Angela van Bengale : The Indian Slave Brewer in South Africa
|Mauritian Connections in South Africa’s Wine Industry
Heritage
Is it not fascinating that a brewery started by the son of a Mauritian governor was inherited by a woman with Indian mother? One a slaver and another a slave.
By Baljinder Sharma
Groot Constantia is one of South Africa’s finest breweries.
Its list of clients includes General Napoleon Bonaparte, author Jane Austen, German Count Bismarck, King Philippe of France and poet Charles Baudelaire.
Before its establishment, sometime around 1685, the first governor of the Dutch Cape Colony, himself a botanist, Simon van Der Stel, had carried out an extensive survey in the region and found Constantia to have the best soils for grape plantations and wine production.
Like most Indians, I don’t understand wine.
Yet, over the last three decades, I have acquired the essential skills to distinguish a good wine from a bad one. The wine at Groot Constantia is good – I can say. I drank a lot of it – freely mixing the red and white – eventually remembering nothing except that it was a pleasant experience.
That day, last year, while tasting the beautiful wines in the sprawling precinct of Simon – a restaurant named after its founder, and reading its history in the brochure, one name caught my attention. It was Anna de Koningh.
But what is so special about Anna de Koningh? Well, she was a rare woman who owned a brewery in the seventeenth century Cape.
Anna de Koningh was the wife of Olof Bergh, who bought the portion of the land from Simon van Der Stel after his death. This place became known as Groot Constantia, and when Olof Bergh passed away in 1724, Anna de Koningh inherited the winery.
The most interesting thing about Anna de Koningh is that she was the daughter of a freed slave called Angela van Bengale, an Indian who was brought to Cape Town aboard the ship Pins Willem in 1662 and was sold to Jan Van Riebeeck, the then colonial administrator and a well-known name in South African history.
It is believed that Angela (perhaps her original name was Anjali) was kidnapped as a child in the Ganges plains by slave catchers and then transported and sold in the bazaars of Batavia (modern day Indonesia),
She was resold to another burgher (that is how Dutch settlers were called in South Africa) and when her owner Abraham Gabbema, left for Jakarta – she was freed.
As a free woman, Angela van Bengali was taken on by several men including the Belgian businessman François de Koninck, who is the presumed father of Anna de Koningh.
Angela had subsequently married Arnoldus Willemsz Basson, with whom she went on to have seven more children.
Through her early arrival at the Cape, as well as through the parentage of several children, Angela is considered to be a “founding mother” (“stammoeder”) of many present-day South Africans, including the Basson family.
The brewery has a strange Mauritian connection too.
Its founder Simon van Der Stel – the then Governor of Cape Colony, was the son of Adriaan van Stel, an official of the Dutch East India Company and Maria Lievens – a creole mother (Dutch father and Malay mother) who he had married in March 1639 in Batavia (Indonesia).
Simon was born at sea and spent his youth in Mauritius where Adrian served as the Governor from 1640 to 1645.
The Dutch East India Company, as the name suggests, was established in 1602 to trade with countries bordering the Indian Ocean. This was nearly a century after the Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama discovered a maritime route to the East by successfully navigating the southernmost tip of Africa, Cape of Good Hope, and reaching Calicut in 1498.
By that time, the Portuguese, the French and the British had monopolised the lucrative spice trade with India. The Dutch were therefore compelled to go further East to look for alternative source of spices. They were to hit gold with the discovery of nutmeg – a wonder fruit that had near magical properties – given its use in medicine and in food preservation. The Cape was an important resting place between Batavia and Netherlands.
Is it not fascinating that a brewery started by the son of a Mauritian governor was inherited by a woman with Indian mother?
One a slaver and another a slave. And how history fused them so tightly that the stout black guide who supervised our wine tasting that day was absolutely unaware of it.
But that is how history is told and retold. Remembering and reinforcing certain parts. Forgetting others.
Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 31 January 2025
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