Anthony Egan hen asked how their latest work is doing, academics sometimes joke ironically about selling the film rights. In Nigel Penn s case, a discerning film producer really could turn these true stories of violence, sex, race and class into costume epics of the Wilde Wes-Kaap.
Social history is a relatively recent development in South African historiography.
Estienne Barbier, a bungling rebel who perhaps thought of himself as a Robin Hood, at war with the VOC, dismembered, beheaded and quartered on November 14 1739. Political pressure led to this being rescinded - but Buijtendag died on the voyage home. Sexual politics, slavery, miscegenation and jealousy are a feature of the story of Willem Menssink, a failed brewer whose open dalliance with a slave led to domestic strife and the attempted murder of his wife by the equally jealous slave Trijntje, for which she was garrotted. Other accounts feature runaway slaves and awol VOC soldiers forming droster gangs and engaging in violent criminal activity - or social banditry, depending on where one stands. It might be argued that Penn is practising a kind of tabloid history, focusing on the sensational.