Quite possibly, Eva, born Krotoa, is the most written about African
woman
in South African historiography. Her name fills the journals of the Dutch
East India Company almost from the very start of their little feeding-station
at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. She is known as a Khoena girl taken into
Dutch commander Jan Van Riebeeck's household from the age of about
twelve, who later became a key interpreter for the Dutch, was baptised,
married Danish surgeon, Pieter Van Meerhoff, but then died as a drunken
prostitute after his death. Yet her persona remains an enigma. As Christina
Landman put it, ‘Krotoa is a story-generator’.To conservative historians, Eva's life offers living proof that
the Khoena
were irredeemable savages. To black nationalist writers, such as Khoena
historian, Yvette Abrahams, she personifies the widespread rape and abuse
of black women by the invaders. Eva's chief biographer, V. C. Malherbe,
forms a more neutral judgment by describing Eva as primarily ‘a woman
in
between’. Landman views her as an early synthesizer of African and
Christian religious traditions. Carli Coetzee demonstrates how recent
Afrikaans-speaking artists, poets and actors have constructed an image
of
Eva as the mother of the Afrikaner nation, a tamed African who acquiesced
to Europeanness. She is often portrayed as yearning to return to her African
roots, but without success.Virtually all of the representations of Eva construct her as a helpless
victim
of vicious culture clashes. Today's racial consciousness, laced with
assumptions
of inevitable African/European hostility, is often read back into the
historical record. Frustratingly large gaps in that record leave room for
a
wide range of interpretations, depending heavily on the subjectivities
of the
historian. Virtually all previous writers, however, have judged Eva primarily
by the tragic circumstances of her death, while minimizing the considerable
achievements of her earlier years.
A zooarchaeological investigation into the meat industry established at the Cape of Good Hope by the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries