The Past and Present of South African Law

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-236
Author(s):  
François du Bois
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
Affirmative Answer ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Roman Emperor ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law

In January 1672, nearly twenty years after the Dutch East India Company had established an outpost at Africa's Cape of Good Hope, a case was adjudicated by the rudimentary local judicial body, the Council of Justice, the significance of which was evident even then. The facts were simple. Members of the indigenous population were accused of having robbed and assaulted European servants of the Company. The legal question before the Council, however, was an intricate one. Did it have jurisdiction over the accused and could it apply to them the same law as would have been applied if the roles of perpetrator and victim had been reversed? The prosecutor successfully urged an affirmative answer. Citingthe Roman Emperor Justinian's Corpus Iuris Civilis, he argued that: “Since the law of nature is implanted in all reasonable creatures, the Hottentots cannot be excluded therefrom. They are consequently subject to the law of nature and therefore also the law of nations …”

EVA'S MEN: GENDER AND POWER IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, 1652–74

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA C. WELLS
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
East India Company ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Feeding Station ◽  
Wide Range

Quite possibly, Eva, born Krotoa, is the most written about African woman in South African historiography. Her name fills the journals of the Dutch East India Company almost from the very start of their little feeding-station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. She is known as a Khoena girl taken into Dutch commander Jan Van Riebeeck's household from the age of about twelve, who later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised, married Danish surgeon, Pieter Van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken prostitute after his death. Yet her persona remains an enigma. As Christina Landman put it, ‘Krotoa is a story-generator’.To conservative historians, Eva's life offers living proof that the Khoena were irredeemable savages. To black nationalist writers, such as Khoena historian, Yvette Abrahams, she personifies the widespread rape and abuse of black women by the invaders. Eva's chief biographer, V. C. Malherbe, forms a more neutral judgment by describing Eva as primarily ‘a woman in between’. Landman views her as an early synthesizer of African and Christian religious traditions. Carli Coetzee demonstrates how recent Afrikaans-speaking artists, poets and actors have constructed an image of Eva as the mother of the Afrikaner nation, a tamed African who acquiesced to Europeanness. She is often portrayed as yearning to return to her African roots, but without success.Virtually all of the representations of Eva construct her as a helpless victim of vicious culture clashes. Today's racial consciousness, laced with assumptions of inevitable African/European hostility, is often read back into the historical record. Frustratingly large gaps in that record leave room for a wide range of interpretations, depending heavily on the subjectivities of the historian. Virtually all previous writers, however, have judged Eva primarily by the tragic circumstances of her death, while minimizing the considerable achievements of her earlier years.

National Report for South Africa

2012 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Common Law ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Insolvency Law ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
British Rule ◽  
The Common

That South Africa has a mixed legal system is aptly illustrated by the origin and current structure of its insolvency law. Roman-Dutch law, including the procedure of cessio bonorum, was introduced when the Dutch East India Company established a presence at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. The Ordinance of Amsterdam of 1777 is still regarded as the basis of South African insolvency law. The first local insolvency legislation was enacted under British rule. While the 1829 Cape Ordinance introduced some English bankruptcy principles, it retained certain features of the Ordinance of Amsterdam. The English influence was extended in the subsequent Cape Ordinance 6 of 1843 which in turn formed the basis of insolvency legislation in Natal as well as in the former pre-union republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. After unification in 1910, the Insolvency Act 32 of 1916 was passed. It was replaced by the current Insolvency Act 24 of 1936. This legislation does not codify the law of insolvency but applies alongside the common law principles derived from Roman-Dutch law.

The old authorities in South African practice

2007 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-408
Author(s):  
Ian Farlam
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
South African ◽  
English Translation ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The Other ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Republic ◽  
New Generation

AbstractThe old authorities have been quoted in, and relied on by, the courts of the Cape and subsequently in the other territories making up the Republic of South Africa from the foundation of the colony by the Dutch East India Company in the middle of the seventeenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century not only were the main authorities extensively quoted in the courts but the doctrines they contained were being incorporated in the textbooks that were being written. And that is still the position. It is not likely that the new generation of judges to be appointed in the next few decades will frequently consult the old authorities for guidance but the civil component of the law, already anchored in the judgments of the courts and the textbooks, will forever be part of the law. When the old authorities are consulted, it is likely that those used will primarily be those available in English translation.

Hobbes among the Classic Jurists

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Boucher
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Complete Identification ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Hedley Bull ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

The classic foundational status that Hobbes has been afforded by contemporary international relations theorists is largely the work of Hans Morgenthau, Martin Wight, and Hedley Bull. They were not unaware that they were to some extent creating a convenient fiction, an emblematic realist, a shorthand for all of the features encapsulated in the term. The detachment of international law from the law of nature by nineteenth-century positivists opened Hobbes up, even among international jurists, to be portrayed as almost exclusively a mechanistic theorist of absolute state sovereignty. If we are to endow him with a foundational place at all it is not because he was an uncompromising realist equating might with right, on the analogy of the state of nature, but instead to his complete identification of natural law with the law of nations. It was simply a matter of subject that distinguished them, the individual and the state.

Culture and Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652–1795

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Groenewald
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Natural Increase ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Male Population ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Entrepreneurial Activities ◽  
Settler Population

In 1652 the Dutch East India Company founded a “refreshment station” in Table Bay on the southwestern coast of Africa for its fleets to and from the East Indies. Within a few years, this outpost developed into a fully-fledged settler colony with a “free-burgher” population who made an existence as grain, wine, and livestock farmers in the interior, or engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Cape Town, the largest settlement in the colony. The corollary of this development was the subjugation of the indigenous Khoikhoi and San inhabitants of the region, and the importation and use of a relatively large slave labor force in the agrarian and urban economies. The colony continued to expand throughout the 18th century due to continued immigration from Europe and the rapid growth of the settler population through natural increase. During that century, about one-third of the colony’s population lived in Cape Town, a cosmopolitan harbor city with a large transient, and overwhelmingly male, population which remained connected with both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The unique society and culture that developed at the Cape was influenced by both these worlds. Although in many ways, the managerial superstructure of the Cape was similar to that of a Dutch city, the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of its population meant that a variety of identities and cultures co-existed alongside each other and found expression in a variety of public forms.

The Portuguese Estado da Índia (Empire in Asia)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoltán Biedermann
Keyword(s):  
East Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Dutch East India Company ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Negotiated Agreements ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Trading Posts ◽  
English East India Company

The origins of the Portuguese Estado da Índia—the sum of all Portuguese Crown possessions east of the Cape of Good Hope—can be traced back to the late 1400s, most importantly to the inaugural voyage of Vasco da Gama from Lisbon to Calicut (Kozhikode) in 1497–1498. After some initial hesitations, the Portuguese Crown created a governorship for India in 1505, with a seat at Cochin (Kochi) later transferred to Goa, to oversee commercial, military, administrative, and other activities in an increasing number of possessions along the shores of East Africa and Maritime Asia. Portuguese trading posts (feitorias), forts, and fortified towns across the region resulted from conquest or, more frequently, from negotiated agreements with local rulers, on whose cooperation the Portuguese generally relied. The Estado reached its apex in the second half of the 16th century, drawing vast resources from trade around the Cape and within Asian and African waters, while investing increasingly in military and religious campaigns in a variety of regions from southeastern Africa to the Moluccas (Malukus) and Japan. Despite significant losses to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the English East India Company (EIC) during the 17th century, the Estado survived until the 20th century. Goa became a part of the Indian Union in 1961, and Macao integrated into the People’s Republic of China in 1999. The perceived decadence of the Estado during much of its history is at odds with its longevity and has prompted longstanding debates about the nature of Portuguese power in Asia; its reliance on trade, military might, and imperial ideas; and its intertwinement with Asian polities and societies.

The Influence of the Law of Nature Upon International Law in the United States

1909 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 547-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse S. Reeves
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
Traditional System ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Scholastic Philosophy

The political philosophers of the eighteenth century might have been surprised if told that their favorite doctrine of natural rights was the intellectual successor of certain theories of the Roman law and of the scholasticism of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Yet the “ state of nature,” which filled so large a place in the discussion of natural rights, has been called “ an exaggerated perversion of what, in traditional system, was quite a subordinant point” From Locke to Hooker, and back through the scholastic philosophy, the germ of natural rights has been traced to the jus naturœ and the jus gentium of the Roman law. Grotius and his successors preserved the tradition in another and more direct line. The continuity of Grotius with the doctrine of the Roman law was complete. “ The law of nature,” said Holland, “ is the foundation, or rather the scaffolding, upon which the modern science of International Law was built up by Gentilis and Grotius. The change in the meaning of jus gentium made by Grotius and his successors, and the influence which the jus naturœ had in forming the new conception of the law of nations can only be referred to here.

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