The subject of three novels – the latest of which has just been released in English – and copious academic research, the enigmatic ‘Hottentot’ woman who was taken into Jan van Riebeeck’s household and was the female counterpart of the country’s first ‘mixed’ marriage between a European and Cape-born African continues to intrigue South Africans 330 years after her death. What is her truth? Why won’t she die?

“How changeable this African climate is […] The West wind which had by its violence caused a boisterous sea, and during the last two days had threatened everything with destruction, had today (29 July 1674) gone down completely, followed by such calm weather that not the slightest motion could be observed in the air, whilst the bay was a smooth and bright as a mirror. This day departed this life, a certain Hottentoo named Eva, long ago taken from the African brood in her tender childhood …”

The passage from the Dutch East India Company (DEIC) journal describes the day that Eva Meerhoff, widow of an ambitious Danish surgeon, met her death at the age of 31 on Robben Island. Six years earlier, her husband and father of three of her children, Pieter, had faced his final judgment call when the slaves he sought to buy in Madagascar massacred him and his party of Company traders at Antogil Bay.

Tones of divine justice like this make the Eva story poignant still today, and though there was none for her, the appellation the Dutch gave her – in place of Krotoa, her indigenous name – has prompted many a writer to add biblical allegories to the complex socio-political situation developing in the Eden at the tip of Africa in the late 17th century.

Simplistically put, in the beginning (of South Africa) there was free grazing and simple values and the Lords 17 said, “Let there be ownership”. In 1652 Van Riebeeck and his band of European disciples chose the Cape to set up a refreshment station , far from the war-induced poverty in their own cold lands and midway to the mysterious East, which lured them with promises of exotic wealth.

Though the situation looked promising, the Lords of the autocratic DEIC needed cattle which meant barter with the strandlopers who spoke an incomprehensible tongue. So they used Autshumao, who had learnt to speak English after being taken to the East on an English ship, to facilitate trade and fatten their stocks. Amongst his tiny band of Goringhaicona, a clan of Khoe who lived off the fruits of the sea, was Chief Autshumao’s young niece, Krotoa, who was possibly born on Robben Island, and who picked up the Dutch language quickly. In return for cattle (to be secured by Autshumao), housekeeping and translation services, Van Riebeeck offered Krotoa a home – Christianised, euro-civilised and very different from the wandering life she was used to.

Just when Krotoa fell from grace (or faith) is a matter of speculation as primary records offer new clues, but relations soon began to sour between indigenous tribes – a complex mix of Khoe already competing with each other and encroaching Nguni tribes for cattle – and the Dutch fat cats who, with their double talk, sophisticated weapons and buying power, took over more and more grazing land on the fertile Liesbeeck River and beyond.

Though some Khoe descendants contend that her identity begins and ends with her Khoe birth status, others see her as ‘the woman between’. In order to fit in to her Dutch environment, albeit unchosen, Krotoa had to stop walking about ‘naked’ and trade her skins for western attire, learn the art of dinner-table etiquette and convert to Christianity. She also had to engage in proverbial white lies both to her father-cum-employer Van Riebeeck and her own people, led by her father-cum-uncle – to keep the increasingly fragile peace, which resulted in the Khoe tribes setting aside their own raging differences to revolt against the colonial oppressors.

Perhaps the truth was too complicated, and double-sided, for her to understand, but it is clear from a jubilant entry in Van Riebeeck’s journal – “Eva says she has a Dutch heart” – that the Dutch commander’s interest in her was crucial to relations at the Cape. It is this early cross-cultural interaction which played such a huge, unsung role in the South Africa story that Cape Dutch historian Dan Sleigh explores – with some poetic licence – in his novel ‘Islands’, aptly drawn from the famous John Donne adage ‘No Man is an Island’ and which alludes to the ubiquitous role of Robben Island.

Around this time, Krotoa, now in her late teens, evoked the attentions of Pieter Meerhoff, a newly appointed surgeon who often dined with the Van Riebeecks. An adventurer at heart, he had dreams of living in the East, with Krotoa at his side, suggests Sleigh in ‘Islands’, recently translated from Afrikaans by Andre Brink. Whether a romantic attempt to sanctify Meerhoff or whether she was effectually raped, as suggested by Yvette Abrahams in an article published in 1996 in Kronos (‘Was Eva Raped? An Exercise in Speculative History’), Krotoa gave birth to a son, Jacobus, in 1661.

A year later, Krotoa’s life was set to change again. Van Riebeeck was transferred to Batavia (present-day Djakarta) in 1662 and though inexplicably a union was not solemnised, Krotoa was baptised by a Christian minister a few days before the Van Riebeecks left. Only after the birth of a second child, Pieternella, in 1663, when Zacharias Wagenaer was the new commander, did a wedding ceremony at company expense on 2 June 1664 take place.

The next upheaval in Krotoa’s life was in progress. Now a lawfully wedded wife, she had little choice but to accompany her husband to Robben Island now appointed postkeeper overseeing exiled convicts on 19 May 1665. A controversial move, which many researchers suggest was a ruse to keep the undesirable match out of sight, it rendered Krotoa more isolated from her roots than ever. It was while here, after conceiving her third child, Salomon, that her husband was commissioned in 1667 to lead a slaving expedition in Madagascar from which he never returned .

Returning to a house converted from the Company’s old pottery on the mainland together with a Cape Verde slave owned by her husband, the widow Meerhoff sank into a hopeless depression – aided by alcohol, introduced to her people by European explorers. Rumours of prostitution were rife and she gave birth to at least two more children, refused to conform to colonial behaviour codes, remonstrating drunkenly in front of a hypocritical European society which rejected her (as did many of her own who criticised her cross-marriage) and in 1669, she was sent, without trial, to Robben Island away from her children to mend her immoral ways.

Five years later, at the zenith of the second ‘Hottentot’ uprising which saw an unprecedented public execution of indigenes, she was dead. Though she was given a Christian burial at the Old Fort, the Company journal ‘obituary’ makes no pretence at hiding their intolerance of her – and the people they sought to vanquish:

“This day departed this life…Eva…taken…by the Hon:[ourable] van Riebeeck, and educated in his house as well as brought to the knowledge of the Christian faith, and being thus transferred from the female Hottentoo almost into a Netherland woman, was married to a certain Chief Surgeon of the Residency, by whom she had three children…Since his death however at Madagascar, she had brought forth as many illegitimate ones, and for the rest led such an irregular life that for a long while the desire would have existed for getting rid of her, had it not been for the hope of the conversion of this brutal aboriginal. Hence in order not to be accused of tolerating her adulterous and debauched life, she had at various times been relegated to Robben Island…but as soon as she returned, she like the dogs, always returned to her own vomit, so that finally she quenched the fire of her sensuality by death …, affording a manifest example that nature, however, closely and firmly muzzled by imprinted principles, nevertheless at its own time triumphing over all precepts, again rushes back to its inborn qualities …”

Her remains were later moved to a burial site which is now below the foundations of the Groote Kerk in Bureau Street. But the bitter irony of her story, which in many ways set the tone for apartheid, was only to come later.

Today her documented legacy lives on, as paradoxically as her life, in at
least three million previously classified ‘white’ descendants of her daughter,
Pieternella, who married Dutch farmer Daniel Zaaiman. According to
lineages provided by genealogist Keith Meintjes, these descendants include
former premiers Paul Kruger, Jan Smuts and FW de Klerk. Both Pieternella and Salomon were shipped off to Mauritius with a childless Dutch couple and were later joined by Jacobus, who, rejected by his sister, fell mysteriously to his death from the ship returning him to the Cape. Salomon died young but there is a chance that descendants of Krotoa’s sons Jeronimus and Anthonij spawned by liaisons post-Meerhoff escaped being recorded, as many non-Europeans did.

Perhaps, therein, lies the real reason for the spell she casts 330 years on. Many with Khoe ancestry see her as a traitor to her people, and though a photograph of the smiling person believed to be her has been added to the memorabilia at the start of the Robben Island tour, officials decided for this reason against naming a tour boat after her. Others see her as a pawn in the power game the Dutch played with the aborigines – who, sans organised leadership hierarchy, were willing to trade services to hang onto their land. Besides being a voice for the dispossessed , female victims of exploitation and those ‘caught between’ colour and culture bars still today, the Eva story is in many ways the uncut South Africa story, details of which micro-historian Mansell Upham, himself a descendant, has explored in Capensis and other genealogical journals.

The debate about her status as ‘mother of us all’ is not a new one and Upham is documenting her descendants, which include members of the illustrious Diodati family, one of whom was commander of Mauritius and married Pieternella’s eldest daughter. Piecing together previously unexplored documentary evidence – like the diary of Hans Petersen, a Danish visitor who met Krotoa during her stay on Robben Island – with a view to publishing a factual, rather than a ‘factional’, account of the life of this unwittingly powerful matriarch, Upham’s message is one that South Africans cannot afford to ignore. Complex though it may be, only the truth shall set us free.

Published in Sunday Life. Copyright Sharon Marshall 2004.