In the eighteenth century Dutch colonists in the Cape of Good Hope built houses with a particular style of gabled architecture, known as Cape Gable. Martin Hall has shown that these were associated with wealthy landowners, who focused on large wine and wheat-growing operations using the labor of enslaved Africans. Smaller landowners, and those who did not own slaves, did not build houses with ornate gables.
The documented owners of these gabled houses were predominantly male, but the Roman Dutch legal system of partible inheritance meant that females inherited equal portions of these agricultural properties. Marriage between cousins, transfer of title from father to son-in-law, and other methods were used to keep the estates within a set of elite families concerned about maintaining economic and racial boundaries. His research showed that although a wide number of sales of these houses took place throughout the eighteenth century, they were in fact held by seven or eight leading family networks. The networks were often tied to female inheritance patterns, and descent through female lines. Hall theorizes that the gable architecture, with its outmoded baroque decoration of riotous growth and foliage, symbolized female fertility, the female role in the domestic space, and their role in maintaining family lines.
Hall has looked toward Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation of symbolic capital to characterize the use of Cape Gable architecture by this elite. Although the inheritance patterns and social systems of this group were never overtly stated, the houses were a euphemism for a set of class and gender relations which formed a habitus shared by all elite slave-owning families. This is important in underscoring that those on every rung of the social and economic ladder in a colonial situation build new identities through the process of daily practices in the colony, including their definitions of appropriate domestic architecture.
World History
