The Classics at World’s End.

Tycho Maas

doi:10.21825/jolcel.v5i0.16569

Abstract

The Dutchman Johannes Willem van Grevenbroek (1644-circa 1726) was secretary of the Dutch East India Company’s Council of Policy at the Cape from 1684 to 1694. In the years that had passed since Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape in 1652, marking the first permanent European settlement in modern-day South Africa, regular expeditions had been launched into its hinterland. A year after his retirement from VOC service, Grevenbroek wrote a letter in Latin about the Cape’s native inhabitants: Elegans et accurata gentis Africanae circa Promontorium Capitis Bonae Spei vulgo Hottentotten Nuncupatae Descriptio Epistolaris (An Elegant and Accurate Account of the African Race Living Round the Cape of Good Hope, Commonly Called Hottentots). In this paper, I consider Grevenbroek’s engagement with ancient (Greek and Roman) antiquity in his framing of the Khoi. Ancient times had left early modern Europe with an authoritative literature on the world’s geography and history, descriptions about its then-known people, and suppositions about the ways of life of its many un-known people in yet to be discovered realms. In his letter, Grevenbroek returns to the Classical sources to meaningfully recapture the Cape native people and thus renegotiate the popular contemporary European image about them.

Highlights

Europe’s Outward GazeBooks about ‘newly discovered’ peoples were as popular in 17th-century Europe as the novel is today. Overseas explorations continued to bring home knowledge of peoples that had existed on the pages of ancient books and in popular oral tradition but that until no European had seen with his own eyes
The Dutchman Johannes Willem van Grevenbroek (1644-circa 1726) was secretary of the Dutch East India Company’s Council of Policy at the Cape from 1684 to 1694
Marking the first permanent European settlement in modern-day South Africa, regular expeditions had been launched into its hinterland

Summary

Europe’s Outward Gaze

Books about ‘newly discovered’ peoples were as popular in 17th-century Europe as the novel is today. Overseas explorations continued to bring home knowledge of peoples that had existed on the pages of ancient books and in popular oral tradition but that until no European had seen with his own eyes. Two Dutch examples of books about a ‘new’ people are Kaffrarie of Lant der Kaffers, anders Hottentots genaemt (Kaffraria or Land of the Kafirs, named Hottentots) (1668) by Olfert Dapper, and Schediasma de Promontorio Bonae Spei; ejusve tractus incolis Hottentotis (A Short Account of the Cape of Good Hope and of the Hottentots who inhabit that region) (1686) by Willem ten Rhyne.. Two Dutch examples of books about a ‘new’ people are Kaffrarie of Lant der Kaffers, anders Hottentots genaemt (Kaffraria or Land of the Kafirs, named Hottentots) (1668) by Olfert Dapper, and Schediasma de Promontorio Bonae Spei; ejusve tractus incolis Hottentotis (A Short Account of the Cape of Good Hope and of the Hottentots who inhabit that region) (1686) by Willem ten Rhyne.5 They rank as the longest continuous treatises about the Khoi by Dutchmen from the decades preceding Grevenbroek’s letter. By the time Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape in 1652, the Khoi, bereft of human, Christian civility, had gradually come to confirm the trope of the

Such agnomens were not uncommon for Roman generals

Grevenbroek’s Introduction

Framing the World