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Archiver > SOUTH-AFRICA > 1999-02 > 0917950916


From: Lesley Robertson <>
Subject: Re: Eva - Krotoa
Date: Tue, 02 Feb 1999 10:21:56 +0000


Morning all,
I've got a good choice at the moment - home with a new pc that
refuses to talk to my provider, or the office where some kind soul
managed to cut through out (3inch coaxial) phone cable!

> I find your other statement helpful:
> "that I've always thought that the boozing was due to being widowed,
> isolated, not fitting fully into the local or the settler society -
> there's enough factors to drive anyone to drink! An individual disaster"
>
> I do not think we do justice to Eva to try and say she was just doing
> what everyone else was doing. That is a cop out. And not looking at the
> facts.

In much of the discussion I've seen about Eva in assorted books and
things, I've often had the uncomforatable feeling that people
couldn't see the woman for the symbol. If you look at a very
simplified summary of her life:
Raised from a child outside her biological family and culture, not
just in a European home, but in the Governer's home, so accustomed to
a very different style of life than her blood relatives AND many
others in the colony (I wonder how many of the general community
resented her because she was raised by the van Rs).
Made what looks like a fairly decent marriage (in all senses of the
term) - he must have cared for her, to marry someone so different.
Husband murdered, leaving her with a couple of young children.
I'm willing to bet that at this point a lot of the folk she's
considered to be friends of the family vanished - that happens under
such circumstances even in a small village where everyone knows
everyone from birth, very well. Somewhere in all this, the van
Riebecks were repatriated (can't remember when) so she couldn't even
turn to the family who raised her.
This leaves her with a number of problems - lack of friends, lack of
income, lack of family support, and the VOC and the church elders
looking for a chance to prove her a bad mother.
I have seen her described as a prostitute - that may be true, like
so many other women, it may have been the only way to generate any
money to raise her kids. She may have just been looking for human
contact, desperate. Again, looking at today's prostitutes (even in a
country where it's glamourized to the point of girls in shop
windows), the numbers who are on booze and/or drugs is way beyond the
national average.
She was packed off to Robben Island several times afer warnings about
her conduct - being threatened when you're seriously depressed only
makes things worse, so I double if she could have helped herself
much.

All things considered, Eva did no worse than many other women in such
nightmare situations. So many things could have made a difference
(apart from the obvious one of growing up with her blood relatives) -
had the van Rs been permanent residents, she could have turned to
them. Had she been raised by folk a little down the social scale, or
in one of the groups with community feeling such as the huguenots
she might have had more community support, had the dutch church been
more tolerant of women.... so many possibilities.
As far as I can see, my multi-great gran never had a chance from the
moment her husband was murdered.

I did enjoy Mansell's write-ups on Eva and Angela (Lorna sent them to
me).
Lesley Robertson

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