‘Never luff to meddle mit politics, sir’: Errant Satire and Historical Gainsaying in A.G. Bain's ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek, or, Life among the Hottentots’

Abstract

Andrew Geddes Bain's doggerel squib, ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek’, lies towards the front of anthologies of English and Afrikaans poetry in South Africa. Its foundational status urges the historicist treatment of this essay, in order not only to more thickly describe the social moment of its composition and performance, and thereby to elucidate its real subject, but also to conjoin the objects and methods of literature and history. The Cape Colony between Ordinance 50 of 1928 and the Glenelg Retrocession of 1837 resounded with rhetoric on both sides of debates around colonial subjectivity, whether colonised indigene or establishing settler. Against the noise of the War of Hintsa, scholarship must listen also to the voluble archive of a very textual decade: the first years of the Cape press, the inquiry into the murder of Hintsa, the evidence before the Select Committee on Aborigines sitting at Exeter Hall, meetings and petitions around the proposed Vagrancy Ordinance of the early 1830s. ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek’ belongs to this archive and exemplifies the knot of text and history in these seminal years. Its donation to posterity is in part the constitution of the type and temper of Cape history, and the language used to tell it.