Johanna Margaretha Duminy was a fourth generation South African of Huguenot stock. Her father, B. Nothling, born in Germany, arrived at the Cape in 1746 as a soldier for the VOC. In 1792 she and her husband Francois Renier Duminy moved to their newly built house, Le Jardin, in Tafel Valley where she wrote her diary.
By the end of the eighteenth century a new sense of community had crystallised in the Western Cape. There was no single fatherland with which all could identify. A recent study calculated the composition of the Afrikaners by 1807 as follows: Dutch 34%, German 29%, French 25%, and non-European 5%. There was a sense of being a distinct community, called Afrikaners (and sometimes also Christians) rather than Dutch or French or German. Admiral J.S. Stavorinus wrote in 1770: ‘Although the first colonists here were composed of various nations, they are, by the operation of time, now so thoroughly blended together, that they are not to be distinguished from each other; even most of such as have been born in Europe, and who have resided here for some years, changed their national character, for that of this country.’
