Dutch girls carry an aura of property with them. They are first of all property themselves: they bring not only so many pounds of white flesh but also so many morgen of land and so many head of cattle and so many servants. (J. M. Coetzee, 'The narrative of Jacobus Coetzee', Dusklands, 1974) Until its abolition in 1834, slavery formed the backbone of settler agriculture in the Cape Colony and underpinned a complex hierarchy of status and social inequality. A number of historians have pointed to the existence of stratification within the slave society at the Cape, and have identified its leading slave-holders as the 'Cape gentry'. This article reaffirms this appellation, but argues that this class was reproduced in ways that differed from the standard 'model' based on the English experience. Cape landlords, like many of their contemporaries elsewhere, displayed deep cultural commitment to a system of inheritance based on the principle of equal division of property. As a result, the formation of stable, long-lasting elites proved difficult. Under these circumstances, women – and widows in particular – stood at the centre of this process of class formation. This article uses detailed case-studies of property transfer to track the gendered mechanisms through which elite status was maintained from generation to generation. It further argues that these men and women were defined not by ties to specific properties, but by their commitment to particular localities. In this way, and by translating their wealth into local influence, the gentry were able to rule the Cape countryside.
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Wayne Dooling (2005) studied this question.