Murderers, Miscreants and Mutineers by Nigel Penn

Author:Nigel Penn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Fortuijn Coridon had certainly succeeded in causing a great deal of trouble for his master and a number of other people in the Onder Bokkeveld. If he had thought that in the furore following his revelations the allegations of his attempted rape of Mietje would be forgotten, he was mistaken. The court began its inquiries with this matter. Was Coridon guilty of attempted rape? The key witness was Mietje.

By the time she came to tell her tale, Mietje had been thoroughly coached by her father into giving answers that conformed to his version of events. But if Steenkamp had had his way, his daughter would not have had to give evidence at all. When he, his wife, Mietje, as well as Hartwyk Fleck and his wife, together with all their Khoikhoi labourers, were ordered to the Cape for questioning in January 1813, Steenkamp tried to keep Mietje at home. He told the deputy landdrost at Jan Disselsvlei that Mietje had been taken unwell en route and had been sent home. Fischer’s response was that if Mietje did not keep her appointment with the fiscal, then a wagon would be hired to convey her to the Cape and the expenses charged to Steenkamp. This threat had the desired effect, and on 21 February 1813 Mietje, along with her mother and father, faced judicial interrogation.106

Steenkamp’s anxiety to prevent the cross-examination of his daughter may have stemmed from a paternal desire to protect her. But it might also have been the case that Mietje was not the victim of attempted rape and that Coridon’s version of events was closer to the truth. Steenkamp quite obviously did not like the idea of his daughter being alone with a Khoikhoi man in a clay pit, particularly one who had proved to be capable of mutilating corpses. There may also have been something about his daughter’s behaviour that suggested to him that she was not entirely innocent and had merited a thrashing. Fortunately for Steenkamp, Mietje proved to be a star witness.

She told the court that, after showing her the clay, Coridon ‘took hold of my hand and asked me to cohabit with him’. She asked him how he dared to suggest such a thing and threatened to tell her father. ‘Before you do so,’ he answered, ‘I will have run away.’ He then dragged her out of the old dam, behind a stone, and pulled up her petticoats. Her screams brought her father to the scene before Coridon ‘could accomplish his design’. Coridon then got up (a statement which she subsequently corrected: the Hottentot Fortuijn did not get up as he was not laying [sic] on her body) and ran away to stand on the dam wall. When her father asked her what was going on, she told him that ‘the Hottentot had seized me but had done me no injury, upon which my father broke a tough switch from the bushes and gave me one or two lashes because I had gone alone to the dam without one of my sisters’.

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