Unlike most children, I never wanted to become a fireman or an astronaut when I grew up. Instead, when prompted, I proudly announced: “I want to become a Professor!’ (Or so my grandmother used to say.) Initially, the appellation “history nerd” felt more like a scourge than praise – something to be disavowed, not aspired to. Admission into the popular group in school, as I quickly discovered, wasn’t contingent on your knowledge of dinosaurs or Ancient Egypt. Yet, whereas L.P. Hartley’s famous quote that “the past is a different country; they do things differently there” discouraged most of my classmates, I found the allure of time travel to this foreign country totally intoxicating. By the time I completed my bachelor’s degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2018, this intoxication had crystallised around colonial society in the Dutch Cape Colony, motivating me to pursue a master’s degree under the tutelage of Professor Nigel Penn at the University of Cape Town in 2021. In contrast to other historical epochs, the Dutch period at Cape appealed to me because of its socio-economic complexity and its relevance to my personal history. Eighteenth-century Cape Town was one of the only entrepôts during the early modern period where, for instance, my Dutch ancestor could conceivably marry a Huguenot refugee, and have a Javanese imam and a formerly enslaved Mozambican cooper as neighbours. It was this diversity, as well as the socio-economic and legal nuances of Cape society, that I explored in my PhD dissertation at Radboud University Nijmegen from 2023 until 2026. Crucially, by centring my research topic on colonial landownership and formerly enslaved people, I gained a newfound appreciation for the distinctness of the Cape vis-à-vis other Dutch colonies such as New Netherland and Sri Lanka. Unsurprisingly, when my then-supervisor, Dries Lyna, announced in April 2025 that he had been awarded a grant from the prestigious Gerda Henkel Stiftung for a research project on the urban poor of the Cape Colony, I couldn’t resist putting my name forward.
One of the attractions of the project conceived by Dries, Wouter Ryckbosch and Eva Marie Lehner – ‘Economies of Trust? A New Digital Infrastructure on the Urban Poor in the Cape Colony’ – is its novel, tripartite approach to recovering the voices of those typically confined to the margins of colonial society. Eva Marie and postdoctoral fellow Julia Schmidt will delve into the detailed records of the Dutch Reformed Church to tell the story of unmarried women, while Wouter and postdoc Yannis Skalli-Housseini consider how social connections can be mapped onto credit networks.
My own sub-project, provisionally titled ‘Behind Closed Doors: The Not-So-Private Lives of Eighteenth-Century Capetonians’, is in many ways the realisation of my childhood dream of time travel. By harnessing court records of civil cases and their ancillary witness statements, my ambition is to generate a multidimensional social map of eighteenth-century Cape Town. One of the doors that this research will throw open is that of the courtroom. How did plaintiffs and defendants conduct themselves in this arena of public appeal? Which tactics did they deploy to show their trustworthiness? Conversely, how did they attempt to undermine their opponents? The second set of doors I want to get behind is that of the private and semi-private space. In a society devoid of banks and law firms, business in Cape Town was often conducted in taverns or homes. During these interactions, tempers often flared, conversations were eavesdropped on, and body language was misconstrued – details which are animated by witness statements. Of course, business deals are not the only, nor even the primary, activity that transpired in homes and taverns. These were also extremely intimate spaces where potential marriage partners were discussed, friendships celebrated, or adultery was committed. It was through these acts and in these spaces that trust was accumulated or squandered.
