Kronos, 36 (2010)

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https://hdl.handle.net/10566/204

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    Family law and "the great moral public interests" in Victorian Cape Town
    (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2010) Malherbe, Vertrees C.(University of Cape Town)
    In the wake of the mineral revolution, and the Cape Colony�s attainment of responsible government, Cape Town�s population doubled in the nineteenth century�s latter years. Its largely British ruling class, seeing opportunities for wealth and a greater significance in empire and world, sought to construct a social order conducive to those goals. Faced with increasing ethnic heterogeneity, gender imbalance due to the numbers of male immigrants, and frustration in combating the endemic poverty and slums, city fathers and their closest colleagues � doctors, clergy � perceived the way forward in terms not of extending rights but of moral reform. This article carries the ongoing investigation of family life and law in Cape Town through the Victorian period. It examines legal enactments and social developments where they impacted on marriage, divorce, concubinage and related matters, with particular reference to the welfare of children and those born out of wedlock.
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    Laughing with Sam Sly: The cultural politics of satire and colonial British identity in the Cape Colony, c. 1840-1850
    (Published by History Department, University of the Western Cape, 2010) Holdridge, Christopher
    This article examines Sam Sly�s African Journal (1843�51), a literary and satirical newspaper published by William Layton Sammons in Cape Town. It contends that the newspaper utilised satire to forge British cultural affinity in the colony, as well as to encourage and preserve the conservative social boundaries of propriety and family values espoused by white middle-class colonists. This differed from the more widely studied position of satire as a subversive challenge to the established order, with Sammons avoiding sexually explicit, scandalous humour or overt attacks on personal character. In a period of growing white consensus, the African Journal�s use of satire in the 1840s formed part of the cultural politics of establishing bourgeois values through the medium of appreciation of British literature and popular culture. Satire in Sam Sly�s African Journal thus functioned ideologically to extend British cultural dominance and affinities, and to preserve and instil white bourgeois moral codes. Although much satire was shorn of the racial reality of the Cape Colony, seeking to replicate an impression of metropolitan whiteness, those satires that focused on race derided the Khoikhoi and Xhosa as incapable of achieving equality with whites, drawing on growing anti-humanitarian sentiment in the Cape. The African Journal�s popularity, however, diminished in the face of the anti-convict agitation of 1848�50, when colonists opposed the landing of ticket-of-leave convicts from Ireland as an impediment to the goal of representative government, through petitions and boycotting supplying to the government. Satirising these measures as a radical betrayal of British loyalty, Sammons�s support dwindled owing to his criticism of popular feeling.