The Piety of Afrikaans Women

ISBN O 86981 853 8

From the Foreword

Feminism did not inspire me to write this book. I wrote it because I am angry. In the feminist interpretation of a text, anger is indeed a sound hermeneutic principle. But my anger is not in service of a theory. I am angry, and I am sad, especially when I look around me and I see Afrikaans women who are socially and politically enslaved by their piety. They are also enslaved by history and especially by history books portraying as the ultimate woman Racheltjie de Beer, who took off her clothes and died in the cold while her young brother warmly survived. I am intrigued by the way self-sacrifice has become synonymous with Afrikaans women while survival has become synonymous with the men. I am intrigued by the way female sacrifice has been focusing exclusively on the smaller circle of the family or in its extreme form only within the boundaries of the nation. And I am intrigued by the type of female piety used to enslave women to this type of ideology. I am, of course, not angry at the women. I identify very strongly with those women whose diaries I have read. In a certain sense, their story is also my story: the story of a woman fervently seeking her God, pleading for religious answers to life's problems and losses. Albeit only a number of diaries have been used for the purposes of this book, I have read all those diaries of Dutch-Afrikaans women that I could find. In every single one of them, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in diaries of women who never met, I experienced the same type of piety. It is a piety concealed by submission and guilt, yet there is a strong yearning to be freed from societal chains in order to be near God. This piety involves pleasing men, the nation, as well as a male God, but it is also a piety filled with visions of a loving Jesus taking women into his arms. These women are my foremothers. They lived on border farms in the eighteenth-century Cape Colony; they formed part of the Great Trek; they clung to life in British concentration camps. They searched for religious comfort when their children and their other loved ones died. They had no theological training. Consequently, they believed that they were guilty of causing their own misery and that they could change their fortune by pleasing God. Furthermore, they were regarded by society as Eve and therefore as guilty of the misery of all society. Now that Afrikaans women are beginning to undergo theological training, it is no longer possible to believe this pious but deadly lie. This is my foremothers’ story. Now we are no longer storyless.

 - Christina Landman

Contents

1 Introduction: The male Dutch connection 1

2 Catharina Allegonda van Lier (1768-1801): The Eve of our female sin 19

3 Hester Venter (b 1750): The woman who loved Jesus 36

4 Matilda Smith (1749-1821): Our virgin of grace 48

5 Susanna Smit (1799-1863): Guilt fantasies and the Great Trek 60

6 Tant Alie of the Transvaal (1866-1908): God's wife in the concentration camp 77

7 Johanna Brandt (1876-1964): Visions of the cosmic God 94

8 Marie du Toit (1880--1931): The first muted Afrikaans feminist 109

The piety of Afrikaans women: A summary 117