Dias’s pioneering voyage evoked little interest or action in Europe for the better part of a decade. As Christopher Bell sympathetically points out, “Dias received no public honour nor tribute to his success. Before Vasco da Gama set out to bring his efforts to a triumphant conclusion, nine years had passed.”¹ Following Da Gama’s “triumphant” journey to India in 1497, the Cape quickly became a routine stop for traders but never a permanent base. These circumstances changed drastically in 1652 with the arrival of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, more commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, and their agent, a man named Jan van Riebeeck. Immortalized in the history books of apartheid South Africa as the father of the nation, van Riebeeck established the first European settlement in the Cape and signaled the beginnings of race mixing in the subcontinent.

In his study Not White Enough, Not Black Enough, Mohamed Adhikari emphasizes the association between the seventeenth-century arrival of van Riebeeck and the “birth” of South Africa’s coloured community. Adhikari analyzes a common South African joke, which traces the coloured people quite literally to the nation’s “founding father”: “[T]he alternative version of the joke dates the origin of the Coloured people at nine months after the landing of van Riebeeck.”² Much like European encounters elsewhere, the Dutch arrived with a tiny contingent but quickly staked a permanent claim and expanded their interests. Their interaction with indigenous peoples, in this case the Khoe-San population, soon became a blend of trade, infringement, and sexual transgression. Indeed, van Riebeeck’s official company journal, which covers his ten-year command of the Cape Colony and which is contained in the exhaustive Precis of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope, suggests that the twentieth-century joke might well be taken literally.³ One of the central individuals in his journal—a figure read by most scholars as his protégé and by some as his lover—is an indigenous woman. Originally named Krotoa, she was rechristened by the Dutch as Eva, an appropriate signifier for the ostensible first mother of South Africa’s mixed race population.⁴

An exoticized figure that has fascinated scholars for centuries, Eva was taken in by van Riebeeck and his family while still an adolescent. In a brief summation of Eva’s life, Julia Wells writes that she “later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised, married Danish surgeon, Pieter van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken prostitute after his death.”⁵ While Wells suggests that Eva may have been intimate with van Riebeeck, hence the literal possibility that he “sired” the coloured people, it was her nine-year relationship with van Meerhoff that produced the Cape’s first documented mixed race progeny. Her unprecedented marriage to a European in a Christian ceremony, the births and baptisms of her mixed race children, and her alleged descent into alcoholism and an early grave at 32, make Eva a distinct, albeit tragic, figure in the saga of early miscegenation in South Africa.

But despite her primacy in van Riebeeck’s journal, Eva was not necessarily the first indigenous woman in the Cape to have sexual relations with a European. Another important factor in the history of miscegenation in South Africa is the mass importation of slaves beginning in 1658. Officially prohibited by the Company from attempting to enslave the Khoe-San, the Dutch turned their attentions elsewhere, focusing on East and West Africa and later the East Indies. As with the institution of slavery in the United States and the broader Americas, female slaves in the Cape were immediately and quite literally used as sexual objects and breeders by European men. So, for example, in 1660—around the time that Eva had her first child—van Riebeeck also documents interracial relationships between Dutch men and slave women: “H. Elbertsz:, also a burgher here, and partner of Stephen, living with the latter in one house, had for a long while had illicit intercourse with the female slave belonging to them, and named Adouke. Often he had turned her husband from his bed and gone to lie with his wife.”⁶ The emphasis on miscegenation as an act of rape is explicit in this account. In the same year, van Riebeeck writes a similar entry: “[T]hey and the Commander Riebeeck did last night, long after the sentries were posted, arrive at the dwelling of Gunner Willem, whom they found undressed lying alongside of a female slave of the Commander, named Maria.”⁷ Here, the two individuals caught in flagrante are a Company soldier and van Riebeeck’s own slave.

To emphasize the parallels between early colonial race mixing in the Cape and early colonial race mixing in America, let me quote a couple of well-known contemporaneous accounts from the Statutes of Virginia. In 1630, the Virginia court decreed that Hugh Davis “be soundly whipped before an assemblage of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonour of God and the shame of Christians by defiling his body in lying with a Negro.”⁸ Similarly, in 1640, Robert Sweat was to “do penance in church according to the laws of England, for getting a negro woman with child, and the woman to be soundly whipped.”⁹ In the former case, the crime appears to be the interracial sex act but there is a subtext of rape.¹⁰ Tellingly, in the latter example, the white man who has fathered the mixed race child is only sentenced to “penance in church” while the black woman gets the whipping. These accounts of illicit miscegenation may seem isolated but they confirm that forced sexual relations between white male settlers and black female laborers took place in the colonial Cape and colonial America, respectively.

By the early 1800s, miscegenation in the United States was a “tradition” roughly 200 years old and mulattos were a thriving population, despite myths of inherent weakness and an inability to reproduce. The practice of race mixing in America became increasingly inseparable from the practice of slavery, during which mulattos procreated with other slaves as well as white slaveholders. Like their counterparts in America, the slave women of the Cape—a vastly heterogeneous group originating from places as diverse as Indonesia, Ceylon, and Madagascar—played a principal, if imposed, role in the development of a mixed race population. Even though specific incidents of miscegenation were rarely documented, the mixed race population alone attests to its widespread practice.

In his innovative study of coloured stereotypes in South African literature, Vernon February reiterates that age-old excuse for miscegenation during European exploration and colonization, namely the absence of white women. In 1656, van Riebeeck writes an almost endearing account in which he “takes with him in the wagon all the Dutch women of the Cape, in order to provide them with a little pleasure.”¹¹ Already the target of one sex-inspired joke, van Riebeeck sets himself up for another here. I will ignore the double entendre and make the point that if “all the Dutch women of the Cape” could fit in one wagon then their numbers were not staggering. By 1658, van Riebeeck records a grand total of 20 Dutch women and children residing at the Cape.¹² Given the seemingly endless births and baptisms registered in Company documents and the paucity of white women, one can deduce that the majority of these infants were mixed race. Ultimately, but not uniquely, miscegenation in South Africa was a sordid or, to adopt contemporary coloured writer Zoë Wicomb’s interpretation, a shameful business. Wicomb posits shame—a sense of humiliation and disgrace—as the colonial bequest to coloured people, precisely because of the abusive circumstances under which mixed persons were historically conceived. In her succinct words, “the nasty, unspoken question of concupiscence … haunts coloured identity.”¹³

Documents of the time do not emphasize the racial mixedness of the children at the Cape any more than they highlight miscegenation in general. During the period of van Riebeeck’s command of the Cape, the cataloguing of racial mixture was still a budding practice in Europe. In his discussion of the Dutch invasion of Brazil, which took place from the 1630s to the 1650s, Jack Forbes notes that “mulat was a new word to the Dutch, not yet incorporated into the ordinary Dutch language.”¹⁴ The Precis of Company documents bears out Forbes’s observation. There are no references to “mulattos” in these Dutch records of the Cape Colony, a precedent that seems to have carried down through subsequent generations since that term remains largely absent in South African racial vocabularies. Instead, there are scattered references to “half-breeds” and “half-castes” in Company records.

One of van Riebeeck’s successors, Jacob Borghorst, writes the following entry in the Company journal in 1669: “In the evening meeting the Fiscal reported that a female slave of the Company, named Susanna of Bengal, lying stiff and stinking with the small-pox in the slave house, had not hesitated to strangle her infant, a half-caste girl.”¹⁵ Whether or not Susanna is another rape victim is not mentioned here. Nor does the account delve into her motivations for infanticide, which might well have been connected to her exploitation as a slave or the fact that she was dying from smallpox. Infanticide can constitute a painful act of agency for a slave woman, as Toni Morrison poignantly illustrates in her novel Beloved. What is most chilling about Susanna’s story is her immediate sentencing to death by drowning and her dismissal as “a murderous pig” for her actions against her “poor innocent child.”¹⁶ This unique account suggests an intrinsic value to the mixed race children born at the Cape, as well as the expendability of their slave mothers. Indeed, there are more parallels to be found with seventeenth-century colonial America here. In her discussion of infanticide cases in colonial Massachusetts, Sharon Harris notes that “Most of the women of color brought to trial for infanticide were either slaves or indentured servants.”¹⁷ She further indicates that judgment was swifter and harsher for nonwhite women.

The record of another slave woman named Angela—also from “Bengal” or modern-day India and Bangladesh—serves as a compelling foil for the story of Susanna. Angela is a popular figure in the annals of the Cape and a number of history texts refer to her story.¹⁸ Arriving at the Cape via Batavia in 1657, Angela was bought and sold twice before being manumitted in 1666, after which she married a Dutch “free burgher” or independent citizen and established herself in Cape society. One of her children, a daughter named Anna de Koning, went on to be a prosperous merchant and landowner in her own right. If the nameless daughter of Susanna, strangled in infancy, has an unusual fate, then Anna, also a slave-born “half-caste girl,” has a different but equally unusual destiny. Anna has gained a measure of posthumous celebrity as a former owner of the farm Constantia, now a museum in Cape Town, and as an exotic ancestor for “white” Cape families.¹⁹ Her portrait also provides the only extant visual image of a seventeenth-century mixed race woman (and former slave) at the Cape (see figure 1.1).

The experiences of the Cape’s early “half-caste” population presumably fell somewhere between Anna’s romanticized narrative and the haunting story of Susanna’s daughter. This population remains a subtle but unmistakable presence in Company records right up until the Company’s dissolution in the late 1700s. The 1800s and the British colonization of the Cape brought new or simply reinvented labels for mixed race persons. Most notably, the term “coloured” entered the popular vocabulary and colonial documentation during this century. The British usage of the term implied a free and light-skinned class of nonwhites. The equivalent Dutch term “kleurling” was also in broader circulation by this point and designated those individuals who were neither black nor white.

As with the term “mulatto” in the United States, historical definitions of “coloured” in South Africa were ultimately vague and inconsistent but they broadly implicated persons of mixed race. February’s study includes an overview of statutory definitions and policy statements, as well as an appendix that details definitions of “coloured” from 1908 to 1967.²⁰ He cites informal epithets such as “Eurafrican” and “bruinmense” and a more formal example like the Population Registration Act of 1950: “ ‘Coloureds’ are simply referred to as persons who are neither ‘natives’ nor whites. The basic criteria of appearance, descent and general acceptance are very flimsy indeed.”²¹ Colouredness was thus largely determined by what an individual was not, and by such “flimsy” qualifications as what a person looked like, who their family was, and what people thought they were. Adhikari notes that a range of subgroups evolved under the amorphous banner of colouredness—the Malays, Griquas, Namas, and Basters.²² By the end of the nineteenth century, coloured was a new social identity premised on unique placement between black and white in the colonial hierarchy. In the twentieth century, this identity, founded on a collective sense of race, class, and culture, would be tested in the crucible of apartheid and by the ongoing marginalization of mixed race people as an embarrassing but permanent side effect of the colonial enterprise.