These are some silver jewellery pieces which I made a while ago, amongst other memorabilia such as T-shirts, candle holders, placemats etc to commemorate what I consider to be my premier ancestral event of note. This weekend 206 years ago the most significant act of resistance to slavery occurred at the Cape, remembered as the ‘Jij’ Rebellion led by an odd band of urban slaves headed by Louis van Mauritius but involved around 326 rural slaves and a few apprenticed Khoena from the Swartland, mainly Mazbiekers. The act of resistance was brutally taken down. This amazing event does not stand out in history books nor does it feature in public commemoration. Most South Africans, regardless of national group, are relatively ignorant about that huge chunk of South African history – the era of Slavery that formally ended in 1834 but continued in practice well into the 1850s. Slavery laid the basis for the indentured labour system followed by the migrant labour system on which the main pillars of the South African economy to this day was dependent – agriculture, mining and industry. A few years ago when South Africa hosted a major international conference on slavery in Durban it was embarrassing to see how little South African political figures knew about this subject. The problem is that academia has created an iron curtain around broader public access to information where ownership of knowledge seems to be the driving force. A further problem is the orthodoxy of interpretation where the white colonial lens acts as a kind of censor to exploration. On the 200th anniversary of the ‘Jij Rebellion’ one academic broke ranks. Nigel Worden produced a very different account which was more aligned to the exploration by Cape slavery heritage activists up until then. Most academic voices were very disparaging about the event which they portrayed as a cuckoo adventure by irresponsible villains who had no inkling of what they were doing and were completely disorganised and reckless. They more or less propagated the version of events of Lord Caledon and his court. The more ‘enlightened’ said that it was possible that a different account could be explored but suggested that a truer account of the event was impossible. Nigel Worden’s evaluation dared to turn the colonial accounts and evaluations on its head and for the first time from the formal world of study put forward a perspective of restorative evaluation of past events and gave Louis and his followers a dignified place in our heritage. Nigel Worden’s account can be read here: media1.mweb.co.za/iziko/education/pastprogs/2008/slavery2008/Iziko_1808_Worden.pdf It appeared in the Cape Times on the 200th anniversary of the ‘Jij Rebellion’ in October 2008 as : The day Cape Slaves made themselves masters – The 1808 Rebellion a dramatic shift in the nature of resistance; Nigel Worden Cape Times; (2008) My own version appears under PROFILES - camissapeople.wordpress “Tomorrow when we raise the blood flag…. You will be able to address your madams and masters as Jij” – Abraham van der Kaap, slave rebel October 1808.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 20:17:08 +0000
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