Dis Vrydag ouens...

etienne_marais said:
6 April 1652

Ai tog Jan

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Dias sailed in 1487. His ships were off the southwestern coast of Africa when they were
caught in a gale, which drove them for thirteen days, sails at half-mast. The seas were
so violent that they expected to be overcome by them. When the storm abated, the
Potuguese steered east, thinking the coast still ran from north to south, ‘But after sailing
some days without reaching it, they steered to the north, and thus reached a bay which
they called Dos Vaqueiros, because of the many cows they saw upon the land guarded
by their herders…’
They had been blown around the tip of Africa without realizing it.
The Portuguese did not land. The natives were so terrified by the weird structure that
approached the shore from the sea that they drove their cattle inland, and vanished, ‘so
that the Portuguese could learn no more of them than they were blacks, with woolly hair
like those of Guinea’.
They followed the coast a short distance and rounded a cape into another bay, which
they called Säo Bras, Saint Blaize, today known as Mosselbay. Here they finally landed
to fill their water barrels. The natives appeared again, but kept their distance, and
refused to accept the presents that Dias proffered. They eventually began hurling
stones at the Portuguese. Dias picked up a crossbow and shot one of the stone throwers
dead: the first indigene to be killed by the white man in southern Africa.
 
etienne_marais said:
6 April 1652

Ai tog Jan

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In 1693, just two hundred years after Bartholomeus Dias and his crew had first
encountered Khoikhoi at Säo Bras-Mosselbay, John Ovington, master of the East
Indiaman Benjamin set down with vitriolic emphasis a description of the Khoikhoi which
might very well be seen as a consensus of those who called at the Cape.
‘ of all people they are the most bestial and sordid. They are the very
reverse of human kind…so that if there is any medium between a rational
animal and a beast, the Hotantot lays the fairest claim to that species. They
are sunk even below idolatry, are destructive of priest and temple, and
saving a little show of rejoicing, which is made at the full and new moon.
The Hotantots are as squalid in their bodies, as they are mean and
degenerate in their understandings…They are satisfied with the same
wrought garments that nature has clad sheep with. The hair on their heads,
and all their bodies are besmear’d with kitchen-grease, tho’ never so stinking
and loathsome, which when dissolved and heated by their bodies, sends from
thence an unsavory smell, as may be scented at a furlong’s distance, and
nearer is their sweet oil, and the dust of the streets the powder of their hair.
Round their legs is twisted sheep’s gut...which are serviceable upon a
double account, both for food and ornament. The guts, which are made
more savoury by the dirt which sticks to them, adorns them as good a meal
as the flesh of sheep, and are eaten with as good a gusto…their native
inclination to idleness and a careless life, will scarcely admit of either force
or rewards for reclaiming them from that innate lethargic humour. Their
common answer to all motives of this kind is that the fields and woods afford
plenty of necessaries for their support, and nature has amply provided for
their subsistence, by loading the trees with plenty of almonds. So there is
no need to work. Thus, many of them idly spend the years of a useless
restive life!
 
etienne_marais said:
6 April 1652

Ai tog Jan

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Along with this went the Khoikhoi habit of smearing themselves with fat and grease,
including that left over in the cooking pots of seamen on shore. The two habits of
consuming offal and smearing themselves with grease appeared to be revolting
combined in the Khoikhoi customs of draping the entrails of grass–eating animals
around their necks and legs, as decoration and as portable delicacy. They always stank
greatly, since they besmeared themselves with fat and grease. When we killed any oxen
they begged for the entails, which they ate quite raw, after shaking out most of the
dung,’ observed Cornelis Houtman, leader of a Dutch fleet in 1595…. a goodly
Countrey, inhabited by a most savage and beastly people as ever I thinke God created’,
reported Sir Edward Michelbourne in 1605. John Jordain reported in 1608 in describing
the consumption of seal flesh that had been rotting fifteen days, ‘Nothwithstanding the
loathsomeness of the smell, these people would ate of it as if it had bene better meate,
and would not take of that which laye upon the topp, which were the sweetest, but
would search under for those which were most rotten…’ They eat their lice.’
 
etienne_marais said:
6 April 1652

Ai tog Jan

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The Dutch East India Company settlement that struggled into existence in April 1652,
under its commander, Jan van Riebeeck, began miserable and continued year after year,
to be miserable. It was a place of fear: fear of the environment, of the disciplines that
ruled the station, of the natives. The Dutch were never sure whether the Khoikhoi’s
intentions were peaceful or not, and their behaviour at times was farcical.
Desertion became frequent, mostly through attempts to stow away in passing ships.
Some tried the coast, in an effort to reach the Portuguese at Mozambique, which seemed
to strike them as a more enviable place to be, or easier to get away from. Van Riebeeck
himself begged the company to remove him from among the Khoikhoi, ‘these dull,
stupid, lazy, stinking people’. He preferred, he pleaded, to be amongst the sharper wits
of the Japanese, Tonquinese’ and other precise nations’. But still had nearly a decade to
serve, and he and his wife had to seek native relief from the company of Harry’s young
niece, a girl of ten or eleven years of age named Eva, whom they took into their home,
dressed in European clothes and began teaching Christianity and the Dutch language.
 
So hulle gooi al klippe van nog voor ons voorvaders hier geland het.
 
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