view the genitals of the women in order to satisfy their curiosity about the existence, or not, of the so-called ‘Hottentot apron’, the elongated nymphae that Khoikhoi females were reported to possess. But others, no doubt, took their investigations into Khoikhoi sexuality further and there were, no doubt, some Khoikhoi women who prostituted themselves.
European travel literature of this time, when discussing the inhabitants of Africa, commonly attributed to Africans, in general, a promiscuous sexuality. African women, in particular, were portrayed as being sexually insatiable and immoral. As a number of authors have pointed out this deliberate denigration of Africans was not unconnected with attempts to justify the increasing enslavement of Africans by Europeans. The depiction of African women as being even more sexually voracious than African men is partly explicable by the fact that the writers of such descriptions, who were themselves males, saw women as being even more ‘other’ than men.
These prejudices concerning Africans were magnified in written accounts about the Khoikhoi as, from the seventeenth century onwards, these people were considered to be the least civilised of all African and, indeed, all human societies. William Ten Rhyne’s description of Khoikhoi lovers in 1686 leaves the reader in no doubt that Khoikhoi sexuality is of bestial nature:
Abandoned as they are to every vice, they practice the rite of Venus a posteriori; the woman rests upon her side higher up than the man, while he reclines in the hollow that serves him for a bed. Thus after the fashion of the beasts they rush on their mutual embrace.
If Khoikhoi sexuality was not entirely human then, it was implied, their genitals must be unnatural. Many travel accounts debate whether Khoikhoi men had ‘male organs of more than usual size’, or permanently erect penises and described evidence of the self-excision of one of a man’s testicles.
Khoikhoi females, in particular, were demonised. ‘The women may be distinguished from the men by their ugliness’, declared Ten Rhyne. Not only were their genitals supposedly deformed, either by nature or self-mutilation, but they were depicted as being able to fling their breast over their shoulders so as to be able to feed their infants as they clung to their backs. According to Herbert Khoikhoi women could give birth without pain. They were accused not only of sounding like apes, but of having sex with apes as well. In the words of Herbert ” tis thought they have unnatural copulation with those beasts and baboons with whom their women frequently converse’. As Z.S. Strother puts it: ‘In the chain of being that proposes the Hottentot as the missing link between the human and the animal realms it is the Hottentot woman who serves as the truly transitional figure between man and ape.’
It might be assumed, from the above, that European men were revolted by Khoikhoi women and that this would be have an impediment to sexual contact. Elphick and Shell, in The Shaping of South African Society, argue that sexual relations between Europeans and female Khoikhoi were comparatively rare, at least in the seventeenth century, because Khoikhoi women were ‘still subject to the disciplines of their fathers and husbands and to the stringent traditional penalties (often death) for adultery’. More controversially, they add: ‘Moreover, the European male colonists preferred the Asian and “mixed race” women and looked upon the Khoikhoi, with their animal skins and grease, with distaste.’ Sexual preference may be one thing, but sexual need is another, and a feeling of contempt for another has, historically, been no barrier to sexual intercourse with that person. In any event it is unlikely that Roelofsz treated Crebis the way he did because he had read travellers’ accounts of the Cape. But it is likely that these accounts reflected prevalent European attitudes towards the Khoikhoi and beliefs about their nature. The accounts also serve to illuminate European ideas about Khoikhoi sexuality and help to explain why no European was ever convicted of raping a Khoikhoi woman at the Cape during the VOC period.
H.F. Heese, in his summary of criminal sentences in the eighteenth-century Cape, states that there were some cases of rape, or attempted rape, which involved whites. But he does not state what these cases were and whether they involved Khoikhoi women. He does not, in fact, list a single instance of a sentence being passed against a white man for the rape of a Khoikhoi woman in his list of criminal sentences. He does state, however, that the majority of people charged with rape were slaves. Whether their victims were fellow slaves, Khoikhoi or white, the rapists were invariably executed in a gruesome way. It is clear, however, that the rape of a white woman was regarded as being particularly shocking and the worst punishments were reserved for those who had been guilty of this outrage.
Mansell Upham has been the most diligent in searching the VOC’s criminal records for rape cases but not even he has found an example of a white man being sentenced for raping, or attempting to rape, a Khoikhoi woman. Upham has taken great care to discover the exact status and exact circumstances of each rape case arguing, correctly, that the precise facts are very important in establishing the nature of the crime and whether rape, attempted rape or consensual sex across the colour line was on trial. He has found five incidents of attempted rape of a European female by a male slave. The first of these occurred in 1705 when a slave called Jacob van Coromandel propositioned 19-year-old Hilletje Smits at Jonkershoek. Though he did not get as far as having sexual intercourse with her he was hanged for the crime of desiring a ‘free daughter of European descent’ whilst he himself was ‘a black slave’. A similar incident occurred in 1712 when 30-year-old Robert van Batavia was attracted by the provocative squatting (so he said) of 17-year-old Neeltjie Olivier as she mashed rice for chicken feed. After some banter about her deliciously displayed ‘melktert’, Robert went too far. Attempted seduction was seen as attempted rape. He fled, was caught, and executed. In 1729 Abel van Timor was broken on the cross for the attempted rape of 12-year-old Helena Willemsz. In 1732 Hendrik van Nias was broken on a cross for the attempted rape of 17-year-old Susanna Kuun and in 1767 the 17-year-old July van Malabar, slave of Barend Ackerhuys, was hanged for the attempted rape of his master’s two daughters, aged 6 years old and 16 months old respectively. What these cases prove is that the VOC regarded the attempted rape of white female minors by slaves as a very serious offence and had no compunction about accepting the testimony of a white female minor over that of a male slave.
Only two cases of white female minors actually being raped by slave men have been found. In 1713, 14-year-old Anna Jordaan was raped at knife point by Antony of Mozambique and kept in his power during the night. His sentence was to be bound to a cross and to have his flesh pinched from his body by red-hot irons. He was then to be broken on a wheel without the coup de grace, decapitated and his body left for the birds. His head was affixed to a pole close to the scene of his crime. The court explicitly stated that it found the rape of a European girl by a heathen to be an ‘execrable enormity’ and a ‘godless deed’. Earlier, in 1681, Cupido van Bengale had been hanged and burnt under the gallows for having sexually molested the child Risie Jacobs as she slept. He was also charged with the crime of having fornicated with the married white woman, Anna Elisabeth Roleemo, ‘on various and numerous occasions’, three years before, ‘thus adding to his offence the greater crime of adultery’. Whether adultery really was worse than the rape of a minor is doubtful. What is not disputed, however, is that the VOC regarded the sexuality of white women as being out of bounds for slaves. Such reactions are in keeping with what we know of other colonial slave societies, where perhaps the worst crime imaginable, as far as the masters were concerned, was the rape of a white woman by a slave, a crime that simultaneously subverted the sexual, racial and political order. It is likely that this particular crime was more often anticipated than performed and that some of those slaves convicted of rape were unjustly accused. But the relative infrequency of the rape of white women by slaves does not mean that it did not haunt the colonial consciousness. There is, in fact, only one case of a white woman, as distinct from a white girl, or minor, being raped by a slave at the Cape. The victim was Petronella Marseveen, a mother of four, who was pulled from her horse and raped by Jeptha van der Caap in 1761 near Roodezandkloof. Petronella died shortly after her ordeal. Jeptha was bound to a cross, castrated, and his genitals burnt in a fire. Therafter he was broken on a wheel and decapitated with his head impaled on a stake at the entrance to the Roodezandkloof.
It is not surprising that neither Heese nor Upham list a single example of a European being sentenced for the rape of a Khoikhoi woman since no such sentence was ever entered in the volumes which record the criminal sentences. These volumes provided the bulk of the evidence for both Heese and Upham’s invaluable research, but they only record criminal cases in which sentences were passed. There were some cases, and the case against Roelofsz is one of them, where sentence was not passed because the Council of Justice felt there was no case. The evidence of these cases is to be found in the records that contain the documents of the cases, rather than in the records of sentences passed in criminal cases. The reason why no white man was found guilty of raping a Khoikhoi woman was not because such a crime did not occur, but because it was a crime that could not be proved.
Rape was regarded as a serious offence in early modern European societies and could carry the death penalty. Very often, however, the law seemed more concerned about protecting the rights of the ravished woman’s family rather than those of the individual herself. The emphasis was on defending the potential value that a woman might have, socially and materially, as a marriage partner. Nobody wanted damaged goods and the law was there to protect a patriarch’s investment in marrying his daughter into a good lineage. It followed from this that the law was less concerned with the rape of a low status woman, since her social capital was judged to be less than that of a woman of high status. The same reasoning was extended to the rape of married women. The honour of a high status family was of much greater worth than that of a low status family and the rape of a serving woman of less consequence than that of a lady.
Of even greater significance than this bias, however, was the fact that rape was a crime that was very difficult to prove. The great majority of rape cases involve a crime committed by a man against a woman in the absence of witnesses. If a woman accused a man of rape it was very often her word against his and, historically, courts of law tended to give more weight to the word of a man rather than of a woman. This was especially true of early modern Christian countries, like the Netherlands, where religious doctrine encouraged the belief that female sexuality was a snare for the righteous. Linked to such prejudices about female sexuality was the associated idea that a woman’s honour was bound up with her sexuality. As Wiesner-Hanks puts it: ‘For all women, honour was a sexual matter.’ Sexual propriety, in a woman, was the hallmark of honour and the most dishonourable name for a lady to be called was ‘whore’. Rape was thus a crime committed not so much against a woman’s body, as against her honour and (perhaps more importantly in early modern Europe) against the honour of her men folk. An honourable woman’s male relatives, rather than the woman herself, was expected to defend her against the insult of rape, if necessary in the law courts. A dishonourable, sexually promiscuous or low class woman, on the other hand, would find few but herself to defend her honour.
The situation was even worse in a colonial context where the majority of women were heathen or slaves. It may be appreciated that the chances of a low status, non-European, non-Christian Khoikhoi woman’s word being accepted against that of a white, Christian man’s word in a rape case were almost non-existent, a fact confirmed by Van Kervel’s ruling. Though there were witnesses to Crebis’s rape, they were slave witnesses and thus, legally, unacceptable. Casper’s attempt to protect his mother’s honour, as we have seen, cost him his life. The consequence of these legal and customary obstacles to Khoikhoi women bringing a successful case against colonial rapists is that the crime becomes largely invisible in the historical records. Was the rape of Khoikhoi women by colonists much more widespread than the records suggest?
This is certainly the assumption of Yvette Abrahams. But we should be cautious about assuming that colonial men would simply rape Khoikhoi women because they could, an argument that comes close to the feminist view that rape is functionally integral to patriarchy and that all men are potential rapists, restrained only by the law. As historians like Porter and Bourke have reminded us, ‘it is better to view sexuality as shaped by culture, values and social habit’ and rape, as a form of sexual behaviour, cannot be removed from its cultural context. It may indeed be true that the colonial context both encouraged the rape of subaltern women and prevented evidence for this from being recorded in the criminal records, but one needs to consider rape within an even broader cultural context than this. In the first place, there is the context of the concept of honour in European society. In early modern European societies, particularly in Holland, ‘honour depended to a great degree on proper sexual behaviour’ and neither men nor women would willingly compromise their honour by too blatant an indulgence in improper sexual behaviour. Similarly, studies of rape in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century England have shown that, despite the problems of under-reportage of the crime and the bias against women’s testimony rape rates were low, at least compared to contemporary figures, suggesting that men strove to avoid the social stigma of being publically identified as rapists.
Second, there is also the cultural context of Khoikhoi society to take into consideration. It is quite obvious that sexual relations between white men and Khoikhoi women took place but were all of these relationships based on sexual violence or rape? Robert Jacob Gordon, the commander of the Cape garrison visited Little Namaquland in 1779 and reported that ‘there are nineteen stock farms in Namaquland. Of these there are five married farmers; the rest mostly take a Hottentot woman or two which, so I hear, they marry according to their custom’. Admittedly, this was more than 50 years after 1727 and a long way from the Tygerberg but there is no reason to suppose that only in the late-eighteenth-century Namaquland frontier zone did consensual sex, or marriage, take place between Khoikhoi women and white men. In Khoikhoi society, as Gordon explained, a man expressed his interest in marrying a woman by entering her parents’ hut, where she slept at night, and lying down beside her. If she did not raise the alarm the emboldened suitor would stay until dawn, allowing the parents to discover him. If they did not protest marriage arrangements could proceed with, hopefully, benefits to all the parties involved and gifts of cattle to the bride’s parents.
Kolb’s description of Khoikhoi marriage customs is essentially similar but contains a description of rough wooing that seems, to contemporary eyes, disturbingly close to the act of simulated rape:
But before the request for the girl is made […] the future bridegroom goes [with his father] and offers dagga to both her parents, and smokes it with them. When now his father perceives that by this smoking he himself begins to feel somewhat light-headed he tells his future brother-in-law the reason for the coming of himself and his son, and thus duly asks for the girl. Her father takes counsel a little with his wife in their presence, and either agrees or refuses […] If the father and son thus receive a refusal, they soon stand up and leave, and the son seeks for another girl in the same manner and with the same circumstances. If however they receive a favourable reply, and the parents agree […] then for the first time the suitor is permitted to speak with the girl and enquire whether she also has an inclination towards him. If the reply is now again according to his wish, the marriage is now certain; but if not, they two must fight it out, and this is done in the following manner, the two young people battling during the whole night, who is to have the upper hand. Not that they stand up and box one-another’s ears, since such actions would be entirely repulsive to them, but that they lie together and pinch each other’s buttocks as hard as they can, until at last the girl is tired out and concedes victory to the boy, so that the whole courtship comes to an end.
Though such customs may easily have been abused or misunderstood by some white men in their cross-cultural courtship overtures there were others who went on to live with the Khoikhoi women as their wives and raised families with them, either with or without the benefit of Christian baptism. The Khoikhoi marriage ceremony itself may have been, as Kolb said, ‘impolite enough’, but basically, the key features of the ceremony were parental consent, consensual agreement to marry between bride and groom and gift giving. It is not too fanciful to imagine that these conditions were often met on the Cape frontier zone when white men desired Khoikhoi women. Within marriage, according to Kolb, Khoikhoi men and women were not promiscuous. Adultery was regarded as a capital offence but a man could take more than one wife if he so wanted so he was not necessarily restricted to one woman.
As far as the Cape authorities were concerned such marriages would not be considered to be marriage but rather concubinage, the cohabitation together of a man and woman not legally married but who lived together as if they were man and wife. In order for a man and a woman to be legally married at the Cape both partners had to be free and Christian, and, it should be added, baptised as a Christian, which implied a degree of familiarity with the Dutch language and customs. Such conditions were not that easily met by those females at the Cape who were of Khoikhoi or slave heritage so there was a high incidence of concubinage at the Cape. This was exacerbated by the fact that there were far fewer white women than white men at the Cape throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, causing white men to seek sexual relationships with un-baptised women. It would seem that even if such relationships gave no de jure rights to the unmarried women and their children that concubinage did give de facto rights to the illegitimate family members. In 1759, for instance, the common-law Khoikhoi wife of Hendrik Eksteen, Griet, was able to take control of Eksteen’s farm and labour force after his death without objection from the local authorities. Griet and Eksteen had lived together for 20 years at the Gouritz River, parenting five children together. Only when it became clear that Griet had had Eksteen murdered, out of jealousy, did the authorities move against her. For much of the eighteenth century there was similar tolerance for the so-called ‘Bastaard’ families of the northern Cape frontier zone whose presence was testimony to the widespread practice of concubinage between white men and Khoikhoi women.
Significantly the change to the new colonial regime of the British at the Cape in the nineteenth century, along with its different legal system that accepted the testimony of slaves and Khoikhoi plaintiffs, did not unearth a hitherto invisible but extensive practice of interracial rape nor encourage a host of accusations. Although Pamela Scully has shown that no white man was convicted of the rape of a coloured woman in the criminal records that she consulted (the early-nineteenth-century rural western Cape)—a fact that seems to confirm the continuity of the vulnerability of Khoikhoi women to rape—it is significant that there were not all that many cases of rape brought to court to begin with. This negative evidence may, of course, mask the fact that coloured women were being raped in large numbers by white men but chose not to trust in the law as a means of redress. But it is more likely that the rape of coloured women by white men did occur but was not endemic. Similarly, R.L. Watson has shown that, at the Cape, settler fears that freed slaves and liberated Khoikhoi would celebrate their emancipation by acts of sexual violence against white women came to nothing. Indeed, he argues, the Cape was remarkable in that white settlers there scarcely anticipated rape scares such as those that terrified the whites of the ante bellum American south or the white settlers of Natal and the Witwatersrand at the end of the nineteenth century. As Watson states ‘The surviving court records during the period [1830s] show few cases in which Coloureds or blacks were actually charged with the rape of white women’. There were also very few cases of the rape of coloured or black women by white men.
The evidence from the early nineteenth-century Cape thus seems to suggest that, despite some instances of rape taking place, there was no culture of endemic interracial rape in the colony. The reason for this is very likely to be found less in the deterrence of the death penalty for convicted rapists, nor in the knowledge that whites were seldom convicted of the rape of Coloured women, but in the dishonour that was attached to the act of rape by all sections of Cape society. This feeling of repugnance was probably present in the eighteenth century as well. As the Roelofsz case illustrates, both slaves and Khoikhoi were appalled by the knegt‘s behaviour. So too were the authorities. Even though Van Kervel obviously believed in Roelofsz’s guilt and abhorred the act that he had committed, and even though there was little, legally, that he could do he did express the strongest disapproval he could of the act by ordering that Roelofsz be banished from the limits and jurisdiction of the VOC for life, a punishment that meant, in effect, banishment to the Netherlands and the removal of the sin from the colony.
Conclusion
We do not know what happened at ‘Mosselbank’ after Roelofsz’s banishment. It is likely, once the autopsy had been performed on Casper, that his body was buried, by his mother and brother, according to Khoikhoi custom. Ten Rhyne writes that the Khoikhoi would ‘mourn their dead with lamentations for three days, both men and women sitting round the hut of the deceased’. Kolb declared the mourning could last for up to seven or eight days and described the noise of the howling and weeping as capable of bursting the head of anyone within a quarter of an hour’s distance away from the mourners. There would have been clapping of hands and the repeated shouting of ‘Bo! Bo!’ From this it is clear that Crebis’s loud and persistent weeping and wailing was a Khoikhoi custom. Casper would then have been bound up into a foetal position in his kaross, his body would have been taken out of the back of the hut, not the front entrance, and buried. Stones or logs would have been placed on the grave to prevent wild animals from exhuming his body. His hut would then have been abandoned and never again used as a dwelling place. The mourners might then have been sprinkled with urine by the eldest male present and smeared with ashes and cow dung, but whether all these ceremonies were observed in the case of Casper we cannot say. We can only assume that, after the burial, Crebis went to live with her son, Spanjaard, but where he lived the records do not state.
Rigter’s wife, Margaretha, died in 1728 and it seems that there was nothing to keep him at the Cape any longer. He very likely sold ‘Mosselbank’ and took his share of his deceased wife’s property back to Amsterdam. It is recorded that he was granted permission to return to the Fatherland on 22 February 1729 since he had ‘no wife or family’ at the Cape. He was to travel on the return fleet, in a cabin, unlike his fellow returnees, who were to be housed in the ‘constapels camer’. This detail suggests that he was relatively well-off, a fact confirmed by his entry in De la Fontaine’s report of 1732 where it is noted that he ‘is met een gemeene stuiver thuijs gevaaren’. We do not know to whom he sold ‘Mosselbank’ in 1728 but by 1753 it was in the possession of Thobias van Dijk.
Dirkje Helm, whose second husband, Hendrik Neef, had been murdered by a knegt in July 1727, did not stay a widow for long. In February 1728 she remarried. Her new husband was Meyndert van Eeden of Bremen, who was very likely another knegt. The man who had murdered Neef, Loef Claassen van Mook, was finally brought to justice in March 1729. He had somehow managed, in July 1727, to evade capture and stow away on the Barbesteijn, the flagship of the Admiral of the return fleet bound for the Netherlands. Once at sea he had been discovered, hiding amongst the livestock, and imprisoned. Off the coast of Holland he was then transferred to the warship, De Oranje Galleij and, from there, taken to Middelburg where he spent 14 weeks in prison. At the end of this period he was placed on the ship Duijnbeek and returned to the Cape for trial. On 21 March he stood trial at the castle and was sentenced, on 24 March, to be hanged with his body to be left exposed to the birds of the air. He was executed on Saturday 2 April, the same day that a large group of his fellow soldiers engaged in an attempt at mass desertion.
Dirkje’s daughter, Elizabeth Knoetsen, married Nicholas Pilje in 1740 at the age of 29. This was a relatively advanced age for a nubile white woman to marry in the eighteenth-century Cape but it would seem that it was not Elizabeth’s first sexual relationship. She is credited as having born a child before this, out of wedlock, to Joachim Prinsloo. This child, Anna Elizabeth, would later marry a man who was most likely a freed slave, Moses Davids van der Kaap, an extraordinary occurrence in a society where the marriage of a white woman to an ex-slave was virtually unknown. Of significance here is the fact that ‘Vleesbank’, Dirkje’s farm, was a mere five kilometres from ‘Bartholemeu’s Klip’, the farm where Maria Mouton and the slave Titus of Bengal had lived together as man and wife before their execution in 1714 for the murder of Maria’s husband. Elizabeth’s sister, Catharina, the object of Loef Claasen’s passion, also seems to have had an irregular love life for in the 1730s she gave birth to a child who was christened at Paarl as Roelof Coertze. Roelof was to become the founding father of the Coertze family in South Africa (the surname is a variation of his mother’s maiden name—Knoetsen or Knoetzen) but he too was born out of wedlock and his father is unknown.
It is interesting to note how many of the settlers whose lives were connected to the events that took place at ‘Mosselbank’ had multiple marriage partners or extra-marital sexual relationships. Only one of the European colonists mentioned in this narrative, Cornelia Nel (who was married to Adriaan van Jaarsveld) seems to have had a single, socially sanctioned relationship. Though natural mortality no doubt accounted for the demise of most marriage partners one is left with the impression that the regions of Tygerberg, Riebeeck’s Kasteel and Paarl were inhabited by passionate men and women who were quite prepared to act with impropriety in pursuit of sexual satisfaction. These findings seem to be contradicted by recent research into the genetic heritage of the Afrikaner population that has found very low rates of nonpaternity in an old Afrikaner family, namely 0.73%, a figure that suggests that the children of an Afrikaner wife really were fathered by her husband. It should be remembered, however, that illegitimate children, or children produced outside marriage, would have ‘defaulted to the slave and Coloured communities’ and thus ‘while men may have fathered illegitimate children with slaves in their youth, the recorded genealogical history of Afrikaners may in fact reflect genetic ancestry correctly’.
It is difficult to say whether the thrice-married widow Helms and her desirable and unconventional Knoetsen daughters had been shaped more by the frontier farming environment or by family genetics. One argument is that the taint of illegitimacy, or scandal, in a family restricted the family as a whole to pursue illegitimate, rather than respectable marriages. But it is clear that the region behind the Tygerberg was still fairly turbulent in 1727 and that this had an effect on the way in which settler sexuality was expressed. The presence of so many unmarried men—most of them knegts—seems to have imparted an edge of violence to courtship procedures and their quest for a sexual partner seems just as likely to have ended up in concubinage, rape or murder than with a rich widow. A high percentage of white men at the Cape never married at all and we may assume that many of them turned to Khoikhoi women for sexual gratification. Though it is unlikely that rape was involved in every case it is disturbing to realise that, as they initiated these relationships, such men would have known that they could use force with virtual impunity. It is also disturbing to know that if they did turn to rape the archival records are unlikely to record this as having been a crime.