Kronos: Southern African Histories

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/97
Kronos: Southern African Histories is published annually by the Dept of History and the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC. It is an accredited South African journal that aims to promote and publicise high quality historical research on southern Africa. The journal also encourages comparative studies and seeks to break new ground in its dynamic integration of visuals and text.

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Browsing by Subject "Cape Town"

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    Demanding satisfaction: Violence, masculinity and honour in late eighteenth century Cape Town
    (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Worden, Nigel (Univ. of Cape Town)
    This article analyses two separate cases of public violence which took place in Cape Town in the summer of 1772/3. At surface level they appear to be very different in character. One was a scrap among low-ranking soldiers who were playing cards at a shoreline outpost. The other was a formalised challenge between two captains of the VOC return fleet as they were lunching with the Governor, which resulted in a death and the flight of the murderer. Yet closer analysis suggests common ritualised codes of behaviour that intriguingly reveal how violence, masculinity and notions of honour operated at all social levels within the town. Both cases were complex and coded social conflicts, rooted in northern European early modern social beliefs and practices as transferred to a colonial context. However, none of these perpetrators of violence was viewed sympathetically by the VOC authorities at the Cape. By contrast, the assailant Captain who had escaped back to Europe was able to successfully appeal to the VOC directors in the Netherlands.
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    An early modern entrepreneur: Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen and the creation of wealth in Cape Town, 1702�1741
    (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2009) Groenewald, Gerald
    This article uses the career of Hendrik Oostwald Eksteen at the Cape between 1702 and 1741 to illustrate the mechanisms free burghers could use to create wealth in an economically restrictive environment. By making use of the concept of entrepreneurship and its attendant issues, the article describes Eksteen?s rise to fortune and prestige through his exploitation of a combination of economic opportunities afforded by Cape Town?s position as a port servicing passing ships. Crucial to Eksteen?s later success was his successful use of the opportunities provided by the monopolistic alcohol retail market at the Cape. Eksteen?s initial success in this arena provided him with a capital base to pursue other opportunities in agriculture, fishing and meat provision, making him the wealthiest man at the Cape by the 1730s. The article also illustrates how Eksteen?s upward mobility was linked to his use of social capital and the cultivation of large social networks through kinship. It demonstrates, furthermore, that economic success was wound up with social power and prestige. In using the biography of Eksteen, the article argues for the importance of economic history in the study of the early modern Cape, but calls also for a study which links economic developments with social and cultural ones through a focus on individual entrepreneurs. Shown, too, is the fact that the existing conception of the rise of a Cape gentry in the eighteenth century needs to be revised to take into account the role of entrepreneurship, the urban foundations of wealth creation, as well as the role of the free black community in this process.