FROM MATJIESHUIS TO KAPSTEILHUIS - Cross Cultural Borrowings in Cape Migrant Pastoralist Sub-culture

Franco Frescura

INTRODUCTION

One of the beliefs most fondly entertained by the white South African community holds that the arrival of their ancestors to the Cape in 1652 was to bring about, in the course of time, a variety of deep seated changes in the material culture and behavioral patterns of their black neighbours. They point out, not without a measure of pride, to the success enjoyed by missionaries in proselytizing indigenous groups to the Christian faith; to the fact that these same people were induced to wear clothes with relatively little effort; and to the degree with which western artifacts and materials have been assimilated into local building traditions and lifestyle. Matthew Blythe, Agent to the Mfengu for the Cape Colonial Government, reported in 1875, for example that:

"The social condition of the Fingoes has certainly advanced during the past year; some headmen and people have built and are building good houses of brick and stone. Clothing is much more work. In many of their homes plates, tables, chairs, beds, etc. are in common use."

In more recent times however such statements have become the subject of more stringent analysis as a variety of historians have questioned not only their exact meaning but also their veracity. They point out, for example, that the first white settlers to southern Africa did not arrive in 1652 but exactly one hundred years earlier, albeit somewhat unwillingly, and only as the result of shipwrecks on the eastern seaboard. Missionary successes have also been brought into some doubt. Livingstone, for example, is only recorded to have made one convert in his whole missionary career, and even this lone soul is thought to have recanted as soon as his pastor returned to Scotland. Writing more recently Donovan Williams has pointed out that:

"Of the missionary failure in (the Transkei) there is no doubt. Even today the amaXhosa is not a Christian nation ... The fact that abaKweta ceremonies take place two miles from the University College of Fort Hare in the year 1959 symbolises the missionary failure significantly to influence the way of life of the rank and file amaXhosa."

In my own work, conducted over this last decade, I have been able to show that whilst there has been an undoubted influx of mass-produced industrial material into the rural built environment, affecting the use of decoration, of dwelling forms and of building technology, none of these could be considered to be deep seated enough to strike at the "cultural core" of southern Africa's rural architecture. Indeed, when I began to analyze the fundamental principles of this built environment I discovered that, if anything, such changes in material culture had been incorporated into local building customs and often reinterpreted and given new meaning in terms of local value systems.

Thus when we read the report made in 1880 by John R Thompson, Government Magistrate for Gatberg, in Griqualand East, to the effect that "The square plan ... is superseding the old grass huts” we should also consider the fact that today the circular plan unit remains the single most popular dwelling form, not only in Griqualand East but also throughout rural southern Africa.

This does not mean to say that there were no cross-cultural transmissions in architecture between immigrant white and indigenous black communities. There undoubtedly were. As early as 1775 Sparrman reported that Khoikhoi in the Outeniquas were building dwellings "in a square form, with shelving roofs, like the cottages of the slaves", but by this time the Khoikhoi had been in contact with the Dutch for over a century during which time they had been decimated by smallpox, dispossessed of their lands and, in many cases, indentured to white farmers. It is no surprise that, at some stage, they should also begin building their dwellings in emulation of their conquerors. Indeed some years later, in 1840, Backhouse was led to report on the progress made by the Khoikhoi residing on the mission station of Groenekloof, no doubt under considerable missionary pressure. He stated that:

"Their first habitations were usually of rushes; they next built hartebeest houses of better quality; and many had superseded these by neat comfortable cottages; well built and thatched."

However it should be realised that this cultural trans-migration of architectural forms was not a simple one-way traffic. In spite of John Campbell's warning made in 1815 to the effect that:

"Missionary stations are surrounded by moral atmospheres, or have a moral and civilising influence to a considerable distance around, beyond which it is extremely hazardous for white men to go."

many white men, as well as whole families, strayed from the "moral atmosphere" of mission stations and settled in remote areas of southern Africa, often beyond the demarcated boundaries of the Colony.

GEOGRAPHICAL DEMARCATION

This paper deals with that portion of southern Africa which, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, became associated with the architecture, culture and lifestyle of migrant pastoralist farmers and graziers. This is being interpreted in its widest cultural and geographical sense, and should be seen to encompass the major part of the southern African hinterland, including the northern Cape and southern Namibia through to southern Botswana, the western Transvaal, the northern and central OFS down to the eastern Cape and Border region. For the sake of completing the picture I also intend to quote, very briefly, examples from Lesotho, the Transvaal and Zimbabwe.

THE INDIGENOUS INFLUENCE IN THE CAPE AND ITS HINTERLAND

An important factor which has gone largely unexplored thus far relates to the numerous recorded cases of European families immigrant to the region who adopted indigenous building forms and technologies and made them their own.

This began as early as 1552 when some 220 white survivors from the Portuguese slaver the Sao Joao were shipwrecked near present-day Port Edward. It is estimated that between 1552 and 1782 some one thousand whites were marooned in a similar manner on the eastern coast of southern Africa. Although many of these made their way back to their homes, usually via Mocambique, others died during this journey whilst some prudently chose to remain behind. No figures for these early settlers are available but numerous reports tell how survivors from one shipwreck would travel up the coast only to come across people who had been stranded there twenty years previously and, in the interim, had become assimilated into local communities, had taken local spouses and had generally flourished. No cases are recorded where these persons had built their homes in a European manner. All appear to have adopted local building customs as part of their integration with local culture.

Understandably intermarriage between white and black appears to have been a key factor in the transmission of indigenous architectural forms to white colonial society and although such examples do not seem to have been numerous, sufficient numbers were documented for us to derive some conclusions. Writing in 1820 Campbell reported that:

"Kreega (Kriege), a boor from the colony, lived among the Griquas about fourteen years ago, when Dr. Cowan and his party were on their journey into the interior ... Kreega left four or five wives behind, and a considerable stock of cattle."

Campbell omits to tell us what Kriege's homestead looked like but it is safe to assume that he and his extended family lived in Khoi mat huts. Backhouse tells of a similar example he came across at Kokfontein in Namaqualand in 1839 where:

"Near the ford, the family of an aged Boor was residing in mat-huts. We did not visit him, as his wife, who was a (Khoikhoi), said he was so deaf, that we could not make him hear".

The same author wrote earlier that year of another family in the southern OFS where "a Welshman, who had married a Bechuana woman, was living in a poor, roof-like hut of reeds, near a spring".

Backhouse's description leaves no doubt as to the fact that this dwelling must have been a kapsteilhuis. This example therefore is one of the earliest recorded cases of a white-black marriage where the family did not build their dwellings in an altogether indigenous style, although it could be argued that the kapsteilhuis represents a reasonable compromise between white expectations of dwelling form and an indigenous availability of materials.

Unlike these cases where white men married local women and settled down among indigenous groups, there are other examples of people who, as a matter of choice, conformed their dwellings to local architectural norms. Although in many cases these were not permanent but merely aimed at meeting the settlers' short-term needs for shelter, in a small number of instances they were upgraded and became part of their new vocabulary of settlement. This standpoint was put forward as late as 1935 by the Government of Southern Rhodesia when they argued that:

"As a purely temporary dwelling, huts of pole and dagga ... under a thatched roof are satisfactory. These can be either round or square, and separate huts can be used as sleeping and living rooms ... they should be so placed that when the permanent homestead is built they can be used as 'outside' or store rooms."

One of the earliest cases recorded was that of the missionary Van der Kemp who not only lived among the Khoi in a traditional mat hut, but went so far as to take a local girl to wife. His philosophy was that he could not inspire his "flock" with a love of God unless he was himself willing to share in their privations and style of life. Needless to say his methods did not meet with the approval of other whites. Lichtenstein wrote in 1804 that:

"... he would surely have done much better ... to have inspired them with some sort of taste for the refinements of civilization, rather than to have levelled himself with them, and adopted their habits of negligence and filth. It appears to me that Van der Kemp is of little value as a missionary, ..."

while Campbell commented nine years later that:

"... had the founder of Bethelsdorp been more aware of the importance of civilization, there might at least have been more external appearance to it than there is now ... The Doctor would appear in public without hat, stockings or shoes, and probably without a coat. I leave it to commentators to determine how far that passage did or did not countenance his practice; ..."

As it turned out, such value judgments were premature. Subsequent missionaries to Bethelsdorp scarcely managed any better with the resources available to them, although none of them are recorded to have appeared barefoot and hatless in public.

Most other instances recorded during this period relate to the dwellings of Dutch pastoralists who, having observed at first hand the advantages of the Khoi lifestyle, adapted to it quite readily. Barrow recorded such an instance in the Khamiesberge in 1797 where:

"We took shelter in the solitary hovel of a Dutch peasant, that stood on the general summit of the mountain. Cold as it was, the man and his family had no other habitation than a hut made of rush matting, and fashioned after the manner of the Namaquas,"

He, like most other town people, looked down upon these graziers, regarding them as:

"... a class of men ... the least advanced in civilization. Many of them, towards the borders of the settlement, are perfect Nomads, wander about from place to place without any fixed habitation, and live in straw huts similar to those of the (Khoikhoi)."

Within a generation or two of Barrow, however, much of the stigma attached to Khoi mat beehive dwellings was to disappear as more and more missionaries found these perfectly adequate to meet their immediate housing needs. Backhouse tells of one case in Namaqualand in 1839 where:

"Michael Wimmer constantly left Kok Fontein in the winter; he packed up three mat huts, which then served him as a dwelling, a chapel, and a kitchen, and removed with his wagon and cart, to the places where most of the people were sojourning."

Other missionaries also found the Khoi mat dwelling, or matjieshuis as it became known, quite sufficient for their needs. Campbell recorded that the missionaries at Silver Fountain, in Namaqualand:

"All live in huts covered with mats of rushes, the same as the ordinary (Khoikhoi) houses, only those belonging to Cornelius Kok and Mr Sass are much larger, so that a person can walk about in them."

However it is probable that the missionaries did not adopt this style of architecture only for political reasons, in order to get closer to their brethren, but also because such dwellings were suited to the local economy and the migrant pastoralist lifestyle of their inhabitants. Once white pastoralist farmers began to supplant the Khoikhoi in the Cape interior, in many cases they also assumed the latter's architecture and lifestyle. Thompson visited the Kamiesberg in 1823 and there recorded that a Dutch grazier "was living in a rude Namaqua hut, though apparently a person of considerable substance", whilst at nearby Buffelsfontein he reported finding the farmer, a man called Coetzee "also living in a Namaqua hut, without either garden or corn-field, but with extensive kraals full of sheep and cattle".

In these terms therefore the architecture of the Khoikhoi will be seen as a response to two separate sets of factors: the prevailing migrant pastoralist economy of the region; and the availability of suitable building materials, most especially reeds, necessary for the manufacture of the matjieshuis.

The first is self-evident. A farming community which depends upon the continued availability of grazing for its economic survival and who inhabits a region of fluctuating grazing resources, will be forced to develop an architecture which responds in every way to their lifestyle. The graziers of this region, most specifically the arid central and northern Cape led a hard existence in what could, at times, be a harsh environment. Their dwellings had to be strictly functional and as transportable as possible. Thus whilst some Dutch farmers there lived in either tents or their ox-wagons, many others opted for the tried and tested architectural tradition of their predecessors. In the process, an equation was created between the matjieshuis and the ox-wagon and it is not at all certain that the latter was the better choice of the two. It also means that South African architectural historians should be revising their long-held definitions of a dwelling to incorporate the ox-wagon tradition.

The second factor is perhaps a little more difficult to examine, not because of the technology involved, but because so little is known to us as to how its transfer took place. It must be assumed that if the matjieshuis was, as is recorded, the preferred dwelling of Khoikhoi pastoralists, and that subsequently this domestic form became associated with the Dutch who supplanted them, then a transmission of both its form and technology must have occurred between the two groups. We must therefore ask what the exact mechanics were of such a transfer. Did Khoikhoi servants for example build and maintain such dwellings or were they purchased as part of a local barter system? If the latter was indeed the case then was some kind of micro trade pattern established to supply Dutch householders with new mats for their existing dwellings? Did the Dutch learn the skills necessary to build matjieshuise and if so who taught them? If the Dutch did indeed learn such skills then was there a division of labour between the genders as is known to have existed in indigenous society? Did the Dutch ever gain a knowledge of the physiognomic symbolism involved in the matting cover and if so how was this incorporated into their own culture and value system? Were Dutch mat shelters laid out according to any pattern pre-established by cognitive spatial distributions? Were Khoikhoi spatial distributions also acquired and observed?

And my final question must be: at what point did this transmission actually stop? We do know that some intermarriage between Khoi and Dutch took place; what we do not know is to what degree Khoikhoi life and value systems permeated into the Dutch farming community.

THE INDIGENOUS INFLUENCE ELSEWHERE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

Finally I would like to examine a few examples of cross-cultural influence between indigenous and immigrant cultures as they took place elsewhere in southern Africa. One famous example was recorded in Grahamstown in 1850 where Bishop Merriman built a study in his own garden in the form of a beehive hut after the mFengu model. He was quite precise in his opinions on housing and wrote in his journal in 1849 that:

"On riding into Bathurst I visited the (mFengu) settlement near the village where I went to look for a good hut as a pattern of one which I intend to build as a study for myself on the lawn before my house. But there were no very good ones there. In fact the people are, under the persuasion of their teachers and governors, changing their round huts for miserable mud hovels built in European shape. The only advantage they gain by this is the power of dividing the hut into 2 rooms, but as they have no fire places or chimneys I could not see that much was gained by this sort of reform."

Also in the eastern Cape the trader Harris a similar dwelling for himself near the White Kei in c1848. Baines described it in his journal:

"... we halted for a short time opposite the station of an English trader named Harris, who with his wife and family occupied a hut of similar form but of larger dimensions than those usually inhabited by the (Xhosa). The interior, which formed a room of between twenty and thirty feet in length, was lighted by a single tier of small loopholes; the roof was supported by two or three upright pillars;"

Despite the rapid spread of immigrant settlement, and hence infrastructure, into the southern African interior from the 1880s onwards, the white use of indigenous forms continued well into the 1890s and probably even later. Widdicombe built a set of quite substantial cone on cylinder structures at Thlotse Heights, Lesotho, in 1877 at a total cost of £60, and these served as mission quarters for nearly a decade. Further inland the first administrative buildings erected in Harare in 1890 were Shona cone on cylinder dwellings, as was the first church in Bulawayo. Structures of a similar nature were also functional during the early part of the twentieth century on local Swedish, Trappist and Swiss mission stations but the dates of their construction are not known. Kearney has suggested that white, specifically English, immigrants to southern Africa may have been particularly susceptible to the charms of what he calls the "Bundu Style". He argues that the picturesque movement was derived from an English fondness for natural scenery; that the indigenous architecture that explorers found in the course of their journeys of discovery during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was evocative of a rural charm which their own industrialization had but recently desecrated. Thus it was only natural that once they came into contact with local vernacular styles, they should adopt many of these features and incorporate them into their own colonial dwellings.

CONCLUSIONS

It is clearly a difficult matter to bring together groups of migrant graziers, missionaries, liberal churchmen and white settlers and attempt to find the one common factor that could link them and explain why each chose to abandon its own architectural traditions in favour of those of another group. It is probable that the country's natural environment played a strong role in influencing their respective choice of dwelling form but, at the same time, we should also ask whether this choice was not guided by some overriding instinct, some subconscious wish perhaps to find greater identification with the country that was to become their new home.

It is noticeable however that the majority of examples quoted above were recorded during the first half of the eighteenth century. As such they pre-date the major period of colonial expansion in southern Africa, the consolidation of white settlement in the Transvaal, OFS and Natal, the laying down of a railway infrastructure, and the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior. They preceded the time when indigenous culture and architecture both began to find reference in vitriolic and xenophobic terms, when writers such as the missionary John Mackenzie wrote about "reeking and offensive hovels which you fear may contaminate your neighbourhood" and their inhabitants were described by the missionary Wilkinson as being "low down in the scale of civilization".

These sentiments stand in stark contrast with those expressed by Barrow, Burchell, Campbell, Smith and Backhouse a bare two generations earlier. Burchell told in 1811 how the Tswana town of Dithakong "excited astonishment" while the novel form and character of their houses seized his whole attention.

Quite clearly then those early settlers to the interior of southern Africa adapted to local architectural values to a large extent because of a pragmatic need for shelter. They also lived in an era which still believed in Rosseau's "noble savage" and strengthened by their own ideal of the picturesque, were able to make their homes in a style which they perceived to be appropriate in the context of their new environment. Subsequent generations had no such illusions and made no such attempt to adapt to local values.

It might also be pertinent to consider that, until the 1850s, competition for land between immigrant white settlers and indigenous communities had not yet become a matter for widespread armed resistance. It is not difficult to see how dwellings which "excited astonishment" in 1811 could have been transformed into "reeking and offensive hovels” forty years later as part of a wider and deliberate programme of denigration of indigenous values aimed at subverting their moral claims to ancestral lands.

POSTSCRIPT

This paper originally formed the basis for the Mary Alexander Cooke Memorial Lecture and keynote address, delivered in Worcester on 21 September 1989 to the Western Cape Branch of the South African Museums Association Annual Conference on Living History, under the title of From Matjieshuis to Kapsteilhuis: Cross-cultural Borrowings in Cape Migrant Pastoralist Sub-culture. It has since been extensively revised. I was pleasurably surprised to note that, to date, it has never been submitted for publication to any journal, something I propose to rectify at the earliest opportunity.

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