“Born into Bastardy” contributes to research into family life and law as it evolved in South Africa's “mother city” from the seventeenth century. It traces the legal framework in which illegitimacy occurred and the experience of out-of-wedlock children when the father was absent or negligent in providing support. Histories of illegitimacy lead to considerations of the destruction of unwanted children by abortion and infanticide, or their abandonment to custodial care. The early years of Victoria's reign coincided with the emancipation of slaves throughout the British Empire. The fact that Cape Town had been home to slaves for whom marriage was proscribed until very recent times affects significantly this account of children born into bastardy.
John R. Shorten, Cape Town (Cape Town: Shorten and Smith, 1963), 119-119. The town grew slowly: by 1849, its population had risen to some 24,000; see “Census of May 1849 for Cape Town,” in Cape Almanac (Cape Town: Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, 1850), 308-9. By 1865, it “stood at 28,400, with a small preponderance of females. Whites, at 15,100, slightly outnumbered ‘Other’ at 12,400, with 628 [indigenous Khoesan] and 274... [Xhosa, etc.] making up the rest”; Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, the Making of a City: An Illustrated Social History(Cape Town: David Philip, 1998), 177.
2.
Claire Tomalin, Mrs Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King (New York: Penguin, 1995). Two daughters born to his consort, Queen Adelaide, had died.
3.
Peter Laslett, Karla Oosterveen, and Richard M. Smith, eds., Bastardy and Its Comparative History (London: Edward Arnold, 1980), 26-26.
4.
Alan Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17-17, 23-23, and passim; and Felix Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834-1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 10 and passim.
5.
Erwin Spiro, “Legitimate and Illegitimate Children,” in Acta Juridica (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1965), 54-55, 62-63. N.B.: fornicatie, ofte hoerendom translates as “fornication, or whoredom.” For the relationship between church and state under the Vereinigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC; also known as the Dutch East India Company), see for example Gerrit J. Schutte, “Between Amsterdam and Batavia: Cape Society and the Calvinist Church under the Dutch East India Company,” Kronos, Journal of Cape History 25 (1998/1999): 23-27.
6.
“Slavery has this consequence that slaves... cannot marry... still however they can cohabit together as man and wife....The breaking of the faith of such cohabitation among slaves is not punished as adultery, because no marriage can subsist among them”; George M. Theal, ed., Records of the Cape Colony (hereafter, RCC), 36 vols. (London: William Clowes, 1897-1905), D. Denyssen, March 16, 1813, 9:150-151.
7.
For the additional complications besetting societies of diverse ethnic and cultural origins, see Sandra Burman and Eleanor Preston-Whyte, “Assessing Illegitimacy in South Africa,” in Questionable Issue: Illegitimacy in South Africa, ed. S. Burman and E. Preston-Whyte (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1992), xi-xii; and David Chidester, “The Politics of Exclusion: Christian Images of Illegitimacy,” in Burman and Preston-Whyte, Questionable Issue, 164.
8.
Vertrees C. Malherbe, “In Onegt Verwekt: Law, Custom and Illegitimacy in Cape Town, 1800-1840,”Journal of Southern African Studies31, no. 1 (March 2005): 164-165.
9.
For calculations by year and decade in eighteenth-century Cape Town, see Vertrees C. Malherbe, “Illegitimacy and Family Formation in Colonial Cape Town, to c. 1850,” Journal of Social History 39, no. 4 (June 2006): 1160-63. Because the NHK monopolized public worship until circa 1780, records exist for that church only until the commencement of those kept by the Lutherans from around 1800 and kept by the Anglicans from 1806. By 1840, other Christian congregations had been established, Jews were becoming organized as a community, and Islam was highly visible in Cape Town. Manumitted slaves were known at the Cape as free blacks (vryswartin).
10.
Lionel Rose, The Massacre of the Innocents: Infanticide in Britain 1800-1939 (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1986), 121-121.
11.
For the battle to have English law sanction the legitimation of a child by the parents' subsequent marriage (it was permitted under Scottish law), see Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, From the Eighteenth Century to the Children Act 1948, vol. 2 of Children in English Society (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1973), 599-603. It is “unknown to the mainstream of Islamic law”; Ebrahim Moosa, “‘The Child Belongs to the Bed’: Illegitimacy and Islamic Law,” in Burman and Preston-Whyte, Questionable Issue, 174.
12.
Cape Town Archives Repository (hereafter, CAR), Verbatim Copies (hereafter, VC) 618, Doop Boek van Gedoopte Christen Kinderen in de Nederduitsche Hervormde Kerk van de Kaap de Goede Hoop, in de Kaap Stad, beginnende met den 1st Januarij 1832: see August 11, 1839. The note read, “Bovengem. Kinderen door het huwelijk geecht den 4 Augustus 1839” (“The above-mentioned children legitimated by marriage on 4 August 1839”).
13.
Andries F. S. Maasdorp, ed. and trans., The Introduction to Dutch Jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, 1903), 35-35.
14.
CAR, Cape Supreme Court (hereafter, CSC) 8/1/1, orders under sec. 17 of the Marriage Ordinance, February 1839. Ordinance 62 of 1829 had made twenty-one the legal age of majority “for all persons whatever.”
15.
CAR, CSC 8/1/1, no. 40, March 14, 1874. For possible racial considerations, see the case of Jurgen van Winkel and Rachel Williams, below.
16.
Ginger Frost, “Bigamy and Cohabitation in Victorian England,” Journal of Family History22, no. 3 (July 1997), 286-306; and Ginger Frost, “‘The Black Lamb of the Black Sheep’: Illegitimacy in the English Working Class, 1850-1939,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 295.
17.
Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, “The Social Evil in the Cape Colony 1868-1902: Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts,”Journal of Southern African Studies10, no. 2 (April 1984): 171-174; Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 195; and Joannes van der Linden, ed., Institutes of the Laws of Holland, trans. Jabez Henry (London: Stevens, 1828), 353-59. Twenty-six of the 1,262 persons arrested in Cape Town for criminal offenses between May 1 and December 31, 1840, were “disorderly prostitutes”; CAR, Colonial Office (hereafter, CO) 502, Police Office, Criminal Returns, 1840. See also CO4000, Memorials, 1839, vol. 1, A-E, no. 94, 389-400.
18.
Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk Archive (hereafter, NGKA), G1, 1/25, Sara Cornelia Visagie (wife of Tom Tobias Rutgers) and Carel Petrus Muller, September 2, 1850, 246-48.
19.
CAR, Attorney General (hereafter, AG) 2616, Reports, 1841-1843, Memorial of P. J. Lerm, August 26, 1843, 226-226.
20.
Frost, “Bigamy and Cohabitation,”294-294. Working-class mores required bigamists to show “good reason” for leaving the original spouse, to ensure support for children of the first union, and to be open with each other about their situation; Frost, “Bigamy and Cohabitation,” 288-94.
21.
Frost cited a cohabiting couple who, like Visagie and Muller, “preferred marriage” and so “went through a ceremony...even though they knew it was illegal”; Frost, “Bigamy and Cohabitation,” 300. This may have been impossible in a community as small as Cape Town.
22.
NGKA, G1, 1/24, May, June, and July 1846, Johanna Jacoba le Clus, wife of Jacobus Hendrikse.
23.
Horak v. Horak, in Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of the Cape of Good Hope during the Years 1857-1860, 5 vols., ed. Malcolm W. Searle (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, 1884-1894), 3:389-390. The full names have not been found. This case originated in the hinterland but was argued in Cape Town.
24.
Ibid., 393, 395. The court made the child a codefendant with the mother “in anticipation of the possibility of its being found...to have been legitimately born, however conceived”; ibid., 399. For the law's reluctance to bastardize children, see Malherbe, “In Onegt Verwekt,” 179.
25.
In Nel v. Nel (1841), the court reached what seems a contradictory verdict, but in that example the husband as plaintiff had sought a divorce rather than an annulment, and his case appears to have been ineptly prepared, James Buchanan, ed., Cases Decided in the Supreme Court of the Cape of Good Hope as reported by the Hon. William Menzies Esq. (hereafter, Menzies Reports), 3 vols. (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, 1870-1903), 1:274-276.
26.
The duty to support a dependant child, whether legitimate, fell on both its parents, according to their means.
27.
Bronn v. FritsBronn's Executors, in Searle, Cases Decided in the Supreme Court, 3:332-332 and passim.
28.
CAR, AG 2618, Report Book, August 7, 1850, 529. In 1859, the Rev. Joel Rabinowitz arrived as rabbi; Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 189.
29.
Sandra Burman and Margaret Naude, “Bearing a Bastard: The Social Consequences of Illegitimacy in Cape Town, 1896-1939,”Journal of Southern African Studies17, no. 3 (September 1991): 408-408; and Act 16, “To Amend the Law Concerning Marriages” (1860), in Statutes of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1895, 3 vols., ed. Hercules Tennant and Edgar Michael Jackson (Cape Town: J. C. Juta, 1895), 1:779-86. There were special provisions respecting the potentially polygamous nature of “Mohammedan” marriages.
30.
Martin Chanock, The Making of South African Legal Culture 1902-1936: Fear, Favour and Prejudice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 203-203, 205-205. For a sanguine view of poor relief at the Cape, see Cornelia J. de Kock, “Die Geskiedenis van die Suid-Afrikaanse Weeshuis tot 1923” (master's diss., University of Stellenbosch, 1983), ch. 1.
31.
All baptisms involved witnesses or godparents; from 1809, mothers who presented bastards for baptism were required to find two sponsors who signed a document whereby they underwrote the child's support and religious education.
32.
NGKA, G1, 1/23, Johanna Audelia Jacobse and James Johnsby, September 1, 1845, 366. Members were also routinely excluded from communion (Avondmaal) for a period of time.
33.
H. J. Ludeking v. A. B. de Villiers, CAR, CSC 2/1/1/38, November term; and Ludekins [sic] v. de Villiers, in Menzies Reports, 3:461-62.
34.
For the concerns of women “of Cape Dutch origin” with regard to sexuality and reputation, see Kirsten McKenzie, “Wollstonecraft's Models? Female Honour and Sexuality in Middle-Class Settler Cape Town, 1800-1854,”Kronos23 (November 1996): 57-74.
35.
Crowe v. D. (August-September 1863), in Searle, Cases Decided in the Supreme Court, 4:227-230. In this case, in which the plaintiff had been a servant in the home of the defendant's mother, defendant's counsel argued the need to protect “the safety of the classes peculiarly exposed to such charges”; ibid., 230.
36.
NGKA, G1, 1/23, Johan George Kraft (for Sophia Johanna Magdalena Kraft) and Petrus Wilhelmus Keytel, December 4, 1845, 455-56.
37.
NGKA, G1, 1/23, April and May 1845. Johnstone, an Anglican, had impregnated Catharina Leep, a member of the NHK.
38.
CAR, VC 618, September 18, 1842.
39.
Elizabeth Eckhardt v. John Wilson CAR, 1/Cape Town (hereafter, CT) 5/20, Civil Record Book, March-October 1842 (July 27), no. 13; and Dorothea Eckhardt v. John Wilson, CAR, 1/CT 5/20, Civil Record Book, March-October 1842 (July 27), no. 14. For details, see Vertrees C. Malherbe, “Paternity and Illegitimacy: A Problem for Church and State at Cape Town, to the Mid-1800s,”South African Historical Journal55 (2006): 79-81. The marriage of the reputed double adulterer and Frederika Eckhardt endured. For the right to “proper maintenance” enjoyed by children born of adultery, see Irene A. Geffen, The Laws of South Africa Affecting Women and Children (Johannesburg: R. L. Esson, 1928), 133.
40.
See Cape Almanac (1850), 308-309.
41.
Frost, “‘The Black Lamb,’” 296. Frost noted the generally unimpaired, if delayed, marriageability of English bastard begetters, especially after a single youthful error; Frost, “‘The Black Lamb,’” 316.
42.
CAR, CSC 8/1/1, no. 6, July 29, 1850. The chief justice overrode parental objections to this marriage after Van Winkel argued that he knew of nothing they might allege against Williams “except that she is to a certain extent,—a person of color.”
43.
CAR, CSC 8/1/1, no. 2, March 1842; and VC 631, Index to Marriages, April 14, 1842. It would be useful to know how Auret construed “respectable.” Of the West Indies, it has been said that “respectability implied a European cultural affinity, a level of education, a manner of speech, and a certain approach to religious or spiritual concerns”; William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830-1865 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 393-393.
44.
NGKA, G1, 1/23, May-July 1846, October 1847; and Johannes A. Heese and Roelof T. J. Lombard, eds., Suid-Afrikaanse Geslagregisters/South African Genealogies, 12 vols. (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1986), 1:598-598. For poverty in mid-nineteenth-century Cape Town, see Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 179-84.
45.
NGKA, G1, 1/24, October 1847. The Commission of Censure came into being in 1838; see NGKA, G1, 1/20, March 5, 1838, 366, and May 7, 1838, 396-97.
46.
NGKA, G1, 1/23, May 1845.
47.
Andries F. S. Maasdorp, in C. A. Beck and O. H. Hoexter, eds., The Law of Persons, book 1 of The Institutes of South African Law, Being a Compendium of the Common Law, Decided Cases, and Statute Law of the Union of South Africa, 5th ed. (Cape Town: Juta & Co., 1929), 9-10.
48.
Van der Linden, Institutes of the Laws of Holland, 357-358.
49.
NGKA, G1, 1/25, January 22, 1849, 4-5.
50.
NGKA, G1, 1/24, June 8 and September 1846; and G1, 13/7, August 31, 1846. Fees could be waived on the basis of a report by Kleynsmith's wardmaster respecting his financial situation.
51.
NGKA, G1, 1/24, November 1848; and Heese and Lombard, Suid-Afrikaanse Geslagregisters, 2:105-105.
52.
NGKA, G1, 1/25, January 22, 1849, 6-7. The toponym van de Kaap had been used from the earliest years of slavery to signify a slave born at the Cape. Its perpetuation in the 1840s appears anachronistic.
53.
“Marriage Order in Council, in Force in This Colony from the 1st February, 1839,” in Tennant and Jackson, Statutes of the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1895, 1:238-238; and Otto F. Mentzel, A Geographical and Topographical Description of the Cape of Good Hope, trans. H. J. Mandelbrote, pt. 2 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1925), 115-21.
54.
At Cape Town in 1841, the membership of the NHK (at 15,000) far outnumbered those of all other Christian denominations combined (9,495). There were 6,492 Muslims and 1,541 “heathen,” with the still-tiny Jewish community not counted; Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 123.
55.
NGKA, G1, 1/24, February, April, and May 1846, 10, 11, 12, 14-15. Apart from Kranko's drunken Sundays, the family was judged to be stable and hardworking. Shortly afterwards, their son, James Carl, was accused—falsely, it seems—of fathering a child born to a two-time bastard bearer whom he claimed to know only by sight as a promiscuous girl; NGKA, G1, 1/24, May-June 1847.
56.
NGKA, G1, 1/24, December 1847. No surname is given for this unwed mother.
57.
Daniel Brink acknowledged paternity respecting Boltman's sons, Johannes (21¼ years) and Daniel (3 months); CAR, Accessions (hereafter, A) 1939, 1/1/3, September 26, 1842. Brink and Boltman married on July 11, 1864; see CAR, VC 631.
58.
It is suggested here that Theunis Kranko supported his family, although he was a disorderly man.
59.
By a point in the 1820s, Cape Town had 846 male and 422 female slaves who professed Islam; Johannes S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People, 1652-1937 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1968), 172-172. Marais remarked, “It is doubtful whether the Christian slaves totalled one-tenth of this number” (172).
60.
NGKA, G1, 1/22, March-April 1843, 752-53, 762-64; G1, 1/23, July, August, and October, 1845; and G1, 1/24, October 1847.
61.
NGKA, G1, 1/24, July and August 1847, February 1848.
62.
NGKA, G1, 1/25, Notulen, July 1, 1850, 215-16. Carelse's use of the word man, which normally means “husband,” and her reference to a lawful marriage (“wettig huwelyk”) suggest that she considered herself married to Smeda but recognized that the tie lacked legality.
63.
Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558-1803 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 53-53; and Irvine Loudon, Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality, 1800-1950 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 123.
64.
Van der Linden, Institutes of the Laws of Holland, 335-337.
65.
Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900 (London: Longman, 1987), 41-41. For early nineteenth-century England, see for example Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1984), 135-44.
66.
For Jeremy Bentham's vision of pauper management, some of which influenced the New Poor Law of 1834, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 111-143.
67.
Rose, Massacre of the Innocents, 36, 120-120, 176-176.
68.
Robert Shell, “Samuel Hudson on Marriages and Other Customs at the Cape,”Kronos15 (1989): 53-53 and passim. See also Margaret Lenta, “Degrees of Freedom: Lady Anne Barnard's Cape Diaries,” English in Africa 19, no. 2 (October 1992): 64.
69.
Sentences, Minerva van Madagascar, CAR, Court of Justice (hereafter, CJ) 802, August 27, 1807, 118-31; Truter to Somerset, March 27, 1817, enclosed in Somerset to Bathurst, May 19, 1817, in Theal, RCC, 11:345-46; Victor de Kock, Those in Bondage (London: Allen and Unwin, 1950), 184-185; and James C. Armstrong and Nigel A. Worden, “The Slaves, 1658-1834,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1840, ed. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), 124-25.
70.
Sentences, no. 27, Hester van de Kaap, CAR, CJ 812, 590-602; Mr. Money, House of Commons, July 25, 1822, in Theal, RCC, 14:484-485, and Somerset to Wilmot, October 20, 1823, with enclosure, 16:379-95.
71.
Proclamation of April 26, 1816, in Cape of Good Hope Proclamations and Advertisements, 1806-1815 (Cape Town: Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, 1816); and Truter to Somerset, March 27, 1817, enclosed in Somerset to Bathurst, May 19, 1817, in Theal, RCC, 11:346. Adoption, as practiced at the time, is discussed below.
72.
Edna Bradlow, “One of History's Minor Tragedies: The Case of Maria Holl,”Cabo (Historical Society of Cape Town) 3, no. 1 (1982): 23-25; CAR, CSC 1/1/1/11, April 17, 1841, no. 6; Pamela Scully, “Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 102 n. 3. For references to infanticide by means of drowning at the Cape, see Malherbe, “In Onegt Verwekt,” 175-77. The Charter of Justice of 1827 saw the overhaul of the Cape's judicial system in 1828.
73.
Rose, Massacre of the Innocents, for example 62-69. English law defined infanticide as the murder of a child younger than one year of age.
74.
Ibid., for example 120-21; and Elizabeth B. van Heyningen, “Public Health and Society in Cape Town, 1880-1910” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cape Town, 1989), 53. The 1836 act was in force in Wales and England only.
75.
Van Heyningen, “Public Health and Society,” 123. For the police, established by Ordinance 12 of 1825, see Katherine Elks, “The Police and Crime in Cape Town, 1825-1850,”Kronos12 (1987): 43-48.
76.
Ordinance no. 10 of 1845 for Punishing the Concealment of the Birth of Children, in Tennant and Jackson, Statutes of the Cape of Good Hope, 1:372-73.
77.
Hoffer and Hull, Murdering Mothers, 25; and Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 41 (Emsley referred to the 1850s and 1860s).
78.
Scully, “Narratives of Infanticide,” 89. Scully's article investigates prosecutions involving women attached to Christian mission stations in the Western Cape.
79.
Helen Bradford, “‘Her Body, Her Life': 150 Years of Abortion in South Africa” (paper presented at the Conference on Women and Gender, Durban, South Africa, January 30–February 2, 1991), 1. In Britain, abortion had been outlawed by the 1803 Offences against the Person Act, and the penalties were periodically increased thereafter; see Rose, Massacre of the Innocents, 70, 86.
80.
Proclamation of November 7, 1817, in Cape of Good Hope Proclamations and Advertisements.
81.
William Porter, The Porter Speeches (Cape Town: Trustees Estate Saul Solomon & Co., 1886), 133-134.
82.
Ibid., 135-36; and Queen v. Elizabeth August, CAR, Clerk of the Peace (hereafter, CP) 22, Cape Town, July 15, 1842. The surname August suggests slave descent because many had been named for months. For an analysis of the peculiar pressures on female mission residents after emancipation, see Scully, “Narratives of Infanticide,” passim.
83.
Scully, “Narratives of Infanticide,” 94.
84.
Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, 583-583, 589-589, 595-597. The infant death rate among bastards had for long been much higher than for children born in wedlock; opponents warned (to no avail) that the stringent “bastardy” clause of the New Poor Law of 1834 would compound that tragedy.
85.
It has been cogently argued that “sexual propriety” was highly important to Cape Town's businesswomen; see McKenzie, “Wollstonecraft's Models?”65-66.
86.
Cape of Good Hope Government Gazette, December 16, 1842, art. 13. For comment, see Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853 (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 82-88.
87.
Scully, “Narratives of Infanticide,” 95.
88.
Van Heyningen, “Public Health and Society in Cape Town,” 123. In Britain, an estimated 60-90 percent of out-of-wedlock babies born to the “urban working class” died before the age of five (most when younger than one year) during the early to mid-nineteenth century; see Rose, Massacre of the Innocents,7.
89.
Mentzel, A Geographical and Topographical Description, pt. 2, 114-114.
90.
The Orphan Chamber was founded in 1673 to look after the estates of (half) orphans, not the orphans themselves. For the British period, see William W. Bird, State of the Cape of Good Hope in 1822, Africana Collectanea Series no. 19 (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1966), 53-56.
91.
A private bequest was supplemented by government in 1811; de Kock, “Die Geskiedenis van die Suid-Afrikaanse Weeshuis tot 1923,” chs. 1 and 2, trans. Minnie Lewis, Centre for Socio-Legal Research, University of Cape Town; NGKA, V5, 3/1, South African Orphan House, Notarial Deed, September 1, 1808; and Malherbe, “In Onegt Verwekt,” 172-73.
92.
De Kock, “Geskiedenis van die Suid-Afrikaanse Weeshuis tot 1923,” chs. 1 and 2; and NGKA, V5, 3/1, South African Orphan House, Notarial Deed, September 1, 1808. In 1811, the governor donated Rixdollars (Rds) 5,000 to the Weeshuis.
93.
The prohibition was upheld throughout the century: on February 5, 1900, a bastard was refused admittance to the orphanage; NGKA, V5, 1/3.
94.
In 1834, the Orphan Chamber had been abolished and its duties assigned to the master of the Supreme Court. There was no change “concerning the paternal power, guardianship, duties, and obligations of fathers and mothers over, and to their legitimate children, and of mothers over, and to their illegitimate children,” and the existing system with respect to “the charge and custody of... minors” was preserved; Ord. no. 103 for Abolishing the Orphan Chamber, July 5, 1833 (in force at the Cape from March 1, 1834).
95.
CAR, CO451, Superintendent of Police, 1836, no. 15, Lorentz to Bell, and enclosure respecting the legalities of apprenticing children in such a case; CO4907, Letterbook, 1836, Bell to resident surgeon, Somerset Hospital, and Bell to director, Hospital for Infirm Government Apprentices, March 12, 1836, 177-78; CO 490, nos. 66, 74, and 84, Townroe to secretary to government; master of the Orphan Chamber (hereafter, MOOC) 35/7/1, Tutors, 1, no. 307, R. Townroe, March 15, 1836 (canceled January 29, 1844 vide no. 1709); NGKA, V5, 1/1, ZA Weeshuis Notulen from September 1809 to December 11, 1843, Extraordinary Meeting of Directorate, March 10, 1836, 195; and V5, 2/1, Outgoing Letters, Stronch to Bell, 14.
96.
CAR, CO 490, Medical Committee etc., 1840, no. 28, Townroe to secretary to government, March 12, 1840, and enclosure, respecting the application of a certain Richard Melwood. It appears that these children and their mother were supported by public funds from 1834 until her death in 1836.
97.
CAR, AG 2616, Report Book, March 14, 1842, 66-67.
98.
CAR, CO 490, Medical Committee, etc., no. 66, Townroe to secretary to government, June 17, 1840. The younger boy, Dennis, was later apprenticed to the same master.
99.
Malherbe, “In Onegt Verwekt,” 181. It appears from the tutor's remarks that James had been in the habit of absconding from the Pauper Institution.
100.
NGKA, V5, 2/1, Outgoing Letters, July 19, 1861, Acting Secretary Bergh to H. C. Dreyer. Weeshuis boys were apprenticed at age fourteen.
101.
Janet L. Dolgin, “Transforming Childhood: Apprenticeship in American Law,”New England Law Review31, no. 4 (Summer 1997): 1119-1120, 1123-1124; Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 211; and Mentzel, A Geographical and Topographical Description, 109. For the then-recently halted project to apprentice British orphans and neglected children at the Cape, see “Committee for the Management of Juvenile Emigrants,” Menzies Reports, vol. 3, pt. 2, 72-73; and Edna Bradlow, “The Children's Friend Society at the Cape of Good Hope,” Victorian Studies 27 (Winter 1984): 155-77.
102.
Leonard Blussé, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris, 1988), 158-161; and Jean G. Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 6-15. For orphanages in Batavia, see Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 26-27.
103.
NGKA, V5, 1/1, Weeshuis minutes, October 14, 1841, 321-22. For management and disciplinary problems experienced by the orphanage, see De Kock, “Die Geskiedenis van die Suid-Afrikaanse Weeshuis,” ch. 4.
104.
NGKA, V5, 1/2, Weeshuis minutes, July 10, 1850, 149.
105.
Heese and Lombard, Suid-Afrikaanse Geslagregisters, 2:598-598; and NGKA, V5, 1/2, Weeshuis minutes, July 10, 1850, 148-52. On November 12, it was reported that Gunn had given birth to a girl on October 11 (155). The father was to meet costs. Gunn married in 1855, having left Cape Town for Mossel Bay.
106.
NGKA, V5, 2/1, October 6 and 22, 1862. See also V5, 2/1, November 25, 1869. Anna Green was placed with a branch of the Stegmann family at Pniel.
107.
Pamela Scully, “Private and Public Worlds of Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, 1830-1842,” in Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, ed. Nigel Worden and Clifton Crais (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994), 211-214.
108.
CAR, CO 472, master, attorney general, 1838, no. 89, Attorney General Oliphant to clerk of the peace, December 20, 1838.
109.
Mary L. Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850-1895 (London: Tauris, 1989), 139, 150-153.
110.
NGKA, V5, 1/1, February 6 and June 12, 1843. A Mr. Le Roux of Franschhoek applied to have the boy—a sign, perhaps, that he was mature enough to be of use, although the inquiry was not pursued.
111.
NGKA, V5, 1/2, minutes; and CAR, MOOC 6/9/20, no. 4258.
112.
Burman and Naude, “Bearing a Bastard,” 407. The possibility that bastard births were “forgotten” has been noted in another context: “In the case of a pregnancy, the cohabiting couples married, or sometimes the technically illegitimate child was absorbed into the woman's own natal family”; see Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 64-64.
113.
Burman and Naude, “Bearing a Bastard,” 404. Prior to the Adoption of Children Act no. 25 of 1923, an adopting parent formalized the arrangement by notarial deed; Malherbe, “In Onegt Verwekt,” 182. See also Rose, Massacre of the Innocents, 79; and Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society, 133-137, 604-604.
114.
CAR, A1939, 1/1/3, Marriages, Baptism and Burials, August 26, 1839. Another foundling was reported as adopted and baptized on September 30, 1844.
115.
Frost, “‘The Black Lamb,’” 306.
116.
Nazareth House opened on Buitenkant Street in 1882, moved to Roeland Street in 1884, and settled on the slopes of Table Mountain, above Mill Street, in 1904. Most of the children (including the orphans formerly at St. Brigid's) had received a Catholic baptism, but a few apparent exceptions (“father heathen, coloured”) were noted.
117.
Burman and Naude, “Bearing a Bastard,” 396-97; and Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 186-186.
118.
Giovanni Urbani, “Die Voorsiening in die Maatskaplike Behoeftes van Kinders in Kinderhuise deur die Inrigtingspersoneel...van die Kaapse Ned. Geref. Kerk” (master's diss., Potchefstroom University, 1972), 26-28.
119.
Frost, “‘The Black Lamb,’”299-299; and Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk in Suid-Afrika, De Kerkbode, July 27, 1894, 11, 30.
120.
Van Heyningen, “Public Health and Society,”351-351; Shirley Judges, “Poverty, Living Conditions and Social Relations: Aspects of Life in Cape Town in the 1830s” (master's diss., University of Cape Town, 1977), 73-78, 83-84; and Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 182. The old ward system ended in 1867 when the town was divided into districts; Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 172.
121.
Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 211, 218-220.
122.
More is known of the later lives of the Weeshuis orphans; De Kock, “Geskiedenis van die Suid-Afrikaanse Weeshuis,” ch. 6.
123.
Van Heyningen, “Public Health and Society.” For a call for “‘social statistics’” in 1860s Cape Town, see Worden, van Heyningen, and Bickford-Smith, Cape Town, 181.
124.
Frost, “‘The Black Lamb,’”311-311.
125.
Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 107-107. See also Malherbe, “Illegitimacy and Family Formation,” 1162-65.
