Khoikhoi, Microhistory, and Colonial Characters at the Cape of Good Hope

Microhistory unlocked new avenues of historical investigation and methodologies and helped uncover the past of individuals, an event, or a small community. Reclamation of “lost histories” of individuals and colonized communities of colonial South Africa falls within this category. This study provides historical narratives of indigenous Khoikhoi of modest status absorbed into Cape colonial society as farm servants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based on archival and other sources, the author illuminates the “everyday life” and “lived experience” of Khoikhoi characters in a unique way. The opening chapter recounts the love-loathe drama between a Khoikhoi woman, Griet, and Hendrik Eksteen, whose murder she later orchestrated with the aid of slaves and Khoikhoi servants. The malcontent Andries De Necker, arrested for the murder of his Khoikhoi servant, attracted much legal attention and resulted in a protracted trial. The book next features the Khoikhoi millenarian prophet-turned-Christian convert Jan Paerl, who persuaded believers to reassert the land of their birth and liberate themselves from Dutch colonial rule by October 25, 1788. The last two chapters examine the lives of four Khoikhoi converts immersed into the Moravian missionary world and how they were exhibited by missionaries and sketched by the colonial artist, George F. Angas.

Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction: Microhistory and Reclaiming Histories of the Modest Chapter 1. Love, Lust and Loathe: The Story of “Lost Love”: Griet and Hendrik Eksteen, c.1739–1759 Chapter 2. Master, Malcontent, and Murderer: Khoikhoi Andries and Johannes Adriaan de Necker in Dutch-South Africa, c.1764–1766 Chapter 3. Jan Paerl c.1788–1851: Restitutionist, Religious Prophet, and Respectable Convert Chapter 4. “Soil Once His Own”: The Colonial and Christian World of Lebrecht Hans Ari: A Khoikhoi and Moravian Convert at the Cape, c.1774–1864 Chapter 5. “Sketching the Khoikhoi”: George French Angas and His Depiction of Genadendal Khoikhoi Characters at the Cape of Good Hope, c. 1847

About the Author :
Russel Viljoen is professor of history at the University of South Africa.

Review :
In this book, Russel Viljoen has once again demonstrated the power of microhistory for the understanding of the colonial past of the Khoikhoi. On the basis of meticulous archival research, he has reconstructed the lives, or at any rate the most dramatic parts of the lives, of a number of the Khoikhoi individuals living in Swellendam district. He has done it with verve, and most importantly he has shown how an individual's experience becomes intermeshed with that of others to create the wider story of Cape Colonial history. 'Big history often blurs the pain of ordinary lives under oppression. Instead, Russel Viljoen, in his latest volume, finds intricate and intimate details in the colonial record and indigenous sources to give vivid and shocking detail to the lived experience of Khoikhoi labourers, cooks and wagon drivers in the far-reaches of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cape society. The trauma of criminality and racism, mixed with lost love and religion, are empathetically clustered in micro-histories, producing a sharper narrative of the struggle to save a semblance of pre-colonial freedom.