Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

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Manana, to tell all who enquired that a man from Houtbos was the
father of Tini’s child. Petrus made a point of telling the other white
missionaries that Stech had been trying to tell him what to say. 25
In his report, Beuster strongly emphasised the fact that Tini was his
‘white goddaughter’ and that her still-born baby was a white boy. 26
This very conscious effort to claim Tini as ‘one of us’, who deserved
to have been treated as ‘one of us’, of course alludes to the fear that
assumptions may have been made otherwise. Krause had mentioned
Tini’s ‘bastard’ mother, but already he had attempted to ‘whiten’ her
by pointing to her very light complexion. What did Krause and Beuster
fear? Would the ‘whites’ of Soutpansberg, the Boer community who
were already suspecting the missionaries of covering up misconduct in
their own ranks, frown more deeply upon an act of sexual indulgence
across the colour line?
Perhaps their claiming of a ‘white’ identity for Tini alludes to even
more. The very fact that Stech, in his self-defence, tried his utmost
to categorise Tini as a ‘coloured’, attests to that. Stech’s ‘bastard
girl’ Tini was a very unlikely victim of sexual abuse: she ‘behaved
badly’ in the four years she enjoyed the hospitality of the Stech
family. In fact, the very reason why Beuster asked Stech to
accommodate her in the seclusion of Blauberg, was because she had
become such an embarrassment to the Beusters at Modimolle. All
three the Fisher children were a problem, Stech explained: Tini’s
older sister had also got herself pregnant. It is as if Stech wants to say:
what are you expecting of this type — the type who went out dancing
with several men until late at night while visiting Houtbos with the
Stechs; 27 the type who would not recognise the father of her child
because she had had intercourse with the stranger in the dark. 28
Apparently Stech was tapping into the worst stereotypes of ‘coloured’
girls at the time; a ‘coloured’ girl was more likely to have made
herself guilty of sexual misbehaviour, of moral looseness. An overview
of the reports of criminal and civil cases heard in the Pietersburg
court during the course of 1891 gives an indication of the way
‘coloured girls’ featured in the eyes of the white bureaucracy at the
time. Of the women whose court appearances were recorded that
25 EA BMG Gegen Stech: BMW 1/4225 68-72: An den emeritierten Missionaer Herrn
Stech in Ferchland, Berlin, 18 November 1892; 59-60: Anlage B, Blauberg, 10 Juni
1892.
26 EA BMG Gegen Stech: BMW 1/4225 12-15: C Beuster – HT Wangemann, 18 February
1892.
27
EA BMG Gegen Stech: BMW 1/4225 45-53: C Stech – BMG, 2 Juni 1892 ‘ ... ich
entsann mich noch wie einige junge Bengel, unter denen der eigene Bruder des
jungen Mädchens – sich mit ihr zu schaffen machten & besonders in sie drangen,
spät abends noch mit ihnen zu Tanze zu gehen, denn es war da im
‘Hautboschdorp’ eine Tanzerei an jenem Abend.’
28 EA BMG Gegen Stech: BMW 1/4225 23-24: C Stech – Berliner Missionsgesellschaft,
15 Februar 1892. ‘ ...[sie] erklärte ... nach sehr langen Insiedrängen, dass es ein
Mann aus dem Holzbusch sei, denn sie in der Dunkelheit nicht gekannt hätte.’