Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century
Cape Colony, South Africa
Author(s): Pamela Scully
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 335-359
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture:
The Sexual Politics of Identity in the
Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa
PAMELA SCULLY
ON APRIL 2, 1850, A RAPE OCCURREDin the rural district of George, about two
hundred miles from Cape Town, the capital of the British colony of the Cape,
South Africa. Anna Simpson, wife of a laborer, told the local justice of the peace
that Damon Booysen, age eighteen, had raped her "about a month" after he had
started working for her husband. Anna Simpson stated that one day when her
husband had gone to town, Booysen came to her house. "He asked me to go with
him I refused; suddenly he seized me from behind and threw me to the ground."
Booysen threatened to stab Anna Simpson and then raped her. On her husband's
return from Mossel Bay, Anna Simpson told him of the rape.' Booysen was
brought to the town of George for a preliminary examination at the office of the
clerk of the peace, and on April 4 Booysen confessed. "It is true that I committed
the crime ... true that I forced Annie Simpson. I was half drunk. I fully
accomplished my lust."2
This article is drawn from Pamela Scully, "Liberating the Family? Gender, Labor, and Sexuality in the
Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1993).
The research was conducted in 1991-1992 and assisted by grants from the Joint Committee on
African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned
Societies with funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. I also received funding from the Ford
Foundation through the Center for African and Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan,
and from the Center for the Education of Women, and the Rackham Graduate School, at the
University of Michigan. A faculty grant from Kenyon College helped fund the writing of the article.
I am grateful for the support of the department of history at Kenyon College. Thanks also to Vivian
Conger, Frederick Cooper, Clifton Crais, Roderick Phillips, Sean Redding, and Angela Woollacott for
their help with this article.
1 Archival references are mainly to the Cape Archives (hereafter, CA) or the African Studies
Library, University of Cape Town. CA, Colonial Office (hereafter, CO) 599, Preliminary Examination
held at Schoonberg Lange Kloof, before the justice of the peace, George Division, April 2, 1850,
enclosure in letter fromJustice William Menzies to Governor Harry Smith, September 27, 1850. Anna
Simpson's name is spelled differently in each of the documents, ranging from Anna to Ann to Annie.
I use the name cited in the legal document of the Circuit Court trial.
In 1830, George had a population of 8,022. Of that number, 5,962 were listed as "free persons" and
2,060 as slaves. Twenty years later, the district occupied the same area of 4,032 square miles with a
white population of 7,964 and a now undifferentiated "Colored" population of 7,369. CA, Cape
Almanack for 1830, 77. African Studies Library, Cape of Good Hope, "Return of the Population and
of the Marriages, Births and Deaths," Blue Book 1850: 308-09. George Simpson lived on the farm Brak
River and presumably had sufficient money to hire another laborer to help him work on the farm. It
is unclear if Simpson was sharecropping or if he was a wage laborer on the farm.
2 CA, CO 599, Declaration of Damon Booysen to the clerk of the peace, George, April 4, 1850,
enclosure in Menzies to Smith, September 27, 1850.
335
336 Pamela Scully
At the Supreme Court's circuit court trial on September 16, 1850, the presiding
judge, Justice William Menzies, reported that at the preliminary examination "the
prisoner fully confessed having committed the crime ... and ... he neither cross
examined the witnesses nor stated anything in mitigation of his guilt." Menzies
therefore found Booysen guilty and sentenced him to death.3 Nowhere in the
records is any mention made of the race of Damon Booysen. However, remarks by
the judge, Booysen's name, his mother and friends' names, and his occupation as
a day laborer working for another laborer in the poorest section of rural society
suggest that, in terms of the racial and social taxonomies of the mid-nineteenthcentury
Cape, he probably identified himself and was identified in the district of
George as a man of color.4 In 1850, Damon Booysen had good reason to expect
that his life was about to end.
At the end of September, however, Justice Menzies wrote to the governor of the
Cape Colony saying that he, Menzies, had made a terrible mistake in sentencing
Booysen to death. The victim, a woman Menzies had thought was white, had
turned out to be of a different racial identity. A deputation of "eight or ten most
respectable Inhabitants [read white] of George" had called on the judge and told
him that "the woman and her husband are Bastard coloured persons, and that
instead of -her being a respectable woman, her character for chastity was very
indifferent and that it was strongly suspected that she had on several occasions
previously voluntarily had connection with the Prisoner."5 In light of this
development, the judge agreed with the deputation urging the governor to
commute Booysen's death sentence to a term of imprisonment with hard labor.
The last records available of the case show that the death sentence was indeed
commuted. It is important to note that, while the governor instituted an inquiry
into the respectability of Anna Simpson in order to determine the severity of
punishment required, the inquiry investigated only her status as a respectable
woman; the charge of Anna Simpson being "black" was now undisputed.6
HISTORIANS OF COLONIAL LIFE have tended to analyze sexual violence primarily as
a metaphor for or index of tension within colonial societies rather than examining
3CA, CO 599, Justice Menzies to Governor Harry Smith enclosing the "Report in Writing of All
the Proceedings of the Trial of Damon Booysen, at Circuit Court Held at George on 16 September
1850 for Rape of Anna Simpson, Guilty, to Be Hanged," September 27, 1850.
4Damon was a name common to people of Khoi and slave descent in the Western Cape. For
example, see CA, Magisterial Records of Stellenbosch (hereafter, 1/STB), 2/37, No. 11, Documents
in the Trial of Damon and Piet Arries for Theft of Sheep; Cory Library, Methodist Missionary
Archives, 15 099, Register of Baptisms (in church in Stellenbosch catering to freed people), Damon
Salmon baptized, March 10, 1844. Booysen's mother's name was Maria Platjes, another name
connoting some heritage from the indigenous people of the Western Cape. See Statements in
Inquiry, Statement by Maria Platjes, October 16, 1850; enclosure in Menzies to Smith, September 27,
1950. Booysen identified his friend J. Botha as "a man of color." CA, CO 599, Petition of Damon
Booysen, made in George Jail, September 21, 1850, enclosure in Menzies to Smith, September 27,
1850.
5CA, CO 599, Menzies to Smith, September 27, 1850.
6CA, CO 599, John Montagu, secretary of government, to Judge Menzies, October 21, 1850,
enclosing letter from J. G. Aspeling, resident magistrate of George, to secretary to government,
"containing the result of the inquiry respecting Ann Simpson," October 17, 1850.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 337
rape as a fact of violence.7 This is a curious feature of the historiography: that
authors have in general been more concerned with the elusive myths concerning
white women as victims of black rapists than with the ways in which colonialism
created conditions that authorized the pervasive rape of black women by white
men.8 Indeed, there are relatively few studies that examine cases in which black
women were raped either by black or white men.9 This is surprising, given that the
Booysen case is but one of many rape cases found in the archives of colonial and
racially structured societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Studies of rape in postemancipation societies are rare, and African history still
awaits an extended study of women's experiences of rape in colonial culture. This
article represents an initial attempt at such a study by examining the multiple
meanings and experiences of rape in one colonial society. We still have much to
learn both about black women's experiences of rape and the ways in which
colonialism involved complicated linkages between representations of sexuality
and of race. We need to unite the previously disparate historiographic concerns
with rape as a metaphor, or as an index of social tensions, with a study that takes
rape seriously as an act of violence by men against women. We must give attention
to the ways in which multiple narratives about the meaning of rape in colonial
societies helped to solidify and, at the same time, to complicate the meanings of
and relationships between race, sexuality, class, and honor.
Studies on rape scares throughout the British Empire and Commonwealth have
7 For a critique of analyzing sexual violence purely metaphorically, see Ann Laura Stoler, "Carnal
Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia," in Gender at the
Crossroadsof Knowledge:Feminist Anthropologyin thePostmodernEra, Micaela di Leonardo, ed. (Berkeley,
Calif., 1991), 51-101; Jenny Sharpe, "The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and
Counter-Insurgency," Genders, 10 (Spring 1991): 25-46. For a study of rape, race, and gender in
contemporary sexual violence cases, see Sherene Razack, "What Is to Be Gained by Looking White
People in the Eye? Culture, Race, and Gender in Cases of Sexual Violence," Signs, 19 (Summer 1994):
894-923.
8 For example, see Norman Etherington, "Natal's Black Rape Scare of the 1870s," Journal of
SouthernAfrican Studies, 15 (1988): 36-53; Amirah Inglis, The WhiteWomen'sProtectionOrdinance: Sexual
Anxiety and Politics in Papua (New York, 1975); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women,Racism and
History (London, 1992).
9 The exceptions lie in the literature on slavery and emancipation. Historians have argued that, at
the Cape, the rape of slave women by their owners operated both as a field of sexual and social power
and, intentionally or not, as a means of reproducing the Cape slave population. See John Edwin
Mason, Jr., "'Fit for Freedom': The Slaves, Slavery, and Emancipation in the Cape Colony, South
Africa, 1806 to 1842," 2 vols. (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1992), 2: chap. 3, 202-25, who
discusses rape as a form of patriarchal control; and Patricia van der Spuy, "A Collection of Discrete
Essays with the Common Theme of Gender and Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope with a Focus on
the 1820s" (M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 1992). For an early study of slavery and sexuality
at the Cape, see Robert Ross, "Oppression, Sexuality and Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope,"
Historical Reflections, 6 (1979): 421-33. For the American South, see Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women:
The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992), 109, 117-18; Laura
F. Edwards, "Sexual Violence, Gender, Reconstruction and the Extension of Patriarchy in Granville
County, North Carolina," North Carolina Historical Review, 68 (July 1991): 237-60; Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Womenin the Old South (Chapel Hill,
1988), 325; Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York,
1985). Histories of lynching in the South have also provided compelling studies regarding the
implications of the reinscription of older discourses about the need to protect white women from
rape by black men. See Hazel V. Carby, " 'On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and
Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory," CriticalEnquiry, 12 (Autumn 1985): 262-77, 268; and Jacquelyn
Dowd Hall, "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence," in Powersof
Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, A. Snitow, C. Stansell, and S. Thompson, eds. (New York, 1983).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
338 Pamela Scully
contributed to our understanding of sexuality as a key site of colonial anxieties.
Authors have shown that rumors within settler communities about the rape of
white women by black men surfaced in periods of crisis about the efficacy of
colonial rule and helped frame relations between colonizers and colonized,
particularly in the arena of domestic wage work.'0 Rape became a powerful means
of discussing anti-colonial revolts such as the 1857 Indian Mutiny or the 1865
Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica." The myth of the black rapist who through
overexposure to civilization came to desire white women also embodied a more
generalized anxiety and ambivalence about the appropriate limits of the civilizing
mission. As Ann Stoler has suggested, colonialism rested on a contradiction: a
desire to make the "native" adopt the habits and practices of the colonizer but not
to a degree that destabilized the boundaries between colonized and colonizer.'2
Colonial slave societies such as the Cape involved charged notions of how far to
incorporate indigenous societies and how to mark the boundaries between men
and women, settlers and natives, slaveholders and slaves.
The nineteenth-century Cape offers a compelling case study of the many and
competing sites for the elaboration of colonial identities. The Cape was the only
settler-dominated slave colony in the early nineteenth century to be conquered by
the British.'3 The cultural understandings of Dutch settlers competed both with
slave and African knowledge but also with British and metropolitan concepts of
race, sexuality, equality, and the means by which to secure the transformation of
a slave society to one based on principles of free wage labor. For women and men
who had been slaves, laborers, or slaveholders, and for those settlers who had
arrived from Britain in the 1820s, the world after 1838 floated adrift from the legal
and social markers of slavery. In this context, sexual violence, race, and cultural
practice took on ever more important and nuanced meanings as various actors
sought to redefine their social landscape in an era of free wage labor and
discourses of freedom. The Booysen case and other narratives of rape that I will
be examining suggest the centrality of sexuality to the constitution of colonial
identities and expose implicit assumptions about race, gender, and class that
frequently guided colonial rule. I analyze the ways in which communities and
individuals received and interpreted rape cases, that is, the cultural narratives
constructed about any given case; the degree of power accorded rape as a
metaphor for a general crisis; and the ways in which the categories of race, gender,
10 Historians of domestic service in Africa have suggested that the debates within settler societies
about whether to employ black men or women as servants drew on a slew of stereotypes about black
men as sexually licentious or about black women as competitors with white women for white men's
favors. See Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employersin Zambia, 1900-1985
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1989); Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of
Zimbabwe,1870-1939 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1992), chap. 6,170; and Charles van Onselen, "The Witches
of Suburbia: Domestic Service on the Witwatersrand, 1'890-1914," in Studies in the Social and Economic
History of the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914, Vol. 2, New Nineveh (London, 1982).
1 Ware, Beyond the Pale, chap. 1, 38, 40.
12 Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge." For an analysis of colonial categorization, see Ann Stoler,
"Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule," Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 31 (1989): 134-61; Etherington, "Rape Scare," 44; also Inglis, White
Women'sProtection Ordinance, 5-9.
13 Clifton C. Crais, WhiteSupremacyand Black Resistance in Pre-industrial South Africa: The Making of
the Colonial Orderin the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, 1992), 87.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 339
and sexuality informed and were themselves constituted through discussions
about morality, law, and the social order.
THE EVENTS DESCRIBED took place some twelve years after the Abolition Act ended
slavery in the Cape, Mauritius, and the British West Indies. The Dutch East India
Company had ruled the Cape from 1652 until the last decade of the eighteenth
century. For a brief period thereafter, the British and then the Batavians ruled the
colony. The British took over permanently in 1806, slowly introducing legislation
that abolished bonded labor. But the legal freedom gained by the indigenous
Khoi population by Ordinance 50 of 1828 and by slaves with the emancipation of
1838 did not usher in great economic and social opportunity. Freed people, Khoi,
and other members of the free black community continued to work mostly in farm
employment, although a few became market gardeners or joined the small but
growing artisanal class in the villages of the Western Cape.'4
Emancipation at the Cape freed slaves into the category "free black," which
encompassed all people of color native to the Western Cape: "Hottentots" (the
colonial term for the Khoi) and "Bushmen" (the colonial term for the San),
"Bastards" (white father, Khoi mother) and "Bastard Hottentots" (slave father,
Khoi mother), as well as Africans taken from slave ships by the British. By the time
of emancipation, the slave population of the Western Cape was predominantly
creole, including descendants of slaves brought from the west and east coasts of
Africa, Madagascar, India, and the Dutch East Indies, and children born of a slave
mother and a free father. The close cultural and social relations between Khoisan
and slaves, which had been fostered in part by the decimation through colonial
violence and disease of much of the Khoi population in the early eighteenth
century, and the incorporation of the Khoisan into the Cape colonial economy,
also contributed to the heterogeneous culture of the rural poor in the midnineteenth
century. The introduction of "prize negroes," who had been "rescued"
from other nations' slave ships by the British and brought to the Cape from
1808 to 1815 and then again in the 1830s to remedy the labor shortage in the
Western Cape, also served to increase the polyglot nature of the rural poor of the
Western Cape. This diversity of geographical and. cultural origins affected the
emergence of an official racial terminology to cover all of these groups. Thus
while the category of "free black" continued to be used into the 1840s in
government correspondence regarding labor legislation, from 1837 the statistical
Blue Books began listing people of Khoi and San descent, free blacks, "prize
negroes," and freed people under the category "Colored."'5
14 The Khoi were predominantly pastoralists, who from the late seventeenth century were subjected
to increasingly coercive measures to force them to labor for whites. See Richard Elphick, Khoikhoiand
the Founding of White South Africa (Johannesburg, 1985). For a discussion of Cape slavery, see Nigel
Worden, Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, 1985). On the economy of the postemancipation
rural Western Cape, seeJohn Carel Marincowitz, "Rural Production and Labour in the Rural Western
Cape, with Special Reference to the Wheat Growing Districts, 1838-1888" (Ph.D. dissertation,
University of London, 1985).
15 Mason, "'Fit for Freedom,'" 589. Mason also cites De Zuid Afrikaan, December 7, 1838, as using
the term "gekleurde." This is a translation of the English verb for coloured. In later Afrikaans usage,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
340 Pamela Scully
The rearrangement of previously distinct racial status groups into a new racial
classification had multiple origins. Into the nineteenth century, freed people
seem to have continued to construct ethnic sensibilities distinguishing between
people. of Khoi, Mozambican, and slave descent.'6 However, such identities were
not mutually exclusive; and, through the experiences of slaveryand freedom, a
wider rural culture of the poor emerged in the postemancipation Cape.17Recent
historiography has suggested that identification with a "coloured" ethnic identity
arose from both the imposed ascriptions of governmental discourse and the
self-identification of some members of the freed population. It is difficult to
pinpoint when in the nineteenth century, and to what extent, the rural poor
began to define themselves as coloured. But, as a number of authors have shown,
coloured identity emerged among members of the freed population in the rural
areas, as well as from "members of the skilled and educated" class, who, in the
1880s, began to validate the term coloured, using it as a platform for political
action.'8 In part, the use of the category coloured also arose from what EvaSaks
has called, in the context of the postbellum American South, a new "propertyin
race."'9 At the Cape, the possession of legal or customary title to whiteness also
became more important to farmers who could no longer claim the right to
domination through their status as slaveholders. The struggles by Dutch and
British settlers to realign domination and status along the axis of a putative white
superiority thus influenced their articulation of a racial sensibility about "co-
louredness."
If the use of the term coloured became increasingly widespread from the
mid-nineteenth century, it was not necessarily accompanied by great certainty
regarding exactly who fell under that designation. The "recognition" of "colouredness"
depended on an almost unconscious invocation of "common sense"
derived from local association with the norms of domination, status, and physical
appearance on which so much racial consciousness depends. Dutch settlers seem
to have been much more certain than Britishofficials of their abilityto determine
the racial origins or statusgroup to which a person belonged: in the Booysen case,
for example, it was the local white inhabitants of George who confidently asserted
that Anna Simpson was a "Bastardcoloured"-a term probably synonymous in
the noun "kleurling" predominated, describing a person who "possessed" the "property" of
"colouredness."
16 Mohammed Adhikariargues that the "distinction between ex-slavesand Khoisanremained fairly
clear-cut for the generation that had experienced bondage." Adhikari, "The Sons of Ham: The
Makingof Coloured Identity," SouthAfricanHistoricalJournal,27 (1992): 95-112, 109.
17 See Mason, "'Fit for Freedom' "; and Scully, "Liberatingthe Family?"
18 For an early mention of the term coloured by freed people, see CA, Clerk of the Legislative
Council, 6, No. 46, "Petition of the Colored Inhabitants of the Caledon MissionaryInstitution,"
August 11, 1834. For an analysisof the emergence of coloured identity in the Western Cape, see Ian
Goldin, "The Reconstitution of Coloured Identity in the Western Cape," in ThePoliticsofRace,Class
and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, eds. (London,
1987), 156-82, 160. Mohammed Adhikarisuggests that coloured identity "crystallizedin the 1880s."
"Sons of Ham," 99. Also see Vivian Bickford-Smith, "A 'Special Tradition of Multiracialism'?
Segregation in Cape Town in the Nineteenth and EarlyTwentieth Centuries," in TheAngryDivide:
Social and Economic History of the WesternCape, Wilmot G. James and Mary Simons, eds. (Cape Town,
1989).
19EvaSaks, "Representing Miscegenation Law,"Raritan,7 (1988): 39-69.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 341
colloquial speech with "Bastard Hottentot." The ambiguity of the term suggests
the shifting meanings of racial categories as well as the way in which local claims
to knowledge about a person's background helped secure racial identity. Ironically,
while British bureaucrats invoked race as a category free of moral or cultural
assumptions, it was often their invocation of racial categories that exposed the
cultural construction of race as a category of social life. The term "coloured" was
generally employed by settlers and bureaucrats with much more certainty in terms
of including who was not a part of the "coloured population." "Colouredness"
most clearly marked people in the Western Cape who did not fit the category
"white." The "coloured" category evolved from the mid-nineteenth century in
part to enable whites to distinguish the people of "colour" native to the Western
Cape, who had absorbed many of the cultural practices of the colonizers, from the
increasing influx of Africans from Xhosaland and other parts of the Eastern Cape.
Thus many whites' relationships with people they saw as coloured rested on a
profound ambivalence. Whites behaved as if they recognized the freed people of
the Western Cape as having at least a cultural kinship with whites, but at the same
time they preserved the notion of whiteness as untainted by relationships with
slaves, Khoi, and other Africans. This ambivalence is but one of the strands that
complicated the outcome of the Booysen case.20
While various authors have analyzed the malleability of the category "coloured,"
and the contestations around that term from the mid-nineteenth
century, historians of South Africa have paid insufficient attention to the mutually
constitutive relationships between sexuality, race, and gender identities. We need
to explore the ways in which such identities emerged out of continuing reinterpretations
by different actors about the meanings of and relationships between
those categories. In the Booysen case, for example, Justice Menzies' ascription of
"coloured" identity to Anna Simpson, and the meanings that collected around
that identity in the context of her rape, can only be understood by analyzing the
multilayered colonial and metropolitan histories in which sexuality, race, gender,
and class became referents for one another, in addition to being discrete
categories of everyday life and of historical analysis. Paradoxically, while the
process of classifying an individual's racial identity arose out of a complex
identification of class, sexual, and racial markers, once that person had been
identified as belonging to a given group, the ambiguity of how to deal with that
individual often evaporated in the face of the logic of colonial categorization.
Once Anna Simpson's race had been proclaimed with certainty by members of the
settler elite of George, Judge Menzies confidently proceeded along a different
route of sentencing in accordance with the logic of how to deal with the rape of
a black woman. Slippery conceptual and social identities could result in unambiguous
social and political consequences.
20 A striking example of this continued ambivalence is found in a classic text on freed people and
their descendants at the Cape. J. S. Marais appealed to his fellow white Afrikaners to reach out to the
"coloured" population. He stated that it "is arguable that the Bantu do not belong with us . . . But
the Coloured do not appear to differ from us in anything except their poverty, and that they share
with our large army of poor whites." Johannes Stephanus Marais, The Cape ColouredPeople, 1652-1937
(New York, 1939), 281.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL RIEVIEW APRIL 1995
342 Pamela Scully
BRITISH SLAVE EMANCIPATION in the 1830s freed slaves in both the West Indies
and the Cape into a world in which at least some colonial officials and missionaries
believed in the possibility of "civilizing" each individual, a world that stressed, at
least in theory, the equality of men before the law. No laws existed at the Cape
prohibiting interracial marriage and sexual relations such as were found in the
postemancipation legislation of the American South.2' This difference arose
partly because Cape slave emancipation occurred in an era when competing
definitions of race derived as much from culture as from biology but also because
of the legacy of Dutch colonialism, which tended toward a hazy elaboration of
racial difference.22 The Booysen case is enlightening because it uncovers the legal
suppositions, even in this optimistic moment, about how equality before the law
could be mediated by race and, more particularly, overdetermined by the
intersection of properties of femaleness and blackness.
The nineteenth-century Cape offers an interesting, and sometimes baffling,
conjuncture of different legal systems jostling for authority. The legal system was
premised on Roman Dutch law, and juries were predominantly made up of settlers
who drew on local Roman Dutch legal customs, while lawyers and judges were
trained in Britain. The two legal systems were not so much antithetical as placed
at opposite ends of a continuum. Roman Dutch law placed the individual more
firmly within a community than did English law, which treated people as
individuals before the law..Roman Dutch law continued to be the dominant legal
system at the Cape through the nineteenth century, even though new laws
brought the Cape increasingly in line with English legal tenets. The British
retained Roman Dutch law in part because it was deeply entrenched at the Cape
but also because the total elimination of Roman Dutch law would have entailed
more effort and expense than the British were willing to invest in this far-flung
colony. The establishment of the Supreme Court in 1828 and the reorganization
of the judiciary involved the introduction of English legal procedures, including
the use of preliminary examinations and indictments, the establishment of juries
to try serious criminal cases, and the use of English rules of evidence.23 Abolished
in the reshuffle were the centuries-old offices of landdrost (replaced by magistrates)
and the citizen boards called heemraden, which had controlled district
government. The British also eliminated the judicial responsibilities of the local
field cornets, who fulfilled some policing and administrative functions. Field
cornets, often farmers themselves, who were notoriously biased in favor of settlers.
The discrepancy between the written laws and the cultural assumptions that
informed judges and juries led to a tension between the letter and the spirit of the
law in evaluation and sentencing. While legal precedent did not operate very
forcibly in Roman Dutch law, which was guided more by the original writings on
21 See Saks, "Representing Miscegenation Law," for an excellent discussion of the U.S. legal
framework.
22 William F. Freund states that, into the early 1800s at the Cape, "[l]egal distinctions between races
were not clearly formulated or systematically applied." Freund, "The Cape under the Transitional
Governments, 1795-1814," in Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South
African Society, 1652-1840, 2d edn. (Cape Town, 1989), 334. For a comparison of Dutch and British
racial and sexual practices and laws, see Jean Taylor, TheSocial Worldof Batavia: European and Eurasian
in Dutch Asia (Madison, Wis., 1983).
23 Albie Sachs, Justice in South Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1973), 38.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 343
legal issues, judges and lawyers trained in Britain nonetheless used precedent as
a way of arguing for or against certain kinds of punishment. More important, since
the Charter ofJustice explicitly dictated that Roman Dutch law be accommodated
to English law, judges and lawyers were given much leeway in bringing their own
interpretations to the adjudication of cases. British legal and cultural perceptions
especially influenced crimes concerning sexuality and race. These categories
became highly charged in British imperial life in part because of the proliferation
of concerns about sexuality in Britain itself during the Victorian era but also
because sex in the colonies was a political act with repercussions on which
children would be included in the category of colonized and which in settler
society. "Colonial control was predicated on identifying who was 'white,' who was
'native,' and which children could become citizens rather than subjects, designating
who were legitimate progeny and who were not."24
In Cape Roman Dutch law, rape was understood to be "both the forcibleravishing
and the forcible carryingoff of a woman or maid against her will."25 In the colonies,
rape constituted an illegal act of reproduction.26 While it is difficult to chart the
changing Cape laws relating to rape, at least up to 1845 a man could only be
convicted of rape if the prosecution could show that ejaculation had occurred:
"that there was emission as well as penetration."27 The significance of ejaculation
in determining rape made the prosecution of rape more difficult at the Cape than
in England, where, after 1828, rape victims no longer had to demonstrate that the
rapist had ejaculated.28 The discrepancy between the colony and the metropole
suggests the ways in which racial hierarchy depended on the control of sexual
relations: illegal reproduction, particularly when it involved a black man and a
white woman, threatened the foundations of colonial life.
Rape law in the nineteenth-century Cape allowed for the death penalty in cases
of great severity, such as the rape of "a girl still unmarriageable" (not yet
menstruating), married women, and rape by men in positions of authority-the
latter characteristic possibly serving as a marker for whiteness.29 In Cape Dutch
settler society, women's honor referred as much to the men of the family as to the
women themselves. Notions of honor and status crucially determined rape cases,
influencing whether the rape was reported, how it was evaluated, and the degree
of punishment dealt to the rapist. The terms "married women" and girls "not yet
of marriageable age" may be read as cultural markers for women who deserved
the full protection of the law. By being married, women signified publicly that
they held to the Christian moral and religious principles of colonial society, and
those young girls who had not yet menstruated had the potential to be respectable
24 Stoler, "Carnal Knowledge," 53.
25 Johannes van der Linden, Institutes of Holland, orManual of Law, Practice, and Mercantile Law....
5th edn. (Cape Town, 1906), 232.
26 Cape of Good Hope, Menzies, CasesDecided in theSupremeCourtof the Capeof GoodHope, as Reported
bythe Late Hon. William Menzies, Esquire, 3 vols., 1828-1849, James Buchanan, ed. (Cape Town, 1903),
1: 143. Menzies remarks that marriage is for the purpose of having children.
27 William Porter, "On the Judicial System," in Porter, The PorterSpeeches(Cape Town, 1886), 478.
Speech made on December 15, 1845.
28 Anna Clark, Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770-1845 (New York,
1987), 60.
29 Van der Linden, Institutes of Holland, 232.
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344 Pamela Scully
married women. By contrast, young unmarried women latently violated the sexual
code of colonial society: since they were already of marriageable age, their single
state refused, if only symbolically, the married condition. Yet this does not seem
a totally convincing explanation for the absence of young women legally under
the protection of their father, and thus bound to his honor, from categories of
women whose rape was punishable by death. The absence of the death sentence
in cases of the rape of an unmarried woman may have operated as a loophole to
dismiss the significance of rape of working-class women and, possibly and more
specifically, black women, who were less likely to be legally married than their
settler counterparts. Colonial officials, settlers, and indigenous people at the Cape
understood (though they did not necessarily agree with the fact) that race
functioned silently as a salient colonial category dividing beneficiaries of colonial
rule from people more explicitly subject to it. Until the mid to late nineteenth
century, most young women not formally married in the Christian church would
have been slaves, free blacks, and other women of color. For most of the period
of Dutch rule, slave men and women had not been permitted to marry; and, even
after the British passed legislation authorizing slave marriages in the 1820s, few
legally recognized slave marriages occurred. In 1839, the British passed an Order
in Council promoting marriages among freed people, but it was only in the late
nineteenth century that formal Christian marriage became widespread among
people of color in the Western Cape.30 Thus, in referring to married women, Cape
interpretations of Roman Dutch law probably meant settler women, or at least
women of a certain socioeconomic status.
Perhaps marriage functioned in this instance as a potential social marker,
dividing women deserving respect and status from the undeserving.i Although
one can only surmise that such social plots functioned in the legislation regarding
rape in the Cape Colony, they very clearly operated at the level of judicial
interpretation. Cultural definitions and redefinitions of rape and sexuality in the
mid-nineteenth-century Western Cape gained prominence because the legal
system was embedded both in the cultural assumptions of Roman Dutch law and
the various cultural perceptions of rape and sexuality that judges, lawyers, and
juries brought to their interpretations and deliberations. Dutch-speaking white
men constituted the majority of juries in the earlier part of the period under
review, but by the 1850s rural juries also included a number of men with English
backgrounds. Only in 1874 did coloured men sit on these juries.32
In deliberations regarding the severity of rape and the appropriate punishment,
both juries and judges at the Cape, like their peers in England and in the
American South, fell back on "common-sense" notions of female honor and
sexuality derived from local colonial constructions of women's and men's
sexuality under slavery and from the elaboration, both in colonial and metropol-
30 See Scully, "Liberating the Family?" chap. 6.
31 In those cases in which marriage did not work as a racial signifier, race was exposed as the final
factor operating in sentences for rape cases. Thus when a black man raped an unmarried white
woman in 1837, he still received the death sentence. CA, 1/STB 2/36, No. 15, Documents in the case
of Regina vs. Adam, alias Willem Patience, for rape, January 5, 1838.
32 In Cape Town, juries were made up of both white and colored men. Sachs, Justice in South Africa,
59-70.
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Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 345
itan arenas, of ideologies of female domesticity and chastity.33 The Supreme Court
judges interpreted the law through a perspective on sexuality that viewed male
sexuality as a result of "'uncontrollable' passions" and enticement by women.
They saw the existence of a woman's sexual history outside of marriage as
evidence that the woman was a "strumpet," in the words of one judge.34 In 1851,
Judge Sydney Bell dismissed rape charges against a man charged with raping a
woman in George, stating that
perusal ... of the preliminary examination, previous to the trial, had given me the
impression that neither Rape, nor an attempt to commit Rape had been committed, and
as the appearance of the female in the witness box confirmed this impression (she
appeared in a transition between losing the bashfulness of youth & gaining the effrontery
of prostitution) I cross examined her myself.35
For a woman to reveal that she had had previous sexual experience was
sufficient to dismiss the charges. In a case of rape at Genadendal mission station
in 1855, Wilhelmina Johannes lost her suit since, according to the clerk of the
peace, she testified that "had the Prisoner before he committed the Rape civilly
asked her consent to have connexion with her, she would have allowed him."36
Johannes claimed rights over her own body-and asserted her right to accept or
reject a man's advances. In this respect, she violated the sexual code that judges
demanded of single women: they must reject all sexual advances as a matter of
principle. Johannes' charge of rape was further undermined in the opinion of the
clerk of the peace by her statement that she had had sex with other men before.37
Justice Menzies, the Scottish Supreme Court judge who adjudicated the
Booysen case, was a most articulate defender and proponent of an interpretation
of rape premised on an emerging discourse about the uneasy yet seemingly
unproblematic connections between sexuality, race, and respectability. Menzies
also faithfully upheld Roman Dutch law.38He combined his loyalty to legal tenets
with a noticeablyjaundiced interpretation of the morality of working-class women.
In the 1840s, a period that also saw the tenure of the liberal attorney general
William Porter, officials continued to advocate the notion of equality before the
law, and Menzies appears to have been a lone voice in legal circles at this time.
George Napier, governor of the colony in the 1840s, regarded Menzies as
somewhat dim and pedantic and does not appear to have shared Menzies' views
33Edna Bradlow, "Women at the Cape in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," SouthAfrican Histoiical
Journal,19 (1987): 51-75. VictoriaBynumhas suggested that a similarconfluence of factorsoperated
in the determinations of sentencing in rape cases in the American South during the same period.
Bynum, UnrulyWomen,109; see also Edwards,"SexualViolence," 243.
34CA, CO 686, Justice Sydney Bell to Governor Sir George Grey, October 2, 1856.
3 CA, CO 686, Bell to Grey, October 2, 1856.
36 CA, Magisterial Records of Swellendam (hereafter, 1/SWM), 16/36, clerk of the peace,
Swellendam, to attorneygeneral, March1, 1855. On the case, see CA,MagisterialRecords of Caledon
(hereafter, 1/CAL), 1/1/3, Preliminary Examination in the case of Johannes Stompies for rape,
February12, 1855. For another reference to the case, see CA,Cape Supreme Court (hereafter, CSC)
1/2/1/54, Records in the Criminal Cases Tried at the Circuit Court for the Division of Caledon on
3 March 1855, Printed Indictments.
37CA, 1/SWM, 16/36, clerk of the peace, Swellendam, to attorney general, March 1, 1855. For an
example of a similar assessment of a woman's previous sexual history, see Clark, Women'sSilence,33,
the case of MaryHunt, a prostitute who charged a man with rape.
38 Sachs, Justice in South Africa, 41.
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346 Pamela Scully
on the gender and class limits of equality. In 1843, seven years before the Booysen
trial, Governor Napier asked Menzies to give his opinion on whether the Cape
Colony should follow the metropole, which had abolished the death penalty for
rape cases in 1841. Menzies suggested that the Cape should not, saying that the
motion had passed in both houses only because the juries had
of late years shown such an aversion to the infliction of the Punishment of death for such
cases of Rape as were brought for trial before them, as, in violation of their oaths as
Jurymen, to acquit all persons tried before them for that crime ... rather than by
convictions to put them to the hazard of suffering a Capital Punishment.
Menzies stated that, given
the number of chaste & virtuous women in England who would prefer death to being
dishonored-and the intense horror which every rightminded man ... must regard even
the idea of ... Rape being committed on any woman nearly or dearly related to or
connected with him ... the conclusion must be that their conduct
was attributable to the feeling that the cases brought before them were not serious
or "in other words that the injury inflicted on the women in the cases ... had not
been to those women of the same character, class, or station in life, to punish
capitally those by whom the crime had been committed."39 He then suggested
how one might decide on the appropriate punishment for a man convicted of
rape. Menzies believed that the key issue was the "degree of injury which has been
occasioned to the woman." In this regard, he followed the precepts of Roman
Dutch law, which, as we have seen, allowed for the death penalty in aggravated
circumstances. Yet Menzies evaluated this injury through his own assumptions of
what constituted such circumstances and insisted that class provided an evidentiary
and experiential category whereby a woman's honor could be ascertained, an
argument with which Governor Napier apparently did not concur.
Menzies stated that "the degree of injury" could only be determined by the
victim's feelings of "self-abasement" as a result of the crime and by "her
degradation in the opinions of the class with which she associates." He argued
that "it is certain that women in the lowest ranks on whom rape has been
committed suffer much less injury from degradation in the opinions of their
associates, than would be occasioned to women in a higher rank of life." And, he
concluded, "the injury occasioned to them by their being ravished is not so great
as to make it expedient to endeavour to prevent its occurrence by taking the life
of the offender." At this point, the governor appears to have written in the
margin, "I cannot agree in this Doctrine. Why, because a woman is poor, she is not
to be as securely protected as a rich one, I do not understand."40 In talking of
women "of the lowest ranks," Menzies spoke in the language of class but invoked
also the colonial knowledge of the dovetailing of race and class in the Western
Cape in which Africans and "coloureds" occupied the lowest rungs of society.
Menzies thus managed to exclude most African and freed women from the circle
39CA, CO 521, No. 16,Justice Menzies to Governor Napier, February10, 1843.
40 CA, CO 521, No. 16, written in margin of Menzies to Napier, February 10, 1843. I cannot be
certain of the author of the comments, but the initials appear to be GN: that is, George Napier.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 347
of honor while permitting the possibility that class might triumph over race in
those cases in which freed women had moved into respectability.
Menzies did allow that, at the Cape,
there is a very large proportion of virtuous women in this Colony, principally of pure or
nearly pure European Blood but including also in it women of mixed Blood, many of
whom would prefer death to being dishonored,-on all of whom the commission of Rape
on their person would inflict the most poignant & permanent mental anguish &grief [In
the margin, Governor Napier wrote, "I dare say there are."] & whom in many cases,
especially if committed by a colored man, it would so degrade in the estimation of their
associates, as to drive them from the Society of those withwhom they had associated, &mar
all their prospects of happiness in life.4'
In a colony as sparsely populated as the Cape, where men had to travel and leave
their wives alone on farms and where, Menzies believed,
a large proportion of the male population of this colony consists of half-civilized &
uneducated persons of colour whose passions & appetites are under no restraint except
what arises from fear of punishment ... I am of opinion that the fear of Punishment of
death at present affords to ... virtuous females of this colony, particularlyin the Country
districts, their only protection against violence of Lust.
Again, Napier wrote, "I am not prepared to concur in this sweeping clause."42
The 1850s, however, witnessed a move away from the liberal humanitarianism of
the immediate postemancipation period. While representative government in
1854 introduced a qualified, non-racial male franchise, settlers pursued a conservative
legislative agenda with lasting implications for the political economy of the
Cape and, later, South Africa as a whole. Legislation passed in this decade
criminalized "laziness," desertion, and collective action on the part of workers
(who were understood to be mainly black or coloured), expanded the powers of
field cornets, and introduced Divisional Councils (dominated by settlers), which
controlled access to land. These measures all limited the equality before the law
implied by emancipation. A sign of the shift in public life is demonstrated in the
Booysen case. While Governor Napier had frowned on Menzies' sentiments in the
1840s, Governor Harry Smith in 1850 followed Menzies' interpretation in the case.
THROUGHOUT THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, black women in the Western Cape took
men to court for rape.43 The law at least allowed for the possibility that black
41 CA, CO 521, No. 16, Menzies to Napier, February10, 1843.
42 CA, CO 521, No. 16, Menzies to Napier, February10, 1843.
43 For examples of such cases, see CA, 1/STB 2/34, Documents in the Trial of Jan Hermanus
(Khoi) for Rape of Anna (Khoi), March 4, 1834; CA, CSC 1/2/1/15, No. 7, Circuit Court for the
District of Swellendam, Case of Jacob Oranje (Bastard Hottentot) for Attempted Rape of Silvia, a
Slave,January 19, 1835; CA, 1/STB 2/35, Documents in the Trial of Andries Bantom, for Rape of
Jannetje, March 19, 1835; CA, Magisterial Records of Worcester (1/WOC), 3/9, Preliminary
Examination in case of Pass Platjes for rape of Dina Koeberg, February6, 1843; CA, 1/WOC 3/9,
PreliminaryExamination in case of Mentor Kloutersfor rape of Rozet, February16, 1843;CA, 1/STB
22/43, Statement of Silvia, March 18, 1847; CA, 1/STB 4/1/1/5, No. 157, Criminal Record Book,
James Mitchel for assaulting Steentje,July 21, 1851; CA, 1/CAL 1/1/3, PreliminaryExamination in
case of Jacob Orrie for rape of ElizabethAugust,January 16, 1855; CA, CSC 1/1/1/17, Calendar of
the Names of Parties ... John Treble, for Rape of Lena Bastiaan,November 1, 1858.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
348 Pamela Scully
women could be raped: no legal statutes precluded black women from bringing
such a charge. The majorityof the rape cases are available only in the abstractsof
cases that came before the Cape Supreme Court. These tell us the name of the
accused and the victim, the places where they resided, and a brief history of the
alleged crime. When we do encounter the voices of poor rural women, it is
through linguistic, colonial, and gendered translations. We can only guess at the
many nuances of the witnesses and victims' original declarations that were lost in
translation. They probably spoke in creole Dutch, which was interpreted by a
court translator (who would be more familiar with High Dutch) into English and
then transcribed by a clerk. The few initial preliminary examinations, located in
the criminal records of the resident magistrates,provide at least some information
on the women and men involved in rape cases. More often, however, the records
on rape are very brief and leave the historian considerable latitude in interpretation.
The analysis below is thus offered as one that seems the most plausible
given both the evidence and our knowledge of Cape historyin the mid-nineteenth
century.
No systematic analysis of rape in the nineteenth-century Cape has yet been
undertaken, and the outline below only -sketches broad trends derived from
different archives covering the period 1831 to 1865.44The paucity of studies of
rape in other colonial societies makes comparison difficult, but comparison is
possible between the Cape and Yorkshirein the nineteenth century: both sets of
records involve a metropolitan area, London versus Cape Town, and a more rural
area, Yorkshire, versus the rural districts near Cape Town. Comparison with
figures provided byAnna Clarkwith reference to rape cases from the North-East
Assize circuit (Yorkshire)in England in the first three decades of the nineteenth
century suggest that the majorityof women bringing men to court for rape both
at the Cape and in Yorkshirewere members of the working class. The Yorkshire
and Cape profiles of victims are even more similar if one adds Clark'sfigures of
domestics and farm servantstogether, which total 68 percent, as compared to 77
percent at the Cape. The higher proportion of domestic servantsand laborers at
the Cape is probablydue to the less differentiated labor and social structurein the
colony than that present in England at this-time.45
44 These figures are verydifficult to gauge correctly.Myrecords from each archiveoverlap in terms
of period, but not all the records cover the entire period 1831 to 1865. In addition, it is not clear if
rapeslisted in one archiveare also cross-listed,in different form, in another. The sources used for the
following discussion include records of proceedings in criminal trials from the archives of the
Stellenbosch, Swellendam,Worcester,and Cape Town magisterialdistricts.The Cape Town criminal
records include cases from Paarl, Stellenbosch, and other country locales close to the town. I also
drawon records from the Cape Supreme Court circuit court and the reports of the high sheriff on
cases to be tried in the Supreme Court.
45 In Yorkshire,53 percent of the victimswho brought charges were domestic servantsand nurses.
Fifteen percent were farm servants and "wivesand daughters of the same," while 16 percent were
women of the skilled workingclass.Another 16 percent were dressmakersor the wivesand daughters
of farmers, shopkeepers, and overseers. Clark, Women'sSilence,appendix 1, table 4, 137. Edwards'
studyof rape in North Carolina does not break down the figures for rape along lines of class alone,
so I am unable to offer a comparison with that postemancipation setting. I have had to collapse the
Cape categories of domestic servant and laborerAsinceit was not possible in most cases to be more
precise than to saythat the woman wasworking in some sort of unskilled work.Only two of the cases
involved slave women (both of whom were raped by laborers), while six involved women who were
identified as the wives of sawyers,coachmen, or fishermen. Only three cases involved the rape of
farmers' daughters.
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Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 349
At the Cape, race played a part in determining who was most likely to appear in
court as a victim of rape and who was most likely to be charged with the crime. The
majority of the women involved in the cases of rape or attempted rape were black
or coloured. Black and coloured men also overwhelmingly made up the number
of men charged.46 This class and racial profile of rape victims arose in part
because of the dovetailing of race and class status in the nineteenth-century Cape,
although a stratum of white laborers is evident in the records.47 Despite
inadequate precision and different ways of categorizing information, the censuses
of 1865 and 1875 reveal that coloured women "predominated among those who
can unequivocally be designated pauper and working-class women." Coloured
women were also prevalent among "the lowest unskilled but 'respectable' group
of working-class women-washerwomen and laundresses."48 White women do
appear as rape victims, but it is striking that these victims were largely members of
the working class, being domestic servants, laborers, or wives of laborers.49
Working-class women were most likely to be victims of assault defined as rape since
they often worked late at night and had to walk long distances by themselves.50 For
example, one evening in 1835, a laborer named Andries Bantom raped "Jannetje,"
the daughter of an ex-slave, at Klein Drakenstein outside Stellenbosch,
when she was sent by her "mother Philida with some curtains which she had
washed" to a Mrs. Mellet, who resided nearby. Bantom was convicted and received
thirty-six lashes and twelve months' hard labor.5' In 1843, Mentor Klouters raped
"Rozet," a fellow worker on a farm in the Worcester district, when she was working
in a garden "fully a mile from the house." Rozet's mother testified that her
daughter was a virgin at the time of the rape, probably the reason why Klouters
initially received a sentence of death.52
46 Of the sixty-sevenrapes in which the women were identified, forty-threeof these cases involved
black women, while in twelve cases white women were the victims. The remaining twelve cases
constitute those in which the race of the woman was difficult to gauge. For men, sixty-fiveout of
ninety cases of rape involved black or colored men. Only twelvewhite men were brought to trial on
rape or attempted rape charges. In the remaining thirteen cases, I was unable to ascribe a racial
identity to the defendant. In all these cases, however, it must stressed that the tally of rapes is very
tentative and that veryimprecise markerssuch as name and occupation were used to determine the
race of the woman since race wasrarelyindicated on the forms. Edwards'analysisof rape in Granville
county shows that about half of the twenty-four cases involved black women. Edwards, "Sexual
Violence," 242.
47 The immigration of children under the auspices of the Children's Friends Society in the 1830s
added-to the white laboring population, as did those sailors who decided to remain at the Cape.
48 Bradlow, "Women at the Cape," 68, 69.
49For example on July 30, 1861, Ellen Pearson, wife of William Pearson, bricklayer,was raped by
one Jessie Ruth, a laborer, at Bennetsville in the division of Paarl. Ruth was found guilty and given
two years' hard labor. CA, CSC 1/1/1/18, Calendar of the Names of Parties ... against Whom Bills
of Indictment Will Be Presented to the GrandJury, Criminal Session of Supreme Court, November
1, 1861. Edwardsfinds a similar pattern. "SexualViolence," 242.
50 Anna Clarksuggests that poor women in England were similarlypreyed upon by men who saw
women walking alone as legitimate quarry. Women'sSilence, 38.
51 CA, 1/STB 2/35, Documents in the Trial of Andries Bantom, in Service of Stephanus Mellet,
Agriculturist,in Klein Drakenstein, March 19, 1835.
52 CA,CO 521, No. 105,Justice Menzies to GovernorNapier, enclosing Report on the Proceedings
&Evidence at the Trial of Mentor Klouters,at the CircuitCourt at Worcesteron November 13, 1843,
November 18, 1843. Klouters' sentence was subsequently commuted. For another example of such
vulnerability,see 1/STB 22/43, Statement of SilviatoJustice of the Peace,Johan Adam Mader,March
18, 1847.
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350 Pamela Scully
Like domestic abuse, rape was more clearly articulated as such in the midnineteenth
century when it occurred outside the family and domestic circle. The
fact that women of the middle and farming classes are mainly absent in the
records as victims of rape in the Western Cape may have arisen from the way that
rape was popularly and legally defined in the nineteenth century. Sexual attention
forced by a man upon a woman was most likely to be defined as rape if the man
was not the husband or a close friend of the woman.53 Women were more likely
to have success bringing a charge of rape, and were possibly themselves more
likely to have defined sexual abuse as rape, if it involved someone outside their
immediate family. White women in the towns lived increasingly circumscribed
lives: they did not often leave their houses unaccompanied.54 The men most likely
to victimize them, such as husbands, male relatives, and their peers, were
protected from prosecution by their positions in society. In addition, social
pressure from families not to appear in court and dishonor the family and the use
of civil measures such as bringing men to court for seduction might be reasons
why so few women of the middle classes appeared in the records as victims of
rape.55
Women of the working classes appear to have been much more willing to charge
men with rape or attempted rape. Under slavery, slaveholders had literally owned
women's bodies; and, in the postemancipation setting, freed women may have
sought to emphasize their ownership and control of their persons. The consolidation
of the tradition of legal appeal during amelioration in the 1820s and 1830s,
and apprenticeship from 1834 to 1838, provided impetus in the postemancipation
period for rural women's actions against what they perceived as infringements of
their rights.56 In 1836, Anna, a woman defined as Khoi in the record, in the service
53 I found no cases of incestual rape within white middle-class or farming families in the records.
I found only a handful of cases relating to incest, and they involved only men of the laboring or
skilled working class. For example, CA,CSC1/1/1/20, Calendarof the Names of Parties .. against
Whom Bills of Indictment Will Be Presented to the GrandJury, Criminal Session of Supreme Court,
November 1, 1865; CA, CSC 1/1/1/21, Calendar of the Names of Parties ... against Whom Bills of
Indictment Will Be Presented to the GrandJury, Criminal Session of Supreme Court,January 15,
1867.
54 For the history of Victorian gender ideology at the Cape, see Bradlow, "Women at the Cape,"
who suggests that among ruralDutch families, women were not encouraged even to engage in charity
work.The records of the Dutch Reformed Church in Stellenbosch, however, do indicate that settler
women were prominent in the missionaryactivities of the Stellenbosch MissionarySociety. See CA,
Archives of the Dutch Reformed Church, P 31 1/3, Diary of P. D. Luckhoff, of the Stellenbosch
MissionarySociety, December 4, 1838.
55 It is virtuallyimpossible to determine if any of these civil cases originated in rape, but it does
suggest-thatwomen's honor wascrucial in determining eligibility for marriage.Thus bringing a man
to court on a charge of rape, in a situation where the victimwason trialas much as the accused, might
verywell have acted as a deterrent. CA,CSC2/1/1/5, No. 49, MariaJohanna StadlerAssistedby Her
FatherDekkerAdam Stadlervs. EdwardTedlie, . . . Defendant, October 12, 1828;CSC2/1/1/16, No.
21, Anne Elizabeth Steytler vs. Daniel Disandt, June 21, 1831; CSC 2/1/1/20, No. 16, Catharina
Josina Joosten, a Minor Duly Assisted by Her Father Hendrik PieterJoosten vs. Willem Grobbelaar,
June 26, 1832; CSC2/1/1/25, No. 28,Johanna FredricaCarolinaGodier AssistedbyHer Mother the
Widow Rebecca Catharina Godier, vs. George Titterton, August 8, 1833; CSC, 2/1/1/67, No. 19,
Christina Beck a Minor Assisted by Her Father and Natural GuardianAdriaan Beck, Plaintiff, and
Alfred Dolman, Defendant, June 3, 1851.
56 CA 1/STB 22/19, Complaint to the Assistant Protector of Slaves, Stellenbosch, by Theresa, a
slave,against a slaveman for raping a fellow slavewoman,January26, 1833; CA,CSC1/2/1/15, No.
7, Circuit Court for the District of Swellendam, Case of Jacob Oranje, for Attempted Rape of Silvia,
trial held January 1, 1835. For discussion of the importance of amelioration, see Wayne Dooling,
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 351
of a widow in Stellenbosch, complained that she had been attacked by Dienaar de
Vries, a Khoi hawker. Anna stated that the Widow Van der Byl had ordered her to
collect wood, and she left the house in order to do so at about 6 p.m. De Vries
followed her onto the property of Pieter Edward Hamman and then approached
her. Anna testified that she had told him she was not acquainted with him, to
which "he replied that did not signify ... that he had long been on the lookout
for such a one as I was." Dienaar took her behind a bush and said he wanted "to
have connection with me ... I told him I could not allow it, that I had a husband
... I was not used to remain in the bushes that I had a young child at home and
that my mistress would be angry." De Vries took her to a threshing room, where,
after "he threatened to knock out my brains" with a brick, he tried to rape her,
being prevented from doing so when a laborer came into the room.57
In her testimony, Anna raised a number of reasons why she "could not allow"
de Vries to have sex with her, invoking her status as a married woman, as mother
of a child, and referring to the possible anger of her mistress should she, Anna,
return late. Anna employed respectability as a way of staking her claim to the
protection and understanding of the court; she also alluded to her position as a
dutiful servant. Anna may have used these rhetorical strategies "to acquire status
not as.a mute, colonized object, but as a voiced individual with a socially condoned
moral ... life."58 By mentioning her marital status in court, Anna alerted the
magistrate to her status as a "respectable married woman," thus emphasizing her
claim to honor and protection. By saying that she "was not used to remain in the
bushes," Anna perhaps also sought to set herself off from contemporary stereotypes
that portrayed Khoi women and men as living "wandering" lives and
preferring the "bush" of barbarism to the community of civilization.59 As a last
resort, she also appealed to her and De Vries' shared experience as the lowest
members of a colonial system that privileged the rights of masters over those of
servants.
Anna invoked her "special status" as a married woman who did not live in the
bush to try to obtain respect from both her rapist and the magistrate. She thus
employed a variety of rhetorical strategies to prevent being raped and also in
"Slaves,Slaveholders and Amelioration in GraaffReinet, 1823-1830" (Honors dissertation, University
of Cape Town, 1989), chap. 2, 32; alsoJohn Mason, "HendrikAlbertus and his Ex-SlaveMey:A
Drama in Three Acts,"JournalofAfricanHistory,31 (1990): 423-45; John Mason, "The Slaves and
Their Protectors: Reforming Resistance in a Slave Society, 1826-1834," Journal of SouthernAfrican
Studies,17 (March 1991): 104-28. For a consideration of laborers' use of law in the late nineteenth
century, see Pamela Scully, "Criminalityand Conflict in Rural Stellenbosch, South Africa, 1870-
1900" Journal of African History, 30 (1989): 289-300.
57CA, 1/STB 2/35, Documents in the Trial of Dienaar de Vries ... for Intention to Commit Rape
on Anna, December 15, 1836. On the back of the trial documents, it is written that Dienaar was a
"Hottentot." Anna's last name is not provided.
58 Moira Ferguson, Subjectto Others:British WomenWritersand Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York,
1992), 289.
59The dichotomy of the bush and the town as metaphors for barbarismand civilizationplayed out
both in Britishcolonial rhetoric and in some indigenous symbolic systems.For archivalreferences by
Dutch farmers and officials to the Khoi, see, for example, CA, 1/STB 18/188, Statement by Widow
Spykerman,August 5, 1836; CA, Government House (GH) 23/12, Opinion of the Attorney-General
Regarding the Proposed VagrancyLaw,enclosed in Governor Napier to Lord Glenelg, secretaryof
statefor colonies, June 22, 1838. For the British,see Clifton Crais,"TheVacantLand:The Mythology
of British Expansion in the Eastern Cape, South Africa,"JournalofSocialHistory,25 (1991): 255-75.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
352 Pamela Scully
subsequent testimony possibly to invoke a sympathetic response from the resident
magistrate, but these tactics did not work: the judge acquitted Dienaar de Vries.
While the records of rape cases in the rural Western Cape rarely tell us much
about the motivations of the rapists or the reactions of the victims, this case
suggests that one woman perceived unwanted sexual attention as an infringement
of her rights and her body and rape as a heinous crime against her person.60 Freed
women might well have defined honor in terms of getting public redress for
infringement on their persons. Honor and shame thus were configured differently
for women of the former slaveholding class and women who had been slaves or
dependent laborers but not in the way that Menzies envisioned. Freed women atthe
Cape saw rape as a violent act and attempted to seek redress for this crime.
While there seems to be a similarity between the experiences of rape among
working women at the Cape and in Yorkshire in the nineteenth century, the
profile of the men who were charged with rape suggests a divergence between
Yorkshire and the colony. In Yorkshire, between 1800 and 1829, unskilled working
men and farm laborers constituted 37 percent of the men charged with rape.6' At
the Cape, in contrast, out of the sixty-nine cases in which the occupation of the
assailant is known, fully 81 percent of the alleged rapists were identified as
laborers. The man most likely to be charged at the Cape was a working-class man,
particularly a man performing unskilled labor. Black men were also much more
likely to be charged with rape than were white men.62 In Yorkshire, far more
records exist of masters raping their servants or of men of the upper classes raping
working-class women.63 In general, the Cape records I looked at do not provide
sufficient detail to make such fine definitions, but of the fifty cases in which I was
able to identify the occupation of both the victim and the alleged assailant, 66
percent involved laborers, 1 percent involved laborers raping wives or daughters
of skilled workers, and only one case involved a farmer who was alleged to have
raped a servant, a case that never came to trial.64 The majority of the cases in
which white men were charged with rape involved laborers or sailors, that is, men
of the working class who enjoyed little status in Cape society. Most of the rapes
that came to court in the Western Cape in the mid-nineteenth century therefore
were perpetrated by men of the laboring class against women of the same class;
and, in those records in which we are given sufficient detail to make an analysis,
it seems that the women knew the men concerned. In 1835, Willem, a so-called
60 See also the case of Wilhelmina Johannes mentioned above, as well as that of Rosie Dryden,
below.
61 Clark, Women'sSilence, appendix 1, table 4, 137.
62 Of the seventy-sevencases in which the race of the assailantcan be identified, 84 percent of the
cases involved blackmen. The close correlation between the 81 percent of laborerscharged with rape
and the 84 percent of black men points again to the association between race and class status that
continued through the nineteenth century. "By the early 1860s, there were around twenty-three
thousand 'agricultural workers' in the western Cape. Of these, approximately three thousand, or
nearly 13 percent, were 'European.' Only 10 percent, or 1,416 out of 13,712, farmers in the western
Cape were 'coloured.'" Marincowitz,"RuralProduction," 116.
63 The Assize records show that 38 percent of rapes were committed by an acquaintance of the
woman, 7 percent by a fellow laborer, and 20 percent by a master or someone connected with him.
Clark, Women'sSilence, appendix 2, table 7, 139.
64 CA, 1/SWM 16/35, clerk of the peace, Swellendam, to the attorney general. A woman made a
complaint against Charles Barry, but it was not followed up. Possibly, this is because six months
elapsed between the alleged rape and the woman's complaint, February15, 1855.
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Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 353
Bastard Hottentot of Caledon district, attempted to rape a Khoi woman, Amelia
Hartenbeeste. She stated in her testimony that on August 22, a Saturday night, at
about nine o'clock, Willem, a bastard Hottentot, in the service of the field cornet PAR
Otto, came to the pondok where I reside at Caledon. I was in my bed ... [H]e laid hold
of me and said he would drukit too,that he would have me for his wife, that I had drank
with him, and if I would not have him for a husband, he would murder me &that no other
man would have me.65
Willem seems to have thought that Hartenbeeste's willingness to socialize with
him in another context gave him the right to have sex with her when he chose.
THE RECORDS SUGGEST that black laborers and their employers shared some
attitudes regarding the rape of black women and that a tenuous bridge of
masculinity could be momentarily constructed around a joint perception of the
sexual availability of women. In 1839, a laborer named Charles, who worked on
the farm of Jacob de Villiers in Franschehoek, was charged with the rape of Rosie
Dryden, a domestic servant from Cape Town. Dryden and her aunt and cousin had
been visiting her relatives in "the interior" and stopped on their return to Cape
Town at De Villiers' farm to visit their relatives employed there who were ill with
the measles. De Villiers threw her off the farm, charging that she had brought the
disease. As Rosie Dryden and her cousin were on their way to a neighboring farm
where her aunt had found employment, Charles came up and asked where they
were going. Rosie replied,
"to myAunts at MrsRoux"-when he told me "thatmyAunt said I wasnot to come as she
slept in the kitchen and there wasno place for me, but that I should return to his master's
and sleep in his room ... I told him that I would not go back to his room ... I said "Idon't
like to sleep with all black boys" he then said "whynot" "Itwas not proper for girls to do
so"-I said-and the smell in your room is too disagreeable."66
Charles tried to rape Rosie; but Savonie, her cousin, got help from two laborers,
who brought Charles and the women back to De Villiers. When De Villiers had
heard the story, Rosie Dryden reported that "he replied, if Charles had cut off
[her] head, it would have served [her] right." Charles subsequently asked Rosie's
forgiveness, but, finding his apology unacceptable, she proceeded to make a
complaint against him at the local magistrate's office. According to Rosie Dryden,
Charles said "he did not intend to murder me but to have connexion with my
65 CA, 1/SWM 16/29, justice of the peace, Caledon, to clerk of the peace, Swellendam, enclosing
Complaint of Khoi Woman Amelia Hartenbeeste against Willem, Khoi of Caledon Neighborhood for
Assault with Intent to Rape, August 29, 1835, Preliminary Examination, August 27, 1835. As far as I
can ascertain, the charge was not followed up. For other examples, see CA, 1/STB 2/35, Documents
in Trial of Andries Bantom, in the Service of Stepfhanus Mellet, Agriculturist, in Klein Drakenstein,
for Rape ofJannetje, November 14, 1835. Also see CA, 1/WOC 3/9, Preliminary Examination in the
Case of Pass Platjes for Rape, February 6, 1843.
66 Very little evidence exists about the thoughts of the men who were charged with rape. CA, 1/STB
2/36, No. 7, Documents in the Case of Charles, Laborer in Service of Jacob de Villiers, Fransche
Hoek, District of Paarl Free Person of Colour for Rape on 4 May 1839 against Rosie Dryden, in Service
of James Dunbar of Rondebosch, District of Wynberg, July 19, 1839.
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354 Pamela Scully
bodym-I replied he should ask his God to forgive him, and not ask me."67 Charles
and De Villiers apparently agreed that a woman had no right to refuse sex when
a man demanded it, or at least that a working-class woman did not have that right:
De Villiers clearly saw Dryden's charge of rape as inconsequential, while Charles
perceived her objections as arising from his threat to kill her, not from objections
to his attempted rape. Rosie Dryden did not say merely that she did not want to
have sex with Charles but identified Charles' putative skin color and living habits
as reasons why she had no wish to sleep with him. She identified him as "all
black," thereby invoking the boundary between herself and a man who she
perceived as outside the "coloured" category. In the early nineteenth century,
both the slaveholding community and travelers had represented slaves of Mozambican
descent as being inferior to Malay and Cape-born slaves, and this case
suggests that some free black women shared this perception during the midnineteenth
century.68
Very few insights into sexual exploitation or sexual relations between white
farmers and their female employees or other women of the rural poor can be
gleaned from the local records of Stellenbosch, Swellendam, or Worcester
districts. This silence on the question of possible sexual relations across putative
racial categories echoes the larger silence on these issues in the wider archival
record. In the cases involving men whom I guessed would have been thought of
as white, only two involved farmers, that is, men who would have had some social
standing in the community, and even then it is difficult to measure whether they
were wealthy farmers or farmers working on the share. These two cases were for
rapes of white women.69 The demographics of rape suggest that a black woman
could more easily bring a black man to court for rape or attempted rape than she
could a "respectable" white farmer: the archive does not easily reveal the sexual
exploitation by farmers and men of social standing of working-class women. The
annals of sexual exploitation at the Cape say more about the suppression involved
in the creation of identities and histories than the elaboration of "facts." We hear
more of the echoes of what might have been than we do a record of the past.70
Returning to the case of the rape of Anna Simpson, at first it seems astonishing
that in 1850, a group of men, who were likely to have been white settlers, should
petition the government on behalf of a lowly black laborer. After all, only twelve
years before, the Cape had been a racially stratified slaveholding society dragged
into an era of free wage labor through the influence of the anti-slavery movement
in Britain and a resigned Colonial Office. The actions of settlers in the aftermath
of emancipation only heighten the strangeness of this gesture of empathy: in
67 CA, 1/STB 2/36, No. 7,July 19, 1839.
68 See WilliamBird, StateoftheCapein 1822 (fasc.rpt. edn., CapeTown, 1966), 74, where he asserts,
"The Africander slave girl would consider herself disgraced by connection with the Negro, or the
production of a black infant."
69 CA, CO 578, ChiefJustice SirJohn Wylde to GovernorSir HarrySmith, enclosing Report on the
Proceedings in the Trial of Cornelis Volschenk for Rape of Anna Eliza de Vos, Daughter of Wouter
Abraham de Vos, held at the Circuit Court, Swellendam, March 13, 1848, March 20, 1848; CA, CSC
1/1//I/20, Calendarof the Names of Parties... CriminalSession of the Supreme Court,May1, 1866.
Benjamin Smit Altree, tried on May7, 1866, for rape.
70 Clifton C. Crais, "Race, the State, and the Silence of History in the Making of Modern South
Africa" (paper delivered to the African Studies Association Conference, November 1992).
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Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 355
1834, farmers throughout the Cape called for a vagrancy act that would have
forced freed people and other free blacks to work, subsequently helped draft
stringent labor laws that severely impeded the rights of servants and favored those
of employers, and complained incessantly to the Colonial Office about the
unwillingness of freed people and other people of color to work on the farms. If
anything, a reader of the Cape mid-nineteenth-century archival record might
expect that white settlers would have been happy to see a black rural laborer lose
his life on the gallows. However, in the light of what we have learned from the case
involving Rosie Dryden, perhaps it is not surprising that in 1850 white men of
George could find commonality with a black laborer over the rape of a rural
working-class woman. In fact, additional incidents occurred in the aftermath of
emancipation in 1838 in which white men petitioned the government on behalf
of black men accused of rape. In 1852, seventy-four men of George again
petitioned the governor to commute the death sentence of Kobus Goliath, stating
that Kobus had had no intention of killing the woman he had raped and that the
"offence did not seem to be premeditated, and that the complainant was not
deprived of her life."'7' As in the case of Anna Simpson (once her racial status had
been "clarified"), the woman raped was free black.
The memorials predominantly or exclusively by white men on behalf of black
men accused of rape indeed have one feature in common: that the woman who
had been raped was black, or at least was perceived as being so in the white
community. The petitioners for Damon Booysen insisted on labeling Anna
Simpson and her husband "Bastard coloured." The fact that the petitioners
perceived Anna Simpson to be a "Bastard coloured," that is, not "white," was part
of their support for Damon Booysen, and it turned out to be a pillar on which
Judge Menzies was to rest his appeal for clemency. By designating the couple as
coloured, the petitioners in effect cast the first slur on the character of Anna
Simpson. When black men raped white women, they were not as likely to receive
such a warm defense by white men. Willem Patience, a Khoi laborer in the service
of a farmer in the Stellenbosch district, received the death sentence in 1838 for
raping the daughter of a farmer in the same district.72 In contrast, while a white
farmer, Cornelis Volschenk, was convicted of raping a farmer's daughter and
sentenced to death on March 13, 1848, the governor commuted the sentence to
ten years' hard labor-the jury and others having written a mem9rial in his
support.73 The rape of a white farmer's daughter involved all the elements that
71 CA, CO 615, secretary to government to Governor Smith enclosing Report of Proceedings in
Case of Kobus Goliath for Rape with Intent, to Commit Murder, February28, 1852. I find myself
falling into the same situation as the judge. Since racial designations were not written into trial
proceedings veryoften, one has to make guesses according to the names. Goliath was a typicalslave
surname, and as such I am presuming the man to have been free black,or coloured, or at least to have
been considered such in the community. CA, CO 615, Memorial of Undersigned Inhabitants at
George, undated. Signatories included names such as W. Elliot, Robert Mollison, J. C. Truter (a
distinguished Cape settler family),J. M.Johnson,'and J. W. Cooper. See also CA, CO 503, No. 118,
Justice Menzies to Governor Napier, commenting on the Case of Jacob Magerman for Rape,
November 15, 1841.
72 CA, 1/STB 2/36, No. 15, Documents in the Case of Regina vs. Adam, alias Willem Patience, for
Rape,January 5, 1838.
73CA, CO 578, Wylde to Smith enclosing Report on the Proceedings in the Trial of Cornelis
Volschenk for Rape ... held at the Circuit Court, Swellendam, March 13, 1841, March 20, 1848.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
356 Pamela Scully
Menzies was to argue constituted a case of aggravated rape-loss of status, feelings
of shame, and great "injury"-yet, ultimately, the race of the rapist also helped
determine sentencing.
One way of understanding the Booysen case is through attention to the
narratives, or the "sexual stories" that white men told themselves in the aftermath
of emancipation.74 Hanna Rosen has suggested that in the Reconstruction
American South, white men, both ex-slaveholders and poor whites, perceived
relations of power operating through a complex racial and sexual economy
premised on the subordination and sexual availability of black women. They
sought to shape the understandings and social definitions of rape in a way that
excluded any sexual activities on their part as rape.75 White male domination in
the postemancipation Cape operated around a similar linkage of racial and sexual
domination, which saw black women's bodies as the property of men, more
specifically, the property of white men. Possibly, white men in the rural areas
perceived the rationalization of their sexual abuse of black women as especially
important in maintaining a representation of white sexual dominance of black
women, which had its formative roots in the sexual economy of slaveholding.
While Roman Dutch law prohibited slave owners from "forcing a slave to obey any
such commands which are contrary to law or morality," apparently the statute was
never used to prosecute rape cases.76
It is unclear if white men regarded black women in particular or working-class
women in general as more available for sexual exploitation. It is also unclear to
what extent black men in the postemancipation Western Cape shared this sense of
the right to have sexual relations with black and working-class women. Historians
have pointed to widespread violence by slave men against slave women in the Cape
Colony, citing the uneven sex ratio in which men competed for few women or a
frustration of masculinity as reasons for this abuse.77 Perhaps we might more
fruitfully examine the silences that pertained to the sexual violence of white men
against both white and black women and interrogate the constitution of the
archives as productive of the historical subjects of the "violent slave man" and the
"sexual slave woman." The criminal records produce and reproduce the "fact" of
violence and degeneracy within freed families and the "fact" of harmony and
support within settler families.
One can read the response of the petitioners in the Booysen case as a defensive
reaction. These white men's sense of identity had in part derived from their power
over others: with the ending of slavery, the power over the bodies of black men was
74 See Hall, "'The Mind That Burns in Each Body.'"
75 Hanna Rosen, "Sexual Violence in the Era of Reconstruction" (paper presented to Postemancipation
Conference, University of Michigan, April 1990). For other observations on this definition
of rape, see Edwards, "Sexual Violence."
76 "Statement of the Laws of the Colony of the Cape Regarding Slavery," cited in Mason, "'Fit for
Freedom,'" 210. Some disagreement exists on the nature of sexual violence under Cape slavery.
Patricia van der Spuy argues that "many slaveholders did not take the right of sexual possession for
granted." John Mason suggests instead that, for most slave women, relationships with slave masters
were premised not on consent but abuse. The weight of power in Cape slave society in favor of the
masters makes the latter interpretation more likely. Van der Spuy, "Collection," 18; Mason, "'Fit for
Freedom,' " 210.
77 For a critique of this historiography, see Van der Spuy, "Collection," chap. 2.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995
Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 357
symbolically and, in some senses, actually curtailed. If the bodies of black women
were also no longer legally owned, the sexual economy that made all women
subject to the power of men made black women a nearby and easy target for sexual
abuse. One might say that the sexual story these petitioners told themselves was
that while one arena of domination had been foreclosed, another still existed. The
identity of the petitioners as white males in a colonial society in part depended on
a denial that their abuse of black women constituted a crime punishable by death.
This view therefore depended also on a denial of the possibility that black women
had honor to lose. Although the petitioners' "rescue" of Damon Booysen perhaps
illustrates a tenuous bridge of masculinity thrown across class and racial identities
at one particular juncture, this bridge was itself a defense of a racially constructed
sexual right to the bodies of black women. In the end, the petition by respectable
white men on behalf of a disreputable black man should not be read as evidence
that white men and a black man could overcome racial difference. Rather, the
petitioners thereby defended and legitimated a racial interpretation of female
sexuality that ultimately overrode any claims black women might have to
respectability. The "respectable" white men of George came to the rescue of
Damon Booysen not so much to save him as to save themselves.
ANDWHAT OFJUDGE MENZIES' switch in the Booysen case? In light of his statement
of 1843, we can appreciate why Menzies initially sentenced Booysen to death for
the rape of a white woman in 1850. In his first reading of the case, Menzies saw an
instance in which a virtuous white woman was raped by a man of a class Menzies
had called "half-civilized . .. whose passions & appetites are under no restraint."'78
In addition, the woman had been left on her farm when her husband had to go
to town, in precisely the kind of situation that Menzies saw as dangerous to
virtuous wives at the Cape. He had believed "that for the due protection of the
chastity and honor of respectable married women in this colony, it was necessary
that the sentence of Death should be pronounced on the Prisoner."79 After his
meeting with the deputation from George, Menzies revised the premises on which
he had evaluated the case. Now the case seemed of another sort, in which a
licentious woman of "mixed" race-being of Khoi and white descent-had
seduced a young man of eighteen, a man whose appetites were, after all, "under
no restraint." Anna Simpson's sexual habits came under review and were found
wanting. The fact that she was married did not serve as sufficient reason for
maintaining the sentence of death, since, by the accounts of the "respectable"
men of George, she was not respectable, nor was she white. While, in 1843,
Menzies had alluded to the notion that women of "mixed race" might have a
sense of virtue, in 1850 he ultimately relied on a racial determination in his
assessment of the severity of the crime perpetrated against Anna Simpson.80
78 CA, CO 521, No. 16,Justice Menzies to .GovernorNapier, February26, 1843.
79CA, CO 599, Menzies to Smith, September 27, 1850.
80 CA,CO 521, No. 16, Menzies to Napier, February26, 1843. CA,CO 599, Declaration of Damon
Booysen to the clerk of the peace, George, April 4, 1850, enclosure in Menzies to Smith, September
27, 1850.
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358 Pamela Scully
It is unclear what helped anchor her racial status as black, when the judge had
been so sure she was white, but in part it seems her status was fixed by the other
claims relating to her supposedly adulterous behavior. Damon Booysen's mother
testified that she had on a previous occasion seen Anna Simpson "lay hold of my
son by his private parts," and Damon stated in a memorial drawn up after the
initial sentence that he had previously had sex with Anna.8' Thus Anna Simpson's
race was explained with reference to sexuality-the one category helped explain
and construct the other. Yet, by other accounts, Anna Simpson was a respectable
woman, and she was a married woman at a time when many of the rural poor were
not. In addition, both she and her husband worked. Defined as a "Bastard
coloured," however, probably a synonym for "Bastard Hottentot," the illegitimate
child of a slave father and Khoi mother, Anna Simpson received the first strike
against her claim on the full protection of the law.
The term "Bastard Hottentot" derived from the inability of a slave man to claim
legal heirs, he being a man without honor, outside of the natal circle, devoid of
social standing.82 A slave's "bastard" child inherited this marginal status: beyond
the pale of family and, in one respect, beyond the law. In addition, the ascribing
of "Bastard coloured" or "Bastard Hottentot" status to Anna Simpson also made
more feasible the innuendos about her sexual behavior-witness the resident
magistrate of George who argued that he could draw no conclusions from the
numerous depositions testifying to her morality since the speakers were "all
related by marriage to Anna Simpson."83 In a context in which he had to evaluate
the sexuality of a black man and a black woman, the judge fell back on notions of
black women's sexuality that had a long history in Cape colonial discourse, dating
from at least the late eighteenth century. By the 1820s, Europeans increasingly
fashioned a sexualized knowledge about Khoi and slave women. It was, after all, a
Khoi woman who was paraded through Europe in the early 1800s, shown off at
balls, named the "Hottentot Venus," and made an object of elite and intellectual
discussion.84 European men saw slave women, too, as particularly "licentious" and
prone to sexual promiscuity, a representation with echoes across the white
slaveholding societies of the Atlantic world.85
Menzies' interpretation of the punishment required for the rape of Anna
Simpson reveals, at least in this instance, that when race, class, sexuality, and
gender were put up against one another, a woman's sexuality was determined by
her race: class and culture could not "rescue" her. The referential relationship
between racial and sexual stereotypes served to categorize Anna Simpson in a
81Jan Botha, the man who Booysen claimed as a witness to his having had sex previouslywithAnna
Simpson, denied this. CA, CO 599, Statement byJan Botha, Statement by MariaPlatjes, Statements
in Inquiry into Case of Damon Booysen, October 16, 1850; Petition of Damon Booysen, George,
September 21, 1850, enclosures in Menzies to Smith, September 27, 1850.
82 Orlando Patterson, Slaveryand SocialDeath(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), chap. 1.
83 CA, CO 599, resident magistrate of George to secretary of government, October 17, 1850,
enclosure in Menzies to Smith, September 27, 1850.
84 See Sander Gilman, Differenceand Pathology: Stereotypesof Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, N.Y.,
1985), chap. 3.
85 For the Cape, see CA,Accessions (A) 602, Notebook of S. E. Hudson, "Marriages";also Mason,
"'Fit for Freedom,'" 203. For the Caribbean, see BarbaraBush, Slave Womenin CaribbeanSociety
1650-1838 (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), chap. 2.
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Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture 359
situation in which otherwise her race, her status, and her sexual life were far from
apparent.
The Booysen case suggests how seemingly unambiguous categories and boundaries
in Cape colonial life such as race unravel as discrete units of explanation on
closer scrutiny, and it points to a number of paradoxes that solidified in colonial
discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As racial categorizatibn
based on the inevitability of biology became increasingly hegemonic in the British
Empire and elsewhere, the very malleability of race-the cultural construction of
race-continued to facilitate the successful deployment of racism in societies with
discrete relations of power.86 Ironically, while the race of Anna Simpson was
invoked as thedetermining yardstick in ascertaining the appropriate punishment
for rape,. the judge's own remarks illustrate how malleable and subjective racial
categories were: Menzies changed his interpretation of Anna Simpson's race to
accord with the "common-sense" racial knowledge of "respectable" inhabitants of
George. The petitioners and the judge thus participated in a broader colonial
discourse in which words such as "virtuous" frequently were metonyms for
"whiteness" and in which the relationship between and stability of categories such
as respectability, race, and sexuality was far from self-evident.87 Their decisions
and actions were informed both by a metropolitan discourse about the uncontrolled
sexuality of working-cla-ss women and by empire-wide representations of
the hypersexuality of black women, whether under slavery or after. Their ultimate
reliance on intertwined racial and sexual discourses underscores the powerful
appeal of racial explanations and the ambivalence in British colonialism, and
among its settler subjects in general, as to whether cultural practice alone could
bring a person within the fold of European civilization.
86 A person declared white in South Africa might well find herself or himself declared mulatto in
the West Indies.
87 For analysis of metonymy and racial discourse, see Crais, "Race, the State, and the Silence of
History."
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995