Status and respectability in the Cape colony 1750-1870: A Tragedy of manners. (Reviews).

Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony 1750-1870: A Tragedy of Manners. By Robert Ross (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xxii plus 203pp.).

Robert Ross has long offered his readers a reliable blend of eloquence and insight. Unlike many other historians of South Africa, Ross rarely explicitly positions himself within a particular theoretical or political position. Instead, Ross' primary aim, both in the book under review, as well as in much of his earlier work, appears to be to help the reader to appreciate the different visions and worlds of the past. Ross prods the reader to imagine how life could be lived very differently from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries and according to ideas and standards that might no longer be popular or attractive.

In this volume, Ross examines the sources and conduits of respectability and status in the Dutch and then British-ruled Cape Colony. He demonstrates that many Africans, slaves and free blacks as well as settlers sought to re-imagine themselves as British subjects, speaking English and dressing in European clothes and embracing Christianity and Victorian moral norms. Ross thereby analyzes peoples' attempts to conform to dominant colonial culture. He thus ruptures a standard theme in South African history of the last twenty years which has focused on explicit resistance to colonialism.

The key words in the title, "status" and "respectability", aptly describes Ross's concerns. The book is composed of eight chapters, primarily focusing on the nineteenth century. The first chapter analyzes rules of etiquette under the Dutch East India Company in the eighteenth century. Ross demonstrates with a good eye for interesting detail how the Dutch codified and carefully reproduced different axes of status. These included sumptuary laws, seating at church, and racial hierarchies. All these forms of production were emphasized particularly in a variety of public rituals such as baptisms, marriages, and funerals. Only members of the highest echelons of society, for example, were permitted to wear gold thread in their clothing while slaves had to go without shoes and hatless as a marker of their enslavement. Ross also demonstrates in a fascinating portrait of two funerals the rigid accounting of where individuals of different status should stand in the funeral procession.

Ross argues that a variety of social and economic classifications existed under Dutch rule. The main distinctions were between Christians and heathen, and between slaves and free; the latter being the more important marker. Ross concludes his analysis of the period of Dutch rule by arguing that the relations between settlers and the ruling elite generally were characterized by accommodation. On the other hand, he argues that widespread if localized slave resistance dominated the labor and social relations between slaves and their owners.

The second chapter focuses on the reformulation of the terms of respectability under the British who formally ruled the Cape from 1806 through to the early twentieth century. In contrast to the tensions between slaves and owners that Ross discusses earlier, he sees in the aftermath of slavery from 1838 a much more widespread aspiration by ex-slaves and Africans to "respectable" colonial culture. Respectability became associated with Englishness. Ross shows that many wealthier Dutch-speaking settlers accommodated themselves to the new political reality by sending their children to English schools and by making peace with the new administration. Thus, while the grounds for an assertion of Dutch settler ethnicity were present, instead, adoption of English as the language of political culture and status trumped white ethnic enclaves.

Subsequent chapters in particular demonstrate Ross's empathy for the struggles of ex-slaves, indigenous Africans and ragtag Europeans seeking respectability through the adoption of habits associated with Englishness in the colony. Ross analyzes the role of the missions in incorporating ex-slaves into the Christian world of wage labor and nuclear families. In a chapter entitled "outsiders" Ross discusses the role of Islam and of working class urban and rural culture. He also documents the successes and failures of the 1853 Cape franchise that was remarkable, certainly given the franchises of neighboring settler states, in being based on property rather than racial qualifications. Ross demonstrates that the world of the first half of the nineteenth-century Cape was one in which Africans and people of slave descent could hope to be included in civil society if they embraced Englishness sufficiently. However, he also details the ways in which those aspirations to inclusion were also frustrated by growing racism a t the heart of the colonial enterprise. He ends the book with an analysis of the truncated promises of slave emancipation and the ambiguous legacy of Cape liberalism. Ross has provided the reader with a profound and eloquent social portrait of an era.

The book is part of a growing body of work in South African history that takes culture seriously as a topic of analysis. Ross is very generous in citing other scholars of the Cape, but one longs for him to make clearer his own analytic contribution to our understanding of material and popular culture. One yearns for a more explicit examination and discussion of the theories of representation and culture that guide the analysis. This is an important book: it addresses one of the uncomfortable truths of the colonial experience: that many colonized people sought to be included in the world of the colonizer by embracing European conventions. The book also tells another truth familiar to many scholars of colonial nationalist movements throughout Asia and Africa: that it was the very people who most embraced the norms of the colonizers who often led the most successful anti-colonial movements. Robert Ross has written an absorbing and interesting book that should stimulate more research on culture and representation in South African history.