The Secret Lives of Houses: Women and

Gables in the Eighteenth-Century Cape

Martin Hall
Historical Archaeobgy Research Group
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Department of Archaeology
University of Cape Town

Part One
This paper originated in my attempt to understand the materiality of
colonialism at the Cape of Good Hope. How did material things -
buildings, farmlands, street grids, personal possessions, domestic utensils,
food - contribute to the mapping out of the colony?1 What were the
relationships between such systems of signification and the discourses of
colonial power? In this project attributable artefacts (that is, material
objects that can be firmly associated with a particular person or family
within a narrow date range) are particularly privileged, for they offer the
possibility of connecting the material world with other texts: travel
accounts, probate inventories, deeds of transfer, tax rolls and the like.
This route of inquiry led me to the question of the eighteenth-century
Baroque Cape gable: ornate plasterwork standing above the front doors,
side wings and back façades of rural manor houses (Figure 1). These
gables are sometimes dated or datable, and they are usually attributable, in
that the land on which they stand was often freehold and taxed, leaving
clear traces in the transfer documentation and census rolls. Their
prominence in the colonial landscape - often framed by other buildings
and avenues of trees, and designed to be seen by all approaching -
indicates that, par excellence, they were artefacts signifying colonial
possession and domination.2
Re-evaluating the Cape Gable in this way is a political project. The
mythology of the eighteenth-century Cape has contributed to the
naturalization of white domination and colonial control, and the image of
the benign patriarch sitting at ease beneath the oaks, in front of his
whitewashed façade, smoking his long clay pipe and contemplating
civilization against the barbaric chaos of Africa, permeates popular history.
Our public institutions have done little to challenge this mythology, and
numerous school children are still fed stories about Simon van der Stel and
Groot Constantia; the South African Cultural History Museum, which has

social dynamics 20.1(1994): 1-48

 2 social dynamics

custodianship of this most national of national monuments, still manages

hardly to mention the embarrassing subject of slavery, and implies the
charming conceit that Oom Simon tilled the land himself.
However, this project has proved more difficult than expected. The
buildings themselves are generally very accessible, while documentary
sources are for the most part easily consulted. What have proved
intractable are the connections, the webs of consanguinity and conjugality
that tie eighteenth-century gabled buildings together into a tight set. The
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documents seem to conspire in hiding these connections, presenting the

buildings as the product of a set of largely unrelated men, and the farms on
which they stand as acquired by thoroughly modern commercial
transactions.
This difficulty in excavating the ties that bound such buildings together
led to a growing realization that systems of colonial signification cannot
properly be understood - and, I want to argue in the case of the
eighteenth-century Cape, cannot be understood at all - without recognizing

Figure 1 : Zwaanswyk (now known as Steenberg) during recent restoration work. Some
20km south of Cape Town, and with a gable dated to 1763, this house has the
characteristic adornment of a symmetrical façade and ground plan.
 secret life of houses 3

the articulation of a network of race, class and gender relations.

There has been remarkably little recent writing about the role of women
in the initial colonization of the Cape, although early accounts of the
colony written by men are suffused with a consciousness of women -
assessments of female health and childbearing potential, ambiguities about
women's roles in informal trade, obsessions with Khoi and slave women's
sexual potentials and dangers, and otiose metaphors that link women and
nature in fertility and fecundity. Women's voices seem absent, but the
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documents themselves are heavy with their implied presence.

The dynamics of class intersected gender relations. Although, for its
first century and a half, the Cape colony was a part of the Dutch East India
Company's deployment of merchant capital in Indonesia, and the first
freeburgher farms established along the banks of the Liesbeeck River in
1657 were tightly constrained by the Company's tithes and regulation of
trade, there was increasing pressure on the local VOC administration at the
Castle on Table Bay from those farmers who were building up capital to
their own account.31 hope to show that material signification was a critical
part of this emergent class identity.
A third axis of relationships, which I suggest gave the social dynamics
of the Cape their particular quality, was race. Recent historiography has
emphasised the degree of miscegenation in Cape colonial society, and has
seen early Cape Town as a multi-ethnic community, with high class
merchants and officials, soldiers and slaves living close together.4 But it
does not necessarily follow from these observations that South African
racism - the establishment of difference and superiority on the grounds of
biological descent - is an essentially modern phenomenon. I will argue that
the emergent elite of the colonial countryside formed webs of economic
and social relationships around connections between women who were
marked out by their claim to racial purity and superiority.
By reading race, gender, class, the poetics of some contemporary
pictures and verbal accounts, as well as the architecture of the Cape manor
house, as interlinked symbolic and economic capital, I have come to the
following interpretation. The ebullient gables that fronted symmetrically
planned houses, set in orderly werfs5 and regimented vineyards and
wheatfields, were part of the signification of the colonial countryside, and
the title deeds that described these properties were an integral part of this
same materiality. But, rather than being the product of an earthy,
homespun vernacular and the simple operation of the market, this
architecture was the mark of a small elite group of slave-owning families.
The connections between these families were marked out by consanguinal
and conjugal relationships between women of established European
descent. A gendered segment within a burgeoning gentry class, these
women facilitated capital accumulation and carried the identity of
 4 social dynamics

difference from the transgressive miscegenation that was an inevitable

consequence of the expanding colonial frontier. The gables themselves can
be read as a metaphor of fecundity contained within the discipline of order,
a metaphor that finds poetic expression in the contemporary image of the
colonial garden. The rest of this paper will be an attempt to justify these
propositions.
Part Two
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At first sight, there are gabled buildings everywhere in the Cape. But most
are undatable, date to the nineteenth century, or are later products of the
"Arts and Crafts" fetishism of the late Victorian and subsequent revival
movements. Only about forty standing or recently standing buildings have
gables that can be attributed to a specific year prior to the Dutch
capitulation in 1795, and the earliest of these are dated to 1756; all could
be encompassed within a single lifespan, or within two or three
generations. Thomas Arnoldus Theron, who had his initials cast in plaster
on his gable at Languedoc in 1757 when he was 41 years old, was still on
his farm in 1783. Jacob Marais, who built a gable at Plaisir de Merle in
1764, lived until 1787, when the property passed to his son Pieter Marais;
the combined lifespans of father and son exceeded the span of baroque
gable building in the Dutch Cape.
Nor are these dated eighteenth-century gables promiscuously dispersed.
Almost all of them are located in the fertile catchments of the Liesbeeck,
Eerste, Berg and Upper Breede Rivers - the established wheat and
winelands of the Cape countryside (Figure 2). The census returns reveal
the same profile over and over again: variable numbers of sheep and cattle,
wheat and barley, and extensive vineyards.6 The census returns also record
the ownership of gangs of slaves and, often, kneghts (overseers) on loan
from the Company. Positioning datable eighteenth century gables within
the dimensions of time and space, then, reveals at once that they are a tight
group, implicated by association with slavery, and the architecture of the
Cape gentry. These connections exclude the poorer farmers and, almost
invariably, pastoralists pushing the frontier on beyond the Hottentots
Holland mountains. Rhys Isaacs' description of eighteenth-century
Virginia as a network of roads and paths linking together a small number
of "great houses", interspersed with the holdings of smaller "yeomen"
could happily be transposed to the contemporary Cape.7
However, the comparison between colonial Virginia and the Cape of
Good Hope breaks down as quickly as it can be set up. A Virginia house
such as, for example, Westover on the James River, ideally passed through
successive generations by primogeniture. William Byrd I acquired the
estate and built a house; William Byrd II added symmetrical offices and a
geometric garden; William Byrd III replaced the main building after a
 secret life of houses 5
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0 S 10 kilometres

Figure 2: The distribution of surviving eighteenth -century gabled houses, correlated with
the major wine producing areas (houses east of the Hottentots Holland Mountains have not
been included).
 6 social dynamics

disastrous fire and dissipated the family fortune.8 Materially, then, the
house came to stand for the male line and the patriarch. Another Bird -
William Wilberforce, writing about the Cape of Good Hope in 1822 -
made the comparison, revealing the jingoistic prejudice of the British
against the Dutch:
In the Cape colony there are few farms or places that remain long in the same
family; probably not during two descents. The legal distribution of property between
all the children of a family, whether male or female, renders the sale of an estate
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usual on the death of the owner. Sometimes the whole is purchased by one son; but
frequently it is sold in parts: and very soon the whole goes into other hands. . . .
There is in the colony none of that strong innate feeling of regard for a native spot,
which obtains in England; no attachment to the place, where the years of boyhood
were played away. Such a sensation could not be understood or felt by a
Cape-Dutchman. So much land, of such a quality, will produce so much corm so
much veldt, or field, will feed so many oxen, cows, and horses; no matter where/
This impression is widely held today.10 However, a closer investigation
shows that William Wilberforce Bird was wrong. Far from there being no
"strong innate feeling of regard for a native spot", or "few farms or places
that remain long in the same family", there were extensive networks of
connections, expressed through property ownership, that quite often
spanned several generations and much of the eighteenth century.
The basis for this claim is a close study of the 41 surviving (or recently
standing) gabled buildings with traceable histories of ownership that can
be firmly dated to before 1795.11 Appendix 1 gives the date at which the
gable was built, and the name of the title holder at the time. These are not
all the surviving eighteenth-century gabled buildings; there are without
doubt others amongst those buildings for which dating is uncertain. Also,
there were gabled buildings constructed before 1756; Stade's 1710
panorama of Stellenbosch shows at least one building with a symmetrical,
single storey façade and a simple, unadorned gable, and Yvonne Brink has
shown that the architectural form that incorporated gables was established
around the first quarter of the century.12
The list of title holders in Appendix 1 reveals, at face value, few family
connections. Two of the title holders were associated with more than one
gabled building (Jacob Hugo of Buffelskraal and Lemoenbult, with gables
dated a year apart, and the houses adjacent, and Hendrik Cloete of
Nooitgedacht, which he inherited, and Groot Constantia, which he
purchased more than a decade later). There are two father-and-son pairs
(Jacob Marais of Plaisir de Merle and his son, also Jacob Marais, of
Burgundy, and Johann Bernard Hoffman of Libertas and his son Dirk
Wouter Hoffman of Blaauklip), and two uncle-and-nephew pairs
(Johannes Albertus Myburgh of Meerlust and his nephew, Albertus
Johannes Myburgh of Spier, and Jacob Hugo of Buffelskraal and Daniel
Hugo of Boesmansvlei). There is one pair of brothers (Hendrik van der
 secret life of houses 7

Merwe of Klaasvoogdsrivier and Willem Hendrik van der Merwe of

Doornrivier), and one pair of distant cousins, sharing the same name (Isaac
Stephanus de Villiers of Dwars-in-die-Weg and his second cousin once
removed, Pieter de Villiers of Landskroon). But when these are
discounted, there are still 33 different family names associated with 41
estates. Similarly, the histories of most of the individual farms show
frequent changes in title holders' family names through time, and transfers
that often specify a purchase price, even when the change of ownership is
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part of the settlement of a deceased estate. It is not surprising that Bird

emphasised the contrast with the British system of primogeniture.
However, a deeper exploration of family ties shows that all the names of
title holders given in Appendix 1 can be connected to seven families or to a
notional eighth family (the connections are listed in Appendix 2). Just over
half of the men associated with dated gables were connected either with
the de Villiers family (tracing its descent to three brothers who arrived
together at the Cape in the late seventeenth century), or with the van der
Merwe family (originating with Willem Schalk van der Merwe, who
arrived at the Cape from the Netherlands in 1661, nine years after the Cape
colony was founded). Five other families (Groenewald, Grove, Retief, van
Breda and Louw) link together almost all the remaining estates. The only
farms listed in Appendix 1 that cannot be associated with one of these
seven families are Hartebeestkraal and Rhone. These can be related to one
another (Arend von Wielligh of Hartebeestkraal's aunt was married to the
brother of Gerrit Victor of Rhone), suggesting an "eighth family" for
which critical connections have been lost. Genealogies of Old South
African Families, in contrast, lists more than 2000 names;13 clearly, gabled
buildings were associated with a very small segment of the colonial
population.
The descent profiles of the seven reconstructed family lines share a
number of distinctive features. Firstly, although all the title holders listed
in Appendix 1 are men, only about a quarter carry the name of one of the
founding ancestors of the seven families listed in Appendix 2. 35% of the
title holders were married to women descended from one of the seven
ancestors, rather than being in a line of descent themselves. This indicates
that, both through descent and marriage, women were critical to the
continuity of the underlying structure of relationships that bound together
the rural elite.
Secondly, there are connections both within and between the seven
families. Almost 40% of the male title holders either married cousins, or
had parents who were married cousins. About 32% of the male title
holders can be linked to more than one family line, indicating
intermarriage between the seven families in this sample; some of these
inter-family marriages were also between cousins. Combining these two
 8 social dynamics

trends, it emerges that just under half of the male title holders were married
into their own or one of the other six families in the sample. Closer
inspection of the marriages of the 16 remaining title holders shows that 10
of these were either married to their own cousins from other families, or to
women from other branches of one of the other six families. In other
words, just over 80% in all of the male title holders in Appendix 1 were
married into their own or into one of the other six families listed in
Appendix 2.
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Marriage and descent, of course, are critical to the movement and

accumulation of wealth in an affluent class. This web of conjugal and
consanguinal links protected the interests of the rural, slave-holding elite
of the Cape countryside by keeping economic capital circulating among a
small group - a fraction of the larger colonial population. The boundaries
were not entirely impermeable, although the incidence of men breaking
into the elite once it had been firmly established in the second half of the
eighteenth century seems to have been rare. Thus, although about a third of
the male title holders associated with gable building were married to
women from the seven families, rather than being lineal descendants
themselves, only two had got to the Cape as Dutch East India Company
soldiers, the standard route to enrichment a century earlier, when the first
Company employees were given their freeburgher status.14 Martin Melck
(Elsenburg) had arrived at Sie Cape in 1746 as a soldier and married the
widow Anna Margaretha Hop, and then, after her death, the widow Maria
Rosina Loubser. Johann Bernard Hoffman (Libertas) came to the Cape in
1744 as a corporal. He first married Catharina Elisabeth le Roux (the
mother of Dirk Wouter Hoffman of Blaauklip), then Clara Francina
Groenewald, and thirdly the widow Anna Elisabeth Louw. Although
Melck and Hoffman made something of a speciality of heiresses and
widows, the opportunities were not that frequent; more than two thirds of
the male title holders listed in Appendix 1 were married only once, and to
women who had not been married before.
The juristic structure for this marriage and inheritance pattern came
from the application of Roman Dutch law at the Cape of Good Hope,
sufficiently strange to English eyes for William Wilberforce Bird to set out
the detail of intestate inheritance for bureaucratic colleagues:
Under the laws of the colony the widow takes one-half, whether it be real or personal
property, and the other half is divided equally between the children, whether male or
female; and if no children, to the nearest relatives of both father and mother. No one by
will can deprive a child of its share of the legitimate portion, which is one-third of the
property, where there are not more than four children; and if more, one-half. But a man
can leave his widow, in addition to the half she inherits, one child's portion. At the death
of the widow unmarried, her half descends, in like manner, to ihe children; but if she has
a second husband, and children by him, her property goes equally between such husband
and the children of both beds, as does the property of the husband at her death.15
 secret life of houses 9

To what extent was the opportunity to modify inheritance through a will

taken up? Bird noted that many people at the Cape were content to allow
the Orphan Chamber (responsible for administering intestate estates) to act
as executors for the wills, suggesting that the intestate pattern was often
followed. Examination of traceable wills supports this. For example, Anna
van der Byl of Jpostenburg nominated her brother Gerrit van der Byl and
her nephew Adriaan van Brakel as executors, urging them to ensure that
her children were brought up in a "Christilike maneer" (Christian manner).
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There were no instructions for the distribution of her property.16 Dirk de

Vos (Kromme Rhee) made a joint will with his wife, Geertruy Wouterina
Lourens. Again, the children were to be brought up in a Christian manner,
but the only specific bequest was 50 guilders to the church to help the
poor. "Thomas Arnoldus Theron of Languedoc also made a joint will, with
Elisabeth Margaretha Seitz, his second wife. The document specified that
if they were both to die then Elisabeth's parents were to become custodians
and executors of the estate. There was no mention of the disposal of
personal goods or of the farm.18
It is clear that the system of partible inheritance outlined by Bird was
widely applied at the Cape, as it was in the contemporary Netherlands.19
The effect of the application of this legal practice, coupled with the
tradition of cousin marriage, was constantly to fragment estates between
widows and children, and between the children of successive marriages,
and then to reconsolidate capital in new conjugal estates. There may often
have been a "sale", in the sense that a son-in-law would "purchase" a farm
from, for instance, his wife's widowed mother, or goods would be
auctioned to allow the patrimony to be divided and distributed. The
constraints of tradition and consanguinity were such that there was rarely a
movement of economic capital in any free market. Instead, a death and the
consequent disposal of the household possessions was more likely to be
the occasion for the network of symbolic connections to be aired. British
observers of their new colonial possession were advocates of the market
place who saw the Cape as an archaic remnant of the ancien regime. This
attitude, as well as a typical chauvinistic disdain for the Dutch, is captured
in James Ewart's description of the auction of a deceased estate:
We rode about seven miles to another farm house on the four and twenty rivers,
where a sale was going on of the stock and furniture, the proprietor having lately
died intestate, a law of the Colony ordaining that in such cases the whole of the
deceased's property shall be sold by public auction and the proceeds equally divided
among his family without any difference being paid to seniority of birth. This sale
was attended by all the neighbouring farmers, and as generally happens on those
occasions, a scene took place inconceivable by any but an eye witness. No sooner
had the Boors and their families collected together, and the auction commenced, than
those who were not particularly interested in it, gave way to their fondness for
inebriety, and commenced swallowing bumpers of wine and brandy of the most
 10 social dynamics

wretched quality, which soon shew'd its effects in a display of savage merriment and
obscenity. About two o'clock the sale was suspended and dinner announced,
composed of loads of meat of various descriptions, swimming in fat in the true
Dutch style, and which with equal quantities of bread and vegetables disappeared
almost as fast as it enter'd. During this savoury repast those who had been
purchasing (and on that account kept from drinking in the morning) now gave loose
to their restrained desires and were soon as drunk as those who came for the express
purpose. Soon after dinner the auctioneer who was by this time as drunk as his
neighbours commenced selling off the remaining articles, which consisted of little
more than the wretched utensils in which the dinner had been cooked and served up,
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and during the time this took up, the bawling of the auctioneer, the bidding of the
purchasers, the scolding and screaming of the women, with the noisy mirth of the
bystanders, form'd a concert truly horrible, which only ended in the departure of
each family for their respective abodes, under charge of their slaves, few of the
Boors being able even to take care of themselves.20
Ewart did not realize that he was witnessing a wake rather than a sober
commercial transaction, and that the "customers" were probably relatives,
keeping the deceased's property in the family.
Part Three
I am suggesting, then, that the eighteenth-century Cape countryside was
dominated by a tight group of wealthy farmers who used inheritance laws
and marriage customs to keep economic capital circulating in their small
elite group. These relations of class were enabled, critically, by relations of
gender, because the web of connections between men and women was the
essence of its structure; it is to this dimension that I now turn. In
establishing what form such connections could have taken, it is first
necessary to move away from the artificial "ethnographic present" implied
in Appendix 1, in which the period 1756-1795 is treated as a single unit,
and to construct a synchronie set of relationships, mapped out in the
geography of the Cape countryside.
Given the importance of kinship connections in tying together the Cape
rural elite, it has seemed a fair expectation that a "social map" of the
countryside would be contoured around the "seats" of prominent men or
women. I have used the example of the van der Merwe family to look for
this pattern.
Table 1 gives the names of contemporary title holders; generation in
relation to the founding ancestor; the date when each gable was built; and
dates of baptism and death, if they are known, all information that has been
extracted from Appendix 2. Table 2 gives economic profiles of the "van
der Merwe" men's estates where this has been possible. Morgenster and
Nooitgedacht were substantial farms, but the complexity of the census
returns has made it impossible to separate their extent from the multiple
holdings of their owners. Klaasvoogdsrivier was a small estate in the upper
Breede River catchment, and Karnemelksvlei, Doornrivier and
 secret life of houses 11

Boesmansvlei were loan farms. Of the other farms listed in Table 2,

Meerlust was clearly the most substantial, with extensive vineyards,
livestock holdings and slaves.

TABLE 1 The van der Merwe family: male title holders

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Name Genera- Baptised Gable Died

tion

Johannes Albertus 3 1719 1776 1788

Myburgh

Schalk Willem 4 1720 1767

Burger

Hendrik Cloete 4 1725 1774 1799

Pieter de Villiers 4 1725 1769 1789

Joost Rynhard van 4 1733 1781 ?1805

As

Albertus Johannes 4 1742 1767 post

Myburgh 1781

Hendrik van der 4 1748 1781

Merwe

Willem Hendrik van 4 1754 1790

der Merwe

Philip Hendrik 5 1760 1779 1831

Morkel

Daniel Hugo 5 1761 1790

Dirk Wouter 6 1752 1780 postl818

Hoffman
 12 social dynamics

TABLE 2 The van der Merwe family: estates 1770-1785

Source: Census (averagedfor more than one return)

Name vines horses cattle sheep slaves

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Meerlust 80000 90 150 2500 54

(Johannes A.
Myburgh)
Karnemelksvlei loan farm
(Schalk W. Burger)
Nooitgedacht not
(Hendrik Cloete) established
Landskroon 60000 20 30 200 17
(Pieter de Villiers)
Hazendal 20000 40 30 300 17
(Joost R. van As)

Spier 80000 30 40 400 20

(Albertus J.
Myburgh)
Klaasvoogdsrivier not
(Hendrik van der established
Merwe)

Blaauklip 30000 8 20 ? 14
(DirkW.Hoffinan)

Doornrivier loan farm

(WiUemHvd
Merwe)

Morgenster not
(Philip H.Morkel) established
Boesmansvlei loan farm
(Daniel Hugo)
 secret life of houses 13

"Symbolic capital" is more difficult to measure than material wealth,

but is expressed by the extent of architectural ornamentation and of the
werf - measures of the direct investment of labour (and therefore of
economic capital) in conspicuous display. Of the buildings listed in Table
2, Klaasvoogdsrivier has been demolished; with this exception, the estates
can be roughly seriated by their degree of elaboration.21
The simplest structures are the buildings on the loan farms, which have
T-shaped floor plans and single front gables incorporating the initials of
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their builders. Karnemelksvlei, the only gabled house in the Olifant's River
valley, has "SWB" on the gable. Doornrivier has the initials of both
Willem Hendrik van der Merwe and his wife incorporated in the gable, and
a simple façade that stands prominently in its valley. Boesmansvlei has its
date of construction and Daniel Hugo's initials incorporated in the gable
design, and a long barn on the same building line as the front façade of the
T-shaped house, adding visual emphasis from the broad Breede River
valley below. Landskroon, although a freehold farm in the wheat and vine
heartland, is similar in its form, with de Villiers' and his wife's initials on
the gable ("PDV" and "HB") and a prominent position on a steep hillslope.
Hazendal, Blaauklip and Spier clearly started as simple, gabled houses,
and were then steadily elaborated through the years. At Hazendal the first
gabled house was later converted to an outbuilding and a new, H-plan
main house with an elaborate front gable constructed - this increase in
"symbolic capital" took place over at least a decade. Similarly, Dirk
Wouter Hoffman started out at Blaauklip with a simple, single gabled
building, later converting this into an outhouse in an elaborate, three-sided
werf which framed an elaborate new H-plan house on an elevated platform
with an ornate rear gable, endgables, and a front gable surmounting a door
with wooden pilasters and architrave. Spier's first gables were also on
buildings which later became outhouses.
Morgenster and Nooitgedacht were large estates, each with a substantial
werf. Morgenster is set in an irregular rectangle, with outbuildings given
emphasis by the low hills behind. The visual approach to the main house is
managed by the slave house and barn, standing opposite one another at the
entrance to the complex. The manor house itself has ornate back and front
gables (surely an example of ostentation, as the back gable can only be
seen from the farmlands behind). Nooitgedacht is also visually framed, this
time by gates and a long approach road, by the cellar on the same building
line as the front façade, and by the enclosing outbuildings. Again, the
house has an elaborately moulded back gable.
However, the most substantial of the buildings listed in Table 2 is
Meerlust. The main house has an H-plan, with an elaborate gable on the
front, and gables on the sides and back. The outbuildings have decorative
plaster reliefs over the workshops, and the pigeon house is decorated with