The Dutch Diaspora Boers, Apartheid and Passion

Abstract

In the introduction to her work on ‘colonial practice’ in the Ne Indies, the Dutch-American historian Frances Gouda quotes from sation in Harvard between Christopher Hitchens and Simon Schama the latter a renowned historian of the Dutch past. Hitchens posed a to Schama: how was it possible that Dutch culture, though reprc a ‘model of highly evolved religious tolerance and political plurali rently gave birth to a diaspora (he has Indonesia, Surinam and So1 in mind) that is ‘so disfigured by violence and bigotry’? Schama pointed out that Dutch political and religious tolerance was actually predicated on the need to foster profitable trade: it was a practical consideration rather than an idealism. We could add here that so much is almostcommon-sense in the Netherlands. However, Schama pointed out a tendencyof Dutch ‘self-invention’ that first expressed itself in the rise of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century and then in the rise of Afrikanerdom Africa. As Gouda rightly points out, following Schama's own work, the Dutch Republic rose from a ‘Protean feat of self-creation’ out ofan ‘amorphous assemblage of towns and villages’, in an act resembling parthenogenesis. She then adds that this ‘unique Dutch habit of self-invention may have also taken place elsewhere in the world.