[It is an extraordinary coincidence that a direct descendant (8th generation) of Hendrik Biebouw's half-sister, Susanna Biebouw, now lives in Jeffreys Bay. His name is Sias Odendaal. An exerpt from the Odendaal family history appeared in Jaarringe on 11 September 2012. Click HERE to read more
– Ed.]
In March 1707, the landdrost of the small town Stellenbosch, Johannes Starrenburg, reported that on the preceding Sunday he found four young men racing on horseback ‘like madmen’. After causing havoc, the four proceeded in a drunken state to the Company mill and, with ‘many curses’, they tossed the scales around. The miller’s attempts to restrain them were to no avail. When Starrenburg, a German, came upon the scene he rebuked them, hitting a seventeen-year-old youth with his cane and ordering him to leave. Hendrik Biebouw shouted: ‘I shall not leave, I am an Afrikaner, even if the landdrost beats me to death or puts me in jail. I shall not, nor will I be silent.’ (‘. . . ik wil niet loopen, ’k ben een Africaander al slaat die landrost myn dood, of al setten hij mijn in den tronk. Ik sal, nog wil niet swygen.’)
The landdrost did put him and the others in jail, and, in a letter to the government in Cape Town, urged that the four be banished. Soldiers publicly thrashed three of the young men a month later.
For Biebouw to use the name for himself was strange. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the term Afrikaner was applied to locally born slaves and free blacks and the Khoikhoi. Biebouw’s public protest in Stellenbosch was the first occasion on which a European was recorded as using Afrikaner as a name for himself.
But was the term more than merely descriptive? Did he only want to indicate that he was a native of Africa (in contrast with immigrants from Europe), or did he imply that Afrikaners of European descent had rights and enjoyed a status that Landdrost Starrenburg, an immigrant, ought not to ignore? It may be significant that the landdrost, the miller and the writer of the report were all European immigrants, while the four young men were all born locally.
Biebouw’s father could not sign his own name and was very poor. Before marrying Hendrik’s mother, a Dutch orphan, he lived with a slave woman who bore him a daughter. It is significant that Hendrik Biebouw, with his tangled roots, did not use any of the existing identifications. He did not say – as one would expect – that he was a German, a Christian or a white. He said: I am from this continent, I am an African.
From: New History of South Africa, edited by Hermann Giliomee and Bernard Mbenga, published in 2007 by Tafelberg Publishers.
