“What we have from that period is Van Riebeeck’s diary, and that diary was actually not even written by his scribes. There’s actually very little written down factually or in history books. But a lot of it is supposition and a lot of it is deduction. And then you also have various historians who have written essays and subject matter on Krotoa and on that period. If you go back and look at what you actually have to work with – you’ve got oral traditions and Khoi knowledge about the tribes, the chiefs and their ancestry. We produced two episodes and one of them was on Krotoa. “Kaye Ann Williams, now the head of content at M-Net, created a documentary series for the SABC called Hidden Histories. So, for Krotoa to have been mentioned in historical documents such as Van Riebeeck’s diary shows that she must have been remarkable. Women didn’t count much in the 1600s, and even less so if you weren’t white. Or maybe she didn’t, and was bartered by her uncle Autshumao (named Harry/Herry die Strandloper, first by the English and then by the Dutch). Maybe she wanted to go – enchanted by these new settlers in their feathered hats, enchanted by the wares they unloaded from their ships. She’d come there to work as a servant, nanny and playmate to Van Riebeeck, his wife Maria and their children. The Dutch call her Eva, but although she has adopted their religion, their culture and their language, she is not Eva. She’s taken off her long, bodiced European dress and is back in the skins and beads of her people. "I am Krotoa!” she tells herself, screaming, crying, in the fort of Jan van Riebeeck and the Dutch settlers of the 1600s. Grethe Kemp speaks with director Roberta Durrant about who Krotoa, the woman some consider the mother of coloured people in South Africa, really was. A new local biopic on Khoi historical figure Krotoa opens on circuit this week after raking in eight international festival awards so far.
0 kommentar(er)
