SA has a long history of blended families The way we were

MANY people think that blended families with children labelled “yours, mine and ours” are a modern phenomenon, the result of eroding moral values and divorce law reform.

It was also common in the past, owing to life’s uncertainties. Widowed mothers and fathers with small children often remarried within months of bereavement. Slaves (who couldn’t marry) struggled to form lasting relationships and the women often had children with multiple partners.

Most of those who gained their freedom aimed to establish stable families, but they were often sabotaged by poverty.

The slave Rebecca of Bengal brought a son, Jan de Jager, to her relationship with the free black Carel Jansz of Bengal and he had a stepdaughter named Johanna, who married a Swedish VOC employee and bore him six children, one of whom married into the large De Kock family.

During the 18th century, ex-slave women often married low-ranking north European immigrants, most of whom were former soldiers who could not attract settler daughters.

Carel and Rebecca had two offspring, Apollonia and Maria, but the latter didn’t survive infancy. When he died in 1744, Carel bequeathed the precious gift of freedom to Rebecca, Jan and Apollonia.

Rebecca and Apollonia both married German settlers (Andreas Meijer and Friedrich Simon Plagmann). Apollonia’s children, Elisabeth and Sophia Rebecca Plagmann, became the founding mothers of the Geyer and Mocke families in South Africa and their descendants were absorbed into the burgher community.

Jan de Jager married sideways rather than upwards. He was a tailor and his wife Elisabeth Pieterse van de Kaap was a member of the small free black community. Jan died in the smallpox epidemic of 1755, leaving Elisabeth and their child, Fredrik Simon, in poor circumstances.

The Plagmanns may have helped, but Apollonia Plagmann died in 1756.

Under those circumstances, Elisabeth Pieterse was probably grateful for the opportunity to remarry in 1758. Her new husband was the German bricklayer Gottlieb Barends, who had fathered an illegitimate son, Johan Godlieb, with the slave Filida/Chilida van de Kaap.

Filida and her son were slaves of Carel Maximilian Adleda (1706-88), bookkeeper in charge of the VOC timber store and slave lodge. Adleda witnessed Johan’s baptism in the DRC in December 1754. According to the register, the child’s

was Godlieb Barentse. The boy, known as Jan, was later manumitted and fathered a slave child who achieved prominence in the Muslim community in the 1830s.

Meanwhile, his stepbrother and contemporary, Fredrik Simon de Jager (Elisabeth’s son and Rebecca’s grandson), aspired to the same kind of social acceptance as his Plagmann half-cousins, but without success. More next week.