Charles Etienne Boniface
| Charles Etienne Boniface | |
|---|---|
| Born |
2 February 1787 Paris, France |
| Died | 10 December 1853 (aged 66) Durban, South Africa |
| Known for | Book writing, teaching music, playwriting and journalism |
Charles Etienne Boniface (2 February 1787 – 10 December 1853) was an early nineteenth century music teacher, playwright, journalist and polyglot who was born in France, but who spent his adult life in Southern Africa. His writings and compositions are amongst the earliest publications of what was then the Cape Colony.
Boniface was born in Paris in 1787, two years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. At the age of twelve he had a grounding in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, had written short dramas in the style of Molière, played the guitar and had learned to dance.
In 1798 his father, who was a prison governor was banished from France on suspicion of helping Sir Sidney Smith to escape back to England. Smith assisted the Boniface family to settle in the Seychelles, a former French colony which, since the beginning of the French Revolution, was effectively under the control of its own assembly. Boniface enrolled in as a cadet in the Royal Navy. In 1806 Cape Colony passed back into British hands and the following year Boniface made his way there via Mozambique on board a Portuguese slave ship.
In Cape Town, Boniface learnt German, Dutch and English and set himself up as a language and music teacher, particularly playing the French and Spanish guitars. He was the first person in the Cape Colony known to have noted the local music.
In the early nineteenth century the theatre was one of the principal leisure activities in the Cape and Boniface, writing in English, Dutch (with the first words of Afrikaans to appear on the South African stage) and his native French was one of the most popular dramatists in the colony. He wrote a series of plays including L'Enragé (1807) which, in 1823 was translated into Dutch by Joseph Suasso de Lima with the title De Dolzinnige of De Gewaande Dolleman, in 1813 a ballet-pantomime Het beleg en het Nemen van Troyen (The siege and taking of Troy) and in 1826 he translated Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman) into Dutch under the title De Burger Edelman.
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