Going Dutch in South Africa

This book is in no way a history book, but briefly illustrates the tremendous link and influence that the Dutch brought to South Africa, especially in its early beginnings. There are few instances in the histories of nations that are as filled with turmoil, wars, hardships and a kaleidoscope of contrasts than that of South Africa.

One of the icons in our rainbow of peoples is the three-legged pre-cast-iron pot, as it has the strength to hold a cauldron of potions from the country’s beginnings.

What was stirred into this broth when the Dutch East India Company (VOC) started a trading post for its merchant ships was and still remains to this day a matter of enormous complexity.

To the lingering words of my first teacher, I now whistle to her ghost that the first peoples to roam these southern lands were living at the Cape some 2,000 years before Van Riebeeck landed at the Cape as the commander of a merchant vessel of the VOC. The Khoi khoi were pastoralists and the San were hunter gatherers who were called Hottentots and Bushmen by the Dutch settlers.

Initially the Dutch used the Cape as a resupply post for fresh produce for their merchant vessels on route to India and the Dutch East Indies. Sporadic trade and barter did occur between the Dutch settlers and the indigenous peoples, but they were looked down upon as being native savages with spears and loincloths. Fruit and vegetable gardens were planted along the fertile slopes of Table Mountain and a fort was built for protection against the African beasts and these half-naked little savages.

A directive was sent to Commander Van Riebeeck from the Heeren XVII (or Gentlemen Seventeen), the board of directors of the (VOC) in the distant Netherlands, that none of the wild locals should be tamed and enslaved.

I could well imagine that during those times of world slavery with so much menial work to be done, that Jan van Riebeeck must have punched a few holes through the mud walls of his fort.

By then, in 1659, he had already planted the first vines. The Dutch brought slaves from India, in particular Bengal, Ceylon, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Madagascar, Mozambique and areas of the Indian Ocean to the Cape.

This is where is our great African pot, our cauldron of turmoil, of African uniqueness, started to cook, bother, bubble and broth – bubble-trouble-bubble-bubble-trouble.

In fact, so great was the increase of slaves that by the late 17th century, the Cape Colony moved from being a settler colony to a slave colony. But, it appeared that none of the European settlers seemed to be too concerned, as we say in Afrikaans today – ‘Alles sal regkom’. (Everything will be OK). At the end of the 17th century, many of the Company’s employees were given freedom to farm on their own land and the right to move away from the settlement around Table Mountain.

They were classified as ‘Free Burghers’. A census performed around 1749 found that there were 4,800 VOC employees and Free Burghers and 3,500 slaves in the Cape.

Settlers at the Cape of Good Hope were mostly Protestant Calvinists from the Low Countries, who were gradually joined by Lutherans, mostly from Germany, and the Huguenots from France.

Two Oberholzer brothers from a town named Holzer in Switzerland joined the VOC ranks as soldiers in 1696.

Dutch remained the official language at the Cape, whilst the tongues of the original inhabitants were sidelined and would gradually disappear.

The unique ‘click’ sounding languages of the Khoisan are now termed as being ’endangered’. In fact, only half a dozen people are still native speakers of Nllng or Nlln j !ke, commonly known by the name of its dialect Nluu. When they die, this unique language will die with them. At the beginning of the 19th century, during the Napoleonic Wars in 1806, the British Empire annexed the Cape Colony.

Our great southern pot now had a British monarch, King George III, thrown into the mix with pomp and ceremony, crown and all.

For many, especially the Boer farmers, this new broth of British pomp and highmindedness mixed an imperial poison into the cast-iron pot.

A major turning point in our history was reached, great for some, bad for others and unacceptable for many. Many of the Dutch farmers packed their ox wagon trains, their families, slaves, their own cast-iron pots, their guns and bibles and trekked into the open plains of the interior. The abolition of slavery in 1834 also hastened their departure.

Around 14,000 Boers, the majority of Dutch descent, are believed to have left the Cape in the early part of the 19th century, in a movement called the Great Trek from 1835 towards its end around 1854. The men, women and children who set out from their farms and eastern frontier towns such as Swellendam, Grahamstown, Uitenhage and Graaff-Reinet represented only a fraction of the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of the colony.

Yet their determination and courage have become the single most important element in the folk memory of Afrikaner nationalism.

Fiery, independent, conservative, with a deep protestant culture, these stoic, brave Dutch-speaking pioneers believed that they were a blessed tribe, spreading their culture and Dutch Reformed religion into the interior and converting the heathens of the wilderness. I have read references that imply that the initial seeds of what became Apartheid policies were dormant in the genes of these Voortrekkers. Whether the modern Dutch would want to believe it, their stamp of identity still lies strewn over South African history.

My thoughts return to my little farm school north of Pretoria where our motto was, ‘Skouer aan die wiel’. This meant ‘Shoulder to the wheel’ and romanticized this so-called chosen race pushing their wagons over the mountains to their own freedom and the promised land.

The Boers together with English settlers who arrived in large numbers from 1820 had already clashed with the Xhosa people on the Eastern frontier of the Cape.

As the Voortrekkers moved north they encountered other indigenous tribes like the Zulu, Sotho and Matabele that soon led to bloodshed and wars. Ancient Nguni history states that these Bantu ethnic groups migrated south from the great lakes and were present in the northern parts of South Africa long before the Great Trek. In fact, the first complex society and state was Mapungubwe, that existed just south of today’s Zimbabwe, from 1220 to 1300 AD. Along their way to independence, their promised land, the Boers experienced and caused great tragedies of which the ripples can still be felt in present-day South Africa. They had disagreements amongst themselves and fought wars against the Basothos, Xhosas, Matabele and Zulus, changing the history of South Africa forever.

Hunting the remnants of the San people was considered fair game, but this is still a matter of bitter contention. Before the end of the 19th century, these Dutch descendants had settled in small villages throughout South Africa. The towns with Dutch names are often names of farmers longing for their Dutch homeland far across the oceans or names given by the Dutch Reformed Church. A few carry a Dutch name in honour of the Dutch support for the Boers against the British during the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. Like my tribal fathers who came to the Cape of Good Hope in 1696 as soldiers for the Dutch, I am just a soldier of photography and a pilgrim on the road. My shoulder still pushes the wheels of

dreams, scenes that lie along the tracks and over other far horizons. Time has changed the wheels of steel and wood to rubber, yet the tenacity and drive to see new things are embedded in me, similar to those pioneers from so long ago. I live in a land of great complexity, of happiness and sadness, of wealth and poverty, of crime and corruption, a land that wrestles with itself, with its own identity. But, for many of us, there is a certain unpredictability, a certain freedom in not quite knowing what is to become of us all in the future. What does the present broth in our great iron pot predict? Throughout my travels around southern Africa over the past 55 years, I have often come across old ox wagons, broken and rusted and scattered along the trek routes of the Voortrekkers. They stand forgotten as sad relics of an era covered by the dusts of time. On every occasion I would take time to photograph and then just wonder what had happened to those pioneers and their descendants. Perhaps some joined the trek of many who have emigrated elsewhere. Thabo Mbeki, our second president after independence from 1999 to 2008, once said in a speech that no white people in South Africa of European origins can ever be called ‘Africans’. I just shook my head and wondered about the two Oberholzers who landed at the Cape in 1696.