TOPICS: History, Holland, South Africa, Colonization, Propaganda

USES: A

SYNOPSIS
A conservative history of Dutch colonization of South Africa after 1652. Made by a Dutch company, the film's interpretation of Dutch South African colonial history is very similar to the official apartheid version. The seeds of apartheid are blamed on the Dutch East India company's 17th Century social policies. It is only at the end of the film that apartheid is hastily mentioned as having become a conversation piece. In an attempt to redress the lack of historical enunciation on the Jan van Riebeeck era, who arrived at the Cape in 1652, the film dwells on the conflicts that occurred between the colonists and a later governor, Simon van der Stel. This film, however, has little to say about the slave economy which was legal at the Cape but not in Holland itself.

CRITIQUE
The text is illustrated with period re-creations of paintings, documents, contemporary location shots and models. Despite these extensive resources available to the producers, the film is basically a sanitized history constructed by uncritical members of a former colonial power. The Dutch in South Africa is riddled with omissions of events and policies which would have required critical elaboration, and blames conflicts with the settlers on "belligerent Bushmen" and "Hottentots who did not want to work". Despite these statements, the narrator claims that no-one was at the Cape when the first European voyagers arrived. The first blacks arrived at the Cape, viewers are told, when the Dutch robbed a Portuguese slave ship and put them to work.

Vague statements like "Black tribes wandering south" do a disservice to the history of population migrations in Southern Africa, and perpetuate the dominant white myths of white settlement before blacks arrived from the north. The National Party did not get into power in a "landslide victory" in 1948, but barely obtained 37% of the white vote. It was able to dislodge the ruling Jan Smuts United Party government because of the skewed delimitation of constituencies. That the majority of the (black) population were denied voting rights isn't even mentioned.

While unfortunate racist colloquialisms might have unintentionally slipped into the narration, the omissions, images, music and emphases reinforce a paternalist view of both Dutch and South African history unfolding in the absence of complex economic, social, imperialist and cultural processes.

The Dutch in South Africa is true to a conservative Dutch historiography, but it lacks the dialectic of the history of the indigenous people whom the Dutch, and later the British, came to subjugate. The film lacks the signposts of an official apartheid history as, for example, the narrator's neutral voice entirely lacks any sense of irony as he mentions the origins of race classification under the British, and the 2nd Anglo-Boer War which just `happens', as if outside of historical or economic impulses.

The film is not totally irretrievable, however. Used in a critical context, teachers could employ it to show how official histories are constructed to serve contemporary ideological purposes. Monuments like the Cape Town Castle built by Van Riebeeck and the houses of the early Dutch settlers continue to provide ideological rallying points and are maintained by cultural capital with a vested interest in maintaining images of the official past. The Dutch in South Africa offers a benign interpretation which needs to be unpacked in terms of other voices of history.

(Written by Keyan G Tomaselli and MSU Evaluators, 1990)