Gerald Groenewald
Gerald Groenewald is an associate professor in the Department of Languages, Cultural Studies and Applied Linguistics at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
Phone: +27 11 559 2001
Address: Dept. of LanCSAL
University of Johannesburg
PO Box 524
Auckland Park 2006
South Africa
Phone: +27 11 559 2001
Address: Dept. of LanCSAL
University of Johannesburg
PO Box 524
Auckland Park 2006
South Africa
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In her Cape life writing, she is very much an active presence in her texts and, if her power was partially restrained by her gender, she still exercised a significant amount of agency. The extent to which she feels able to express her opinions freely depends, at least to some degree, on
the type of text she is producing and on the likely imagined audience for the particular type of text. While even supposedly private writing always imagines or perhaps tentatively anticipates an audience, the writing is shaped by the varying degrees of this expectation. For instance, even
though Barnard revised some of her earlier diary entries later in her life, one would regard a diary as a more private type of writing than a journal. Different politics of representing the self necessarily come into play depending on the readership one expects. Although Barnard
attempted to exert some control over her reading audience (by, for instance, explicitly prohibiting the publication of some texts and decreeing that others were exclusively for the eyes of family and dear friends), she was savvy enough to know that these efforts offered no guarantees. While we thus do, and should, read dairies and journals differently, we cannot assume that the former offer any direct insight into Lady Anne’s thoughts. They all provide specific authorial versions of the self that have been constructed, albeit with different levels of care
The first section deals with the ways in which women viewed and defended their sexual honour and does so through the lens of breach of promise cases, especially ones which involved pre-marital births. Whereas in the Dutch Republic a whole repertoire of informal actions existed through which women could restore their honour, at the Cape they mostly turned to the courts (either the matrimonial or the civil court). In these cases they often produced testimonies of their honourable conduct, revealing their own perception of themselves and that of the community. Interestingly, in most cases the woman herself brought the action, and not her father, indicating the importance of personal honour in sexual matters. In cases where the men in question could not be convinced to honour their promise of marriage, the women’s loss of honour was ‘amended’ through monetary awards.
The second section investigates how the sexual behaviour of colonist men affected their perceived status in society. I do so by focusing on cases of divorce on the basis of adultery involving slave women. Roman-Dutch law considered sex with any person except one’s spouse adultery, and did not allow a difference in status to affect the crime (unlike Roman and Germanic law where sex with a slave did not constitute adultery). This may be the case in law, but was more social opprobrium at the Cape attached to colonist men who cheated on their wives with slave and Khoi women? I discuss these issues with relation to cases from the 1760s-1780s which caused much stir. I demonstrate that these seemingly private affairs impacted on the public standing of prominent men who could be ruined and stripped of their public honour through their private misconduct in a society which was becoming more and more aware of social and racial status differentiation.
The third section picks up on the issue of how the public censure of private morality changed over time and increasingly started to involve race. Here I discuss the treatment of children born out of wedlock by the Dutch Reformed Church, in particular their admittance to the sacrament of baptism. Whereas for most of the Dutch period, the Church had no qualms about admitting such children, this started to change significantly in the 1780-90s when the morality of unmarried mothers was being questioned and sometimes publicly censured. This change was the result of the impact of pietist and Enlightenment ideas about the behaviour of ‘a good mother’ at the Cape, within the context of a rapidly changing society during the Revolutionary wars. The fact that this moral regulation was aimed at mostly working class women, often of mixed race, paved the way for the more familiar public discussion and concern over morality of the nineteenth century.
Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans is not merely a reaction to current political realities. Instead, Afrikaans historical linguistics originated at the turn of the 20th century in the very debate about the contribution of slaves and Khoikhoi to the development of Afrikaans. This article traces this history, and demonstrates that considerations of the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the history of Afrikaans have formed a golden thread in debates about the origins of the language throughout the 20th century until the end of apartheid in 1994. The aims of this article are
twofold: to trace how various of the most influential Afrikaans linguists have viewed the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans, on the one side; and to investigate how and to what extent they have used external history (as opposed to the internal development of the language) in the construction of their theories, on the other side. The article demonstrates how increasingly Afrikaans linguists have come to realise how and to what an extent history determines the parameters within which linguistic proposals should be sought to trace development of Afrikaans.
urban areas could nowadays be under threat from the sustained influx of migrants from Namibia’s northern districts, including those that constitute the traditional homeland of the Ovambo, the country’s numerically dominant group, where English is better known than
Afrikaans. An indication of the pressure that Afrikaans might be subject to in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, is the demographic preponderance that the Ovambo group has locally acquired within the last three decades. Based on a qualitative survey conducted among an
ethnoracially representative sample of young Namibians, this article provides a description of the status and use of Afrikaans in contemporary Windhoek, as well as a reflection on its
potential for locally maintaining itself as a lingua franca. It generally shows that Afrikaans has to compete with English in that function, while indigenous languages are still largely restricted to intra-ethnic contexts of use. Afrikaans is clearly perceived as the lingua franca
with more “covert prestige” in that it is associated with informality and a sense of local identity. By contrast, English is generally associated with overt prestige and formal functions, and it is characteristically used as a lingua franca within groups that do not understand Afrikaans, such as among particular Ovambo migrants. It is not enough, however, to give an
account of Windhoek’s sociolinguistic profile in which English and Afrikaans are presented as the two main lingua francas without specifying which form of Afrikaans is used in which contexts as a lingua franca. Standard varieties of Afrikaans do not seem to possess enough
neutrality to function as a medium of inter-ethnic interaction as they are perceptually amalgamated with “White Afrikaans”, that is, the linguistic marker of an ethnoracial group, namely, the Afrikaners, that is still largely seen as self-insulating in the context of Windhoek. Those varieties of Afrikaans perceived as more neutral for the purpose of inter-ethnic
communication are Coloured varieties of Afrikaans, with which various Non-Coloured ethnic groups seem to identify. However, there are indications that English rather than those varieties tends to be used by Non-Whites in communication with Whites, even when Afrikaans is
notionally shared as a native language. Where Standard Afrikaans is used in inter-ethnic communication, it is mostly unilaterally by Afrikaners, as it is apparently not widely used in informal contexts outside of that group. Also relevant to a description of the uses of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in the context of Windhoek is the practice among Non-Whites of combining it with English in the form of Afrikaans-English mixed codes. As regards the long-term prospects of Afrikaans in Windhoek, the data suggest that Afrikaans in its local Coloured varieties has potential for spreading as an attribute of a local urban identity among migrant groups, as it already has done among Ovambo born in the city or in the southern districts in general, to the point that language shift might be taking place among them from Oshiwambo to combinations of Afrikaans and English.
lease or monopoly ('pacht') system whereby a person paid the authorities for the right to sell a certain type of alcohol for a given period in a specific area. This article traces the intellectual origins of this system of alcohol retail at the Cape during the VOC era. It does so by tracing both the idea of using leases or monopolies, first in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and by investigating the ways in which various products, including alcohol, were leased off in the largest and most significant of the VOC’s colonies, Batavia, during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is demonstrated that the ways in which alcohol retail and other economic activities were organised at the Cape developed out of practices established elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch world, but that the exact nature of the system was adapted to unique local circumstances at the early Cape. As such, this comparative article serves as an illustration that developments at the Cape in such a central sphere as business practices were the product of both global and local forces and influences.
In her Cape life writing, she is very much an active presence in her texts and, if her power was partially restrained by her gender, she still exercised a significant amount of agency. The extent to which she feels able to express her opinions freely depends, at least to some degree, on
the type of text she is producing and on the likely imagined audience for the particular type of text. While even supposedly private writing always imagines or perhaps tentatively anticipates an audience, the writing is shaped by the varying degrees of this expectation. For instance, even
though Barnard revised some of her earlier diary entries later in her life, one would regard a diary as a more private type of writing than a journal. Different politics of representing the self necessarily come into play depending on the readership one expects. Although Barnard
attempted to exert some control over her reading audience (by, for instance, explicitly prohibiting the publication of some texts and decreeing that others were exclusively for the eyes of family and dear friends), she was savvy enough to know that these efforts offered no guarantees. While we thus do, and should, read dairies and journals differently, we cannot assume that the former offer any direct insight into Lady Anne’s thoughts. They all provide specific authorial versions of the self that have been constructed, albeit with different levels of care
The first section deals with the ways in which women viewed and defended their sexual honour and does so through the lens of breach of promise cases, especially ones which involved pre-marital births. Whereas in the Dutch Republic a whole repertoire of informal actions existed through which women could restore their honour, at the Cape they mostly turned to the courts (either the matrimonial or the civil court). In these cases they often produced testimonies of their honourable conduct, revealing their own perception of themselves and that of the community. Interestingly, in most cases the woman herself brought the action, and not her father, indicating the importance of personal honour in sexual matters. In cases where the men in question could not be convinced to honour their promise of marriage, the women’s loss of honour was ‘amended’ through monetary awards.
The second section investigates how the sexual behaviour of colonist men affected their perceived status in society. I do so by focusing on cases of divorce on the basis of adultery involving slave women. Roman-Dutch law considered sex with any person except one’s spouse adultery, and did not allow a difference in status to affect the crime (unlike Roman and Germanic law where sex with a slave did not constitute adultery). This may be the case in law, but was more social opprobrium at the Cape attached to colonist men who cheated on their wives with slave and Khoi women? I discuss these issues with relation to cases from the 1760s-1780s which caused much stir. I demonstrate that these seemingly private affairs impacted on the public standing of prominent men who could be ruined and stripped of their public honour through their private misconduct in a society which was becoming more and more aware of social and racial status differentiation.
The third section picks up on the issue of how the public censure of private morality changed over time and increasingly started to involve race. Here I discuss the treatment of children born out of wedlock by the Dutch Reformed Church, in particular their admittance to the sacrament of baptism. Whereas for most of the Dutch period, the Church had no qualms about admitting such children, this started to change significantly in the 1780-90s when the morality of unmarried mothers was being questioned and sometimes publicly censured. This change was the result of the impact of pietist and Enlightenment ideas about the behaviour of ‘a good mother’ at the Cape, within the context of a rapidly changing society during the Revolutionary wars. The fact that this moral regulation was aimed at mostly working class women, often of mixed race, paved the way for the more familiar public discussion and concern over morality of the nineteenth century.
Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans is not merely a reaction to current political realities. Instead, Afrikaans historical linguistics originated at the turn of the 20th century in the very debate about the contribution of slaves and Khoikhoi to the development of Afrikaans. This article traces this history, and demonstrates that considerations of the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the history of Afrikaans have formed a golden thread in debates about the origins of the language throughout the 20th century until the end of apartheid in 1994. The aims of this article are
twofold: to trace how various of the most influential Afrikaans linguists have viewed the role of slaves and Khoikhoi in the genesis of Afrikaans, on the one side; and to investigate how and to what extent they have used external history (as opposed to the internal development of the language) in the construction of their theories, on the other side. The article demonstrates how increasingly Afrikaans linguists have come to realise how and to what an extent history determines the parameters within which linguistic proposals should be sought to trace development of Afrikaans.
urban areas could nowadays be under threat from the sustained influx of migrants from Namibia’s northern districts, including those that constitute the traditional homeland of the Ovambo, the country’s numerically dominant group, where English is better known than
Afrikaans. An indication of the pressure that Afrikaans might be subject to in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city, is the demographic preponderance that the Ovambo group has locally acquired within the last three decades. Based on a qualitative survey conducted among an
ethnoracially representative sample of young Namibians, this article provides a description of the status and use of Afrikaans in contemporary Windhoek, as well as a reflection on its
potential for locally maintaining itself as a lingua franca. It generally shows that Afrikaans has to compete with English in that function, while indigenous languages are still largely restricted to intra-ethnic contexts of use. Afrikaans is clearly perceived as the lingua franca
with more “covert prestige” in that it is associated with informality and a sense of local identity. By contrast, English is generally associated with overt prestige and formal functions, and it is characteristically used as a lingua franca within groups that do not understand Afrikaans, such as among particular Ovambo migrants. It is not enough, however, to give an
account of Windhoek’s sociolinguistic profile in which English and Afrikaans are presented as the two main lingua francas without specifying which form of Afrikaans is used in which contexts as a lingua franca. Standard varieties of Afrikaans do not seem to possess enough
neutrality to function as a medium of inter-ethnic interaction as they are perceptually amalgamated with “White Afrikaans”, that is, the linguistic marker of an ethnoracial group, namely, the Afrikaners, that is still largely seen as self-insulating in the context of Windhoek. Those varieties of Afrikaans perceived as more neutral for the purpose of inter-ethnic
communication are Coloured varieties of Afrikaans, with which various Non-Coloured ethnic groups seem to identify. However, there are indications that English rather than those varieties tends to be used by Non-Whites in communication with Whites, even when Afrikaans is
notionally shared as a native language. Where Standard Afrikaans is used in inter-ethnic communication, it is mostly unilaterally by Afrikaners, as it is apparently not widely used in informal contexts outside of that group. Also relevant to a description of the uses of Afrikaans as a lingua franca in the context of Windhoek is the practice among Non-Whites of combining it with English in the form of Afrikaans-English mixed codes. As regards the long-term prospects of Afrikaans in Windhoek, the data suggest that Afrikaans in its local Coloured varieties has potential for spreading as an attribute of a local urban identity among migrant groups, as it already has done among Ovambo born in the city or in the southern districts in general, to the point that language shift might be taking place among them from Oshiwambo to combinations of Afrikaans and English.
lease or monopoly ('pacht') system whereby a person paid the authorities for the right to sell a certain type of alcohol for a given period in a specific area. This article traces the intellectual origins of this system of alcohol retail at the Cape during the VOC era. It does so by tracing both the idea of using leases or monopolies, first in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, and by investigating the ways in which various products, including alcohol, were leased off in the largest and most significant of the VOC’s colonies, Batavia, during the first half of the seventeenth century. It is demonstrated that the ways in which alcohol retail and other economic activities were organised at the Cape developed out of practices established elsewhere in the seventeenth-century Dutch world, but that the exact nature of the system was adapted to unique local circumstances at the early Cape. As such, this comparative article serves as an illustration that developments at the Cape in such a central sphere as business practices were the product of both global and local forces and influences.
The first chapter treats the origins and operation of the alcohol pacht (lease) system and its contribution to the Cape economy. This is followed by a prosopographical analysis of all 198 of the alcohol pachters. Chapter three presents the biography of Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen as a vehicle with which to present the theoretical concepts attended on entrepreneurship, which are employed in the rest of the thesis. Chapter four illustrates the importance of social capital and kinship to what was still a largely immigrant society in the 1730s, while chapter five traces the changes which had occurred by the 1770s. These two chapters also demonstrate the ways in which the urban and rural elites coalesced over time. The final chapter shows to what extent the economic success of pachters was translated into other forms of power.
This study is a critical investigation of the socio-historical foundations of the Convergence Theory for the genesis of Afrikaans, as developed by Hans den Besten. It is done within the theoretical framework of the study of Creole genesis as suggested by the gradualists (John Singler, Jacques Arends and Philip Baker) and the Complementary Theory of Salikoko Mufwene. These approaches stress the use of socio-historical material. In line with this the work of historians on aspects of the early Cape society, c. 1590-1720, especially the number, distribution, origins and mutual contact between the three main groups at the Cape, viz. the Khoikhoi, slaves and European settlers, is used. Material from primary sources such as travel descriptions is also used. This historical material is used to test and nuance the Convergence Theory. It is shown that the central proposition of this theory, viz. the existence of a stable pidgin among the Khoikhoi and slaves in the period before 1713, is not tenable. Moreover, many of the details of the theory still offers a useful framework for the study of the history of Afrikaans and that the rejection of a stable pidgin does not dispute the important role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans.
The study consists of five main chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the development of Afrikaans historical linguistics and shows how two basic views developed about the role of the Khoikhoi and slaves in the genesis of Afrikaans. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the development of the gradualist hypotheses and Mufwene’s Complementary Theory against the background of theories of Creole genesis. The methodology, techniques and examples of the work of these theorists are stressed. Chapter 4 gives an overview of what the Convergence Theory entails and points out the problems which can be levelled against it from a socio-historical viewpoint. Chapter 5 is a detailed exposition of those historical aspects of Cape society, c. 1590-1720, that are of importance in the evaluation of the Convergence Theory. The demography of the Cape and mutual contact between the Khoikhoi, Europeans and slaves are emphasised, although other factors, such as the rise of the free-black community and the role of education, are also considered. The analysis is supported by quantitative data of historians on the number and origins of slaves (Addendum 8). Chapter 6 considers the criticisms that were levelled against the Convergence Theory in the light of the historical data presented in chapter 5. It is shown which aspects of the theory are unacceptable and which should be nuanced. Finally a short comparative perspective with two other Dutch colonies is given to show how decisive a role Khoikhoi and slaves played in the genesis of Afrikaans. Apart from quantitative data, the Addendum also contains a corpus of utterances in any form of Dutch or English by Khoikhoi and slaves in the period 1590-1720 which were noted in the course of this research project.