465 WEEK 3 Lecture
You’ve had an introduction to South Africa after 1994 elections, and the politics
of the Struggle against Apartheid.
Apartheid necessitated silences, suppressions, and maintained, brutally a culture
of denial.
I just found out, for instance, on this visit, that Simon van der Stel, the first (and
crazy) governor of Stellenbosh – a very, very segregated whites-only town build
around South Africa’s vineyards – that he was an “Anglo-Indian”…such “mixing”
of a figure of importance would have been completely erased and denied.
The most interesting historical work coming out of South Africa right now are the
stories that open up those silences, and “storify” those silences, and reveal the
hidden multiplicity of South African ancestry. People are finding out that pretty
much all South Africans have a Khoi/san or slave or white ancestor – no matter if
they are dark as the rolling hills-of Kwa-Zulu Natal and Zulu, or blue-as-the
cornflower eyed Afrkaner.
And the slave history of South Africa – particularly in the Cape – and the history
of the countless indentured servants brought to Durban and Johannesburg from
India is making for some of the most interesting explorations about our shared –
but hidden - ancestry.
1658: six years after the establishment of a “refreshment stand” at the cape by
Van Riebeek, two shiploads of West Africans were brought to the Cape. During
the next century and a half, approx. 63,000 captives were brought here.
In 1838, 36,000 slaves were released from slavery after a 4-year
“appprentenceship”, and allowed to take charge of their own poverty, says Jackie
Loos (7).
11: 1807 Abolition of Oceanic slave trade; but slaves were in bondage til
1837 ..
_Many contradictions to this slavery and indentured labour…Slaves were unfree
in every sense, but also allowed to go to mosque/religious services by some
masters – not like US slavery at all. Extra-maritial sex was widespread (many of
those who arrived in the cape were ill-educated, unattached sailors and labourers
from Northern Europe), and the Slave Lodge in the heart of the city
became/doubled as the city’s brothel.
-Also about 1,000”mixed” marriages are recorded – the Dutch custom of Women
not changing names helps us trace ancestry 99) .
Why would this history be suppressed – by BOTH those who were the powerful –
and those who were the less powerful? Why would those descendants of slaves
not speak of it/deny it? Why would those of “coloured” background never want to
say that they have any “San” in them? (the san are called “bushmen” – does that
give you a clue?)
The reality of the settlement at the cape was that many European sailors who
came there took local “wives” or concubines. Their offspring became “natives” of
that location, AND had ties to the “motherland” of the location that their fathers
came from – they have that “cross-eyed” state - of being in both locations of
Empire…
- What’s important is that those who are “dispersed” by the Empires of Modernity
is that they understand themselves to be part of kinship/linked by bonds to BOTH
places
-And these bonds exist as long as people read, write, narrate or speak, or
otherwise “represent the self”. In the fist book that you will read, Rayda Jacobs’
The Slave Book, cooking and the practice of one’s faith becomes the most
important means of maintaining ties to the location from which slaves in the Cape
were dislocated.
_these representations of the self – especially narrations of ancestors, food, and
religious practice are the most enduring forms through which we remind
ourselves of persons, places, and lives from which we are now absent. Long
after language has been forgotten, cooking and cultural practices passed
on by mothers remain…
We in America do that…
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Cape Town is a place watered by the sea. And port cities, as places
that make their living from the sea – are ever-aware of the capricious
source of their sustenance.
Before the Europeans ever mapped their voyages of discovery, there was
the Hadramis, the the Gujaratis, the Chettiars, the Bohras, the
Malays, and the Bugunesse who traded throughout the Indian ocean
lands.
The “HADRAMI” seafarers: a gulf nation near the present-day Yemen.
Hadramis differed from their Euro counterparts in that on engaging the
Indian Ocean, they were NOT backed by an equally mobile armed
state.
The Portuguese, the dutch, and the English, who arrived in the Indian
Ocean later, were traders who brought their states with them – they
created militarised trading post stations. Wherever you go around the
coast of Africa and Asia, you find Dutch and Portuguese Forts – in Cape
Town, in Mombassa, in Colombo – the same architecture!
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The sea that sustains the nation/city state is therefore also the
course of trouble – of desire – others see your ties, trade agreements,
maps, knowledge of the winds, trade routes, etc. and want them. And
those who live in cities created by seafaring trade tend to be both open
and closed at the same time: engaging intensely with others and
otherness, and yet, at the same time, deeply distrustful of what
comes from across the sea – it makes for a schizophrenic self and
society.
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When travellers came to the Cape in the 17th and 18th Centuries, they found an
immature and inefficient economy, says Jackie Loos in Echoes of Slavery.
They regarded slavery as a necessary evil.
Slaves were brought from their trading posts from around the Indian Ocean –
Indians, Malays, Indonesians, Celonese, Javanese, Arabs, and people from
Madagascar, Mozambique, and even a few slaves from East Africa. If the rulers
– religious or political – made trouble in some other colony, they were brought to
the Cape – to be “marooned” or exiled. An Imam from Sri Lanka is one of those
famous first figures of Islam in South Africa.
-The language used was the language that the slaves used – not the “official
Dutch” of the settlers – why do you think that happens?
-Descriptions of the people: the European settlers are described as fat and
lazy…intolerant and abusive…Lady Anne Barnard of the colonial secretary
describes how she was seen as too tolerant of her slaves (2).
SO: this is, indeed, a very tangled society
This is not a strictly black and white slave society. There were aristocratic Arabs
who came to visit the cape – Abu Talib ibn Muhammed Khan OF Persia was a
visitor who had much to say in his diary (2-5).
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