Nigel Penn

This work is the long-awaited sequel to the historian Nigel Penn's award-winning book Rogues, Rebels and Runaways, in which he entertained and informed readers with stories of the lives of some remarkable characters from early Cape history. In this new volume Penn, a consummate raconteur and storyteller, brings to life an assortment of extraordinary personalities from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There is Maria Mouton, the first white woman at the Cape to be executed, for her adulterous affair with a slave and the murder of her husband. Then, too, there is Johannes Seidenfaden, an LMS missionary whose 'enormities' so shocked Dr John Philip, the LMS superintendent, that he branded him 'a wolf in sheep's clothing' (Seidenfaden, a married man, had not only attempted to seduce his Khoikhoi housekeeper on five occasions but also turned his mission station of Suurbraak, just outside Swellendam, into his own personal fiefdom and impoverished all the Khoikhoi inhabitants.) Other chapters tell stories of desertion by ill-treated soldiers in Cape Town, who intended to escape to Mozambique but got no further than the Hottentots Holland Mountains, where they were apprehended before being hanged; the escapades of the Swiss Meuron Regiment at the Cape; and the 'ear atrocity' in the Onder Bokkeveld near Ceres. These remarkable stories, told with elan, erudition and humour, throw light on our extraordinary past and reveal much about social relations and human experience in the early Cape colony --

Early Colonial Cape Lives

Murderers, Miscreants and Mutineers

"The dissolute Cape Town beer brewer, Willem Menssink, whose fatal passion for a young slave woman brought about his downfall; Carel Buijtendag, the beast of the Bokkeveld; and Estienne Barbier, the quixotic champion of the oppressed and leader of a rebellion against the VOC government: these, as well as an assortment of runaway slaves and Company deserters, are some of the lesser-known characters from the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape whom the historian Nigel Penn has brought to life in a series of hugely enjoyable and historically revealing stories."--Cover, p. [4].

Eighteenth-century Cape Characters

Rogues, Rebels, and Runaways

The First Mission to the Cape San, 1791-1806

'Civilising' the San

Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape's Northern Frontier in the 18th Century

The Forgotten Frontier

Maurice Boucher

Documentary history of British occupation of Cape Colony, South Africa (now Cape Province).

Britain at the Cape, 1795 to 1803

Patrick Harries

Martin Lengwiler

Historically, scientists and experts have played a prominent role in shaping the relationship between Europe and Africa. Starting with travel writers and missionary intellectuals in the 17th century, European savants have engaged in the study of nature and society in Africa. Knowledge about realms of the world like Africa provided a foil against which Europeans came to view themselves as members of enlightened and modern civilisations. Science and technology also offered crucial tools with which to administer, represent and legitimate power relations in a new global world but the knowledge drawn from contacts with people in far-off places provided Europeans with information and ideas that contributed in everyday ways to the scientific revolution and that provided explorers with the intellectual and social capital needed to develop science into modern disciplines at home in the metropole. This book poses questions about the changing role of European science and expert knowledge from early colonial times to post-colonial times. How did science shape understanding of Africa in Europe and how was scientific knowledge shaped, adapted and redefined in African contexts?

Processing Information and Creating Knowledge

Science, Africa and Europe

Jay Winter

Louise Edwards

The Cambridge World History of Violence

Adrien Delmas

Exploring the extent to which the control over the materiality of writing has shaped the numerous and complex processes of cultural exchange from the 16th century onwards, this book introduces the specifities of written culture anchored in colonial contexts.

Africa and the Americas 1500 - 1900

Written Culture in a Colonial Context

Nigel Penn

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