Apartheid's festival: contesting South Africa's national pasts

Abstract

Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts. By Leslie Witz. African Systems of Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003; and Cape Town: David Philip, 2003. Pp. xiv, 324; illustrations. $59.95 cloth, $29.95 paper. In over a decade of teaching South African history American university students, I have often asked them, toward the end of the course, if we should consider South a segregated state from its founding in 1652. Some have answered with considerable subtlety, noting that the Dutch East Indies Company founded a refreshment station, not a colony at Table Bay in 1652, and that the Union of South dated only from 1910. Many, however, have enthusiastically embraced the idea that Europeans systematically oppressed the indigenous peoples who lived in a country called South that is seen have existed since time immemorial (p. 253), from the moment Jan Van Riebeeck stepped ashore, an interpretation now ironically shared by many students in post-apartheid South Africa. Leslie Witz's engaging study is a welcome remedy this misreading of history. In Apartheid's Festival, Witz dismisses the notion that Van Riebeeck founded anything, noting that one of the first things he did was search the coast immediately around Table Bay make sure that there were no Portuguese or English ships whose captains might object the Dutch setting up their provisioning depot. Van Riebeeck was a minor figure in the Company's history-even his famous diaries, it seems, were largely business records transcribed by clerks at the direction of the Company. In 1804, however, the Batavian Republic, having regained control of the Cape from the British (only lose it again in 1806) resurrected him as a symbol of early settlement bolster their claims the small colony at the Cape. In 1910, Van Riebeeck was appropriated again as a symbol of the new Union. In 1952, he became the vehicle through which the Afrikanerdominated National Party and its newly inaugurated apartheid state reached out white English speakers. The 1952 festival commemorating the 300th anniversary of Jan Van Riebeeck's arrival in South is the centerpiece of Apartheid's Festival. The 1948 election had been bitterly contested and the National Party's margin of victory was narrow; achieve the goals of its rigid, segregationist platform, it needed reach out non-Afrikaans-speaking whites, to construct a history and identity of as whites (p. 15). Presenting Van Riebeeck as the purveyor of a shared Western Civilization darkest Africa offered the government its opportunity. …