Charles Etienne Boniface

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.

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 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.

[1][2][3] 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.

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)[4] and his native French was one of the most popular dramatists in the colony.

[3][8] His French-language writings included Relation du naufrage de l'Eole, published in 1829—a record of the journey made by the survivors of the Eole, a French ship that was wrecked off the coast of what was then known as "British Kaffraria" en route to Réunion from France earlier that year.

The play satirised the wave of British puritanism and temperance of the day and in particular John Philip of the London Missionary Society who had secured equality of all free people within the Colony.