APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA AND RACISM IN HOLLAND

APARTHEID IN SOUTH AFRICA AND RACISM IN HOLLAND
Introduction
Jan van Riebeeck (1619 – 1677) a colonial pioneer was recalled to Holland on account of fraud by the Dutch East Indies Company. This man was sent in 1651 as chief salesman to found a refreshment station at the Cape. On 6 April 1652 he stepped ashore and laid the basis for a colony by building a fort. His main aim was to supply the Dutch travellers to and from their colonial possessions in the East Indies (Indonesia) with fresh water, vegetables, fruit and meat. To achieve this, he literally held the bible in one hand and a gun in the other. After all, in order to supply the refreshment station, he needed land and cheap labour. These were to become two major corner stones of the subsequent history of South Africa. It was later given a name: apartheid.
Jan van Riebeeck meticulously kept a diary which provides valuable information. The first orange trees, for example, arrived in the Cape on the ship ‘de Tulp’ from St. Helena on 11 June 1654 and by 1661 no fewer than 1662 orange and lemon trees decorated the private garden of van Riebeeck.
In 1657 a group of Dutch settlers broke away from his authority and started to live outside the boundary of the refreshment station. They called themselves ‘vrijburghers’ (free citizens). The original inhabitants the Kho-Khoi (abusively called Hottentots by Europeans) lost more and more land to the fast expanding white colonists. Slavery became officially introduced in 1657 and the supremacy of the whites and the subordination of blacks became a fact.
In 1648 five years prior to his settlement, Jan van Riebeeck already made acquaintance with the local people of the Cape. On his way back from the East Indies with his fleet of boats, he picked up a Dutch group who had suffered shipwreck a year earlier. They had enjoyed the hospitality of the Khoi-Khoi for a full year. However, the fleet of van Riebeeck was not impressed by this and they shot and stole a number of cows belonging to the Khoi-Khoi and disappeared without paying.
Most remarkably two other Dutchmen, Janssen and Proot, from the sunken ‘Haarlem’ who had enjoyed the hospitality of the Khoi-Khoi lodged a complaint at the powerful Dutch East Indies Company in Holland:
“Others would say that the natives are brutal and wild from whom no good can be expected… However, this is a mistake…We are convinced that the Dutch farmers, if their livestock had been shot down or stolen, without any pay, would not have behaved any better that these natives”
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