Abstract

This case study focuses on the 1952 celebration of the 300th anniversary of the landing of the Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck in the Cape. It shows how several families who had emigrated from the Netherlands to the town of Upington in the Western Cape presented themselves as Dutch South Africans who felt connected to the white population of South Africa. Photos and memories of their contribution to the local festivities will be contextualized in a broader frame of national celebrations (and the protests against it) of the Van Riebeeck Tercentenary in both South Africa and the Netherlands. This chapter explores the meaning of Van Riebeeck as a historical persona around whom the image of South Africa as a ‘white man's nation’ was constructed, and how that image was taken up in the Netherlands. Additionally, this chapter examines how Dutch migrants in South Africa used the local Van Riebeeck celebrations to simultaneously perform and display their shared Dutchness – through their white skins in Dutch costumes and the design of their common floats – within the local community and their transnational belonging to both the Netherlands and South Africa. The concept of ‘imagined communities’ provides a basis to analyse the in- and exclusion of groups of people from the modern nation state of South Africa, and to expand the concept to the imagining of transnational communities – in this specific case the so-called ‘stamverwantschap’ (kinship ties) connecting Dutchness and the Netherlands with white Afrikaners in South Africa.

Keywords: Dutch immigrants in South Africa, (post)colonial celebrations of whiteness, Jan van Riebeeck, stamverwantschap, transnational communities