13 April 1666
Outgoing Cape secunde Abraham Gabbema (from The Hague) liberates his slave Angela / Engela van Bengale [Maaij Ans(i)ela] (dies 1720) & her 3 illegitimate Cape-born children: Anna de Coninck / Coning(h) (1661-1734), Jacobus van As (1663-1713) & Johannes (Jantje) van As (1665-executed 1688)
Thereafter, she acquires more wealth, respectability & influence than any other any slave woman in the colony. Her sons marry white women, defying the usual pattern at the Cape. She outlives her children (excepting her eldest daughter Mrs Olof Bergh), surviving the devastating smallpox epidemic (1713) that kills 5 of her children & 3 daughters-in-law.
1st Cape Commander Jan van Riebeeck's granddaughter, Johanna Maria van Riebeeck (wife to Batavian Governor-General Van Hoorn) describes Engela in a letter (1710) when stopping over at the Cape: ”... an old black woman has been to see me who says that she was one of my late grandfather's slaves, and that she had nursed father and all the other children. Her name is Ansiela. She is married to a Dutchman [Arnoldus Willemsz: Basson aka Jagt (1647-1690) from Wesel in the Duchy of Cleves] and her daughter is the wife of Captain B.[ergh]. In her house hang the portraits of our late grandfather and grandmother.” She adds, condescendingly: “it seems that these people [former slaves in Van Riebeeck’s household] still have a great affection for our family”.
Engela astutely negotiates her upwardly mobile ascent, ensuring that the biological fathers (both from well-connected VOC families – De Coninck & Van As) provide for her slave-born offspring & secures a husband of convenient, non-conformist background willing to adopt her 4 bastards. Together she & Jagt spawn a mammoth BASSON clan permeating the Zwartland & beyond & every aspect of colonial life. Amassing land, jewelry, portraits & influence, she dies without ever freeing any of her slaves. Not even the biggest of social hiccoughs deter her from her meteoric rise to respectability: the suicide of a Khoekhoes woman [Zara (c. 1648-1671)] in her sheep pen, the detention & banishment of her Swedish son-in-law [Olof Bergh (1643-1724) (from Stockholm], the execution of her son [Jantje van As] for murder & stock theft, the spawning of a bastard grandson (incapable of ever being legitimized & later politically exiled) [Arnoldus Johannes Basson (1702-1742)] & the detention on Robben Island (1716) of yet another grandson [Johannes van Van As (born 1692)] for immorality. A great many descendants manoeuvre their way into prominent political positions in the colony & participate in the ‘Patriot’ uprising - even turn-coating after both the 1st & 2nd British occupations. Worth mentioning, too, is the participation of her granddaughter [Maria Bergh (1682-1699/1700)], in the virtually unprecedented baptism (1705) of a ‘Hottentot’ foundling [Ismael]. Her ingratiating great-great-grandson, Johan Isaac Rhenius (1750-1808), ironically omits Engela’s important genealogical output when decrying the in-bred nature of other entrenched Cape colonial families:
"In this Colony intermarriages are so frequent that the whole of the Inhabitants are related. I recollect when General Jansens first took upon him the Government of the Cape of Good Hope he was consulting with a very worthy Friend of mine, a Mister Rheinens [Rhenius] concerning the necessity newmodeling the constitution and if possible indicating the vices and corruptions of the generality of the People. An Herculean labour it would have proved. “How,” cries His Excellency “is this to be done?” My friend whose penetration was equal to the goodness of his heart said: “General this may be done by banishing root and branch four of the principal Families of the Cape: The Van Reinens [Re(e)nen], the Cloetez [Cloete], The Bredaus [Van Breda] and The Exteens [Eksteen].” Now these Families were so interwoven with each other and with nearly the whole of the colony that there must have been a general clearance. This the Governor was convinced of and gave up the Attempt."
Via marriage & inter-marriage, the descendants of this slave woman ramify & permeate the upper echelons of Cape colonial society assuming positions of power & dominating the legal order. The Eurasian Van der Stel father-and-son governors favour the Cape’s free-black population in general - & Engela & her family in particular – contributing to their success. The high degree of intermarriage between Engela’s descendants further entrench the family also by marrying into well-connected European families, eg:
Engela’s one son-in-law is a creole from Batavia, the son of Nicolaas van der Sande (from Middelburg) & Catharina Hoffers (from Dodrecht), possibly related to the jurist Johannes van der Sande (1568-1638). Her granddaughter marries into the eminent La Fèbre family & her great-granddaughter marries into the Frisian Hemmy family, sufficiently well-connected for her intellectually enlightened great-great-grandson Gijsbert Hemmy (1746-1798) to be sent to Hamburg & Leiden – a privilege seldom available to Cape-born offspring - paving the way for him to author 2 works in Latin: his oration on the Cape of Good Hope (Johanneum, Hamburg 10 April 1767) & his doctoral dissertation in law on the testimony of Africans & Asians (Leiden 17 September 1770), becoming the VOC’s last superintendent (1782-1798) at Deshima [Dejima] at Nagasaki & the highest educated opperhoofd or kapitan to serve in Japan & only one to die there - a cultivated man, classicist, lover of music & clarinet-player, bibliophile (his library boasted a copy of renowned feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s latest work on the French Revolution), who now lies buried at Tennenji Temple, Kakegawa, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan with the posthumous name Tsū-tatsu-hō-zen-ko-ji - ‘Accomplished and Righteous’.
[Mansell Upham]
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