Half way to paradise
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Islands, a novel
Dan Sleigh
2004
Secker&Warburg, London
512 pages
Reviewed by Lara Scott
This is a terrifying book. Terrifyingly thick for a start, which would be fine if there wasn’t that equally terrifying instant association with school history and the tedium of the fathers of the nation and their legacy of sins. It is also terrifyingly pedantic, written by a historian who is an expert in the Dutch East India Company and trading all over the world four centuries back, and who is not nervous of letting the facts speak the epic tale. Primarily though, it tells a terrifying story, that of the colonisation of the Cape of Good Hope, and the men sent out here to do it.
Max du Preez, a renowned South African journalist, has just published an autobiography. He claims he’s done this due to his sudden panic at being who he is where he is when the ‘big wheel of history turned’ and the country moved on with apparently no room for the likes of him. Van Grevenbroek, Sleigh’s narrator, shares Du Preez's nervousness of the big wheel turning, albeit from the perspective of the beginning, rather than the end, of the same cycle. Near the end of the story he talks resignedly about the Dutch trading company’s plans to build a new outpost on the east coast of Africa, to form another base in another part of the continent. ‘’Will they never learn?’’ he asks. ‘To what purpose’ he continues, questioning the sanity in taking more and more of the continent, ‘why make it so?’
Sleigh’s novel, originally written in Afrikaans, explores the colonising of the Cape and the setting up of a small trading statio
n that eventually became the lifeblood of the European traders heading out on the spice route. In this way he describes the start of a process that got somewhat out of control, a historical curve-ball that transformed the bay on the edge of Africa forever. Trapped halfway between home and paradise, the men ‘who made this land’ rapidly develop a colony that was only ever meant to be a halfway mark, something which entails an almost nonchalant takeover of the indigenous population’s home on the continent’s edge. (It is almost as an aside that Van Riebeeck orders the land around the castle to be taken and the infamous barrier hedge to be built.)
"The men who 'made this land' rapidly develop a colony that was only ever meant to be a halfway mark"
Sleigh loves his subject, that is apparent. He says the book was written 20 years ago, only to be left on a shelf while he continued his research at the National Archives in Cape Town where he works. He is a respected historian, who is currently an advisor to an international research project on the Dutch East India Company’s colonies. He knows his stuff, and refutes both Hegel and Marx’s definition of history in his afterword, preferring to describe it as ‘the search for survivors in endless space’, the ransacking of documents for remnants, for characters, for some human way into the fragments of facts and papers. He struggles to end his book, eventually his only way out is for his narrator to die. This may seem to be due to his complete inability to stop writing, but it is more like a clever reflection of there being no ‘end’ to the story. He literally takes a chunk out of time and tells it like it was, less ‘beginning and end’ narrative, and more rich description of people and place, and the rest is history. And definitely Sleigh’s take on history – not stages or repetition, but gradual, unstoppable, keeping on-keeping on. It is a perspective that maybe does make more sense in South Africa, where forces such as the Dutch East India Company did carry on regardless.
Why ‘Islands’? Two feature prominently in the story – both Dassen and Robben Island were used to imprison criminals from the very beginning of the Cape’s time as a colony. The woman, Eva, who forms the crux of the novel ends up on the latter with her husband, a doctor sent out to conduct research. She is the centre of seven men’s lives, as Sleigh intones in the dramatic introduction, seven men who love her absolutely. It is a real saga, it can’t be anything less with an opening passage that describes a woman tragically loved over three generations. The characters are all well known historical figures, Harry the Strandloper, Eva the indigenous girl who became a translator for the colonisers, Pieter van Meerhof the Danish doctor. Harry was the first prisoner on Robben Island, Eva the first indigenous woman to marry a white man, Pieter a company employee based in the Cape. Interestingly, Du Preez mentions both Eva and Pieter in his autobiography, as he continues his nervous search for his roots. They are characters already inhabiting a confusing mix of fact and fiction scattered throughout South African literature before Sleigh got to them.
This book is all about the strange myths and stories that exist concerning the Cape’s formation. Andre Brink has ventured into similar territory with his novel The First Life of Adamastor, which was inspired by a much earlier version of the myth – The Lusiads by the Portuguese explorer and poet Luis Vaz de Camões. Brink refers to Islands as the ‘great South African novel’ because Sleigh’s search through space has found a way to enhance the myths, rather than fix them. Sleigh is a historian who has chosen to take real people and place them in a novel, where they fit better. They could never be more believable.
The islands of the title are literally alien pieces of land stuck out in the ocean at the edge of the known world. We might tend, very modernly, to imagine it meaning lonely or alienated people, but there are a string of them too, as there would be in such an extreme and isolated environment. You know how far-flung they are when you hear Eva begging Pieter, her husband, to take the family back to the mainland, to the comparatively bustling Cape and away from Robben Island. They do go back, and as they are entering the harbour they are awe-struck by the sight of the building of the new castle, a pinnacle act in the formation of the Cape. "This will need a governor," they say, an ominous moment as temporary trading station becomes fully fledged colony.
Sleigh goes on to describe a building site that functions in absolute silence, as the company bizarrely ruled no-one was allowed to talk, building work was done without a word and instructions given through hand gestures. Imagine it – an entire castle built with no-one speaking. It is with things such as this that Sleigh is great, the story is strange and fascinating enough to not need much embellishment, he tells it like it was and that is enough.
Pieter is the saddest character in the book, wretchedly miserable and carrying the aspirations shared by most men who found themselves in the isolated Cape. All he wants, desperately, is to go to the East. He works his whole life with this aim, and takes the job at the fort on the promise of eventual promotion to the Dutch base of Batavia. When the chance eventually arises to join an expedition to Mauritius, he takes it and abandons his family, driven to follow his original intention at the risk of losing everything, as if he needs to go to justify spending so long at the Cape. He is killed during the journey, in a sudden and violent attack. Eva is left with the children, stuck once again on Robben Island and giving birth entirely alone in a stable outside their house. It is a powerful scene described through the bystanders’ eyes. They see only the blood seeping out from under the door in a large fan-shaped wave, an echo of her husband’s bloody death of which she knows nothing.
Pieter is the character who speaks for all the men trapped in the Cape halfway to achieving their goal of reaching the East, when he wonders, in the depths of his isolation, whether "there is a real world over there, isn’t there, across the sea? Or has Copenhagen become a dead world, Batavia a series of letters in his imagination, like Monomopatpa or Davagul?"
Sleigh’s work powerfully reminds us that few chose to go to the Cape. Most desired to go East, fervently, desperately, and they were often the ones attempting to leave Europe far behind and start a new life in Batavia, for whatever dubious reason. Those based in the Cape colony found themselves trapped and isolated in a life they couldn’t quite remember having chosen. Madly these miserable people were the human force in a new and influential colony. Quite a contrast to the image of the proud forefathers, loyal to Holland, confidently driven to expand her empire on the tip of Africa.
There is a way of trying to understand apartheid which argues: imagine living in the middle of nowhere for centuries with only the Bible to read, what would that result in? Living with nothing, no input, no points of reference beyond your own small community, the local people you use and abuse, and the occasional pieces of information brought by ships from the homeland, which is not exactly shining a light for benevolent philanthropy. Sleigh’s epic cleverly captures this – the formidable role of the Bible is underlined through being constantly quoted, throughout the story and at the beginning of each chapter. As the story progresses, the excerpts become darker and darker. He uses ‘and the sea shall become blood; and the creatures which were the sea died, and the ships were destroyed’ from Revelations to open the chapter which describes in captivating detail a horrific shipwreck and the travels of a lifeboat stuffed with 80 people, which floats over the sea in a desperate and delirious passage, for weeks. The more I think about it the more I realise I will have these images in my head forever. Thank you Mr Sleigh.
Also, such an epic is the only way that this strange period of history can be explained to the bewildered people who partook in it. One young man is told ‘‘come away from the North, I am sending you to the four quarters" (a quote from the Bible), when he questions the building of the colony and how someone like himself winds up months from home, stuck there en-route to paradise. Apparently, the wheel will keep turning as long as it is perceived to be pre-ordained.
But one realises that stories from the Bible are truly everywhere in the character’s shared imagination, when in the last chapter of the book, Van Grevenbroek is told that Batavia, great, magnificent Batavia that was the reason for the colony’s formation, that drove those longing for it while working at the Cape to despair, and even killed miserable Pieter van Meerhof, is no longer what it was. The three great canals running through the middle of it are silted up and the town is a ghost of its former self. It is an unbearable thing to hear for those living in hope in the world’s outskirts, longing only to reach the paradise they have dreamt about. One day, the two men tell each other, they will arrive only to find that ‘Heaven itself is not what it was’.
Lara Scott works for publishing companies in Cape Town.
