THEWHITEINVADERS
ty, because under the prevailing Roman-Dutch law, the wife was the legal
owner of half the combined estate.
Compared with contemporary European colonies in the Americas, the
tiny Cape colonial population was remarkably unsophisticated.
Formal
educational institutions were meager. A few boys and girls were taught
basic skills at several elementary schools in the town and at elementary
schools of sorts attached to the churches that the company founded at
Stellenbosch
(1686), Drakenstein
(1691),
Roodezand
(later' Tulbagh;
1743), and Zwartland (later Malmesbury; 1745). A minister founded the
only high school in the colony in 17 I 4, but it received little support and
was abandoned in 1725. Most colonists, moreover, were indifferent to
religion, at least until the last few years of the eighteenth century, when a
new wave of Dutch clergy spurred signs of an evangelical movement. A
visitor had commented in 1714 that the clergy had made little headway
among the colonists, "due in no wise to the faltering of their zeal, but to the
stupidity and indolence of the burghers.l'P
Formal authority over the colony was virtually a monopoly of the Dutch
officials. The governor and Council of Policy, consisting exclusively of