As you look up at the Dutch house above you, you are suddenly transported. The people around you seem to move more quickly, and time begins to warp as you jump forward to 1834, the year we must visit the De Wet home. The door opens, and a slave woman ushers you inside, to chaos.
Theresa: Welcome, please do come in! Margaretha is out at the moment.
Margaretha Smuts-de Wet inherited seven slaves from her late father, and owned three more by the year 1816. Her granddaughter, Marie Koopmans de Wet, whom the museum is named after, would go on to aid many widows and children victims in the Boer Republics during the South African War. Though slavery ended in 1834, this very year, most slaves were not truly freed until four years later, after a quote, “apprenticeship period.”
Theresa: There goes the children. I must run and catch them! But Nancy’s in the kitchen cooking, why don’t you talk to her?
You walk into the kitchen, and are overwhelmed by the smell of fresh baking bread. By the oven, you see a young girl of 15, her belly swollen and pregnant.
Nancy: Hi there Miss. You must be looking for Margaretha.
Visitor: Yes.
Nancy: Would you like a tour around the house while you’re waiting? I can tell you a little about about the Cape Furniture here! Some of the pieces were carved by my grandfather- see there. As you could see with Theresa, the women here are very busy. I’d try to introduce you, but they’re all hard at work.
Why don’t you come see me quarters instead? There is a special painting I’d like to tell you about, a painting of a ship.
Look down on your phone to see the painting Nancy wants to show you. Historians uncovered this painting in excavations, and the true story of it is not known. But perhaps we can imagine the stories told by slaves at night around the painting, the memories Nancy’s mother might have shared of a home Nancy had never seen.
Nancy had her child a few months later, Malatie. The child died before her first birthday. We do not know much else. What happened to her elder children, did they ever see true freedom? Did they take after their great grandfather and become an carpenter? Join us as we attempt to find Nancy’s eldest child in the Bo-Kaap.
