Book contents
2 - Under the VOC
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Summary
Clothing and display
In 1755, the Government of the Cape was faced with a problem. They had received the new regulations to control the display of pomp which had been issued in Batavia, and which in theory were also applicable in all the factories of the VOC. However, in certain particulars these regulations were not suitable for the circumstances in South Africa, and therefore the Council of Policy issued a plakkaat which modified, to some extent, the orders which had been issued for the rest of the Dutch Empire in the East. In so doing they demonstrated very clearly how they conceived the order of society in the Cape to be arranged, in theory if not always in fact.
The High Government in Batavia had itself issued these regulations for a definite ideological purpose. As they wrote in the preamble to this ordinance, despite numerous ordinances to the contrary ‘the splendour and pomp (pracht en praal) among various Company servants and burghers … reached such a peak of scandal’ that the Heren XVII were forced to order the Government in Batavia to take measures against this.
This was necessary
to prevent the ruin of many servants and citizens who, with little or no reflection or ruled by an intolerable puffed up pride, forget themselves and do everything almost to exceed the first ministers of the Dutch Company – in whose territory and rule distinction, according to station (character), and subordination are the major pillars on which rests the prosperity of the said Company and that of its servants, burgers and inhabitants – or at least to be equal to them in all externals, so that those few goods which they owned before being possessed by this cancerous and emaciating sickness are lost to them and they are brought by the passage of time into the most miserable circumstances, where they become the objects of derision and finally, withdrawing from the world's gaze, they pass such little time as is left to them.
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- Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750–1870A Tragedy of Manners, pp. 9 - 39Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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