It is a beautiful May morning in Pinelands, Cape Town: crisp and fresh with a cloudless blue sky and yellow sunshine flooding the lush vegetation of Dan Sleigh’s verdant garden.
“Too lovely to be trapped behind a desk all day,” he says as walks me up the driveway towards the house. “We have to enjoy it while we can — we only have the here and the now. We can’t go back in time, yet — like something out of Star Trek … do you watch it?” The question drops from the clear blue sky like an unexpected bolt of lightning. Science fiction was not what I anticipated an acclaimed South African historian would bring up as a first topic of discussion.
Having recently returned from The Netherlands — where he has been promoting the Dutch translation of Eilande, his well-received historical novel (already translated into English by André Brink) — Sleigh looks every bit the way you would expect a devoted historian to look. An unruly shock of white hair frames his face.
His eyes are bright and penetrating, and seemingly miss nothing. These are, after all, the eyes that have searched through volume upon volume of spidery, hand-written texts, to piece together from minute, officious details the lives and passions of those who walked these shores centuries before.
“There is no history other than the analysis and interpretation of documents, a search for survivors in endless space,” Sleigh stated in his acknowledgements in Eilande, which caused a stir when it first appeared in Afrikaans in 2002.
In it he brings to vivid life seven characters, including the Hottentot chief, Autshumao; a Dutch East India Company ship’s surgeon, Pieter van Meerhof; an illiterate fisherman, Bart Borms; and a cantankerous Latin teacher who becomes the unseen narrator of the novel, Johannes de Grevenbroek. All these characters existed, and lived at the Cape during the mid-to-late-17th century.
But it is through Sleigh’s painstaking analysis and interpretation that we are shown a colourful and convincing picture of life at the Cape about 350 years ago.
It is not generally, however, a happy view that we are presented with. De Grevenbroek comments on Van Meerhof during his tenure as postkeeper on Robben Island: “This was his world, and it was meagre, and impoverished and bitter.”
Isn’t this, I ask, a rather bleak view of the situation?
“Well, it certainly was an accurate description,” Sleigh says, matter of factly. But he is hardly a dispassionate historian. On the contrary, his deep empathy for his subjects frequently breaks through. “They were suffering, living, breathing people,” he says. “And they went through trials and pains that we, as modern people, can perhaps have no inkling of.” He pauses, almost as though gazing directly on to that distant past. “They suffered terribly, sometimes. And sometimes they lost so much; so much … Those poor, poor people,” he murmurs.
At times Sleigh seems to be enraged by the injustices of the past. In one chapter he writes: “There were wars about resources. Koina risking everything and losing all, prisoners on islands who should never have been prisoners, slaves from black Africa sold for rubbish by their kings, crimes committed on sea and land, people losing their jobs, children losing parents, people losing their lives.”
Despite his compassion for humanity, however, Sleigh’s overriding passion is history. During the late 1970s he conducted extensive research into the Dutch East India Company (VOC) for a PhD in history. This culminated in the publication of a substantial tome, Die Buiteposte van die VOC onder Kaapse Bestuur, 1652-1795 (The Outposts of the VOC under Cape Control, 1652-1795), and laid the groundwork for his novel, Eilande, which was written over two years, from 1980 to 1982, and then lay in a cupboard for almost 20 years before being published.
Sleigh says he wasn’t sure how to complete the novel until he came across the historical figure of De Grevenbroek.
In him, Sleigh says, he found the ideal personality to tell the tale: “When I found [De Grevenbroek] he appeared, like a drowning body, released from the bottom of the ocean — and he shot to the top, gasping for air, but full of life and full of plans and full of things to tell you … and he took the story, and he completed the story, the things that I couldn’t complete, or that I didn’t know how.”
Once completed, Sleigh was urged to enter the manuscript into the Sanlam/Kwela Novel Competition in 2001. It won, and brought him wide recognition.
Sleigh’s undoubted expertise regarding the VOC also led to him being invited by the Dutch government to join Towards a New Age of Partnership project — an initiative to transcribe and translate into English all the records of the VOC into a database that forms part of Unesco’s Memory of the World collection.
He worked for two years to capture the remainder of the South African documents in digital format, and the database (which also incorporates archives from Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and The Netherlands) will be housed in the Hague.
In many areas, the documents provide the only historical records of indigenous peoples at the time. Their 150-year span offers an insight, albeit a limited one, into cultures that no longer exist.
“I am so relieved the project is finished,” says Sleigh. “Now, if anything should happen to the physical archives — fire, flood or some other catastrophe — at least the records are safe.”
I ask Sleigh why history is important to us. He hesitates for a long moment before answering.
“If you look back,” he says, “you must also look forward. And if you are interested in where we come from, you will wonder where we are going, where we are headed.”
And then he returns to the topic that earlier had startled me. “In this, science fiction is not nonsense. “I think it is an honest effort to glimpse into the future.
“In the same way that I have tried to pull back the curtain of the past — have tried to leap in and tried to strike a light there and see what happened — science fiction attempts to pull the curtain away and look into the future; it is a speculation on what we might encounter next.”
Speaking of looking into the future, I ask him — pointing to the stack of three books; the English, Afrikaans and Dutch editions of his novel — what he would have thought if, 20 years ago, somebody had shown him a snapshot of this scene.
He laughs: “Star Trek come true!”