Tomorrow we begin the final unit of the course: Colonial Encounters.
This section continues to probe the contours of coastal interactions between Africans and European merchants, sailors, and soldiers. We shift our attention to Southern Africa. Here, European adventurers and profit seekers encountered nomadic groups of hunters (San/Bushmen) and herders (Khoekhoe/”Hottentots”), rather than the organized states with formidable military power of the kingdoms of Kongo and Angola.
The permanent presence of a powerful, hierarchical merchant company (the Dutch East India Company, or VOC) at the Cape of Good Hope after 1652 left us with a rich set of historical records. These archives focus on the activities of European and European-descended settlers, but in the process also capture information about the Africans whose lives were forever disrupted by colonization.
In tomorrow’s class I’ll provide some historical background and context for discussing both a primary source (an excerpt from the governor’s official journal) and historian Julia Wells‘ use of that source to construct an argument about the ways in which gendered expectations shaped specific colonial interactions.
Unit IV study questions will help you navigate course material for the next two weeks. One particular skills focus in this unit is historiography, the study of changing historical interpretations. Julia Wells gives us a clear example of historiography in this brief catalog of the various ways scholars have portrayed Eva/Krotoa:
“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.” (Wells 417-18—citations omitted)
What does Wells add to this discussion?