Author Fred Khumalo refused to shake hands with Helen Zille at a literary event following her tweets about colonialism. In his novel 1795, Dan Sleigh portrays how Dutch officials at the Cape of Good Hope, used to scraping and bowing before each other, were eager to do what was a new thing: shake hands with rebellious burgers from Swellendam.
The officials needed the help of the smelly, donkey-riding frontiersmen to fight the British who had just arrived in a fleet in Simon’s Bay with orders to annex the Cape. Those handshakes were as symbolic of a new era then as Zille’s ostracisation by the commentariat may be in contemporary politics.
It also illustrates why greater accuracy is required when debating history. Whose colonialism is being discussed? The Dutch version, which wasn’t really a colony? The British manifestation, which regarded the Dutch, and later the Boers, as an inferior race? The colonialism of the Union of SA? The postcolonialism of apartheid?
Sleigh’s masterpiece, Eilande (recently translated as Islands), should be required reading for anyone wishing to understand SA. A professional archivist, he drew on his decades-long research in Cape archives to tell the story of the Khoi woman Krotoa and her descendants.
He describes how she was taken into Jan van Riebeeck’s household as near equal, and was probably the first speaker of Afrikaans. The segregationist ethos took root when the Van Riebeecks moved on, leaving a question fit for a counterfactual experiment: what if Van Riebeeck had remained governor of the halfway station for another few decades, using Krotoa as his go-between with the Khoi?
Similarly, Sleigh’s second undoubted masterpiece, 1795, prompts consideration of this possibility: what if the Dutch had beaten off the British at the Battle of Muizenberg, instead of meekly submitting in a farcical pretence at resistance, shot through with what some historians have described as one of the worst instances of treachery by a commander in all of military history? Would the country have become a republic along American lines 166 years before that actually happened?
He convincingly describes the germination of independence and self-determination ideas among the burgers, at a time when farmers at Swellendam and Graaff-Reinet had shaken off the corporatist hold of the declining Dutch East India Company — the world’s first multinational megacorporation that was only ever interested in SA as commercial property.
His main character is the aristocratic William van Reede van Oudshoorn, son of a former governor and member of the council appointed by the company to manage its property and maintain autocratic order.
In Eilande, Sleigh had already shown how ruthless this management was, with legal procedure frequently shoved aside and bodies of black and white alike swinging from the company’s gallows as standard entertainment. (Imagine modern SA ruled by a council appointed by Anglo American, in whose mines tens of thousands of workers died, and you might get a closer idea of what went down from 1652 to 1795).
In 1795, Van Oudshoorn comes up with a foolproof military plan to lure the British into a quick ambush centred around the Thermopylae-like neck on the seaward slopes of Muizenberg Mountain. The Dutch had fairly well-trained forces, sufficient artillery and entrenched redoubts, and above all, help offered by the Vryburgers (free burgers) and slaves from towns all over the Cape.
But he gradually discovers that the autocratic acting governor of the Cape, Abraham Sluysken, and military commander Sir Robert Gordon had what one might call a reverse Zille moment: they could see more good than bad coming from a future British colonial project.
With the slow-burning love affair with a Frenchwoman deftly mixed in, Sleigh presents a riveting account of how the initial resistance, fuelled by ideas from the French Revolution and America’s War of Independence, gets undermined by treachery and cowardice.
A constant refrain is how Sir Robert, after whom Gordon’s Bay is named, fails to personally lead the defence at Muizenberg, preferring to oversee the installation of hare-brained ramparts on the other, safer side of the peninsula.
The book’s 500-odd pages are filled with wonderful detail engaging all the senses – Sleigh’s ability to put himself in the muddy boots of soldiers, officials, farmers, slaves is a marvel. No wonder his book won SA’s richest literary award in 2014, the R200,000 Sanlam Groot Romanwedstryd.
The novel was written before the current prolonged debate on colonialism emanating from the #RhodesMustFall movement, but its English translation will only be good for it.
What it amply shows is that the black-white divide in the current discourse is so inaccurate that the reasons for its Manichean confabulations might turn out to be more significant than the content of the debate.
It also helps to disprove another key fallacy: that SA supposedly suffered under 350 years of colonialism. The largest part of the country has only ever been under full control of an effective state since the formation of the union in 1910.
SA’s history can be seen as a long battle by its citizens against the encroachments of foreign powers. Ideas about equality, accountability and liberal freedoms brought by the British since 1795, were regarded by many of the Cape Dutch’s descendants as ideological weapons wielded by hypocritical exploiters of local resources for pecuniary gain.
Their resistance ultimately gave rise to the disaster of apartheid, which in turn engendered the new disaster of occidentalism, where everything smacking of whiteness or westerness is deemed irretrievably bad.
Whites might feel better if they understood that colonialism did not discriminate as it devoured SA’s resources — witness the atrocities of the Anglo-Boer War. Colonialism privileged their forebears, and therefore them too, but that was by accident, not because of their genetic superiority.
Blacks need to understand that white history too is suffused with anticolonialism, and can be turned into a useful resource in the quest for equality. Black exceptionalism, which is really just a new racism, will only take SA back to where it was — to even before 1795.
1795
Dan Sleigh
Tafelberg
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