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SA Slaves, Blacks & Coloureds Who Owned Farms that Became Wine Estates
Groot Constantia
After her manumission in 1666 and baptism in 1668, Maaij Ansela (Angela) van Bengal married Arnoldus Willemsz Basson in 1669. Her daughter Anna de Koning, who’d arrived with her at the Cape in 1657, married Olof Bergh (future owner of Groot Constantia) in 1678 which she was to inherit. Anna was a so-called halfslag (half-slave), which is to say that her father was European (most likely Francois de Coninck from Ghent). For although concubinage and ‘that shameful crime of fornication or whoredom’ were strictly forbidden in terms of the Statues of India, they most certainly did occur – and nowhere more so than in the heavily male-skewed Cape, where VOC commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein was shocked to find such sexual ‘relations’ openly acknowledged and certainly not considered illegal when he visited in 1685.by Joanne Gibson
Muratie
By 1685, the young German soldier Lourens Campher had started his life-long relationship with the halfslag Ansela van de Caap, whose mother came from Guinea. (Their three children would be born at the notorious Slave Lodge, only moving to what is now the Stellenbosch wine farm Muratie after their mother was manumitted in 1695.) by Joanne Gibson
Klein Constantia
By 1685, the remarkable Swarte Maria Everts (the Cape-born daughter of Evert and Anna van Guinea) was also living with Bastiaan Colijn, with whom she would have four children, most notably Johannes Colijn, who would take up where Simon van der Stel left off, making sweet Constantia wine at the original Klein Constantia (Hoop op Constantia), which his descendants would own until 1857, completely assimilated into ‘white’ society. by Joanne Gibson
Spier
I’ll share the sordid details of Jan Coenraad Visser’s not-so-happy household (here’s a teaser: he and his son both had children with the slave Maria van Negapatnum, including a daughter named Susanna Visser who would marry Hans Heinrich Hattingh, thereby becoming the mistress of Stellenbosch wine farm Spier). by Joanne Gibson
Solms-Delta
There’s even the unusual case of a man born into slavery, Christoffel Snyman (son of the exiled convict Groote Catrijn van Paliacatta, adopted son of Anthonij Jansz van Bengale), who married Marguerite-Therese de Savoye, daughter of the French Huguenot Jacques de Savoye, and eventually owned the Delta part of what is now Solms-Delta. by Joanne Gibson
Lanzerac
There’s also Anthonij van Angola, who had 4,000 vines and employed (wait for it) three white men on his Jonkershoek farm ‘Angola’ (now part of Lanzerac). by Joanne Gibson
Wolwedans
And there’s Willem Stolts, who owned the Swartland farms Wolwedans and Hoornbosch, not to mention 11 slaves of his own. by Joanne Gibson
Allesverloren
In the Inventory after the 1737 death Jan Jacobsz, son of Jacob v Macassar & Maria v Guinea, is the farm Allesverloren
References
- SA wine history: On some of the ‘invisible’ people of early Cape wine By Joanne Gibson, 14 August 2018
- SA wine history: The freed slaves who owned land in Stellenbosch’s Jonkershoek Valley Article by Joanne Gibson, May 6, 2021