Krotoa: Daughter of the Cape

Robben Island, Birthplace of Krotoa
Photograph by Roger de la Harpe, Getty Images

It is not right for us today to write off our past generations and pretend that history began when we were born.

-Es'kia Mphahlele, 1986

As a person who is from the line of Krotoa, who shares that ancestral line, it is important for me to know who my ancestors are and to celebrate those ancestors.

As South Africans, Krotoa represents a cement. If we liken ourselves to different bricks in our diversity, she is the cement that binds these bricks into the wall we want to call a nation.

Krotoa has white descendants. Krotoa has black descendants. Krotoa has descendants who are labelled "coloured". We have something here in common to explore, to celebrate, to build upon.

If we use this cement as a nation we can be a strong wall. If we remain just bricks piled on top of each other this nation is going to fall apart.

You judge for yourself whether this was a vixen and a whore and a drunkard as some historians say. This woman was much, much more.

-Tariq Mellet, Hidden Histories, Krotoa Daughter of the Cape, SABC TV2, 9/6/2013

RE-MEMBERING KROTOA & AUTSHUMATO

by Deela Khan

http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/re-membering-krotoa-amp-autshumato

Divested of names and birthright

Autshumato and Krotoa were ferried

oor die see, oor die see, in die eiland stemertjie 

every time they incurred the wrath of their insatiable masters.

As island-prison you were too small to hold Autshumato

(considered to be the devil himself & called Harry die Strandloper)

whose nostrils retained the odour of the wild.

The irresistible allure of the ancestral spirit-land compelled him

to snatch a boat, brave the froth and blinding spray 

of vessel-snapping swells and with fellow Khoi-comrade row into 

Blaauwbergstrand, unspotted, dazed, but in one piece!

Swift as an air-slicing pestle, he was not re-captured

but his land had already slipped into Dutch hands.

Robbed of her Khoikhoi identity at eight 

Krotoa, pygmalioned into a Dutch girl,

was baptised and re-named Eva.

Subtly programmed to manipulate and betray

her people and to serve the Dutch East India Company

Krotoa became the most spirited traitor-diplomat of her time.

But when the Dutch had eventually grabbed all

her political use-value declined.

A sudden turn of the wheel of fortune made her service

at the Castle obsolete, put her master-mistress foster-parents

Jan & Maria Van Riebeeck on a ship to Holland and lured 

her husband, the respected Posthouder1, into a premature death.

Thus shaken awake she found no hooks to hold her

at the castle, but to what alternative place was she to trek

lugging her bewildered self and her young?

Estranged from Autshumato and her fast-disappearing

people, there remained no Khoikhoi kingdom

she could return to. Caught as she was between

two cultures, tottering on the rim of the Dutch world,

the Khoikhoi world, the Khoi-Dutch world,

she threw herself into a cask & hit the bottle hard

as she struggled to drown the niggling imagoes

of her Khoi-princess past.

Khoi princess Krotoa, wrapt in the glory

of her favourite skins, chattering away in musical clicks,

limbs oiled, vital and glowing, would only be seen as a smelly

inboorling, a Hotnot meid wholly and innately dangerous?

Never could she dream of reclaiming

her birthright, she had irretrievably

lost her natural identity?

The Company buried baptised Krotoa

away from her kindred spirit-soil. Thus

"earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

in sure and certain hope of the resurrection

to eternal life..." Eva, propped into a Dutch

coffin, was planted in a remote corner of the

Castle-fortress where she had served,

had loved & married, was widowed,

lost her children, lost her people,

her head, heart & carved-up soul?

-Extract from: Engaging the Shades of Robben Island, (Realities, 2002. pp.22-23)

See: 
http://alternation.ukzn.ac.za/docs/16.2/17%20Narismulu%20F.PDF
http://ichthyscybernetics.blogspot.com/2012/11/krotoa-our-mythic-go-between.html

Sources:
Hidden Histories, Krotoa Daughter of the Cape, SABC TV2
Deela Khan, 2002. Engaging the Shades of Robben Island. Realities.
Karel Schoeman, 2009. Seven Khoi Lives. Cape Biographies of the Seventeenth Century. Pretoria: Protea.
Dan Sleigh, 1938, Eilande, recently translated from Afrikaans by Andre Brink (in Dutch: 'Stemmen uit zee'/in English: 'Islands').

Internet Resources:
http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/krotoa.htm
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/69.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotoa
http://ancestry24.com/eva-krotoa-van-die-kaap/
http://www.geni.com/people/Krotoa-Eva-van-die-Kaap/
http://www.southafrica.to/history/history.html


©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za

Krotoa - Our Mythic Go-Between

There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call the terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come.

Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, p.86-87

Recently, the South African Post Office, issued a postage stamp portraying a young Khoikhoi woman named Krotoa, also known as Eva to the Dutch. Krotoa became an important figure in South African history. The recognition of Krotoa on one of our postage stamps was of considerable import to me personally as it must have been for many others.

Krotoa was a 9th great grandmother of mine and as such I have a special affinity with her. Indeed she is "mother" of countless South Africans of many races. Through her we are all connected. She embodies and reflects in many ways the "shattered mythic" essence of the South African psyche. Her story is our story.

The stamp, "designed by Lien Botha, features a drawing from the Western Cape Archives portraying Krotoa and a VOC (the Dutch East India Company) ship from a painting by Aernhout Smit (1683). These images are superimposed onto a contemporary photograph taken at Milnerton beach with Table Mountain in the background. The Commemorative folder cover also features the face of Krotoa, this time encircled by a wreath of tulips which alludes to the Company's Garden" (1,2)

Krotoa is probably the most written about woman in South African history. The Post Office Souvenir Folder (3) gives us a tantalising glimpse into the life of this remarkable but enigmatic young woman...

Krotoa was born in about 1642 on Robben Island, a decade before the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck. She was the first Khoikhoi woman to appear in the European records of the early settlement at the Cape as an individual personality who interacted socially and culturally with the Dutch settlers. 

Krotoa's brother-in-law is said to have been Oudasoa, a chief of the Cochoquas. When she was young, she worked in the household of Jan van Riebeeck, the first governor of the Cape Colony. 

As a teenager, Krotoa learned Dutch and Portuguese and like her uncle, Autshumao (known as Harry or Herrie by the Dutch) - a Coringhaicona Khoikhoi leader and trader, she worked as an interpreter for the Dutch who wanted to trade goods for cattle. Krotoa's role as interpreter extended beyond trading, as she was also instrumental in negotiating with the 'Peninsulars', whose foreman was Doman, regarding conflicts around land that erupted into formal war in 1659.

Since Krotoa travelled frequently between the Dutch colony and the Cochoquas, she came to embody the notion of an in-between figure, but found little happiness in either community. On 3 May 1662, she was baptised into the Christian religion by a visiting parson, Petrus Sibelius, in the church inside the Fort de Goede Hoop. 

On 26 April 1664, she married Pieter van Meerhoff, a Danish surgeon. She was the first Khoikhoi to marry according to Christian customs, and this marriage is the first between a European and a Khoi at the Cape. In May 1665, the couple left the Cape for Robben Island where Van Meerhoff became superintendent. He died on 27 February 1668 on an expedition to Madagascar. 

On 30 September 1668 she returned to the mainland with her children. According to VOC reports, she was suffering from alcoholism and left the Castle in the settlement to be with her family. In February 1669, she was imprisoned at the Castle and then banished to Robben Island for disorderly conduct. She returned to the mainland on many occasions just to find herself once more banished to Robben Island. Three of her children survived infancy. She died on 29 July 1674 at the Cape and was buried on 30 September 1674 in the church at the Fort.
Krotoa's eldest daughter, Pieternella, married Daniel Zaaijman, a friend of Van Riebeeck's. 

They lived in Madagascar for a while, but returned to the Cape upon the departure of the VOC from the island. Because of Pieternella's documented descendants, Krotoa is regarded a significant ancestor for many South Africans across various races.

Krotoa is described as an "in-between figure" reminding me of Brighid of the Celts (4).

Like Brighid, Krotoa is the 'Lady of the Shores'. She greets the European settlers as they come ashore. The shore is one of those magical in-between places that so fascinated the Celts and certainly the Strandlopers of the Cape. These in-between places, sometimes called "thin places", such as shorelines, fountains, wells, mountain passes, doorways and so on, are go-betweens, corridors. The shore is neither dry land, nor is it the ocean, yet it is the meeting place of both. In Krotoa, Africa and Europe meets. If we consider that the land represents our solid, material world, while the sea represents the Great Cosmic womb of all life, the intuitive side of our nature, we can see that the shore is a meeting place between one world and another and a young Khoikoi girl the bridge between Black and White South Africans.

oOo

Relationship Chart

Krotoa (Eva vd Kaap) - Colin Garvie

Acknowledgements:
1. Botha's interpretation of Krotoa was derived from; Sketches representing the Native Tribes, Animals and Scenery of Southern Africa, from drawings made by the late Mr Samuel Daniell, engraved by William Daniell, London, 1820, Courtesy of Western Cape Archives and Records Service - M1052 (photograph) and J 741 DAN (publication).
2. William Fehr Collection, Iziko Museums, Cape Town - ship from Aernout Smit painting of Cape Town, 1683. Carine Zaayman, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
3. Setempe, South African Stamp News, Vol.17, No.3, September - December 2012.
4. Wendy M. Reynolds, The Goddess Brighid, http://www.millersv.edu/~english/homepage/duncan/medfem/bride.html

Sources:
Karel Schoeman, 2009. Seven Khoi Lives. Cape Biographies of the Seventeenth Century. Pretoria: Protea.
Dan Sleigh, 1938, Eilande, recently translated from Afrikaans by Andre Brink (in Dutch: 'Stemmen uit zee'/in English: 'Islands').
SA Philatelic Services, Customer Services: http://www.postoffice.co.za, http://www.virtualpostoffice.co.za

Internet Resources:
http://v1.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/bios/krotoa.htm
http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/69.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krotoa
http://ancestry24.com/eva-krotoa-van-die-kaap/
http://www.geni.com/people/Krotoa-Eva-van-die-Kaap/
http://www.southafrica.to/history/history.html



©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za