Kameraad Mhambi

In the last two days we’ve been treated to such ill informed, bad and reductionist journalism about the Dutch and their relationship to Afrikaners and culpability for colonialism and apartheid, that I just had to quickly write this blog post. So what exactly is the relationship?

Fact 1

The Dutch state, the Netherlands, never decided to colonise the Cape, South Africa’s Southern most province.

Fact 2

A Dutch company based in Amsterdam, the Dutch East India Company (bigger and more powerful than Wallmart today – it even had its own warships) decided to build a “halfweg stasie” – a refueling station for its ships – where modern day Cape Town is.

Fact 3.

The majority of the employees, were not Dutch, but German. There were also, Swedish Danish, employees and a few Portuguese.

Fact 4

There was an industrial dispute, the employees of the company claimed this Wallmart paid them too little, went freelance – and started the colonisation process. Each time the company increased the size of the area under their control to bring the errant workers under their control, the workers scampered over the border.

The British tried the same later and also failed, and them let them be. Until gold was discovered.

Fact 5

The company brought slaves from the East, Malaysia and Sri-Lanka today, and the Governor of the company that created Stellenbosch, Simon van der Stel was Javanese himself. Most coloureds – the majority of inhabitants of the Cape – are their descendants and they speak Afrikaans.

Fact 6

More than 10% of Afrikaners were in fact French Huguenots who arrived around 1700.

Fact 7

The first guy to call himself an Afrikaner was Hendrik Biebouw. His father was German and his sister a coloured. He was pulled off his horse by a Dutch magistrate after speeding through Stellenbocsh drunk.

The Dutch magistrate hit him with a cane. Biebouw who – unlike the Magistrate – was born in South Africa protested, “you can’t hit me, I’m an Afrikaner”. As was customary at the time for disciplinary matters Biebouw was deported to Australia.

Fact 8

The Dutch King asked the British to protect the company in 1796 from the French during the Napoleonic wars. When the British arrived they were not received with open arms, but were shot at by the settlers (not the last time), who disliked the Dutch King who had never held any sway, and never showed much interest. They supported Napoleon and spurned on by the Americans, were Republicans to boot.

Fact 9

The Dutch had very little contact and cultural exchange with Afrikaners from 1806 – when the British took over completely – until today. Boer War leader and later prime minister Jan Smuts was educated in the Netherlands(actually he was educated in the UK – thanks to Piet – see comments), and so was some Afrikaans writers in the 1950′s and 1960′s during an era of burgeoning cultural contact, but apartheid, which the Dutch vehemently opposed – put paid to any further contact.

Update: But Prime Minister H F Verwoerd, seen as the most important instigator and ideologue of apartheid, was born in Amsterdam and moved to SA with his parents when he was two years old. (See comments – Thanks Nick)

Fact 10

Very few towns founded by Afrikaners, especially significant ones, had any link with Dutch ones, quite unlike towns in Spanish, British and Portuguese colonies. They had by and large home grown names and indicative of the cultural disconnect.

Fact 11

The Dutch, like the Germans and the French did not support the Boer republics during the Anglo Boer War (even after being begged to), being scared of the mighty British empire. The Germans did supply weapons, and the Dutch sent a ship to pick up Paul Kruger, Transvaal president and ship him to exile. Kruger however preferred to spend exile in Switzerland.

Fact 12

The Dutch supported the ANC and liberation movements like SWAPO during the apartheid years. The Afrikaner Nationalists despised the Dutch for this.

Fact 13

Afrikaans – contains very many Dutch and Dutch based words. But its negation is based on French, the so-called dubbel nie. Afrikaans verbs don’t conjugate like Dutch ones and is much simplified. Afrikaans also contains much by way of Malaysian words like baie and quite a bit of Zulu.

Fact 14

The Dutch mangle their words with a nasal twang which sometimes makes even understandable words incomprehensible to Afrikaans speakers.

Fact 15

The first written Afrikaans is a translation of the Koran.

Fact 16

The Ducth were, for a long time, rather embarrassed about Afrikaans & Afrikaners. Recently there has been a subtle mood change with increasing interest in Afrikaans music & culture.

Update – Fact 17

I had not known this, but last week I went to the apartheid museum in Johannesburg. There it is claimed that one of the influences on D F Malan, the first Nationalist prime minister and a theologian, re apartheid was Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and Prime Minister.

This is from Wikipedia:

There, his Christian-National conception, centred upon the identification of the Afrikaner Calvinist community as the kern der natie became a rallying position for the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk and the Gereformeerde Kerk, the South African offshoot of his own Gereformeerde Kerken during and after the Boer war. As Christian-Nationalists, Kuyper’s adherents in South Africa were instrumental in the building of Afrikaner cultural, political and economic institutions to restore Afrikaner fortunes following the Boer War. One key creation was the Afrikaner Broederbond, the anti-British and White Supremacist political secret society whose foundation was explicitly Christian-National. It was the Afrikaner Broederbond, in course of time, loyal to its specifically Kuyperian Christian-Nationalist ideology, which created the Afrikaner National Party, with its Apartheid plans. Throughout the Apartheid era, party and state officials swore oaths affirming the ‘sovereignty and guidance of God in the destiny of countries and peoples’ and to ‘seek the development of South Africa’s life along Christian-National lines.’ Dr. Vorster’s 1961 essay on the biblical foundations of apartheid quotes Kuyper 6 times.[4] Yet Harinck argues that “Kuyper was not guided by the cultural racism of his day, but by his calvinistic creed of human equality”.

Related deployments:

1. Let Afrikaners be African
2. The Boers & the making of modern Britain