In a country of multiple languages like South Africa, as many scholars and commentators have observed, interpreters and translators have always played a key role. In pre-colonial times, translation must have occurred between, say, Nguni or proto-Xhosa speakers and Khoi or San-speakers, until such time as the languages partially merged. The arrival of Dutch and English-speakers of course added a whole new power dynamic. Very different cultures struggled to understand one another; where they failed, they fought. Yet cultures changed, languages shifted, fruitful and destructive lessons were learned and shared. Culture-change could not have occurred without the translator or interpreter – an ambivalent intermediary who might be at once a bridge and internally torn, who might be a powerful agent of events as much through failings as through successes. Even today, when many if not most South Africans have learned at least one other official language, thus dispensing with the intermediary, translators remain crucial – take the example of the key role of the ‘court interpreter’ today.
Especially
during the initial two centuries of conflictual colonisation, sundry
interpreters found themselves at the literal frontiers of negotiation, war,
culture-clash, and conciliation. They might often have been the actual engineers
of events. Even the best-known were often patently poor or limited translators,
so there were endless opportunities for mistranslation, misunderstanding, manipulation
and deliberate deceit. The interpreters I’ve been reading about of late were
almost all both troubled and troublesome, as suspect as they were necessary.
In Jan
van Riebeeck’s tenure at the Cape in the 1650s, interpreters were crucial to
the Dutch East India Company’s often hapless efforts to obtain cattle and sheep
from local ‘Hottentot’ (Khoikhoi) transhumance herders. Perhaps the first
intermediary was one Autshumao, variously spelled, colloquially known as
‘Harry’. Autshumao was a Goringhacoina, a Beachcomber or Strandloper, who even
before 1652 had acted as unofficial postmaster to passing Dutch ships. So
useful was he that he had been taken to Bantam in the Far East, so had facility
in both Dutch and English, not to mention a slew of Khoi dialects. When van
Riebeeck arrived, Autshumao was probably in his fifties and seriously
destitute, but in his burgeoning role as interpreter and cattle broker, he
cannily and rapidly built up considerable wealth in livestock of his own. By
1656 he had 100 cattle and 200 sheep, which was more than the Company could
boast. Having joined a peninsular group known as the Capemen, he shamelessly
played the Dutch and the often mutually fractious Khoi segments off one
another, a power that hinged on the Dutchmen’s inability to master the clicking
local tongue. After a few years he announced he would no longer interpret. He
was, van Riebeeck fulminated in his journal, ‘a sly rogue’ whose word could not
be trusted, but he also exemplified indigenous intelligence which became
‘sharper every day’. In contrast to the prevailing prejudice against the
indigenes, van Riebeeck was forced to recognise that ‘they were certainly not
so savage and stupid as beasts’.
Autshumao
continued to accumulate his herds, while the stubborn Khoi reluctance to part
with any but the most meagre livestock obliged the Dutch to start colonising
pasturage and trying to establish their own crops and stock. The competition
over pastures inevitably spawned an outbreak of vigorous resistance, starting
in May 1659, with Autshumao a chief instigator. Lured into the Dutch fort, he
was imprisoned on Robben Island, an early victim of that ugly, centuries-long
institution. Foreshadowing the Xhosa prophet-chieftain Makhanda 150 years
later, Autshumao escaped in a leaky boat; unlike Makhanda he didn’t drown, and
improbably was back interpreting by 1660. The interruption of exile seems to
have done him in, however; he died in 1662, as destitute as he had begun. His
intermediate position at the nexus of animal- and land-control is especially
illuminative of the dynamics that would dominate the next three centuries of South
Africa’s ‘fractured and fractious society’, as Sandra Swart concludes in her
lovely new book, The Lion’s Historian.
Autshumao’s regrettable absences obliged van Riebeeck to
call on other interpreters, among them Autshumao’s niece, Eva or Krotoa, and a
man named Doman. They formed, as Noel Mostert lays it out in Frontiers,
a curious trio: Autshumao the ‘self-interested go-between’; Doman an
‘embittered anti-European’ who led the 1659 resistance; and Eva, the ‘first
cross-cultural product of Europe’s arrival’. Doman ingratiated himself to van
Riebeeck by squealing on ‘Harry’, and was accordingly sent to Batavia
(Indonesia) for a year’s further education in Dutch. His initial apparent
devotion and attachment to Christianity turned rapidly to bitter enmity. He was
shocked at Dutch depredations on both environment and indigenes in Batavia, and
quickly recognised the same monopolistic rapacity emerging at the Cape.
Vilifying Eva for squealing on him to the Dutch, Doman led the Khoi in
ravaging the Dutch fields and forced a withdrawal to the fort. Wounded, however,
Doman was obliged to sue for peace, even as he complained vociferously about
‘free burgher’ encroachments.
Mostert doesn’t record what became of Doman; we know more of Eva-Krotoa. Largely raised from an early age in the van Riebeeck household, she transcended her status as ‘Hotnot meid’ to be married, aged 15 or 16, in the fort to a Netherlander or Danish seafarer named Pieter van Meerhoff. To him (and perhaps others) she bore an alleged six children, three stillborn. If so, she must have been almost continuously pregnant as van Riebeeck despatched her on interpretation jobs (she learned Portuguese as well as English), and obsessively on ventures further inland in search of the gold of ‘Monomotapa’. Over-used and much abused, to echo Janis Ian, she not only reverted to Khoi skins and habits periodically, but descended incrementally into debauchery and drink. Initially indulgent of her evident split between cultures, van Riebeeck eventually bundled her off to ‘rehab’, which is to say Robben Island. She died there in July 1674, aged 22, to become exemplary of a quasi-historical, quasi-literary trope: the ‘Hottentot Eve’.
Her divided,
unhappy life foreshadows that of subsequent ‘Hottentot’ concubines, including
the traveller LeVaillant’s squeeze Narina, Bain’s ‘Kaatjie Kekkelbeck’, Sara
Baartman, and Athol Fugard’s Lena, thus foreshadowing also the unhappy
splitness of ‘Coloured’ folk more widely. So argues, at least, Stephen Gray in
his still-challenging 1979 survey, Southern African Literature. Dan Sleigh fictionalised Krotoa in his
fine novel, Islands, and Dalene Matthee imagined the life of one of
Eva’s daughters, Pieternella van die Kaap. A still more recent addition
to this literary genealogy is Trudie Bloem’s biographical novel, Krotoa-Eva:
The woman from Robben Island.
Robben Island seems a persistent node in the story of the
South African interpreter. Incarcerated there alongside the aforementioned
Makhanda in 1819 was another Xhosa man, an habitual livestock thief, allegedly.
This was Msimbithi, colloquially known as Jacob or Jackot. I have written at
length about this extraordinary character in a previous blog, so won't repeat
it all here. Suffice it to remind you that he had acted briefly as an
interpreter to Major Fraser on the eastern frontier, and was plucked off Robben
Island for that purpose when William Fitzwilliam Owen was conducting a Royal
Navy survey of the whole east coast. He later escaped, only to be rediscovered
living with Shaka’s Zulus, and subsequently wove a chequered career as
interpreter between Shaka and the first white adventurers in that region. Like
Autshumao and Doman before him, he repeatedly attracted opprobrium and
suspicion – deserved or not is moot – so much so that in 1832 Dingane ordered
the whites to kill him. Which they duly did.
Captain Owen
dropped anchor in Delagoa Bay (now Maputo) in September 1822. Msimbithi was
hopeless in this context as an interpreter, and Owen was obliged to resort to a
local interpreter, a Tembe man named ‘Shannuahguahvah’ [Hlanguava?],
colloquially called ‘English Bill’. He is a yet more colourful individual,
chameleon-like in his adaptability, less torn between cultures than revelling
in the possibilities of his position. Lt Thomas Boteler, one of Owen’s
companions, left a memorable description:
He was a thin slight man, about thirty-two, of middling height, meagre aspect, and keen, uneasy, cautious, yet vivacious eye. With an infinite fund of cunning, trick, and finesse, he possessed great talents for humorous mimicry and grimace, together with an unbounded impudence … Affected dignity and mystery were weapons with which he often carried a point … He was a consummate politician and courtier in a savage state …
Though every transaction between speakers of different languages required interpreters, those who made interpreting their business often remained suspect. A little later, as Roger Levine has written, the mission-trained Jan Tzatzoe, who would travel from Xhosaland as far as England, was destined to end up rejected and alone.
These exemplars of a unique metier were hardly angels, but one feels they somehow
deserved better.
*****
No comments:
Post a Comment