A grave discovery

(see Part I of the story) and started tracking down his and my own ancestors, who moved in the same circles.

In my travels overseas, I have never been able to resist a graveyard and the silent history it relates. At home I’m so caught up in the cause of progress it’s easy to pass off a cemetery as the dead centre it seems.

Until I found boy-soldier SE Morley

In a little cemetery on Grassridge Farm in Cradock , James Lydford Collett, the progenitor of my paternal grandmother’s family and that of the late Professor Guy Butler, is buried beside his wife Rhoda Trollip, herself a settler in search of a better life and unknowing pawn in England’s grand emigration scheme which shaped the complicated history I call my own.

I’m told the grave-site still exists, and the thought of seeing it produces the same chilly-warm feeling that I have somehow come home – to the mighty Fish River, Bartholomew Diaz’s turning point in 1488, strategic boundary of the 1820 settlement and site of my great great great uncle’s marriage to a slave from Madagascar in the early 1830s.

This is Frontier country: nine wars were fought here before 1900, the ANC and resistance to Nationalist rule was born here in the 20th century and graves are as much a part of the landscape as the melting pot of people who have fought to own a part of it.

Halfway between nearby Graaff-Reinet and Aberdeen in the middle of the veld lies the overgrown grave of an Afrikaner voortrekker, fenced in by his wife on their pilgrimage north, and, not far away, an ancient rock painting of the sacred eland and runic inscriptions proclaim spiritual homage to a San hunter-gatherer.

Closer to colonial strongholds like Grahamstown, settler graveyards like St James at Southwell, St John’s at Bathurst and Cuylerville Cemetery complement the lone testimonies of an unnamed Hottentot whose hand was chopped off to save the life of a Xhosa chief to whom he was handcuffed. The grave of cult figure and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in King William’s Town, who was murdered in jail in 1977, also bears testimony to generations of political strife.”

If Queenstown’s on your route, there’s an elderly gentleman in the town who knows every ‘inhabitant’ of the vandalised graveyard, because he made it his business, as a United Party member, to ensure the opposition Nats weren’t using dead people as bogus postal voters in the 1960’s elections.

If you’re into drama and have access to a 4×4, get someone to guide you to the top of Buffelskop, overlooking Cradock, where the spirit of controversial author of Story of an African, Olive Schreiner, lives on, in an elaborate igloo-shaped tomb built in 1920 by her estranged husband Samuel Cronwright, who had her remains moved from Maitland Cemetery in Cape Town.

More of a contrast would be hard to find. Maitland or Woltemade Cemetery, though it houses hundreds of notables, is run-down and a source of much agitation for visitors. Over 100 homeless squatters camp out in plastic ‘tents’ beside their stone-slab ‘postboxes’, hanging out their washing to the approval of the dead who they say protect them from gangsters.

Unorthodox form of respect though it may be, respect it is; which, many believe, is a civilised custom that began right here in South Africa. The Border Cave, a site on the KwaZulu Natal/Swaziland border, is the site of the first known deliberate burial in the world 80 000 years ago, and as recently as 1999 archaeologists discovered the mummified remains of a 2000-year-old San hunter-gatherer embalmed by an indigenous plant, in the Kouga mountains.

Respecting the dead

It is this same need to show respect that sparked the international battle over the remains of Sara Baartman hundreds of years after she was publicly humiliated in Europe and which saw them finally brought to rest in Hankey; the same debate that raged over the removal of Chief Makana’s remains from Robben Island to the Eastern Cape; the same urge that motivated local tribesmen to preserve the Valley of the Kings in KwaZulu Natal, home in life and death to a long line of Zulu chiefs which include Cetshwayo, the man who brought the British to their knees at the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879.

For better or worse, spiritual consciousness deems it necessary to honour the dead, and like the circle of modern South African life begun at the foot of Table Mountain, the Mother City is the fulcrum around which at least one circle spins.

Begun over 250 years ago, when Islam slaves were first brought to the Cape, a circle of tombs of saints of their religion is now complete. It starts at the kramat on Signal Hill and ends at Robben Island.

For those with little inclination to travel beyond the fairest Cape, just one trip is necessary: embodying the essence of what all this battle and heartache is about: a granite Celtic cross marking the grave of Kirstenbosch’s first director, Professor Harold Pearson, states simply, “If ye seek his monument, look around.”

Extract from Thabo Mbeki’s words at the adoption of South Africa’s constitution on May 8, 1996:

“I owe my being to the hills and the valleys…the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land. I owe my being to the Khoi and the San… I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home in our native land… in my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves… I am the grandchild who lays flowers on the Boer graves…I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led…the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.”

TOUR YOUR LOCAL CEMETERY Eastern Cape Liz Eshmade, known as the ‘Grave Lady’ by the Port Elizabeth press, has, with the help of school groups and other volunteers, recorded a comprehensive list of graveyard inhabitants in the greater Port Elizabeth area, and is in the process of publishing a second book which already covers over 16 000 names in 230 cemeteries – from the Fish River to Port St. Johns and north to the Orange River. It should be out later this year. On visiting graveyards, Liz says: “The main element here is that cemeteries are NOT sad places, they are gold mines of information about our past, they are the best and easiest way to learn history and get a load of fresh air and exercise at the same time. Everything from battles, the rise of commerce and industry, the killer diseases of their period, their way of life, their thinking, their religious beliefs – it is all there to be noted and can be so easily understood when you are away from the comforts of your lounge and standing in a forgotten cemetery in the bush.” However, she cautions that it is safest to do tours in groups, especially in more isolated areas, and she herself conducts tours to this end of St Mary’s in Port Elizabeth, while Rose Treahaven includes other cemeteries in her Ghost Walk Tours. Contact Liz at eshmade@mweb.co.za or 041-3682213. Settler Country If you’re into experiencing the whole Frontier shebang, Rob Speirs of Frontier Tours runs comprehensive tours of settler country. Brochures can be obtained from info@speirstours.co.za or 043 642 1747, or by visiting www.speirstours.co.za Gauteng Elaine Persona runs customised tours of Brixton and Braamfontein cemeteries, combined with other architectural legacies in Johannesburg. Contact her at the Parktown & Westcliff Heritage Trust on: 011-482 3349. Cape To find out more about graveyards around the Cape peninsula, contact info@twinoaks.co.za or catch a ride on the Mystery Ghost Bus Tour. And if you’re ever in the Prince Albert district in the Karoo, make sure you try out their ghost walk. In the Northern Cape town of Kimberley, you can join the Kimberley Ghost Trail. Phone: 053-832 7298 for more info.

 

 Published on iafrica.com 2004. Copyright Sharon Marshall 2004.

 

A grave guide to South Africa

There is something about a grave that speaks of dignity…perhaps the only real permanent spot one gets on Planet Earth. In a mission to trace her settler origins Sharon Marshall uncovered the evolution of her family as well as that of the land which gave her birth – through the monuments to the dead.

It all started in Sri Lanka a few months ago.
We were catching a tuk-tuk ride up in Trincomalee, a strategic spot which has seen few foreigners in the last 13 years because of civil war, when the driver pointed out a pristine Bougainvillea-bordered patch of ground amidst the war-ravaged countryside.
A few steps closer and the rows of white benches turned into perfect little crosses – not a refuge for tired travellers or locals, but an honorary haven for allied forces who fought here in World War II.
All too aware of the irony of seeming to be paying homage to an imperialist soldier in a Buddhist land, which ironically was once the source of slave labour for our country, I told the overseer I was a South African Buddhist.
Unperturbed, he proudly unlocked his register from a vault in the wall and, following the map to one South African citizen – 19-year-old Private SE Morley from Queenstown, the very place of my own birth – I flounder.
A halo appears around the head of this gentle man who has probably seen more senseless deaths than I have read about, and I am transported back to a time when my travelling partner, an unwilling conscript in the apartheid government’s great Angolan cover-up, nearly lost his life.
Not much I can do, but this I can – a photo for the family back home.
An act which, I discover on returning in search of this young man’s family, was pre-empted 100 years before when Rose McEwan and a band of women friends took to the Anglo-Boer battlefields in Lydenburg, photographed the resting places of fallen soldiers and sent the pictures to their wives and mothers.
A fitting tribute
She herself now occupies a respectable place in Brixton Cemetery (Krause Street, Vrededorp), which has recently been upgraded with tar roads and trees to accommodate tourist tours at the recent World Summit. Something macabre about the concept at face value, but on deeper reflection, a fitting and clever tribute to many who left their personal marks on the history of the country.
Her neighbours in this leafy olde-worlde cemetery include the likes of Johannesburg trade unionist Mary “Pickhandle” Fitzgerald and Samuel “Taffy” Long, whose spot in eternity is marked with a granite cross stating that he was executed “for a crime he did not commit” in the aftermath of the 1922 Miners’ Strike.
Laid out in 1912, Brixton Cemetery speaks silent testimony to battle and success across the board, and is the site of the first Hindu crematorium in Africa (built in 1918) conceptualised by human rights pacifist Mahatma Gandhi before he left the country for good.
A lesser-publicised inhabitant of the cemetery is Cornelis Broeksma who was executed by firing squad at Johannesburg Fort on September 30, 1901, for exposing the appalling conditions at concentration camps in the South African War at the turn of the 20th century, with the help of Emily Hobhouse. Her ashes were brought from England and placed at the bottom of the Vroue Monument in Bloemfontein to commemmorate the deaths of over 28 000 women and children in the camps.
Of the 115 white concentration camps, the biggest in Johannesburg was at the Turffontein Race Course, which housed around 5000 people, of whom 700 died and were buried in Winchester Hills, on a farm called Kliprivier Berg.
Vandalised by an anti-Ossewa Brandwag group during World War II, it was overhauled and re-opened in 1961. It now consists of a number of coffin-shaped terraces, with a memorial listing the names of the dead and a few headstones, including that of an eight-month-old baby.
Not far from Brixton, in Braamfontein Cemetery (Graf Street), lies another tragic rite of passage.
Unaware of the passive resistance campaign instigated by Gandhi in response to 1906’s Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, by which Indians and Chinese were bound to register their presence in the Transvaal, a 24-year-old Chinese man, Chow Kwai For, registered.
When he realised what he had done, he committed suicide – his letter of apology (written in Chinese) is engraved on the headstone. Put this one high on your grave tour agenda.
Besides other passive resistors, the graveyard also accommodates dynamite explosion victims, South African War soldiers, cholera and flu epidemic victims, and a memorial to Enoch Sontonga, the creator of South Africa’s national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, who died in obscurity at the age of 33.
Though it took authorities over a year to find his grave which itself had been buried, a glamorous black granite tribute to his unique legacy has now been erected.
Nearby, in Soweto’s overcrowded Avalon Cemetery, lie Communist Party leader, Joe Slovo; 1976 Soweto hero Hector Pieterson; and human rights stalwart Helen Joseph; not recommended if you can’t ignore the rows of cot-like structures and pauper’s graves of Aids victims that will forever bear witness to this tragic slice of SA history.
If you’re in Johannesburg, don’t miss the three words on the SAHRA memorial commemorating the casualties of the Soweto “uprising” in 1976: “Never never again…”

Fascinating, isn’t it? And that’s not all. Sharon Marshall has many more grave stories to share. We’ll publish PART TWO of A grave guide through SA next week.

Published on iafrica.com 2004. Copyright Sharon Marshall 2004.

 

For Eva and ever

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.

 

SA family history on the web

 

What’s in a (South African) name?