This not a revisionist history, nor is it a work of scholarship; it is a brief polemic. It intends no exculpation for wrong-doing and it denies no-one’s suffering.
The most persuasive myth bedevilling our attempt to create a happy and a prosperous South Africa is the narrative of racism and colonialism as the sole and exclusively defining condition of our society. It is a myth favoured by sections of all the population groups in South Africa, although often for mutually exclusive reasons. For instance, contemporary South Africans uniform in their objection to British colonialism have different interpretations of the emancipation of slaves. I have yet to read a South African historian who doesn’t refer to the VOC as “the colonial government”, but the VOC was never a coloniser and never a government.
What then do I mean by colonialism? Conquest, domination and wealth extraction. What do I mean by racism? Discrimination based on skin colour. In both cases, intentionality is key. By these definitions, South Africa was never colonised, and whilst disposing of the racism myth is complex, there are substantive aspects of the narrative that are fictitious.
The grand narrative of South African history is better represented as the collision between, on the one hand, collective land occupation and ownership by legacy right, and, on the other, land ownership by right of title deed, irrespective of considerations of skin colour. It was a tragedy for the former groups that their rights had to give way to the latter group, but universally this has been the case, and the victory of title deed was to become a blessing for all the inhabitants of South Africa who aspire to own land. No-one today is claiming restitution of collective land ownership rights.
To this day the conflict between the two competing forms of land occupation and ownership remains unresolved in those areas of South Africa originally designated as “tribal lands”, and it is a mordant irony for proponents of the argument for pervasive racism that the adversaries in the current conflict over land occupation and ownership are dark skinned South Africans.
In the context of a global human history of migration and settlement, it would be an act of astonishing uneven-handedness to hold the Dutch to account for sending 90 people under the jurisdiction of a private company, the VOC, to establish a refreshment station in the Cape. The European settlement in the Cape and beyond remained under the tenuous control of the VOC for 150 years, after which the company collapsed into bankruptcy.
Throughout this period, the VOC never constituted itself as a government, never had its own uniformed military wing or police force, never issued a currency, nurtured no imperialistic desire for territory, never extracted any net wealth from the Cape, and never wavered from its mission of being a refreshment station. It operated under the strict orders of its governing body to respect the local populations (the Khoi), and it was prohibited from enslaving them. The VOC’s governing body in the Netherlands frequently exerted a liberalising influence on its Cape subsidiary, and it must be remembered that the Netherlands was even at that stage one of the most egalitarian and open societies in Europe, with a progressive legal system that was also applied in the Cape.
The arrival of the Dutch, however, represented no unmitigated disaster for the Khoi, whose members found a market for their livestock. Some Khoi found gainful employment as guides, interpreters, stock agents and domestic servants, in rare circumstances gained a foothold in the burgeoning Dutch community, and acquired from the Dutch valuable new skills in crop cultivation and animal husbandry.
There is a tendency to view the Khoi as representing a community of bucolic innocence. This is not the case. They experienced severe setbacks of a naturally occurring nature, they were subject to wealth disparities, feuds, depredations by the San, extreme hardship, and their own practices of rough justice. Khoi society was fissured and stratified, and it is moot whether relationships between Dutch farmers and their Khoi labourers were any crueller than between Khoi or Bushman masters and Khoi servants. The relationship between Dutch trekboere and their Khoi helpers was often akin to the relationship in America between farmers and share croppers.
Conflicts in the 17th and the 18th Century Cape characteristically transcended simple skin colour, with ever changing alliances and allegiances. Trade and relationships did eventually become fractious, and the more powerful inevitably prevailed, but what legitimate moral judgement can we make today of human power relationships 350 years in the past? The collapse of Khoi society, as tragic as it was, came about as a consequence of a competitive struggle for natural resources, and although human malignancy may have played a part in that collapse, no group of people are immune from its infection. It was only one of a number of other factors that brought about that collapse, another being disunity among the Khoi themselves, and – perhaps most substantively of all – the devastating effects of smallpox. It makes no sense to describe all victors in the contest of life as “colonisers”, and in an age in which Israel can be stigmatised as a “colonial power”, the word loses its defining force.
Those who insist on the narrative of racism have the obligation to demonstrate that it was racial hatred that defined the relationships between the various population groups in the Cape, bearing in mind fallacies that bedevil all historiography. The first lies in judging human action in the deep past by current standards of behaviour and belief; the second, lies in problems of ontology or logic. There is no foolproof way of deriving a cause from an effect: thus the racial stratification of early Cape society cannot automatically be deduced as the consequence of an intention. Social stratification is an endemic human tendency that doesn’t need the excuse of skin colour differences, as Britain’s class system and India’s caste system graphically demonstrate. When stratification matches skin colour it does not necessarily mean that stratification is a consequence of racial discrimination. In human affairs the cause of an effect can be mired in a multiplicity of obscure and subterranean factors, or even coincidence; as we have all come to know, correlation isn’t causation.
Another problem of ontology lies in the assumption that a bad event necessarily replaces or drives out a good event. This is not a purely hypothetical quibble. Had the Dutch not arrived in the Cape who can say what the consequences of the competition for land between Khoi, Bushman and Bantu might have been?
One has also to view the historical events in the Cape in their global context – an undertaking I have never seen in any of the standard histories – and remind ourselves of the horrors of the European Thirty Years War, concluded just before Van Riebeeck set sail for the Cape. One has to also view the 50 or more wars that afflicted Europe for the 350 years after his arrival, including the bloody and barbaric Napoleonic Wars, the two world war conflagrations of the 20th Century, the 160-million dead at the hands of their own governments in the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia, the indescribably horrific Sino-Japanese War and the South American War of the Triple Alliance.
We also need to remind ourselves of the barbaric criminal justice systems that prevailed in most of Europe throughout this period, the social conditions there of extreme hardship and poverty, naturally occurring crop failures, food shortages, widespread starvation, and the devastating effects of the Little Ice Age. For those wedded to the myth of unique suffering in southern Africa it may be a hard pill to swallow, but, in a global context, and making allowance for the two undoubted cataclysms here – the Zulu Wars and the Anglo Boer War, neither of which was racist in origin – our history is benign, and the true wonder of it lies in the relative restraint of settlers in dealing with their differences.
Before we play the race card in coming to understand early Cape history, we need to remind ourselves that miscegenation quickly became widespread after 1652 and was actively encouraged by the VOC as a means of growing and rejuvenating the population. Yes, gender-based exploitation existed, but it was not the universal state of gender relations. Appetite for sex is not born solely of biological need, it is also driven by desire. Desire cannot exist without attraction, and attraction cannot exist without affection. Thus it was that co-habitation and marriage between dark and light skinned became common. Within 30 years of Van Riebeeck’s arrival, the Cape was a thriving multicultural entrepôt that laid the foundation for the richness of the multicultural society that prevails today.
What about slavery? The case has been made and settled by scholars that slavery was never a racist phenomenon, and I see no reason to rehearse their arguments here, except to make the point that whilst the historiography of the iniquity of slave conditions in the Cape is comprehensive, I have never yet been able to find in that historiography any account of the iniquity of enslaving practices in the East, which enabled slave trading and the slave owning society in the Cape.
As time passed the European settlers trekked into the Cape hinterland in search of opportunity. They were not conquistadors nor were they agents for the VOC or any other institution of colonial power, they were opportunity seekers as nearly all people at nearly all times of Earth’s history have been. They fanned out into what must have appeared to them an empty land – the total population of what was to become the Cape Province was in 1700 no more than 70 000 people. They would have been perplexed to know that the time would arrive when they would be regarded as ”colonisers”. In the earliest days of this outward migration the Dutch lived a life of privation that hardly differentiated them from the Khoi, and the Dutch and the Khoi often made common cause in sustaining their lives. Life was a competition for survival, and it was not Dutch guns, colonial avarice or racial hatred that was responsible for the final collapse of Khoi society, but smallpox, a tragedy, but not one caused by deliberate human agency.
Before I leave the Cape, I need to modify our understanding of the conflicts on its eastern border, conflicts inappropriately called “wars” by liberal historians who wish to re-inforce the mendacious narrative of perennial, endemic racial conflict. It is a misconception to understand the late 18th Century on the Eastern Frontier of the Cape west of the Fish River (the Zuurveld) as being a time of predatory expansionism, chicanery and armed aggression on the part of the light skinned settlers. Between the time of the first meeting of the settler groups and the end of the 18th Century there were extended periods of peaceful co-existence. When conflict eventually broke out it arose at least in part from bona fide cultural differences, and it was characteristically cross -racial as loyalties and vested interests shifted. There were population bifurcations between Christian and ‘heathen’, and there were class difference between the poor and landless light skinned, the dark skinned aristocracy, and the Khoi, who in some instances were the owners of large stock herds.
The VOC was no ally of the burghers, and at least one Dutch voice was heard expressing the view that the Zuurveld should be returned in its entirety to the Xhosa. The final losers in the conflict were the light skinned settlers who had all but abandoned the Zuurveld by the turn of the Century.
[Image: Simons (P.) THE LIFE AND WORK OF CHARLES BELL, including The Art of Charles Bell: an appraisal, by Michael Godby, 176 pp., oblong 4to., maps, b/w & colour illus., hardback, d.w., Cape Town, 1998., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3735183