ABSTRACT
In a book concerned with the politics of memories of South Africa’s violent past, it seems appropriate to begin on the shores of Cape Town’s Table Bay, at the foot of Table Mountain, at one of the first scenes in the long drama of European colonization in southern Africa. It was here, three and a half centuries ago, that a group of Dutch merchant-colonists established a small settlement that would by turns become a lonely fort, a thriving refreshment station for European ships passing around the Cape of Good Hope, an expanding Cape Colony, and, eventually, Cape Town, the “Mother City” of South Africa. This shore, now mostly harborfront, marks the site of one of the first skirmishes in the long and deeply troubled encounter between Europe and southern Africa, one distinguished by violence and subjugation, by collusion and cooperation, by brutal separation and by furtive and ambivalent border-crossings. The Dutch did not arrive in a land free of conflict—there were tensions in and between indigenous communities as there are everywhere—but the violence the European arrival initiated is at the historical heart of the memories being dealt with in post-apartheid South Africa.
