I recently came across the book Cape Town: The Making of a City and pulled out the following extracts.
What was particularly interesting to me was how their fortunes were build on owning slaves prior to emancipation.
"Economically the Dutch flourished under the British as they could not under the monopolistic and moribund VOC. Many were slave owners themselves and they profited even from emancipation. The fortunes of Dutch businessmen in Cape Town had been laid during the 1830s and 1840s when they acted as moneylenders to their compatriots on the security of slaves! Cape Town ’s Dutch slave owners were not neglected when compensation was paid. RM Brink and JJL Smuts were both members of the slave compensation board while Smuts, acting with Hamilton Ross, was an agent for the payment of compensation money, along with Servaas de Kock and J.H. Hofmeyr. Slave compensation money was frequently invested in property to house the newly liberated population.
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The Hon. J.H. Wicht 1808-1886 |
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Johan Andreas Heysze 1806-1861 |
All told, this made a family group of 460 houses. Typical of these properties was ‘Sebastopol’, nicknamed in reference to the notorious London tenements, consisting of a row of small, two-storeyed houses in Bree Street . Without water supply, sanitation or much refuse removal, such places were overcrowded and squalid in the extreme.
After JAH Wicht's death in the 1860s, the estate devolved on his children, Christiaan Lodewyk and Johan Andreas Wicht, who themselves had some 325 houses. These increased after the boom of the 1870s. By 1880 C. and Andreas Wicht owned 375 houses worth about £60,000 according to the municipal valuation, mainly in District Six. In the 1890s they began to sell their holdings and by 1896 they had a combined total of less than 70 houses."
According to "Ethnic Pride & Racial Prejudice In Victorian Cape Town" (Vivian Bickford-Smith) the Wicht family owned 12% of the Cape's housing stock in 1870.
According to "Ethnic Pride & Racial Prejudice In Victorian Cape Town" (Vivian Bickford-Smith) the Wicht family owned 12% of the Cape's housing stock in 1870.
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