A Story about Slaves and Ancestors

Origins of the Schonken Family at the Cape of Good Hope

Allan Heaton Anderson

 

Introduction: DNA analyses

My paternal grandparents William and Sheila Anderson, missionaries with the London Missionary Society (LMS), had four sons (Ralph, Keith, Alexander [Alec] & Ian) and four daughters (Sheila, Noreen, Marjorie & Jean). We were surprised by the ethnic composition of the DNA results of seven members of the extended Anderson family, including two sisters and my aunts (Marjorie Connor, born in 1929, and Jean Forrest, born in 1932) and five first cousins. The youngest of these cousins, Noreen Forrest Cattle, is the daughter of Jean; Michael and Edward are sons of Ralph Anderson; and Allan and Carol are the children of Keith Anderson. The surprising evidence was of African and Asian DNA in the results. We were curious about where that came from, which initiated this research. In all seven cases more than 90% of the DNA was from western Europe, which is in keeping with the known family tradition. Figure 1 illustrates the African and Asian composition of the DNA analyses:

 

Figure 1: African and Asian DNA Results

NAME	% AFRICAN DNA	% ASIAN DNA	SOURCE
Marjorie	1.5	7.3	23&Me
Jean	1	3	Ancestry
Michael	2	7	23&Me
Edward	4	5	23&Me, Ancestry
Allan	0	1	23&Me
Carol	0.4	1.1	23&Me
Noreen	0	0	Ancestry

 

It will be noticed that everyone has more Asian than African DNA, and that the percentages of both in the aunts and the children of Ralph and Helen Anderson are higher than for the last three in the list. Allan, Carol and Noreen have lower or no African or Asian DNA. This can be explained by the DNA of the other parent, who are not biologically related to the Anderson side. Most of the African DNA is listed as coming from West Africa, and most of the Asian DNA from India.

There are various sources for our investigation. These include the DNA evidence above, the extensive genealogical records created by Ralph Anderson and maintained by his son Edward, and subsequent discoveries on the ancestry.co.uk website by Noreen and Allan. I have also found documentary evidence in records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), who governed the Cape from 1652 to 1795, and in the baptism, marriage and funeral records of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in the Cape, who alone had the right to conduct these religious rites during this period. All the slaves and Free Blacks (vryswarte, see below) are meticulously listed in the VOC records and separated from the lists of European settlers. Background information was provided by academic essays on the period by social historians (see references below). This information was important for understanding how families like the Schonkens intermarried and functioned during the early Cape period, while giving clues about some of our ancestors who were clearly not all “white” or “European”. This subject has been controversial. Malherbe (2006: 1168) points out that during the apartheid era “some researchers were motivated to suppress the evidence for illegitimacy and racial mixing at the Cape”. Or as Elphick and Shell (1989: 194) put it, “This theme of intermixture has caused several painful debates in the race-conscious historiography of South Africa, particularly where it has probed the ‘purity’ of the Afrikaaners’ ancestry”.

 

The Schonken Family in the 18th Century Cape

We go back to the beginnings of settler and slave communities in the Cape, where the Schonken family are found. Our ancestor William Anderson arrived in the Cape in 1800 as a missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS). In 1806 he married a woman born in the Cape, Johanna Schonken, in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) in Cape Town. On her side of the family, with both paternal and maternal grandparents, her ancestors had been in the Cape almost since the beginning of European settlement there in 1652. In 1800, the Cape had only just become British, taking over administration from the Dutch, with a brief return to the Dutch Batavian Republic in 1803-4.

It is probable that some of our ancestors whose descendants were in the Cape when William Anderson arrived, starting with my generation’s 3x great-grandmother Johanna Anderson (neé Schonken), were descended from slaves brought to the Cape in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries. Johanna and William Anderson’s son Bartholomew E. Anderson (1819-1900) was also an LMS missionary at Pacaltsdorp near George. His son Ebenezer T. Anderson (1851-1921) was a magistrate and one of our four great-grandfathers. As far as we know, most of the Anderson marriages that took place in the 19^th Century were to Scottish and German families, and our grandmother Sheila Anderson was born Blyth and of Scottish descent.

It is reasonable to assume that the Asian and African DNA of contemporary descendants of the Andersons comes from the 17^th and 18^th Century Cape population. The historical context bears out the slave ancestry of the later Andersons via the Schonkens, formerly using the name Schonke, who were already a well-established Cape family in 1800. Slavery was practised in the Cape until 1838, when it was banned throughout the British Empire. Most of the slaves taken to the Cape originated in Madagascar and Asia, mainly in what are today India and Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies). As we will see, the Free Blacks (below) were overwhelmingly of Asian descent. This may account for why the Andersons have significantly more Asian DNA than African. 

Johanna Schonken’s father Bartholomeus Schonken (1739-1806), hereafter the younger Bartholomeus, was born in Cape Town. His father was Bartholomeus Schonke (1710-1774), hereafter the older Bartholomeus, who had come to the Cape as a servant of the VOC in 1723. The will of our 5X great-grandfather and Johanna’s grandfather, the older Bartholomeus, is listed in the “Wills and Testaments of Slaves and Free Blacks” in the year 1775, the year after he died, but this is more likely to have been his will concerning a slave or slaves, as he was a free burgher.[I] 

Malherbe (2006:1161-62), writes that freed slaves were “known at the Cape as the vryswarte or ‘free blacks,’ and their descendants” are named with the toponyms, mostly “van de Kaap” {“from the Cape”).[ii] Van de Kaap in the records signified a Cape-born slave or Free Black. Vryswarte were not necessarily Africans; in fact most were of Asian descent. Armstrong and Worden (1989:122) state that these slaves were given European names by their masters, and “whether slave or free, of African, Malagasy, Indian or Indonesian origin were all zwarten (blacks). …Slaves freed at the Cape became vrijzwarten (free-blacks). Further definition in racial terms was not needed”.  So the Free Blacks were mostly Asian slaves who had been freed. 

Burman and van der Spuy (1996:613) note that by 1713 there were more slaves than colonists in the Cape, and the result was an increase in “intermixture”. Malherbe (2006: 1163) writes that by the early 1770s, there were 350 Free Blacks in Cape Town who formed 15-20 percent of the town’s burghers (free citizens). Elphick and Shell (1989:239) define Free Blacks as understood in the DEIC period as “all free persons wholly or partially of African (but not Khoikhoi) or Asian descent”. Nearly all the vryswarte were of Asian origin. Similarly, the Camissa Museum states that “Free Blacks were ‘Free Burghers of Colour’” who “were recorded as a separate category of the population” until the 1830s.[iii] A VOC proclamation in 1752 that Free Blacks paid taxes was “on the grounds that they enjoyed ‘all privileges and rights of burghers’” (Elphick & Shell 1989: 216). Free Blacks also had access to all the activities and ceremonies of the church, and we know that by 1827, Free Blacks comprised about a quarter of the urban Cape population (Elphick & Shell 1989: 218).

Based on the evidence in the VOC and DRC records, the older Bartholomeus Schonke was from Venlo in the southeastern Netherlands and arrived in the Cape in 1723 as a VOC servant. He married a free black Leonora Claasz ("van de Caap") ten years later, after he had become a burgher (citizen) and his wife had been freed, possibly in 1727. They had two children before their marriage in 1733, and the younger Bartholomeus Schonken was born in 1739. Guelke (1988:463) states that European-born men who greatly outnumbered women in the early Dutch Cape “had great difficulty finding marriage partners”. Legal marriages could only be conducted in the DRC (Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk) of couples baptised in that church. Only in 1779 were Lutherans allowed to conduct marriages (Malherbe 2006:1154). Slaves were regarded as non-persons and therefore could not marry unless they had been baptized in the DRC, but VOC slaves were routinely baptised if born in the Cape. As a result of all these factors, when European settlers wanted to marry slaves or vryswarte, they were unable to do so unless these conditions were met, and so “concubinage and fornication were rife” (Guelke 1988: 463). The Camissa Museum states:

Being Christian was considered synonymous with being European, so baptism into Christianity offered a path to ‘passing for white’ for persons of colour. In this way a significant number of persons of colour assimilated into white society over time as a means of attaining upward social mobility. While most Free Blacks would ultimately be classified as ‘Coloured,’ some Free Blacks gradually also assimilated into the European or ‘White’ community.[iv]

The older Bartholomeus Schonke’s wife Leonara Claasz is listed as Leonora van de Kaap/ Caap/ Caab in the official DRC records, so our 5X great grandmother was also a vryswarte. It is possible that her father, only known as Claasz, was a freed slave from Bengal, India, as there is a person of this name in the VOC records.[v] From all this detail, it is possible that the Schonken family, at least by 1775, were Dutch-speaking vryswarte. Figure 2 outlines the family of Johanna Anderson. 

 

Figure 2: Parents and Grandparents of Johanna Schonken

JOHANNA SCHONKEN (1777-1848) m. WILLIAM ANDERSON (1769-1852)

Johanna's parents: BARTHOLOMEUS SCHONKEN (1739-1806) m. ELISABETH VAN ELLEWEE (1750-1845)

Bartholomeus's parents: BARTHOLOMEUS SCHONKE (1710-1774) & LEONARA CLAASZ (1715-?)

Elisabeth's parents: HENDRIK VAN ELLEWEE (1729-1767) & ELISABETH ESTERHUIZEN (1733-1783)

 

Slaves in the Cape in the 17th and 18th Centuries

If we go further back in the genealogies, we find further interesting information. Slavery was more common in the 17^th and 18^th Centuries than it was in the 19^th Century. Intermarriage and (illegitimate) intermixing between white settlers and slaves was also more common, whether solemnised in the DRC or not. The Cape’s economy was heavily dependent on slaves. Malherbe (2006: 1153) explains that the VOC lists, even when they only give names, are important, because “reconstituting families formed by slaves, freed slaves, and the white or ‘mixed race’ underclass presents many challenges”. By 1713 the slave population outnumbered that of the settlers and “the intermixture of the peoples at the Cape increased” (Burman & van der Spuy 1996: 613). By the end of that century there were still greater numbers of slaves at the Cape than settlers. It has been estimated by the Camissa Museum that over 40,000 slaves were brought to the Cape from Asia (mainly from India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia), and about the same number from Madagascar, with not as many from other parts of Africa.[vi]

Elisabeth Esterhuyzen (above) was Johanna’s maternal grandmother. Her paternal grandmother was Elisabeth Beyers or Beijer, whose mother Catharina or Catrina is listed as a “Vryman van de Kaap” (free person of the Cape), which again points to her being a Free Black. Catrina's mother is listed as Catherina van Malabar (in southwest India), so again, a Free Slave. Figure 3 traces the lineage of Elizabeth Esterhuyzen, one of our 5X great grandmothers.

 

Figure 3: Parents and Grandparents of Elizabeth Esterhuizen

 ELISABETH ESTERHUIZEN (1733-1783) m. HENDRIK VAN ELLEWEE (1729-1767)

Her parents: JAN ANDRIES ESTERHUIZEN (1704-1783) m. APPOLONIA EVERTS (1706-1760)

His parents: C. ESTERHUIZEN (1675-1724) & ELISABETH BEYERS (1683-1726)

Her parents: ABRAHAM EVERTS (1678-1712) & CATHERINA LE FEBRE (1688-1760)

Not all the information given here can be confirmed, but it is reasonable to conclude, based on the evidence we have, that the descendants of William and Johanna Anderson are descended from European settlers and missionaries, but also from slaves from Asia and Africa who were eventually freed and absorbed into the Cape community.

REFERENCES

Armstrong, James C.  & Nigel A. Worden, “The Slaves 1652-1834”, in Richard Elphick & Hermann Giliomee (eds.), The Shaping of South African Society 1652-1840. 2^nd ed. Wesleyan University Press, 1989, pp.109-183.

Burman, Sandra & Patricia van der Spuy, “The Illegitimate and the Illegal in a South African City: The Effects of Apartheid on Births out of Wedlock”, Journal of Social History 29:3 (1996), pp. 613-635.

Elphick, Richard & Robert Shell, “Intergroup Relations: Khoikhoi, Settlers, Slaves and Free Blacks 1652-1795”, in Richard Elphick & Hermann Giliomee (eds.), The Shaping of South African Society 1652-1840. 2^nd ed. Wesleyan University Press, 1989, pp.184-239.

Guelke, Leonard, “The Anatomy of a Colonial Settler Population: Cape Colony 1657-1750”, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 21:3 (1988), pp.453-473.

Malherbe, Vertrees C. “Illegitimacy and Family Formation in Colonial Cape Town, to c.1850”. Journal of Social History39:4 (2006), pp. 1153-1176.

 

NOTES

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[i] Records of the Dutch East India Company, accessed 20 June 2022.

[ii] Sometimes the Cape was spelled “Caap” or “Caab”.

[iii] Camissa Museum (https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php), accessed 4 July 2022

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Records of the Dutch East India Company, accessed 20 June 2022.

[vi] Camissa Museum (https://camissamuseum.co.za/index.php), accessed 4 July 2022.

[vii] Source: Genealogical Record discovered by Noreen Forrest.