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Hall - The Secret Lives of Houses Women and Gables in The 18 C Cape - Reduced
Hall - The Secret Lives of Houses Women and Gables in The 18 C Cape - Reduced
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
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
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
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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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
Blaauklip 30000 8 20 ? 14
(DirkW.Hoffinan)
Morgenster not
(Philip H.Morkel) established
Boesmansvlei loan farm
(Daniel Hugo)
secret life of houses 13
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