1. ‘Free Black’ was the term given to manumitted slaves and free-born descendants at the Cape during the VOC period. See K. Schoeman (2007) Early Slavery at the Cape of Good Hope 1652–1717 (Pretoria: Protea Book House), pp. 307–308.
2. See Y. Brink (2008) They Came to Stay: Discovering Meaning in the 18th-Century Cape Country Dwelling (Stellenbosch: African Sun Media), chapter 1.
3. This research was first published in N. Worden (ed.) (2006) Contingent Lives (Cape Town: University of Cape Town) and as part of a paper that was presented at an international conference held at the University of Cape Town in December 2006. My thanks to Antonia Malan for reviewing a previous version and Gerald Groenewald for his valued suggestions.
4. A. Malan (1998/99) ‘Chattels or colonists? “Freeblack” women and their households’, Kronos, Journal of Cape History, 25, pp. 50–71.
5. A. Malan (1997) ‘The material world of family and household: the Van Sitterts in eighteenth-century Cape Town, 1748–1796’, in L. Wadley (ed.) Our Gendered Past; Archaeological Studies of Gender in Southern Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press), pp. 273–302.