The Way We Were

The Cape had been colonised for 80 years when the writer Otto Friedrich Mentzel (1709-1801) arrived as a humble soldier in July 1733. The two detailed works he published in Glogau four decades after his eight-year stay didn’t arouse much interest outside Germany, and his reputation languished until the first English translations appeared in the 1920s, when they were belatedly recognised as prime source material for the 1730s.

Mentzel was born in Berlin, where his father was a court physician. He was better educated than most of the Germans who entered the service of the VOC, but his gifts didn’t secure him a suitable civilian appointment in his fatherland.

Soldiers based at The Castle were ill-paid for their onerous guard duties, but those who were sent to company posts in the interior had an easier life.

Better still, some were released into the service of free burghers who needed farm overseers or tutors for their children. Secondments such as these were popular because the soldiers lived more comfortably and received better pay.

Mentzel obtained an appointment with an elderly farmer named Paul Keijser in 1734, and remained at his farm Welgelegen in the Bottelary district until February 1736. Keijser was a native of Langensalza in Thüringen who came to the Cape in VOC service in 1707, and later gained fame as an elephant hunter.

His much younger wife, Aletta Lubbe (b 1699), was the daughter of a colonist who had arrived in 1691. Two of the Keijser daughters married Mouton brothers who lived in Drakenstein. Mentzel was acquainted with the Moutons and described their mother as “a sprightly and cheerful lady of over 70”.

Keijser was the third owner of the farm Welgelegen, which was first granted to the heirs of Andries Olofse in 1715. Keijser bought it in 1719 and it remained in the family until 1754. He dabbled in other farms, however, and in 1731 he was described as owning quite a bit of land, some of it mortgaged.

Properties which passed through his hands included the neighbouring farms Hartenberg and Weltevreden, which he appears to have bought, sold and bought again.

After Mentzel left his service in 1736, Keijser decided to sell Hartenberg on credit to a “free black” named Aron of Ceylon for 4 900 guilders, but the new owner had paid only 1 000 guilders when he died. Keijser was obliged to take the farm back and he kept it until 1745.

Mentzel was a very precise observer of the social and commercial scene in Cape Town, but he never travelled further than 100km from Table Bay. His geographical and topographical description of the entire colony, which appeared in the 1780s, was not based on first-hand experience, but he was at pains to explain that he had questioned trustworthy informants, including members of the Mouton and Keijser families and Mrs Keijser’s brother, Barend Lubbe, who lived beyond the Twenty-Four Rivers.

He also quizzed her brother-in-law Christiaan Liebenberg, who farmed on the north-eastern frontier, but called at Welgelegen twice a year when he and his family travelled to Cape Town by wagon.

Mentzel’s descriptions of settler life include interesting comments about platteland wives and daughters. He wrote that middle-ranking country girls were not brought up to be as fashionable, polite and well-mannered as their “city” cousins. They hardly ever visited anyone but their nearest neighbours and might reach the age of 20 without visiting a town or seeing a church.

There were not enough slaves to do the manual work during the harvest and the sons and daughters of well-to-do farmers were expected to help, the youngest collecting heaps of stalks to be bound into sheaves.

Girls had no schooling, apart from what they learned from their mothers, who expected them to work in the kitchen and sew from an early age. They spoke a simplified version of High Dutch 200 years before Afrikaans was adopted as an official language.

Farm girls were generally lively and healthy and were unaware of their lack of refinement. They looked people straight in the eye and spoke frankly and naturally when introduced to strangers, but their conversation didn’t go beyond household matters.

Some women had regrettably bad teeth, which Mentzel ascribed to their habit of holding chunks of sugar candy in their mouths while drinking tea and coffee – there was no granulated sugar in those days.

Although youths and men protected their feet with homemade velskoene, country girls commonly went barefoot from childhood and walked awkwardly when they wore shoes and stockings for special occasions.

Mentzel wrote: “As soon as the honeymoon is over, the shoes are laid aside and not produced again until such time as they go to town or attend a wedding or church service.”

More next week.