Strictly Come Dancing's new head judge Shirley Ballas featured in Monday's episode of Who Do You Think You Are?
I have to say, it was one of the better episodes of recent years!
Rumors of possible Black ancestry took Shirley to South Africa and a complex history.
Her family were originally Muslim, probably brought into Cape Town, South Africa, as slaves before slavery was abolished.
I found it quite amusing that the Deacon of the Cathedral didn't mention Jesus at all when asked why the Muslim Caroline Otto and her family would convert to Christianity - he was refreshingly honest in admitting that their motives would likely have been an improvement in social status.
I did find this episode quite naïve when it came to the parentage of the Otto family.
There were several generations of the Otto family born to single mothers, no fathers being mentioned.
An ex-slave-owner, Isaac DaCosta, left one of the generations of ladies named Caroline Otto an inheritance in his will, as well as her children, who were all named individually.
Esther DaCosta, Isaac's daughter, also witnessed an Otto marriage.
There's nothing invalid about the conclusion put forward on the programme, that the DaCosta family valued the Otto family as friends and excellent servants - but it seems impermissible to ignore another strong possibility.
Relationships that are this close between servants and their masters would be rare, especially when the servant was previously a slave, and in such a race-defined society as pre-21st-Century South Africa.
Where servants were that close to their master, I would expect the bequest in the will to contain the words 'to my servant' or something similar. An absence of this doesn't prove anything, but is interesting.
The whole set-up, to me, suggests more of an intimate obligation on the DaCosta family - possibly even a familial obligation, if one of the DaCosta family was the father of one or more of one of those fatherless Otto children.
Again, that's just my take on things, and just a theory at that!
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