Episode 18 – Early days of coloured single-parent Simon van der Stel and the first Venda miners appear
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Show notes
This is episode 18 and we’re focusing on the 1670s through to the 1680s where a whole lot was going on in the south of Africa.
Let me first start with race relations. South Africans probably have no idea that the man who launched the most aggressive drive to expand into Africa was not born in Europe – he was born in Mauritius of Dutch and Indian stock. Had he been born after apartheid’s firm grasp fixed South African in a race-based laws after 1948 he would have been classified coloured.
The man who ran the first version of our country would have been denied the right to vote and forced to take second-class trains. And yet he introduced colonialism in South Africa in its full stark reality.
History. Got to love it in all its irony.
He arrived with his six children, but not his wife. She refused to make the trip so he was not only a coloured governor, he was also single parent. Van der Stel was to found a South African dynasty, casting off his links to the motherland.
More than a thousand miles away to the north another process which had started hundreds of years before was also to prove significant and we need to return to this part of Southern Africa for an update.
From the fourteenth century, Shona and Sotho speakers were in close proximity in the Soutpansburg close to the Limpopo River.
The Venda people were emerging from the Singo – an offshoot of the Shona. There’s a lot of debate between archaeologists and traditionalists around this story where Venda oral history speaks of the Singo Capital Dzata.
