2014-03-25

Just arrived in Johannesburg.

Nothing happened yet other than a long boring flight via Singapore, so perhaps to set the scene first a very short bit about some historical facts of South Africa. Better not to go into too much detail as the Dutch would no longer be proud of being Dutch. Holland was amongst other countries which started the slave trade from here and made their own country wealthy. And the English?… well they invented concentration camps where 1000's upon 1000's died,mostly from starvation. (Google will tell you all about it.)

Prologue-South Africa

Without trying to create a long and boring anecdote, I think a little bit of historic background about South Africa is called for in order to put possible future events and references in its right perspective.

As like most European countries, South Africa used to consist of numerous small tribal areas. The Zulu tribe being the most significant. In the 1400’s the first explorers arrived from Portugal, followed in the mid 1600’s by the Dutch who set up supply station for the the ships of the Dutch East India Company. The British entered the area in late 1700’s. Meanwhile the Dutch settled further inland and later started the great trek north to the area of Transvaal.

The Dutch (and German) settlers were called "Boers".

“Boer “ is the Dutch word for farmer. Both the Boers and the English were claiming more land which resulted in “The Boer War. I don’t know if there were winners or losers. Today the country has two main languages: English and Afrikaans, the latter being a type of old style Dutch mixed with new local African words. Being Dutch it sound amusing to me.

I may as well mention here that the Dutch people residing in Holland in the 60’s and 70’s would shy away from any association with the South African-Dutch heritage which laid claim to the well known word of “Apartheid” . The only proper use of that word would have been that the very tolerant Dutch nation set itself miles apart from the “apartheid” policies of their political counterparts.

This afternoon we drove to the “Apartheids Museum” which took about 2 hours to get through the timeline from the 1800 until recent years. It made me feel ashamed that I was able to read everything in my mother tongue and that a combination of the English, Dutch and Germans immigrants could unleash so much agony onto the African people who had lived in these lands for tens of thousands of years. One of the reasons I migrated to Australia was that I refused to go consider South Africa (as advised by my parents) because I had family which lived here and who had absolutely no problem with the policies of white superiority and the treatment of the coloured people. Further evidence of early Dutch settlement is the hundreds of towns with similar names like Haarlem, Alkmaar, Middelburg, Ermelo and Amsterdam as found in Holland. If you are English this would not be anything special but being Dutch it is. Later I will pass many places which names I associate will well know Dutch cities or towns. Having been born in Haarlem in The Netherlands it would be amusing to travel trough Haarlem in South Africa. SO especially for my Dutch friend I will take some pictures in the places which may have some meaning to you- so watch this space…