"This Is the Mark of the Widow": Domesticity and Frontier Conquest in Colonial South Africa

From a few iron cooking pots and pewter plates to copper tart pans and porcelain teacups, the material success of frontier farmers entailed more than extensive land claims and fat livestock; it dwelled significantly on such subjects as furniture, crockery, and other symbols that connected scattered homesteads to the heart of colonial society in Cape Town, and thus to European-derived cultural norms. Without egregious speculation, I cannot populate a house and farmyard with women and men at different, complementary work the way Laurel Thatcher Ulrich does so well for colonial New England.5 As records of quotidian existence, however, the inventories symbolize the state's ability to regulate the material consequences of death,6 showing just how powerful a merchant company acting as a prince could be, whether in Cape Town or on the colonial frontier.\n81 To make a list means something more than the sum of its contents, language intervenes, as do the preoccupations of our own time and place.