Illegitimacy and Family Formation in Colonial Cape Town, To C. 1850‪.‬

For 143 years after European settlement in 1652 the Cape of Good Hope was governed by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), a chartered company of the United Provinces of the Netherlands. (2) Founded as a refreshment station for Company fleets, bound for the VOC's eastern empire, the town which began as a fort and garden spread to fill the mountain-flanked bowl which faced on Table Bay. In 1806, as a result of the internecine conflict besetting Europe, the British took possession of the Cape station and retained it as a colony throughout the 1800s. This article investigates family formation in Cape Town through the lens of illegitimacy, amongst a population which was, for most of the period under review, part free and part slave. The chief sources for this inquiry are the church baptismal registers and records of "hands-on" responses to the moral and other issues raised by out-of-wedlock births. Charges of seduction, defloration and breach of promise which resulted in illegitimacy are scattered among the cases heard by the VOC's Court of Justice and, after the late 1820s when the British overhauled the justice system, by the magistrates' courts and the Supreme Court of the Cape. The records of the Orphan Chamber, Colonial Office and other government departments afford glimpses of the social milieu, and the considerations which shaped policy respecting marriage and related issues such as adultery, judicial separation and divorce. Researchers have little option but to embrace Peter Laslett's appreciation of the available sources, however scant: "It is difficult to exaggerate the value of lists of inhabitants to the sociological historian. Even the bare copying out of names can tell him a great deal, if he treats the evidence imaginatively...." (3)