Sex, Gender, Becoming - PULP

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farmers would only have done with black or coloured ‘inboekelinge’,
or ‘oorlams’. 33 This is perhaps also the appropriate place to remark
that Vorster seems to be the official to have seen to it that the
gossiping about Stech remained just that, and that the Boer
authorities did not launch any official inquest.
Apparently it had not even occurred to Tini Fisher to turn to Boer
officials for assistance. Given the way the average coloured girl was
perceived in court, this was probably unthinkable. Stech had anyway
departed from the Transvaal. Yet, the good name of the Berlin
Missionaries in the Transvaal could still be challenged. In the words of
Ben Okri, ‘[t]he people without knowing it will always be on your
side’: 34 Tini asserted herself by speaking out; by refusing to be
Stech’s accomplice in lying about who the father of her child was. She
thereby rejected the subordinate racial identity he conferred upon
her; she appropriated ‘whiteness’ and therewith a voice in which to
insist upon the recognition of her truth – a truth which she repeated
under so many different circumstances to so many witnesses that it
eventually had Stech condemned by the Berlin Mission Society to
dismissal ‘without pension’. 35
The power Tini managed to exert and the processes she set in motion
by simply refusing to shut up, were quite remarkable for the time. In
the case against Reinhold Wessmann in Vendaland a little more than
a decade later, the Venda women who had accused the missionary of
sexual harassment in a joint letter to the Superintendent, were at
first muffled by the overbearing commission of enquiry which put
them on trial in an effort to prove the innocence of the missionary. 36
Apparently, because at least some of the missionaries deemed Tini a
member of their group, they considered it as less of a betrayal to
condemn Stech – although it remains remarkable that Stech managed
33 In one of his later explanations, Stech even mentioned the shortage of servants in
the remote Blue Mountains as one of the reasons why he and his wife did not send
Tini away after the birth of her child. The shortage of suitable domestic servants
was one of the major reasons why the ‘inboekeling’ system, according to which
an orphan could be compelled to provide service until at least the age of 21, was
so deeply entrenched in Boer practices. Another factor strengthening the
argument that Stech may have perceived Tini as an oorlamse inboekeling, rather
than a godchild, was his conviction that he had to find an alternative household
for her to serve in, before he could release her from his own service. See EA BMG
Gegen Stech: BMW 1/4225 56-58: Beilage A, 27 Juli 1892. For a more in-depth
discussion of racial categorisation in the Transvaal in the last half of the
nineteenth century, see P Delius & S Trapido ‘Inboekselings and oorlams: the
creation and transformation of a servile class’ in B Bozzoli (ed) History Workshop
2, Town and countryside in the Transvaal. Capitalist penetration and popular
response (1983) 53- 88 and J Boeyens ‘”Black ivory”: the indenture system and
slavery in Zoutpansberg, 1848-1869’ in EA Eldredge & F Morton (eds) Slavery in
South Africa. Captive labour on the Dutch frontier (1994) 187.
34 B Okri Dangerous love (1996) 310.
35 EA BMG Gegen Stech: BMW 1/4225 56-61: Beilagen A, B & C, Juni – August 1892;
BMW 1/4302: BMS – Stech, 13 Mai 1893.
36 Kirkaldy (n 16 above) 191-200.