Dalene Matthee’s new novel deal with the first interracial family at the Cape under the Dutch
Jane Rosenthal
Dalene Matthee, who is rather smaller than one would expect from the authority and stature of her novels, appeared promptly for a hotel breakfast interview. She applied herself politely and diligently and with increasing eloquence to a set of questions she had probably been asked many times before. Warming to the task she several times insisted that I “put that thing off!” (the tape recorder) so that I could not use her funniest profanities and more unusual ideas. Yet she offered me a cigarette from a worn little tin, of which she said, “My man skaam hom naby dood oor hierdie blikkie [My husband is almost shamed to death by this little tin].”
Her latest work, Pieternella van die Kaap (Tafelberg), is a mother of a novel; substantial and wise, it is a fascinating life story set in the 17th century, the days of the early white settlement at the Cape, with the VOC (Dutch East India Company) clinging precariously to a little piece of land around Table Bay.
The novel opens with Pieternella resisting with all her might being sent as a sort of orphan “slave” to Mauritius. She wishes to stay at the Cape where her mother’s people, the Goringhaicona and neighbouring Khoikhoi tribes, had always lived, and where she herself endured a troubled childhood alongside her much loved mother.
This was Eva, also known as Krotoa, one of the first interpreters and intermediaries between the Khoikhoi and the Dutch, who married Pieter van Meerhoff, the VOC’s surgeon at the Cape. Pieternella and her siblings were amongst the first mixed-race children born at the Cape, which circumstance was a source of joy and strength, and of bitter unhappiness, their lives a manifestation of a sentiment often expressed by Matthee in this novel, that life consists of heaven and hell rolled together in the same cloth.
With her well-known ability to create characters that come to life on the page, Matthee has once again drawn women of great soul and intelligence. In this novel she wanted “to honour Eva”.
The research process took four years. In addition to travels in Holland and Mauritius, she was assisted greatly by her co-researcher, Dan Sleigh, and others who fine-combed the text for inaccuracies. Finding the soul of a “Hottentotinnetjie”, Eva, in the voluminous records of the VOC’s reports, Van Riebeeck and Wagenaar’s diaries, letters and court records, was virtually impossible. “She just died under your hand, because it was all men.” Then Sleigh suggested she approach the novel through Pieternella, Eva’s “very special daughter”, and this was the “million dollar tip”.
When Matthee wrote her acclaimed novel Kringe in die Bos, she used a “sharpened yellow pencil”, but is adamant that she could not have written this new novel without a computer. She describes how she went about it. “You put it all down, everything is together, and suddenly patterns come out, the most amazing patterns … [Then] if you take everything they wrote about her and see what happened on the day, what happened around her, see what influenced her, see what she must have experienced.”
So Matthee shows us the Cape through the eyes of the 13-year-old Pieternella. The sea voyage is described in detail, wondrously imagined, with Pieternella making sense of this new experience in terms of her life at the Cape, so that to her the ship looks like a wooden goose floating on the water and she focuses on the animals on board to orientate herself on the deck, sheep-side and chicken-side.
It is a long novel, but never loses its vigour or its capacity to surprise, and is all the more interesting because it is based on fact. Matthee says, “The most important thing was not to change one historical thing.” Eva emerges as a woman of intelligence and independence, qualities that Matthee celebrates in several of her characters; these gifts are passed on to Pieternella. She lives an extraordinary life.
Matthee’s dialogue is exceptionally skilful, and she often runs a counter- thread of opposing thought alongside it for Pieternella, revealing her as a real, thinking being. She remembers her mother clearly and benefits from her good advice. Pieternella reflects on life, looking for meaning and examines along the way the idea that “Elke mens is op soek na iets om van gelukkig te wees [Each person is searching for something to bring them happiness].”
Throughout the novel Matthee balances the elements of Pieternella’s life: love and shame for her disintegrating mother, the impersonal might of the VOC versus the puny individual, a slave who is freer than a free woman, the hurricanes and turquoise waters of the island Mauritius, rolling up heaven and hell into the cloth of this remarkable novel.