Foibles of memory

Stanley - quinta-feira

I'm sure what happened to me this week happens to everyone my age. I remembered something from the time of childhood, only to realise that it no longer exists. Usually, when this happens, it's about something physical: Balyna's fabulous diskbat cricket game; Studebakers; the Doll's House drive-up restaurant in Johannesburg; dial phones; blue flash bulbs for your camera; newsreels before movies; restaurants with tableside jukeboxes; home delivery of milk in glass bottles; 45 rpm vinyl records; BAYKO building sets; and WHITES ONLY signs. 

1950 Studebaker

Doll's House manager Lucky Mulewa carrying window tray to customer car

Do youngsters today know how to use one?

Flash bulb

News before the movie

I can't stand music in restaurants - this was worse!

I loved building BAYKO houses.

I could never stand these either.

And more recently gone but not forgotten (at least in South Africa): Marmite and peppermint crisps.

My flashback happened yesterday, which was April 6. Specifically what happened was that I thought it was a public holiday. Why? Because, when I grew up, April 6 celebrated the landing in 1652 at Table Bay of an employee of the Dutch East India Company, Jan van Riebeeck, and a small group of people whose task was to create a garden to supply vegetables to DEIC ships going to and from the East Indies. It was originally called Van Riebeeck's Day, and later Founders Day.

Van Riebeeck lands at the Cape - panting by Charles Bell

Model of Van Riebeeck's ship - the Dromedaris

When I noticed that traffic was the same, and people were going to work as usual, I realised my mistake. After the apartheid regime was replaced by a democratically-elected parliament in 1994, Founders Day was scrapped because, of course, Van Riebeeck and his colleagues weren't the first people to settle the Cape. The Khoikhoi had been there for eons.

That got me to think about the fact that Europeans had been rounding the Cape en route to the East for a very long time before Van Riebeeck planted his first potatoes. And that reminded me that but for one stupid mistake, I could have been writing this in Portuguese. I've written about this before, but it's worth a reprise.

In 1488, Bartolomeu Dias was the first known European to round the Cape - he called it Cabo das Tormentas - Cape of Storms.  King John II of Portugal later renamed it Cabo da Boa Esperança - Cape of Good Hope.

In 1497 Vasco da Gama also rounded the Cape and established that the route could be used to gain access to the spice producers of the East.  Until this time Venice had monopolised the spice trade through a combination of sea and overland through the Middle East. This discovery led to a massive Portuguese influence in the East.

Vasco da Gama

It is unclear why the Portuguese did not establish a settlement at the Cape - the harbours were good and the climate excellent.  They established settlements in what is now Mozambique in 1505, on the Island of Mozambique among other places.  And in 1575 that they created at settlement at Luanda in what is now Angola.  But they left the southern tip of Africa alone.

One argument of why this happened is because of what happened to another famous Portuguese explorer and colonist - Francisco de Almeida.  

Francisco de Almeida

In 1503 he was appointed Viceroy of India and left Portugal two years later with an impressive fleet.  He subdued most of the east coast of Africa, including Zanzibar, then accomplished the same in eastern and southern India.  By early 1509, the Portuguese had control over the area, with the Ottomans and Egyptians returning home.  This gave the Portuguese a monopoly over the spice trade for over 100 years.

In December 1509, De Almeida set sale for Portugal to pay homage to his king and to receive royal accolades for his successes. He cast anchor in Table Bay at the Cape for water and replenishment.  After some friendly trade with the local Khoi, De Almeida allowed some of his men to go to the Khoi encampment to steal cattle.  While this was happening, De Almeida and other men looked on.  

Unfortunately, at the same time, the ships were moved to a point where they could get fresh water.  The Khoi sensed that the Portuguese had no way to return to the boats and attacked.  Eventually 64 seamen were killed including De Almeida.  He was buried at the Cape.

After this slaughter, Portuguese seamen had a very negative attitude towards the Cape, this possibly being the reason why no further efforts were made for a very long time by the Portuguese or anyone else to use the Cape as a refreshment station.  In fact, nothing of importance from a European perspective happened at the Cape for nearly 150 years, when the Dutch established their vegetable gardens.

And so, if it were not for De Almeida's stupid decision to allow his men to steal cattle, I would be writing this in Portuguese.

Tim-tim

Constantia revisted

Michael - Thursday

If you notice some similarity between this post and an earlier one, then all I can say is that you have a very good memory. It overlaps the first blog I posted in 2009. Partly because not many memories are that good, partly because it leads into next weeks post (about Bonaparte, but not the one mentioned here), and partly because tomorrow is the absolute deadline for the fifth rewrite of our book, I thought it was worth resurrecting.

In 1652 Jan van Riebeeck landed at what became the Cape of Good Hope with the aim of providing fresh produce for ships of the Dutch East India Company on the way to and from the Indies.  Ostensibly because wine was supposed to help scurvy but perhaps for a quiet tipple on the side, he planted the first vineyard three years later.  And on the 2^nd of February 1659, he was able to proclaim: “Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed from Cape grapes for the first time”.  By all accounts the wine was pretty foul - not too surprising given the level of expertise around. The Netherlands is not renowned for her wine.

But van Riebeeck was succeeded twenty years later by Simon van der Stel, an interesting if contentious character, who did know about wine and saw the opportunity for a guilder or two to come his way also.  He was the son of Adriaan van der Stel and Maria Lievens, the daughter of a freed Indian slave woman, which made him “coloured” in the racial parlance of the apartheid government.  (Needless to say this was not a feature emphasized in the school history text books of the day.)

The Cape peninsular has a climate not too different from that of southern Europe with winter rainfall and moderate temperatures.  It's the area of South Africa which most reminds people of the Continent with gnarled oak lined streets and the genteel plants that thrive in the “old country”. Van der Stel carefully selected a wine farm for himself along the southern slopes of the Cape peninsular, actually testing the soils and choosing a cool microclimate with winds from the sea.  He called the estate Constantia and did very well.

But the wines that made Constantia famous came later when Hendrik Cloete moved from
Stellenbosch (named after van der Stel) and bought a portion of the Constantia estate.  He planted new vines and specialised in a wine made from grapes ripened almost to raisins on the vine, matured in vats, and fortified.  The wine was called simply Constantia and it held its own with all the choice sweet wines with the rich and famous of the day.  All this came to an end late in the nineteenth century when phylloxera devastated the vineyards.  Still, a few bottles survive to this day.  A wine-writer friend of mine was fortunate to taste one some years ago and pronounced it still luscious after two hundred years.

A famous story about Constantia is that it was one of Napoleon's favourite wines and he received a regular supply to cheer him up on Saint Helena - an island off the west coast of Africa to which he was exiled the second time after Elba couldn't hold him. A juicy twist was that the British used the wine to kill him with small doses of arsenic poisoning, but if arsenic was involved, it was more likely to have been from the glue in the wall paper. The modern consensus seems to be that he died of stomach cancer and that spoils the tale altogether.

In 1980 a new estate named Klein Constantia (part of the original van der Stel estate) decided to try to recreate the wine.  It was to be a sweet desert wine in the late harvest style – not botrytis – with the berries hand-selected.  The venture was a stunning success and celebrated in the name – Vin de Constance – and in copies of the old Constantia hand-made bottles which the estate uses for the modern wine.  It's available outside South Africa – a friend in Australia has a good selection of vintages, and I've had a bottle in a restaurant in New York.  If you like dessert wines, this one is worth trying if you have the chance.  

You can imagine you're sharing the bottle with Bismark or Napoleon or King George... It will set you back more than a few dollars though. The wine has become something of a collectors item.

Happy Birthday Cape Town

Stanley - Thursday

On this day in 1652, Johan Anthonizoorn van Riebeeck, known as Jan, arrived in what became known as Table Bay on the ship Dromedaris.  He was accompanied by two other ships, the Reijger and the Goede Hoop.

Landing at the Cape

Jan van Riebeek

He came as an employee of the Vereenigde Oost-Insische Compagnie (VOC).  In English it is known as the Dutch East India Company. Throughout the regions in which the company did business, you can see the letters VOC on buildings it built.

Logo of the VOC

The reason Van Riebeeck came to the Cape was to create a vegetable garden to provision VOC ships sailing between The Netherlands and the outposts in what is now know as Indonesia, Malaysia, Indochina, and even Japan.  This long voyage was brutal and many lives were usually lost, many of which were through scurvy.  Having fresh vegetables halfway on the trip was helpful both for physical and mental health.

The vegetable garden changed southern Africa for ever, not only for having the first white people living there, but also for the new plants that arrived – grapes, potatoes, apples, citrus, various ground nuts, and cereals.  Today, South Africa is a major producer of grapes and wine, and an exporter of a variety of fruits and grains.  Apparently Van Riebeeck learned a lot from the local Khoi-San peoples, who had lived in the area for a long time.

Vineyard with Cape Dutch style buildings in the background

The Afrikaner has long regarded Van Riebeeck as the founder of South Africa (despite the fact that other peoples already lived there), and his name appears as a street name in many towns.  Two towns are named after him, and his image adorned the South African currency.  (Actually the image used that was supposed to be that of Van Riebeeck was actually of another man!).  Of course, there is a statue of him in Cape Town.

Jan van Riebeek...not.

He and other VOC officials of the time were remarkable in that they undertook long voyages in extremely trying and dangerous conditions and established outposts and colonies over vast stretches of the planet.  Of course, the motive was always profit, and anything that impeded its accumulation was dealt with very strongly, and usually not very nicely.

Back to Cape Town.

Happy birthday, mother city of South Africa, you are one of the planets most beautiful.  And it is in you that one can see why the country is known as the rainbow nation – people of all colours and religions coexisting peacefully, living between the mountains and the sea, surrounded by beautiful flora.

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Murder Is Everywhere

Author Recognitions and Events

ANNAMARIA ALFIERI

April 28-26

Malice Domestic

Hyatt Regency

Bethesda, Maryland

Panel: The British Empire

(FYI- Sujata and I will be on the same panel!!!)

May 31

Janet Rudolph Literary Salon:

"The History of Hot Places: Clashes between Colonialism and Local Cultures”

Joint appearance with Michael Cooper

Jun 11

Books NJ

Sounds of the Paramus Library

1-5PM

Panel: How to Write (and Read) Mystery

Signing at the MWA-NY Booth

June 16-18

Deadly Ink Conference

Hilton Garden Inn

Rockaway, New Jersey

CARA BLACK

Murder in Saint Germain, Aimée Leduc’s next investigation, comes out June 6, 2017.

CARO RAMSEY

Paper back of Rat Run published 28th March.

JEFF SIGER

"The Olive Growers,” appears in BOUND BY MYSTERY, an anthology edited by Diane DiBiasi celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Poisoned Pen Press, out in March.

MICHAEL STANLEY

Dying to Live (Kubu #6) to be released in May in UK & South Africa and in October in USA

May 19-21   

Franschhoek Literary Festival (Michael)

May 20        

Panel :One Voice, Two Authors with Alex Latimer and Diane Awerbuck 11:30 - 12:30

May 21        

Panel: The Author as Chemist with Joanne Harris and Ekow Duker 11:30 - 12:30