MDMD(5): Drosters

Michel Ryckx michel.ryckx at freebel.net
Mon Oct 8 13:12:34 CDT 2001


"Although rooming at the Zeemanns', the Astronomers are soon eating at
the house behind, owing to the sudden defection of half the kitchen
Slaves, gone quick as that to to the Mountains and the Droster life."
(Mason & Dixon, 60.1-3

A great help was this book:

Nigel Penn, Rogues, Rebels and Runaways. Eighteenth-Century Cape
Characters. Cape Town, David Philip Publishers, 1999.  The author, a
professor at Cape Town University, dedicates a whole chapter to the
'Drosters' phenomenon.

A colony based on iniquity, slavery and violence creates its own
outcasts.  Some tribes, like the Khoikhoi, were determined to stay
independent.  Some slaves, be it from Angola (in the beginning),
Mauritius or even more East, ran away.  And there were white soldiers (a
lot of them were French, other Dutch), who simply deserted the Cape
zone.  These three categories formed bands, called Drosters by the
settlers.  Add to this the usual thieves, murderers, people fleeing from
debts.

The Dutch word 'drossen' meaning to desert (especially said of soldiers
and sailors) gave its name to this strange phenomenon.  Strange, for of
the fact that on the borders of a more or less segregated society, these
people were mixing up, creating all kinds of 'Bastaards': white - slave,
Khoi - slave, Khoi-white (so becoming the illegitimate's illegitmate).

A constant move in South African history is 'trekking', going North
--remember the beginning of Mondaugen's story.  As 'civilisation' was
gradually expanding, its border reached the Droster area.  Then a new
segregation took place: some white Drosters were accepted and became
functionaries --some preterite becoming elect.  It seems that, at a
certain moment in 17th century the colour of skin became more important
than someone's legal status.







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