Helena: an Exploration of Nostalgia and Identity Through the Cape Town - St
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Cape-Helena: An Exploration of Nostalgia and Identity through the Cape Town - St. Helena Migration Nexus By Damian Samuels A full-thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History, University of the Western Cape, September 2018 Declaration I, Damian Sean Samuels, declare that ‘Cape-Helena: An Exploration of Nostalgia and Identity through the Cape Town - St. Helena Migration Nexus’ is my own work, that it has not been submitted for any degree or examination in any other university, and that all the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged with complete references. Damian Samuels 05 September 2018 i http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ ii http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ Table of Contents Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………...iv Introduction……………………………………………………………………........................1 Chapter 1: St. Helena Immigration to South Africa, 1838-1879………….12 Chapter 2: St. Helena Immigration to South Africa, 1880s-1948..............67 Chapter 3: Nostalgia and the Sacral Introjection of an Island…..............109 Chapter 4: Race and Respectability, Nostalgic Associations and Disassociation.……………………………………………………………………………....143 Appendix...…………………………………………………………………………………….179 List of illustration…………………………………………………………………………..188 Bibliography.………………………………………………………………………………....190 iii http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ Acknowledgements I am indebted to a range of people for their encouragement and support. From the academic community, I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Patricia Hayes, for doing the real arduous work in helping me bring my project to fruition; to Prof. Daniel Yon of York University, Toronto, for his publications and knowledge on a number of matters relating to the migratory relationship between South Africa and St. Helena, which he readily shared with me; and to Dr. Mark Espin for planting the original seeds for this study, when it was not something I intended to embark on as an academic project in the first instance. I also thank the Friends of Saint Helena for sharing with me selected articles from their Wirebird Journal. And, thank you to all my colleagues who work with me in the first-year Humanities programme at the University of the Western Cape for their moral support. Each project has its silent partners. I wish to thank those archivists who assisted and enabled me to weave together a coherent narrative from fragments often buried deep in their repositories. These silent partners are Erika le Roux and all her colleagues at the Cape Archives in Roeland Street Cape Town; Melanie Geustyn and Laddy Mckechnie at the South African National Library (NLSA); and Karen Henry and Tracy Buckley at the Government Archives on St. Helena Island. I commend Merle Martin for the very important work she is doing as the founder of the South African St. Helena Heritage Association. Thank you for introducing me to several descendants of St. Helenians living in Cape Town and for your direct participation in my study. I extend my gratitude and appreciation to all my research participants and to those who have assisted me in some form or the other: Gwen Benjamin, Ethel Feils, Mustapha Solomon, Belinda Summers, Mogamat Kamadien, Steven Caswell, Castella Fourie (née Caswell), Robin Castell, Paul Alexander, Mervin Watson, Lionel Davids, Gail Thorpe, Darren Newbury and Jolene Joshua. To all of you and iv http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ those who chose to remain anonymous, I cannot put a price on the invaluable intimate family stories you have shared with me; the value of your contributions extends far beyond the completion of my thesis. For their financial support, I owe an immense amount of gratitude to the following institutions: The Centre for Humanities Research based at the University of the Western Cape, run by people resolved to clear new paths in understanding and defining the African Humanities; The Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust, constituted of people who genuinely care about addressing Africa’s many exigent challenges by extending the vision of their founder to embed a robust rights-based human culture in our beloved continent, Africa. Thank you to the SARChI Chair of Visual History and Theory for the extra NRF completion funding. This thesis would not have been realised without all your generous financial support. I owe an added appreciation to the Centre for Humanities Research for their academic guidance during my fellowship, and the Canon Collins Trust for demonstrating to me how transdisciplinary scholarship can work. To my grandmother, Lydia Elizabeth Fourie (née Caswell), whose memory and life I dedicate this project to, thank you for the discipline and work ethic you have instilled in me in my formative years. May your soul rest in peace (now). For the rest of my extended family, who have long possessed knowledge of their St. Helena ancestry, may this work serve to expand our knowledge and root us more firmly and confidently as those who belong to both Land and Sea – to (South) Africa and the Island of St. Helena - as a people who instantiate many places and whose contemporary identities traverse oceans and cultures. And ultimately, I thank my partner and friend, Nadia Sanger, for her patience, sacrifices and support, and for casting her superior gaze over some of my writing. To Akin Sanger-Samuels, my son, who was born when I had just started this project and competed for my attention throughout: this is what I was immersed in when I said I could not play with you at times or allow you to use my laptop to watch the your all important Peppa Pig. v http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ Introduction For an Island measuring merely 128 square kilometers, and in spite of its remote location in the mid-South Atlantic, St. Helena “punches way above its weight in history”,1 earning and occupying a privileged place in British scholarship of its imperial thalassocratic age. However, prior to this period in which the Island was indispensible to British Empire formation, it had passed through the hands of at least two former European naval nations before it was eventually laid claim to and effectively colonised by the British. The Portuguese, who were the first to stumble upon the uninhabited Island in 1502 - naming it St. Helena in honour of Roman Emperor Constantine the Great’s mother - managed to keep its existence a closely guarded secret for over eight years. For nearly a century, the Island was reserved for exclusive use by the Portuguese as a port for recuperation, replenishing and re-provisioning, which they usually visited on their homebound journey from trading (and conquering) in the East Indies.2 This Portuguese monopoly of use of the Island, however, ended during the last decade of the sixteenth century when other maritime nations, particularly Dutch and later English traders, became aware of and started frequenting the Island. The initial overlap period, constituting the first three decades of the seventeenth century when mostly the Dutch and Portuguese shared use of the Island, was cause for occasional hostile encounters between the two nations. Apparently, continued Dutch and English harassment of Portuguese (and Spanish) ships made visiting the Island untenable for the Portuguese who opted to avoid St. Helena and instead make use of a number of their other port ‘possessions’ along the West African coastline to replenish and repair their ships. 1 This is how one of my research participants, Paul Alexander, articulated St. Helena Island as a historical place. Paul Alexander. Interviewed by Damian Samuels. Woodbridge Island, Cape Town, July 24, 2016. 2 The Portuguese were the first to partially colonise the Island by making some utilitarian ‘improvements’ for their own benefit: they colonised the Island naturally by introducing fruit trees, vegetables and domesticated farm animals. However, they did not fortify or settle the Island, leaving it uninhabited and vulnerable to being seized by other sea-faring European nations. 1 http://etd.uwc.ac.za/ The Dutch eventually made a formal claim to the Island as a ‘proprietary’ of the United Provinces of the Netherlands on the 15th of April 1633, but they too neglected the Island, preferring instead to commit their energy and resources to their ‘possession’ at the Cape.3 The English formally annexed the uninhabited Island of St. Helena in 1659 (see document image 1 in the appendix) as a strategy to secure sustainable trade in the East Indies. A delayed Dutch response to re- stake their former claim to the Island saw St. Helena temporarily wrested back from the English in December 1672. Following a tactical skirmish with no casualties, the British successfully recaptured the Island from the Dutch in May 1673.4 With the exception of this brief five-month interstice, St. Helena has remained, in various legal forms, an uncontested British territory since 1659.5 Initially, to discourage further Dutch retaliation and dissuade other ambitious maritime nations who may have coveted the Island, the British, under the auspices of the English East India Company, fortified and garrisoned the Island, settling it permanently and, therefore, effectively colonising the Island for the first time. It is under the rubric of British imperial maritime history that St. Helena ascended as a remarkably fascinating historical place that has undoubtedly played a pivotal role in establishing British maritime supremacy and dominion.6 So vital was St. Helena, it has even been argued that the commonly accepted triangular transatlantic trade was actually a quadrangular trade where St. Helena functioned as the tiny pivot around which the British oceanic trade rotated.7 For this very reason it was enticing for early historiography – textual and visual - on or related to St. Helena to follow that typical format that commences with the Portuguese ‘discovering’ St. Helena Island in 1502 and 3 Philip Gosse, St Helena 1502 – 1938 (Shropshire, England: Anthony Nelson Ltd, 1990), 41.