Anthony Egan
ROGUES, REBELS AND RUNAWAYS: 18TH-CENTURY CAPE CHARACTERS by Nigel Penn (David Philip)
When asked how their latest work is doing, academics sometimes joke ironically about selling the film rights. In Nigel Penn’s case, a discerning film producer really could turn these true stories of violence, sex, race and class into costume epics of the Wilde Wes-Kaap.
Social history is a relatively recent development in South African historiography. Politics being such a major issue in South Africa, historians have – necessarily – concentrated on the “big picture” for so long that the ordinary or the low-key has been overlooked. The extraordinariness – and in some cases the extraordinarily nastiness – of the mundane is slowly gaining the attention of serious historians.
The backdrop of this book is the Cape of the 18th century – a colony ruled by a “multinational” corporation, the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Beyond the hub of frontier wars, big business and VOC intrigue there were ordinary people, fighting personal battles, doing small (at times shady) business and engaging in all manner of domestic intrigues.
Thus one finds: Estienne Barbier, a bungling rebel who perhaps thought of himself as a Robin Hood, at war with the VOC, dismembered, beheaded and quartered on November 14 1739. Less noble – or is it stupid? – than Barbier was Carel Buijtendag, a thug who savagely assaulted his Khoi servants, treated colonial law with contempt, managed to alienate himself from his wife and was banished from the Cape. Political pressure led to this being rescinded – but Buijtendag died on the voyage home.
Sexual politics, slavery, miscegenation and jealousy are a feature of the story of Willem Menssink, a failed brewer whose open dalliance with a slave led to domestic strife and the attempted murder of his wife by the equally jealous slave Trijntje, for which she was garrotted. Though adultery was a crime in the VOC Cape – and Penn presents records of a woman punished for adultery – Menssink was never punished.
Other accounts feature runaway slaves and awol VOC soldiers forming droster gangs and engaging in violent criminal activity – or social banditry, depending on where one stands.
It might be argued that Penn is practising a kind of “tabloid” history, focusing on the sensational. This would be grossly unfair. As a serious historian, Penn uses these undoubtedly macabre events to analyse aspects of colonial Cape society.
Violence, lawlessness, slavery and sexual politics are shown to be undercurrents rooted in the class, race and gender relationships of the period. By going to the margins, Penn presents vivid contrasts, contrasts so often understated or overlooked in more mainstream history. By using a historical microscope, aspects of the whole society – cruel, discriminatory and rooted in class distinction – are held up for our scrutiny.
Beyond that, it all makes for great reading.