Wentzels of Strand's German roots
WHEN Ebrahim Rhoda, enthusiastic historian of the Strand Muslim community, began to research his great-great-grandfather Galiel Wentzel (1815-1885), he faced the difficulty of accounting for his German surname.
It turned out that Wentzel, one of the patriarchs of the fishing village at Mostert’s Bay, was the child of a slave named Lena and the schoolmaster Carel David Wentzel III.
In a colony where land ownership conferred status, CD Wentzel would have occupied an inferior social position, despite the education which fitted him to tutor settler children and hold the position of (lay reader) in the yet-to-be-built Dutch Reformed Church.
CD Wentzel’s German grandfather and his father were employed by the VOC, but the great commercial company was in decline when he was born in 1780 and vanished from the local scene after the British occupied the Cape in 1795.
Grandfather Wentzel had been a well-respected land surveyor and cartographer and his elder son entered Company service as a 16-year-old assistant in 1773 and progressed to become bookkeeper of the VOC hospital. He married Maria Sophia Hoebert at the age of 20 and produced a family of 13 children.
By the time his eldest surviving son Carel David Wentzel III turned 16, the VOC patronage network had been swept away and the British were in control. What opportunities were there for a well-educated but landless youth who couldn’t speak the invaders’ language?
In May 1798, Lady Anne Barnard, first lady of the Cape, and her husband Andrew (the colonial secretary) toured the Overberg district by horse wagon, sleeping at farms along the way. They spent a night at Onverwacht, the farm of Daniel Johannes Morkel, before ascending Hottentots Holland Kloof.
Morkel was away at the time. Speculation has it that he decamped to avoid having to entertain the despised English visitors and left a substitute in charge of his house and slaves – the local schoolmaster, who was apparently CD Wentzel.
Lady Anne, oblivious of the possible insult, focused her insatiable curiosity on the young teacher, whom she found more intelligent than “any of the men here of his class”. They conversed in French, which he spoke badly (leading her to imagine that he had been born in Europe), but they got on very well.
She sympathised when she heard that his teaching salary was a mere eight rixdollars a month, but he replied that although little, it was a “genteel independence”. This is perhaps the key to understanding his subsequent relationship with Lena – unable to afford marriage to a free woman, he consorted with a slave whom he could neither marry nor acknowledge.
Thanks to Rhoda, the Strand Wentzels can trace their history back to Dresden in the 1720s, which is quite a long way…