The Side of the Sun at Noon flipping preview

Hazel Crampton

The Side of the Sun at Noon

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Hazel Crampton

The Side of the Sun at Noon A QUEST

Hazel Crampton

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First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2014 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +2711 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za Š Hazel Crampton, 2014 All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-4314-0940-2 Also available as an ebook: 978-1-4314-0941-9 d-PDF 978-1-4314-0942-6 ePUB 978-1-4314-0943-3 mobi file Cover design by publicide Unless otherwise stated, all maps, drawings and photographs are the work of the author.

Cover portrait of Eva courtesy of Special Collections, South African National Library, Cape Town Set in Minion Pro 11/16pt Job no. 002208 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za iv

Hazel Crampton

for

Jeremy deeply madly truly

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Acknowledgements

My deepest thanks to Jeremy Pickering, our beautiful kids Ky and Kashka Crampton, and Adam and Anna Pickering, and friends and fellow-travellers Dave de la Harpe, Professor Etienne Nel, Peter Reed, Juli Lotter, Fi Macleod, Reneilwe Malatji, Sue Jowell, Meindert Paul Honig, Didi Moyle, Judy and Dimitri Repanis, Aslam Seedat and Diana Cilliers.

Special thanks, too, to Laurence Wright and Maggie Davey, and the staff of the Cory Library for Historical Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown.

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Contents

Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Chapter 1: Eva. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chapter 2: The mysterious Chobona. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Chapter 3: Sex, drugs, rock and drol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Blogue 1: Crooks’ Corner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Chapter 4: On the side of the sun at noon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Chapter 5: Land of an angry God. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Blogue 2: ‘We were once white men’. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Chapter 6: The lake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Chapter 7: The explorer who got lost. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 Blogue 3: The journal that got found. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Chapter 8: Riding on elephants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Chapter 9: The Big Blank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271 Blogue 4: Making Mzanzi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 Chapter 10: Closing the circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302 Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 Notes & Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Endnotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 466 vii

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Prologue

A few years ago I wrote a book. It was called The Sunburnt Queen, the true story of a little English girl called Bessie who was cast away on the Wild Coast of South Africa about 250 years ago. It almost killed me. Writing and researching it took me about 10 years during which time my sons and I travelled thousands of kilometres, moved towns, and had wonderful adventures. But it was tough. Kash and Ky grew up with that peculiar syndrome that afflicts writers’ kids, the absent-even-whenpresent parent, plugged into inner-space more than reality, and with a raised fork and thousand-metre stare at the dinner table.

At the end of it all they said: Promise you won’t write another book. I promised. It was easy. The book was done, the obsession was over and I had no intention of ever writing another one.

I lied. I had already stumbled on the strange story of the Chobona and their lost stone cities and, once bitten, was far from shy. It was completely beyond my control. I had to find them.

I pored over maps from the Cape to the mighty Gariep (Orange) river far to the north, to the great stretches of the Kgalagadi sands beyond it and the diamond-rich earth of Botswana; to the banks of the Limpopo and the thousands of stone ruins that lie beyond that, spreading across the grasslands and kopjes to the Zambezi in the north and the jagged escarpment in the east, where heaven falls to earth and the great coastal plains of Mozambique sprawl down to the shores of the Indian Ocean.

I looked at modern maps, I looked at ancient maps. I looked at old viii

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hunters’ and missionaries’ routes, at geological maps and population maps, and as my collection grew the maps became increasingly detailed in scale. I serviced my 4x4, put on spanking new tyres all round and dug out our passports. Kash was 10, Ky was 11, we were going exploring.

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CHAPTER 1

Eva

Eva was just nine years old when the men-through-whose-ears-thesun-shone arrived at the Cape, bearing the seeds of her destruction.

It was the seventh of April, in the middle of the southern autumn, when they landed. As the first stranger took his first step ashore, in that moment centuries and centuries of finely-tuned tradition and delicately-wrought custom began to unravel. It was a process that was perhaps inevitable, certainly unstoppable. And in her own small way, Eva contributed to it. In a sense she was an innocent, a mere conduit, but she knew things, things she shared with the strangers which were not secrets but perhaps should have been, and these things sparked in their breasts, and in their Commander’s in particular, unquenchable curiosity, greed and a yearning for fame and fortune which would irrevocably alter the fate of her people and the course of her own life.

For it was from her lips that the Dutch new-comers would first hear the strange stories of the Chobona, a mysterious long-haired people who lived deep in the hinterland in houses of stone and were rich in gold.

From then on, nothing would ever be the same again.

The strangers came heavily armed and they moved quickly. On their very first day ashore their leader selected a site for a Fort to be built, marking out the foundations on a flat plain beside the sea in the shadow of a great flat-topped mountain which they called the Table, and within two days they had begun building their fortifications.1 Within three weeks the first of its four bastions was completed – equipped 1

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with cannon in case of ‘an unexpected attack of the savages’, wrote their Commander2 – and another begun.

Eva’s people did not try to stop the strangers or interfere in any way, although it was their land on which the Fort was being built. To the Khoikhoi3 the idea that land could be privately owned was as ridiculous as claiming ownership of the wind. They believed that the land, like the air we breathe, belonged to all. A slender coffee-coloured people, they were semi-nomadic pastoralists who practised seasonal transhumance, grazing their herds on the lush grasses of the Cape Peninsula that followed the winter rains and moving them back eastwards in the dry summers. They were used to sharing their grazing and water with others.

They were used to Europeans visiting their shores, and used to trading with them. Generally speaking the relationship was mutually beneficial and, barring a few isolated incidents, had been so since the sea-borne trade between Europe and the East began in the late 1400s.

If the Khoikhoi had any reservations about the Europeans it was their habit of farting. They themselves did not publicly break wind or belch, and expressed their disgust ‘pretty sharply’ when the Dutchmen did.4 But the Dutch had other, far more objectionable traits than flatulence.

In their short time in the East they had not conducted themselves with any great civility towards the indigenous people. Treaties of ‘protection’ were usually extracted under duress and any infringements were met with violent reprisal.5 Sex-starved crews and arrogant officials acted with the same measure of contempt for cultural courtesies, and the Dutch were deservedly feared and loathed. They were pretty awful to their European rivals too. An English trader incarcerated in the Dutch East Indies in 1618 complained that they kept twelve of us in a dungeon where they pisst and shatt upon our heads and in this manner we lay until we were broken out from toe to toe like lepers, having nothing to eate but dutie rice and stinking raine water.

Throughout this ordeal a fellow prisoner, Kellum Throgmorton, found solace in the belief that ‘God will provide for his servants, though he 2

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give these Horse-turds leave to domineere a while’.6 Perhaps He did. But life is seldom as fair as we would wish it, and at the Cape the Horse-turds were all set to ‘domineere’ some more. When the Fort was excavated by archaeologists in 1983, artefacts found beneath it and in the surrounding beach-sand indicated that it had been occupied by the Khoikhoi long before the arrival of the Europeans, and that they considered it a prime site. By choosing to build their fortifications right there the Dutch were sending a clear signal of supremacy to its previous occupants. The Khoikhoi’s ousting was a sign of things to come, the beginning of a pattern which was to be repeated again and again over the next few hundred years: that, as one commentator puts it, ‘the white man did not share – he possessed, and excluded’.7 Yet, to Eva and her fellow Khoikhoi, the men building the Fort did not at first appear threatening. In time their numbers would grow alarmingly, but to begin with there were only 100 of them.8 Although they are usually referred to as ‘the Dutch’, the majority was not: 91 were German and seven Scottish or English.9 One of the few genuine Hollanders was the gardener, serendipitously named Boom (‘tree’).10 At their head and driving them on was Jan Antonyssen van Riebeeck, also known as ‘Little Thornback’. It was a cruel if apt nickname. Tenacious, driven and demanding, Van Riebeeck was, by modern standards, diminutive. Humans are known to have increased in height in recent centuries, but even at a time when the average man was much shorter than today he was referred to as een klein kereltje, ‘a little chappie’ and, less flatteringly, de luttel rogh, ‘the little rogue’.11 In later centuries as the Dutchmen’s descendants, the Afrikaners, emerged as a new political power, certain myths grew up around Van Riebeeck, springing from and nurturing the ideological needs of the tribe. The Afrikaners weren’t just descended from the colonists, as some of them liked to believe, but also from Khoikhoi and black slave women: at least one in 10 white South Africans today has DNA of African origin.12 Yet, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Afrikaners chose to maintain that they were of pure race, and of pure white race at that. It was a whitewash of spectacular proportions, but 3

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the architects of apartheid, ignoring their many black ancestors, focused instead on the other-than-sexual activities of their white patresfamilias.

As the foremost among them, the symbolic father-figure Jan van Riebeeck evolved into a towering giant of the new nationalism.

His growth in stature was not just figurative. By the mid-20th century, with help from writers such as C Louis Leipoldt, Van Riebeeck, who barely cleared five feet in his socks, had grown to a height of almost six feet.13 The handsome portrait which graced South Africa’s old R10 banknotes was the product of a similar subterfuge. It was not, as it purported to be, the face of Van Riebeeck, who had rather bloated features and a double chin, but of someone else entirely, an altogether better-looking individual by the name of Vermuyden.14 Van Riebeeck’s reputation as the Founding Father of South Africa is also a little shaky as his stay at the Cape lasted barely a decade. He repeatedly begged to be transferred, and many of his ‘settlers’ were just as unsettled – in 1660 alone, 44 out of a total of 70 free burghers stole away aboard ships bound for the Netherlands.15 For Van Riebeeck the Cape was merely a stepping stone to greater opportunities. The Dutch East India Company never intended establishing a permanent Colony at the Cape, and he himself saw his posting as a temporary affair. Senior Merchant Van Riebeeck, as his title affirms, was not a settler but, first and foremost, a trader: Van Riebeeck was a buyer. He was the servant of a trading company, and his preoccupation, from the day he landed in South Africa until the day he left, was with the cattle trade, to provide food for his men and fresh supplies for scurvy-ridden ships... The lives of his men, and his countrymen on the passing ships, as well as his own career, depended upon his success.16

When Eva was born, in the mid-1600s, the sea-borne spice trade between Europe and the East was not only highly lucrative but highly competitive, with ships of practically every European nation jockeying for paramount position, power and profit. Against the grand, sweeping 4

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backdrop of adventure and avarice that characterised the Eastern maritime trade, veggies seem a humble and very un-sexy detail, barely worthy of mention. Yet access to fresh provisions was vital in keeping the whole edifice afloat – literally. To combat scurvy, the debilitating vitamin-deficiency disease, fresh fruit and vegetables were essential to the health and even survival of the crews that manned and maintained the ships bearing the wealth of the Indies back to Europe, thereby keeping investors like the Dutch East India Company coming back for more.

For centuries Europe and the Near East had obtained their spices from the Indies. Spices were the basis of many medicines, added flavour to a variety of foodstuffs, and were particularly valued as preservatives.

Indian spices were used by the Egyptians to embalm their dead. The Europeans used spices to preserve meat which was freshly available for only a few months of the year and which without them would have been not only unpalatable but inedible.17 With the establishment of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century, effectively blocking the overland route between India and Europe,18 spices became scarcer and even more sought after than ever before.

Wealth, it was said, ‘could be measured in spices’: men were prepared to die in search of them, and many did; no gift was more acceptable, and to be well supplied was a mark of status...19

The race to find an alternative route to the source of these spices, and many other wonders – such as silks, damasks and saltpetre, an essential ingredient in making gunpowder – was won by the Portuguese in 1498 when Vasco da Gama broke through to the East by sailing around the southern tip of Africa and up its eastern seaboard to the flourishing and cosmopolitan trading centre of Malindi.

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At that time trade between Africa and India was dominated by the Arabs and Indians. Their pilots and navigators knew the secrets of the seasonal monsoon winds blowing between the two continents, and it was from them that the European mariners obtained their own knowledge. It was an Indian pilot, Malemo Cana of Gujarat, who guided Da Gama from Malindi across the ocean to India. Cana, who was ‘so expert in navigation that being shown an astrolabe he took little notice of it, as one who was used to more considerable instruments’,20 showed da Gama a chart of the whole coast of India arranged in the Moorish fashion, that is divided into very small squares by meridians and parallels, without any other indication of the winds, for as the squares of these meridians and parallels were very small, the coast in the two directions north to south and east to west was very clear, and there was not that multiplication of winds and points of the compass common to our charts, which serve as sources of information for others.21

It was from Cana that the Portuguese learnt how to use the southwesterly monsoon to sail from the east African coast to India, and the north-easterly monsoons of February and March to blow their vessels back towards Africa on their return to Europe. This information was priceless; the Portuguese would have killed for far less than Cana gave them, and it is not surprising that da Gama ‘looked upon him as a great treasure’.22 The Arabs, who subsequently lost their monopoly of the Indian Ocean trade, remember him less fondly – as a drunkard ‘bewitched by the Portugal admiral’.23 For the Portuguese the maritime trade with the East brought unimaginable wealth. But the cost was high. A great number of the ships and sailors that left Portugal every year for the Indies failed to return.

The causes were multifarious but included poor navigation, faulty charts, scurvy, overloading and treacherous weather. So many vessels were lost that Portuguese sailors on the East Indian route had a special prayer for the Virgin Mary: 6

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Hazel Crampton We humbly beg you to bring safely to port your familiar and unworthy servants, the mariners who on the terrible and tempestuous seas of the Indies, which they sail not so much through greed and a desire for earthly possessions as for the benefit and good of the common people, are never far from danger...24

Despite their denial greed was a factor, the main motivation, in fact. In Europe spices were literally worth their weight in gold. In a single year, 1585, the German Treasury paid Portugal more than 1½ metric tonnes of gold for pepper alone.25 A wave of European traders and adventurers turned to the East for fame and fortune. As the sea-borne traffic increased in volume, more and more vessels, of all European nationalities, began to make use of the bay beneath the great table-topped mountain at the southern tip of Africa. Situated roughly half way between Europe and India, and blessed with fresh water, great herds of livestock and an abundance of fish and fowl, the Cape was a convenient and increasingly popular stop-over on the long outward- and homeward-bound voyages, where captains could replenish their supplies and sailors stricken with scurvy, beriberi and other shipboard diseases could recover their health. A delighted, somewhat syntactically-challenged, visitor wrote in 1644: Immediately, on the day of our arrival, we brought some of our sails ashore and pitched two tents, one for the healthy and one for the ailing. There were about sixty sick people but thank God they were all soon well again, because there is good fresh water here, all kinds of fruits, garden and kitchen herbs and roots, parsley as well as Dutch fetticus. The Portuguese, English and Dutch originally planted them here and now they propagate by means of self-seeding. There are also hares, steenbuck, buck, cattle, sheep, lions as well as all kinds of birds such as ostriches, spoonbills and penguins. Lovely rivers full of fish which we called five finger fishes because they have five blue marks on each side and in shape they were like mackerel, there are also steenbras, sardines and bass. Also many small tortoises which the Dutch like to eat and which taste like chicken.26 7

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The Cape had the added advantage of having a healthy, malaria-free climate and mild-mannered indigenes – on the whole, for the Khoi could, and would, take up arms if necessary. A fragment of handwriting found in England during renovations to a house in the 1980s, describes one such incident some twenty years before the above account was written.

Stuck face-down on an old parish tax list for Hartpury, Gloucestershire, the fragment was part of a letter addressed ‘To my loving frend Judeth’.

Written in ‘olde’ English, quaintly phonetic and virtually devoid of punctuation, it is at once awkward and heartfelt, the distress of its author as immediate as the day it was written, all those centuries ago, and one can imagine the shock and grief with which it was received.

Judeth Calzey I have reserved your letarse with your tokens for which I rest indeted to you with many thanks I think that if you com up this sumar you may have your husbandes wairs and your sarvantes that which is due to them but you must content your selfe with Ill newse for your husband with your sarvant James and William Page and Eaight more waire slayne by the black people at the Cape by going on shore and Mr. Clifinger verie much hurt I coold have sent you word a month since but I was loth to bee that ill mesingar but you give god the glorie for all you shall heare the next returne wherin you shall Receve his wairs and ... them I rest Ratlif this third of Februarie 1620.

Youre frend in what i may, Nathaniell Gosse.27

We don’t know exactly who the victims were but they probably belonged to a pinnace called the Rose, which stopped over at the Cape on its way back from the Indies in January 1620, and where a ‘most tragicall and woefull accident’ occurred. While fishing in the Salt river some of its men were attacked by a party of Khoikhoi. Only four bodies were recovered, and the survivors were unable to explain what had provoked the violence, other than that it may have been in retaliation for ‘some wrong offered by the Dutch lately gone hence’.28 Incidents such as these, however, seem to have been the exception 8

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rather than the rule, and as the struggle for domination of the sea route to the Indies escalated, so did the value and desirability of the Cape. It was only a matter of time before a rival European nation recognised the advantages of seizing this strategic prize for itself and monopolising its benefits. And that is exactly what happened.

Jan van Riebeeck, a naval surgeon’s mate who had made several voyages to the East, was among the Cape’s many visitors.29 When the Dutch East Indiaman, the Haarlem, was wrecked in Table Bay in 1647, near what is now Paarden Eiland, Jan van Riebeeck spent 18 days there as part of the rescue team. What he and his comrades had seen so impressed them that they sent a memorandum to the Directors of the Dutch East India Company recommending the establishment of a refreshment station at the Cape, to replace St Helena which had been virtually stripped of hogs and fruit by seamen.30 They stressed the peaceful nature of the indigenous Khoikhoi. On the odd occasion that the latter did kill Europeans, they noted, it was ‘more out of revenge for taking their cattle’, than for purposes of cannibalism.31 All of which must have been very reassuring. When the Company in due course acted on the recommendation, it was Van Riebeeck they chose to oversee the station’s establishment.

For the 34-year-old Van Riebeeck it was a golden opportunity. Once a rising star in the Dutch East India Company he had been dismissed and sent back to the Netherlands in disgrace for engaging in private trade at the Company’s expense.32 His appointment to the Cape was a chance to redeem himself and win promotion back to the honey-pot of the East, ‘the goal of his ambition’.33 Van Riebeeck had no intention of staying any longer at the Cape than it would take to fulfill his mandate, and it was probably largely because he saw it as a temporary halt on his way back to the East that he brought his wife Maria de la Quellerie and infant son Lambertus with him. He also brought along Elizabeth and Sebastiana van Opdorp, the daughters of his sister.34 The family was already sizable and would soon grow larger still.

In October 1653, a year and a half after their arrival at the Cape, Van Riebeeck’s wife, Maria, was delivered of a son whom they named 9

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Abraham. The household now consisted of two adults, two infants and Van Riebeeck’s two nieces. With the Company’s sick-comforter,35 who also had a young family, Van Riebeeck hatched a plan to recruit Khoi children to live in their homes and assist with the house-work.36 And that is how Eva came into his life.

The experiment wasn’t particularly successful. Khoikhoi children were accustomed to a lot more freedom than the average European child and found the European routines, clothing and domestic duties overly restrictive: ‘they are like the birds that prefer ranging the open air to living in the finest halls of kings’, wrote Van Riebeeck.37Accustomed to running most did exactly that, and fled.

But at least one stayed. Eva. It was to cost her dearly.

Eva was probably introduced to Van Riebeeck through her uncle, Autshumao. The English called him Harry, others King Harry or Harry the Hotnot. Nowadays of course Hotnot and Hottentot are offensive terms, but as ‘Harry’ he got off relatively lightly: other Khoi elders were given even more contemptuous names. Carabinga, for example, was called ‘Flat-nose’, Guasso ‘Big Navel’, and Danhou ‘Raw’.38 To be fair the Dutch penchant for nasty nomenclature was not limited to the Khoi – their own surnames included Onkruid (weed), Kruigwagen (wheelbarrow) and Niemand (nobody), Borstlap (baby’s bib) and even Piel (penis).39 Autshumao was one of the first Khoikhoi Van Riebeeck met on his arrival at the Cape, in fact on his very first day ashore, and whom he describes in his journal as ‘the Hottentot who speaks English’.40 It’s a startling statement.

Van Riebeeck had just landed on the southern-most shores of the African continent, a world away from Europe. Besides the huddle of newly arrived Dutchmen, there was not another European for thousands of kilometres. The only other human beings around, it appeared, were a bunch of savages who dressed in animal skins and smeared their bodies so heavily with animal fats and pigment that they shone ‘like looking-

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glasses in the sun’,41 and gave off an exceedingly rancid smell; who spoke a guttural, clicking language so unintelligible that one European described them as ‘farting with their tongues’42 – and here was one speaking English!

His ability to do so, like his name, was both product and proof of Autshumao’s prolonged contact with English mariners and merchants.

He had the dubious honour of being the first Postmaster of the Cape,43 and twenty-odd years before had sailed to Bantam, the English trading settlement in north-western Java (Indonesia).44 Nor was Autshumao the only Cape Khoi to have been abroad. In 1644 Jurgen Andersen, a soldier of the Dutch East India Company, met another young Khoi man who had learnt to speak English in the East: ‘the English had taken him to India against his will, he was with them for three years, and now they had brought him back three months ago’.45 This wasn’t the first or only time the Europeans had abducted Khoikhoi. In 1613, for example, two Khoi men were seized against their will and taken to England. At the time the English were seriously considering establishing a refreshment station at the Cape to service their East Indian sea route. They were hoping to learn more about the place and its people from their captives, but things didn’t quite pan out the way they had planned. One of the kidnapped men died before reaching England and the other, whose name was Xhore, was so homesick he threw himself to the ground ‘daily’, crying out in in broken – but rapidly improving – English, ‘Coree home go... home go’.46 By the time he finally did six months later, Xhore had learnt far more about the English than they had about him. While they had not learnt to speak his language he had learnt theirs and understood the importance of the Cape’s fresh produce to their crews. Back at the Cape he put his knowledge to immediate use, increasing the price of livestock, boosting his people’s profits, and incurring the wrath of his erstwhile hosts, who thereafter referred to him as ‘that dogge Corye’.47 Unlike Xhore’s trip to England, Autshumao’s voyage to the East appears to have been voluntary, since he willingly boarded a large English

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vessel on at least one later occasion.48 Natural curiosity, the possibility of earning provisions and other perks, such as rice and clothing, and the opportunity to learn the language and customs of these potential trading partners, may all have motivated him. The risk was worth it.

The benefits he later reaped as an interpreter, intermediary and as a trader in ‘Cowes, Piggs, Henns and Chickins’ may be judged by the fact that by 1634, just two years after his return from the East, Autshumao dressed ‘in English habit from head to foote’ and was chief of over 60 men, women and children.49 It was surely no coincidence that he was one of the first Khokhoi that Van Riebeeck met as he stepped ashore.

Autshumao was waiting for him.

Autshumao’s people were Strandlopers, or beach combers. They were said to have no cattle of their own but to live off the sea, on fish and shellfish and whatever else they could find along the shore. But he was no mere scavenger. As Van Riebeeck was soon to discover, Autshumao was a skilled broker and mediator. He had a keen grasp of the principles of commerce, and was adept at manipulating the cattle trade with the Dutch and maximising his own profits.50 Trade, ideally, is a voluntary and mutually beneficial transaction from which both parties benefit, perceiving themselves as wealthier than they were before,51 and the Khoi were already experienced traders long before the advent of the Europeans.

Vasco da Gama, the first Portuguese to set foot at the Cape, in November 1497, found the Khoikhoi eager to trade, especially for copper which they ‘greatly esteemed’; they wore copper earrings which they normally obtained from the Nama, some 400 to 500 kilometres to the north. Da Gama had a similar experience a couple of weeks later when he landed at what is now Mossel Bay, several hundred kilometres east of the Cape. The Khoikhoi gathered on the beach to meet the new-comers and once again bartering commenced immediately, the locals exchanging ivory bracelets and an ox for little Portuguese bells and red caps. This amicable scene was unfortunately shattered when the Portuguese – believing, ‘for some unknown and probably fictitious 12

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Copper deposits in South Africa: those nearest the Cape were in Namaqualand hundreds of kilometres to the north

reason’, that they were about to be attacked – suddenly fired on the Khoi and hurriedly withdrew to their boats. It was the first of many misapprehensions that were to blight South Africa’s future.52 Other Europeans who visited the Cape over the next century and a half confirmed the Khoikhoi’s experience in and propensity for trading, and when the Dutch arrived in 1652 they too found them more than willing to engage in trade.53 A couple of days after Autshumao met Van Riebeeck a group of 10 ‘very fine and nimble men... with their private parts exposed’ approached Van Riebeeck and ‘gave us to understand that for copper and tobacco they would bring cattle and sheep within a few days’.54 Van Riebeeck was excited, though probably more because of their livestock than their attire, or lack thereof. In any case he was exaggerating: Khoi men customarily wore a small flap of leather or penis sheath of wild-cat tail55 and a leather 13

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cape or kaross; but to the heavily-clothed Europeans they appeared almost naked. Their habit of smearing themselves with animal fats was probably to protect them from insect-bites, but most Europeans found the smell objectionable. The Europeans themselves probably smelt even more rancid, especially after months at sea in crowded, rat- and buginfested vessels with limited fresh water and no real bathing facilities.

At least one canine companion agreed. John Davys, an Englishman who visited the Cape in 1598 was forced to leave his ‘great Mastive Dogge behind’. It refused to go with them, he explained: ‘For I think he was ashamed of our Companie’.56 Dogmatic dogges notwithstanding, even the most malodorous Europeans were convinced of their superiority to the Khoikhoi and found fault with almost everything about them. Their mode of dress caused offence: the Khoikhoi were ‘miserable folk who went quite naked’. Their language caused offence: ‘they clucked like turkeys’. Their looks caused offence: their faces were ‘full of ugly wrinkles, the hair on their heads unruly and wild...’ Their toilette caused offence: they ‘stank greatly’. Their diet caused offence: ‘they lived upon the guts and filth of the meat which we did cast away, feeding in the most beastly fashion, for they would neither wash nor clean the guts...’57 Europeans sniffed at the strips of dried sheep skin which the Khoi wore around their ankles as protection against thorn-bushes, mistaking them for sheep’s guts.58 Visiting sailors believed Khoi women were ‘so hot-blooded that when they have their menses and make water, if a European pass over it he at once gets a head-ache and fever, and sometimes even the plague’ – which doesn’t however seem to have stopped them having sex with them. The Germans succumbed to penis envy: ‘the men have a member [that]… more resembles the organ of a young bull than that of a man’, while the Dutch were deeply shocked to discover that ‘Cheese they neither love, nor know how to make’. But what most offended the Europeans was, in fact, land-envy: ‘it is a greatt pittie… such creatures as they bee should injoy so sweett a counttrey’.59 Van Riebeeck, to his credit, was far less derogatory than most and at times even admiring. Aside from their habit of ‘besmearing’ themselves 14

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with fat, he wrote, the Khoi of the interior were ‘fine, well-built men’.60 But he too coveted their land. It was, as he told the directors of the Dutch East India Company in April 1652, better than anything he had ever seen, including Formosa and New Netherland (Taiwan and New York): In the afternoon went down along the downs behind the rump of the Lion Mountain, where we found between the mountain and the downs the most beautiful land for sowing and for grazing cattle that one could desire, several miles long and about one mile wide... Down into the Table Valley once again found the finest clay soil in the world, watered by several rivulets... and suitable for cultivation... if only there were enough men for the purpose... who could be allowed on certain conditions to occupy some plots of land.61

The fact that it was already occupied by the Khoi seems to have eluded him – or perhaps they didn’t count. The Dutch had been at the Cape for just three weeks and already they thought of it as their own.

Meanwhile work on the Fort continued and on 30 April the first stones for the stores and dwelling house were laid. By 12 May the square of the Fort had been completed and, three days later, the official naming of the Fort de Goede Hoop (Fort of Good Hope) took place.62 Later that month the buildings within its walls were thatched. But quickly though it was built, the Fort still took longer than expected.

The Cape enjoys a Mediterranean climate. Which is all very well in summer when the south-easter is not blowing; as it basks in the still crystal air, poised spectacularly between the massive mountain and the mirror-flat ice-blue sea, the Bay’s long rain-free days are among the most breathtakingly beautiful in the world. Then it really does live up to Sir Francis Drake’s praise as the ‘Fairest Cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth’. But as winter begins to bare its teeth the Cape of Good Hope undergoes a metamorphosis, and re-invents itself as the Cape of Torment, ‘the most dangerous Cape of the world, neuer without intolerable stormes and present dangers to trauailers’.63 Rather like the little girl with the curl on her forehead, when the 15

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Cape is nice, it is very very nice, but when it is not it is horrid. Van Riebeeck’s first winter was diabolical. As the days shortened, icy rain and howling winds began to lash the tiny settlement, while the Dutch huddled in their ‘loose and leaky’ tents and temporary wooden sheds.

As the downpour became heavier, flooding became more frequent.

Water washed through the tents and food sheds, rotting supplies and soaking clothes and bedding. The newly established vegetable garden was nearly washed away too, but was saved at the last moment by the singularly Dutch notion of building a little dyke around it.64 Scurvy made a come-back. Some of the men deserted, a mutiny in the garrison threatened, and disease spread through the small community.

Men fell ill daily with ‘the bloody flux’ and other diseases and fevers.

Van Riebeeck’s wife, Maria, suffered ‘pitifully’ from dysentery. Several others died ‘from the same plague or sickness’, among them the chiefsurgeon’s wife. A troop of baboons came down from Table Mountain to watch her being buried.65 Amidst the heavy downpours building began to falter. With work almost at a standstill, Van Riebeeck fired off letters to his betters back home: ‘Chinese would be welcome’, ‘Would like to have some slaves for the dirtiest and heaviest work’, ‘the Natives cannot be trusted’, and so on.66 It was only on 3 August that the sodden Dutch were able to begin moving out of their temporary camp and into the Fort itself.

Throughout all this Van Riebeeck had been extremely active, occupied not only with building the Fort but also with establishing a Garden, experimenting with different kinds of crops, seed and fruit trees from Europe and the East, planning whale and seal fisheries, organising an iron-smithy and establishing a dairy. The first wheat had arrived in a barrel and been planted at the Cape within three months of his arrival.67 He had also begun looking for other challenges beyond his role as refreshment-station-manager, and in October 1652 he sent the Goede Hoop to explore the coastline north of the Cape. Some years before, as he explained to the Directors, a Portuguese vessel had landed at Saldanha Bay and in exchange for copper had ‘obtained a fair quantity of gold, 16

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amber, and ivory’. While the Portuguese had not enquired further into the source of this gold, the Bay being too far ‘beyond their district’, it was not far beyond his, and his men were instructed to barter, gather information and erect ‘signs of possession having been taken by the Company, especially wherever some profit can be made’.68 Van Riebeeck already had gold in his sights – and as yet he hadn’t even heard of the Chobona.

The winter meanwhile was drawing to a close and, as the weather improved, so did the opportunities for trade. One of Van Riebeeck’s primary functions was to secure an adequate and steady supply of meat for the garrison and the crews of visiting Dutch East Indiamen.

His primary source was the Khoi, but the cattle trade was seasonal.

With the coming of spring the Khoi began bringing their livestock back to the Cape from their grazing grounds to the east, and by early summer the main cattle-trading season was in full swing.69 By the end of October 1652 the Dutch had acquired so many cattle that the square inside the Fort had become too small to accommodate them, and work was begun on a much larger and stronger kraal at the back of the Fort, with breastwork 2.5 metres high and a ditch from which the cattle could drink. Eva’s uncle Autshumao, who lived in a hut on the north bank of the Salt river, across from the Fort, acted as a broker in these deals and extracted a hefty commission – ‘excessive’, according to Van Riebeeck.70 Van Riebeeck had begun to mistrust Autshumao and was growing increasingly averse to him. He mocked his ‘little broken English’, and his way of saying Goo, goo! for ‘Go, go!’ and Nosie for ‘No sir’. By November he was seriously considering kidnapping Autshumao and his family and dumping them on Robben Island, the flat, barren rock in the middle of Table Bay which was to make such a convenient penitentiary for political prisoners in the years to come, including Nelson Mandela. When a Dutch herd-boy was murdered and his cattle stolen, Autshumao was his first suspect.71 But Autshumao was becoming more fluent in Dutch and was useful as an interpreter and mediator. Though he would never be as good as his 17

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niece, Eva, who would come to speak ‘the Dutch language with almost as much perfection as a Dutch girl’, for the moment Van Riebeeck tolerated him.72 By 1655, just three years after its founding, the Cape refreshment station was supplying some 7000 sailors per year with fresh produce – a startlingly large number of stomachs and a significant amount of food.73 It was all dependant on Chief Merchant Van Riebeeck’s ability to maintain a stable commercial environment in which exchanges were mutually beneficial and disputes minimal, and on his ability to communicate with his Khoi trading partners in a respectful, reassuring fashion. All of this in turn ultimately relied on the good-will, loyalty and fluency of his interpreter. By December of that year Van Riebeeck had had enough of Autshumao and replaced him with another Khoi interpreter by the name of Doman.

Although his earlier attempts to find gold up the west coast had come to nothing, Van Riebeeck had heard that the Portuguese of Mozambique obtained gold from the legendary east African trading empire of Monomotapa (of which more later), and shortly after Doman’s appointment he noted in his journal: It would not be strange or quite contrary to expectation... if in the course of time people were to come over land to visit us all the way from Monomotapa or Butua, just as, according to the belief of many, they trade with Angola over land and travel from one to the other. Angola’s gold is said to have come from Monomotapa; indeed, those of Sofala and Angola are believed to visit each other. We could thus in time expect them here also...74

Doman had been Van Riebeeck’s best interpreter ‘to date’.75 But within two years he left for Batavia with the future Governor-General of Dutch India, Rijckloff van Goens, and while he was away the fourteen-year-old Eva, who already spoke good Dutch, stepped into his shoes.

Doman was only gone for a year, but his experiences abroad were to politicise him and sour his relationship with Van Riebeeck. Tensions 18

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between the Dutch and Khoi had arisen even before his departure. The longer the Dutch stayed at the Cape the more entrenched they became, the more territory they occupied, and the more buildings they erected.

As early as the beginning of 1655 the Khoi had begun to suspect that the Dutch did not intend to leave and their fears were confirmed later that year when, in order to save itself money, the Company allowed free Dutch burghers to settle outside the Fort for the first time.76 In protest some fifty Khoikhoi families tried to reoccupy their former land and began erecting their huts close to the moat that surrounded the Fort, but Van Riebeeck drove them away. The Khoi objected, pointing out that the land did not belong to him, but to them, that they ‘would place their huts wherever they choose’, and if any Dutchmen tried to prevent them from doing so they would be killed. Emotions ran so high that for a while the Dutch were ‘forced to do our work with a tool in one hand and a weapon in the other...’77 Van Riebeeck put up several small forts or watch-houses, one of which was on a dune near the Salt river and another at the Ronde Bosjen (Rondebosch), but the real defensive line was along the Liesbeeck river and included the forts Kaert de Koe (Check the Cow) and Houd den Bul (Hold the Bull), names which reflect his preoccupation with cattle. In April 1657 a plan was mooted to turn the Cape Peninsula into an easily-defendable island by digging a canal from Table Bay to False Bay.78 It was never completed, but to many Johannesburgers the Cape remains something of an island to this day.

It was in this climate of increasing hostility and polarisation that Eva first began serving as Van Riebeeck’s interpreter, and as the months went by he became more and more dependent on her. His hope of establishing contact with Monomotapa and its famous gold-mines also grew, and it was through Eva that he had his first intimation that his hope might one day be realised.

Eva was not her original name, of course, but one given to her by the Dutch.79 According to Van Riebeeck the Khoikhoi called her Krotoa, and nowadays it has become fashionable to call her by that name. But ‘Krotoa’ probably wasn’t correct to begin with, and it is worth exploring 19

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why. The Dutch were notoriously bad at trying to pronounce and write Khoi words. To them, the Khoi did not seem to speak as much as ‘clap or clack each word in the mouth, as if a man were snapping his thumb, so that their mouth goes almost like a rattle...’80 Their language was rife with clicks, acoustically complex sounds which, as one linguist points out, are not simply the product of ‘rarefaction between two points of closure of the tongue’, but ‘compound phonemes, consisting of the clicknoise proper plus an acoustic result of the velar or post-velar release following the click release, or of an accompaniment, during its stop, by a non-click sound’.81 The Dutch simply couldn’t hear the auditory distinctions involved, let alone write them down.

The Khoikhoi use four main clicks, which in modern orthography are written as follows: ‘/’, a dental-affricative made by clicking the tongue on the inside of the top two front teeth; ‘//’, a lateral affricative rather like the click made when urging on a horse; ‘!’, a palatal click made by snapping the tongue off the roof of the mouth; and ‘≠’, a denti-aveolar click on the roof of the mouth, somewhere between the front teeth and central palate.82 Prior to the adoption of this system of notation writers struggled to transcribe these sounds into print, and it is difficult to know what exactly Van Riebeeck was trying to reproduce. The explorer Wikar, a century later, used a ‘k’ to signify a click,83 and it is possible that Van Riebeeck’s ‘k’ was an attempt to do the same, since the prefix ‘Kro-’ does not exist in any surviving Khoi dialects.84 Khoisan orthography, like most African languages, is a colonial construct – a more correct rendering of ‘Goringhai’ for example would be ‘!uri-//’ae’85 – and Van Riebeeck’s ‘Kro-’ was just his attempt to render sounds not present in his own language experience. In any case ‘Krotoa’ may not even have been a ‘real’ name, but a nick-name. Van Riebeeck, our only source, mentions it just once; nor does he claim it as Eva’s birth-name but merely what the Khoi called her.86 Eva is said to have been very light in complexion, and ‘Kro-toa’ could, for example, be a combination of /kara or !ku:p (other, different, or forehead), and tsaop (ash-coloured, whitish).87 The point is we have no way of knowing what Eva’s original name really was, and while Krotoa may appear the more 20

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politically-correct, it is just as much a colonial construct as Eva. Eva straddled two worlds. She was a product of diametrically opposed and colliding cultures. But her Dutch upbringing may perhaps have been the more formative of the two, and her adoptive name the one which best encapsulates the way she saw herself. She had, in her own words, ‘a Dutch heart’,88 and she certainly allied herself politically with the Dutch rather than the Khoi. It was precisely because she so often put the interests of her adoptive people above those of her biological people that, as Van Riebeeck says, she was so ‘thoroughly hated’ by many of the Khoikhoi:89 they think that she reveals too much about their actions and of this country’s state of affairs. This is quite true, for we would be ignorant of many things without Eva.90

Eva, bluntly, was a collaborator. Doman, her fellow interpreter, openly referred to her as the Dutchmen’s ‘advocate’ and even their ‘lickspittle’.91 Although she did on rare occasions put aside her Dutch clothing and resume her animal skins, this may have been more an attempt to fit in with the Khoi than symptomatic of her real loyalty, as some historians have suggested. While it is true that, on at least one occasion, she did try to return to live with them, it wasn’t long before she was back at the Fort.

In fact, when push came to shove, Eva always sided with the Dutch, and in retrospect it is not really surprising. Having lived with them from a very young and impressionable age, she was as much their creation as the Khoikhoi’s, if not more so. Van Riebeeck himself confirms she had lived with him ‘from the very beginning’,92 and she was to spend the greater part of her short life among the Dutch. She married a white man.

Her children were fathered by white men. In fact, Eva may even have had a white father herself. This is not as improbable as it may seem: a contemporary report describes her as ‘white and beautiful, save that she has a slightly depressed nose’.93 Sex between white men and Khoikhoi women was not uncommon, even before the arrival of the Dutch. In 1615, for example, the Khoi 21

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trader-chief Xhore sent a group of women to pleasure a party of English sailors, as a sort of peace-offering after a minor skirmish.94 These and other encounters may explain the unusually fair complexions of some of the Khoi, such as Namies, who was described as ‘pretty, well-shaped… [and] no darker than a fairly white mestizo’;95 or another light-skinned woman who gave birth in 1654 to a baby girl who was ‘as light of colour as a little brown Jewess’.96 On 8 December 1655 Van Riebeeck’s wife, Maria de la Quellerie, too, gave birth, to another son whom she named Antony in honour of her first-born child who had died shortly before their departure for the Cape. It probably wasn’t a good idea. Antony mark II was as unfortunate as Antony mark I, and in February 1656, at the age of just three months, he too died.97 By then Eva was almost certainly already living in the Van Riebeeck’s home as Maria’s full-time domestic assistant.

Although Maria was not much more than a decade older than Eva, they came from very different worlds. The daughter of a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church, born into a respectable middle-class Dutch family with French Huguenot roots,98 Maria spoke French as fluently as Dutch. A contemporary Dutch portrait shows her to have been pretty, with warm brown eyes and dark-blonde hair and contemporary accounts agree she had a lively intellect.

Polished, confident and able to hold her own in conversation with Company officials of all orders, she was also ‘gentle-natured, eventempered, calm and persevering’.99 Bishop Ettienne, who spent 10 months with the Van Riebeecks following the wreck of his ship, says she was ‘indisputably one of the most perfect women I have ever seen and everybody likes her’.100 Unlike her husband, who was on occasion called ‘a fool’ and was even punched in the face (by the aptly-named Hendrick van Bliksem), Maria was deeply respected by his men. ‘You and all the women at the Cape are strumpets’, one shouted in a drunken quarrel with an innkeeper’s wife, ‘excepting the Juffrouw (Mistress)’.101 To the sublime Maria, Eva, in her sheepskin vest, leather apron, and cowhide leggings, must have appeared a dirty little savage.102 Yet Eva was a member of the Khoi aristocracy, related by marriage to two of their 22

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This portrait, although not strictly contemporary, is popularly believed to be Eva103

most powerful men, Sousoa, chief of the Chainouqua who lived near modern Swellendam, and Oedasoa, chief of the Cochoquas who lived near Saldanha Bay. When visiting the latter, instead of travelling on foot like a commoner, Eva was given an ox to ride ‘as if she were a lady of quality’,104 and it is worth bearing this in mind when considering the veracity of the stories she was to tell about the mysterious people called the Chobona.

Maria made every possible attempt to ‘civilise’ Eva. She taught her to pray in the Christian fashion. She also helped her to learn to read.

In Maria’s home Eva put aside her traditional skins and dressed in ‘the Indian way’ in a sarong, and a loose blouse called a kabaja, ate Europeanstyle food and spoke Dutch. Eva’s talent for the language which she soon spoke perfectly105 would have made her a prime candidate for the school that was established in 1658 for company slaves and ‘some Hottentots’.

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