Crimes against Nature at the Cape of Good Hope: A Short Paper about a Dog

Susan Newton-King 

My paper is constructed around the story of a single individual, an elderly German knecht named Claas Holder, who committed suicide in 1713 on a remote farm in the interior of the Dutch Colony of Cape of Good Hope. He had allegedly been caught having sexual intercourse with one of the farm dogs, and he committed suicide within hours of being discovered. The paper has two aims: first, to tell Claas Holder's story and second, to contextualise and interpret his death. The circumstances surrounding his death may have been atypical, but his life was not. His single status, his poverty, and his relative anonymity (even in death his name was misspelt) were all typical of a certain sub-group of Europeans at the Cape—the so-called eenlopende mannen—Company servants and former Company servants who had failed to secure their position by marrying into an established settler family.

Given his insignificance within the colonial scheme of things, Holder's story is a short one, but the genealogy of the ideas that informed contemporary attitudes toward his aberrant behaviour is, by contrast, very long. Much of the paper is taken up with an attempt to understand and document this genealogy. A brief and preliminary sortie into the judicial archives in search of similar cases that were actually brought to trial was enough to convince me that this long genealogy did indeed have a bearing on the attitudes of judges, witnesses, and the accused in sodomy trials at the Cape of Good Hope.

Finally, I have allowed myself some tentative experiments with the process of narration. It seems to me that historians' preference for the stance of the covert, "extradiegetic" narrator is unnecessary. There is no reason, it seems to me, why we should not experiment with narrative voices, even "unreliable" narrative voices. Perhaps we cannot allow ourselves the novelist's latitude with respect to the imaginative reconstruction of events and characters, but there is no reason to think that we are any more capable than they of "getting the story right."

[WP # 00009]