DISCOVERY
Our knowledge of others and of ourselves is shaped by learning and (re)discovering throughout our lives. The knowledge we have now seems like an unshakable truth, but by continuing to learn and discover new perspectives, we learn to understand the world around us and ourselves better and better
In this exhibition, we focus in on South Africa, on the relations between South Africa and the Netherlands, and on how we have influenced each other.
Through the collections of the South Africa House, we look back at the controversial history of South Africa, which ‘officially’ began in 1652 with the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck at the Cape, and its association with the small country on the North Sea. We can also say that that history began with Autshumao or with the ‘Strandlopers’. We can also go further back in time to see the relationality of the global south to the northern hemisphere.
We will see that there is not just one story, but several, overlapping stories, which are insufficiently or not yet told.
SETTLEMENT? OR CONTACT…
The story of the colonization of the southernmost part of Africa is usually presented as a peaceful process. But this perspective is far from the truth. Colonisation was accompanied by no fewer than nineteen wars between 1659 and 1879.
As the Cape Colony grew and developed, the original inhabitants found themselves in more and more distress, because they no longer had control over their common lands. Their property was appropriated and their trading opportunities with the Dutch, as well as their freedom of movement, were restricted by imposed rules and laws.
The Dutch soon went in search of ‘wealth’. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this wealth meant fertile soils, cattle and fresh drinking water. Conflicts arose because cultural norms and values, traditions and worldviews came into contact with each other.
Many people lost their lives trying to make a living within contested territories.
Some of you may be familiar with the story of Autshumao, called Harry by the Dutch. He was one of the leaders who opposed the colonisers’ encroachments on the freedom of his people.
About forty years earlier, it was the Goringhaiqua leader, Xhore (Coree), who was the first to stand up against the arrival of Europeans, in this case the English. They took him to England in 1613 to mold him into a reliable ally. At the Cape, Xhore traded with them, he was an intermediary, but at the same time one of the main opponents of the English who made unsuccessful attempts to establish a penal colony here.
Many years later, Xhore was murdered by the Dutch.
The stories of Xhore and Autshumao as defenders of their people’s freedom and property are impressive and powerful, but they are hardly known to many people.
OCCUPATION AND IMPACT
Culture is a fluid aspect of life that changes and adapts as new information’s introduced and environments change.
When Western countries began to sail the seven seas to ‘discover’ new areas, the home front became interested in these seafarers and in their stories about those areas outside Europe and their inhabitants. In words and images, curious and stereotypical reports were made of these ‘unknown Others’.
The people who lived closest to the VOC settlement at the Cape were the Cochoquas. Not only did they trade with the Dutch, but they also concluded agreements and treaties with them. It soon became apparent that these were not complied with or violated, with the result that cattle was stolen and land was destroyed by both parties.
Tensions ran high and the Cochoquas and other ethnic groups were forced to flee and leave their lands. Those who did not flee were captured and forced to work for the Dutch or live under strict conditions.
The original inhabitants were employed as servants in the households of the VOC representatives and later also the ‘Burghers’, as the example of Krotoa shows: as a very young girl she became the servant of Van Riebeeck’s wife, Maria de Queillerie.
With the increase in the number of Europeans who came to South Africa with their families or got married there, the number of households with servants, and farms with labourers from the original population, increased. Their cultures changed as a result. New relationships were established and new ways of life were ‘invented’.
Those who could not or did not want to flee were absorbed into the still unknown white-European culture. They worked, lived, and even fought alongside the colonisers.
The Europeans used a number of them as ‘Voorlopers’: these usually young men were used to help find lands and passes towards the interior of southern Africa. The role of ‘Voorlopers’ was only one of the ‘roles’ that were given to the original inhabitants.
Those who managed to flee the Cape warned others of the ‘white peril’ and threats to their way of life. And many joined forces to oppose the ‘new way of life’. One of their leaders was Gonnema, who for years on end (in the 1670s), successfully took up the fight against Dutch dominance.
The Dutch also came into contact with other population groups further inland in their drive for territorial expansion and settlement. On their farms and estates, enslaved people from Africa and Asia, as well as people from South Africa itself, were enlisted as labourers.
The original inhabitants were not usually formally enslaved. In the 1650s, in order to ensure a sufficient number of workers, Jan van Riebeeck devised a plan to set up a network for the slave trade with Madagascar. That plan did not go through, but in 1658 the first 170 enslaved people, mainly children, were registered at the Cape. It was a pirate’s booty: the Dutch had captured a Portuguese slave ship that was on its way from Angola to Brazil. A ‘slave school’ was established for these Angolan children – the first school in South Africa – to train and mould them into obedient and pious ‘inhabitants’ of the colony.
ALLIANCE OR ADVERSARY: ETHNIC WARS
In the eighteenth, but especially the nineteenth century, the borders within what is now called South Africa shifted considerably. More and more original inhabitants were driven from their native lands. To name just a few: Gonaqua, Gamtoos, Damasqua, Hoengeyqua, which slowly merged into different Xhosa clans eastwards and Korana Grikwa clans northwards.
Historical geographical maps tell us the story of how these and other forced migration movements came into place time and again.
These groups were well organized in their resistance to the Dutch and English presence. Using a range of military strategies and tactics, they fought in varying alliances against the colonial invaders.
New communities with mixed backgrounds also emerged: white and ‘black’, but also of descendants of forced immigrants from the Indonesian archipelago and what is now India. The result was communities that became known as ‘Basters’, ‘Oorlams’, ‘Hartenaars’ and ‘Bergenaars’.
They spoke an early form of what later would become ‘Afrikaans’, interspersed with many other linguistic influences from southern Africa and Asia, and adopted aspects of ‘Dutch’ culture.
Many people with Khoi blood in their veins who continued to live at the Cape had a livelihood as labourers. Their work for the Europeans was often far from voluntary. From the eighteenth century onwards, laws and regulations determined where they were allowed to stay, where they were allowed to settle and where they had to work. They could be arrested and ‘tried’ for ‘wandering’ by Veldwachtmeesters and Landdrosts.
Most of these Khoi workers had no choice but to continue working under ‘Boere toesig’. Their free brothers and sisters who had evaded this ‘toesig’ and resisted European colonisation were portrayed as dangerous, uncivilized ‘beasts’ to be feared and protected from.
DISPLACEMENT
All historical narratives are constructions. They say something about the past, work through the present and put their stamp on how we deal with our future.
This also applies to the perspectives on the ‘Great Trek’, to the stories that are passed on from generation to generation in all sections of South African society.
These are complicated stories because they always include and exclude people. They only tell one side of this and other histories.
For example, white people in South Africa look back on their history from the seventeenth century onwards and some of them are proud of their ‘ancestry’, while others bow their heads deeply out of shame for all the suffering inflicted on the original inhabitants and enslaved people in the centuries that lie behind us.
‘Brown’ and ‘black’ people in South Africa look back on the suffering inflicted on them and the violence that was used against their ancestors. They remind us that their original names, languages and identities have been taken away by Europeans. And that from the seventeenth century onwards they have been systematically ostracised and marginalised by white people.
The dominant narrative is that the relations between white, brown and black would have been non-violent and that the latter happily accepted their white masters as their superior ‘guardians’.
Nothing could be further from the truth, not then and not today, as today’s – complex – South Africa shows.
The Dutch and the English, the new occupying power in the Cape Colony since 1806, were at odds with each other, and with the populations that since the seventeenth century had been trying to save what could be saved in what they considered to be their country, their cattle, their freedom and their culture.
When slavery was abolished in 1834 in the British Empire, and therefore also in the Cape Colony, many of the ‘Boers’ opposed this measure. Their ‘Great Trek’ north-eastwards, which began in the mid-1830s, was the direct result of this decision of the English Parliament. These Voortrekkers took their enslaved and forced labourers with them on their journey into the ‘unknown’ and came into contact and conflict with other native South Africans.
A SOUTH AFRICAN WAR?
In 1880 the First Boer War broke out, followed in 1899 by the Second Boer War. At least that’s what the Dutch called this battle between, in their eyes, the Boers and the British (in English: Anglo-Boer Wars). The term used by the Boers themselves was ‘Vryheidsoorloë’ (Freedom Wars). And today they are known as South African wars, because they have marked the lives of many non-white South Africans who in history have been left out of the narrative.
During these wars 20 000 black men were recruited into Brittain’s imperial army and 12 000 black militia servants as ‘Agterryers’ ‘supported’ the Boers in the fight against Brittain.
The reason for the First South African War was the foundation of the independent Boer republics of the Transvaal (the South African Republic) and the Orange Free State.
Portrayed as a conflict between the Boers and the Brits, other conflicts and other narratives were brushed under the carpet.
In the nineteenth century we count no less than nine border wars with the Xhosa, three with the Basotho and an Anglo-Zulu war, not to mention several wars on Namibian territory, in Bechuanaland and eSwatini.
The Dutch, who sympathized with Paul Kruger and his followers, heard and read almost nothing about these wars. Their newspapers and magazines reported extensively, very extensively even, about the tough and tenacious ‘brotherhood’ in faraway South Africa who were fighting for their freedom and about the suffering inflicted on them by the English.
The concentration camps during the Second South African War, where thousands of Boer families, mainly women, children, and the elderly, found their (almost) death, were widely reported on. Similar circumstances were to be seen for the black and brown people who were also placed in segregated concentration camps but never made it in the reports.
These charm offensives and media tactics were extremely successful. Thousands of Dutch people emigrated to South Africa, temporarily or permanently, to assist their ‘brothers’ as railway workers, soldiers, teachers, pastors and whatever else was needed.
These stories encapsulate the origins of the South Africa House in Amsterdam.
Religion
During VOC times, being civilized became synonymous with belonging to a religion. At first, a number of enslaved people got baptized by the Dutch Reformist church. And later on, especially in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, missionary expeditions to the Cape brought other denominations to South Africa. In the nineteenth century missionary schools were founded to convert and educate the free black people and native Africans. The fallacious rhetoric held that a native or (former) enslaved person could strive for civilization. However, they could never achieve complete civilization according to white measures of civilization. Being white meant being superior, as being black was seen as inferior.
Baptized freed people gained rights to land and wages. And native reverends engaged in politics to advocate for the advancement of their people. An example of this is John Knox Bokwe (1855-1922). Bokwe was a journalist, musician, and missionary. He founded several schools in ‘townships’, and was one of the Founding Fathers of Fort Hare University (1916), previously South African Native College.
Christianity was not the only religion that founds its way to the South. From the seventeenth century on, we see the emergence of the Islam in the Cape, predominantly through enslaved people from the Indonesian archipelago.
In the collections of the Zuid-Afrikahuis you can find records and pictures that show that people in South Africa belonged to a certain religion and that they incorporated this religion into their – daily – lives. However, the pictures do not give us any details of, for instance, who the depicted religious leaders were.
Panel Union of Southern Africa or Separation?
Leading to the Union of South Africa (1910) there were multiple campaigns for control over the soon to be purely British colony. The British would now decide who was to lead South-Africa as a whole.
Already in the nineteenth century, Black Africans and Coloured people organised themselves politically. Around the turn of the century, the African Political Organisation (APO) was formed notably by black and coloured men such as Abdullah Abdurahman, Peter Daniels, and Matt Fredericks. Pixley ka Seme stood at the cradle of the South African Native National Congress (NNC) in 1912, which would become the African National Congress (ANC) some years later. Both APO and NNC campaigned for equal rights in the new South Africa.
But, the only changes and reparations that occurred in South-Africa were towards the white community. Coloured people and natives would end up empty-handed despite their lobbies for independence and equality.
Panel Mining, labour, and development
After the South-African war uncertainty rang high among all people of the United British South Africa as the living conditions were uncertain as well as the leadership of the country.
The Nederlandsch Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappij (NZASM) was expropriated and the rail lines became eventually part of Spoornet in the United South Africa. Many of the mines remained either under British control or were privately owned, which added to the uncertainty, as the wages the South African labourers were offered were too low. These circumstances created a gap in the labour market as people from the white communities would not work for the low wages, nor would the black communities.
The solution was to import cheaper labour from China to fill the labour gap in the (gold) mines. The first Chinese arrived in 1904 in Witwatersrand. Soon, protests arose against what was considered to be ‘slave labour’, and ultimately the solution would be to repatriate the Chinese labourers back to their country.
At the same time, the culture of South Africa faced turbulent times, as the Afrikaner Dutch community was at odds with the English community and the governmental language impositions. Under the leadership of J.B.M. Hertzog and Louis Botha the Dutch-Afrikaans language became an official language alongside English in 1925 in attempts to restore the cultural character of white South Africans.
Measures for further development of the Boer-Afrikaner would be the founding of several organisations such as the Zuid-Afrikaansche Stichting Moederland (ZASM) with headquarters in Amsterdam and Pretoria. This institution would strengthen the cultural (including educational development) and economic ties between the Netherlands and South Africa.
These developments and interests did not extend to all inhabitants of South Africa as they were not considered part of the Afrikaner-Dutch community under the Eigen land, eigen regels. This resulted in the development of homelands or Bantustans where people were grouped into corners of South Africa under the new government. However, persons of colour would still be used as labourers within the white-areas or households, their movements would be restricted by various legislations throughout the twentieth century as the notion of Swart Gevaar would be spread among the white-Afrikaner population.
