Forty-six things

On 27 April 1802 a clerk listed everything an old couple owned, forty-six items, and the forty-fourth is a man. Anthony van de Kaap sits between a plough and a flock of sheep. The page reads the inventory as it stands, sets it beside the ten enslaved and free-black people in the same family's own ancestry, and follows the line four generations back to a daughter baptised before her mother was freed.

On 27 April 1802 an official wrote down everything an old couple owned. They were Jacobus Oosthuysen d'oude and Dina Carolina Brits, and the reason for the visit was that one of them had died. The inventory does not say where it was taken beyond ter plaatse van Pieter Cornelis Oosthuysen, at their son's place, and it does not name the farm.

The document is MOOC8/24.27, an inventory taken for the Orphan Chamber, and it is one of the plainest things in this whole history. It lists forty-six items. No commentary, no valuation, no explanation. Just a clerk going through a house in order.

The list

It begins where these lists always begin, at the door and working in. A large chest. A wagon box. Two chairs. An old table. A tea kettle, a pewter teapot, a copper funnel, a copper tart pan, a frying pan, a gridiron, two ladles, a meat fork, a tin canister. Four dishes and twelve plates. Seven pewter spoons, five steel forks, two small bowls. A cellar flask, an earthen jug, a little sauce pot, a beaker, a pepper box, a flour sieve, one glass.

Then the one thing in the house that was there to be looked at rather than used: a cane with silver mounting.

Then the working things. A gun. A chopping knife, a cutting knife, a handsaw, two axes, a plane, a pick, a spade, an uintjes yzer for digging wild onions out of the veld. Ten old sacks. A soap mould. Five iron pots, one of them broken. A cask, a half cask, a half aum, a small anchor keg.

Item forty-three is a plough with its accessories.

Item forty-four is:

EEN OUDE SLAAVE JONGE, gen:d ANTHONY VAN DE KAAP

Item forty-five is one hundred and forty sheep, small and large. Item forty-six is three hundred rixdollars in cash. And the list stops.

Four things in nine words

Nine words of Dutch, and every part of them is information.

"Van de Kaap" means Cape-born. He was not carried here from Bengal, Malabar, Madagascar or Angola, as the people at the head of this family's other line were. He was born into slavery in this colony, to a mother who was already enslaved in it.

"Oude" means he was old in 1802. If that word is doing ordinary work, he was born in the 1740s or earlier, which would make him about sixty at the time of this list, and would mean he had been somebody's property for his entire life.

"Jonge" is not an age. In the Dutch of the Cape it was what an enslaved man was called, whatever his years. The clerk wrote old and boy in the same phrase without noticing, because the phrase was standard.

"Anthony" is a name he was given, not one he chose, and it is the only part of him the paper kept.

There is no age, no birthplace beyond "the Cape", no family, no work, no price. The inventory records no values at all, not for the plough, not for the sheep, not for him, so this document cannot even tell us what he was reckoned to be worth. What it tells us is where he was placed in the order: after the plough and before the sheep, in the part of the list where the estate's working assets were counted.

Why this page exists

There is another half to this. Nine of Frans's own direct ancestors were enslaved or free-black people at the Cape, in the ninth to thirteenth generation. That descent rests on a family tree and not yet on the Cape records.

Both facts are true at once, and there is a difference between them worth stating plainly. The descent is held on a tree and marked provisional, waiting for the Cape records to be read. The holding is on a transcribed archival document with a reference number. As the records gathered here stand, the best-evidenced fact about slavery in this family is the one in which the family were the owners.

That is not a comfortable sentence and it is not meant to be a dramatic one. It is what the paper says.

Four generations, and the same institution at both ends

The two facts do more than sit side by side. They meet in one person, and she is named at the top of this very inventory.

Dina Carolina Brits is the widow whose estate this is. Her mother's mother's mother was Catharina van Malabar, who reached the Cape from India in 1662, was baptised as a thirty-six-year-old in 1673, and was freed at some point before her marriage in March 1676. Catharina's daughter Cornelia was baptised in November 1674, which is to say before her mother was manumitted, so Cornelia was born owned, and freed as an infant along with her mother. Cornelia's daughter Catharina Bastijaans Pyl is Dina Carolina Brits's mother.

Four generations, and a hundred and twenty-eight years, separate the child born into slavery from the widow whose movable estate includes a man held in it.

That is the shape of the thing, and it does not resolve into a verdict. These are not our choices to make from here. A woman in 1802 in the Karoo did not inherit the world we inherited, or the arguments we have had since, and reading her as though she had is not honesty, it is a way of making ourselves comfortable. What the record supports is narrower and harder: that this family was on both sides of the same institution inside four generations, that the paper trail is better on the owning than on the being owned, and that the reason for that is itself part of what happened. Estates were inventoried. People were not.

The Helderberg descent above comes from a published article on the wine farms of that district, which follows Catharina van Malabar's family through the Cape court and church records without any idea that the line runs on into the Karoo ([SRC-295]). Every date in this section is not yet verified against the originals; the manumission is the one that matters most, and it is the one to order.

Anthony van de Kaap is recorded here as a person, PER-000307, and not as a line in a furniture list, because that is what he was.

He has no FamilySearch id, and that is not an oversight. He has no baptism, no marriage, no death and no descent recorded anywhere reachable from here. He appears once, in somebody else's estate, in the year the household was broken up. The only records that could hold him are the Cape slave registers and the transfer and valuation rolls, and nobody has looked yet.

The absence is the point, and it should be read that way. Everybody else on this page can be followed. He cannot.

The other side of it

These are the enslaved and free-black people among Frans's own direct ancestors, with their ids, because a name without one is a claim that cannot be checked. One line is struck through: that descent was disproven and she is kept in the table so the correction is visible.

They enter the family through nine different third great-grandparents, and only one of them, Catharina van Malabar, comes down the Oosthuizen line. The other nine arrive through Mocke, Basson, Zeederberg, Snyman, Reyneke, van Oosterzee, Smuts, Duminy and Zulch. That is the half the farm papers were never going to show.

Three things that table says out loud.

Catharina van Palliacatta is one of the three matriarchs this history's own conventions name and undertake to handle with accuracy and respect. Palliacatta is Pulicat, on the Coromandel coast.

The generation-12 Maria van Bengale has no row, deliberately. The family tree holds two women of that name born about 1660, and nothing distinguishes them. Giving her a row would mean choosing between two records on no evidence, so she stays a line in the table and an open question.

Eleven of the twelve carry no FamilySearch id. Only Catharina van Malabar can be reached through one. That is the largest identification gap here, and it sits precisely on the people with the least ability to be found, which is not a coincidence and is the same fact this page began with, seen from the other end.

The rest of the same document

Two other things sit in this inventory and they belong on this page rather than a separate one, because they are the same household on the same day.

The couple had no farm. The inventory was taken ter plaatse van Pieter Cornelis Oosthuysen, at their son's place. At the end of their lives they were living with a child.

And they were the bank. The whole movable estate came to Rd 1,382:5, and Rd 1,082:5 of it was money owed by their own children, more than three quarters of what they had, and more than three times the cash in the house. Eight debts: seven living children, and the estate of a son already dead, administered by the Orphan Chamber. The largest, Rd 350, was owed by Pieter Cornelis, the son they were living with. A generation before any lending institution reached the frontier, an old couple's savings were held as debts inside their own family, and the estate had to call them in.

The same document then boards out eight orphaned grandchildren, each named with the household they had been placed in.

So: forty-six things, a man among them, Rd 1,082:5 owed inside the family, eight orphans placed. One sheet of paper on one April day, and most of what this family was in 1802.

Source: [SRC-093], MOOC8/24.27, Master of the Orphan Chamber, taken 27 April 1802 by A. v. Kerveld with Secretary A. Stockenstrom; the account given by Pieter Cornelis Oosthuysen Jacobsz. Full transcription at sources/inventories/MOOC8-24-27-oosthuysen-brits-1802.md.

What this story is about

• about Anthony van de Kaap
• about Jacobus Oosthuizen (b.1722)
• about Dina Carolina Britz

Sources

Everything this story rests on, with a link to the original wherever one exists. Where a citation is incomplete it says so, an incomplete citation is a research gap, not a formatting problem. If your work is here and the credit is wrong or thin, please tell us and it will be fixed.

1. Estate inventory, deed MOOC8/24.27, 27 April 1802 Cape Archives (KAB), Master of the Orphan Chamber; transcription published by TANAP / Globalise (Huygens KNAW)MOOC8/24.27, {18020427}view it online →

Research notes

The research behind this page, kept separate from it: dated working notes, open questions, and what is not yet settled.