Groot Constantia: Wine or Slaves?

Groot Constantia: Wein oder Sklaven?

 

Abstract: Groot Constantia is the iconic South African colonial estate. Located centrally in the Cape Peninsula, on the slopes of the Table Mountain among oak trees, it is immediately recognisable and a very popular tourist destination. In the reception area of the manor house, there are two display units on either side of the doorway. One celebrates Constantia’s wine history – 333 years of continuous production — the other the story of its slaves. For most visitors the wine is the attraction, but Constantia needs to be commemorated equally for what it perversely symbolises as part of South Africa’s human heritage.
DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2019-13195.
Languages: English, Deutsch


Groot Constantia is the iconic South African colonial estate. Located centrally in the Cape Peninsula, on the slopes of the Table Mountain among oak trees, it is immediately recognisable and a very popular tourist destination. In the reception area of the manor house, there are two display units on either side of the doorway. One celebrates Constantia’s wine history – 333 years of continuous production — the other the story of its slaves. For most visitors the wine is the attraction, but Constantia needs to be commemorated equally for what it perversely symbolises as part of South Africa’s human heritage.

Slaves and Wine

Hendrik Cloete around 1788, unknown artist. Public Domain via DBNL.

Hendrik Cloete (1725-1799), who owned Groot Constantia from 1778 until his death, is credited for  pioneering viticulture in the Cape in the eighteenth century. A widely reproduced sketch (c. 1788) depicts him smoking at a card table with his (unidentified) personal slave propping up the end of a very long clay pipe. The picture very well conveys both the man and his status as the richest colonist in the Cape.[1]

As Cloete expanded his cultivation of vines and increased the production of quality wine, he constantly added to the number of slaves that he owned by regular purchases. He was one of the Cape’s largest slave owners and employed at least 50 male and female slaves at Groot Constantia, one of ten farms in his possession. He was an astute owner, who not only increased the number of his slaves but also the value of their labour. Early on, he purchased a new cellar man because he was dissatisfied with the previous slave’s work. So satisfied was he with the replacement, April van de Kaap, that Cloete later granted him his freedom in his will. He was also apparently prepared to work alongside his slaves, explaining that he never left the cellar during the pressing season – while his slave workers, however, were picking the grapes in the hot vineyards.[2]

Half a century later, twenty years after the end of slavery at the Cape in 1838, one of Hendrik’s grandsons, Jacob Pieter Cloete, complained:

“I used to have up to one hundred and fifty slaves! And what do you think? Most of them were used to us so much that they were like family members. And now we have such trouble with these people.”

In 1858, he employed only between ten and twenty labourers.[3] Constantia wines became famous in the period of the Cloetes. Much of the corresponding detail is contained in the correspondence between Hendrik with the Cape Governor and the Lords Seventeen of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). He constantly deplored the company’s trade monopoly and his inability to export enough wine to make a profit. It is clear, however, that the slaves contributed significantly to the reputation of the Groot Constantia wine.

Those in Bondage

Groot Constantia brings many facets of slave life into clearer focus. The insolvency of another of Hendrik Cloete’s grandson’s estates in 1836 resulted in his slaves being auctioned on a farm neighbouring Constantia. A particularly poignant record is that of the sale of Andries of the Cape, aged 3, to Betje, who was a free woman. She was almost certainly his mother.[4] It is difficult to imagine a more telling commentary on life as a Cape slave.

Eighteenth-century slave life could be very precarious. Cloete records the death of many able-bodied male and female slaves from jaundice in 1773. There was never any doubt that they were chattels to be disposed of at their owner’s whim. In his will, for example, Cloete distributed slaves to family members as gifts: all of his granddaughters to whom no slave girl had been bequeathed were given the right to choose a slave girl for themselves. The will also records the names of many slaves whom he either desired to protect from being sold by his estate in their old age, or to reward, like April, in some way. He emphatically desired that male and females slaves who had formed relationships should not be separated, “even less should the children who are not yet twelve years old be separated from their mothers but that such children… be included [with their mothers] at a reasonable price.”[5]

There was a variety of slave occupations. August van Bengale and Sabina van de Kaap were body servants, probably of Hendrik Cloete and his wife, Hester Anna Lourens. The most prominent of his slaves were the mandoor [foreman], the cellar hand and the coachman. There was a brandy distiller, wagon drivers, carpenter, tailor of women’s clothing, fishermen, a chef and his assistant, two house slaves, four female house slaves, a stable-slave, a horse-slave, a cattle-herd, a shepherd, two gardeners, three cellar-slaves and 30 labourers.[6]

Maturing Legacy

The human legacy of 153 years of slavery at Groot Constantia is still widely evident 180 years after emancipation. A Cape Town directory will reveal family names for every month of the year. These names were common in the Cloete records (all but June and December). Also common at Constantia were Biblical names (Anna, David, Eve, Goliath, Jacob, Sarah) and classical allusions (Amour, Bacchus, Diana, Fortune, Gallant, Nero).

Apartheid spatial planning meant that Groot Constantia fell into a white “group area” and many of the descendants of the people whose families had always lived in the Constantia valley were forcibly removed and scattered to bleak areas on the periphery of Cape Town. Groot Constantia itself is now secured under the Groot Constantia Trust, but progress towards compensation and restitution of land remains very slow.[7] As Anna Bohlin has observed, the histories recorded in land claims by their nature refer to events that mostly took place in what are today still white areas.

Public history in this context “carries great potential for bringing into public consciousness the way that apartheid affected, and continues to affect, everyday life for vast numbers of South Africans.”[8] For the estate, its museum, restaurants, farm and winery, one needs to ask both which “public” constitutes their audience and which “history” they claim to represent.

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Further Reading

  • Schutte, G.J. (ed.). Hendrik Cloete, Groot Constantia and the VOC 1778-1799: Documents from the Swellengrebel Archive. Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2003.
  • Shell, Robert C-H. Children of Bondage. A Social History of Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
  • Dane, Philippa, and Sydney-Anne Wallace. The Great Houses of Constantia. Cape Town: Don Nelson, 1981.

Web Resources

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 [1] As Nigel Worden asks in an exercise for children: “What does the picture tell us about Cloete?”, see Nigel Worden and Kerry Ward, The Chains that Bind Us. A History of Slavery at the Cape. Teachers’ Notes for the Source Pack (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, undated).
[2] G.J. Schutte, “Introduction,” in Hendrik Cloete, Groot Constantia and the VOC 1778-1799. Documents from the Swellengrebel Archive, ed. G.J. Schutte (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2003), 15 and 23.
[3] Alexey Vysheslavtsev’s account in Boris Gorelik, ‘An Entirely Different World.’ Russian Visitors to the Cape, 1797-1870(Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2015), 132.
[4] Philippa Dane and Sydney-Anne Wallace, The Great Houses of Constantia (Cape Town: Don Nelson, 1981), 103-105.
[5] G.J. Schutte, “Introduction,” in Hendrik Cloete, Groot Constantia and the VOC 1778-1799. Documents from the Swellengrebel Archive, ed. G.J. Schutte (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2003), 309, https://slavery.iziko.org.za/cloeteera (last accessed 9 november 2018).
[6] G.J. Schutte, “Introduction,” 300-308.
[7] South African History Online, “Timeline of Land Dispossession and Restitution in South Africa 1995-2013,” https://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/timeline-land-dispossession-and-restitution-south-africa-1995-2013 (last accessed 9 november 2018). See for instance: Polity. Restitution of Land Rights Act: Claim for restitution of land rights: Erf 4673 Constantia in Cape Town, Western Cape: Comments invited: http://www.polity.org.za/article/restitution-of-land-rights-act-claim-for-restitution-of-land-rights-erf-4673-constantia-in-cape-town-western-cape-comments-invited-2018-04-05 (last accessed 9 november 2018).
[8] Anna Bohlin, “Claiming land and making memory: Engaging with the past in land restitution,” in History Making and Present Day Politics, ed. Hans Erik Stolten (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitute, 2007), 114-128.

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Image Credits

Groot Constantia Manor House © 2019 Rob Siebörger.

Recommended Citation

Siebörger, Rob: Groot Constantia: Wine or Slaves? In: Public History Weekly 7 (2019) 1, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2019-13195.

Copyright (c) 2019 by De Gruyter Oldenbourg and the author, all rights reserved. This work may be copied and redistributed for non-commercial, educational purposes, if permission is granted by the author and usage right holders. For permission please contact the editor-in-chief (see here). All articles are reliably referenced via a DOI, which includes all comments that are considered an integral part of the publication.

The assessments in this article reflect only the perspective of the author. PHW considers itself as a pluralistic debate journal, contributions to discussions are very welcome. Please note our commentary guidelines (https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/contribute/).


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DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2019-13195

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