This collection of portraits of women at the Cape brings to life
some extraordinary personalities from the early day of the
settlement. Cape Town was a wild “frontier town”, attracting the
most desperate, hopeful and intrepid adventurers from the Old World
– who both clashed and mingled with the local people. Women had to
have extraordinary strength of character to survive at the Cape,
facing war, wild animals, slavery, and the stern laws and
punishments of the powerful VOC. But women also found opportunity
at the Cape: vastly outnumbered by men, they were in great demand –
many went through several husbands, as their menfolk succumbed to
lion attacks, Khoekhoe assegais or ill health. Although historical
background is given, what makes this book different is that it
focuses on individual personalities and life stories. These
portraits are what make A Tapestry of Women Lives sparkle and
distinguish it from more conventional historical texts. We meet
familiar figures such as the Khoekhoe Krotoa and her mistress,
Maria de Queilleirie, as well as lesser-known characters: Maria
Mouton, who had an affair with her slave and suffered terrible
punishment; the shadow Nicola Six, the power behind Simon van der
Stel's throne; the remarkable slave Angela of Bengal, who escaped
the hell of slavery and entered in Society, and intrepid Anna
Rodolphus, who disguised herself as a soldier to find love and
adventure at the Cape. The approximately 40 women and girls
profiled in the book come frome every walk of life – the original
Khoekhoe and Bushman inhabitants, the bourgeois governors' wives;
the peasant farmers, inn-keepers and prostitutes of the rough port
city; and the slave women who were brought to the Cape from the
East and other parts of Africa. Filled with detail and
painstakingly researched, the book ranges from the Governor's
drawing room to the sordid Slave Lodge, from hunter-gathering to
stoking beacon fires on Robben Island and wine-farming in the
Stellenbosch valley. An added attraction for many readers will be
the fun of discovering one's forebears mentioned in the text – the
women featured here, slave, settler and Khoekhoe, are the
stammoeders of very well-known South African families. Almost any
South African reader will find some familiar name in the many
mentioned. Illustrated, this is a fascinating contribution to
popular South African history: an intimate, personalised women's
account of the first permanent settlement in the country.
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