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#Post#: 40--------------------------------------------------
Interesting - "IT WASN’T JAN – IT WAS SIMON"
By: Hawk Date: March 21, 2018, 4:20 am
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Shared by JL
[quote]I might not always agree with these guys, BUT their
history lessons are always interesting :[/quote]
IT WASN’T JAN – IT WAS SIMON
Front National SA
After president Jacob Zuma’s downright idiotic statement a year
or two ago that all the problems in South Africa started with
the arrival of Jan van Riebeeck in 1652, I have been noticing
quite a number of Jan van Riebeeck profile pictures, cartoons
and T-shirts going about. As could be expected – I would
personally consider doing anything civilised to annoy Jacob Zuma
as well. The latest, apparently, is this: At the National
Library of South Africa in Cape Town they display a picture of
Jan Van Riebeeck upside down!
Any Front National member in Cape Town who wants to go and hang
it the right way up again?
Let us talk history for a few moments here and then we can focus
on the future again, instead of doing the ANC thing of dwelling
in the past for ever. They have started with blaming apartheid
for everything until they realised that some of us actually
remember the years of apartheid and might not be as foolish as
the majority of KFC-eating, my-vote-for-a-free-yellow-tee-shirt,
snorting and dumping rubbish in the streets-voters are. So Zuma
then tried to blame a section of history which nobody can
remember first hand. Stuuuuupid! Europeans actually had the
skill to write and record journals, and if the former president
bothered to read one or two from time to time, he might not make
such a fool of himself. But I understand he said once that he is
not one for reading much. That is very obvious, I fear.
The former president passed standard 3 at school, I understand.
Which explains his lack of knowledge, because the old standard 5
history text book was the one which taught us that Jan van
Riebeeck was sent to the Cape to establish a halfway station for
the trade ships of the DEIC (HOIK or Vereenigd Oost Indische
Compagnie). There never was the intention of colonising or
settling. Uncle Jan wanted to open a tuck shop, not take over
the (non-existent) government! We know that all too well,
because he sent out only a few expeditions to trade cattle with
the Khoi-groups in the Peninsula and allowed the first free
citizens to measure out small farms only after a lengthy
correspondence with Amsterdam. He left the Cape after a decade,
never to return and never to look back.
No, if Jacob Zuma wants to blame the first Dutch “settler” we
must look at the arrival of the last Commander of the Cape who
also became the first governor in 1679. This was the man who
started building the strong sandstone fortifications of the
Castle of Good Hope, who measured out farms, planted endless
avenues of trees, started new enterprises, in particular
viticulture, and within three weeks after his arrival visited
all the outposts of the Cape. On the 3rd of November 1679 he
arrived at a lovely spot nestled in the mountains by a river and
decided to establish a “colony” of people there and to build a
new town. This was a very clear indication that this man, Simon
van der Stel, who named the new town, Stellenbosch, after
himself, intended to stay and to create a new nation.
It is ever more obvious as he, after his retirement, never left
the Cape but went to live on his farm, Groot Constantia, despite
the fact that his children all returned to the Netherlands. He
lived for another 14 years before peacefully passing on, loved
and respected and known as “Father Simon” by the people of the
Cape – black and white alike. Simon van der Stel, the first
colonialist...
Now, before you decide that you had the wrong spirit exorcised
and that Jan van Riebeeck was only a visitor while Simon van der
Stel was the bad guy who brought the white man to this country:
Here is a little challenge for you, mr Zuma.
We have no reliable portrait of Simon van der Stel, only a
description which tells us that he was short and stocky with
very dark hair, oriental eyes, small flat nose and a yellowish
complection. And you know why that was? No, of course you don’t:
In the records of the Dutch East India Company Simon van der
Stel is described as “mestizo” – non-white. His mother was the
daughter of captain Hendrick Lievens and a Batavian slave woman
Mai Monica da Costa van Java.
You see, president Zuma, your first European coloniser wasn’t
even a white man. In today’s South Africa he would be regarded
as a Coloured person. So question is now: Are you going to
exorcise the spirits of the ancestors of the Coloured people and
tell them how unwelcome they are? Or of Indian South Africans
whose ancestors originated from the same region as Simon van der
Stel’s?
Mr Zuma, children should never play with matches, nor should
idiots toy with history....
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