A Tapestry of Women's Lives

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.