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WORLDCONFERENCE A
ON RECORDS
AND GENEALOGICAL SEMINAR

Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.A.

5-8 August 1969

IMMIGRATION PATTERNS IN SOUTH AFRICA AND

THEIR EFFECTS ON GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH

Part I

Netherlands Administration (NetherIand East

India Company, 1652-1795, and the Batavian
Republic, 1803-1806)

By

Dr. Cornelis Pama

OF T‘I~'il§L..7 .13 In :” if;"fij§;‘.;:,:5'?‘

C227

COPYRIGHT© 1969 THE GENEALOGICAL SOCIETYOF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY
SAINTS, INC. ~ , — 3
 IMMIGRATION PATTERNS IN SOUTH AFRICA AND
THEIR EFFECTS ON GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH

Part I.

Netherlands Administration (Nether|and East

India Company, 1652-1795, and the Batavian
Republic, 1803-1806)

Bv

Dr. Cornelis Pama

WHITE BEGINNINGS IN SOUTH AFRICA

From an immigration and colonization point of view South Africa is a young country.
Columbus sailed to America in 1492 and it is true that Bartholomew Dias rounded the
Southern part of Africa in 1487, that is five years earlier; but besides putting up a few
padraos - stone crosses with the arms of the King of Portugal - the Portuguese made no
attempt to occupy any land in what is today the Republic of South Africa. They had their
eyes firmly fixed on India and the East Indies and although they established a settlement in
the present-day Portuguese Province of Mozambique, this was only meant as an intermediate
harbour from which to cross the Indian Ocean to Goa in India.

The Southern part of Africa had little to offer to the conquering Europeans. The
wealth and riches they were after lay somewhere else. Except for a few ships that tried to
get some fresh water or barter some cattle with elusive natives, and a number that
shipwrecked on the dangerous coast, South Africa remained virtually untouched by
Europeans till the middle of the seventeenth century.

In the meantime the colonial scene had changed. A hundred years after the Portuguese
the first Dutch or Netherlands ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope on their way to the
East and they were followed by :numerous others. A long struggle followed, the Portuguese
monopoly of the trade with the Indies was broken, and finally the Hollanders ousted the
Portuguese from many of their overseas possessions and founded a colonial empire of their
own with Batavia, now Djakarta as its capital.

The voyage from Holland to the East in small wooden sailing ships was a long and
dreadful one. The crews suffered from scurvy and other diseases and sometimes half of them
got seriously ill or died. It was therefore necessary from both a humanitarian and a business
point of view to establish somewhere half way a harbour where the sick could be looked
after, the crews have a rest, and fresh water, vegetables and meat could be obtained.

For a while the island of St. Helena was used for this purpose, but it had great
disadvantages and finally the directors of the Netherlands East India Company in
Amsterdam, who controlled the whole Eastern Empire, decided that the best solution would
be to establish a fort, hospital and other facilities at the Cape of Good Hope on the
Southernmost part of Africa.

They had in hand optimistic reports about the weather and the soil, a garden for fresh
vegetables could easily be established, and cattle could be bartered from the natives,
although there did not seem to be all that many. For this reason the Netherlands
Commander Jan van Riebeeck arrived with three ships at the Cape in April 1652 and in the
course of ten years did exactly what had been expected of him. When he got at last his long
awaited promotion to a better post in the Indies the Hollanders were firmly established at
the Cape of Good Hope.

It is not the purpose of this address to give a history of South Africa, but a few basic
facts are necessary to get the background of the immigration which was to follow.

Let us say at the outset that the Netherlanders were most reluctant colonizers. In fact
they were exclusively business men and nothing was further from their thoughts than
establishing overseas settlements of Netherlanders. If they encouraged any permanent
settlement at all, it [wassimply because they were forced to it by circumstances or because
business required it. In consequence, what rudimentary settlements there were, were
completely subordinated to the commercial policy of the Company. The purpose of the
whole enterprise was to make profits and pay dividends Settlements were usually just a loss
on the balance sheet. From this point of view the Cape of Good Hope was a failure because
it never paid its way.

It soon appeared that the native Hottentots were wandering nomads, who sometimes
appeared with cattle at the castle gates, but often not. There were not many of them either.
The East India Company was, therefore, soon forced to raise its own cattle besides
cultivating its own vegetables. At first they tried to use soldiers and sailors for this purpose,
but soldiers are bad agriculturists. Within a few years the Company had, therefore, no other
choice but to give land to people who were willing to make a living from farming, give them
title deeds and other rights and hope, in that way, to get a steady supply for the passing
ships.

So, in 1657, the first freeburghers got their rights, nine free farmers who started
agriculture at the Liesbeek river. More and more followed, and when Van Riebeeck left the
Cape in 1662 there were already about sixty. Some of them had surnames which, today,
may be counted in their tens of thousands, such as Botma, Clasen, Cloete, Louw, Van der
Merwe, Mostert, Visser and Van der Westhuyzen.

Let me give a few actual figures.

There are at present 76,500 Jacobse in South Africa, 69,500 Botha’s, 63,000 Van
Wyks, 60,000 Van der Merwe’s, 48,000 Venters and we could go on quoting such numbers
much longer. I have no statistics to prove it but I have the impression that such an enormous
descent in the male line from one particular ancestor, who landed here in the seventeenth
century is a typical South African phenomenon, not to be found in any of the other new
countries. Perhaps nowhere else were the historical, climatological and geographical
circumstances so favourable for such a development.

CLIMATE and SIZE of the COUNTRY

The Cape of Good Hope, and much of South Africa, has a climate which may be
compared with Southern Europe. There was, therefore, no reason why people from Western
Europe should not settle there. Also, the country was comparatively empty. There were the
nomadic Hottentots whom I have already mentioned, but they were very thinly spread.
There were also the very primitive and elusive Bushmen about whom there was a prolonged
uncertainty whether they were really human at all and not a kind of baboon. The
Hottentots were not organized in large tribes but formed a kind of family clan without
much coherence. They showed little inclination for much contact with the Europeans and
withdrew rather into the vast interior. The Bushmen were difficult to find at all in their
caves high up in the mountains.

The Cape was such an enormous country that there seemed to be a place for
everybody. However, their withdrawal did not make the Hottentots immune from European
diseases and soon most of the original population of the country fell victim to various
smallpox epidemics, notably the one of 1712. In the end they almost vanished as a race,
exterminated not by the Europeans, but by diseases to which they had no resistence.
The Bushmen were pushed further and further into the interior, till finally they were
almost exterminated by Europeans, Hottentots, and Bantus. Today the pure race hardly
numbers a thousand souls, in uninhabitable parts and deserts outside the borders of the
Republic.

As for the Bantu who, today outnumber all other races in South Africa, they were at
first non-existant. While the Europeans were busy pushing from the South to the East and
North-East, the Bantu pushed from the North East to the South. When the two streams
finally met some 500 miles from Cape Town the scene was set for a long and bloody
struggle. But this was still a long way off, in fact it did not happen until the last quarter of
the eighteenth century.

COLONIZATION PATTERNS

The almost unlimited vastness of the land and the sparseness of other inhabitants
enabled the freeburghers to spread themselves over the country, just as thinly but ­
considering their small numbers —with comparatively great rapidness. Their raison d’etre was
to plant vegetables and raise cattle for the Company's ships. Their original stock had to be
bartered from the Hottentots and as these became more and more elusive, expeditions were
organized to find them in the interior wilderness. In that way the burghers became well
acquainted with the interior, and when their own herds of sheep and cattle multiplied, they
had no reason to barter with the Hottentots any longer but simply put their own herds in
the country the Hottentots had left.

Besides cattle they raised large families. Although the number of children is often
exaggerated, and fifteen to twenty were rather the exception than the rule, the average
number was nevertheless between 5 and 5‘/2in the time of the Netherlands administration.
Under Roman Dutch Law the property of the parents had to be divided evenly between the
children, male and female. There was, however, little reason to divide the enormous farms,
or rather cattle ranches the parents had established. The sons simply moved further into the
interior and established farms just as large, if not larger. In fact there seemed no end to the‘
expansion.

In course of time they found themselves so far from the original settlement at the Cape
of Good Hope that it often took journeys of more than a month by oxwagon to reach the
coast. In that way cattle raising became almost‘a purpose in itself. Some sons of farmers did
not even bother to ask for a grant of land at all, but wandered around with their herds from
place to place wherever the grazing was good. It seemed that the European population of
South Africa was well on its way to become nomadic. The large families, the healthy
climate, and the way of living thus account for the phenomenon of the large number of
descendants today.

One should not think for a moment that the East India Company looked in favour
upon this development. On the contrary, they did what they could to check it. Again and
again they drafted regulations threatening the farmers who dared to move outside the
established border of the Colony, but it had no effect. Just as many times they ultimately
had to extend these boundaries.

In 1735 pioneer farmers had reached Mossel Bay, some 250 miles from Cape Town and
nine years later they stood at the Gamtoos River. When Governor Van Plettenberg made an
inspection of the Colony in 1778 he found settlers as far as the Fish River, 500 miles away,
facing for the first time the advancing Bantu from the North. It was here, therefore, that the
emigration found its first real obstacle and for half a century no further advance to the East
took place. Seventeen years later the British took over from the Hollanders and it was on
their shoulders that responsibility for the further development came to rest.

GOVERNMENTAL DEVELOPMENT

Besides the circumstances just sketched the lack of effective supen/ision of the
boundary was of course also a contributive factor in the enormous expansion that took
place. The Netherlands administration was a trading company with no interest in a
permanent settlement beyond the need of their ships. They hated the idea of setting up
centers of administration in the midst of the wilderness for people who hardly paid any
taxes, in any case not enough to make the colony self sufficient. They would have preferred
a closely populated settlement in the vicinity of the fort or castle. if, in the end, they had to
move with the farmers and extend the boundaries again and again, they did reluctantly and
willy-nilly.

The center of administration remained always in Cape Town and initially the Dutch
Reformed Church, the Calvinistic official church of the Netherlands, also remained there.
This meant that, no matter how far the burghers moved into the interior, they always had to
undertake the long journey to Cape Town if they wanted to marry, baptize their children,
obtain a grant of land, make their will, or conduct any other kind of lawful business.

This was not without consequences for later genealogical research, because it meant
that all records of importance to genealogy from the very foundation of the colony in 1652,
were kept in one place. The Hollanders, good businessmen as they were, were also good,
almost fanatic adminstrators. Exact records were kept of almost everything that went on,
the important ones even in triplicate, one to be kept locally, one for Holland and a third for
the central administration of the Company in Batavia.

Practically none of these records have ever been lost, and this makes genealogical
research in South Africa again rather unique: from the first moment of immigration of the
records are not only there, but for the first two centuries they are in one place, Cape Town.
On top of that there is the happy coincidence that the buildings of the Government
Archives and those of the Dutch Reformed Church are almost facing each other. Add to this
the fact that the Library of Parliament and the South African Library which together
possess practically everything published in and about South Africa are only a five minutes
walk from there, and one has to agree that this is almost a genealogist’s paradise, also
difficult to find anywhere else in the world.

RELIGION

The Netherlanders believed in religious freedom, but the East India Company tolerated
only one church, the official Reformed Church and all other religious denominations were
suppressed. Only after the number of Lutheran Germans had increased so much that they
could no longer be pressed to become Calvinists did the Company reluctantly consent to the
establishment of a Lutheran Church in Cape Town in 1780. Even so the directors acceded to
the request only on condition that the Company should not be involved in any expense and
that the minister was a Netherlander by birth.

The Lutheran Church never made much headway in South Africa. The Germans were
mainly bachelors who had to marry South African girls and consequently most of the
marriages and baptisms continued to be held in the Dutch Reformed Church. After the
arrival of the British, things changed considerably, but that is the subject of my other
lecture.

We have already seen that the first freeburghers were reluctant sailors and soldiers who
had an uncertain knowledge of agriculture. No immigrants were specifically sent out from
Holland for this particular purpose. One may easily imagine that these former sailors,
whatever their original background, were not the best of farmers. In fact they showed little
love for the work involved, especially because the Company having a monopoly of all trade
and being a business undertaking, always tried to underpay them so that there did not seem
much future in their labour. This was also a contributive factor to the flight into cattle
raising which offered a much easier existance than the care of crops. The Company,
therefore, realized that another policy had to be followed and a possibility for such a change
presented itself almost overnight in 1685: the flight of the Huguenots from France.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes which, tell then, guaranteed religious freedom in
France caused thousands of Huguenots to flee to neighboring countries, especially to
Holland, and the Netherlands government had to take action on a grand scale to
accommodate them. As both Hollanders and Huguenots were Calvinists there was not much
difficulty from a religious point of view. Some left Holland again to settle in other
countries, notably England.; others were prepared to start a new life almost anywhere if
only given a chance.

ETHNIC-RELIGIOUS FACTORS

The Dutch East India Company offered favourable conditions, among others free
passage to the Cape of Good Hope with financial assistance and grants of land after arrival.
This was tempting enough for a number of them to accept and in 1688 these Huguenots
arrived in various ships at the Cape of Good Hopéf.The local governor, Simon van der Stel,
helped them with money, tools and land and settled them mainly in a valley which still
today is called Fransch Hoek (French Corner), one of the loveliest parts of the whole of the
Cape Colony, some 50 miles from Cape Town.

Their number was not large, less than 600 in all, including women and children, but the
Netherland’s Government nevertheless wanted to avoid at all cost the establishment of even
an embryonic French—speakingcolony in its overseas possessions. Although they got in the
beginning a French—speakingminister to look after their spiritual needs, the immigrants were
settled in such a way that every Huguenot came to live between Netherlandslspeaking
neighbours. The idea was that, no matter what language the parents spoke, the children
would speak Netherlands.

This policy, although understandably a cause of much friction between the Huguenots
and the government, In the end succeeded so well that for all practical purposes the French
died out with the next generation. But because of this early infiltration of Huguenots into
the immigration pattern of the Cape, old Huguenot names are at present amongithe
best—known of South African surnames: Malan, du Plessis, Marais, Terblanche, de Villiers,
Pienaar, Malherbe, Retief, du Toit and many others, whose names are borne by tens of
thousands of their descendants. Today all of them are Afrikaners.

Was there no tendency to retain their own identity? Yes, as seen from a genealogical
point of view there certainly was. Especially in the first generations they prefered to marry
among themselves. To give just two examples at random: the late prime minister of the
Union of South Africa, Dr. D. F. Malan, descended in the 4th generation from 16 South
Africans, 12 of which were of French descent, and a century before that Piet Retief, the
great leader of the Afrikaners into the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, (the Great Trek)
had an ancestry which was exclusively French.

Besides a short-lived experiment with the dispatch of girls from orphanages to

wife—hungrysettlers at the Cape, this Huguenot episode was the only attempt of the
Netherlands ever to colonize South Africa willingly. After that the only influx of new blood
came from soldiers and sailors who asked for freeburgher-rights and the natural growth of
the existing population.

The result was that if compared with other colonies, for example North American - the
increase of the population was very slow indeed. In fact at the end of the second
Netherlands administration, in 1807, the whole Netherlands-speaking population of the
Cape Colony was not more than 25,000, probably less, notwithstanding the fact that the
frontiers of the Colony extended more than 500 miles to the West and some 250 miles to
the North of Cape Town.

There was also still a chronic lack of women. In that same year, 1807, men numbered
about 13,600 and women 12,000. it is also doubtful whether all these women were of pure
European descent. The immigration pattern was namely further complicated with the
import of slaves.

THE SLAVE PROBLEM

The laws and regulations of the Netherlands East lndia Company forbade the enslaving
of the local original population, Hottentots and Bushmen. The first Governor, Van
Riebeeck, therefore was in favour of importing slaves and in 1657, five years after the
establishment of the Colony, the freeburghers also asked the Governor to provide them with
slaves. An unexpected opportunity presented itself when a Netherlands’ ship captured a
Portuguese slaver off the coast of Brazil and landed the slaves at the Cape, in March 1658.
Another shipload of the same kind was landed later in the year. Van Riebeeck decided to
keep some of the slaves at the Cape and fon/varded the remainder of the cargoes to the East
Indies.
 In the same year Van Riebeeck issued a-proclamation for the humane treatment of the
slaves and opened a school to teach them the Netherlands’ language and the Christian
religion. At the end of every lesson they received a cup of brandy to encourage them. These
first slaves came from Angola but later they came mainly from Madagascar, Ceylon, the
coast of Malabar in India and from the Netherlands East lndies. In comparison with what
happened in America their treatment was quite humane.

It should also be taken into account that the majority of them were Malays, and
therefore, in appearance and intelligence much closer to the Europeans than negros. There
was also a system whereby they could buy their freedom, and these non—Europeanfreemen
had the same rights as the European ones. Children, from European fathers and slave
mothers had to remain in the Company's service, the boys until 25 and the girls until they
were 22 years old, at which ages they were freed. In 1793, at the end of the first
Netherlands administration there were about 17,000 male and female slaves at the Cape.
That is less than the European population. However, during the first British occupation,
1795-1803 the number increased considerably. In fact, in 1803, the slave population was
30,000, plus 5,000 children, an increase of more than 78% in ten years.

This is not the place to deal with the history of slavery at the Cape and the
considerable differences existing between the situation there and in America. The fact,
however, that they were willy-nilly immigrants to the Cape of Good Hope, brings them
within the scope of this lecture. There were thus, during the Netherlands administration,
two different kinds of immigrants in the Cape Colony: Whites, originating from Western
Europe, mainly the Netherlands, Germany and France; and non—whites,originating from
Madagascar, India and the East lndies.

GENEALOGICAL FACTORS
Genealogically we know practically all there is to know about the whites and next to
nothing about the non-whites except for a group of half-castes. Slaves had no surnames.
Their marriages - if one could call it that - were not registered, their children, unless they
were baptised, were unknown. Today their descendants, the Cape Coloured People, number
about one million, and even if there are no individual records of their blood mixture,
nobody will have difficulty in reading their history from their faces. A walk in Cape Town,
where the majority of them live, shows an astonishing racial mixture. Some show almost
pure White Malay, Malagasy, Hottentot or even Bushmen features; the remainder various
stages of grading between the one or the other or all of these races.

Those who consider themselves of almost pure Malay descent form a separate
community and are Moslims, the remainder belong to Christian Churches, mainly the
Netherlands Reformed Church. Afrikaans, a form of Dutch, is their mother tongue although
today an intellectual elite prefers to speak English. They live mainly in the South Western
part of the Cape Province, the majority of them in Cape Town.
 They should not be confused in any way with the Bantu in the rest of the country.
Although, in a way, also immigrants to South Africa, it is obvious that these Bantu, the
dark-brown almost black people who migrated to the South from the North of Africa are
outside the scope of our subject. The oral genealogy of their chiefs and headmen belongs to
anthropology, not to genealogy in our accepted sense.

Returning now to the immigrants of European descent, the Whites, they eventually
ceased to consider themselves as immigrants. As we have already seen, the Netherlands East
India Company was a trading company and their whole and only object was to make profits
and pay dividends to shareholders. The colonists, just as obviously thought only of their
own existence andmeans of making a living.

in the early days of the colony this led to trouble. Descendants of Hollanders and
Huguenots soon forgot their differences and became united against the Company's
government in Cape Town. Out of this a new people grew, who lost all ties with Europe,
considered themselves as of Africa and proudly called themselves Afr/kaners. Out of
seventeenth century Netherlands they developed their own branch of the Netherlands and
Low—German language, Afrikaans, of which the vocabulary is still more than 90%
Netherlands but which has quite a different grammar and idiom. This language is today,
together with English, one of the two official languages of the Republic of South Africa.
60% of the white population speak it and practically the whole of the Cape Coloured
population. Let us now look at it more genealogically.

The smallness of the white population, the excellent records which were kept and the
feeling that in some way everybody was virtually related to everybody else fostered the idea
that it should be possible to compile the family trees of all the Afrikaans-speaking families
up to the middle of the last century. If that could be done, it should be easy for every
person living at the end of the century to establish his relationship to the last persons
mentioned in such genealogies - a matter of two or three generations at the most —and so
establish his full genealogical record from the arrival of his first ancestor on South African
soil.

GENEALOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS

This idea gripped the imagination of Christoffel Coetzee de Villiers, himself a

descendant of one of the most distinguished Cape Huguenot families. He became so
absorbed in his research that it left him no peace. Whatever earthly possessions he had were
evidently spent on genealogical research and when he"died in 1887 there was nothing left.
As is often the case with many of his calibre, it was only after his death that his countrymen
began to appreciate the work he had done. At his death the work was not complete and it
seemed that the sacrifices he had made to build this genealogical monument for his people
had been in vain.
 In accordance with his last wishes his widow collected as many of his notebooks and
memoranda as she could find and send them to Theal, the government archivist, with his
letters and the massive manuscript volumes in which he had copied the baptismal and
marriageentries of the church registers. Theal took charge of the papers, but because he was
engaged in other work, two or three years passed before anything was done.

Then, at last, voices were raised that such an enterprise should not end thus and that
something should be done to complete the work and publish it. A committee was appointed
under the presidency of the Chief Justice and an appeal was made for funds. Apparently this
was a failure. Nothing more was attempted until the winter of 1892 when the Government
was requested by Parliament to prevent the loss of De Villiers’ labour and the same year
Theal was requested by the Government to prepare the work for publishing. A long history
followed but at last the first volume, which went from A-J was published in 1893, at the
Government's expense.

After this, much new material came to light, the second volume started again with A
and this time went as far as O. A third volume completed the work. Today Christopher
Coetzee de Villiers is honoured not only as ”the Father of South African genealogy”, but
more than that, as a seer who realized that the title deeds of his people for land in which
they live were anchored in their very genealogies. They show how and when they arrived,
how they lived generation after generation and how this finally made them what they were:
not Netherlands, Germans, Frenchmen or whatever other nationals, but a new nation which
came out of the biological and intellectual crusible with an identity of its own. His 3
volumes Ges/achtsreg/ster der oude Kaapssche Fami/ien is in a way an unique work, not in
South Africa only, but in the whole world, because in no other country does a work exist
that contains the genealogical records of all its families from the very year of the foundation
of the settlement until more than two centuries afterwards.

ln itself this was an almost superhuman task for one man to undertake, and as the
work had to be completed after his death, it will surprise no one that there were mistakes,
and that to mention just one example, data regarding the first ancestor were often at fault
or much to sketchy.

The Huguenot sections were the first to be revised. Dr. C. Graham-Botha, Chief
Archivist of the Union of South Africa, devoted a special monograph to them in 1919 The
French Refugees at the Cape and Prof. J.L.M. Franken added to this some more
biographical details. Some of the Netherlands material had already been augmented from
sources in the Colonial Archives in the Netherlands by Prof. H.T. Colenbrander who also
gave the first analysis of the composition of the Afrikaner People, and the Flemish
Netherlanders were the subject of Dom A. Smits book De betrekkingen tussen V/aanderen
en Zuid-Afrika. He also dealt with the difficult question whether some of the Huguenot
families were really French, because most of them came from the North of France and
French Flanders which was recently acquired by France and where many of the inhabitants
spoke Netherlands.

10
 A similar question has confused the origin of the Germans, because many came from
Low-German speaking districts or countries bordering on the Netherlands, and where was
the actual borderline between Netherlanders and Germans when viewed from a cultural
point of view?

I do not know whether the same questions also arise in American genealogy but in
South Africa they wereidebated with much vigour between those who prefered to be of
Netherlands descent and others who declared the whole of the Afrikaner nation as coming
from German stock. Nevertheless, the controversy produced some excellent genealogical
material, especially the studies of Dr. J. Hoge and the works of E. Moritz and Werner Smidt
Pretoria. Together with other genealogists, such as Com. H.C. Hopkins and Prof. C.G.S. de
Villiers they changed the genealogical scene.

In the meantime some excellent monographs were also published dealing with one
special family only. Having all this material to draw on I published in 1966 a revision of C.C.
de Villiers Genealogies of old South African families, again in 3 volumes, this time in
Afrikaans as well as in English. This book contains the genealogies of all South African
families from 1652 up to the beginning of the Great Trek, roughly till about 1840. ls this
new edition now complete? No, far from it, and to attain completeness would be
impossible. However, the work aims at reflecting as far as possible the present state of
genealogical research in South Africa, and every attempt has been made to achieve this goal.

ETHNIC ORIGIN PROBLEMS

I think we cannot leave the subject of immigration patterns in South Africa during the
Netherlands Administration without touching also on the question of the composition of
the Afrikaner people, because this composition reflects, in fact, the immigration pattern and
is the outcome of it.

As could be expected the Cape historian Theal was the first to make this study. He
himself had seen de Villiers work through the press and he was therefore thoroughly familiar
with its contents. When in 1897 the second volume of his History of South Africa was
published, he stated that in 1795 almost two thirds of the Afrikaner people were of
Netherlands descent, while the French contribution was one sixth and the remaining part of
German and other origins. He rightly pointed out that the simple preponderance of one kind’
of immigrant over another was in itself no overriding factor. Much more important was the
date of their arrival and the fertility of their marriages. The longer a family was settled in
the country, the greater its contribution to the composition of the population would be. At
the beginning of the settlement there were more Netherlands immigrants than Germans, and
it was only after 1725 that this became reversed.

After him came Prof. Colenbrander, whose point of departure was 1806. He was of the
opinion that no further reinforcement of the Cape population took place after that date and

11
that this was, therefore, the ideal year for a survey. He then estimated that at that time the
Afrikaner people were 50% Netherlands, 27% German, more than 17% French, and 5‘/2%of
other origin. He did not seriously investigate the period after 1806 but took it for granted
that the composition of the white population of the Boer Republics had not materially
changed in the meantime.

His argument was that the outlying districts from where the Great Trek started, had
hardly any British settlers at the time, and that marriages with those later settlers only took
place in Cape Town. How wrong he was we will see in our second lecture, but for the time
before 1806 it does not really matter. We see thus, that neither Theal nor Colenbrander paid
much attention to the mere fact that out of 1391 immigrants who entered the Cape before
1806, 745 were of German origin, but this was not going to be overlooked by German
historians.

It is not the place here to go too deeply into the controversy and the various arguments
which were advanced to get the German percentage higher. Nor should we concern ourselves
too much with the question whether the Low-Germans were really Germans or the
immigrants from Netherlands speaking French—rea|ly_Frenchmen. in the light of the history
of the countries of Northwestern Europe the whole argument as to the percentage of
‘German’ or ‘Netherlands’ blood is nothing but a skirmish in words without much
significance. In fact, Germany as a political unity hardly existed at the time. The various
counties and duchies often fought each other with great gusto and the idea of German unity
was only realized in the end of the nineteenth century, to become lost again in our days.

The time has, therefore, clearly come for an entirely new approach to this vexed
subject. In recent years this task has been undertaken by Dr. J.A. Heese. He rightly started
anew, from the very beginning, taking nothing for granted. He also, for want of a better
solution, kept to the existing political borders. His study has not yet been published, but he
has kindly consented to allow the use from it of such facts as are relevant to our subject.

He investigated the origin of every immigrant to the Cape before 1808 and also took
into consideration the number of children from their marriages and their descendants.
Because de Villiers had been unable to consult the baptismal registers of George and
Uitenhage, Heese filled this gap by taking them into consideration as well. As a result, he
found that Colenbrander had overestimated the Netherlanders by approximately 100 and
under-calculated the Germans by the same number.

Dr. Heese’s researches also indicate that the Netherlands or Afrikaans speaking
population of the Cape in 1807 was more likely to have been 18,000 than 25,000, because
the census of 1807 also included the free-colourds of the mission stations, baptised children
of mixed- marriages and their descendants, and the like. It was, therefore, safer to depend on
the 1795 returns of the Dutch East lndia Company. He finally gave as his final conclusion
with regard to the composition of the Afrikaner people that, in 1807, the percentages were:
Netherlanders 38%, Germans 35‘/2%, French 14%, Danes, Swedes, Etc. 3%, other, and
indeterminable, including non—white,9‘/2%.

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This may well be a good point with which to to conclude the first part of this lecture.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

General:

M. Whiting Spilhaus, South Africa in the making 7652-7806, Cape Town 1966; G.E. Pearse,
The Cape of Good Hope 7652-7833, Pretoria 1956; and the usual handbooks on South
African history such as G. McCall Theal, History of South Africa before 77.95, 3 vols.
London 1916; Eric Walker, A History of Southern Africa, 3rd ed. London 1957; C.W. de
Kiewit, A History of South Africa, New ed. London 1950; A.J.H.’van der Walt a.o.
Geskiedenis van Suid-A frika, 2nd ed. Cape Town 1966, etc.

Genealogical:

C.C. de Villiers, Genea/ogies of old South African fami/ies. New ed. revised by C. Pama. 3
vols. Cape Town 1966; D. Brink Bosman, "Oor die afkoms van die Boere”, in: Vragen van
den Dag, Amsterdam 1923; C. Graham Botha, The French Refugees at the Cape, Cape Town
1919; H.T. Colenbrander, De Afkomst der Boeren, Den Haag 1902, repr. Cape Town 1964;
S.P. Engelbrecht, Die Kaapse predikante van die 77e en 78e eeu, Cape Town 1952; J.L. M.
Franken, "Die Franse V|ugtelinge", articles in: Die Huisgenoot, Cape Town 1925-1939; J.
Hoge, Persona/ia of the Germans at the Cape 7652-7806, Cape Town 1946; ld.,
”Verbeterings en aanvullings op die ’Geslachtregister der oude Kaapsche Fami|ien,” in:
Historiese Studies 1948-1949; ld., Bydraes tot die genea/ogie van die ou Afrikaanse families,
Cape Town 1958; ld., Persona/ia of Nether/anders at the Cape 7652-7806 (manuscript); A.J.
Kannemeyer, Hugenote—Fami/ieboek, Cape Town 1940; J.D.A. Krige, Oorsprong en
betekenis van Neder/andse en Duitse fami/iename in die ’Ges/achtregister der oude Kaapsche
Fami/ien’, Pretoria 1934; ld., Die Franse fami/iename in Suid-A frika van voor 7800, Pretoria
1936; H.C.V. Leibbrandt, Requesten (Memoria/s), vols. l & ll, Cape Town 1905; D.F. du
Toit Malherbe, Family Register of the South African Nation, Stellenbosch 1966; E. Moritz,
Die Deutschen am Kap under der Ho//andischer Herrschaft 7652-7806, Weimar 1938; ld.,
Die deutsche Einwanderung in die nieder/andische Kap/<0/onie 7652-7806, Ludwigsburg
1943; M. Nathan, The Huguenots in South Africa, Cape Town 1939; G.S. Nienaber,
Afrikaanse fami/iename, Cape Town 1955; C. Pama, Die wapens van die ou afri/<aanse
families, Cape Town 1959; O. Pirow, ”Die Mitos van ons Hollandse afkoms” in: Nuusbrief,
2e reeks, no. 219, Pretoria 1953; J. Prinz, Das wurttembergische Kapregiment 7786-7808,
2.Aufl. Stuttgart 1932; J.H. Redelinghuis, Die Afrikaner-Fami/ienaamboek; sketse en
besonderhede omtrent die voorges/agte van bekende Afrikanerfami/ies, Cape Town 1954; W.
Schmidt-Pretoria, Der Kulturanteil des Deutschtums am Aufbau des Burenvo/kes, Hanover
1938; G. Spelstra, Bouwstoffen voor de geschiedenis der Nederduitsch—Gereformeerde
Kerken in Zuid-A frika, 2 vols. Amsterdam 1906-1907.

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Cape Coloured People:

W.M. Macmillan, The Cape Co/our Ouest/on,‘ a Historical Survey. New ed. Cape Town 1968;
J.S. Marais, The Cape Coloured People 7652-7937, New ed. Johannesburg 1962; V. de
Kock, Those in Bondage, Cape Town 1950; Eric Stockenstrom, Vryste///ng van die s/awe,
Cape Town 1934; H. P. Cruse, D/e opheff/ng van die K/eur//ngbevo/k/ng.' Aanvangs/are
7652-7795, Stellenbosch 1947; D.P. Botha, Die opkoms van ons Derde Stand, Cape Town
1960; E. Fischer, D/e Hehobother Bastards und das Bastad/erungsprob/em be/"mMenschen,
Jena 1913.

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