Jan Van Riebeeck Research Articles

A Climate History of Early Dutch Settlement at Cape Town, 1652–62

This article uses historical and climatological methods to recontextualise the first decade of Dutch settlement at the Cape, 1652–62. It draws on weather data contained in the Journal of Jan van Riebeeck, natural proxies in the region, climate reanalysis and the global context of a particularly severe period during the Little Ice Age to reconstruct climatic conditions at monthly and seasonal scales for the decade under review. This reconstruction shows that the Dutch settled at a time of declining moisture at the Cape: relatively wet summers gave way to dry winters, while short-term droughts and deluges were regular occurrences. It then integrates this climatic context into an understanding of the history of this period. In so doing, it argues that adverse climatic conditions helped to undermine early Dutch designs on intensive agriculture, accelerated many free burghers’ initial transition towards pastoralism, shaped the timing and volume of the cattle trade between settlers and indigenous populations and exacerbated tensions that led to the first Khoikhoi–Dutch war (1659–60). It may also have enhanced the transmission of and deaths from disease, though the evidence in this instance is less conclusive. In short, a climate-historical perspective shows that adverse climatic and environmental factors critically affected many of the core themes that are already associated with the history of early Dutch settlement at the Cape.

Four female Khoisan language translators across three centuries of Cape history: a morphogenetic analysis

Female translators are highly atypical in South African colonial history. Yet four important female translators appear on the scene who, interestingly, all translated or interpreted into or from Khoesan languages. Therefore, apart from their marginalised position as women, these translators are also linked to marginalised languages. These translators are Krotoa, a Khoe interpreter employed by colonial administrator Jan van Riebeeck, Zara Schmelen, a Nama mission assistant and Bible translator, and Lucy Lloyd and Dorothea Bleek, so-called Bushman researchers and relatives of the famous philologist Wilhelm Bleek. This article is interested in the ways in which the work of these early female translators expressed social conditioning and in the characteristics of their agency within a restrictive social space. The hindering and enabling factors involved in these women’s practice of translation and interpreting is analysed and particular attention is paid to the ideological characteristics of their work. In the analysis of the social characteristics of translation, Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach is employed. Archer’s approach involves an investigation of structure, culture and agency and the ways in which these contribute to cycles of social change (morphogenesis) or maintenance (morphostasis). With regard to agency, the analysis is guided by Archer’s terms primary agency (which results from social rank), corporate agency (which results from social organisation) and social actorship (which results from the unification of personal identity with social roles). The research finds that chance and male sanctioning were present in these women’s involvement in translation, but that a strong exercise of agency was present which was personally motivated. Agency involved no organisation, however, and neither sought nor achieved social change. Yet, three of the four translators were able to achieve social actorship, whereby their role as translators was successfully united with their personal identity.

Die probleem van historiese skuld in Suid-Afrika The problem of historical guilt in South Africa

OPSOMMING Historiese skuld is ten beste 'n baie problematiese konsep. Dit word duidelik geïllustreer deur die Duitse geskiedenis sedert 1945, toe die Duitsers vir hulself rekenskap moes gee van hul optrede in die jare 1933-1945.1 Wié het wát aan wié gedoen? Wie besluit oor die vraag van skuld of onskuld van wie? En wie of wat gee hulle die reg om dit te doen? Welke morele of regsbeginsels word in die proses gebruik? Ook: Hoe ver moet in die tyd teruggegaan word? Na Columbus se aankoms in die Nuwe Wêreld in 1492? Na Jan van Riebeeck se koms na die Kaap in 1652? Na die "Scramble for Africa" in die negentiende eeu? Die verwoesting van die Boererepublieke en die groot sterfte van die Republikeinse burgerlike bevolking in die konsentrasiekampe in 1899-1902? Die begin van apartheid in 1948? Dit is vrae wat nie so maklik beantwoord kan word nie. Tog, gebeure wat 'n sekere morele grens oorskry - soos die volksmoord op die Jode in die Tweede Wereldoorlog, die Rwandese volksmoord van 1994, of die etniese "suiwering" in die Balkan in dieselfde tyd - het uitgekristalliseer in 'n bepaalde konsensus oor internasionale optrede rakende menseregte in die breedste sin van die woord, en dit is geformaliseer in 'n sekere juridiese benadering oor die saak. Oor die kwessie van historiese skuld in Suid-Afrika is, in elk geval op politieke vlak, reeds besluit. Die paradigma wat die ANC aan die Waarheids-en-Versoeningskommissie (WVK) voorgehou het - wat, met sekere nuanses, basies deur die WVK aanvaar is - was dat daar twee kante in die bevrydingstryd was. Oorvereenvoudig, was dit die "siegte ouens" (die apartheidsregering) teen die "goeie ouens" (die bevrydingsbewegings, veral die ANC/SAKP). Trefwoorde: Apartheid, kommunisme, ANC/SAKP, Nazisme, Karl Jaspers, Alfred Nzo, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, pres. FW de Klerk, Afrikanernasionalisme, Lenin, Gandhi, Albert Luthuli, Kabwe, MK, Chris Hani, WVK, Joe Slovo ABSTRACT South Africans are very quick to accuse one another of having been very bad in the past. Afrikaners are accused of severe race discrimination in the form of apartheid. They are portrayed as uniquely evil, almost as bad as the Nazi's in the Second World War. At the same time, especially the ANC/SACP is accused of severe transgressions, such as terrorism in the name of a freedom struggle, supportfor a totalitarian system in the form of Marxism-Leninism, and extreme intolerance of deviant viewpoints in the liberation movement. It would be wrong to view the matter in a simplified way, as the problem of historical guilt is a complex one. In this article, the problem is, firstly, examined from an ethical perspective. Apartheid must be recognised as - when viewed from a Christian viewpoint - immoral and wrong. The policy is examined in detail, with the conclusion that, while there were fleeting moments in which things could have developed more positively, these moments were still-born. Subsequently, the accusation that apartheid was akin to Nazism is examined. It is concluded that, while there were superficial similarities, the differences were too deep, in principle, to be taken seriously. Another aspect that should be seriously considered is why the Afrikaners actually acted in a particular way. Without defending what they had done, it is clear that they, in their own minds, were convinced that the very survival of Afrikaners as a people was at stake amidst threatening historical circumstances exemplified by the political, cultural and economic onslaught of British imperialism, as well as the looming shadow of a vastly superior majority of black people. Lastly, there is the question as to whether the ANC/SACP also has historical guilt to carry. In the light of the way in which the very Kremlin-loyal SACP during the years took over the leadership of the alliance, the answer must be yes. The alliance wanted to replace apartheid with Communism, a policy which has as severe ethical problems as may be ascribed to apartheid. Also, the alliance handled dissenters in an extremely intolerant way by locking them up in concentration camps, where they were treated very cruelly. It is hoped that a nuanced treatise like this could promote a public debate in South Africa. Keywords: Apartheid, communism, ANC/SACP, Nazis, Karl Jaspers, Alfred Nzo, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, President FW de Klerk, Afrikaner nationalism, Lenin, Gandhi, Albert Luthuli, Kabwe, MK, Chris Hani, TRC, Joe Slovo

The Classics at World’s End.

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.

(Un)Lawful Subjects of Company

This essay engages Cape Town – a city founded as a tavern of the seas linking Atlantic and Indian Ocean trade routes – by tracing the ways in which its foundation as seventeenth-century Dutch East India Company settlement resonates as metaphor through which to approach the contemporary corporate city. Rereading the Journal of Jan van Riebeeck through the lens of Ishtiyaq Shukri's The Silent Minaret and, particularly, Dan Sleigh's Islands, it explores the Journal's mutually informed production of crime and profit. It then turns to a set of recent thrillers – by Andrew Brown, Deon Meyer, Margie Orford, Roger Smith, Mike Nicol and Joanne Hitchens – as a way of reading the post-apartheid city. Finally, it engages Lauren Beukes' Moxyland, in which corporate Cape Town takes concrete form in a virtual society, before closing with reflections on the limits of the Company archive, the alternative archives it overwrote and erased and the potentialities of what it forecloses, including the common and the creole.

A Brief History of Wine in South Africa

Vitis vinifera was first planted in South Africa by the Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck in 1655. The first wine farms, in which the French Huguenots participated – were land grants given by another Dutchman, Simon Van der Stel. He also established (for himself) the Constantia estate. The Constantia wine later became one of the most celebrated wines in the world. The decline of the South African wine industry in the late 1800s was caused by the combination of natural disasters (mildew, phylloxera) and the consequences of wars and political events in Europe. Despite the reorganization imposed by the KWV cooperative, recovery was slow because of the embargo against the Apartheid regime. Since the 1990s, a large number of new wineries – often small family operations – have been created. South African wines are now available in many markets. Some of these wines can compete with the best in the world.

APIS VERBORUM

Examiners and moderators of Latin annually note that the biggest bane of Latin matriculants is inadequate command of vocabulary. The common core syllabus prescribes active command of the 1500 words contained in Smuts et aI., Lexis Latina (pretoria, Academica 1987), but matriculants have in the past seldom attained this goal. CASA-WP teachers have at last found a cure: for the second year running the WP-Branch teachers' sub-committee late in 1994 ran an Apis Verborum ("Word Bee"). Schools enter per standard. For each class a number of words from Lexis Latina is prescribed. Standardised texts are circulated to be taken at each school on a set date, and are marked by the local teacher. These are then submitted to the committee for moderation. Prizes are awarded not for individual achievement but for the average mark attained by the class as a whole. In 1994 the standard was exceptional: Jan van Riebeeck went off with first prize in Std. 10 with 98%, and also achieved two second places and two third places. The standard in the other classes was consistantly excellent: Herschel (std 9 winner) also achieved 98%, and this school's std 8 and 7 classes could not be bettered, with a 100% and 99% average mark , respectively. In std 6 the overall winners were Wynberg Girls' High, whose std 8 and 9 pupils were placed second in their respective standards.

The portraits of Simon van der Stel, first governor of the Cape

In the identification of portraits, often the wish is father to the thought. This is a tendency that is strikingly illustrated by the identification of a pair of Dirck Craey portraits from 1650, one of which was held until recently to be the official likeness of the founder of the Cape Colony, Jan van Riebeeck, and the other that of his first wife, Maria Quevellerius (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). The portrait expert Jonkheer F.G.L.O. van Kretschmar has denied the identity of the subjects on convincing grounds; indeed, he has demonstrated how this tendency played its part in the identification of these portraits in the past. 1 In the first place, it played its part in the minds of the 18th century owners of the portrait collection that included the two paintings. The owners wished to feel that they had in their possession an unbroken sequence of ancestral portraits, and so they furnished these two paintings with labels and coats of arms accordingly. Subsequently, the same tendency was shown by certain South African historians. Against a background of growing nationalism in South Africa, especially following the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 and the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, these historians began to take an interest in the long neglected founder of the South African nation. Gradually, their interest in Van Riebeeck turned into something very much like a cult, in which Maria Quevellerius was cast in the role of a mother of the fatherland, and along with which there went a deep-seated and justifiable wish for portraits of the founder and his wife. In such a euphoria of nationalist sentiment the identification of the Craey portraits was not conducted with too many scruples.

The portraits of Simon van der Stel, first governor of the Cape

In the identification of portraits, often the wish is father to the thought. This is a tendency that is strikingly illustrated by the identification of a pair of Dirck Craey portraits from 1650, one of which was held until recently to be the official likeness of the founder of the Cape Colony, Jan van Riebeeck, and the other that of his first wife, Maria Quevellerius (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). The portrait expert Jonkheer F.G.L.O. van Kretschmar has denied the identity of the subjects on convincing grounds; indeed, he has demonstrated how this tendency played its part in the identification of these portraits in the past. 1 In the first place, it played its part in the minds of the 18th century owners of the portrait collection that included the two paintings. The owners wished to feel that they had in their possession an unbroken sequence of ancestral portraits, and so they furnished these two paintings with labels and coats of arms accordingly. Subsequently, the same tendency was shown by certain South African historians. Against a background of growing nationalism in South Africa, especially following the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 and the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910, these historians began to take an interest in the long neglected founder of the South African nation. Gradually, their interest in Van Riebeeck turned into something very much like a cult, in which Maria Quevellerius was cast in the role of a mother of the fatherland, and along with which there went a deep-seated and justifiable wish for portraits of the founder and his wife. In such a euphoria of nationalist sentiment the identification of the Craey portraits was not conducted with too many scruples.

The Illusion of Freedom in South Africa: Post-colonialism, Exploitation and Identity Crisis in Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country

Colonization of Africa began in 1488 when the Portuguese explorer Bartolemeu Dias first sailed along the cost of South Africa and eventually arrived at the north of South Africa. Then the British sailors stopped briefly in the southwest of Africa on their way to India in the 1600s. In 1602, the Dutch East India Company was established to expand trade relationship with colonies in Asia by entering into a fierce rivalry with Britain, and Jan van Riebeeck brought in 1652 three Dutch East India Company ships with around 100 people to establish a station, and these people, known as Afrikaners, were the first white settlers of South Africa. By the end of the seventeenth century, the white population, including Dutch, German, and French, increased considerably in South Africa by killing, driving out or enslaving the indigenous peoples, and then the slave trade started.

Jan van Riebeeck as Pioneering Explorer and Conservator of Natural Resources at the Cape of Good Hope (1652-62)

Abstract The first decade of Dutch VOC occupation of South Africa's Cape of Good Hope has been ill served by environmental historians. An examination of the daily journals covering the first decade of settlement proves fruitful for historians interested in the origins of European exploration, exploitation and conservation of natural resources at the Cape. This settlement is moreover a unique example of seventeenth-century Dutch settlers establishing a cornucopia of food plants in the absence of indigenous agriculturalists, experimenting with species imported from the VOC's many bases. The difficulty of establishing what they may have learned from the indigenous peoples is addressed.

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

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. …

Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts (review)

Reviewed by: Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts Loren Kruger Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts By Leslie Witz Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2003. pp. ISBN 0-253-34271-6 cloth; 0-253-21613-3 paper. South Africa's first postapartheid decade (1994-2004) has seen competing attempts by educational institutions from schools to museums to neighborhood tour guides to create compelling histories of the present out of the conflicting pasts offered by colonial, neocolonial, apartheid, and resistance narratives. As Leslie Witz demonstrates, these attempts remain uneven as "contesting South Africa's national pasts" continues to be conducted in the streets as well as the halls of academe. In his persuasive account, the transformation of Jan van Riebeeck—from a Dutch East India Company official on temporary assignment at an insignificant African outpost in 1652 to the volksplanter, planter or founder of white South Africa honored, at the tercentenary of his arrival in 1952, not only with a national festival but also with pride of place on the country's currency and the status of original South African in the opening chapters [End Page 182] of history textbooks—acts as a touchstone of the changing stakes involved in writing and rewriting South African history since that initial contact. In this revision, Witz's project complements those of researchers such as Carolyn Hamilton, Shamiel Jeppie, Bhekizizwe Peterson, and Witz's frequent collaborator Ciraj Rassool, who have revised previously firm assumptions about clear-cut opposition between apartheid power and anti-apartheid struggle. Framed by current debates about South Africa's contested pasts and possible futures in the introduction and conclusion, Witz's study shows how different stakeholders created in Van Riebeeck the protagonist or antagonist of their national narrative and the architect of the material basis on which that narrative had been or might be turned into lived reality. From the Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to formal colonial regimes (briefly Dutch and later British) in the nineteenth and early twentieth to the technically if perversely postcolonial polities from the segregated union under the Commonwealth (1910-48) to the state of systematic apartheid (1948-90), to the antisegregation organizations or resistance movements contesting white supremacy in each of its phases, Van Riebeeck played a perhaps surprising leading role. The first chapter examines the tensions among "Van Riebeeck's pasts" from conflicting editions of a diary attributed to him in a series of school texts and other instructional histories that transform him from a transient Dutch official to the forefather, in early English accounts, of the British Cape Colony and on to foundation of a unified white South Africa. The rest of the book charts the planning, execution, and reception of the tercentenary celebrations in Cape Town. Chapters 2 and 3 plot the tensions among the predominantly Afrikaner Nationalist organizers to represent Van Riebeeck as ethnic volksplanter as well as founder of a nation encompassing English- as well as Afrikaans-speaking whites, the skeptical response of less nationalistic white liberals as well as sharp critique from opposition organizations especially the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM), while chapter 5 investigates the reactions of hinterland towns through which reconstructed "mail coaches" passed on their way to Cape Town. Chapter 4 focuses on the festival fair, which like its predecessors, the commemoration of the Union in Cape Town 1910 and the Empire Exhibition in Johannesburg (the first city outside Britain to play host to the British Empire) in 1936, and elsewhere, such as the 1886 Paris Exposition and the 1893 "white city" of the World Exposition in Chicago, offered an unsettled mixture of exhibitions of "modern" industry as the achievements of the "new" nation, and displays of "primitive" people allegedly left behind by white modernity. While Witz offers an unprecedented study of the Van Riebeeck tercentenary, the conditions that made it possible, and responses to the festival itself and the debates it engendered, he does not fully realize the promise of the introduction, to match this festival against other "journeys, festivals and the making of national pasts." To be sure, the introduction does compare the Van Riebeeck festival with the Columbus Quincentenary in the United States and Founder's...

Land Reform in South Africa: An Overview

South Africa suffered a long history of colonization, racial domination and land dispossession that resulted in the bulk of the agricultural land being owned by a white minority. Black people resisted being dispossessed but were defeated by the superior arms of the newcomers. As Lewin has written, “whatever minor causes there may have been for the many Bantu-European wars, the desire for land was the fundamental cause.” Despite the claims that South Africa was largely uninhabited at the time of the arrival of Europeans, documentary evidence shows that in fact the land was inhabited. Thus the journal of the first European to settle at the Cape, Jan van Riebeeck records incidents of confrontation with the indigenous Khoi-khoi (or Hottentots) in 1655.

In Search of a New National History: Debunking Old Heroes in Robert Kirby's The Secret Letters of Jan van Riebeeck

In Search of a New National History: Debunking Old Heroes in Robert Kirby's The Secret Letters of Jan van Riebeeck

The politics of black identity: Slave Ship and Woza Albert!

Both Apartheid South Africa and white America relied on images or representation to mediate and distort the identity of blacks. In the United States, the misrepresentation dates as far back as 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. In South Africa, the distortion predates 1652, the year Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape, but was intensified in 1948, when the nationalists came to power on an agenda of racial discrimination and separation. The enormous investments in the arts in both societies would ultimately create a semiotic ensemble that, while systematically erasing the identity of blacks, posited a white structure of value as the point of reference. Woza Albert! and Slave Ship are designed to counteract such images. As products of the Black Power Movement and the Black Consciousness Movement respectively, they constitute a mode of intervention, political and aesthetic, into a world or discourse that sought to annihilate blacks.

EVA'S MEN: GENDER AND POWER IN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE, 1652–74

Quite possibly, Eva, born Krotoa, is the most written about African woman in South African historiography. Her name fills the journals of the Dutch East India Company almost from the very start of their little feeding-station at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. She is known as a Khoena girl taken into Dutch commander Jan Van Riebeeck's household from the age of about twelve, who later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised, married Danish surgeon, Pieter Van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken prostitute after his death. Yet her persona remains an enigma. As Christina Landman put it, ‘Krotoa is a story-generator’.To conservative historians, Eva's life offers living proof that the Khoena were irredeemable savages. To black nationalist writers, such as Khoena historian, Yvette Abrahams, she personifies the widespread rape and abuse of black women by the invaders. Eva's chief biographer, V. C. Malherbe, forms a more neutral judgment by describing Eva as primarily ‘a woman in between’. Landman views her as an early synthesizer of African and Christian religious traditions. Carli Coetzee demonstrates how recent Afrikaans-speaking artists, poets and actors have constructed an image of Eva as the mother of the Afrikaner nation, a tamed African who acquiesced to Europeanness. She is often portrayed as yearning to return to her African roots, but without success.Virtually all of the representations of Eva construct her as a helpless victim of vicious culture clashes. Today's racial consciousness, laced with assumptions of inevitable African/European hostility, is often read back into the historical record. Frustratingly large gaps in that record leave room for a wide range of interpretations, depending heavily on the subjectivities of the historian. Virtually all previous writers, however, have judged Eva primarily by the tragic circumstances of her death, while minimizing the considerable achievements of her earlier years.

Comment

Comment Loren Kruger We all know where South Africa is, but we do not yet know what it is. —Albie Sachs This statement by Albie Sachs—former anti-apartheid activist, Constitutional Court judge, and most recently chair of the commission setting up a National Arts Council in South Africa—was first uttered at a meeting of the African National Congress in exile in 1989, but it is still apt today. The unifying energy of the anti-apartheid struggle has dissipated under the pressure of daily life and mundane politics. Without the binding force of a common enemy, discrepancies in economic and social conditions, as well as cultural conflict, are too powerful to permit easy appeals to a united national culture. In particular, the moral conviction that sustained several generations of theatre activists and cultural workers since the 1930s and that culminated in such memorable political theatre events as Sizwe Bansi is Dead (1972), Woza Albert (1981), and Born in the RSA (1985) has given way to a variety of not-quite-compatible political persuasions and cultural practices. “Blessed with a perfect confusion,” in the words of one character in Sophiatown (1986), the play that dramatized that township’s urban and intercultural legacy, theatre in South Africa is now more diverse but also more conflicted. The provocative image on our cover, for instance, would have been unthinkable in the days of struggle. Satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys’s appearance as Winnie Madikizela Mandela draped in a Nelson Mandela T-shirt does not simply present the spectacle of an “Afrikaner-Jewish drag queen” impersonating the woman known as “mother of the nation” (at least until she was dismissed from the Cabinet). Its hybridity also challenges South African audiences and performers to think skeptically about national icons and founding fictions when competing appeals for national, regional, and ethnic affiliation continue to echo across the country. The articles in this special issue on “Performing (in) South Africa,” take readers beyond (and before) the vivid and familiar images of anti-apartheid theatre to critical investigations of other performances with national aspirations, past and present. Most of the authors are practitioners as well as critics; all are based in South Africa. Researchers on the ground are in a unique position to map uncharted terrain and to open up new perspectives on well-trodden areas. In “Masques, Monuments, and Masons,” Peter Merrington draws on the theoretical work of Benedict Anderson and Jean-François Lyotard to analyze the South African Pageant of Union in 1910, and the local drama of the enmity and reconciliation of the “white races,” Boer and Briton, against the international backdrop of Masonic ritual and British imperial iconography from Canada to the Antipodes. Complementing Merrington’s historical investigation of the invention and performance of national tradition in a partially postcolonial South Africa is Jacqueline Maingard’s essay, “Imag(in)ing the Nation.” Her account of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Rugby World Cup, hosted by South Africa in 1995, shows the remarkable continuity of motifs and format between this “postapartheid” celebration of the “rainbow nation” and the pageants celebrating Union (1910) and the Tricentenary of Jan van Riebeeck’s landing at the Cape at the height of the apartheid era (1952). Taken together, these essays illuminate the unacknowledged legacy of South Africa’s conflicting pasts as well as the remarkable achievements of the present and so remind us of the difficulty as well as the necessity of coming to terms with those pasts in the present. Hazel Barnes’s essay, “Theatre for Reconciliation” directly addresses the roles that theatre and ritual may play in working through the past in the present. Her account of her production of Desire, a play by anthropologist David Lan about reconciliation in the wake of the Zimbabwean struggle for independence, draws on Victor Turner’s reflections on social drama as well as the interaction of student actors and spectators from different backgrounds. She shows how the performance and reception of conflict and redress in the theatre might foster the kind of thought and feeling necessary for reconciliation, while acknowledging that the translation of theatrical into social action is a difficult and delicate operation, especially in strife-torn...

The Rainbow Nation Identity and Transformation

In Cape Town's Kirstenbosch Botanic Gardens are the remains of a hedge of bitter almonds, planted by Jan van Riebeeck in February 1660 to protect the settlement, the grain farms and the forests from the Khoikhoi, who inhabited the area when the Dutch arrived. Planted in a half moon and punctuated by watch-towers, it effectively isolated the settlers from the African continent. The bitter-almond hedge grew into the apartheid divisions that ran through every aspect of life in South Africa, and that invaded the psyche of the nation1 (Fig. 1). Since the first democratic elections held in South

THE WITNESS OF THE REFORMED CHURCHES IN SOUTH AFRICA

Some information about churches With exception of a few smaller groupings of churches in South Africa are based in Afrikaans-speaking(1) communities.(2) For purposes of this article read Reformed where title says Reformed. The largest of these churches (the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk -- NGK) is in fact organized into four separate racial(3) churches, and explicitly speaks of itself as a family of The second largest Afrikaans church (the Nederduitsche Hervormde Kerk -- NHK) has an infamous Article III in its constitution which states that only whites may be members. A third (the Gereformeerde Kerke -- GK, of which current president, F.W. de Klerk, is an active member) is strongly Calvinistic and has a strong majority of whites. Together these Dutch churches (with their black offshoots -- see later) represent largest religious grouping in South Africa, with exception of African independent churches. A privileged past The Dutch Church (DRC) was planted in 1652 at southern tip of Africa when a Dutch settlement came into being at Cape of Good Hope. This settlement was a commercial enterprise of Dutch East India Company, which needed a halfway station en route to east. However, a formal prayer was part of prescribed ritual when Jan van Riebeeck stepped ashore. The prayer mentioned planting of the true Christian Religion among wild and brutal men (Du Plessis 1911:23). For a century and a half this church was official -- and for all practical purposes only -- church in settlement. The company controlled it, but that didn't bother anybody, because to be Dutch meant being Christian of (Calvinistic) extraction. The company only formalized this. The church's position was a privileged one, but it implied a grave responsibility. Basically church was religious arm of government, looking after religious needs of colonists. But christianization of indigenous Khoikhoi people, whom they encountered in their efforts to barter fresh meat and other products, was also contemplated. The people charged with pastoral oversight of settlers were expected to deal also with natives. The relations with these people were always dualistic: as children of their time Dutch had romantic notions of noble savages, but on other hand never questioned absolute superiority of their own culture and religion. They had a benevolent paternalistic attitude, but it easily turned negative when they encountered difficulties. Nevertheless, records show that a number of Khoikhoi were welcomed into Christian fold, even though relations were generally less than cordial. The same happened with some slaves from Indonesia as well as elsewhere in Africa (Du Plessis 1911:29-35). But strict ruling that converted slaves were freed didn't really make evangelization popular! By nineteenth century colonial era arrived when European governments themselves took responsibility for Cape. The colonial government (Dutch, and later British) still had authority over church, but other persuasions were also allowed. It was only in 1824 that church could convene its first synodical meeting, but already at this first session decided to embark on missionary work (Crafford 1982:36). The next quarter of a century was an extremely traumatic one for Dutch Church at Cape. General dissatisfaction with colonial government's handling of clashes with Xhosa peoples on eastern frontiers led many farmers and townspeople to leave colony. This they did against explicit wishes and advice of church leaders. The result of so-called Great Trek was founding of free Boer Republics in north. …