How did social affiliations and trust function in a hierarchical society of strong asymmetric dependencies and violence-based inequality? This is the question investigated by an international research team led by Dr. Dries Lyna (Radboud University Nijmegen), Dr. Eva Marie Lehner (University of Bonn) and Dr. Wouter Ryckbosch (Ghent University), focusing on early modern Cape Town in the period from the mid-17th century through the end of the 18th.
The research focuses in particular on how individual members of the city’s diverse urban underclass positioned themselves strategically within informal networks and formal institutions. “Cape Town has always been a key port city on the Indian Ocean. Sources reveal that its residents included soldiers and sailors from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, and the Baltic States, as well as enslaved people from Asia and East Africa, brought there against their will, and the children born of relationships between European men and enslaved women,” says Dr Eva Marie Lehner, who is also a member of the Present Pasts Transdisciplinary Research Area (TRA) at the University of Bonn. ‘The members of this cosmopolitan underclass networked with each other on a basis of necessity and trust. We are digitising a number of historical source documents to find out on what basis loan applications were approved or denied, how women and men obtained witnesses to testify on their behalf in court, and how godparents were chosen for each other’s children.”
The researchers are studying how bureaucratic classifications influenced social structures in early modern Cape Town to gain a better understanding of complex narratives around identity, social relations and social class during the colonial period.
Enslaved women in colonial Cape Town
In a subproject titled 'In God We Trust?', Julia Schmidt, from the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bonn, is studying the support networks of unmarried, free, freed and enslaved women in colonial Cape Town. For example, enslaved women in the Cape Colony were not officially permitted to marry, making them a particularly interesting group for the project. “I am interested in the day-to-day reality of these women’s lives, particularly in relation to their social networks,” explains Schmidt. 'Who could they rely on in times of need? Who was there to provide assistance? How did they organise their lives? Who did they choose as godparents for their children?”
The project thus explores the complex social realities of a society dominated by colonial authorities and the Church and its parish structures. ‘We are interested in how these women positioned themselves within different communities, and in the strategies they employed in view of the social dynamics and power structures resulting from the colonial context,’ says Dr Lehner.